Leah Busque: Tell Everyone About Your Idea

So the first lesson learned really came down to being able to tell everyone I met about the idea. So sometimes folks say, oh, I was nervous to share my idea with people because I was afraid they were going to steal it. Here is some news for you all. I am not the first person to have this idea. This is a very simple idea, right? Connect with someone else in your neighborhood around you that can help with a job. Definitely not the first person to have this idea. And people come up to me all the time. They're like, I had this idea like 10 years ago. I'm like, I bet you did. It's a great idea, right? And I'm like, tell me about that. Like, why didn't you do it? Why didn't it work? It all really comes down to execution. So I'd say, one, never worry about being afraid that someone's going to steal your idea. There's just so much value in sharing your idea with as many people as possible. Getting feedback early on, and then developing it from there. As an example, I was out to dinner one night. Here's another restaurant we were eating at. It's a place in Cambridge called Ten Tables. And we were out to dinner with my husband, one of his coworkers, and a couple of other friends. And we're just chatting. And I didn't know them very well. And I was like, hey, I'd love to share this idea with you, get your feedback. So I started talking about it. Her name is A.G., and A.G. says to me, "You know who would think this is really interesting? My buddy Scott." I was like, "Oh yeah? Really?" She's like, "Yeah, you should just email him. Just email him." She gave me his email address. "Just tell him about your idea. I think he could find it really interesting." Now, I didn't ask too many questions. I was like, "Okay, cool. Another person I can get feedback from." I didn't realize her buddy Scott with Scott Griffith, the CEO of Zipcar. So yeah, ignorance is bliss sometimes, because I literally went home that night. It was like midnight on a Saturday. And I was like, dear Scott, my name is Leah Busque. And I have this idea. And your friend, A.G., says that you will think it's really cool. I'm like, if I could have 30 minutes of your time, I'd love to tell you about it. And to Scott's credit, he wrote me back the next morning on a Sunday morning. And I see his email signature. I was like, oh, shit. He's the CEO of Zipcar. So he was very, very nice. And he said, you know what? Why don't you come into my office, tell me about what you're working on. I'd love to give you feedback and talk about it. So I went over. Let me see what the next picture is. OK. This is actually us at Zipcar. And I'll get to this in a second. So Scott and I met. I remember being so nervous the night before our meeting. I didn't sleep at all. And I went into the Zipcar office. And I sat down in his office. And he's like, OK, tell me about Run My Errand at the time. So I told him about social location and mobile and how I thought all these technologies could be mashed up to connect real people in the real world in real time for real things. And he was like, cool. That's actually a lot. What we're doing with Zipcar. We have cars in these neighborhoods. And we're getting people to share resources to live more efficiently together. So he got the vision immediately. And we just got into this really engaging conversation about what the vision of Run My Errand, what TaskRabbit could be, what it could grow into, where Zipcar was going. And he just became an early mentor of mine. And so I spent— as much time as Scott would give me with him at his office. And we talked about our go-to-market plan and how the product was coming along. He was the one that started introducing me to other people, other mentors, investors, angel investors. I had no idea about raising money. I didn't know about angel funding. I started reading a lot of books, asking Scott a lot of questions, and just tried to get ahead of the steep, steep learning curve that was ahead of me. I literally didn't even know about how equity worked in a company. I was like, OK, so these investors, they write you checks. But then what if it doesn't work out? Do you have to give the money back? What happens? I don't understand. And so just to give you a sense of where I was coming from, huge learning curve there. But I learned quickly. And I had amazing people like Scott being able to mentor and guide me along the way. So when I quit IBM, Scott offered me desk space at the Zipcar office. How amazing is that, right? And this is our first employee, Brian Leonard, who's our chief architect at TaskRabbit now. He and I worked together at IBM for 5 years. And so actually the day I left IBM, it's funny, there was a group of us, a small group of us that were sort of the same peer group. And they took me out to lunch on the last day. And Brian was like, what are you doing? And I told him, well, I'm working on this new product thing. And he's like, let me build your mobile app for you. And I was like, OK, cool. And so that next summer he was coding away because he just wanted to play with iOS. It had just come out. And so once we got into the Zipcar office, Brian came on board full time. I was able to hand over a lot of the engineering reins to him. The first thing he did was throw away all of my code. Literally. You can ask him. He was like, this is crap. Starting from scratch. And he did. And it's much better. So I was happy about that. So the first lesson of just telling anyone who'd listen to me about the idea— that's how I met Scott. I mean, there's no way— it was so serendipitous that I got connected to him and that we really hit it off. You just never know where different leads are going to take you. And if you can just be really open about what you're working on, open to feedback, open to connecting with people, you just never know where that's going to take you.