Clio's founders wanted a small lifestyle business making a few hundred thousand dollars a year. An advisor named Christoph told them to swing for the fences instead. They raised millions, pursued venture capital, and scaled into a billion-dollar company.
Look, if you're really trying to build something other than a lifestyle business, which originally that's all Ryan and I wanted to build, like our, our ambitions initially were very humble, which again is, is surprising. You know, some people see the success Clio has had and assumes we must have founded the company with this ambition of building, building a multi billion dollar company. Our ambition initially was to build a company that would throw off a couple hundred thousand dollars a year that we could split up and call a day. We had very humble ambitions initially for Clio, and Christoph helped us reframe that and become a bit more ambitious, or maybe a lot more ambitious as the case might be, in terms of what we wanted to build. And he just said, look guys, you might be able to build this great bootstrapped lifestyle business, but if a venture funded competitor comes into your space, they could take you out. They'll eat your lunch, they'll take you out. And while you might think you have this nice little corner of the market for yourself and this nice little lifestyle business, that venture funded competitor could easily pave over you guys and leave you with nothing. So why not swing for the fences? Why not take a big swing with this and raise some VC and try to build a really big business? And he helped change our minds, really. And Ryan and I said like, okay, let's, let's go for it. Let's, let's go raise a multi million dollar round. Let's go try to build something really scaled. Thankfully, that big swing panned out.
Don't make this mistake when hiring executives or you'll pay dearly for it - Jack Newton
