That so many tech founding teams end up building a technology,
let's call it a quote solution, that's still in search of a
problem. And it's so important to start
with a problem and make sure you understand it's a big market.
If you have a great market, you can have a less than great
product and still do fantastically.
Or you can look at things and say I have incredible
technology, but there's no identified great market.
It doesn't matter. You're not going to succeed,
hey? Everyone, My name is Henry Surya
Virawan and you're listening to the Technically Juno podcast,
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So let's dive into our journal. Hello again, everyone.
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My guest for today's episode is Jocely Rosenberg.
Jyothi is a serial entrepreneur who has founded 9 startups with
exits of over $100 million. He is the author of an upcoming
book, Think Like a Tech Founder, Anecdotes of an Incorrigible
Entrepreneur. In this episode, Jyothi shared
his valuable lessons learned on founding and managing a startup,
such as why and when you should decide to start up valuable
advice for founders, including letting go founders who don't
work out, dealing with failures. Being the CEO of your own
startup and traits of a bad CEO we should avoid.
Towards the end, Jyoti shared inspiring message about his
story overcoming physical disability, which resulted in a
foundation he runs called Who Says I Can't?
And also described his formula why people with physical
disability so often over achieve.
I hope you enjoy listening to this episode and learning
valuable lessons about founding and running a startup,
especially if you are yourself currently running your own
startup. And I'm also very much inspired
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Let's go to my conversation with Jyothi after quick words.
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any of those swags. Hey everyone, welcome back to
the new episode of the Technijuno podcast.
Today I have with me an author named Jyothi Rosenberg.
He's currently in the process of finishing his book.
Actually the book title is Think Like a Tech Founder.
So as you can tell from the title itself, we are going to
talk a lot more about founding a tech company, a tech startup,
how to become a good founders, and many lessons learned
actually from Jyoti who has I believe set up 9 startups in his
career. I think there will be a lot of
learnings, a lot of mistakes that he want to share probably,
and a lot of advice that we can learn from him.
And at the end, later on, we will also talk about something
that is really inspirational to me, The Who says I can't
foundation that he does. And I think we'll hear a lot
more later on in the conversation.
So Geordie, thank you so much for this time.
I'm really looking forward for our conversation.
Well, thank you for having me on, Henry.
I'm so glad that we got connected and that I can do this
with you. I'm looking forward to the
interactions. So when I read the first few
chapters of your book, I can see so many things that you did in
your career. Highlights.
I always like to ask my guests to share a little bit more about
themselves, if there are any major highlights or turning
points, which I'm sure there are plenty that you can share with
the audience here. Maybe to just give a little bit
of background about yourself and something that we can learn from
your journey. Sure, sure.
Well, I started off getting a strong technical background.
I got a pH. D in Computer science at Duke.
And then I stayed on it Duke as a faculty member for five years,
mostly teaching grad students. But actually I did teach one
undergraduate course. Everybody called it computer
science for poets. And here I was with 400 students
trying to teach them how to program in BASIC when all they
wanted was a science credit. But while I was there, I was
doing research. That's kind of the expectation
if you have a position like that.
And I was on a NASA contract and we were supposed to build a
single board 1000 processor, essentially A supercomputer to
go on board the space shuttle. And if this was just a fantastic
project, so much fun. And in order to build it, I had
to buy 2 traditional supercomputers, the kind that
sit up on a raised floor and have.
Paylon Fire Protection. And that was just to simulate
the single board computer we were building.
And I felt like, wow, if this is something that could make a huge
difference to NASA being on the Space shuttle, this ought to
have application in the non NASA commercial world.
But I didn't know anything about starting a company, but I said
to my wife I got to do this and she said okay, she's such a good
sport. She said, where do we have to go
for that? And I said, well, we can't do it
here in North Carolina. That's not true anymore in 2023.
But this was 1987. It was true.
You really couldn't start up, start up there.
And I said to her, we going to have to either move to Boston or
Silicon Valley. It's just said oh please,
please, Boston. She's from Ohio.
She said there's going to be an earthquake in California is
going to fall into the ocean. So please don't do it there.
Anyway, I'm not going to drag this out.
It didn't work out in Boston, so we moved to Silicon Valley and I
started my first startup. There was a supercomputer
company based on the work we were doing for NASA, and it went
fine. But you've all heard of Moore's
Law and Moore's Law was our real competition, meaning traditional
computers were going to catch up to us eventually.
But we had a pretty good head start, the machine we made.
Was no longer a single board computer like for NASA.
This had 32,768 processors in a machine that was the size of a
four drawer filing cabinet, and it didn't need any special air
conditioning. It just plugged into standard
wall current in a standard office.
But it ran Unix and it was blazingly fast for the time.
Now your iPhone 7, which is so many years back, was much faster
than our computer, just to give you a sense of how fast things
have changed. So I learned a lot.
I was one of the founders, and we built this great machine.
We sold it to American Express and the New York Times, and it
wasn't a general purpose computer.
It did some things extremely well, like search every word
that the New York Times had ever published.
In there, you know, 200 years or 150 years, and it could do
unstructured text searching just like that.
But it wasn't jumping off the shelves.
In four years we sold 100 of them, which is considered good
for supercomputers. Well, that kind of ended and I
did a, you know, a short stint at a company that was a big
software company at the time called Borland and Borland,
ironically. Moved me to Boston because they
just done an acquisition of a company in Boston and we were
supposed to be here for one year and then go back.
But when we got here, my wife and I loved it so much.
We loved it much more than California, which and all the
people from California listening to this are going to scratch
their heads and say what? But it just worked out better
for us and the schools were just fantastic and unfortunately.
The California taxes had started to hurt their schools, and since
we've been here, I've started actually eight more, so a total
of nine. The current one is my 9th.
They've been in a variety of areas, Internet, infrastructure,
security, various kinds of hardware startups.
I've had two that had what I consider to be pretty good
exits, which were sold for over 100 million.
One of them was in the middle of the Internet bubble, and so it
just was off the charts. But I also had a whole bunch
that just failed. And so, you know, I'm jumping
ahead because, you know, sort of why did I write the book?
But I see a lot of people that write books and they tell all
about all the great things that they did, and there's nothing
wrong with that. But I feel like people learn
more from all the bad things that happened and maybe, you
know, understanding why did it happen and how could it have
been avoided. You also asked what were some of
the major events or turning points in my career.
I would say making the decision to leave academia and going to
do startups was, you know, kind of a major thing.
But I've always had an interest and it still has to be sort of
in the back. To go do teaching again, and
maybe writing these books is partly an outlet to try to teach
a little bit, the move to Boston was significant.
I found that some things that were going on in Silicon Valley
at the time, to me, were sort of worrisome.
It was becoming a monoculture, meaning it lived off of almost
exclusively the tech industry. And if the tech industry goes
down, the whole Silicon Valley area is in trouble.
And you can tell because you can drive up and down 101 with no
traffic. But Boston has a very diverse
economy. There's a strong biotech
industry. There's a very strong financial
services industry, a medical industry and tech.
And so any one of those can be down and the others are not
down. And so there's a balance there.
And so that was very big deal founding my first company which
happened here and. Where it was my idea and also
first time being a CEO. Those are major milestones and
learning that there can be very difficult in some cases bad
investors surprised me and I learned about that and that the
challenge of founders. So these are all things I talk
about in the book, but those are some of the highlights of real
learning experiences. About hearing what you just
shared and also looking back yourself, right?
I believe it's a pretty long and accelerating journey.
I would say founding like 9 startups, that is really great
to me, like being an serial entrepreneur and you have had
major good exits, right? More than 100,000,000, but as
you said, right, there's so many that also failed along the way
and I think there are so many first experience that you had
that we will learn from this episode.
Maybe let's start by going back to the time when you decided
that you want to start a startup, because I believe many
listeners here have these aspirations to, you know, become
a founder or creating a startup. And since the listeners here
majority from tech, maybe let's just focus on a tech startup.
So in your mind back then, what made you decide to become a tech
founder, right? You said that you work in
academia before, and what made you decide to actually jump from
academia to? A startup.
I guess what I was seeing was that I knew that a lot of
technology is developed under government contracts.
I had a NASA contract, but I was aware of contracts funded by the
Pentagon. For example, as a grad student,
we were on the earliest versions of the Internet, which was
actually called the ARPANET at the time, and it wasn't called
DARPA back then, it was called ARPA.
But then they decided to put the D in the front to make sure it
was clear that it was the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency. So I knew that that was
happening, that a lot of tech was being built under government
contracts, and yet a lot of it, which clearly wasn't unique to
the military. I'm not talking about, you know,
weapons systems. I'm talking about networking
technology and things to do with just broadly with the Internet
and solving other hard tech problems.
And it didn't seem like they were coming out of the
contractors, the government contractors that were doing
these things. And that's been a theme for me
my entire career. But at least as far as getting
started, sometimes ignorance is bliss and I didn't know how hard
it would be. I just.
I wanted to try. I was at least aware that of
what I didn't know. And so on That first one, I was
one of 12 founders, but the other folks were more
experienced. And so I felt like I could learn
from them and they were excited that I had done this research
that was very aligned with what they wanted to do.
They all wanted to build a supercomputer that was
affordable. That was the goal.
The company was called Maspar, which was just.
It's not a very clever, creative name for Massively Parallel, but
yeah, the idea was to build an affordable supercomputer.
And then when I came in with the work we'd done that fit really
well with what they were doing and they were very excited to
bring me in and have me join. That first group of there were
11 and I was the 12th, and a grad student of mine went with
me and so we were 13 people. Building this company, hardware
and software all had to be built and then we could declare
success. Because it was a supercomputer,
it was affordable and people were buying it.
But there were also the challenges that I mentioned
earlier. Moore's Law and very difficult
to make it good enough to make it perfect was definitely a
stretch, but we had bugs and we only had 100 customers, but
there was no Internet to distribute updates on.
And so we would have to ship floppy disks to our customers a
couple times a month, and luckily you don't go broke
shipping floppy disks to 100 people.
But we couldn't make it with bug free.
And that was a little frustrating to me.
It was naive, but frustrating. And that's why I went to
Borland, by the way, because I asked people around who's
building the best quality software in the world, and I
wanted to go learn how to do that.
And that's why I actually joined Borland.
So compared from then, right, you said was 1987 right when you
started and now it's 2023. Of course a lot of things have
changed. What you saw maybe the
technology was initiated in the government projects.
Now I think it's like ubiquitous.
There are so many technologies available and around us.
So what will be your advice for people who are thinking of
founding a startup or building a tech?
Kind of like technologies. What would be your advice for
them to actually start thinking, OK, should I or should I not
start the startup? And what would be your lessons
also for them in this modern era, right?
Like what they should think about before they actually think
whether the startup is going to be a successful one?
So a lot of startups, tech startups, we're going to be
talking about tech startups this whole time, are started by a
couple of people. Couple.
Three people. They understand a problem.
Because they came out of a market that has that problem and
they're motivated because they see no one solving this problem
and they can solve this, whatever it is, they can solve
this problem. And that's a perfectly good, if
not sometimes very, you know, great way in which to think
about Okay, do I have something that can really be a startup.
I mean, if there's a big problem in a big market.
And you, because you come out of that market, know a lot about
it, then you're like 5 or 10 steps ahead.
The challenge still of course, is that so many tech founding
teams end up building a technology, let's call it a
quote, solution that's still in search of a problem.
And it's so important to start with a problem and make sure you
understand it's a big market. If you have a great market, you
can have a less than great product and still do
fantastically. Or you can look at things and
say I have incredible technology, but there's no
identified great market. It doesn't matter.
You're not going to succeed. It's just, well, yeah, everybody
will find exceptions, but you'll rarely succeed.
And so the most important thing is look at your group of
founders. You need to understand enough
about the technology that you have the right people that can
build something, but it's even more important that you
understand the market and the problem really well.
Thank you for that advice because I think that speaks
true. I talked to so many product
people as well. They also speak the same thing,
building something that people want that solves the real needs,
not like building a technology in such of the problem like you
said. So I think that's a really good
advice. So you mentioned a couple of
times about founders. Most of the startups that I know
also have a team of founders, not just one, although there are
some which have just one founder.
But why do you think so many startups have many founders?
That's the first thing. And what will be the role of
these people who will somehow maybe they are friends or maybe
they just get connected right? What will be your advice for
them to become a strong founder right that can lead this startup
from initiation up to the success?
I've had some startups where I was the sole founder.
Up to this most recent one, there were six of us founders
and that team. They're a group of people that
all came together at the same time.
It's very hard to add somebody late later as a founder.
There's not a formal definition of founder, but there is a sort
of an informal you're there at the beginning.
You're the thought leaders of the company.
They get a different kind of stock and that's important to
understand. They don't get options which
vest over time. They actually get well if it's
done right. They get shares which are
reverse vested, meaning you still need to stick around at
the company. You don't just get the shares
and get to walk away. And I've always had it so they
reverse vest over four years, but instead of.
Paying let's say $0.25 a share. When they exercise them some
period of time later, they paid more like .001 cents for the
shares and they pay for them upfront, and that protects them
from being considered income. Instead their capital gains,
because you're going to hold on to them for a long period of
time and they're yours. Except that the company has a
right to buy them back at this price you paid, depending on if
you leave early. So those actually end up being
important because those do distinguish the founders in an
economic way. But the most important thing is
they have the knowledge and then they're going to be the leaders.
I would typically have meetings with the founders to talk
through everything that was going on with the company.
They weren't on my staff meetings.
I would have, you know, typical staff meetings where I would
have the head of marketing, the head of sales, the head of
legal, the head of engineering product.
But I would separately have a meeting with the founders and I
wanted to make sure they were aware of everything that's going
on. They would have opinions.
They would say, what, what about this?
What about that? They didn't have a formal role
like that, but they have an informal, very influential, very
important role. So it is difficult, I will say
the larger group of founders you have, the more difficult it can
be to deal with. You want me to expound a little
bit more on why that is? Yeah, sure.
So I think it will be great because if people have you know
more than two or three Co founding teams, right.
So that means there are a lot of perspectives and what do you
think will be better for the founders to actually align on,
right. So how can they work together or
what are some of the maybe anti patterns that should not do
whenever they found a team? So I would recommend people to
keep the founding team very small, which is hard because as
you're founding the company. Somebody comes in, you know,
let's say they're your first employee after the founding team
has come together. And this person says, hey, I'm a
very senior person. I think I should be a founder
too. And that becomes a very slippery
slope. If you do that, okay, you've got
your founding team and you're moving forward.
And like I said, this founding team I have right now is 6
people. And they're not all going to
have the same views and they're going to feel like they should
have maybe more influence over the strategy, the direction of
the company. Sometimes this founding team
would say to me, hey, we should be the ones driving strategy.
Well, OK. But you know, once you've got a
head of marketing and a head of sales, those people know a lot
too. And so, you know, honestly, the
founding team is not really driving strategy.
They have a role in it. And then.
Sometimes you can get a founder who gets off the rails and he
gets very difficult to manage. And because this group came
together at the very beginning and they all went together, went
through some difficult times, when things are lean, there's a
strong sense that they should be treated differently than
everyone else. And that starts to create a rift
within the rest of the company. And then when you have one of
the founders who is just being so disruptive that it's.
Hurting the company. Then as the CEO, you've got to
make a really tough decision because how do you let a founder
go? How do you ask a founder to
leave? And it's happened and it's
really, really difficult because it scares the rest of the
company because these are people that have been there from the
beginning, they're the leaders. And then suddenly one is asked
to leave the company. But you know, you got to do what
you got to do to make sure that you don't let the culture go
spiraling down because you've got somebody that's just not
happy any longer. And sometimes it's just time to
move on for somebody that's been there a long time.
So from your experience looking at this letting founders go,
right? If you have to summarize what
will be some of the key things the Co founding team should
think about whenever they want to ask a founder to leave the
group, Are there certain things that you learn from that
experience? Yeah.
So I have a philosophy in all hiring of hire slowly, fire
quickly. You hire slowly for the maybe
obvious reasons that you want to make sure you get it right.
And hiring people is one of the hardest things you do because
you have this artificial situation where you're, you
know, somebody you don't know. It's a stranger perhaps, and
you're talking to them and you're not in a work situation,
you're just talking to them sitting in a couple of chairs.
And from that, you're supposed to decide if you're going to
make a big bet on them. And then if things don't work
out with a normal employee that you hired like that, you say you
know it's not working out and you need to go.
And I mean quickly, like the minute I find out that somebody
is having a negative influence on the productivity of the
people around them, I don't wait.
I'll make the decision to let them go right then and there and
you move on. Well, with founders, you really
cannot fire quickly because it's such a big deal when you let a
founder go that you have to flip things around and say, I'm going
to fire very slowly and you work with that person, you work with
the rest of the founders. It's frankly almost exhausting.
And then ultimately, well, the ideal thing is that person and
you and the rest of the founders.
All ultimately come to an agreement that it's time for
them to leave. They're fully, I mean hopefully
it's been four years, they're fully vested, you know the
reverse vesting that I talked about.
And so they earned those shares and they own a lot of them and
they get to benefit in however the company turns out.
So my advice is you normally hire slowly, fire quickly but
with founders. You have to fire very slowly and
carefully because of the huge impact it'll have.
Right. Thank you for that tips.
I think many people would have found it quite unique, right?
Fire slowly. But I think it's probably for
the better of the company as well not to disrupt, you know
the whole idea of being a one unit team, right.
So another thing that you mentioned in the beginning is
that actually you had experienced failure as well.
The statistics still speaks true, maybe 8 out of 10 startups
fail, right? And still many people want to
think of starting a startup. What makes people want to give
this experience a try? And from your experience, did
you actually regret experiencing all those failures despite you
have two exits? 2 massive exits?
But at the time when you had that failure, probably you would
think differently, right? When you had the bad situation,
or you wasted effort or all those things, do you think you
will regret some of those journey?
Oh, I guess so. But the good thing is that time
sort of heals wounds. And then, yeah, I can sit here
and say, wow, I worked really hard on that one.
One of the phrases I use is we hit the wall and there were no
skid marks. I mean, we just hit the wall
fast and hard. And those are regrettable.
And at the time it seemed like absolutely horrible.
But I guess one of the things that.
I've observed in myself and other startup people, Is there
eternal optimists? Almost sort of pathological
optimists? Maybe.
And they just keep trying again and again and again.
And there's another aspect to why do startups at all?
And to me the answer is simple. If you work.
And it was good that I did. I worked at a couple of big
companies surrounded by startups, but I did a stint at
Borland. 4 years, five years maybe.
And then I did a stint at a defense contractor.
And so those experiences teach you that it's not that big
companies don't want to be innovative, it's that they
really can't be. They become very risk averse.
They've got too much to lose, they got too many shareholders,
they got too many employees, they got customers, etcetera.
And you can't make radical changes.
I mean, think about the most recent announcement that Intel
made with, they said we're going to drop everything but 64 bits.
In the X86 architecture and they'll probably get a lot of
pushback. They've had to keep the basic
core of the 8080 working all of these years and think about how
hard that has been for them versus somebody that just says
on start from scratch, I don't have any installed base.
So even though big companies would like to be innovative,
they can't be. And so if being innovative is
important to you, well. Then you kind of got to be at a
startup. Now you don't have to found a
startup. In fact, I recommend people who
think they want to be at a startup join a company that's
got 100 people. And that's still a startup.
And that's still going to be a company that can Bob and weave
and pivot and make changes that would, you know, make the head
spin of people that work at a big company.
So I don't know if that answered your question, but that's why I
keep doing it. It's that.
You get addicted to being able to innovate and move quickly and
change things and try another angle.
As long as you don't run out of money, that's the other problem,
of course. Yeah.
So you mentioned this eternal optimistic kind of mindset,
right? I think that's really key to me.
Whenever you work in a startup, sometimes it frustrates the
person who worked there because there is no process, there's no
good amount of resources, right? Everything needs to be started
from scratch. I think becoming an optimist is
really key and whenever you seem to find a failure you don't give
up, right? You always have to find a new
ways of solving the problems. So you mentioned about working
in a big companies, right? I'm sure there's also a lot of
advantage there compared to working in the startups and you
even mentioned that you work in a big companies.
Before you actually jump into startups all the way, what are
some of the lessons you learn from big companies that you
apply in the startups? Well, you can learn a lot about
process. And you can learn because one of
the challenges as the CEO of a startup is that you can't have
too much process early on because it's sort of unnecessary
when it's just five of you or 10 of you.
But as it gets to be 255075 people, you start needing some
more process, process around how you're going to hire process
around product changes. Around deciding what your
strategy should be. Reacting to what you're hearing
from the market in a way that is fast but also makes sense.
And then of course, dealing with your board and with your
investors starts to require a certain amount of process, and
you learn a lot about process at a big company, and you might
learn both good and bad lessons from it.
I'll give you an example. So Borland.
Was a large company that had very efficient, useful process
and I almost never felt like there was too much process at
Borland, even though it was a 1500 person company and it was
the third largest software company in the world at the
time, only behind Microsoft and Lotus.
Of course. Some of your listeners are going
to go Lotus. What's Lotus?
Well, Lotus got swallowed by IBM as people that do remember Lotus
would we were just behind Lotus. But then I was that a defense
contractor where they have gotten so bogged down in process
and some of it's mandated by the government and they can't help
it, but it just, it makes their overhead rates, you know, if a
defense contractor is proposing to do some work that's being
asked for by the government. If you look at what the overhead
rate for some of these companies is, it's like over 200%.
So you take somebody's salary and it's not multiplied by 25%,
it's multiplied by 250% is how much that person is going to
show up in your budget to the government.
That's because there's so much process and that's not their
profit. That's just what they say their
overhead rate is. Then they tack on another 8% or
7% as their profit. It's an amazingly expensive way
for things to get done. When I joined a company that
should have been acting like a startup and I was going in as
CTO, and then eventually I became the CEO later and they
told me about these things they had called pigs Pi G's.
I said, what's a PIG? They said process improvement
group. They had six or eight groups
that met regularly to come up with and manage a whole 6 or 8
different processes. So they had a group to define a
process and to manage it. I said you have got to be
kidding me, there were only 75 people at this company and you
need 6 process improvement groups.
Something's wrong here. So it can take over even a
smaller company if you let it too much process.
Right. So the learning here is process
is good at a certain stage, right.
So when you're small, probably you don't introduce too many,
but as you grow larger, I think good process especially you have
seen in the big companies, right.
Of course they have good processes that we can follow,
but also don't get too bogged down in unnecessary processes.
I think that's the key lesson exactly.
You mentioned also in the beginning that you had to
decide. To step up as a CEO for the
first time, right? Of course, if you want to found
a team, there's a high chance. Also you have to become a CEO.
And for many tech people, we sometimes want to just deal with
technologies, right? Mostly also opt for CTO.
But in your book you discuss like why someone should consider
becoming a CEO. So maybe you can walk us through
the thought process here, why someone should think about
becoming the CEO of the startup they found.
OK, so first of all, let me say this Tech startups.
In their first phase, which is probably the 1st 18 months or
so, the CEO has to be very comfortable and if possible have
a deep understanding of the technology because they have to
go out and they have to talk about it.
They have to sell it to investors at the very least.
And if every time they're supposed to talk about the
technology, they have to bring the CTO with them, well that's
pretty inefficient. And they really need to be able
to answer those questions. And so there's a phenomenon
which is common, where one of the founders is going to be the
CEO and they understand technology and that's
appropriate. But sometimes at the 18 month
mark or so, that person is not the ideal person to be the CEO
any longer and bringing somebody else in who has market knowledge
or is really good at sales and marketing.
And you can't be great at everything.
And so if you're a technology person who understands the
market that you came out of, understands the problem, you're
probably a great startup CEO and then you might have to switch
into the CTO role or some other role and bring in somebody from
the outside. And that's a hard thing to go
through. I went through it a couple
times, twice, and it still really was hard.
But it happens a lot. So one reason that you want to
consider being CEO is because you've got that knowledge of the
market, of the technology, and you can represent it, you can
sell it, you can pitch it in your pitch deck, and you can
raise money much more easily. If that's true, of course the
other reason to do it is that as you move through your career,
you were probably an individual contributor, and then maybe you
ran a small. Group you're you've led a small
group. You might not have been the
manager, but you can still lead as a coder for example.
Or on the engineering side, you can lead as an architect.
You can lead a team of 510 without being their quote
official manager. And in my opinion, the only
reason to move up to the next level, where you're managing the
next level of people that they themselves are managing others,
is because. You've got the experience,
you've got the knowledge to understand all of the big
picture, not just a feature, but you understand the whole product
or we want to understand your product in the context of the
customers full system. And so you have all that
knowledge, but you can't do everything yourself.
That's a really good reason to move up and that's a really good
reason to be CEO, because you've got the experience and you've
got the understanding of, like I said, the product, the market.
And you are the ideal person to lead the whole company.
You don't have to be a super expert at marketing, a super
expert at sales, but you have to know enough about them to bring
in a good person that you can manage.
And so those are the two reasons, I think, for becoming a
CEO of a tech startup. And you mentioned also like
don't think that we can do everything right.
So you need to find good people that you can delegate and focus
on the things that you can bring much impact like you said,
right, the technology itself maybe in the beginning because
you have to pitch it to the investors or to also find the
product market fit to the users. And also maybe if you know a
little bit about marketing, right, you can also cover that.
So in your book there's one chapter you talk about bad
CEO's, I'm sure for many people who are not trained to become a
CEO in the 1st place, what are some of the trades or some of
the practices that you think are very important for the CEO's to
avoid so that they don't have to become the bad CEO's for the
company they found? Well, I'll answer your question
by talking about the two bad CEO's without mentioning their
company or their name, but just talk about their qualities of
their characteristics. That are bad.
So I had one company where I was the founder and we had already
pivoted twice and it still wasn't working.
And I thought if I could find somebody that already
understands a big problem in a big market that our technology
could be fairly quickly adapted to because we were one of those
companies that thought we had a great solution and then spent a
long time trying to find exactly what problem are we solving
here. And so I brought a guy in from
the outside, and what I saw in him that I loved was that he had
a really clear understanding of major problem in the market that
people were trying to solve, but we're doing a horrible job of
solving. And there was an enormous
opportunity. But he had a concept of loyalty
that just dominated everything that he did.
And if anyone actually disagreed with him about anything.
He got extremely upset and he considered that disloyal, and
this became such a big problem that someone like me that
actually brought him in had to leave.
It just wasn't a good mix. And so it was sort of this
combination of micromanaging, meaning, not really delegating.
And the people that he brought with him, they had this strong
sense of loyalty to him. Which meant doing exactly what
he said and never disagreeing or having a thought about it
yourself. And it's stifled that
creativity. It's stifled pretty much anybody
from veering, from doing exactly what he told them to do.
It was almost military precision and military kind of loyalty.
So that one was a problem. Another one, the CEO, turned out
to be bad, but it was because the board.
This is another situation by the way, where I had been there 15
months and then we felt like and I agree with the board that I
was still new to sales and marketing and I hadn't really
gotten as strong in those two areas as I needed to be to truly
be a good longterm CEO. And so we were looking for
potential CEO's. And my idea was we hire somebody
that's an absolute super experienced sales guy selling
high technology stuff. But the two candidates we looked
at, one was like that and the other had been a CTO of a really
huge software company, had never run a small company, had never
raised money from investors and had never run sales or
marketing. It didn't make any sense.
Everybody's scratching their head saying, wait a minute, that
doesn't make any sense. But he ended up coming in
against me and the rest of the founding team.
In that case, we had a total of 5 founders and we all didn't
want this to happen. But we were told by the board
member who was also an investor, that if we threw our weight
around, he would abide by what we wanted, but he would never
invest in the company again. And we weren't going to be able
to survive without that. So we accepted it and a year
later. And I had stayed for almost a
year to help him learn. And then I left.
And shortly after I left, I found out that the company ran
out of money and closed. I quickly called up my
cofounders and I said I don't understand what happened.
And they said he forgot to raise money.
He didn't watch his cash. He didn't know how to raise
money. So he kept putting it off and
putting it off. And ultimately it just, boy did
it hit the wall with no skid marks.
And that was very sad. So what's the point there?
The point is there are a few things which every CEO has to do
and do almost religiously. What are they?
One, watch your cash burn, How much runway do you have?
You have to have more than enough runway to sell your
product, Prove that you've got good product market fit.
And if you see that your runway doesn't get you to cash flow
positive, which you know it's not going to in the early couple
of years, well then you need to make sure that you begin the
process of funding around well in advance of when your runway
runs out. You don't want to be like weeks
away from running out of cash, right, as you're trying to close
around because even nice investors will take some
advantage of that and make sure they get a better deal.
Wow. I didn't know that it could
happen. Like a CEO forgot her to raise
funding, right. So I think that's really a good
lesson for all of us here. So one of the major
responsibility of the CEO is to figure out the runway, the cash
burn, and don't forget to raise the money for the next round.
So, Jodie, thanks for sharing all this.
I think it's really great. Great lessons from all your
journey. I wish you well in writing the
book. So when will we expect to see
the book being published, actually?
I think the publisher, Manning and I are both feeling pretty
good about it coming out before the end of the year, but it will
be pretty late in the year. They're hoping that I'm done
with the writing by September. I think that's a little
optimistic, but the problem is that I'm not writing.
This is not the only thing I'm doing.
I'm still running a startup, and I'm helping a defense contractor
try to learn how to spin out technology into the commercial
space. Like I told you earlier, I'm
sort of, you know, I can't help myself.
I still want to see that happen. But there are so many barriers
to that happening anyway, Very busy and also running a
foundation, but I think it'll come out before the end of the
year. Right.
So let's go to your foundation, which I think is also a very
inspirational message, right? It's an inspirational
foundation. So tell us more about it.
Who says I Can foundation? What is it all about?
And what is the core message that you want to convey out of
that? So part of when you asked me to
talk about my background, I talked about my career.
But part of what happened to me that led to this foundation is
that when I was 16, it was discovered that I had a rare
kind of bone cancer in my right knee that only affects about
1000. It's only in teenagers, only
affects about 1000 kids in the United States a year and the
only treatment back then. In 1973, the only treatment was
amputation. Chemotherapy didn't even exist
yet. Three years later, that cancer
is aggressive. It was in the bloodstream and it
landed in my lung. And then I had to have half my
lungs removed. But at that point in time,
chemotherapy did exist. However, the real point that led
to who says I can't? Is that during all that time?
People were telling me can't you can't ski again, you can't swim
straight, you can't ride a bike because you won't be able to
balance on it. And I was hearing can't so much
that it was really destroying my self esteem and sort of hope.
And I kind of fought back and said, well I'm going to figure
this out and it took a long time, but I ultimately got good
enough at one legged skiing that I'm currently a double black
diamond skier. Then somebody said to me, I was
the CEO of a company and somebody wanted me to fund their
ride, which was supposed to help fund AIDS research, fund their
ride from Boston to New York. And another person who worked
for me said, oh, you sound so excited about that.
Too bad you can't ride a bike from Boston to New York.
So I bought a bike that afternoon and I trained hard and
I did the AIDS ride from Boston to New York three years in a
row. So I then wrote a memoir to try
to help other people get some hope.
And I started to, you know, in my own mind, figure out what's
going on here. Because I kept meeting people
that also were pretty determined and looking at sports as a way
to feel good about themselves again and accomplish something
that everybody else thinks you can't do.
And I turned that into a book, and then I turned it into a Ted
Talk. Which talks about why my theory
why people who have a physical disability so often overachieve.
So it's a Ted talk. If you type into Google Jothy
TEDx, you'll find it. That's all you need to type.
So the foundation is because the best way for me to feel like I
can hands on help kids overcome a disability is by having this
foundation that raises money and then we will buy let's say a
running leg. So right now we're helping a 10
year old girl who was born without a right leg birth defect
and never run, but a year ago 8 to 9 started to really feel
like. Well I really, really want to
run and the reasons were that gym class was starting to leave
her out. She would be the last one picked
for teams because she couldn't run and so it was A tag game.
She'd get caught 1st and if it was a kicking a ball game, well
she wasn't much good at that either.
Running leg for a 10 year old girl is $21,000 and insurance
will not buy sports equipment for somebody with a disability.
So that's what we do, and literally everyone.
I've touched every one of these kids over the years, and I
started it in 2013. We've changed their life
permanently, and there's no better feeling.
There's this little girl. She's left out.
She wants to run. Her parents can't afford it.
We get her a leg and she can't stop smiling and she's just.
She run to gym class with her new running leg on.
They'd never seen her run before.
She goes running in and she's so proud to show it off.
It's unbelievable. Wow, what a beautiful story,
right? I also saw your tat top.
It's very inspirational. I could see some videos.
You did this bike riding, swimming over the sea, a few
other things that you did. Even you jump on a rope at the
end of the tat top. I think that was really cool.
So in your talk you also mentioned this formula for
someone who wants to prove themselves, Like who says I
can't, right? So maybe tell us a little bit
more about that formula so that people can also understand why
you think the people with disability most of the times
overachieve. So I believe and took me.
It's been 50 years since I lost my life.
This past January, it's 50 years.
It's taken most of that time for me to kind of figure this out.
There's three traits. That when combined, make this
happen. The 1st is insecurity.
Someone who has a disability has a baseline level of insecurity.
Always, constantly. Why?
Well, because when you're walking in your prosthetic leg,
it's easy to fall. Amputees fall an average of once
a week their entire lives, and you fall in places and it's
humiliating or it hurts or it's dangerous, but it's more than
that. You know, you get up in the
middle of the night. And you don't have your leg on.
You got to grab a pair of crutches to go to the bathroom.
That reminds you every day that you have a disability.
And so there's this latent sense of insecurity.
OK, so then you figure out, oh, maybe I can do this sport,
whatever it is, I can learn to ski if I work hard at it.
And eventually people start to clap for you.
I'll go skiing under a chairlift, and I'll get people
in the chairlift, hooting and hollering.
And that makes you feel exceptional.
And it's just like a drug. It's like the first time it
happens, you go, what I really like that kind of recognition.
And so you want more of it. And so this combination of
insecurity and exceptionalism, which sounds like it can't
possibly be true in the same person, is this instable kind of
thing that causes you to focus and work hard.
And the third part of the formula is discipline.
So insecurity by itself makes you crawl into yourself and be
feeling sorry for yourself. Insecurity by itself is very,
very dangerous. Exceptionalism by itself makes
you arrogant and obnoxious. But you put those two together
and they balance each other out. And then what seems to come
naturally to people who've had a disability happen to them is
discipline. You're only going to be able to
keep up with these people that have two legs if you work really
hard at how does this running leg work, It's not the same as
your biologic leg, and you've got to adapt to it and you've
got to adjust your brain to it. So discipline sort of comes
naturally. So the formula is insecurity
plus exceptionalism plus discipline.
And my final point about it is that I believe that everyone
eventually has a disability. Everyone.
Eventually, and it's not always just something physical.
Maybe it's a relationship problem and it's making you feel
bad. But can you turn these three
traits to your benefit when you're feeling bad and something
bad has happened and can you overcome it?
And if so, well, how? And I think if you think about,
well, it's made me feel bad about myself.
That's the insecurity part. But.
If I use the discipline that I know is in me somewhere, maybe I
can start to achieve some goals. And I forgot to say that
earlier. Exceptionalism can come from you
set a small goal and you work hard and you achieve it and you
celebrate it, and then you set the next one and you keep going.
Each one is no big deal, but by the time you've built on top of
1, on top of the other on top of the other, you know it's a lot.
And, you know, it's taken me 50 years to be able to swim from
Alcatraz to San Francisco. This year will be my 30th time
doing that. Not only did I do those long
bike rides I mentioned, but I've done one that raises money in
Massachusetts 18 years in a row. And I've tried a few new sports.
I've now started paddle boarding, which is kind of fun
with a special prosthesis just for paddle boarding.
So yeah, it's a lot of work. But the rewards are worth it.
Wow, it's very inspirational hearing what you said and also
the things that you do. You did all this multi years,
right? It's not just one time and you
stop, right? But you did it consistently.
Discipline like you said. And I think it's also very
important that this is not just applicable for the disabled, the
people with disability, right, but also people who are good
physically. But maybe we had issues, we have
mental health problems as well. So use this technique, use this
formula to actually bring back the good in you.
So thanks for this message. So Dorothy, as we reach the end
of our conversation, I have one last question that I would like
to ask you, which is for you to share what I call 3 technical
leadership wisdom. You can think of it like advice
that you want to give to us so that we can learn from your
journey or your experience and all these startups and
foundation that you set up. Yeah, I thought I had on this
just a little bit. So #1 as a leader of a
technology startup. Every day, focus on cash burn
and your runway, because if you run out of runway, the whole
thing's over. And the second thing that's sort
of related to that is people say, why do startups fail?
And of course the obvious answer is because they'd run out of
cash. Well, OK, but that's too simple.
Why did it run out of cash? They run out of cash because
they didn't find a big enough market.
So first, make sure you got enough runway.
Second. Make sure you get product market
fit. My current startup #9 is
basically on its second life because in its first life we got
to the point where we were struggling to get product market
fit right. I finally said we're going to
run out of cash if I don't do something.
I let everyone go except for me, and I built it back up with a
completely different market. That's working well and I
avoided. The Hit the wall with no skid
marks. We'll see how it finally turns
out. So cash burn?
Product market fit. That's one.
Second, do not underestimate the power of culture, positive or
negative, and cultivate a good culture and root out any threats
to it. I didn't always have a great
positive culture at all of my startups, but I've learned how
to do it Besides, you know, hire great people.
But then empower them and don't micromanage.
Then I think you can build a good culture, but if I see
someone that's starting to be a spot of bad culture, it can
spread. And so that's when you say okay,
I flip the bozo bit on this person and they're going to have
to leave. And then the final thing is I
have some very simple management philosophies that I live by.
One is assume the best. In everyone, assume the best.
Now they may not live up to it, but start off by assuming the
best. When you hear something bad
about somebody, assume that it's not true and find out what's
going on. 2nd, treat people like adults.
Oh my God, that sounds so obvious and it's so often not
the case. And the third is and this is
going to sound a little trite, but again, it's so powerful is
to follow the golden rule. If you're about to do something
to somebody that you wouldn't like done to you, don't do it.
That's it. Wow.
Yeah. So those are classic rules.
Yes, people might think it's simple, but it's so powerful.
Sometimes we forget that, especially as leaders and
especially in the situation where, for example, your startup
is having a lot of issues, you know, maybe running a low
runway, for example, or finding product market fit, right.
Sometimes we tend to forget about the culture and just chase
goals, metrics, finding customers, right.
I think what you said. Really, really important.
And thanks for sharing all of them.
So, Jyoti, if people would like to follow you, find you online
or continue the conversation, is there a place where they can
reach out? Well, sure, I do have a website
for The Who says I can't part of my life, which is
whosaysicant.org. No punctuation, no spaces, just
whosaysicant.org and there is a way to sort of message to me
through that as well. And I think that through the
book that I hope some people that are listening to this might
consider reading. You didn't ask me why I wrote
the book, but I wrote the book because I think it's important
to be honest about our mistakes. And most of the book is filled
with lessons learned from mistakes, not the great things.
And other than that, my current company is called Dover
Microsystems. And it's a cybersecurity
company, hardware and software. And you could e-mail me at
jothie.j.othy@dovermicrosystems.com. Right.
So yeah, I think learning from mistakes is definitely crucial.
And I read the early chapters of your book, but it's really
exciting learning from the story.
You begin the first startup, right, the mistakes that you
made. I'm sure when the book is out,
it will help a lot for the founders or many people working
in the startup. So thanks again for that.
So thank you, Jody for your time.
I hope I can see your book by the end of the year then.
I will really work hard to make that true.
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