William Hsu started an Internet company after Stanford, raised significant venture capital, then got ousted by his board. He reflects on the mistakes he made early on due to naivety and inexperience.
Within 18 months of graduating from Stanford. So I graduated when I was 22. By the time I was 23, I started an Internet company. I was a combination of naive and dumb all at the same time. And that's kind of a very dangerous combination. My first job out of Stanford was working for an investment bank. I worked for CodexWiz for a guy named Frank Cotron. I was one of his first analysts hired. I did that job for about 10 months. And I met a bunch of CEOs of companies I was trying to take public. And when you are naive, you can't identify talent when you see one. So I was naive and kind of stupid enough to think, wow, these CEOs, they don't seem that smart. I can do this too. So me plus two other guys from the bank quit 10 months into the program and decided to start an Internet company. 1998 was a great time to start an Internet company. I had a deck and I was a banker, so my deck was really, really beautiful. And luckily for me, I was from Stanford with an engineering degree and I happened to be Asian. So lots of VC like to do pattern matching. So they go, this guy must be just as good as Jerry Yang. So I said, of course. Actually my middle name is Yang. I don't know why. And I wouldn't give myself that kind of money. But in two years since founding the company, we raised about $50 million in total. I didn't know how to actually spend that money. I was really good at talking about a vision of what the future can be with BuildPoint. And by the way, it's funny, I always skipped this part. BuildPoint is a marketplace for commercial construction services. And the reason it always skips my mind is actually because I actually had no passion for that industry. And it's actually one of the biggest mistakes I made in my career, which is picking something I feel like is a great opportunity and therefore VC will invest rather than. Because I love what I do well. I barely knew how to start a company. I barely knew how to design a product. I barely knew how to manage a team. And I was able to get some traction and do some good stuff in 1998. Like Jeff Bezos liked to say, in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king. So nobody realized I was blind because everybody else was blind too. So I was able to raise a lot of money. But the world changed Pretty quickly in 2001, the market crashed and the world changed dramatically. The other direction, Harvard Business Review actually came out with an article and said in 2001, Information technology doesn't matter. This is the end of the technology revolution. Larry Allison that quote is kind of disappearing on that slide. But what he essentially said was he was in the middle of interview, the world's kind of cratering around us. And he basically said that if he was 21 year old, he would not be in the business that he's in. And I believe for the next 1000 years there will be no more revolution around technology and that the platform that we have today will continue to be the same platform. There will be no longer any innovation in technology. And he recommends everyone that he talks to to become a bioengineering or a doctor, bioengineering major or doctor, which is actually an interesting forethought that certainly is a future. But of course, like I said, the pendulum can swing one direction or the other. I was fired in 2001 by my board. It was my own company. I own a significant majority of the company, at least in the common stock. And I was asked to leave. I didn't know that was actually possible. I didn't know the concept of shares and percentage ownership and common versus preferred and the board and the fiduciary duty of the board. Just one day I walked into the office and they told me, hey, we didn't want a 23 year old running a company with $30 million in the bank. We wanted someone with more gray hair, maybe a VP from Oracle to come and run this company that we invested all this money in. My initial first thought, like an immature 24 year old at the time, 25 year old at the time was, I'm going to get all my buddies in the engineering department and we're going to go walk out together and we're just going to disappear and start the same company. Exactly the same thing. Well, thank God I didn't do that because we all have responsibilities. There's 250 people working at BuildPoint. They all have families, they have college savings accounts, they have mouths to feed, dinner to put on the table. What an irresponsible thought I had and what a responsible person I've been to start a company without really thinking through can I truly be successful at building an Internet company At the time.
O processo de reconhecer limites, mesmo quando a vida parece exigir sempre mais.
Depois de tantas histórias, aprendizados e pausas necessárias, o @interior_iza está de volta
