The Entrepreneur Questionnaire: John Hayes, Co-Founder and Chief Architect of Pure Storage

February 6, 2012 1 Comment

John Hayes, Co-Founder and Chief Architect of Pure Storage

John Hayes is the Co-Founder and Chief Architect of Pure Storage, a Greylock-backed start-up based in Mountain View, CA. Pure Storage has a simple mission: to enable the widespread adoption of flash in the enterprise data center.

In a nutshell, what is the big idea behind Pure Storage?

Enable efficient deployment of solid-state storage in the datacenter.

What about the future of Pure Storage excites you the most?

Solid-state storage changes the fundamental data structures and IO patterns business software has been built on for decades; purpose building for solid-state storage yields benefits that are unachievable by repurposing software built for spinning disks or hybrid solutions. Within a decade business infrastructures will realize a 10x-100x performance improvement and we aim to be at the center of that change.

Why did you become an entrepreneur?

An entrepreneur is someone who asks for capital instead of asking for permission. I’ve never enjoyed asking for permission, but I’ve also been lucky enough to know people who have offered a great deal of support.

What was the most difficult lesson you have learned as an entrepreneur?

Every once in a while I notice that something isn’t happening. When I think back to previous jobs, I realize that there was some source of initiative making that thing happen… now that’s now my job. The whole cloth of a new company doesn’t seem so intimidating until you realize you’ve been looking at it through a microscope.

What has surprised you about being an entrepreneur?

It’s often thought that an entrepreneur’s goal is to make a great product. In reality it’s to build a great company that makes a great product. It feels strange to plan your own obsolescence, but it’s an amazing practice for pushing everyone in the company beyond the limits of comfort.

What is the best business advice you’ve ever heard?

It’s not quite advice, but Mike Speiser has said that Pure Storage is ‘making the world safe for flash storage.’ This idea can be applied to almost anything and I think every business should strive for the simple characterization that they are making the world safer.

Mark Leslie – it’s the dream of every entrepreneur to be hauled in front of congress on antitrust charges because they so thoroughly destroyed their competitors.

What is your motto?

Certainty is usually just a lack of creativity.

What are you passionate about?

I love engineering, building new products and working with new technologies. Every technology has a secret  language and the key to great engineering is learning that language.

What was your first paying job?

I was an administrative assistant thanks to my mastery of WordPerfect 5.1.

What do you like most about being an entrepreneur?

It’s almost the purest form of meritocracy. How else can you be the least educated, least accomplished person at a company and still be Chief Architect?
What do you like least about being an entrepreneur?

Being uncomfortable with getting attention while at the same time being restless with the status quo, which often means drawing attention in order to enact change. As an entrepreneur I’m well outside of my comfort zone.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

I would like to be able to focus on two things at a time.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

I hope I’m still working on it; achievement is a product of a lifetime, not a single event.

What is the last book you read?

“Packing for Mars” – it’s evidence that if you call someone an astronaut, you can do anything to them including testing the world’s most expensive disposable vehicle.

What advice would you give other entrepreneurs on how to build a great business?

Every great business initially does something so deceptively difficult that the challenges of success go almost unnoticed.

What led you to found a company?

I wanted to build something substantial and difficult. It would take time to build, but it would make a big difference in the world.  I want to create “perfect storage” where “perfect” is always fungible and always fast.

I want the storage problem to go away. Few companies spend as much time on the 99th percentile of performance.  This focus has driven us to a deep understanding of our medium.  Then, we used that knowledge to create something that doesn’t require users to understand how our product works because it just does.

How did you come up with the idea for Pure Storage?

I have to credit John Colgrove, the senior co-founder with coming up with the idea. I can only be credited with a plausible approach for implementation. When he didn’t panic, it seemed like a good match.

What advice would you give to someone starting a new enterprise? (read: if you could go back in time 2 years and give yourself a piece of advice, what would that be)

It’s hard to tell the difference between a good idea and a merely clever one.  No one ever built a significant business on a clever idea.

Make sure you find founding partners who cover all the gaps.  All the things you don’t know how to do… you should be really impressed by them.  They should be so good at what they do that it seems like magic to you.

What’s the best way to attract talent to a new organization?

Show them the real company: openness, pride, ambition.  Be critical, challenging and purposeful.

What do you like about being at Pure?

The feedback we’ve gotten from the market and customers gives me great confidence that people really need what we are building and the real challenge is to prove why we are the ones to do it.

Entrepreneurs do things that haven’t been done yet. What are you doing at Pure that breaks the mold?

It may come as a surprise, but I had never worked on a storage product before Pure. We work from the user, or application, down not from the hardware up.

What’s the biggest challenge you personally face in pioneering the unknown?

It’s easy to become enamored with the beauty and simplicity of something even if it’s totally unworkable. I don’t mind backtracking on myself; but having a conversation with someone else while proposing rolling back their last few months of work feels terrible.

For technical inspiration, what has been the most effective well?

My past mistakes.

For you, what’s the biggest difference between working in a small start up company and a large established organization?

Large organizations get distracted by the desire to defend the old business.  They can’t invest whole-heartedly in a new direction without considering how it might harm their existing cash flow. At a startup, decisions can be driven in accordance with what’s logical and right for the market.

What principles define Pure’s engineering culture? How do you encourage their exercise?

We are very selective about who we hire and when someone joins our team we inherently trust them. As an example, we share pretty much everything about what’s happening in the company with every employee.

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The Entrepreneur Questionnaire: Sunny Gupta, Founder and CEO of Apptio

July 26, 2011 Leave a comment

Sunny Gupta, Founder and CEO of Apptio

Sunny Gupta is Founder and CEO of Apptio, a Greylock-backed start-up based in Bellevue, Wash., that helps enterprise CIOs manage the costs, quality and value of the IT products and services they provide. Notable customers include Cisco, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Bank of America, Facebook and J.P. Morgan Chase.

Describe your business in 10 words or fewer.

Apptio provides the CIO a business management platform to run IT like a business.

What is the big idea behind your business?

Businesses have witnessed a major transformation in the way they use technology to automate functions such as manufacturing and sales. But most CIOs do not have an equivalent system to manage the business of technology. That is the opportunity we see for ourselves. Globally, organizations spend more then $4 trillion on technology each year. Technology has continued to become strategically important to corporations. There needs to be a paradigm shift that enables more transparency so that CIOs and other technology leaders can make decisions based on facts and not assumptions.

How did you come up with the idea for Apptio?

When I was at Opsware I was sitting in the office of the CIO of Goldman Sachs. We were talking about the acquisition of Opsware by HP and one of the people in the room asked me what I was going to do next. I started asking questions: What are you struggling with? What are your challenges? They described this exact problem. As soon as we got home my business partner and I started calling IT leaders in different types of industries to see if this really was as big of an idea as we thought. That’s when we realized everyone has this problem and no one was solving it.

Why are you excited about the future for this company?

We see a clear window of opportunity and have been able to attract some of the world’s largest companies to run their IT businesses on Apptio. We have the ability to define and build the next major enterprise software category. We also think there is a great opportunity to extend our footprint outside the realm of IT.

Why did you become an entrepreneur?

I was working at IBM as a developer when I started to feel that my career was only going to incrementally grow in corporate jobs. That wasn’t good enough. I wanted to take control of my own career and grow exponentially.

What was the most difficult lesson you have learned as an entrepreneur?

The most important lesson was that customer validation has strategic importance. The key is to continuously reinforce that culture so your team is always thinking about it. The most difficult lesson I’ve learned is personal. At a certain point in running your own business you realize that it is all about the team. You need the right people around you and sometimes you have to make emotionally challenging decisions. As an entrepreneur you start off with people you know and trust but some of those people are unable to help you get to the next level.

What has surprised you about being an entrepreneur?

Entrepreneurship is all consuming and requires a lot of focus. If you are in it for the money, don’t do it. The sacrifice required is unprecedented. You need to be sure you are doing this for the right reasons.

What five adjectives would you use to describe yourself?

Results-driven, competitive, passionate, focused, rational.

What values are important to you as an entrepreneur?

Being focused on results is extremely important. Focus on the areas where you need work rather than celebrating what you do really well.

Integrity and honesty. Rather than speak behind someone’s back I believe in giving direct feedback.

I encourage all our employees to make informed decisions rather than asking for consensus. This is the advantage that a start-up like Apptio has when going to battle with massive competitors.

Encourage fast failures—and be careful not to make the same mistake a second time.

What is the best business advice you’ve ever heard?

Customer validation trumps everything. I learned this at Mercury Interactive.

What is your motto?

In business you frequently are forced to make decisions that are on the borderline of integrity and ethics. The most important thing is to be on the right side.

Which living person do you most admire?

Steve Jobs. The whole world has benefitted from his personal style of innovation. I also greatly admire Jeff Bezos. He has shown a rare ability to continue to innovate from within a large corporation. Amazon started as a book company, then it became an etailer and a Web services company before introducing the Kindle.

What are you passionate about?

Building a next generation business and defining an entirely new business category. Creating wealth for the people around me. And football: I’m a big Seattle Seahawks fan. If I weren’t doing this I would be working in the football industry.

What motivates you?

Winning.

What was your first paying job?

Washing dishes at a restaurant.

What do you like most about being an entrepreneur?

The ability to control your own destiny. I would always bet on myself.

What do you like least about being an entrepreneur?

The constant scrutiny.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

I wish I could be more trusting. It comes down to skepticism and paranoia.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

The greatest achievement is in front of us not behind us.

What is the last book you read?

The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly.

What advice would you give other entrepreneurs on how to build a great business?

Of course it is important to find out what your customers want but it is more important to know what they will pay for. The only way to know if your customers really value something is if they are willing to pay money for it.

Never underestimate the power of the team around you. Bad teams can take a great market opportunity and turn it into a failure. Great teams can take a mediocre opportunity and turn it into a success.

*This interview was conducted by Erika Brown Ekiel.

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The Entrepreneur Questionnaire: David Ulevitch, Founder and CEO, OpenDNS

July 19, 2011 2 Comments

OpenDNS provides security and infrastructure services that make the Internet safer, including cloud-based Web content filtering and DNS-based malware and botnet protection. The service enables businesses to reduce costs, enforce Internet-use policies and secure their networks from online threats, and allows millions of consumers to have a safer, faster Internet experience.

David Ulevitch, CEO and Founder of OpenDNS

Describe your business in 10 words or fewer.
OpenDNS is the safest way to navigate the Internet.

What is the big idea behind your business?
DNS (domain name system) is a protocol you use any time you use the Internet, whether you are casually surfing or reading, shopping or IM-ing your friends. No one has innovated in this area in 30 years. We are adding reliability, speed and safety to it.

How did you come up with the idea for OpenDNS?
Prior to OpenDNS I ran a company called EveryDNS. We provided a different type of management service to people who owned domain names. We became very good at getting rid of spammers and phishers, however we found that those scammers would just move onto another service after being kicked off mine. With my next company I wanted to have the biggest impact possible. We flipped the problem on its head and fixed it so that no matter who is hosting the website, people have control over their own safe Internet experience by using OpenDNS.

Why are you excited about the future for this company?
We serve 1% of the world’s Internet users and we see much larger opportunities in front of us. When you reach a milestone, your horizon of what’s possible grows.

Why did you become an entrepreneur?
Entrepreneurs are always skeptical of the status quo. Whether in school, inside a large company or starting their own venture, entrepreneurs are never satisfied—they are always looking for ways to do things better, safer, faster, cheaper. In that way, I’ve always been an entrepreneur.

What was the most difficult lesson you have learned as an entrepreneur?
Building a successful team is one of the most important and most difficult things you can do as a founder. There are a lot of people who are capable or smart but they may not be great inside your company. It goes both ways. I was fired as the CEO and later rehired. That was a trying experience. I had everything I loved riding on this company. A lot of founders who find themselves in that situation get emotional because they feel like someone is trying to kill their baby. I learned to not be emotional and did everything I could to make it successful. Knowing people make decisions based on the best information they have at the time I remained unemotional and earned my job back. You never know when the tables will turn.

What has surprised you about being an entrepreneur?
It turns out that the difference between being very successful and being marginalized is very thin. If you do just a few things wrong you can be marginalized very quickly. In school you can get nine A’s, fail a test and still get an A in the class. In business you need to get it right every time. You can’t just work harder to make things better. You need to be flawless.

What five adjectives would you use to describe yourself?
Positively disruptive, innovative, compassionate, a good listener, decisive.

What values are important to you as an entrepreneur?
Honesty. It is key to setting and meeting expectations and goals. That includes clarity in communication. When you screw up you need to tell people, whether it’s customers, employees or the public. Commitment is also critical. A startup is a marathon. You need to be in it for the long haul.

What is the best business advice you’ve ever heard?
Be accountable.  Set goals and achieve them.

What is your motto?
Talk is cheap. :-)

Which living person do you most admire?
Steve Jobs. He has disrupted a number of industries, including music, movies, phones, mobile and PCs. He is myopically focused on delivering the best customer experience possible.

What are you passionate about?
I like the idea of using technology to make the world a better place. In the last 50 years I don’t think anything has brought more wealth to the world or helped more people than technology.

What motivates you?
Guilt. :-) If I make an obligation to someone, I will do it. I don’t like the idea of letting customers, employees or shareholders down. I want to leave the world better than I found it.

What was your first paying job?
I worked at a small Internet service provider the summer after eighth grade doing tech support. I learned how to program and use UNIX servers.  I’ve had paying jobs ever since, even in college.

What do you like most about being an entrepreneur?
The opportunities are limitless and there are no constraints around you. You can make perception a reality. A dreamer just keeps it in their heads; an entrepreneur makes it happen.

What do you like least about being an entrepreneur?
If I had to pick a downside I guess I would say that being an entrepreneur is a lonely job. Not a lot of people know what you’re going through and can relate.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
I’d like to be in better shape.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Building a sustainable business around a service people really like. I’m also proud of the fact that everything I’ve ever done has been innovative and disruptive. I avoid doing things others have done.

What is the last book you read?
I just started a book called Eat People by Andy Kessler. He is a phenomenal writer. The book is about the characteristics of entrepreneurship. One of my favorite books is Bread and Wine. It talks about following your convictions and beliefs versus simply following the law of the time.

What advice would you give other entrepreneurs on how to build a great business?
There are lots of great ideas. What sets great companies apart is their ability to execute. Build the best team possible. Get rid of the ineffective people. Bad employees are like a cancer. Once you get rid of people who are a bad fit, everybody else bounces up 20 feet. Once you give up helping someone improve, it’s over. They won’t magically get better.

Make your team feel like they have ownership and are invested in the success of the company. If you can do that successfully all of the decisions they make will be in the best interest of the company.

As a leader you need to be good at compartmentalizing things. You can’t drag one issue into another.

This interview was conducted by Erika Brown Ekiel.

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The Entrepreneur Questionnaire: Josh Silverman, Former CEO of Skype

June 23, 2011 1 Comment

Josh Silverman is an entrepreneurial executive who has built and run a number of consumer businesses. He is currently President of U.S. Consumer Services at American Express. Josh joins American Express in July from Greylock Partners, where he is an executive in residence. Previously, Josh was the CEO of Skype, which sold to Microsoft for $8.5 billion in May 2011. Josh has also served as CEO of Shopping.com, held senior executive roles at eBay and was Co-Founder and CEO of Evite.

Josh Silverman

Why did you become an entrepreneur?

I started in politics thinking that was the best way to make an impact on the world. I got my degree in public policy and then went to work for [former New Jersey senator] Bill Bradley. After a while I realized I could reach more people and have a more immediate impact on the world if I joined the private sector. What I’ve learned is that to be an entrepreneur is to be a leader—you are driving change and getting people to join your dreams with their dreams.

What was your first paying job?

I had three jobs when I was 15. I mowed lawns, was an usher at a movie theater and worked at a Greek restaurant. After peeling hundreds of pounds of potatoes I was rewarded with washing pots and pans.

After years of running start-ups and spending time at Greylock, I imagine American Express will be a big change. What perspectives will you bring with you from Silicon Valley? 

A real passion for customers and products, and that has to come from the top. In my time at Greylock I saw the partners investing in entrepreneurs who are passionate about customers and products and nurturing them to become great leaders. That’s the essence of Silicon Valley.

What are the big ideas behind the businesses you have run?

There is a common thread among all the businesses I’ve led. If you look at American Express and Skype, they both operate in massive, pervasive, critical industries that touch the lives of everyone on the planet. Financial services and communications are in the midst of major transformation and both Skype and Amex are well positioned to lead the charge. I’ve also enjoyed building businesses that bring people together: Ebay built a community of sellers; Evite helps people get together with people they love; Skype allows people to connect with each other even if they are on the opposite side of the planet.

Why are you excited about the future?

True global breakthroughs are happening at an unprecedented pace in a number of industries, including financial services and communication. Innovation in technology is empowering people to make change at a rapid pace while having a lasting impact on the world. Just look at the impact of social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter on the Arab Spring revolutions in the Middle East.

What was the most difficult lesson you have learned as an entrepreneur?

The most painful experience for me was laying off 60% of the workforce—50 out of 80 people—at Evite. Many of those people were talented, hard workers who had put in many late nights and weekends. It was extremely difficult but it forced us to focus. As it turns out a lot of the things we were doing were not that important. We became more nimble.

What has surprised you about being an entrepreneur?

I was surprised by how high the highs were and how low the lows were. Every entrepreneur needs a good internal regulator. Mine was my wife. You need to ride out the tough times. Really it just takes passion and drive. Being an entrepreneur is the ultimate equal opportunity.

What values are important to you as an entrepreneur?

Transparency and integrity. Treating people with dignity. A commitment to excellence. Teamwork.

What is the best business advice you’ve ever heard?

My friend Barney Pell once told me that when you try to do big things the world conspires to help. As it turns out, doing big things is not any harder than doing small things.

What are you passionate about?

I love building teams of great people, getting them inspired about a mission and then taking a hill together.

What motivates you?

The energy of the people around me. Direct feedback from the community about the products I’ve built.

What living person do you most admire?

He is no longer living but the person I most admire is Mahatma Gandhi. Not only did he change a country with hundreds of millions of people but he also introduced a new way of creating change.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

I’m working on becoming more rigorous about how I spend my time.

What is the last book you read?

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee and Innocent Abroad by Martin Indyk.

What advice would you give on how to build a great business?

Learn to trust your gut. Persistence is important but you also need to know when to change course—the answer is rarely. Competitors will always continue to launch new products and you need to stay focused. At Evite we faced an onslaught of competition from Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL; as well as pure-play competitors like TimeDane, SeeYouThere.com and Sendomatic.com. Keeping the focus on our own game plan was key to our success. By the time I got to Skype I had already been through the onslaught so that when Google and Apple came at us, I was much calmer and better able to see our path forward.

Change comes at you pretty fast and you can’t let it become disorienting. People desperately need a steady hand at the wheel. Most of the external stimuli don’t matter in the end. The ability to discern what matters from what doesn’t matter is one of the distinguishing characteristics of great leaders.

-This interview was conducted by Erika Brown Ekiel

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The Entrepreneur Questionnaire: Nir Zuk, Founder and CTO of Palo Alto Networks

May 21, 2011 1 Comment

Nir Zuk is the Founder and CTO of Palo Alto Networks. The company’s next-generation firewalls provide unprecedented visibility and control over applications, users and threats. Palo Alto Networks began shipping its product line less than four years ago and today is one of the fastest growing companies in enterprise IT.

Nir Zuk, Founder and CTO, Palo Alto Networks

Describe your business in 10 words or fewer.

Reinvent the network security market, starting with the firewall.

What is the big idea behind your business?

To extend network security beyond basic web browsing and email to secure social applications such as Facebook and Twitter and enterprise/SaaS applications such as Salesforce, WebEx and SharePoint. We consolidate multiple security devices into a single, high-performance device. The approach of adding a new device every time you have a problem just doesn’t work anymore.

 How did you come up with the idea for Palo Alto Networks?

In 2004 I was working inside Juniper Networks and wondered why there had been no real innovation in the market in years—the existing firewalls were based on decade-old designs. I wanted to build the next generation product but realized it would be impossible within Juniper so I decided to do it on my own. I met with Asheem Chandna, a partner at Greylock with whom I worked with at Check Point Software, to hash out some ideas. I knew I could design and build the next generation high performance network security device, so I resigned from Juniper Networks in 2005 and raised a small seed round from Greylock and Sequoia. I worked out of Greylock’s offices and spent several months brainstorming with my investors, Asheem Chandna and Jim Goetz, and potential customers. It became clear that application control would be our main early advantage. We figured it would be a powerful incentive for our customers to replace their legacy firewalls.

Why are you excited about the future for this company?

We are grabbing share very quickly in a $10 billion market. More than 4,000 customers have rapidly adopted our solution and we are seeing very strong interest from customers across the globe. We see an open highway ahead of us.

Why did you become an entrepreneur?

I have wanted to be an entrepreneur as far back as I can remember. I started my first business when I was in the eighth grade, building and selling commercial software to automate legal offices. Early in my career, it became clear that I could build products better than my managers. I felt they were slowing me down so I decided to continue to build things myself.

What was the most difficult lesson you have learned as an entrepreneur?

Things will go wrong. You cannot expect everything to go smoothly at a startup. A million things could happen: either you screw up or your business plan is not great or the market will tank on you. You will face tough times and when that time comes, you need to have really good people around you.

What five adjectives would you use to describe yourself?

Competitive, tenacious, generous, loyal. I know this isn’t an adjective but I don’t take B.S.

What values are important to you as an entrepreneur?

-Keeping my business in the U.S.

I learned how to be an entrepreneur in the U.S. and I think it is my duty to give it back to the U.S. This includes keeping development here as opposed to China, India or anywhere else.

-Having no ego and surrounding myself with people without egos.

I’ve seen companies hire engineers with great egos and their businesses went nowhere. Someone with a big ego will do things for himself instead of the company. I don’t think there is any room for that in a successful business.

-Frugality

You can show a correlation between frugality and success of a company. Companies that spend a lot of money tend to be less successful than those that are frugal.

-Innovation

Companies rise and fall on their ability to innovate. If you stop innovating you die. For startups, it’s the only thing you have. To build a long-term, successful company you have to continue to be innovative. This has to be built into the company’s DNA from the beginning and you must innovate with each and every thing you do.

-Never compromise

You need to have a strong commitment to high quality with your product, your actions and the people you hire. You must not compromise. With hiring, a good rule of thumb is that if you find and hire people very quickly, something may be wrong with the quality of people you are hiring. Also, your early hires should demand and deserve very strong equity.

What is the best business advice you’ve ever heard?

“I’d rather have a C business plan with an A team than an A business plan with a C team.” The CEO of my previous startup said that to me once.

What is your motto?

Drive the competition out of business.

What are you passionate about?

Innovative technology.

What motivates you?

Building great technology that actually solves customer problems.

What was your first paying job?

Building software at the age of fourteen.

What do you like most about being an entrepreneur?

I really enjoy seeing customers loving what we built. I also like to see the employees who work with me being successful.

What do you like least about being an entrepreneur?

Any signs of bureaucracy or when things don’t move fast enough.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

I’d like to be more tolerant of stupidity.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

I’m most proud of my kids. Palo Alto Networks is my greatest professional achievement.

What is the last book you read?

A book about the history of biology.

What advice would you give on how to build a great business?

-Aim high

If your business plan doesn’t call for a big, sustainable business you will probably fail. If you find yourself building a business because you want to sell it for $100 million and walk away with $10 million for yourself, you will end up with a lousy $10 million company. Don’t even bother.

-Hire a great team.

Everybody says they do this but in most cases it’s not true. Commit to hiring the best people in the industry you are in. If you need someone to build a social networking company, hire the top guys from the best social networking businesses. If you are starting a networking company you need to hire the top networking guys. Otherwise how do you plan to beat those companies with your startup?

-Do all of your R&D in one building.

When you start off-shoring and outsourcing, quality goes down and you cannot act fast enough or exercise control over anything. Your engineers and management team should be based near your target market. If the U.S. is your biggest market, your engineers and management team need to be there. If your market is India or China, go there.

-Raise money from tier-one VCs.

Don’t waste your time with anyone but the top handful of VCs in the world. You may end up with a smaller equity position in the company, but it’s always better to have 10% of $1billion than 20% of zero. Focus on value creation, not small differences in early valuation.

-Don’t be greedy; share the wealth.

I don’t think an entrepreneur needs to have twenty times more equity than his early employees. If your early employees have .1% and you have 20%, that’s wrong.

If something doesn’t work, fix it immediately. This is especially true for people. If you can’t fix it, nix it.

-This interview was conducted by Erika Brown Ekiel

*Disclosure: Greylock Partners is an investor in Palo Alto Networks.

*This interview also ran on Forbes.com.

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The Entrepreneur Questionnaire: Brian Chesky, Co-Founder and CEO of Airbnb

April 8, 2011 3 Comments

Brian Chesky, Co-Founder and CEO of Airbnb (photo credit: chadriley.com)

Brian Chesky is Co-Founder and CEO of Airbnb, an online community and marketplace for unique spaces. Airbnb, a Greylock-backed company, connects people who have space to spare with those who are looking for a place to stay. The site has helped people book more than 1 million nights in more than 9,000 cities in 176 countries around the world.

Describe your business in 10 words or fewer.
Community marketplace that connects people through unique spaces around the world.

What is the big idea behind your business?
For the first time ever with a single click of the button you have access to places, people and experiences to which you never had access before. It’s as easy as booking a hotel but with a local, authentic experience.

How did you come up with the idea for Airbnb?
Joe [Gebbia] and I had just moved to San Francisco and become roommates in 2007. Neither of us had a job and we needed money for rent. We were both designers and we knew the International Design Conference was coming to San Francisco in October, yet all the hotels were sold out. We thought we could make some money if we rented out our place and turned it into a bed and breakfast. We got three airbeds and created a Web site called “Air Bed and Breakfast.” People signed up to rent the airbeds and we cooked them breakfast every morning and acted like tour guides. We didn’t mean to start a business. It just sort of happened. There was no flash of genius. In the beginning, we didn’t realize that this would be the big idea. It was the thing that would pay the rent until we thought of the big idea. Gradually it became obvious that this was the big idea. Eventually we expanded beyond our apartment and our three airbeds and shortened the company name to Airbnb.

Why are you excited about the future for this company?
We are creating a new economy. We are giving consumers access to millions of people, unique spaces and experiences around the world. Airbnb turns online connections into real world meetings. It’s a new way of life, a new way to meet people, a new way to make money and a new way to travel. We also bring liquidity to a new marketplace that previously didn’t exist. In the next few years we will do for space what eBay did in the late 1990s. Some of our customers call it a revolution; some call it a movement. We’re living in a peer-to-peer, collaborative consumption era and Airbnb is helping to propel that forward.

Why did you become an entrepreneur?
I always was an entrepreneur. I grew up as an artist, which is similar to an entrepreneur in that you have a vision and you have the freedom to create it. Being an entrepreneur, you also have access to resources and people who can take your vision and help you bring it to the world. One of the tenets of industrial design is that you can be in service to the world and improve things in a meaningful way. To change the way millions of people live around the world is very compelling.

What was the most difficult lesson you have learned as an entrepreneur?
One of the lessons I learned from Paul Graham was to do important things that don’t scale. Frequently advisers tell you not to do things that can’t be done for millions of users at a time. Paul encouraged us to knock on doors to meet our users face-to-face. You obviously can’t do that for millions of people, but even on a small scale, it helps to build loyalty among your customer base and the information helps you improve on your product.

Another important lesson I learned is that as an entrepreneur, you have to be able to tell your story well—and frequently. It’s remarkable how much time you spend telling your story, whether to potential investors, employees, partners or the media. You need to seek out people with leverage and ask for their help in telling your story, as well.

What has surprised you about being an entrepreneur?
When I first started out, I took for granted the overall speed at which I thought things should happen. It turns out things happen slower in the short term and faster in the long term. As an entrepreneur, you are believer and so you tend to think your idea will be obvious and immediately transformative. But nothing happens at first, and not for a long time. You get 90% of the results in the last 10% of time. You spend so much time thinking about getting to the goal that you forget to think about what to do once you get there. You need to think 30 steps ahead.

What five adjectives would you use to describe yourself?
Passionate. Driven. Creative. Imaginative. Inspiring.

What values are important to you as an entrepreneur?
Devotion. A sense of possibility and an open mind. Resilience. Be yourself. Don’t try to be a clone of someone else.

What is the best business advice you’ve ever heard?
“Build the machine.” It means that in addition to focusing on building the product, you have to build the machine that builds the product. The machine is the human capital and the core values of the culture.

What is your motto?
As a kid I wore a couple of shirts in hockey camp. Both of them are relevant to what I do today. The first is a Wayne Gretzky quote: “Skate to where the puck is going not to where it’s been.” The other was “100% or nothing.”

Which living person do you most admire?
Steve Jobs. He changed the rules. He showed that someone with a liberal arts background can runs a technology company and become a leader. That is what I want to do.

What are you passionate about?
Two things: Design and turning Airbnb into a movement.

What motivates you?
Achieving. Moving toward my personal vision of the future. What motivates you to walk is the place you are walking toward. What motivates to build a company is what you want the company to become. I would love it if someday people forget what life was like before Airbnb.

What was your first paying job?
Selling artwork as an illustrator when I was in school.

What do you like most about being an entrepreneur?
The freedom to change the world.

What do you like least about being an entrepreneur?
The dozens of things that threaten to sidetrack you from your goals each day. As an entrepreneur, you just want to move forward.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
I would like to be more patient. Once I make a decision I want to go but often times you need to explain how you came to your conclusions in order to get buy in from other people. You want to say, “Trust me!” but you do need to communicate to bring other people on board with your plan.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Starting Airbnb.

What is the last book you read?
I’m currently reading The Innovator’s Dilemma.

What advice would you give other entrepreneurs on how to build a great business?
Choose a good co-founder. Develop deep, personal relationships with people who share your values and yet also have a lot of the skills you don’t have.

-Interviewed by Erika Brown Ekiel

Filed under Entrepreneur Interviews, Start-Up Stories Tagged with , , , ,

The Entrepreneur Questionnaire: Brian Biles, Co-Founder of Data Domain

March 11, 2011 1 Comment

Brian Biles co-founded Data Domain in 2001. Data Domain deduplication storage systems dramatically reduce the amount of disk storage needed to retain and protect enterprise data. The company went public in 2007 and was acquired by EMC in a bidding war in 2009 for $2.1 Billion. Biles is now Vice President of Product Management for EMC Backup Recovery Systems. He is one of the industry’s leading experts on data deduplication storage and its application in enterprise environments.

Brian Biles, Co-Founder of Data Domain

Describe your business in 10 words or fewer.
Optimized storage arrays for backup and archival data.

What is the big idea behind your business?
Economically, backup data is low value. People don’t want to spend money on it. It’s like insurance—you look for the cheapest good-quality storage that gets the job done. Historically, the winner has been tape, but that has been problematic. You can easily lose it. Backups can fail. It’s manual. You have to ship it in trucks. Data compression technologies on disk make data small so that you don’t need as much hardware, and this can let it approach as tape automation capital price points. Compression theory had been around for a long time. But compression at this large scale tends to be slow, and the simple way to speed it up is with lots of hardware. Data Domain’s initial innovation was to make it fast enough for the workload, but cheap enough to compete.

Why are you excited about the future for this company?
Various reasons. Direct competition is still very weak. There’s no better sales channel in the world for enterprise storage than EMC.  Tape automation—basically cassette tapes on steroids where robots pull cartridges and stick them into drives, then write to it and stick it into another slot—peaked in 2006, three years after we started selling. EMC’s backup system sales will be bigger than the entire tape automation sector this year.  That is satisfying: We are now bigger than the category we aimed to kill.  And penetration of deduplication in enterprise IT is still considered to be less than 20%.

Why did you become an entrepreneur?
I needed a job. It was 2001 during the last big downturn. I co-founded Data Domain a month after 9/11. The alternatives were not great.  I figured I could join some big company with the possibility of getting laid off or join a start-up. The risk was the same. We got lucky.  We built a great team, landed great VCs and kept maniacal focus on execution; I got to have a front row seat in how to build a great business.

What was the most difficult lesson you have learned as an entrepreneur?
Data Domain’s main product was a file system, a software layer to organize files and compress them. We could have gone different ways in packaging that to customers. In those days Veritas had a file system software product that was very popular, but they were heading into a bad period. The packaging alternative, NetApp, looked like they had more control of their destiny because you bought their hardware and software as a unit. Our board was ambivalent about which way we should go. Aneel Bhusri from Greylock said the only way you’ll know the right answer is to ask your prospects which they would prefer to buy. It was a great axiom for how to keep your head on straight as an entrepreneur. The customers told us they wanted an appliance. We followed that and it was the best decision we ever made.

What has surprised you about being an entrepreneur?
Data Domain was not my first small VC-backed company, so this wasn’t a complete surprise, but it is just like work. It’s just a great job.  It’s not Hollywood. (I literally grew up in Hollywood, so I’m not just making this up.) It’s totally fun in exactly the same way that a great job is totally fun. The tension is higher at some level, because you’ve borrowed someone else’s money, and you might not feel that part quite as plainly in a normal job.

What five adjectives would you use to describe yourself?
Long-winded.

What is the best business advice you’ve ever heard?
For entrepreneurs: Steve Jobs’ Think Different. If you head into a crowded space you have to work harder and spend more money just to keep up.  If you don’t have enough differentiation as a startup, a big player can add a few features and crush you.

What is your motto?
(Pass)

Which living person do you most admire?
I think more about accomplishments and focus than people to admire; no one is perfect.  I’m hugely impressed with the service ethic of Brian Juri, a retired math teacher who has gotten more boys through our local Boy Scout troop achievement process over the last 10 years than you can imagine.  Truly remarkable.  Thanks, Brian.

What are you passionate about?
My family.

What motivates you?
It’s really fun to come up with an ambitious product plan that succeeds, especially if it has enough advanced technology involved to seem like magic.

What was your first paying job?
I was a salesman at a retail clothing store in Southern California in the mid-70s called Ants-n-Pants that specialized in bell bottoms.  It had a logo image of ants “truckin’” like R Crumb’s Mr. Natural.  Shockingly, it’s no longer in business.

What do you like most about being an entrepreneur?
I’ll contrast big companies with small companies. At a big company each employee doesn’t need to make as many decisions or play as much of a role in growing the business.  It’s about scale versus innovation. In a small company, you only have time to do critical things, and you see all dimensions of the outcomes.  I love that level of feedback.

What do you like least about being an entrepreneur?
The odd challenge is that investors are forced to make big decisions with very little data. They can sometimes be persuaded to invest or not invest, or go thumbs up or thumbs down on the fit of a particular candidate as a Board member, for reasons that are shallow by necessity.  I’m not sure I can dislike it – it just is what it is – but good relationships here only happen when communication is both transparent and well directed.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
I’d get younger!

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
It would be hard to argue with founding Data Domain and its business success. Also I’m very proud of my kids.

What is the last book you read?
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett and Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely.

What values are important to you as an entrepreneur?
Frank Slootman canonized the culture at Data Domain with an acronym I liked, RECIPE.  Respect, Execution, Customer-focus, Integrity, Performance, Excellence.  I’d add sense of humor, but it would screw up the spelling.

What advice would you give on how to build a great business?
In the type of business we had there are a few things that I think we did well early. The first was choice of focus. It was a downturn and budgets were all pulled back. We were very conscious to work on building anantibiotic versus a vitamin. Second, you should find something that is easy to sell but hard to build. You need time to evolve the product and idea and if you are making something easy, someone else will come after it. Third, when Frank Slootman joined Data Domain as CEO he said we were a “blue collar company.” What he meant was that everyone would roll up their sleeves and work hard to serve customers.  Leave entitlement and attitude at the door.  Big companies have been built other ways, but I wouldn’t want to join them.

-Interviewed by Erika Brown Ekiel

Filed under Entrepreneur Interviews, Storage Tagged with , , , , , , ,

The Entrepreneur Questionnaire: Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin

February 10, 2011 2 Comments

Glenn Kelman is the CEO of Redfin, the industry’s first online real estate brokerage — think of it as a cross between Century 21 and E-Trade. Redfin is a Greylock-backed company and it has completed more than $2 billion in home sales with a customer-satisfaction rating of 97%.

Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin

-Describe your business in 10 words or fewer. Zappos for Real Estate. It used to be “E-Trade for Real Estate,” but we want to emphasize Redfin’s customer service. Which is awesome by the way.

-What is the big idea behind your business? For almost everyone in the real estate industry, the agent is the customer. We decided to focus on the consumer instead. This means that we publish data that real estate agents hide, and that we hire and pay our own agents to put customers, not commissions, first.

-Why are you excited about the future for this company? Our mission — to change the whole real estate game in consumers’ favor — is so obvious and good that everyone can get behind it. And our source of competitive advantage in a $60-billion market is deep and strange: agents and engineers working together to serve customers directly. It makes us feel unstoppable.

-Why did you become an entrepreneur? I don’t think of myself as an entrepreneur, just as someone lucky enough to be in situations where I could be entrepreneurial. I’ve always looked for those situations, so I could pour myself into them. When I was a kid it was the chess team, Dungeons & Dragons, a TRS-80, debate camp. But then I’d realize it was just a game, and noticed the utter lack of girls, and felt a bit silly. A startup offers the same camaraderie, but in a battle for life and death. It’s sort of like becoming a real fighter-magic user-thief.

-What was the most difficult lesson you have learned as an entrepreneur? Just to be nice and encouraging to people, always. You can be very driven and still be nice. At my wedding, the people from an earlier startup, Plumtree, asked the folks at Redfin if I’d made anyone cry yet, a question that really embarrassed me. I also remember falling in love with a product idea at Plumtree that was a total flop. When you really believe in something, you’ve stopped thinking about it. You have to keep thinking.

-What has surprised you about being an entrepreneur? I’ve been surprised at what has made me happy and unhappy. The day of Plumtree’s 2002 IPO wasn’t much of a triumph; my mother sent me a chocolate cake. I was happiest just working on cool stuff & eating Indian take-out in the conference room with all my friends.

-What five adjectives would you use to describe yourself? Sexy, sexy, modest, sexy, sexy.

-What is the best business advice you’ve ever heard? Jim Barksdale once told a friend that you don’t have to have the job. This means that you can quit if you don’t like it, or you can be fired too. With all the talk about how hard it is to run a startup, we can forget how lucky we are to be here.

-What is your motto? Who has a motto?

-Which living person do you most admire? If you exclude my family? I really admire the fact that whenever Marc Singer gets a call from someone running late, he says he’s running late too. I don’t admit that even when it’s true. Small, unnoticeable acts of generosity are sometimes the most impressive.

-What are you passionate about? Almost everything is interesting, if you work at it.

-What motivates you? Not letting down my colleagues.

-What was your first paying job? Washing dishes for Rax Roast Beef.

-What do you like most about being an entrepreneur/CEO? Not being able to blame anyone else. We spend our wholes lives campaigning, backseat-driving, second-guessing. But it makes you a better person seeing how things turn out when you do get your way.

-What do you like least about being an entrepreneur/CEO? The tendency it creates to evaluate people as a means to an end, rather than an end in themselves. If you compared me to my identical twin brother, and heard how carefully he analyzes whether he might have hurt anyone’s feelings in a meeting at the EPA, you’d see how the pressure to hit $100M in less than seven years changes someone.

-If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? Sometimes I wish I was less of a maniac, sometimes I wish I was more.

-What do you consider your greatest achievement? Getting my wife to say I do! And just how the companies I’ve worked at have made people feel.

-What is the last book you read? A River Runs Through It, which I can’t recommend enough.

-What values are important to you as an entrepreneur? When asked what rules an artist must follow, Henry James said there were none except this: “be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.” What I like about that advice is its combination of carefulness and impatience.

-What advice would you give on how to build a great business? To build a great business, you have to do something hard, just to be able to withstand all the competition that will later come your way.  And since that usually takes time, you need a mission larger than just making money, otherwise everyone will quit once he has enough money or decides he doesn’t have enough; it’s like trying to tame a lion by starving him, but not so much that he eats you.

-Interviewed by Erika Brown Ekiel

Filed under Advice for Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneur Interviews Tagged with , , , , ,

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