Category: Entrepreneurship
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If I could go back in time, I’d kick my own ass
There’s a scene in How I Met Your Mother where Marshall imagines dropping in right at the point where his teenage self starts smoking, and slugs him. I’ve adopted a mentality that, if at any point I’m able to traverse time a year, even six months, back…. I’d kick my own ass. It has nothing…
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Celebrate the wins
The typical startup journey involves a lot of failure, which has luckily been embraced by the entrepreneurial community as a positive experience. Beyond the obvious aspect of innovating in a way that, statistically, won’t work, the act of barn-raising a new company is fraught with it’s own issues. The product has bugs. Support times are…
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We do.
Most people won’t. Which means those that do change everything. – Bryce Roberts I credit much of Contactually’s success not to having some secret sauce (at the outset), being right, hiring the smartest people in the room, or anything else that would qualify as a competitive advantage. That’s important for other reasons. We’re successful because…
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Why Structo Failed
In 2010, I started working on a startup called Struc.to. It’s dead now, not even worth the hosting costs or domain registration. All that’s physically left is ~300 stickers I never distributed, a standing banner I haven’t gotten around to throwing out, and a dog bowl my wife had made for me (or Astro) as…
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Giving Back
When comparing friends’ respective industries, one point of pride for the early stage tech community is the strong focus on giving back and helping those one, two, three billion rungs below you up the venture ladder. I would not be where I am today without the advisors and mentors I’ve connected with – whether I’m…
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Approaches to Competition
As is common knowledge, competition is an inevitability. There are people with similar ideas as you. There are solutions your desired userbase is already using for the problem at hand. As you grow and start making waves, you’ll be attacked from above, below, and sideways. When first learning about a competitor, I used to think…
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Never Stop Pushing
We’ve hit some big milestones at Contactually recently. We passed a big internal revenue related milestone, something that, at the outset, seemed like an unattainable goal. We raised over $1 million for our seed round. And our team can’t be fed by a couple of pizzas anymore, and we’re actively hiring. In that time, I’ve…
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Getting into 500.
Everything has to start somewhere. Contactually would not exist without 500 Startups. Rewind back to September 2011. I was running a pretty successful dev shop. Jeff was working for me. Tony had a full time job, and was about accept a position at a later stage startup. Jeff and I had been building the prototype…
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Around the world
This is a visualization of where Contactually users are, based on location information we can find. Truly around the world.
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Hunting U-Boats and Taking Advice
It sounds circuitous, but one of the most valuable pieces of advice I’ve received as a founder is on taking advice. When I first sat down with someone who would later become one of my lead investors, he asked me if I had read any books chronicling submarine warfare in World War II. He jumped…