Steve Blank

Realizing you need help and learning how to ask for help are crucial skills for a founder.

And while how much money you make at startup is a way to keep score, a successful life can’t be measured only in dollars.

These topics were the focus of interviews with the latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere, my radio show on SiriusXM Channel 111 (airing weekly Thursdays at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern).  The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. The program examines the DNA of entrepreneurs: what makes them tick, how they came up with their ideas; and explores the habits that make them successful, and the highs and lows that pushed them forward.

Joining me in the Stanford University studio were:

• Sarah Calhoun, founder of Red Ants Pants workwear for women
• Steve Sims, founder of Bluefish executive concierge service.

Listen to the full interviews by downloading them from SoundCloud here and here. (And download any of the past shows here.)

Clips from their interviews are below.

Sarah Calhoun has spent two decades building nonprofits and small businesses. She was the 2012 National Women in Business Champion for the Small Business Administration. In 2011, she served as a as a US Delegate to the APEC Women in Business Summit in San Francisco. The same year, President Obama invited her to attend a White House forum on jobs and economic development, and she was named Montana’s Entrepreneur of the Year.

Sarah graduated from Gettysburg College with a degree in environmental studies and worked with Outward Bound and the Student Conservation Association. She had no startup experience, but decided to start Red Ants Pants when she couldn’t find work pants that fit her properly. Here’s how she found her way:

I learned a lot from other people. My pattern maker and this fellow Richard Siberell, (a designer for Patagonia who took her under his wing) were incredibly patient with me explaining the process. I did a lot of reading and research on my own. I asked for help whenever and wherever I could, and that’s a big piece that I think is essential.

Steve:  Is that hard?

Sarah:   Yes.

Steve: Why?

Sarah: I think in general, it’s somewhat of a vulnerable topic, when you just admit that you don’t know something that you need, and that you need help. … because it was all new to me, I was comfortable admitting that. … 

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

In addition to founding Bluefish, Steve Sims is the CEO of the celebrity charity auction platform BLUEcause; a speaker; consultant; and author of the book 7 Ugly Truths. From the time Steve was young, he was on a quest to get rich. Over time, he learned money was not as important as he once thought.

…As you get more successful you get into the trappings. You get the suits. You get the watches. You get the cars. You get the penthouses. You get all of these things because, hey, once I’ve got those I’m successful.  

Then you get it and you walk into your penthouse and you go, “Not much has changed. I’m just on a higher floor now and with a bigger mortgage.”

You suddenly start realizing … once you’ve got (these things) that it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be.

(If I could) I would probably just sit my younger self down, pour a whiskey, and go, “Look, it will be fine. Just keep your word and it’ll be smooth.”

Steve Blank: Would you have listened?

Steve Sims: No. I was young and obnoxious and arrogant. Of course, I never had anything to lose. …I never had any of those trappings to risk. I went out like a bull in a china shop, “Grab grab grab, get it, get it. I want that deal, I’ve got to do that. I’ve got to make sure they’re happy.”

I made sure things worked for my clients because I knew if I looked after you, it would look after me. Without realizing it there was a little bit of intelligence there …

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

—

Like many founders, Sarah is an idealist, but she didn’t initially look to doing a startup as a way to realize her dream of making a difference:

When I got into college, I was an environmental studies student and wanted to save the world. … I looked down upon those marketing majors, who just wanted to make money, and I thought this was the last thing that I would ever do.

…I wanted to make more of an impact as far as doing good in the world, and at that time I didn’t see business as an avenue for that. I didn’t know much about business. I’ve still never taken a business course in my life.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

She had no idea what she was getting into:

There were no work pants that fit women out there on the market. None, whatsoever. As you can imagine, curvy hips do not fit well into square men’s pants.

I was fed up with wearing pants that didn’t fit, as I realized lots of other women in the industry were. I talked to some companies to try to get them to start a line of work wear for women. No one jumped at it.

One guy said, “If you’re serious about it, why don’t you start your own business?”

So at the age of 25, I very naively asked myself, “Well, starting a business, how hard can this be?”

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Sarah’s advice for other founders is straightforward:

Be true and be brave.

There’s a lot of scary things out there, especially getting into a world or an industry that you don’t know and don’t have experience in but having a lot of courage and integrity and going into that … 

We could all afford those things, right? We don’t need to take a loan for more courage. We can do that. We just have to trust our gut too. That’s a big one, I make all my decisions just based on what feels right which may or may not be advisable to everyone but so far it’s worked for us. 

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

—

While he kept trying to get a bank job, Steve worked the door at clubs in Hong Kong, throwing parties and events that became the toast of the town. He never planned to start a company:

I started … with this delusion that I would get to rich people. I started putting on parties and clubs and events. And people would hire me to put on these events with the idea that if I captured enough rich people, that would do it. Without it realizing it, people were saying, “Can you do this? …” “Do you know people in Monaco?” “Do you know people in London?”  

So before it actually became a concept as an industry, I was becoming this international concierge. I was … flying to Macau and flying up to Japan to … try and find the coolest places.

Then I would send people there and go, “Oh yeah, you know because of my recommendation, that’s $1,000 but if you want me to get you a penthouse and a chauffeur … then that’s 10 grand.  

So I was making it up on the fly. And (at the) parties that I would throw, because I was on the door and I like humble people, I would give people a password to get into my club. And one of the passwords was finish this line, “One fish, two fish, red fish…” 

So people would walk up to the door, it would be me and another meathead on the door and they would say, “blue fish,” and I would let them in.

And if they didn’t and they were too arrogant and would go, “I’m here for the party,” we’d say, “I’m sorry. There’s no party here. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And there’d be a line of people getting in and the door would open up and music would barrel out. …

That’s how it started. It was a password.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

The company quickly acquired some mystique, but not by design:

We launched … a website and we forgot to put an email on there and a phone number. Everyone was in the media going, “Oh, that’s so exclusive. They haven’t even got a phone number.” We forgot to put it on there!

…No one could contact us and … this myth suddenly grew … We didn’t have business cards because we thought no one would take us seriously so again people thought we were that exclusive because we didn’t even have cards.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Like Sarah, Steve’s advice to other founders is simple:

Keep your word. … There is no better asset or title than someone turning round and going, “That Steve, he keeps his word.” … 

(Nowadays) I think people feel that it’s OK to let someone down and then apologize about it and then try again. I think if you’ve got someone that keeps their word no matter what, even if you lose money because you priced it wrong, nothing better than your credibility.

… I held onto that (maxim) from an early stage, and it worked well for me.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Listen to my full interviews with Sarah and Steve by downloading them from SoundCloud here and here. (And download any of the past shows here.)

Next on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere: Carmen Medina, former director of the Center for the Study of Intelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency and co-author of Rebels at Work; and Don Burke, Intellipedia Doyen for the Central Intelligence Agency

Tune in Thursday at 1 pm PT, 4 pm ET on Sirius XM Channel 111.

Want to be a guest on the show?  Entrepreneurship stretches from Main Street to Silicon Valley, from startups to big companies. Send an email to terri@kandsranch.com describing your entrepreneurial journey.

Filed under: Customer Development, SiriusXM Radio Show | Leave a comment »

If you’re a technical startup founder, one of the painful lessons is that it’s not enough just to build a great product. You must also understand the value the product provides customers (along with the rest of your business model.)

And going for crowdfunding before you do customer discovery with customers can lock you into the wrong idea too early.

These topics were the focus of interviews with the latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere, my radio show on SiriusXM Channel 111 (airing weekly Thursdays at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern).  The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. The program examines the DNA of entrepreneurs: what makes them tick, how they came up with their ideas; and explores the habits that make them successful, and the highs and lows that pushed them forward.

Joining me in the Stanford University studio were:

• Tiffani Bell, co-founder of the Detroit Water Project
• Clay Hebert, founder of Crowdfunding Hacks

Listen to the full interviews by downloading them from SoundCloud here and here. (And download any of the past shows here.)

Clips from their interviews are below.

Tiffani Bell is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Detroit Water Project, a platform that connects donors to people in Detroit and Baltimore in need of assistance paying their water bills. Since its founding in 2014, more than 10,000 people have given to turn the water back on for over 1,000 families. Tiffani was also a 2014 Code for America Fellow working with the City of Atlanta.

Her first startup, Pencil You In, grew from a personal need to schedule hair appointments. It ultimately failed because she was focused on engineering the product, but didn’t validate the rest of her business model (product/market fit, distribution channel, customer acquisition, etc.)

I should have realized earlier that I was building a marketplace… I could have built what now is like, Thumbtack or ServiceMagic or something like that. Instead, I went the Software as a Service route and tried to charge for what was a commodity product. There was nothing special about it; you could just book appointments on it. I tried to charge for that and nobody wanted to pay for it.

(Instead) I could have given it away and then done something around a marketplace sort of thing and charged for it.

… A marketplace would have worked (like this:) if you book a house cleaner through Pencil You In, we could have taken a percentage of that fee. … We could have let you have the software for free, basically.

… I didn’t (know that was possible) at the time but later I read things and just saw what was happening with competitors. …

It was like, “Duh, we should have done that!”

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Clay Hebert is the founder of Crowdfunding Hacks, which helps startups fund their dreams using crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. He also is an advisor to corporations and startups, having spent a decade at the consulting firm Accenture. 

Clay stressed that crowdfunding should not replace Customer Discovery:

… Customer Development and Customer Discovery need to be moved earlier – before you launch. I always say crowdfunding projects get funded before they launch, not while they’re live… meaning conceptually you need to launch to a tribe of people that you’ve already have identified. Yore launching to the customers you’ve already discovered and validated your ideas. 

… you need to do the customer discovery and validation ahead of time, and then crowdfunded can come in at the point in the process where, it’s not a replacement for it, but it can be a great validation of the idea. 

Steve: I run into a lot of students who say, “Hey, why do I need to get out of the building, I just started something on Kickstarter?” 

Clay: And they’re almost never successful.

Steve: Or worse… some are successful, and now they’re forced to either fail very publicly and messily, or have to deliver something that they no longer are passionate about.

Clay: That’s a very, very good point. … In an ideal world, by the time you click publish on Kickstarter or IndieGoGo, you’ve been iterating, working on this thing for a year or more, and collecting emails and building permissions.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

—

The Detroit Water Project began after Tiffani read about problems Detroit families were having paying their water bills. So far, the startup has been able to help more than 1,000 families. Talking with those people gave Tiffani and her team a deeper understanding of their needs, as well as ideas for other ways they might help.

The idea that people can’t pay their water bills was foreign originally, but just digging deeper into people’s situations (we’ve learned so much more). … For example, in Detroit and Baltimore you can lose your kids over not having water in your house. … They can be taken away from you through Child Protective Services. The house can be declared condemned because it doesn’t have running water. 

… We didn’t know these things (initially). 

We had several families who didn’t have electricity or water. We’ve had folks where they are in between jobs or their hours have been cut. We didn’t know any of these things, so it’s been interesting to dig into situations and do Customer Development … take time to talk to people, whenever they apply, just to figure out what’s (their) situation.  

…People originally said this could be a Band-Aid, but we’re thinking more in the future now about how to help people according to what their specific situations are.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Having developed a passion for coding when she was very young, entrepreneurship seemed a natural leap for Tiffani:

I started reading Wired (magazine) around probably eighth grade. … I was totally a nerd. That was probably around ’99, which was the first dot.com boom, so I read about all those people doing all those things, and I figured out that, “They’re doing the same thing I am.”

(She told herself) “They’re building more complicated stuff, but they’re the skills are the same, so why couldn’t I do the same thing?”

I didn’t know the first thing about how to start a company, but I kept reading Wired and learning about all the different venture capital firms and what people were getting funded for and that sort of thing.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Like a lot of founders, she has no interest in a traditional job:

I don’t have the personality to be an employee. I ask a lot of questions and (keep) … weird hours.… I could never work for someone else. I need to be my own boss.

… I have a personality where I just like to do things. I don’t like to be in meetings. I like to make stuff happen … (as in) we have an idea, let’s go build it and try it out.  

In companies that’s not, sometimes, welcome and accepted. … I have a bias for action and … if I see a problem, I want to solve it. Sometimes it doesn’t work well in companies. You need to respect authority and hierarchy and things of that nature.  I’ve had, mostly, jobs where I’ve had the ability to … do my own thing. … I’ve been lucky that way.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

—

Clay’s father founded a furniture business that ultimately failed. Watching his father struggle had a strong influence on Clay and his brothers:

Me and (my brothers) saw my dad as this very smart, very hardworking guy. And before he was an entrepreneur, when he was at a foundry, things were going really well, and he was promoted to foreman.

For many years I sort of got it wrong, I thought: here’s this guy who’s really smart and really hardworking, and yet the entrepreneurship thing isn’t working. I think (we) rejected the path of entrepreneurship because our one big data point was that even if you’re smart and hardworking it may not work. …

Steve: Is that what drove you to corporate consulting.

Clay: It is, absolutely. …

Steve: You said anything but entrepreneurship?  

Clay: Yeah.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Before starting Crowdfunding Hacks, Clay worked as an intrapreneur:

I tried for 5 years to bring (Lean Startup-style) thinking inside of Accenture (with) very limited success.

… Because Accenture as an organization … works much better as a machine with interchangeable people. If they can unplug me from the project in Boston, and plug me into the project in Chicago with no training and no time lost, that’s great.  

What was frustrating to me was the tagline for the entire company at the time was “Innovation Delivered” and here I felt like I’d found some of the secret scrolls of bringing some of this creative thinking and innovation inside, and yet it was much more a cookie-cutter process making everybody the same so that they were sustainable in any other project and quickly changeable. 

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Would-be startup founders working in day jobs shouldn’t put off their startup dreams, Clay said:

Start a blog, throw up a landing page for an idea that you have, do it nights and weekends.

When we talk about places to hide (from your dreams), one way to hide is convincing yourself that: I have a corporate job, I have a spouse and kids, and I don’t have time to do this other thing.  

You and I know lots of people who made the time – sometimes from 9 pm to 2 am – to get started working on their dream. Because Lean Startup methods, Crowdfunding, Amazon Web Services and the Internet that connects us all, is bringing the cost of failure to zero.  

You don’t need money; you just need to carve out a little bit of time. Chase that idea, stop hiding, carve out the time you need. … I always tell people … “99.9% of people don’t care at all about what you’re building, that’s great news, not bad news, because all you have to do is go find that .1% and that’s actually plenty.”

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Listen to my full interviews with Tiffani and Clay by downloading them from SoundCloud here and here. (And download any of the past shows here.)

Next on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere: Sarah Calhoun, founder of Red Ants Pants workwear for women and Steve Sims, founder of Bluefish executive concierge service.

Tune in Thursday at 1 pm PT, 4 pm ET on Sirius XM Channel 111.

Want to be a guest on the show?  Entrepreneurship stretches from Main Street to Silicon Valley, from startups to big companies. Send an email to terri@kandsranch.com describing your entrepreneurial journey.

Filed under: Customer Development, SiriusXM Radio Show | 2 Comments »

Silicon Valley’s pay-it-forward culture means that others will help when you’re starting up. Yet this same network of connected people affects who gets funded, how startup teams form, and who gets hired. 

And a company culture and values need to be design and engineered just like the product. 

These topics were the focus of interviews with the latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere, my radio show on SiriusXM Channel 111 (airing weekly Thursdays at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern.)  The show follows the journeys of founders sharing their experiences of what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. The program examines the DNA of entrepreneurs: what makes them tick, how they came up with their ideas; and explores the habits that make them successful, and the highs, lows that pushed them forward.

Joining me this week at the Stanford University studio were:

• Wayne Sutton, co-founder of BUILDUP VC
• Dave Kashen, co-founder and CEO of Worklife

Listen to the full interviews by downloading them from SoundCloud here and here. (And download any of the past shows here.)

Clips from their interviews are below:

 

 

Wayne Sutton is a partner and co-founder of BUILDUP VC, a Bay Area non-profit that connects, mentors, and educates underrepresented technology entrepreneurs. He is also the co-founder of Tech Inclusion, dedicated to exploring innovative solutions to  diversity and inclusion in tech.

Looking to create their accelerator/incubator, Wayne and seven other founders rented a Silicon Valley house together one summer.

The experience proved to be a wealth of learning opportunities, but one lesson in particular stood out:

… I learned (from) that experience that if you show that you’re willing to put in the work and the effort, there are mentors and people out there willing to volunteer to help you, but you have to take a risk. You have to put yourself out there.

…By creating the BUILDUP VC incubator and accelerator … we’re got into the business of providing education and access. We learned that people were willing to provide us resources, provide mentorships, and open their doors. …It proved to us and our companies that … if you are willing to take the risk of coming to Silicon Valley and work on your startup, people want to help.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Dave Kashen is co-founder & CEO of Worklife, a Y Combinator-funded startup whose mission to have everyone love their job. Their first product aims to make meetings more productive. Prior to Worklife, Dave was a CEO coach, leadership trainer and culture consultant to some of Silicon Valley’s fastest-growing technology companies. Previously, he was co-founder of Wellsphere, an online health and wellness company that grew to over 6 million monthly visitors.

He faced several challenges with Wellsphere early on:

We were a little bit too early in a couple different dimensions so I learned the importance of timing…  

In ’05, social networking was not quite as prevalent as is it today. The idea of a social network inside of an organization wasn’t a thing yet so that was a little bit scary and even the linkage between healthy behaviors and saving healthcare costs and becoming more productive and being less absent and all of that, a lot of that research has emerged over the last 10 years. 

(Just as important as the product) we did not pay a lot of attention and we’re not particularly intentional about how we were building the company (and its culture.)  

We had this mission. We were both non-technical co-founders so that had its own challenges. We were probably a little bit arrogant in our thinking of what we could create and how we could lead developers to create these ideas that we have.

We were also arrogant in the sense of we have this idea of how the thing should work and we built it … This was a little bit before Lean Startup was very popular, so we just built this thing that we thought would work and lo and behold, it didn’t work. …The features didn’t match what ultimately the customers would buy or wanted.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

—

Wayne set his sights on entrepreneurship when he was a teen, working in the tobacco fields of North Carolina:

I remember working in the tobacco field one morning. It was about 10 am, and it was hot, maybe one of the hottest summers that season. It was maybe 100 degrees. … around me, I saw people my father’s age, I saw some family members as well, and people that could have been even my grandfather’s age working in the field with me.

I understood that this was their opportunity to make money, and in their generation there wasn’t many other opportunities besides farming for them to make money.

I looked at myself, and was like, “When I get older, I’m not going to be working in a tobacco field.” I wanted my own company. …I wanted to be in charge of my own destiny, and that started my drive.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

He first startup idea had potential, but he gave up on it too quickly:

It was going to ESPN before ESPN. … North Carolina is big basketball country, a big basketball world like ACC, Duke, UNC. I met these two athletes … one had a little bit of stint in the NBA, the other one had just graduated college and played overseas a little bit. I was like, “… It’s going to be big. People are going to go online and vote for their favorite athlete and all, post pictures.” This was around 2001.

… They were like, “Oh, this sounds good and everything, but I’m not sure if this thing is going to work out.” … I bought the domain and started doing events… launched a website, and was doing polls (but his co-founders gave up on it, and so Wayne did as well).

… The lesson there is that if I believed in the vision of what things could be. … You have to realize that you may be too early, the market may not be ready, but also … there’s benefit in sticking it out. I look at that lesson (and think) heaven knows what could’ve happened if I would have stuck it out.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Wayne also spoke about working to increase the number of minorities in tech:

It’s not an easy problem to solve. It is not just one thing, -… it’s not just about (a lack of) people in the pipeline, its not just as a problem in terms of biases. Not just a problem in terms of access to technology. (It’s all of these.)

We don’t think about that in 2016, everybody doesn’t have a smartphone. Everybody doesn’t have hi-speed Internet. Everybody doesn’t have or is even aware of success stories such as Steve Blank or the process of launching a startup.  

Even though we have all this information online, not everybody is aware or have access to this, and (on top of this there) is lack of role models … especially for underrepresented entrepreneurs. And it’s a culture issue.  

…Look at the history of America and what has been the role models or the examples of a way out for a lot of underrepresented entrepreneurs minorities? It has been sports and entertainment, not tech.

I feel like now we’re beginning to see people focus a little bit more on tech, but it’s not just one thing. It’s all those pieces. …

…(Silicon Valley) is a network-based system — about who you know … who gets funded, how teams are forms, who gets hired in certain companies, how promotions (are determined) — that is all relationship-based.

Steve:  You think there is implicit rather than explicit bias?

Wayne: Yes.

Steve: That’s an interesting … It’s truly an ‘old boy’ network.

Wayne: Yes. 

Steve: Even though the old boys are not very old. 

Wayne: No.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

—

Right out of college, Dave chased a dream of being rich, becoming an investment banker. It turned out to be the wrong path for him.

Long Island, (where Dave grew up, is) a fairly materialistic place and I was reasonably intelligent, so everyone said to me you’re going to be a millionaire. I thought that was what I was supposed to become, and so that kind of got drilled in my head. … The point was to make lots of money and that’s what led to happiness, and that was kind of the mindset for a while.

…my dad was a doctor, my mom was a teacher. … They were divorced when I was 5, so the distinction between my dad’s lifestyle and my mom’s was very apparent to me. I think that was part of the fuel, but there was no entrepreneurs, no real business people in the family, no finance people, I didn’t know what investment banking was, but there was this really, I think, deeply embedded mindset of like you’re supposed to become wealthy and do high-status things, and that’s how you become happy.  

If you can’t hear the clip, click here. 

Wellsphere found success, but not in the way Dave had anticipated.

…We pivoted the company toward what the market wanted, and what our users and customer wanted, but away from my initial vision and passion.

It worked in the sense of we built value. We were able to grow really quickly from a very small to 6 million monthly visitors. We found a core distribution model that worked in terms of long-tail search. … but by the time we did, it was no longer aligned with my passion, and the vision of the impact I wanted to have.  

In some way, part of the decision to sell the company at that time was because I lost that alignment. I think we could have built more value, had we continued.

Steve: That’s another great lesson. If you’ve founded something, but find you’re no longer passionate about what you’re doing, it becomes just a job.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

The experience led him to create Worklife and, he said, helped him become a better manager:

I’m way more conscious about hiring for values and listening for alignment (with the company’s values). … As I moved from (a founder of my own company) into the world of coaching, and training, I’ve worked with clients on discovering their own (personal) values and their company values, then devising systems and processes used to make sure that 1) that they’re hiring for values; 2) they’re actually living them day to day.

As a coach over the last five years (I learned) that the way to motivate somebody is to have the situation occur to them as if it’s in their best interest. …. When I talk about values, in part it’s trying to understand, what does this person value and do those things overlap with the experience would be like working here. …

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Listen to my full interviews with Wayne and Dave by downloading them from SoundCloud here and here. (And download any of the past shows here.)

Next on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere: Tiffani Bell, co-founder of the Detroit Water Project; and Clay Hebert, founder of Crowdfunding Hacks.

Tune in Thursday at 1 pm PT, 4 pm ET on Sirius XM Channel 111.

 —

Want to be a guest on the show?  Entrepreneurship stretches from Main Street to Silicon Valley, from startups to big company’s. Send an email to terri@kandsranch.com describing your entrepreneurial journey,

Filed under: Customer Development, SiriusXM Radio Show | 1 Comment »

A cool product by itself is not a company. And why being a military veteran is great training for starting up.

The importance of using customer feedback to shape Minimum Viable Products and why world-class founders are disciplined were topics discussed by the guests on the latest episode of Entrepreneurs are Everywhere, my radio show on SiriusXM Channel 111.

Joining me in the Stanford University studio were:

• DJ Jayalath, co-founder of Athos fitness apparel
• Mark Hatch, co-founder of TechShop prototyping studios

Listen to the full interviews by downloading them from SoundCloud here and here. (And download any of the past shows here.)

Clips from their interviews are below, but first a word about the show:

Entrepreneurs are Everywhere airs Thursdays at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern, on Sirius XM Channel 111. It follows the entrepreneurial journeys of founders sharing their experiences of what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries to entrepreneurial education and more.

The program examines the DNA of entrepreneurs: what makes them tick, how they came up with their ideas; and explores the habits that make them successful, and the highs, lows and pivots that pushed them forward.

While studying electrical engineering at the University of Waterloo, DJ Jayalath and his co-founder, Chris Wiebe, devised the Athos workout gear to address their own fitness needs. Interest from a VC catapulted the two, post-graduation, into doing a startup.

One thing DJ learned is that inventing a cool product doesn’t equal having a business:

You can develop whatever you want to develop (but) until you have customers giving you feedback, none of it counts.  

… The product’s great but you really need all the feedback you can get so you can improve on it. You want to move as fast as possible to be able to get that feedback and that might not be the perfect product you wanted to build. You want to have at least some of the earlier versions of it out there like … a minimum viable product that at least demonstrates a key component so that people can start like giving you feedback. … it might inspire some of the things you’re not doing and also validate some of the thoughts you had before.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Mark Hatch is one of the leaders of the Maker Movement. Prior to co-founding TechShop, the former Green Beret was an exec at Kinko’s, Avery Dennison and Health Net. Author of The Maker Movement Manifesto, Mark was recognized by as one of the Bay Area’s Most Admired CEOs and by Popular Mechanics as one of 25 movers and makers reinventing the American Dream.

Mark explained why being a Green Beret is good training for entrepreneurs:

(I learned) confidence, leadership, discipline, stick-to-it-iveness, the ability to function on very small amounts of sleep.

…Discipline (is most important for entrepreneurs). … I think most successful entrepreneurs are very disciplined at some level. … even if you’re not necessarily disciplined with your schedule, you’re always running in the back of your head, “here are the important things that have to get done,” and there’s really nothing that’s going to stand in your way between getting them done and not getting them done. … You have to get them done, so you’ll find a way. … Failure is not an option.

… I think I had part of (those traits) in me, but the military really helped unpack it in a very substantial way. Becoming a Green Beret is not a really easy feat. … 5 percent graduate, 8 percent graduate, something like that. At the end of it, you know you can do just about anything that you put your mind to, and in (Special Forces), in particular, we’ve got a lot of really bright guys. … You have a decent IQ and then you have to be able to operate in extreme environments for extended periods of time.

… It’s a perfect … training ground for an entrepreneur.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

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Before college, DJ dreamed of making robotic prosthetics. An internship set him on a different path:

… I thought I wanted to study mechatronics engineering… to make robots, because robots are cool.  

… I wanted to make intelligent prosthetics. (For example) a leg that bends at the joint, that’s actually smart enough to adapt to you. … (However) I quickly realized I liked making cell phones much better.

… I worked at Qualcomm and RIM at the time … for my internships. … I worked on Android there and it was cool. … That was definitely a thing I was really interested in, hardware design. How all these things went together and how you can work with manufacturers to help you do all the work. … 

Steve:  So much for making limbs to make people’s lives better.

DJ: Exactly. …This is way cooler.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

DJ and Chris created Athos’ technology to fill a personal need:

All the time that we spent at the gym, not knowing exactly how to get the most out of the time. We’ll go there for an hour and lift a bunch of weights, but how do we know that’s the most we can get out of that time? Being engineers we wanted to optimize that.

We couldn’t really afford a personal trainer; for us $50 an hour was a ridiculous amount of money. …. We started looking at what type of information we could get that was really valid about what is going on with your body. …

(At the time, it was less about building a company and) much more about we needed a project for our final design project. … We wanted to do something that was a little more ambitious. … it needed to be a product that we wanted to use. …

(This was important because) when you’re able to relate to the problem you … get to make the trade-offs very easily because you understand, OK it needs to be like this otherwise it’s not going to be really useful.

… We recognized … that we were lazy. We forgot to take a pen and paper to take notes as to what kind of workout we did. There was no chance that we’d take another piece of hardware to go to the gym, so we had to build (the technology) into something that was already a part of our existing routine. … We (built it) into gym clothes because we already took our gym clothes. … 

(We thought) let’s make it as easy as possible for people to use something, so that it increases the likelihood for them to adopt it, because you don’t have to build a new habit or routine to use it.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Here’s how their idea became a startup:

We got lucky. … We were demonstrating this at our final year symposium. … Somebody … came by who talked at us for about 10 minutes. We had no idea who he was (but) he was better dressed than everybody else was. That was a hint. … He said, “Really cool guys,” and … walked away.

(Turns out he was a VC.)… a couple weeks later he sent us an email saying, “… I’m really interested in what you guys are doing. … I want to fund you guys, and keep working on this. Can we talk some more?”

Steve:  … while you are thinking this just happened, I’ll suggest entrepreneurs make their own luck. If you hadn’t … noticed this guy with the nice clothes, and you probably spent another extra couple minutes with him, rather than someone else. … You made a connection in a way, that while you think it was just luck, I’ll contend you actually influenced the event.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

DJ said developing a founder’s mindset was challenging:

When you’re an engineer, you’re always used to working towards the right answer or the correct answer, but (for a founder) there is no concept of a correct answer. It’s more like writing an English essay where you can do your best job, but you never know if you’ve had the right answer until you’re looking back when you got the graded paper.

… You just can do your best (but) you don’t know that you’re doing the right thing or if you’re doing the best thing until … later on.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

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TechShop, Mark said, is Kinkos for geeks:

(TechShop co-founder) Jim Newton… built (TechShop) for himself. He built a 20,000-square-foot facility with every tool you need to make anything on the planet.

… Machine tools … mills and lathes …It had every tool you’d need to make anything. … You (can) build (an) entire (prototype) from the ground up.

Steve:  If it’s something mechanical, this was the ultimate toy store.

Mark:  Absolutely. … the Kauffman Foundation says that 50 percent of all successful companies come out of the founders’ personal need. This happens to be one of those stories. Jim needed access to these tools … because he had … 200 new product ideas in his inventor’s notebook. … He sat down and said, “Here are all the tools I need to do every single one of these,” and that became the minimum set, which was magical.

Nobody else on the globe had come up with this concept for a minimum set for an inventor’s paradise. …

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

He explained the Maker Movement’s impact on entrepreneurism:

I talked to three different entrepreneurs back to back, and each one of them told me that they had saved 98 percent of their startup costs by using the TechShop platform. … (this) quote came to mind: The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed. … 

… if you can reduce the cost of a startup by 98 percent, you’ve completely changed the economic reality for a very significant piece of the economy.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Mark added that founders should take the media’s fairy-tale startup stories with a grain of salt:

It’s a lot harder than it looks. Don’t believe the magazine articles. …The magazines always tell you the success stories. They don’t tell you the 95 percent of the other people who failed. 

Steve: Right, and your co-founder quitting and your biggest customer going away. … 

Mark:  … And firing your best friend, laying people off. If you’re not prepared to let people go, then you’re just not really setup to be able to do this. …

…The enterprise tells you what it needs, and if you’re not prepared to listen to it, and give it what it needs, then you’re probably going to fail at some point.  

You got to listen very carefully. Listen to your customers, listen to your staff, and then make the modifications as early as you possibly can. That’s a hard thing to learn.  

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

And he offered this advice to other founders:

Focus on your strengths as an entrepreneur. (The management consultant) Peter Drucker talked about this in one of his classes. He … said, “Nobody ever became great working on their weaknesses.”

… the intriguing thing is that … if you’re in a big company and HR talks to you, they typically use that conversation around what you’re bad at as a reason why you didn’t get a promotion or whatever. Then they tell you this is what you need to work on. That’s the worst possible advice. …

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Listen to my full interviews with DJ and Mark by downloading them from SoundCloud here and here. (And download any of the past shows here.)

Next on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere: Wayne Sutton, co-founder of BUILDUP; and Dave Kashen, co-founder and CEO of Worklife.

Tune in Thursday at 1 pm PT, 4 pm ET on Sirius XM Channel 111.

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