What to Do If You Aren’t Someone Who Can Sell Anything to Anybody with David Karandish

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 this afternoon with David Kerandish from St. Louis, Missouri, and former CEO of Answers.com, a company that sold for over $900 million. Then he became a founder and CEO of a company he calls Capacity. And it's a new kind of help desk. Powered by artificial intelligence. Automate supports support for your customers and your employees. They had 6.4 million in annual revenue in 2021, or I guess already for 2021. Name America's Best Startup Employers by Forbes in 2020. And he's member of something I've never heard of, the Forbes Technology Council. Then he's been a board member of two other things I haven't heard about, which is Equity and Varsity Tutors. I'm going to get an education today, which always makes me feel happy. David, thanks for taking the time, man.

Hey, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

I like your track record. I like being able to talk to people who can put accomplishments on the wall and have things they can without bragging, but things they can point to to let people know they're not just one of those people who talks a good game. They actually have the capacity to work, figure things out, and make those things happen. So congratulations on your achievement. Talk about. How did you get to be a CEO of, of a company that sells for $900 million?

Sue, I've been. I've been doing entrepreneurial stuff since I was in high school, and even before then, I can remember as a kid, I can remember being in Cub Scouts and not being great at tying knots or getting all the pledge badges, but I could remember I was always great at selling. I loved to be able to sell. I led the candy drives at the time. And so there, there was something there. There was a spark there, even very, very early on. One of the unique, I think people, people are very much products of their environment. And I happen to grow up and kind of come of age in the, in the late 90s. I graduated from high school in 2001, and so I was growing up as the Internet was taking shape, and so I started learning how to code, building web pages for people. And then by the time I graduated college, I had done Six different startups, all of which failed in a conventional sense. But I learned from all six of them something that I'm using today. In my first startup we started doing web design and used a lot of the time and the techniques and just the hustle to go build my first business. We still use that today. Had a lead gen business doing mortgage lead generation. Almost half of our customers are in the mortgage space today and so I can meet with those folks and talk with them with some industry background. Having learned that again as a junior in college I had a website doing bot plugins for AOL's instant messenger at that time that was before Facebook or any social media was really big. And so we use a lot of the same concepts and ideas for my existing AI powered support today. Most recently, my last company was called answers.com we grew it from zero to a couple hundred million in revenue, had a nice exit. And so I really view both the successes and failures to date as helping to shape how I've gotten to where I'm at today.

Hey, let me ask you this. Several questions. So to clarify, you weren't just CEO, you were a founder as well of.

Answers.Com yeah, so you know, success has many fathers and so I was one of the founders. I'll give you my caveat on that. I just graduated college in 2005 and my buddy and I had this idea of starting a comparison shopping website. So I bought a one way ticket, flew out to California, crashed at my aunt's house for again a one way ticket. I didn't know when I was going to come back. And we ended up cutting partnership deals with the major comparison shopping engines, shopping.com and Yahoo shopping, that sort of thing. So we got our little business off the ground, took every penny I had, put it in. My business partner did the same thing and we found an outside investor to help us kind of get, get the car out of the garage if you will. So company was profitable and growing and we recognized we needed to add content to our websites because at that time, now we had websites in health and travel and finance and a lot of different categories beyond shopping. And so we built a Q and A platform that we applied to our individual sites. And then we started to really fall in love with this idea of, of helping to answer people's questions. And so we went out, we found a website called answers.com that was a public company at that time. We raised the capital to go buy it, merged it with our comparison shopping question and answer company that we started and then we Rebranded the whole thing under theanswers.com name. And so I didn't start the branch of answers.com, but I started the. The parent company that ended up growing.

Yeah. And in the end game, it amounts to the same thing for what the company turned into. Talk about why you gravitated. You know, I try and think back to my early motivations of what was going through my mind, caused me to do the things I did.

How.

What was it about sales that you just gravitated to more than, you know, winning all, you know, all the little badges and everything with the Boy Scouts and those things. What was it that turned you on about that part?

Yeah, I think the. I think the thing that people get tripped up on is that you've got people who could sell anything to anyone. And I'm not one of those people. I want to be very clear. I can't sell shoes to a snake or ice cubes to an Eskimo sort of thing. But if I believe in something, I can. Like, I'm two feet in. I can sell it because I'm believable, because I believe it. I actually had one of my. One of our first customers. He said, david, when you came in, you were 22. We hadn't worked with anyone of your age. We hadn't, you know, we hadn't really didn't have a business yet. But we did this partnership because we believed in you, because of how much you believed in your ability to make this succeed. And so I think even from an early age, like I said, I'm not somebody who could just sell anything to anyone, but if I believe something, then I'm two feet in.

So you believed in cookies or whatever it was you were selling as a kid?

It was actually Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, which is one of my favorite snacks.

So you got turned on by taking Reese's Peanut Butter Butter Cups to the masses?

Well, and also, I believe that we could actually really help our Cub Scout troop with it. So it's not. It's not just, oh, now we're talking. But also.

Now we're talking about.

Yeah, also what. What it. You know, what the product stands for. Yeah.

And so what was the kind of thing what caused you to believe that strongly about doing something big for your troop? You know, rather than, you know, you were thinking team rather than individual right from the beginning. And what do you think triggered that?

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, has 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.

I think one of the things I realized early on was that I really enjoy seeing the value creation process happen. I enjoy seeing two sides come together and end up with a transaction that they like. And at the same time, when I say I wasn't good at tying knots, I think I learned to tie my shoes in the second grade. I was really not handy. I'm not, you know, my dad was born in Iran, so I didn't have a lot of Americana in the, in the early Cub Scout days. And so, yeah, I just, I loved the idea that I could just help, help my friends, help the troop out. And I think in the same way today, when I think about what we're doing at capacity, you know, yeah, there's a million different ways for someone to earn a living, go make money, et cetera. I've had great financial success to date, but the reason why I'm still doing what I'm doing is because I truly believe that we can help companies do their best work. We can help teams do their best work by using our platform. And so it's that buy in to the why that I just think is so important. People like to make fun of millennials because millennials are meaning makers and they want meaning out of what they do. And there's, you know, there's some cliches in that, but I think there's some real truth in if people understand the why of the why behind what they do, they can go in and do it with full gusto.

What did learning coding and writing software, they say studying mathematics or learning a musical instrument, things like that are big helps in terms of getting you organized mentally to solve problems and to deal with life and be independent. Did learning how to code write software, what kind of things did that give you? What was the takeaway for you from that, other than the particular skill?

Yeah, great question. I think one of the most undervalued skills that a person can develop. Everyone talks about problem solving, but not a lot of people talk about problem selecting. And so to me, coding was an opportunity not only to learn how to solve problems and to build Things. And I think it's a fantastic route for both of those. But there are other places where you can solve problems and build things, other ways you can do that. I think what coding did for me is it kind of honed this ability to select problems. Okay, what kind of website do you want to build? What kind of software do you want to build? How do you want to go about it? And so I really believe that there are, there's an opportunity to both, really use both sides of the brain, both the creative and on logical side encoding. And it was a nice way to kind of hone those problem selecting skills early when the stakes are low, and that you can then bring that into bigger stakes along the way.

Yeah, that's such a big thing. It sounds like, oh, yeah, I'll make sure I do that. But it's like goal setting and time management, how everything kind of ties together. It's like you could be incredibly organized with your time, but if you have a wrong goal, in other words, you got the wrong target. Something you're not excited, you're not really that excited about, something that's really not going to make that much of a difference. Something you're doing just because somebody else is excited about it, you got caught up in the frenzy. It doesn't really matter how great you are in your time management, how disciplined you are and organized and everything is, because when you get to the finish line, it's going to be like, huh, you know, big deal.

It's funny you mentioned that because you hear a lot of people talk about planning and organizing as if they go together all the time. And I actually find they're very, very different skill sets. My wife and I joke around about this. She loves to organize. So you give her a Saturday afternoon, one glass of wine and a closet. She can organize that closet all day long and be in her happy place and it'll be fantastic. But if I went to my wife and I said, erin, let's plan a vacation anywhere in the world, the infinite possibilities, endless. And so there's a different skill set I think that you need when you're organizing. A set of things that are in front of you that you can see, you can touch, you can feel, you can kind of kind of put in the boxes versus if you're planning or you have seemingly limitless opportunities, seemingly multiple options. To me, those are very, very different skills that people tend to conflate. My wife's a much better organizer than I am, but in this sense of how I'm using the phrasing I'm a much better planner, which is why we go together really well. But I think learning to plan, whether it's goal setting, whether it's problem selecting, that's something that's so important that I think it's missed in the general public when they kind of group planning and organizing together.

Yeah, it has to do with long term, short term, the vision and then the execution of the plan. It does require different people. In fact, that's why in many cases the founders wind up getting thrown out. Because after a certain point, the size of the company, the founders become more of a detriment than an advantage. Because now it's the execution stage and the compounding stage and the founder is more of a visionary.

Well, I found in general, people in startups are like wines. Some of them are good right when you open up, some of them have a couple year shelf life, some of them will continue to get better with age. And that's okay. I think what, what is important is that people recognize. I have a buddy of mine I worked with in three different companies and he is great for years, kind of 1 through 3, 1 through 4, and then after that he kind of hits his limit and then he wants to go on to do something even earlier stage and that's okay. But I think a lot of people get tripped up into thinking they're early stage people when they're not or they are early stage, but they're not the, they're not the scalers for that.

Well, it is, you make a great point there. It is important for you to think about what kind of person you are and to put yourself in positions where you can be your best. You know, if, if you're not visionary, you're not an idea person. Don't be frustrated because most of the work in making something happen is going to be after the idea is conceived. And the people that can stay on track and figure things out step by step are insanely valuable. And so don't be frustrated if you're this way or that way. The main thing is know how you are. Put yourself in a position where you can stay inspired because you're doing the things that you enjoy or the part of the job that you enjoy that you know you're gonna get the most satisfaction from. And you won't get frustrated envying somebody else because you're doing what you wanna do. And it's important for us to be clear on that so you don't let yourself get tricked into envying other people. For example, let me give an example, David.

Sure.

This happens all the time. I'm so stupid. I can get. I've got one guy in my life, Mike Tuttle out of Dallas, a longtime friend. He always seems to be doing fun things, cool things, and usually. But I'll hear about it, you know, it's like, well, why can't I do. Why am I doing it? Why am I busting my rear doing this, that and the other? I can't just drop everything and go for a week here. I mean, you know, just this year he's had like 75 vacations. You know, he's been to Mexico, hunting and fishing and vacationing at, you know, every Cabo there is. And it's just insane. With this guy I like, there's not that many weeks in a month to do all the stuff he does. And now he calls me for, just to torment me. He sent me a thing saying, hey, I got to go. My wife and I were going to go up to a wedding in Mars Hill, North Carolina. So we figured, hey, we're in North Carolina, they live in Dallas. They said, hey, we're in North Carolina, we'll just stay for a week. You know that. He said, what do you think of the best resorts in North Carolina? Because I used to live up there.

Yeah.

And I'm, I'm immediately thinking, what the heck is going on? How can this guy just decide, I'll take an extra week, go here? Now the truth of it is I could do the same thing. But you know, for, for a minute there, I, I was bamboozled. You know, it's like, man, I just wish I could take off and go out. But, you know, I've been in North. I lived in North Carolina for 28 years. I kind of been there, done that. And I found if I go to a resort for a week, I get bored out of my mind. You know.

I've got a three day shelf life at the beach. After three days I'm all conked out.

I go stir crazy, you know, and it's like, you see these people on the sidewalk cafe and, and they're sitting there, they got a couple of drinks and they're in the breeze and they're relaxed clothes. You say, wow, you know, that looks so good. And then when you're in that position, it's like I'm sitting here eating something and drinking something. This just doesn't seem to be that special. I think we've got to be aware of the tendency to look at other people. Wow, they've got a company. Wow, they got all these ideas. Wow. They've got these things. And if you think about it, there's a good chance it's not even something you really want.

Right? You're absolutely right.

And this, this has been so much fun.

If you enjoyed what you've heard and are dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works in the real world, I've taken the most valuable business lessons I've learned over 40 years, put them into something for you to watch. Go to whiteellawinning.com webinar now in order to move up as fast as possible. I'm Larry Wydell, and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go, go, go.