Austin Allison learned three lessons from Dotloop and Zillow that shaped his work at Pacaso: hire great people first, align your passion with your mission, and achieve product-market fit early. At Dotloop he didn't understand fit; at Pacaso he felt the market truly embrace the product.
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What do you think some of your kind of key learnings were from, you know, maybe from Dotloop or even at your time at Zillow that you've taken with you to now at Pacaso?
To try to keep it short, I would say, you know, number one learning is around people. You know, great businesses are built by great people. So, you know, I always try to start, you know, everything with people, whether it's a, you know, a problem that I'm trying to solve or an opportunity that we're trying to pursue. It's always, I always ask the question kind of who, not what first. So surround yourself with great people. Number 2 would be around really following your passion and the mission should be really aligned to the passion of the entrepreneur. And this is probably pretty obvious for everyone on this call, but like when you're working on something you're really passionate about, not only is it a lot more fun, but you end up doing a lot better work. So I think it's super, super important to follow your passion. And I do run into entrepreneurs from time to time, you know, that I just, you know, get introduced to or people that I'm advising or whatever that I find sort of chase entrepreneurship because they want to be an entrepreneur because they just want to like control their own schedule or make a lot of money and some of the other things that, you know, entrepreneurship is known for. And I just don't really sort of align with that approach. I mean, I think that people should start companies and join companies because they're really passionate about the problem that the company is solving or the mission that the company's pursuing. So those would definitely be the top 2. I would say that the 3rd learning would be around product market fit, like really focusing on And chasing product market fit as early as possible. At Dotloop, I didn't even know, you know, what the term product market fit meant. And I don't know if I ever really understood what product market fit felt like until we created Picasso. I mean, we obviously had enough product market fit to build, you know, a pretty decent company at Dotloop. But the product market fit didn't feel like what it feels like at Picasso. Like it always felt like we were pushing rope up a hill when we were selling productivity software to real estate agents versus when Picasso really sort of hit its, found its stride in the early days. It felt like we were being sort of pulled, you know, through this vortex of kind of amazing, you know, energy around people who wanted to live better lives. And find a happy place. So I think it's really, really important to find product market fit. So yeah, those would probably be the top 3.
