Joshua Reeves: Entrepreneurship Without Passion

The way I would summarize this startup experience, it was a two year chapter in my life, was that it was very reactive to kind of be very open and transparent with you. Again, there's many reasons to start a company, many ways to build a business. This was right when Facebook platform launched in 2008, and I had just been finishing up my master's. I was working full time and doing my school part time. And I took the class at Stanford called the Facebook Class. If you guys have heard about it, it kind of became a pretty infamous class because of the companies that came out of it. But what happened with this business was we were making $1,000, $2,000 a day, really in our first month of operating. And it was these platform of applications where other businesses could go build apps on Facebook if you didn't have any technical skill set. So there was some elements of, I think, mission involved in terms of enabling these business owners. But it was also just a very reactive business where we were like, hey, this is working, let's keep doing it. And what happened was over the ensuing year, year and a half, we kept doing well financially, but it really felt like something was missing. It didn't feel like we knew where we were going over the next two, five, ten years. And as we were hiring teammates, that bothered me. Right? If I didn't feel like this is something I could spend 10, 20 years working on and speak about thousands and thousands of times with the same conviction and passion, then it didn't feel right. And so that was why, even though we had offers for funding at that point, we ended up going down the acquisition route. It was because it didn't. And no judgment on the space of social media. If you guys are passionate about it, you have to find what's authentic to you. But it just was too fluffy for us. And that was why we went through the acquisition.