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Telling the stories of startup founders and creators and their unique journey. Each episode features actionable tips, practical advice and inspirational insight.
00:00:00:00 - 00:00:34:21
I was not very good at marketing and it was very, very early, you know, kind of pre-internet. I mean, this is like 99, you know, the.com thing is happening. But but you couldn't really, you know, the way to market was still in kind of paper magazines and, you know, events. So I started writing a lot of articles, in things like, you know, Java Programmers Digest and, you know, all these kind of software magazines presenting it at, like a software development best practices conference.
00:00:34:21 - 00:00:59:12
And I got approached at the, at a conference by, someone who said, look, I represent a government agency. We're using a lot of the technologies you just described. It's going really, really poorly. Would you come in and and help us out? And so that customer turned out to be the FBI right across the river in in D.C., Pennsylvania Avenue.
00:00:59:14 - 00:01:14:08
And they had tried to adopt a software pretty early, in kind of a client server architecture, and it just was not working for the field agents. And I said, look, this is never going to work. I could probably rewrite it for you, you know, when's the deadline in there? Like, you know, six months from now.
00:01:14:08 - 00:01:35:04
And I said, okay, I'll. I'll work night and day. I'll write this story. But I never want to have anything to do with a government customer again. So I started working on that. It was just like, you guys are like, totally disorganized, right? And right. And I, I was able to deliver the thing to them that the agents could use in the field that they liked.
00:01:35:04 - 00:02:16:21
And I then just left and I said, okay, I think we have a business in this kind of, world of kind of enterprise software. It's not really engineering oriented, but this was a successful project. I think this is the direction we can go. But what are the biggest mistakes, if you think about it, that you made along the way in that, in that sort of at whatever point you there earlier days or as you built this thing, it at some point just by the way the cash flow was going, you know, hit the wall where we couldn't make payroll and we were just kind of like, what are we going to do?
00:02:16:22 - 00:02:43:17
I mean, we were totally like, our backs are up against the wall. And I know this happens to a lot of good companies where you have receivables. Even though we had saved money for two years, it wasn't enough. And the only thing that saved us was American Express. Sent over these paper checks to is like an incentive to transfer your balance from another credit card to American Express.
00:02:43:19 - 00:03:18:05
I actually wrote one of those checks out to myself and cashed it at the bank to like, bridge Payroll. It's it's terrible. And it worked. It worked. So it was supposed to be like written to visa to like, you know, like pay off your balance. I just wrote it to like, platinum and and cashed it and it, it actually work where I could make payroll and then, you know, we, we actually got, you know, an invoice paid and, but it's one of those like near-death experiences where for a lot of small businesses, if they have no access to credit, they can just disappear.
00:03:18:05 - 00:03:36:20
And I did not have enough cash. So that was one, you know, really bad mistake. Before we go on to the second, how large were you when when this occurred? Oh, I mean, we probably I mean, it was a significant payroll, so we had at least like 6 or 7 employees at the time, like, just, you know what I mean?
00:03:36:20 - 00:03:59:11
This was now this is this this this check. This was this was like a significant like I didn't know what the the limit on this was. I didn't, you know, find out. Yeah. Right. We got another one I think this would do with that. And if it goes one of the mistakes I made and I think a lot of, entrepreneurs that read books like the E-myth do the same thing.
00:03:59:11 - 00:04:16:06
I was writing all the code in the company, and I had hired people, but I was still kind of a micromanager. I would walk around everybody's screen and say, don't do it that way, change this. You know, there was a point where I was kind of like, Lila, I'm working 20 hours a day. I can't really, like grow this company anymore.
00:04:16:06 - 00:04:38:20
It's like for the people that are sitting at this one table, I can manage them. But I don't think we can get any bigger. And that's when it was like, all right. Like if you come over to the company and help kind of organize this thing from just like an all engineer, you know, no, no organization kind of business, maybe we can grow it beyond, like, my internal ceiling.
00:04:38:22 - 00:04:57:14
And so that's what happened. I mean, Lila came in, looked at what I was doing for a little while, and it was like, you just can't write anymore code. And I was like, what do you mean? And she's like, well, you're like a tyrant, you know? You're like, it's like everyone's afraid to do anything. You got your perfectionist, you know, she's like, you're hiring these great software engineers, but you're not.
00:04:57:16 - 00:05:18:02
You know, she's like, I think what you should be doing is going out and meeting with technical customers, meeting with customers, representing the company. She's like, I'll manage them. You know, you get out there and like, don't write code. And so I, you know, we were only like a dozen people at the time maybe. And I had a meeting and I said, I'm not writing any more software.
00:05:18:02 - 00:05:27:17
And everybody was kind of like, what? What are you going to do around here, man?