Cotter Cunningham

The Paralyzing Fear of Getting Started

I haven't been straight with you.  Like most entrepreneurs... I haven't told you everything.  I told you why I decided to found data.world in this Lucky7 post.  I told you the good part.  What I didn't tell you is that I was living in fear during those first few months of getting started... being back in an office and back in the arena once again.

But why?  I had started successful companies before, such as Bazaarvoice and Coremetrics.  data.world was my sixth!  I had a bigger network than ever before.  I had more know-how than at any other point in my entrepreneurial career, including the lessons that hardened for me in writing Lucky7 over the years to help other entrepreneurs.  I had spent three years in deep reflection.  I had seen over 1,100 startup pitches, which really does have the effect of making new mental connections (VCs call this "pattern recognition").  I had worked behind the scenes at Austin Ventures, seeing how the VC industry really works.  I had served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at both The Wharton School and U.T. Austin.  I knew company culture like the back of my hand - Bazaarvoice had been rated the best place to work in Austin when it was a small, medium, and then large-size company, winning #1 in all three categories as we rapidly grew.  Alongside my excellent co-founders, I had spent months researching the viability of data.world.  In short, I was, rationally speaking, more prepared than I had ever been before.  So why was I afraid?

'Is it too late for me to start my own business?', and other sheepish questions (part 1 of 3)

This is part one of a three-part series on entrepreneurship. The parts:

  1. 'Is it too late for me to start my own business?', and other sheepish questions
  2. Who this new generation of aspiring entrepreneurs are and the new Golden Age of tech (Lucky7 post)
  3. How I define the soul of entrepreneurs: you change the world (Lucky7 post)

Part One

It's March of 2013 and I'm at Wharton serving as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence when I get a question that baffles me. I'm speaking at the Penn Founders' Club, where all University of Pennsylvania students are welcome as long as they are fervently working on a real business while they are in school. I've just wrapped up my opening comments and it is time for Q&A. The baffling question: "Have all of the really big ideas already been thought of?". I couldn't believe it when I could see the student was being serious and not just pulling my leg, and I was fired up. I passionately describe how the world always needs entrepreneurs to drive it forward, and there are always ideas - everywhere - if you just look hard to find them. I talk about how I just read the book Abundance, wrote the longest book review of my life on it at Lucky7, and there are thousands of great ideas in the book for entrepreneurs to solve the world's biggest problems. A few months later, Waze gets bought for $966 million by Google. A few months after that, Snapchat gets a rumored $3 billion offer from Facebook, which I wrote about in this Lucky7 post on valuations. And then almost a year after receiving that question at Penn, WhatsApp gets a firm acquisition offer of $19 billion from Facebook, one month after Google buys Nest for $3.2 billion.

Learnings from three entrepreneurs and one VC I interviewed this past semester

I joined the McCombs Business School at the University of Texas at Austin as Entrepreneur-in-Residence this past semester. I kicked it off with a speech to the entering MBA class about the top-ten lessons I wished someone had taught me when I was beginning my MBA. I have very much enjoyed my first semester in this capacity and the entrepreneurial energy on campus is really fantastic. There is no doubt a huge trend towards entrepreneurship at most top-ranked universities and U.T. Austin is leading the way in one of the most entrepreneurial cities and states in our nation. Consider that Texas has created 70% of the new jobs in the U.S. since 2005, as reported by BBVA Compass, and you start to tune in a bit more into what is happening here. Compared to when I attended U.T. Austin from 1990-1994, where entrepreneurship was hard to find, every major college at U.T. now has its own entrepreneurial club and initiatives. In my Office Hours, I have met with over a hundred students who have either launched their own business while at the University or they are actively planning on doing that at some early point in their career (I didn't become an entrepreneur myself until I was 24 and beginning my MBA, so I tell them I was a "late bloomer").

At age 46, he started his first company and it failed miserably… but then, on his second…!

At age 46, he started his first company and it failed miserably… but then, on his second…!

For all of us Austin fans, I'm talking about Cotter Cunningham, the founder and CEO of RetailMeNot. Last night, Cotter was one of our keynote speakers, along with Mark Cuban, at the University of Texas for Longhorn Startup Demo Day (the event was just fantastic, by the way, and Josh Baer, Ben Dyer, and Bob Metcalfe deserve a huge round of applause for it).

As of today, RetailMeNot is worth $1.33 billion as a public company (it went public in July and just filed for a follow-on offering). It is just four years old - for a value creation of $333 million per year. Who says Austin can't do B2C now? HomeAway is another one of our five tech IPOs in the last five years. It is worth $3.4 billion today as a public company (it went public in 2011). It is just nine years old. Yes, we haven't produced a Facebook or Twitter size outcome - there needs to be a higher volume of failures (entrepreneurial experiements) to do that, but don't forget we did produce a Dell, a National Instruments, and a Whole Foods.

The state of tech entrepreneurship in Austin

The state of tech entrepreneurship in Austin

SXSW has long come and gone in this beautiful city - that was, like, weeks ago! Like years past, it reached more epic heights this year and companies and investors were spending more on gaining attention than ever before. And with SXSW, the typical, "how is Austin doing at tech entrepreneurship?" question was asked again and again. But out of all of the articles written, the one that I personally heard the most about was this one by PandoDaily: "Will the Austin startup ecosystem ever live up to its promise?"". It stirred me up to read it, no doubt. And it lead me to write this post to share my own thoughts - as an insider - on the state of tech entrepreneurship in Austin.