I'm very proud to announce that my book, "The Entrepreneur's Essentials", is now available on Amazon, including Prime. All proceeds from my book will be donated to support and strengthen the next generation of courageous, creative female leaders.
Through an investment in The University of Texas at Austin's Kendra Scott Women's Entrepreneurial Leadership Institute, proceeds will support the curricular and co-curricular programs that empower and equip thousands of female students annually. I hope this makes a big impact in the lives and entrepreneurial careers of women & people of color.
This has been a true labor of love. I've really put my heart and soul into this, and collaborating alongside of David Judson for over 13 months and weekends, with the amazing editing skills of Clarissa Fuselier (formerly of my prior startup, Bazaarvoice), made it all possible.
A note of gratitude for Tony Hsieh
I woke up early this morning and the first news I read was of Tony Hsieh’s passing last night. It hit me hard - he was only 46-years old. Tony was the long-time CEO of Zappos, only recently retiring in August.
Although I cannot say Tony was a close friend, he was an acquaintance that I had some good history with, most of it indirect. Zappos was one of the original pioneers of customer reviews, which Brant Barton and I decided to bring to the majority of the retail industry when we founded Bazaarvoice (literally named “the voice of the marketplace”) in 2005. Zappos was one of our early influences, with Amazon of course being our biggest (Amazon initially launched customer reviews in 1997, three years after their founding). I believe eBags had reviews even prior to Zappos (they were definitely an influence too), and Circuit City (kind of like a Best Buy that went out of business in 2009) had just launched them, paving the way for Brant and I to see that traditional, store-based retailers had a big need for us to fill.
In 2009, I was named Entrepreneur of the Year in Austin by E&Y. Tony had received the same Award for the Northern California region in 2007. My wife, Debra, and I were invited to the National Awards in Palm Springs. It was there that I connected with Tony, and we immediately connected on innovative company culture. We shared a lot of tips with each other, and it was clear that he was just as eager to learn as share.
Netflix vs. Blockbuster and bad profits (reflections from my Bazaarvoice days)
In honor of Netflix’s big beat today in the very unfortunate age of COVID-19, I decided to revisit my four-part Bazaarblog series while I was CEO of Bazaarvoice (from our inception in 2005 to our IPO in 2012). The name of the last part? “Netflix vs. Blockbuster: Round Four (Lights Out?)”
First, just to provide a foundation here, Bazaarvoice was named after Chapter 4 of “The Cluetrain Manifesto” (available for free online), “Markets Are Conversations”. I still think it is the best chapter of any book on marketing that I’ve ever read. Bazaarvoice, literally translated, means “the voice of the marketplace”. I told the story about how Brant Barton, my Bazaarvoice co-founder, and I picked the name in Chapter 7 of my book “The Entrepreneur’s Essentials” (also available for free online). Do yourself a favor and read “Markets Are Conversations” if you never have - it was amazingly prescient.
Revisiting Wikileaks, or "When you don't want to be right"
The news about Julian Assange being arrested two days ago reminded me of a blog post I wrote eleven years ago. I went back to read it today as I couldn’t remember what I said about Wikileaks that long ago. Prior to blogging at Lucky7, I used to blog quite a bit at Bazaarvoice. I felt a real sense of us creating history there, as I do today at data.world, with a power of Archimedes lever of working alongside some of the largest brands in the world. It is important to recall when you read this that at the beginning of Bazaarvoice in 2005 only three retailers in the United States offered customer reviews on their products, Facebook was closed to the public, the iPhone hadn’t come out yet (that was 2007) or Android (that was the next year), and there was no such thing as Snapchat, Twitter, and many of the other mediums, including Medium, that have moved more and more of social interactions - and in some cases transparency (certainly in the case of customer reviews) - online. I’m archiving the post here and will discuss it below, for now here it is as I wrote it on March 2, 2008 (note that I couldn’t recreate all of the links referenced as some have gone offline):
Seven critical lessons learned in angel investing
I had dinner with my good friend and Bazaarvoice co-founder, Brant Barton, on Tuesday at the new Sway in West Lake Hills (yummy) and we talked about lessons learned in angel investing. It was on my mind as I’m doing an AMA (Ask Me Anything) webinar with my good friend and often investing colleague, Josh Baer, on Tuesday, Feb. 5 from 4-5pm CT (you can sign up here). During my conversation with Brant, I distilled down to seven lessons learned (in the spirit of Lucky7, of course). Brant is reading Jason Calacanis’s book on angel investing and told me that many of these are in there (maybe all of these, I haven’t read the book), so you may want to turn to that to really dig in as I’m going to do my best to keep this post short. My hope in sharing these with you is that it ignites more angel investing in Austin - it is vital to our startup ecosystem here. We are doing better on that front in Austin than ever before, but I believe we are only scratching the surface here. And I hope these lessons have an impact beyond Austin angels and startups as well.
The importance of an Always Be Learning life
Happy New Year's, everyone! I wish you much prosperity and love in 2018.
As you may have seen me tweet earlier this week, my New Year's Resolution is to write more. I truly love writing - to write is to serve, to write is to learn, to write is to meditate. I'm going to take a different tact this year, though - I'm going to write more frequently and hopefully much shorter. I like writing longer posts but I'm spending over 70 hours per week on data.world and then some time on our startup investments - and of course I very much care about spending time with my wife and children. So, in short there just isn't much room for more. As a matter of fact, in 2017 I resigned from two non-profit Boards (Conscious Capitalism and Entrepreneurs Foundation) that I really love just to create more time for data.world. Both were painful decisions for me but a startup really needs that type of focus, and I'm truly having a blast working alongside an incredible team at data.world on a very important mission.
I've already got a running list of seven more topics (and growing quickly) that I plan to write about as soon as I can but for now - for my first post in a long time - I want to talk about the importance of having an Always Be Learning mindset and practice.
Back in the arena: the beginning of data.world
It has been a long time since I wrote anything on my Lucky7 blog and there is good reason for that. Back in June, I started to brainstorm my next big idea with long-time friends Jon Loyens and Matt Laessig (both of whom were amazing at Bazaarvoice and had moved on to HomeAway). Bryon Jacob (a 10-year veteran at HomeAway) soon got involved as an idea he had been thinking about was better than anything we came up with and one thing led to another until we founded data.world.
It may feel curious to my regular readers that I would jump back into the arena as the CEO of a company built from scratch. After all, our investments in startups and venture capital funds have been performing well, including a recent exit with Deep Eddy Vodka being acquired (and us subsequently investing in Clayton Christopher’s VC fund, CAVU). There are many factors that led to this calling for me:
How to select the right gift for someone you appreciate (in business)
With this being the season of giving and saying thanks, I wanted to share some thoughts on the right way to do it. Unfortunately, it is common in business to rush through your to-do list and quite often that means not thinking hard enough about what gift to give, especially when it comes to giving chotskies at tradeshows. In business, there is much mediocrity.
Three need-to-meet startups at Shop.org to see the future of digital retail, plus the latest from Bazaarvoice
Every year I look forward to the Shop.org Annual Summit. It brings together the smartest experts and entrepreneurs working in the digital retail space for discussions about the state of the industry and solutions to some of our biggest challenges. It’s an expansive showcase of innovation and insights.
There are a number of companies exhibiting this year that I’m excited to speak with, but I wanted to highlight three in particular that all of my retail friends should check out: Edgecase, Shelfbucks, and Together Mobile.
In the interest of disclosure, I’m an investor and/or advisor (Hurt Family Investmentsportfolio) in all three of these companies (and also a former three-term member of the Shop.org Board of Directors). But there is a reason I’ve been impressed by these companies and believe in them and their value - and think retailers and brands should as well. They are all transforming multi-channel shopping in important ways. They are focused not only on conversion (still a primary pain-point in digital shopping) but also revolutionizing the customer experience.
What I learned from my top three Lucky7 posts in 2013 … and my biggest busts
December 5th marked my first year of blogging personally (I had previously been a corporate blogger for 7 years at Bazaarvoice). I began blogging primarily as a service to entrepreneurs - a form of giving back to the community that I believe is the greatest force for change. I named my blog Lucky7 as a tribute to my amazing mother, who passed away last year. My first Lucky7 post on December 5, 2012 was a revisit of my manifesto to Bootstrap Austin on March 15, 2005. Looking back, it was clear I deeply cared about the development of our entrepreneurial community in Austin. That caring - and passion - drove a year of many highs in 2013. I've been actively investing in startups since December of last year with my wife, Debra, and I formally chose this as a career a few months ago, forming Hurt Family Investments. We've made 14 startup investments so far, 9 of them Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies. I've also joined the Advisory Board of 6 additional companies, all of them SaaS. Out of the 20 startups we are involved in, 16 are headquartered in Austin.