Greg Moran (00:01.481)
Welcome back Founders Journey podcast, Peter Dean and Greg Moran. I'm not Peter Dean, I'm Greg Moran, but Peter Dean's that guy. Back again with another episode. So have a great guest today. It's gonna be a lot of fun. Guy I've gotten to know a little bit recently. Super active writing and in the startup community and things like that. So really excited about this conversation today with Alex Kottoor. He's founder of Dena Growth.

Peter Dean (00:11.298)
That's me.

Greg Moran (00:31.029)
We're going to have him get into what data growth is, but he brings about 20 years of operating and enterprise software and SaaS. And he's a founder and CEO of a company he started SceneDoc, which sounds super ominous. I know you're like doing forensics collection, so we've got to get into that. It sounds like gross a little bit, but we'll go ahead.

Peter Dean (00:49.758)
Yeah, and he's another, go ahead, he's another, he's another that is doing what we're doing now is just trying to give back, which I just wanted to call out in the beginning, which is super important. And we had a very similar path actually. Little different, but very similar. Yeah, so I'm excited.

Greg Moran (01:06.769)
Yeah. Yeah, so we'll get in all we'll get in all that as we're going. So he so his company that he founded, built that up got acquired by a publicly traded company, which is every founders dream. And he's had a couple other businesses since you know, beside that. So we'll get into all that before building Dana Growth. So Alex, welcome. Welcome to podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Alex Kottoor (01:29.95)
Thanks for having me gents. I really appreciate the platform. Thank you.

Greg Moran (01:33.457)
Yeah, no, glad to glad to have you here. So Peter, you want to get us kicked off?

Peter Dean (01:37.446)
Yeah, so you've been in the startup game for some time now. Why don't you tell us about your, your journey that led you to data growth and kind of where you came to get where you are today.

Alex Kottoor (01:51.254)
So I guess I'll rewind to the beginning. So after graduating from business school, I was really fortunate to have landed my first sales gig at a company called CDW that was based at the time, Vernon Hills, Illinois, just outside of Chicago. And honestly, I always characterized that eight or so years as a transformative part of my journey. It's really where I got to.

Peter Dean (01:55.287)
Yeah.

Alex Kottoor (02:21.278)
you know, chip my teeth in the art of sales. Where I developed a passion about customers and solving for customer problems. And honestly, it was one of the best sales schools around at the time. In fact, I think at the time, like there was some selling publication that rated CDW is like one of the top 10 places to learn how to sell.

And so like I stumbled upon it. It was like literally [monster.com](http://monster.com/), and I knew this one really wealthy guy that was a sales guy at IBM in Hong Kong. And so when I graduated from school and mom was like, you need to go find a job, I was like, hey, I want to be like long. And so I was like, I'm going to go and search somewhere where I could sell IT. And came across this three letter acronym, CDW applied.

Peter Dean (03:05.929)
Mm-hmm.

Alex Kottoor (03:12.074)
A guy called me from Phoenix, Arizona. His name was Pete Edwards. Actually, I think he might've been in Chicago at the time. And he was starting to bring CDW to Canada through an acquisition of a company called Micro Warehouse. Anyway, long and skinny of it is, I was one of the first salespeople, first employees in Canada. The company grew from zero to a billion dollars. I was there up until about $800 million. I got to learn everything there. Like it was amazing.

You know, I always say like it was where I saw what good sales enablement looked like. Like it was continuous. It wasn't like this bullshit that we see today guys, where we, you know, throw people in the fire and expect that they're just going to do good. They were like day one, this was what happening day 30, 60, 90. It was just like ongoing three 65 a day enablement. And that has been a thread that I've tried to pull on as, you know, up until today. Um,

Peter Dean (03:48.152)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Moran (03:54.846)
Yep.

Alex Kottoor (04:09.738)
It's there actually though, where I met my co-founder, Adrian. He was a partner of ours at CDW and he was far more of the visionary as we embarked on building SceneDoc. He had this idea of building a note taking application. And, and, and if I can just bring you to sort of the mind of Adrian, he was in IT services. So, you know, think of it as, you know, servicing at large enterprises, call them banks, hospitals, et cetera.

Peter Dean (04:35.7)
Mm-hmm.

Alex Kottoor (04:36.922)
and deploying large projects, data centers, you know, thousand laptops are being rolled out. We're putting in new storage arrays and on a raised floor. And like, I guess what Adrian saw firsthand back in 2010 was that whenever there was an issue, IE like servers showed up without hard drives or they're incorrect hard drives in them. You know, a tech would literally need to go to their laptop bag, grab a digital camera, snap a picture of that issue, and then go back to their laptop.

Peter Dean (04:43.455)
Yeah.

Greg Moran (04:45.49)
Yeah.

Alex Kottoor (05:06.898)
open up an email client, create a ticket for IT help desk to deal with, right? And so Adrian thought, Hey, with the advent of a smartphone, why can't we do all of that on a mobile device? Snap a picture, create some content on or around an image, and then hit a send button. And I always joke that like all of this is like trivial today, right? Like all of our kids play with social media applications that do this. Like, this is like all, yeah, exactly.

Peter Dean (05:11.214)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Dean (05:30.03)
They live that way.

Greg Moran (05:31.692)
Super, super revolutionary though, right? It's at the time. Yeah, absolutely.

Peter Dean (05:33.734)
Like what? But you're talking to you're talking about like, you know, this is we got to keep up with the innovation at that time. And that's

Alex Kottoor (05:36.625)
They live this way.

Alex Kottoor (05:43.67)
Oh yeah, I mean, as an enterprise sales guy, I knew that mobile was an ex. It was just about to be explosive, right? Again, this is 2010. Every CIO that I had privileged to have relationships with or was selling to was like thinking about how they were going to put a phone into the hand of executives, how are we going to use tablets? All these things were starting to happen. Right? So we like two crazy guys put some money together. We build a.

Greg Moran (05:43.989)
That's right. That's right.

Peter Dean (05:48.586)
Yeah.

Alex Kottoor (06:11.182)
what would be our first rendition of a B2C app that we called Picky Note. And being two guys from the enterprise, we were like, hey, let's start building this for the Blackberry Playbook. Like that was their tablet. And people chuckle all the time, like what the heck were you guys thinking? But you know, the Blackberry owned the enterprise in 2010, right? Yeah, and I was always thinking as the consummate sales guy, what could we do where I could sell this back to the CIOs that I've been privileged to build relationships with over the last, you know.

Peter Dean (06:23.691)
Yeah.

Greg Moran (06:24.754)
Yep.

Greg Moran (06:29.87)
I mean that was revolutionary at the time. Absolutely, yeah.

Peter Dean (06:30.718)
Yeah? Yeah, I mean...

Peter Dean (06:39.945)
Mm-hmm.

Alex Kottoor (06:41.642)
eight years. So we build this note taking app. It was actually the number two note taking app on the BlackBerry platform next to Evernote, believe it or not. We thought we were going to make, you know, our riches selling, you know, a 99 cent app to millions of people. That obviously never panned out. But we had a lot of success, you know, learning about mobile app development, you know, sort of building strong mobile first user experiences. So here's where it gets interesting.

Peter Dean (06:55.765)
Yeah.

Peter Dean (07:03.874)
Mm-hmm.

Alex Kottoor (07:10.49)
One day we get an email and it happens to be a deputy director of a federal law enforcement agency in the U.S. And what he says is, hey, I've been a user of Picky Note. We just bought these 200 Blackberry playbooks for our federal agents. And I've been scouring all four points of the planet looking for a piece of software that would enable my agents to process a crime scene using a tablet.

And I think what you guys have is like the early innings of what could be a pretty game-changing piece of technology for first responders. And honestly, for me, it was like light bulbs went off. Like again, bringing it back to like go to market, everything I do today. It was like a repeatable thing that we could go and sell to every police officer around the world. And so I thought this was our way to like build shelf life and build a true enterprise software company.

Peter Dean (07:45.014)
Wow.

Peter Dean (07:58.036)
Yeah.

Greg Moran (07:58.61)
Yeah.

Peter Dean (08:05.709)
Mm.

Alex Kottoor (08:06.282)
And so Adrian takes this conversation with this guy. His name was Dr. Ed Espinosa. And we both agree that we're gonna like work every evening, do napkin sketch wire frames and go back and forth to adapt the code base of PikiNote to be what would soon be called mobile CSI. Yeah, like that was exactly what we called it. And we had our first paying customer.

Peter Dean (08:27.576)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Moran (08:28.49)
Dude.

Peter Dean (08:30.423)
That's cool.

Greg Moran (08:32.863)
Right.

Alex Kottoor (08:35.586)
They had a few hundred agents using mobile CSI on the scene of federal crimes. And honestly, that was our foray into, okay, who's gonna be our customer and how are we gonna go and expand a business around this thing? And I suppose the rest is history. I'll stop there.

Peter Dean (08:39.416)
Wow.

Greg Moran (08:53.813)
That's, I mean, that's, it's so crazy, right? Because all of a sudden, like you're going down, you're building this thing, right? But not necessarily, I mean, you've got one path that you're following and then suddenly this other one comes at you. And it's something we hear all the time, right? Where on the podcast where, you know, you'll hear stories like that and it's like, yeah, we were doing this thing and we weren't real sure what was going on, but you know, it felt like it was getting somewhere and getting somewhere and then all of a sudden something like just pops up.

Peter Dean (08:56.482)
That's amazing.

Greg Moran (09:23.185)
right out of absolutely nowhere. And it starts to narrow that niche down to something you can just go after, right? I think that's the, that it's something we hear all the time, but it's wild.

Peter Dean (09:31.721)
I think.

Peter Dean (09:35.054)
I think it's super important that you told that story because people wanna be entrepreneurs. So like, I wanna do this, but you guys did that, right? And you said, okay, let's find a way. And you got good at something and you kind of refined it. And then you were in the right place at the right time. And this person found you and said, listen, this is what I need help with. And then that's an other piece of advice that we hear a lot is do what people are willing to pay you for, right?

and then you found you built a business around that.

Alex Kottoor (10:04.802)
No doubt, no doubt. And as we were doing our own due diligence, because make no mistake, we did, right? Like, yes, we had this federal deputy director highly, highly regarded, we ran our own Google searches on him, very public, a very published speaker and writer around his domain. But what we had to validate was like, is this a real problem that

Peter Dean (10:14.206)
Yeah, just got to make sure it's real.

Peter Dean (10:32.63)
Yeah.

Alex Kottoor (10:33.934)
people would actually pay to solve. And that obviously starts with him, but it quickly went into like, okay, Alex gets into sales mode and starts building a target list and how do we go and speak to the next 50 chiefs of police that could validate whether or not this is actually a problem and B, would they actually wanna solve it?

Peter Dean (10:47.116)
Yeah.

Greg Moran (10:53.873)
Yeah, and you know, what? Go ahead, Peter. No, go ahead.

Peter Dean (10:54.114)
And so, wait, go ahead. I have a real, so when you, when you did that and you, you said you built this list and you reached out to him, were you kind of selling them or were you just validating your, your idea?

Alex Kottoor (11:08.342)
Well, I guess so. I mean, maybe this is something I had learned early on, but I was always selling sort of a chapter to head of where we were. I don't think it was like lying by any stretch because we knew we were already steadfast that we were going to do this thing. And so I really remember like saying to like the chief, hey, chief, this is kind of the story, the same story I told you. And we are starting to build this thing now. And, you know, how would funding work for something like this?

Peter Dean (11:18.306)
No.

Peter Dean (11:21.867)
Yeah.

Peter Dean (11:38.027)
Yep.

Alex Kottoor (11:38.038)
You know, how do you guys think about putting a mobile device like an iPhone in the palm of your officer's hands? You know, what are the limitations around data integrity and security and like all the things we would need to be mindful of as we started to move from like this B2C mobile app shop, which is kind of what we were in the early constructs to it being like a SaaS company that could stand the test of time in this marketplace. And so, you know.

Peter Dean (11:50.679)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Dean (11:55.329)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Moran (11:58.526)
Right.

Alex Kottoor (12:04.846)
that informed a lot of the architectural decisions Adrian was making on how this thing needed to be built, right, because at the end of the day, now we're moving from like Dr. Ed, the guy at home being the user to, now we have a federal agency using it or a city police department using it. Certainly we knew just given our backgrounds in enterprise that like there would be a litany of things we would need to consider in order for them to be able to use it, you know? Yeah.

Peter Dean (12:10.817)
Yeah.

Peter Dean (12:16.065)
Yeah.

Peter Dean (12:27.978)
Yeah, yeah. That's so cool. Cause I think there's a couple of schools of thought, like people are like, go do these interviews. And when you do the interviews, people are like, Oh, this is great. But when you ask for money, it gets real, you know, and as a salesperson, obviously you know that I think that skill is, is invaluable. And when you start.

Greg Moran (12:30.461)
Yeah, and that's...

Greg Moran (12:42.833)
Yeah, that's right.

Alex Kottoor (12:43.819)
Yeah.

Alex Kottoor (12:49.274)
And you know, we learned a lot in selling to government, right? And so, you know, make no mistake, too, that while we had a lot of chiefs saying that would be something they would want to solve for and pay for and be willing to pay for, what we learned later on is that there's this huge complexity in terms of how you follow a public dollar, right? Like, so, you know, as city council go, like, how do they approve and allocate money for new purchases like this? I mean,

Peter Dean (12:52.502)
Yeah.

Peter Dean (13:13.247)
Yeah.

Alex Kottoor (13:16.126)
Again, it turned a little boy seller into a real man, I believe in a lot of ways, because it was far more complex than I had ever could have imagined.

Peter Dean (13:20.394)
Yeah, cool.

Greg Moran (13:24.303)
that I never could have imagined.

Yeah, no, it's, you know, it's really interesting Alex, right? Because you're coming at this, sorry, I just lost my audio there. Um, you're, you're coming at it like with this kind of mindset of that sales rep founder, right? Which I think, you know, when we invest in companies, it's that kind of mindset that is so powerful that as an investor, what you see in an entrepreneur, right? That they're solving through this lens of, okay, but can I go sell this and who am I going to sell it to and how much are they going to pay?

Because so often you see this, you see the opposite approach, right? Which is the product first kind of, I'm going to go build this thing and I'm going to go help, I can, you know, hope I can go find a market. I think, um, you know, I know today you're really focused on actually helping other companies solve that problem, right? Solve that same kind of that really scale their go-to-market. What are the, what are the really common mistakes you see founders make that kind of get themselves?

sort of in the dog house, right? When they're trying to get their go-to market to scale. So this sales guy turned first time founder and CEO made all the quintessentials. Yeah, join the club. Yeah, in fact, I think that after a lot of the investors that were investing in us because I was the sales guy, successful sales guy turned first time CEO and founder, they had a lot of trust that I broke, because I broke a lot of the cardinal rules.

Alex Kottoor (14:28.73)
So this sales guy turned first time founder and CEO made all the quintessential errors. You know, in fact, yeah, in fact, I think that for a lot of the investors that were investing in us, because I was the sales guy, a successful sales guy turned first time CEO and founder, they had a lot of entrust that I broke, you know, because I broke a lot of the cardinal rules. A lot of the rules that I'm trying to help startups today avoid, right?

Greg Moran (14:52.773)
allow the rules that are trying to help.

Alex Kottoor (14:58.774)
So let's start from the top. You know, yes, we did a good job or we were afforded the opportunity to understand our market ahead of like writing the first adaptation of mobile CSI, right? Like for it to be used by police, right? So that was like a check in the box. But where the mistakes started coming was to feel and behave and operate like every police department on the planet should be our customer.

And we all know now that, you know, we need to go through the path of like getting to early product market fit. How do you really define product market fit? How do you take the world of police departments and dwindle it to those that are gonna be most successful on our platform? Those are things I completely botched. You know, I didn't listen to myself as much as I should have. I think this becomes...

Peter Dean (15:36.119)
Hmm.

Peter Dean (15:49.175)
Mm-hmm.

Alex Kottoor (15:56.49)
one of the first few chapters in some of the books I'm looking to write now is that like I overlooked that. And I think one of the biggest mistakes I made was I listened to a lot of the domain experts that were around me more than I should have just listened to what Alex knew. And it was my first rodeo. Yes, I'm hard on myself about it to this day. We're talking about it 20 somebody years, or many years later.

Greg Moran (16:11.325)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Moran (16:15.73)
Right.

Peter Dean (16:22.2)
hehe

Greg Moran (16:24.382)
Yep.

Alex Kottoor (16:24.506)
But it is something I reflect on a lot and it is the thing that I tried. Like, I think this is step one for many founders now because they all want to jump into just selling to everybody. And, you know, there's no shortage of shiny objects, right? There we all been there, right? Like there's every, there's new opportunities all the time. So we feel we need to chase all of them, but to have that discipline to say, Hey, okay, we service the world of public safety.

Peter Dean (16:39.747)
Anyway.

Greg Moran (16:46.675)
Yep.

Alex Kottoor (16:53.142)
What is that? Is that fire? Is that paramedics? Is that first responders in a police department? Is that federal? Is that state? Is that local? Is that NYPD, which is where I spent a lot of money and time and mistake? Or is it where we caught our real repeatable sales process selling downstream to...

the 17,000 of the 18,000 police departments in the United States that are actually really fricking small, that the big boys like Motorola and Tri-Tech and Central Square and all the big boys had no idea how to sell to. And that's where we caught our stride. That's where the enterprise value of my company was built was when we figured that part out because we were able to build, we were able to get to a customer set that others weren't able to get to.

Peter Dean (17:32.42)
Mm-hmm.

Alex Kottoor (17:47.046)
in a low cost of acquisition format that really made it a valuable business.

Greg Moran (17:53.693)
Hey guys, I'm gonna pause this for one second. I gotta fix an audio problem. Hey, just hang on, just bear with me one second.

Alex Kottoor (17:58.722)
Yep.

Greg Moran: it's such an interesting thing right because we I I think there's probably every other podcast we have a conversation about this concept of like #1 really identifying the pain point for this super narrow market, and then being able to go in. But you've got it when you get you know it's easy when you think about like narrowing the market right it and in your case it’s like we’re going to go sell to every police department and you know and every first responder service in the country, and therefore has narrowed my market. no you if it right it feels narrow because it's not everybody but what you're saying is look they but they all behave a little bit differently the New York City Police Department behaves a lot differently than the Livingston Mt Police Department with you know four police right with four officers and really getting incredibly tight about who it is that you're that you're selling to I think is it's one of those common mistakes that you just see founders make over and over they think they're narrowing but it's still too wide right?

19:14 Alex Kottoor: Yeah indeed Yep and you're spreading your peanut butter just all over the place right which equates to just lost time, capital resources we're depleting. You know I always kind of joke around but in all seriousness say that like had we gotten to understand our Ideal Customer Profile sooner I think we probably would have had another zero or two added to our enterprise value when Tyler came to acquire us. 

19:45 Greg Moran: I think there's probably not a founder out there that wouldn't say the same thing. If you could just figure this out a little bit sooner you know if it just didn't take quite as much time to figure out who is that product market fit and getting really narrow about the market you know you could have grown so much faster I think that's the lesson for founders right that's the power of listening to you know somebody like yourself talk

20:11 Peter Dean: yeah trying to be open because that hindsight when you get to where you are now you look back you're like ohh man that was so logical like it doesn't it just makes more sense 

20:22 Alex Kottor: so and honestly I think that's what puts me in a position to actually help these startups that we're helping now right it's like I can actually operate from a place of like I this is not a lesson I read about like I made this mistake can feel it from me I mean maybe maybe the way that hopefully listeners are gonna feel this from us here recording is that like damn like I really f**** that thing up and this is how you can avoid it and we just like slow down a little bit sometimes because we're always just trying to run 1,000,000 miles a minute as founders is that sometimes you just need to to sit back and and do the homework and write things down and you know and then attack 

21:01 Greg Moran: that's right that's 

21:02 Peter Dean: that's so cool Alex so you're doing this now for other companies why do you think like what are the drivers why do you think these are common mistakes like because you're working with other people doing the same thing you kind of see it more from this perspective what do you think the drivers are to making those mistakes like I you you mentioned a couple but

21:24 Alex Kotoor: I think it's just hot like I think that founders are authentically hungry right yeah and so that hunger sometimes spills over into being careless right and I don't know that's how I think about it that's one yeah one thing that comes to my mind the other thing is just like I think being scared of failure like I gotta tell you there I'm I'm I'm completely OK saying it up until the day we were freaking acquired and everything the transaction was done I was always afraid of it not work always and so as a result of that fear in the pit of my stomach and in my heart you feel you need to turn every damn rock right again instead of being more deliberate and purposeful and you know methodical and so yeah I I lost my way on a lot of that process oriented stuff and thankfully I had a business partner that was a process junkie and so he was really good at stabilizing that as I lost sight of that from time to time 

22:31 Greg Moran: when when you and I talked a couple weeks ago Alex from the first time you know this this was the thing I think and and reading stuff you put out and it's just that sort of that kind of rawness to like this is this is how I got myself in these jams you know and I think that's the that's really the the the huge lesson in this that you know because that what you just said is I mean I could I could literally feel what you were just saying with that sort of frantic like I've got to turn over this rock I've got to turn over this rock I need to move faster I've got to move faster when the answer really but this is so hard to talk to a founder about the answer sometimes actually you know what you need to do you need to do less you need to slow your *** down man like you know you've gotta you've gotta actually kind of be silent sometimes you know and not try to control every single thing but that is I'll tell you man if you can figure out a way to convince the founder of that because I couldn't be convinced of that and you know and and and every other friend like you say it because with hindsight it's so powerful and it's so crystal clear but man that is a hard lesson if you can be that founder who can take that lesson to heart at an earlier stage and just not worry about every last dollar of revenue but worry about staying focused on that on that narrow market and just slow yourself down slow your thinking down and get you know and just keep executing and keep grinding toward that one end point it's it's just the power in that is is enormous 

24:12 Peter Dean: but here's I'll do a quick pitch for him so this is what I've noticed working with a lot of founders I do today and CEOs you gotta get to know like you come and help him with one like to them it's a discreet thing and they put you in a box and like I was going to help you with this I got to solve this problem but you gotta dig and know like this guy's been around he's done it before there's more I can learn from him open up a little bit some of those people around you right like an Alex like he can give you more insight than maybe what he's just here to help you with 

24:44 Alex Kottoor: you know that's right in the in honestly it's it's been interesting it's interesting you say that I think like that ever since I ever since SceneDoc I would say that my life has moved from and I said I don't mean this in any negative way like just being the sales guy yeah to like now being this person that can work across a business and yeah you know I've seen this now like from the time we exited scene doc when I was SVP of global sales at kumu I I ended up becoming like a I think a not just the sales leader but yeah somebody that was helping the CEO in a in a in a in a confidant sort of way yeah and I see this across all my clients now it's like sometimes we're coming in to talk about you know serving as a fractional CRO for a company but without any doubt and without any fail that's the the engagement will move from that to being a coach or an advisor to that CEO because they see it as too limiting to keep me just in the lane of helping out on the revenue op side you know so I think that and I I suppose you guys know this first hand like this is part of the beauty I believe in starting your own company right like I I talked to my kids at 12 and 10 like they're adults I've been doing this for years I that's how my relationship is with them and I'll always tell them that they should go and work in a big company so that they can understand what big company stuff looks like the good bad and ugly of all of that but I think they really should get into building something on their own because I think that's where you really start to grow right like that's where you really really learn like startup is the blessed best classroom I could have ever gotten right I always kind of say two things like there's two ways to learn in life I think startup is one of them traveling is another right like I think the world is a tremendous classroom as well right more we can get out of the communities and environments that we are in every day I think that's how you accelerate learning and for me like learning is what it's all about yeah absolutely so you know if you were to boil this down Alex if you were to kind of give you know it just real simple terms give a founder kind of the three sort of best best practices or best pieces of advice just really simple to to start to accelerate their growth and maybe it's time growth maybe it's just their startup in general right what do you think they would be spend 90% of the time with customers and prospects like turn off everything else like forget the investors forget even you hire good people that you can not have to micromanage like trust and verify I'm a student of that game like hire good people so you don't have to be in that trench be in the trenches with prospects and customers learning feverishly about how they're using your software why they bought it what's changed the most since they bought it like that is where I think the gold is secondarily secondarily like stay doing that as long as you can like again I think that like I felt fell in the trap of like OK we've raised venture capital so we now need a big executive team like stop all that like again stay in the trenches make those prospects your best friend make the market your best friend I think that's like one of the the biggest learning lessons I would say second because I don't know if I have a third is have good mentors like Greg you and I talked about this when we when we first interacted I I've been really blessed to have a guy like George Heinrich on my side a guy there's a gentleman by the name of Ian Locke that is a mentor to me these are guys that I met through my journey as I was building scene doc but like most things in my life I continue to invest in these relationships and they're with me to this day we're almost on a daily basis still texting back and forth because I think that's super critical like surround yourself with good people my dad would always say show me your friends I'll show you who you are I'm sure his grand his dad said that to him but it's something he taught to me pretty early in my life I didn't learn it I was a knucklehead for many years I kept the wrong people around me as I was growing up and that led to a lot of the problems I got into as a youngster but today I I would say I'm pretty darn good about keeping smart people around me that's why I'm gonna keep you guys around me I excellence later but that's why we brought you here I love that like I love I love having people around me that actually have very different experience than the one I had yeah right because then for me just through osmosis I get to like learn about those things and make it my own and in some ways sometimes like depending how immersive I can get like I can actually feel like I was on that journey with them yeah yeah and and all of that has helped me 

29:50 Greg Moran: you know you know that I mean building that community and you know building that support network I just I feel for founders you know when you see them and they're trying to go at it alone and they're so myopic and what they're trying to do and you know it it #1 it's just it's just stupid but it's just bad business but #2 it's it's just a terrible like it's no fun and I think part of the attraction of the startup world and the entrepreneurial world for me is it's really fun I mean it's insanely hard but it's really fun if you have nobody to if all you're doing is kind of taking on the miserable part of it but you have nobody to kind of share the joy of it with that's that's a hard road. you know and in a lot of ways I mean that's why Peter and I you know when we started this podcast I mean this was like just a passion project and quite honestly it was nothing more than an excuse to say like hey let's just have interesting conversations with cool people that we can get to know that probably would ignore us otherwise right and you know and that that's that's the fun of doing this right and so you know I think kind of but you do have to put yourself out there you know you do have to you don't get mentors like you were talking about Peter and I I think on every podcast talked about you know mentors that we've had you know you don't get those by not putting yourself out there you've got to we've got to develop those relationships and it is an investment of time but man is it you know is it ever is it ever worth it for sure you don't have to go this you don't have to do this alone and that that I think is just a big mistake that you see founders make way too often 

31:24 Alex Kottoor: couldn't agree more there's a 

31:26 Peter Dean: that's a good segue so we're talking about people what role do you think culture has an organization and its successive go to market 

31:30 Alex Kottoor: hmm well I I think culture impacts everything in the business right it's not just go to market it impacts everything I think you know if you have a weak culture you're going to have a weak go to market motion too right like that bleeds right like not just inside the walls and I learned this really well actually through one of our CEO's at kumu rose Bentley when we started talking a lot about like vision and mission and like establishing that this was like a 30 year old business that really didn't rally around a shared vision and so she implemented that and I think by doing that it hardened the culture of you know around value sets and what was important to us as people why do we get out of bed every day to service our clients our customers the stronger that is internally I think that directly equates to having happy using adoptive software customers you know like there is a direct translation and if you can do it even better deep into your core values are things like being customer obsessed which is something she had implemented there and it's something like I think those were good words for something I've been feeling for 20 some odd years in my career I've always been customer obsessed I never called it that but now I call it that like I I name it I call it what it is and I think that if you have employees and teams that really believe that then everything in the go to market motion actually becomes centered on that and grounded in that yeah Yep and 

33:13 Greg Moran: people certainly is the force right sure it's I mean it's certainly the force multiplier right that that you can that you can really start to get when you you know this thing can I think without a strong culture right I mean it's you're just kind of pushing the Rock 

33:38 Alex Kottoor: You know it's boring right like right now ahead of having those things defined and you know ones that like everybody in the team can synchronously shout from the mountaintop yeah like it's boring right like you wanna be in the in the boat where everybody's rowing in the same direction because we know precisely why we're rolling in that direction or do we want to be in the boat that we don't know that 

33:54 Greg Moran: Yep right to drill down on that just a little bit Alex right there is at least I find right there is there are cultures that you know there there are unique kind of strengths within the culture and you see some that are very very very technically driven culture where it's really about product excellence and technical excellence and things like that and you also see other cultures where it really is about like we have a culture of SELLING right you think of like or you know I don't know EC oracles like when they were like those shops totally and you and you talk about CDW CDW was legendary yeah right that they just built I mean their competency their culture revolved around that sales mentality I think you know it it is interesting right because you do see companies where when and again I'm not judging one type of culture versus another but when you see companies that really start to scale there is something to be said for that culture that rewards so right where it's not a dirty word it's not frowned upon but it actually is who we are right because you do see you do see the other side you do see sometimes where it's like no we're not about that right people are going to come to us and and it does it it creates a it creates a real challenge 

35:17 Alex Kottoor: yes you're not opposed to U.S. sales centric culture no is that right yeah yeah no not at all I mean I think so many people frown upon it today and I think it's a lost it's a that's that's something that's been lost and yeah today 

35:24 Greg Moran: yeah yeah no no I'm not I'm certainly not not against it I think it's something that it you know I'm I'm also not against it very product centric or very technical centric culture but you have to balance that right yeah you know you've got to be able to 

35:50 Alex Kottoor: that's why I think putting the customer at the center and I apologize if I just 100 he said no no no customer at the center then you can integrate being a sales lead culture you can integrate being an innovation LED culture because it's all for the purpose of servicing the customer 

36:13 Peter Dean: yeah I do it and how you do it right it's the why and the how right that drive what you're talking about yeah 

36:17 Greg Moran: want to shift gears here in our final couple minutes because I know today and you've kind of referenced this a little bit but I know today you're really focused on giving back your you know there's a lot sort of you know yes you're working with companies you obviously make money doing that however you know there's a kind of a deeper value here for you I know and and kind of giving back through foundation and things like that talk about the that motivation a little bit Alex 

36:41 Alex Kottoor: so coming off of the scene doc acquisition I knew my life thesis not just my businesses thesis was that the more I can have line of sight to creating impact for human beings particularly in this in the business in business that's what fills my cup like that that I know and so yeah that's been manifested in like this collar ship fund that we're doing but now in this next wave of like DenaGrowth yes it's an advisory and consulting business so yes we are for profit we make money I’m a capitalist yes but but the I would say that over the last six months I have been making a shift to be deliberate and spending more time with what I call like an underdog founder and I know it's interesting I think I have to put this* so I feel like I'm always saying this like yes every startup founder is an underdog but there are there are swaths of founders that are not in boulder in Toronto and New York City in Silicon Valley that are without the access they deserve right and what I mean by access is they are without the access to smart people like you guys they are without access to the information they need they are without access to good human beings who can also serve as investors to them they're without access to good talent pools just because sometimes of where they live or where they were born so for me I have said I'm not not going to work with the Silicon Valley founder or the boulder bounder or the Toronto founder but I do know that I get a lot more out of trying to help a founder that if they had the liquidity event I had which was not a huge one right I had a modest liquidity event but if they had that type of liquidity event they're not only it's not only changing their own life it's changing an entire community that might rely on them hmm so that to me is I think the place where Alex should go and spend more time and you know when I was in India over these last couple of weeks with my wife and children I was deliberate to go and visit with a handful of startups there a couple of which we're going to be now moving into engagements with DenaGrowth but those founders are great examples where the impact is far more you can draw concentric circles around that founder to how that there's going to be a ripple effect if we can turn their idea and just some sustainable software business yeah yeah I'll stop there but yeah that that's where my heart's at 

Greg Moran: yeah it's it is and this is this is when you know this is when a new Peter when we're when Alex and I were chatting a couple weeks ago I was like yeah we gotta get this guy on the podcast because definitely that it's it you know resonates so much I know when we started Evergreen mountain our you know the venture firm that my partner Ira Grossman and I started together and I think you and I were talking about this Alex it's so similar in a lot of ways right we we've both been very fortunate in terms of you know liquidity events and things like that when we started that it was yes I mean we're we're a venture capital firm right we we do venture capital firm things we we need to make money on companies getting big exits but the thing that we always talked about is you talked about the underdog founder we always talked about we talked about all the time to find a way founder right it's the founder doesn't who doesn't come out of an Ivy League school month or anything with Ivy League schools and we it's not like we wouldn't invest in a one of those founders but it's the founder coming out without the contacts without the network without the you know and their their they need that access they need to because they're every bit as good you know as the other founders I just think it's a it's a you know it's just an there's 500 other VCs that'll go in service the kid that's coming out of Stanford or Harvard walk down right stuff yeah and and all 100% this is not to disenfranchise them this is no no not at all 

40:55 Alex Kottoor: how do you how do you put some focus on to the people that don't have that right like that weren't the access and the privilege to access the rooms we all have been accessing right like and we kind of this by the way is like you know yeah I know like hey would I get here right right you you want right here why do you want yeah I had somebody tell me the other day that as I was explaining this next wave of my business that like you know shame on the founder if they can't get into the rooms you've gotten into like questioning that that was their inability of some sort yeah and you know what that's not like there there are so there are people you know in the continental US right pick an inner city those people just like the founder who in certain parts of India or Africa or pick a place doesn't matter actually agnostic of the geography but there are founders that don't have the confidence yet to go into those rooms and I just think it's a it's a comment on people like us to go and help some of those people build the confidence to go out and access that because guess what if we can go and instill the confidence in that founder to go out and just push their way into the room like many of us did guess what they're going to be able to go and teach the next 15 founders how to do that too yeah so like there is going to be a just a network effect that will naturally occur as we start to invest our time in doing Yep I love that I love that that's so important that you said that and yes in all of that there's going to be a win win right Greg you and I talked about this I wrote about this the other day like it shouldn't this shouldn't be pro bono work all the time and it's not yeah so I don't want to sit on some soapbox that like Alex is like you know the Mother Teresa right here that's that's what I'm doing and I don't wanna claim like that's what we're doing there's a benefit to what I'm gonna do there's gonna be a win to what I do but I want them to win more because they deserve to win more yeah and well that's it that's that's that's exactly it right go ahead Peter 

Peter Dean: sorry you said that like you're not Mother Teresa but it sounds like you learned something I learned like every time you give something more comes back and so every time I give and I'm like I mentor founders like in upstate New York like we're in this place that not a lot of founders come from right we had GE and we had some Bausch and Lombe, Kodak all these big companies that was the past now we're looking for our next ones but when you do that it's amazing what comes back to you and and it turns into economic gain for me eventually in some way and and so it's not mutually exclusive helping someone but it's also important to help someone and not think what is happening today for me because it will come tomorrow or the next day or through some other relationship and that's that's actually probably how we get in those rooms we got in those rooms by just doing things like that and not expecting something back you know I love that game right you're playing a longer game and yes we we three of us I can just speak on our behalf we've been all been afforded an opportunity to think a little longer yeah yeah so you know 

Greg Moran: Yep absolutely well this is a great place to wrap it up Alex this is it was awesome having you on how do people get in touch with you what's the best way to for somebody to contact you:

Alex: LinkedIn, K-O-T-T-O-O-R. you know that's where I'm spending my time if there's any social media in my life it's on LinkedIn and that you know that's where we got to form our relationship Greg Peter yeah I'm looking forward to building with you all absolutely fine as well but thanks so much guys for giving me and website Alex is it the www.denagrowth.com