Brett’s blog, Lucky7
We are at the tail-end of RISE week here in beautiful Austin. If I was an aspiring entrepreneur, I would take a vacation during RISE week and attend as many sessions as I could. I was happy to do my part and present on fundraising both Monday at Austin Ventures as well as Tuesday along with panelists from CTAN (the Central Texas Angel Network). And, overall, it has been another great week for Austin, with TechStars announcing their launch, which I wrote about in this Lucky7 post.
Well here we are the week after with more incredibly exciting news. Yesterday, TechStars launched in Austin. They are the leading brand and one of the most recognized accelerators for the brightest technology entrepreneurs. This is a big shot in the arm for the Austin technology market - nearly every tech-centric U.S. city aspires to have TechStars in their community. Their Austin program, which starts in August, will add approximately 10 talented teams annually to our already vibrant tech scene. At Austin Ventures, we have gotten to know the TechStars organization over the years and we are very fortunate to have Jason Seats, a former successful entrepreneur, move to Austin and run the program. Mike Dodd from Austin Ventures especially deserves a lot of credit here. TechStars Austin will be a great compliment to the other flourishing Austin based accelerators, including Capital Factory, where TechStars Austin will actually be located in an alliance between the two. Great companies like SendGrid and Cloudability were propped up by TechStars.
On Thursday, Consumer Reports named the Tesla Model S the best car they've ever tested. That is quite a statement considering they've been testing cars since 1936.
Josh Baer, founder of Capital Factory (and who invited me to be with The President and CTO of the United States on Thursday), was the first person in Austin to get one and he let me drive it the day it came in, back in November (or maybe it was December). I'm quite an auto nut, and I was stunned. It was like the first time I used the iPhone. I knew it would up the ante forever for the auto industry worldwide. I was also proud that it was happening here, with an American-born company (and the first new American auto company to have this good of financial results in 50 years).
Well, what a week it has been. Speaking of my last Lucky7 post on entrepreneurship being all about the journey, this week has been a one giant leap for Austin mankind (and womenkind, of course).
First, the week started out with an amazing Austin City Limits taping with the band Phoenix playing. Debra and I are annual donors to KLRU and attend these tapings regularly. Debra was out of town for this one, though, and I took Garrett Eastham, co-founder and CEO of Compare Metrics, a company that I proudly serve as their independent Chairman of the Board of Directors. You'll be hearing a lot about this company soon (it is currently in mostly stealth mode, taking a page out of my book - see my Lucky7 post on the weighing whether to be stealthy or not), and I'm having a blast working with them. Here is a photo of Garrett and I at the show. Phoenix was one of the best tapings I've seen - right up there with Pearl Jam, Arcade Fire, and The Lumineers.
If you want to build a strong company culture, then you should care about your company close to as much as you care about your family. That was my goal at Bazaarvoice as our CEO (you can read my 7 lessons learned on the journey from founder to CEO), and I deeply thought about how our family showed that we care about each other. One thing we are particularly good at, especially my wife, Debra, is taking photos while we are on vacation. We want to document the very important time we spend together, and we know that our children will only be this age once. This, of course, is the natural thing for most families to do, especially with young kids (as their appearance changes so much from year to year).
As I mentioned in my first post in this series, every startup has their t-shirts. But you can tell a lot about a company by the t-shirts they make. And so I would like to continue to take you through our history - and our culture - with the most complete collection of Bazaarvoice t-shirts with the possible exception of my co-founder, Brant Barton.
This is the second in my series, and I'll cover the years 2007-2009 here. The first post covers our first two years in business - 2005-2007.
Michael Osborne, our first global head of sales, and I worked hard on establishing a sales-driven culture. In my opinion, this is very important for a B2B company. Your clients are the ones that pay your bills and you should be obsessive about both selling to and servicing them well. All other functions in the company are in support of that goal. The most successful B2C companies, like Wal-Mart and Amazon, are no different in that they are obsessive about those that also pay their bills - with the only difference being they care most about consumers - versus businesses - as consumers are their key source of revenue. Osborne, as we all called him because his personality is bigger than life, was amazing in this regard and a huge part of the culture that quickly took root. His theme song for us "doing the impossible" in our achievements quarter after quarter became Don't Stop Believing by Journey. The YouTube video below will give you a window into our culture and all of us celebrating at the Alamo Drafthouse, where we held our All-Hands (I talked about why the awesome Alamo in my first post in this series). I took this video right after my talk to close out the day, where I was expressing my deep love for the company and then the Bazaarvoice band brought the house down by playing our theme song. This can only be described as a magical moment as I think you'll agree in watching the video (have you ever seen this type of energy at a company you worked at?).
As an entrepreneur, I fostered an unusual communication practice with our investors and advisors. I treated them as I would have wanted to be treated if I were in their shoes. This is the Golden Rule in action.
You need to have empathy for those that you raise money from. They aren't the "man in the arena" (one of my favorite quotes from Theodore Roosevelt), but they can be very supportive - should you choose to treat them as part of your extended team. They are putting their money (if they are angel investors) - or their investors' money (as is the case for venture capitalists) - into your venture and you should treat that capital as if it were your own. And if it were your own capital ask yourself, "What kind of updates would I want?" My guess is you would want to always know how the business is doing and how you could help the business - and therefore help your investment. Part of the thrill of investing is to see the entrepreneur succeed - both changing their life and many other people's lives in the process. Investors enjoy telling their friends - other investors and family - about the success of your business. The journey is more important than any return they get (although to be clear they don't want to lose either their money or their investors' money). The more they help you, the more they live vicariously through you - and their fingerprints are all over your business. This is called a "helper's high" by my good friend and CEO coach, Kirk Dando (you can read more about Kirk and the value of CEO coaches in my Lucky7 post about the 7 lessons learned on the journey from founder to CEO).
This 1.5-minute long interview with Steve Jobs from 1994 has been floating around the Web recently and I love it. It is a philosophy that a good friend, Auren Hoffman (a serial entrepreneur himself), taught me when I was 26 and he was 24. I was lucky to have Auren as a neighbor when he was the founder and CEO of BridgePath and his office was right next door to mine at Coremetrics when Debra and I lived in San Francisco (Auren still lives there and has greatly prospered). Auren had a very popular lunch club for the Silicon Valley elite. There was always a compelling speaker, like the CEO of Exodus back when Exodus was a big deal. He invited me to attend with him, and I think the two of us were the most junior entrepreneurs there. So after attending several of these and being amazed at the networking opportunities each time, I asked Auren over lunch one day, "how the heck do you do it?". He told me about how he was fearless to reach out to anyone - but he did it in a particular way. Instead of approach them with the typical, "I'm a young guy and would like to learn from you", he would approach them with a very informed perspective and opinion about their business, something they said, an organization they are involved with, etc. This required more research, but it was very effective. It worked because of Auren's passion and genuine desire to connect and not waste the other person's time. So it wasn't just a little bit of research - it was an authentic interest in what he had learned about that person and their business. In other words, it wasn't a "cursory" or "shallow" amount of research. And it is the same reason why Bill Hewlett took the time to spend with Steve Jobs when he was only 12, as he talks about in this interview. How many other 12-year olds do this? Very, very, very few.
Lori Hawkins, the business reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, interviewed me last week for an article that ran in the Sunday newspaper. I spent a lot of time with her on this - she is typically very diligent, and that is something that I've appreciated as an entrepreneur and now entrepreneurial catalyst and investor in Austin. She probably spent four hours with me on the article she wrote about my school-of-hard-knocks journey at Coremetrics to get it right.
This interview was full of advice for entrepreneurs and got a lot of attention. However, it had to fit the space constraints of the newspaper and came in around 1,000 words. So here's what you missed - a Director's cut, or a b-side if you choose. I've pasted the article in full below with quotes and filled in the additional content, which is not marked by quotes.
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.
