Matt Rogers: Overcoming Tough Times

It was really tough though. As it turns out, every entrepreneur will probably tell you that it's hard. In fact, in this series, I think Ben Horowitz is the last speaker. I think his whole shtick is like the hard things about hard things. It turns out they are hard. It's obvious. But there is no real way for me to even verbalize how difficult it is. As an entrepreneur, you are really on your own. Yes, you may have a VC partner, but in the end he's an investor. He's going to try to make a return. Fortunately, Randy was not one of those kind of guys. But in fact, Most entrepreneurs have. VCs are out to make a return. I had one co founder. The two of us were literally on our own. Fortunately, we were really close. We call each other every morning. We still do. Every morning at 8:30, we get on the phone with each other on our way to work and we talk about the things that are happening in our day. At the end of the day, we usually call each other on the way home and how did the day go and what kind of things we need to work on next. But really, you're very much alone. Your early employees, your team, they're with you. But being an entrepreneur is a very lonely place. And you may hear this from other entrepreneurs. It's very difficult. Things will go wrong. In fact, everything went wrong for us. To the outside world, it looks awesome. We've done a great job getting this company launched, building momentum with our marketing, with our sales, with our product. But in fact, everything went wrong. Our initial plan was completely wrong. We had to rework that. Our launch plan. We were going to launch in Best Buy Retail. That was our plan. Build the product, put it online, put it in. Best Buy Retail is going to be great. Best Buy backed out at the last minute. We had no retail. Fantastic. It was going to be great. But we worked through it. It turns out when you have an attitude, when things go wrong, you say, let's just figure out how to make it right. And if you have a team culture where when problems happen, people don't freak out and just figure out how to plow through it, things tend to go in your favor. So I think in terms of big lessons, things that I've learned is that surround yourself with a team that augments your weaknesses so that when things go wrong, you have kind of your trusted council of folks who have all these different perspectives who could figure out solutions.