Inch Wide, Mile Deep

And so in late 1995, I left that firm, and with a good friend of mine, actually someone who was a professor here at Stanford in the economics department, a guy named Michael Horvath, we founded what became Khana Communications. Khana, Perfect example of going an inch wide and a mile deep. What I'm talking about there is picking a niche, something that, to many people, may look like too small an opportunity, but going really deep into that opportunity, trying to be authentic there, trying to develop leadership in that space with the hopes that then that opportunity leads to something bigger. In the case of Kana, what we did was we found this opportunity in customer email. And this is 1995. Companies are just beginning to go online, beginning to build their Internet presence, and they have this problem, which is as soon as they go online, they start getting customer email, and there weren't systems to actually answer those messages. So we developed a company, and with some folks other than me who wrote the software, we were able to come up with a solution. Five years later, we started Two Guys and a Dog in 1995. By 2000, we were global company. 53 offices around the world, 1200 employees, generating hundreds of millions in revenue, traded on NASDAQ. Sort of your classic. We got very lucky. Right place, right time, but we picked that inch wide, mile deep. I can tell you, when we were trying to raise capital, we were accused of being a feature, not a product, definitely not a company. But what we proved was by going deep into that one space, that customer email space, it gave us that credibility that then allowed us to expand in our customer base and ultimately offer a whole bunch of other things to our existing customers.