Data is the New Electricity with Bill Richter

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weddell. And before we get started, if you want to know exactly how to win again and again, go to Wydell on winning.com webinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode.

Of Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm here with Bill Richter and, and he is the president and CEO of Cumulo. And Cumulo is a huge American, fast growing data storage company you need to know about and he's got a big history in this business. How did you first get over in the data storage business?

Funny story. So I, you know, I started life, professional life anyhow, as an accountant and I think in the last segment there you're talking about the importance of looking at the books and all that stuff. And boy, oh boy did I spend years doing that. But I just became enamored with technology and I joined Amazon.com in the middle 2000s and spent a couple years there. In fact, I was at Amazon when they released their very first cloud product which was S3 and EC2, the little tiny compute bot and a little tiny storage bottom. And I just became more and more fascinated with those concepts. And then I joined my first startup. It was a little company and had 200 something people and it was getting ready to go public and it happened to be in the data storage space and it was headquartered in Seattle and it was called Isilon Systems. We took it public, we were public for about four years and I was an exec the whole time. And then we sold it for two and a half billion dollars to a larger tech company and we just kept scaling it. And that process of sort of starting with something small, finding a unique problem that needed to be fixed and then figuring out how to build a great business around it was something that just got in my blood. And then I spent a couple years after that I thought I was going to retire and I blasted a few months effectively before my wife changed, chased me out of the house and said, you got to, you know, this isn't good having you around here reorganizing the spice cabinet for me, that's, that's not, it's not good for you. You don't do it well and it's definitely not good for me. And I started getting involved with new early stage companies in the Seattle area, just helping them and advising. And then.

How did you do that? How do you go from helping your wife reorganize the spice cabinet and being annoying at the house to where you're finding companies that you can help grow. And you say Seattle.

Yeah, well, you know, the tech community is a really collaborative space. A lot of times companies are founded by very early in career, brilliant people, but they are early in their career, and the better ones raise their hand often and ask for help. And I was a position where I was eager to help people. Where do they.

Where are they raising their hand and asking for help? Because that comes up in these conversations, getting help and getting advice, you know, especially on the front end, you know.

Well, a lot of times their investors maybe are a bit more prescriptive, Larry. They go, look, you got a good idea, you should go talk to somebody that's already solved this problem before. Because I've just given you a lot of money, and I don't want you to waste time reinventing wheels that have already been invented. You have to go. You have to go build your product, and you have to go win customers. And so I got connected through a lot of investors that I knew and other entrepreneurs. The trick of this thing, though, is, you know, my approach was always like, look, I just want to help. I don't need to be a company advisor. Don't pay me. Let me just help. And if I am helpful, we'll see where it goes. And if I'm not, what you need to do is tell me to get out of here, because your time is very limited. And through that kind of approach, I started working with a whole bunch of entrepreneurs. Everything from folks that were in the virtual reality space to consumer products, to infrastructure software products like Cumulo. And then at some point, a group of founders asked me. I'm actually not a founder of Cumulo. There was a group of founders and they asked me to join as CEO, and I fell in love with the idea. And that was about five and a half years ago.

So you got started in this because I was curious how you went into the investor side, you know, venture capital side. So you got a call from someone who needed some. They were getting in a business that you had some success with and some knowledge. You got a call. So now you're working with one company. And then how does it go from there?

Well, you know, a lot of the stuff happens. You know, it starts with a coffee, maybe if it's, you know, in the evening, a beer, a glass of wine. And sometimes those conversations go on for hours. And I'm a curious person, so I'd say, hey, let's like, why don't. It's good talking to you. As an entrepreneur or CEO, and I say, why don't I come in and spend a little time with your team? And then next thing you know, you're at the whiteboard for hours and hours writing down ideas and picking the good ones and running some experiments. And then, then if things get really juicy, you start talking to one of their customers. And there's no. There's no better substitute for that. You could talk tech all day if you, if you start with the customer and work backwards, things become a lot more clear, a lot more quickly. And, you know, it's kind of an organic process, but you have to be sort of willing to jump in and do it and work through ambiguity and. And not have a lot of structure. I think, especially as you're getting stuff off the ground, a lot of structure isn't all that helpful. And that was always my approach.

You'll find this interesting. My cousin Edward, the computer guy, said, to be an entrepreneur, you have to be willing. He was always making these pithy statements, but he said, you have to be willing to put up with a large degree of ambiguity.

You do. You do. Well, that's a great example. But not to go way back in time, but you said Edward was involved with building some of the first PCs in New Mexico. Again, that's a ridiculous idea. If you go back to that point in time, made no sense. People would have no idea what a home. Someone would do with a home computer, especially with the cape, the needs that they had back then, and the capabilities of those computers. Nonsensical idea. And then you fast forward to today, and it's obviously the most, you know, it's an old, unbelievably obvious idea now, but, you know, every entrepreneur that starts these segments, like I said, it's always a dumb idea. Except for them. Except for them.

Hey, listen, there's a lot of information online, but there aren't a lot of people who have actually done something. In my case, I've actually built a successful business that's accrued over $5 billion in assets under management and has done well even during trying times. Now, if you want to know exactly how I've done this, go to Whiteellawinning.com webinar Now, I've compressed a decade of learning into five short weeks. Just for those of you who want to give yourself an incredible advantage and are tired of waiting and watching others.

Move up, well, when the people problems got to the point where he was just pulling his hair out because he loses mine and he sold out to a German company, who promptly blew the whole thing. The first thing they gave him to do, they said, we want you to be in product development. Which is exactly what he wanted to do. He said, we're going to build you a little house on the other side of the parking lot, give you a little crew and you go over and think up new stuff. So in 30 days, he walked across a parking lot with mock up of the first laptop. Okay. And they said, what the heck? What are you going to do with this? Nobody wants this. He said, oh. He said, okay, check please. You guys are obviously smarter than me. And he moved back to Georgia and became a farmer before he became a doctor. But even people like that, you know, it's like you come up with a new. It doesn't even matter who you are, you come up with a new idea. It doesn't matter what track record you have. It's just people are going to interpret things based off their frame of reference. And if you're going to get ahead, you've got to be smart enough to take what you know, take what you're hearing and realize who it's coming from and why they're saying that and not let it divert you off course.

Well, I'll just reflect for a bit, you know, like a company like Cumulative, I mean, we compete with some of the biggest companies on earth, companies like IBM and Dell and companies like that. And I get asked this question all the time, well, how could you possibly, I mean, have so many resources and there are hundreds of thousands of people and they've been in the business for so long, how could you possibly beat a big company at something like this? And look, the history, history books have been well written on this. If you have a lot of focus on a specific problem space and you have even a tiny team relative to those big companies, even if a dozen or a few hundred people, but they're just working on that one thing. As long as there's a big opportunity on the other side. It's shocking how startup companies with the right focus and the right motivation and pace, the speed, can go beat these big companies. And I'll give you a really interesting example that sort of. I got to watch firsthand. I was at EMC, that had bought my last company about a dozen years ago or 12, 13, 14 years ago. And EMC was like the, it was the largest legacy storage provider in the world. They built those big giant boxes that you see on tv, those big racks of hardware. They still build and sell that stuff today. And Amazon started talking about this idea of cloud computing. And it was really perceived over there as like a joke because think of Amazon, that's where you buy your book and your CD and your dish towels and your, you know, whatever. How, how would they possibly work in enterprise tech? It made no sense at all. And I've heard, I've sat in on Jeff Bezos is like small sessions where he's, he's telling stories and he said, look, you know, we got a gift of a set of a seven year head start because everybody ignored us. They just didn't take us seriously in this space. Space. They figured that whatever Amazon was doing wouldn't really matter because they weren't an enterprise IT company, they were an Internet retailer. And so it's fascinating that even these large companies that are so resourced and ought to have all the good ideas for one reason or another, just overlook something or focus on today, maybe yesterday, but not tomorrow. But the good thing is for folks like me and company builders, that just gives us that, that opening, that opportunity. And the people that win ultimately are the customers because that's how innovation happens. And sometimes these bigger companies see that and then they start innovating faster and that's a good cycle. But that kind of process is what's allowed particularly America to be the center of technology development in the world.

Well, this is a great point for people to have in their piece of knowledge for people to have. And that is it's easy to get overwhelmed by people, you know, the big companies or the big competitor, you know, like in your sports, you know, they got bigger players, better players, they've got, you know, winning tradition, better coaches, how can we compete? Well, the thing about a big company is they have lots of systems in place because big companies, what they do, there's lots of people and they, the entrepreneur, people with all the spirit and drive and originally started it, they're long gone or over, you know, overwhelmed and everything. And big companies are run by people getting paid most of the time what an average person doing that job would be worth. And most, you know, most companies have not really spent a lot of time thinking about how can they, it put incentives in for the average person. And so they have systems, you know, to make sure people perform up to a minimum standard. They got a lot of systems in place, a lot of rigidity, a lot of lawyers, okay, a lot of CPAs, a lot of balances and checks. Now here's what happens in our company. We're in finance, you know, I've been in financial services for a long time and so you come up with a good idea and people out in our field force, they get so frustrated with home office. But I said, well, let me tell you something, the CEO, here's what the CEOs have always told me. They said, even when I get a good idea, much less when I hear a good idea, and I want that in tomorrow. He said, it takes me 18 months to get it implemented.

And so that's what I'll tell you something. I'll tell you, I'll share a little saying that we have or a meme, you know, like in a big company for a given idea you need like 25 people to say yes to it. There's this group and that department and that lawyer and that CPA and this cross functional leader and all that kind of stuff. As long as the 25 people say yes, you get to go. But if One of those 25 says no, you kind of shoot some ladders, you have to start all over again. An entrepreneur, you were asking me in the last segment about capital raising. An entrepreneur just needs one person to say yes. You could go talk to 25 venture capitalists to give you money and 24 can say no. And as long as one says yes, you can get going. So it's almost like the inverse of how opportunity is created in big versus small. And that's one of the reasons why companies like us get going. One person says yes.

Yeah, that is powerful. Thanks for all of that. And I can't wait to dig into another topic, but I'm going to save it for another episode there. Bill, thanks so much.

Thanks, Larry.

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