Mark Organ has hustling in his blood at Hustle Con

So right now our next speaker is Mark Organ. He actually flew all the way here from Toronto, which is really awesome, so we're happy to have him. Mark's the founder of Eloqua, which is a pioneer in market— marketing automation software, and they actually went public and then were acquired by Oracle for $871 million in 2013. Yeah. Now he's currently the founder of Influitive, which is another marketing software company. It has recently raised $16 million from top VCs across the country. So like I said, again, Mark's flown all the way here from Toronto, so let's give him a warm welcome. Hustlers! Loud and proud hustlers. I am so excited to be here among my people. All the hustlers here in the crowd. Seriously, that's why I'm here. I heard about this event and I just said, you know, this is a place where I just have to speak and be here in an auditorium with 400-odd people that are just like me. So I am a career hustler. I am proud of it. Today I want to share a little bit of my story and some of the things that I learned along the way. So what would you do? OK, your company has got 3 weeks of cash left. Your people are tired. Some of your folks, half your development team hasn't even been paid in about 9 months. And then one day you see a press release from your competitor who's raised over $50 million, okay, compared to your bootstrapped company who's raised nothing, gloating over their new customer that they won right in your backyard. What would you do about that? How about this? Fortune 500 company is interested in looking at your product, but there's one problem. They want to see your financials. Another problem is that you've got maybe enough money to last for another month, a couple of payrolls. Moreover, they don't even have a budget to pay for your software. What do you do about that? And then you hit the end of the line. You're out of money. You're, you know, people aren't willing to work for free anymore. Your board is willing to extend you a lifeline. That's some really onerous terms. Okay, $300,000 loan you got to pay back in a year. It's only going to cost you 20% of your company. What do you do? So a lot of entrepreneurs when faced with this kind of adversity, they throw in the towel. They're stuck down there on the mat. But great hustler entrepreneurs like some of the people here, I hope right here in this audience, They power through those challenges. And that's because they've invested in developing their mindset and knowledge and training so that they could be a champion. And that's what I want to talk to you guys today. I want to talk to you about how to develop the right mindset, your knowledge, and your training so that you can be a serious professional career hustler. Before I go on, does anybody know the story around that dog over there running there with Rocky up the steps? Yeah, it's a pretty cool story. Sylvester Stallone actually sold that dog in order to make enough money to get through some very lean years. And when he got a small amount of money because he insisted on starring in Rocky, even with his facial deformities and all kinds of stuff, First thing he did was buy that dog back, right? So that is a hustler and someone I respect greatly. So this is my story. I cannot sing or dance, just like Rocky. You know, Rocky told Adrian that's why he fights. He can't sing or dance. Also, unlike Rocky, I don't have a six-pack. But you didn't know, but you would never have guessed. One thing I have done I'm proud of is having created billions of dollars of new category value, right? Not just from the companies I built, but all the derivative companies, all the competitor companies, all the service companies that have together made up several billion dollars of value, which I think is super cool. Created thousands of jobs, but most importantly, lots of newly minted hustlers who are going out building their own companies right now. I'm so proud of all of them. So I'm going to tell you a little more about that. First, my hustler journey. So it started here when I was 7 or 8 years old, and I was selling pills out of my parents' medicine cabinet. So I got my start as a drug dealer, and then I straightened out and I got into the pornography business. Not as producer. I was a distributor of high-quality pornography tapes that I found in various places. In grade 7. And then I got into the custom software development business. Basically went door-to-door in office buildings in Toronto and said, "Hey, do you need any software done?" And actually attempted to code along with a partner. I learned very quickly that I was a hustler, not a hacker at that point. Reinforced again when I started doing a door-to-door painting thing, just like, just like Gabe. Interesting how similar our careers went. Realized I was useless with a paintbrush but pretty good as a hustling sales guy. So I did spend some time in a respectable job, and before they could fire me, I started Eloqua in 2000 and now at a company called Influitive. So I'm going to focus today on the Eloqua story, particularly the early, lean, bootstrapped years. And hopefully there's some important lessons that we can learn out of that. So a little bit about Eloqua. Eloqua was, as Sam said, a pioneer in the marketing automation space, one of the first real software as a service companies, founded just a few months after Salesforce.com in January 2000. It was a bootstrap company. We raised just $166,000 of equity along with the aforementioned debt at very onerous terms. And we got profitable on that, ran it profitably for 3.5 years before raising some venture capital. It did end up IPOing and got sold to Oracle for around $900 million. Now I'm running Influitive, which is in the advocate marketing category. This is going to be, I think, a way bigger category than cloud-based marketing automation. You've heard a lot of stories today, people saying how important their customer advocates are to building their business, the importance of Yelp reviews, the importance of referrals. Alright, so what we're doing at Influitive is we're helping companies mobilize their armies of advocates, their customer advocates, developer advocates, employee advocates to generate more of those referrals, references, case studies, social media mentions, all those things that are so critical to building a business effectively today. I think this is a multi-billion dollar category, so watch the space. But we won't be talking much about that because I'm going to talk to you about some, I think, really cool stories from my experience at Aliquoa. So let's start with round 1, body blow from the board, right? So my chairman of the board, dear chairman, used to tell me in the early days of Aliquoa, "Don't worry about the bottom line. Don't worry about it. Just keep the sales growing up and to the right." "Hit your plan, right, and we'll be there for you. I'll take care of you." He took care of me, all right. You know, when the chips were down, we had a really difficult decision to make. I didn't even tell you the worst part of it. If we didn't pay back that $300,000 in one year, okay, we'd have to pay another 20% of the company, right? This is not for equity. This is debt. We had to pay the whole thing back. It was absolutely a horrible deal. So when faced between that and imminent death, like, what do you do? Well, here's what we did. We took the deal because death isn't— death isn't much fun. But we resolved to get even, and get even we did. Because when the time came for us to raise venture capital, those early vultures all got bought out at a loss, and they could have made 1,000 times their money. So for those budding venture capitalists in the audience, just because you can turn the screws doesn't mean you should turn it all the way, okay? Okay, so now a Hail Mary. So Winnipeg in winter. So this is, you know, again, 3 weeks, literally, I'm serious, 3 weeks. I mean, it was looking really bleak. Saw this press release, absolutely livid, because the company in question was Manitoba Telecom Systems based in Winnipeg. Okay, now I don't know if there's any geographers in the audience here, but it doesn't get any more Canadian a city than Winterpeg, all right? And here they were rubbing it in our faces that they won this amazing customer and here we were almost dead. Right? So what do you do? So here's what I did. I guessed the email address of the person listed in the press release, sent an email and saying, "I don't know what those guys are doing for you, but whatever it is, we can do things a lot better. And we're Canadian. We're like your people. You got to at least give us a hearing." Okay? So she didn't actually. It turns out, turns out that that she wasn't as happy with this company, this competitor called NewChannel, the Silicon Valley company that raised $48 million. They weren't actually that happy with them. They said, "Hey, you want to do a demo?" We did a demo, worked out great. They said, "Why don't you fly out here?" March 2001, in the middle of a raging snowstorm to Winnipeg. We did the demo, they loved it. We got a check literally 4 days before we were going to have to kick the bucket. It's an amazing story. And that's what gave the company a few more months of life. So is it— now that's interesting, right? This great big amazing company who raised all this venture capital may be a little more vulnerable than we thought. Maybe there are other opportunities in the new channel customer base that we could take advantage of. And so they had their star customer on their website, case studies galore, press releases. Okay, and it was a division of GE called Global Exchange Services. And so we are pounding on those guys, emails, phone calls, everything we had to do to get their attention. Okay, and finally we did get their attention. We got an email back and it said, "Hey, sorry guys, unfortunately, you know, your timing is interesting. We kicked out NewChannel, but we're going with yet another competitor, you know, and we're not, you know, we just don't have time to process, you know, more vendors." I'm like, "Okay." But we talked about all our advantages, they didn't listen, so we weren't getting anywhere. So what do you do? Well, we sent an email right to the CEO of the company. We said, "CEO, I don't know what your dunderheads are doing down there in marketing, but we clearly have a superior solution and they won't even give us a fair hearing." Well, it worked. CEO went down to marketing team and said, "Hey, at least go see their demo." Come on. So they gave us half an hour. And September 11, 2001, our demonstration was scheduled with GXS. Yeah, right in the middle of the demo, everything went silent. And we didn't know what was going on. And they said, I think we're going to have to reschedule this demonstration for another time. That demo did get rescheduled. Showed them the product. They says, you know, pretty good product, guys. It's pretty good. But you're missing these 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 features. "and you know the other guys have it, and so you know, I'm sorry, it's the end of the line for you." And so he said, "Well, just one more thing. What if we were able to deliver those 5 features for you over the weekend?" I said, "Well, if you did that, we'd buy your product, but that's impossible." And he said, "Well, Monday at noon, let's schedule another demo." So, and this is where the hackers came in, they worked All weekend, 70 hours straight, hardly any sleeping in the office. Got it all done, right? Showed it to them on Monday. They were flabbergasted. We went down to Gaithersburg, Maryland, showed them the product. They said, this is great. We have only one problem. The budget has been cut. And so we cannot buy your product anymore. I'm like, this can't be. So I said, there's got to be some money in here somewhere. This is General frickin' Electric. And it turns out there was money. There was money because there was an all-digital initiative at this company. And so all the money that they were going to save on staples and paper clips was available. So literally we sold it to paperclip budget for 4 months. And that's what saved our company again for another 3 months. So then we got really aggressive. We go, holy cow, there's a real opportunity here. And so we started pounding on all these— our competitors' customers are on the website, and we won 3 more of them. And so then NewChannel took all their customers down, all the logos down. So then we wrote a script to go and find them, and we started pounding on more of those companies, and we won 6 more. And then our competitor went out of business. We won most of their customers, and we became profitable, and we stayed profitable for another 3 years. Before we raised venture capital. We raised venture capital mainly to buy out those jerks who gave us that terrible offer in the first place. All right. So that's my story. So one of the things that you'll notice that's a common thread through all of this stuff is that there wasn't any really special tips or tricks or tactics or even strategies that were important to make this all work. And in fact, even the tactics that I used back then aren't even going to really work today. You know, Sam asked me to talk a lot about tactics and tricks and tricks. And I thought about it. And I thought, you know, the most important tactics I can talk about is how to keep you mentally focused, how to keep your head in the game, how to get up off the mat, right? Because all of you guys that are starting companies or are going to start companies are going to face some of the adversity that I did. So I want to tell you about some of the ways that I got through it with the help of some great mentors that I've had over the years. So the most important, I think, first is to charge your brain with customer and user pain. OK? So this is something you can't delegate to the product people. OK? The product people who want to go and interview the users and customers and do the customer development, you can't delegate all of that. You need to talk to customers and users yourself. If nothing else, but you need the confidence, you need the confidence to go and press on. Right? So when I was starting Eloqua, I talked to all these sales reps whose lives were being destroyed by the disruptive innovation of universal call display. And they weren't able to generate the leads that they needed in order to be successful. And I heard about broken marriages, and I heard about just really terrible things. And that's what gave me the strength to go— I knew that if I were just to build this product, I know that I was adding real value to the world. And it kept me going through dark days. At Influitive, I literally interviewed 800+ advocates and asked them a simple question: What would it take for you to triple the amount of advocacy that you do for these companies and products you care about? Right? And they told me. And so I know that if I can solve that problem, I know that we're going to be successful. Right? My friend Scott Cook is one of my mentors from Intuit. I mean, he was at so many kitchen tables watching people do their budgeting. Right? To understand that pain because that pain is what will charge your brain in the dark times. OK. Stronger leadership every day. If you think of yourself as a career hustler, right? If you think that you're just— you're on a long journey that might even go through the current company that you're in, changes your mindset.

Right?

So, if all you do is just get a little better every day. A little stronger, your leadership gets better, your hustling skills get a little bit better every day. Just like Milo of Crotona, right, the ancient Greek wrestler who got strong by first picking up a baby— a calf. And every day as that calf fattened, he got stronger until on the day of the Olympics, he carried a bull over his head, right. That's the kind of mindset that I think keeps you focused. So even if you have a setback, right, you know that all you have to do is just get a little bit stronger every day. Which is reinforced by my first mentor and the OG hustler mentor for me, Vince Chiarelli. And what he taught me and really helped me out a lot was that, you know, you dream of growth, right? You dream of having the best team. You dream of having these amazing numbers that investors will salivate over. But you can't manage that dream, right? The only thing that you can manage is your own activity, right? So If all you do is just make your activity a little bit better every day, better quality and quantity of activity every day, you're eventually going to win, right? So Viktor Frankl is one of the few people to survive in the Holocaust concentration camp where he lived, one of the very, very few. And he credits that to the mindset that he developed, right? And one of the things he said was that when we're unable to no long— we can't change the situation anymore, We can change ourselves. We can challenge ourselves to change. And so that means, I mean, not just increasing the activity, the quality of activity, but it also means improving your education and your training and your knowledge. So you're not a victim of the situation you're in. You're totally in control. And I found that these are the things that really got me through it and so that I could stay focused. So let's talk a little bit now about training. Let's talk a little bit about your hustler personality and skills. And so the thing is, if you're a hustler and CEO, you actually have two different roles, right? You're the leader of your company. You're the CEO of a company. You got to develop those leadership skills, but you're also a hustler-in-chief or chief-in-hustler. I don't know. Something like that. And so, you know, that person there on the left, and for those people who know The A-Team, that's Face from The A-Team. You gotta go and develop those hustler skills. And I think one of the things that's really important is relentless optimism, right? Optimism attracts people, and it's a skill. You can learn it. You can train yourself to see the glass half full. And that's a little different from, you know, CEO seat, you gotta be a little more realistic. But when you got your hustler hat on, right, your job is to see a brighter future for yourself and your company, right? And again, that attracts people, and that's really the job of a hustler, isn't it, right? The job of a hustler is to attract resources. You need to attract great people and cash and customers and partners. So you need to be an attractive person. So if you don't look like George Clooney, like me, then you've got to really work on that personality. So the second thing is really care about people and their success. We've heard this from other speakers. Their success comes before your success always. In fact, I believe that the only real value we could take out of a life is a small fraction of the value that we create for others. So really work on helping people, and you'll do well. You got to hit the books. You got to learn the classics of interpersonal relations. My grandfather made me read "How to Make Friends and Influence People" when I was 13. I'm really glad he made me do it. I reread it every 3 months because I screw up all the time. So the basics, right? Make people feel important. Don't criticize, condemn, or complain. Smile. All those things are really important. I mean, there's lots of great books on it. You know, the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, all that kind of stuff. Those are critical hustler skills. I'm really excited about this Art of Charm that I heard about today. It sounds like that's taking it all to the next level, which I think is really cool. I think my wife would wonder why I'm taking that course. So, you know, hard work goes without saying, right? The dream is free. All of us can dream for free. The hustle. Sold separately. All right. The thing I want to talk about working hard at that I don't see enough of in young hustler entrepreneurs is networking. I spend 20 to 25% of my time networking, helping people, connecting people, right? And really, you know, really, really learning how to do that better. And so I will— I I will do crazy things in order to meet the right kind of person who I think can kind of help me out. I have a little formula that, how, you know, to try to allocate my time for networking. 50% of the time focus on networking up. Okay, let's face it. There's probably no one else in your company that will be able to have that critical connection, that senior person that can change the destiny of your company than you. Not someone on your board of directors, not your board of advisors. You need to go and develop those relationships. But it's not all networking up, right? You do need to network with your peers and down too. Look for those people who are rising up quickly. I met a number of people here in this room that are like that. Those are great relationships that you're going to need later on in your life. Hustlers never stop learning. And this is not just sort of like those skills that you need for your business. I mean, everything from really knowing your market well to all the different functional areas of a business. I mean, those are important not just for running a great business, but it lets you be a chameleon. It lets you, when you're in a crowd of folks, that you can blend in and you can speak their language. You can speak to what they're excited about hearing about instead of just you talking about your own company. So that's another reason why I think learning is important, as well as tactical hustler skills. So there's new hustler technologies that are coming out every day. I mean, my head of sales told me about a month ago, "Hey, we're taking this advanced course in using LinkedIn. Maybe you should go and do it." I'm like, "LinkedIn? I'm a master of LinkedIn. I've got 4,000 connections. I know Reid Hoffman. I'm like number 11, I'm the, sorry, member number like 1,000-something." He's like, "Yeah, you never know. You might learn something." You know what? I learned a ton. There's a lot of advanced techniques that I would never have guessed is possible. Possible in LinkedIn. You really can never stop learning. Finally, what I strive to be is like the Zen Hustler. Outside, externally, I'm like, "Kah-dah!" All energy and optimism and exuding that, but inside, the picture of calmness and stillness so that you take things in stride, you know you're on your journey. Right? Every day you're getting a little bit better. So I try that. I'm not always successful in that, but that's what I strive for. So I'm just going to finish off with a saying from a great hustler philosopher, Rocky Balboa, and he once said this: If this is something that you want to do, and this is something you gotta do, then you do it. Thank you.

Thanks a lot, Mark.

I think we have time for one or two questions if you want to come down.

I actually have one question myself.

Sure, yeah, go ahead.

My name's Eric, and you mentioned mentors a few times in your presentation.

I just wanted to see whether you could talk a little bit more about How you involve mentors in your business and your life. Yeah, I think mentors are crucial. You know, the greatest CEOs out there that you would think of as being real masters of their craft have lots of mentors. Okay. Steve Jobs had them. Matter of fact, I've talked to his mentor before. Jack Welch did. So I have several. I have an executive coach that I work with every week, particularly on management and leadership issues and communication issues where I have challenges. And I also have people that from all the different areas of the business, whether it's how to generate more alignment, sales, marketing, product, you know, I have people that I work with. I'm really aggressive about getting mentors. I think it's really important. And so I'll get in people's face until they're willing to deal with me. I've flown to all kinds of crazy places. In order to catch people while they're flying, and then, you know, they're going to spend much more time with me. Because I tell you, you know, half an hour with someone who really, really knows what they're doing can save you— you have no idea how much grief. So I think it's a critical thing for, you know, really for anybody who wants to be successful to, you know, to be seeking out mentors. And I also think it's important to be a mentor yourself, right? I mean, that's why I'm here. That's why I'm doing this, right? I'm doing this because it's forced me to package up the things that I've learned over my life and to try to express it in a, hopefully, a simple and energetic format, right? And so I learned a lot by building this. This is a completely brand new presentation for me. So I think it's just, if you want to be a great learner, it's also important to teach as well. Thanks, Mark. Thanks.

You want to go next?

Yeah.

Hey, yo, Mark, like, you know, pretty good presentation there, you know? Very inspiring. Seriously, it was great.

Thanks.

So I've been working on my company for the last year. I had a restaurant for 10 years, sold it, Philadelphia, and moved out here to begin this new venture called Lots of Stops. And so Red Lean Startup. Doing what I need to do and putting it all together, create an executive summary, and I get introduced to a VC. I sit down, and he liked the concept and such, and he lovingly beat the hell out of me.

Huh, he's a good guy.

Yeah, I see that now, but it really, it stopped me for like 2 weeks. Ah, yeah. Like, you know, so my question is, like, I think lots of people experience that sort of thing. And my question is, what would you say to self-generating yourself under those situations? Like, do you have any things you employ? Do you phone a friend? You know.

It's a great question. I mean, the first thing I would look at is who's giving me the criticism. No, it's true. I mean, there's some people who, you know, you got to take them really seriously, and there's other people where, frankly, you can brush it off. So I think that's the first thing. Assuming that it's somebody that you really respect, first of all, I would be in a, first of all, a thankful kind of mindset. Because at least this person cared enough about you and cared enough about your idea to give you that feedback. Most VCs will actually do the opposite and will just say, "Oh yeah, sounds great. Sounds great. Call us when you get more traction." And you're like, oh great, he really liked it. Well, no, that's actually not true. So I mean, that person actually cared. So I think I would be really thankful. And take it as a bit of feedback to go and get a little bit better. I think it is important to have people to talk to that's not your spouse and whatnot, because generally they don't understand. So one of the things that I have, for example, is I have kind of an— I call it an informal board of directors. So I have a number of startup CEOs that I get together with every month. And that's where we'll kind of bitch about this stuff and kind of feel better about it. It's a bit of a cathartic release. And you're talking to people who actually understand a little bit about, for example, raising money. And it can be helpful. So yeah, I do think it's important to not kind of suffer in silence. You do need to have people to talk to.

Yeah, thank you. And I did— once I did pick myself up, it's kind of like you develop a thicker skin. So when it happens again, Like, for me, I just continue to put myself out there. I think so. And I do have a meeting with the same person in 2 weeks.

Congratulations. That's— no, I think that's great. And you know what? I mean, there's a, there's a saying that I've heard recently, which is it only takes one to fall in love. Only takes one to fall in love. So what does it mean? Look, these VCs, I mean, they'll, they'll take hundreds of meetings a year and they're going to fund like one company or two companies. I mean, you could do everything perfectly, right? And for some reason that you don't even know about, something's happened in their personal life. That's why they're passing. They're not going to tell you that, right? They're just going to make something up. They're going to say, "We don't like your cost of customer acquisition. It's too high." You know, whatever. I mean, they're just making shit up. So, you know, it is important to go out there and keep pitching and pitching and pitching all the time. Now, if you keep hearing the same thing over and over again, OK, you got to fix your pitch. And but there's a lot of great stories of entrepreneurs, both in the high-tech area that we're in or everything to like Colonel Sanders and his fried chicken, where they pounded the pavement over and over and over again. And eventually, they found success. Got it. Thank you. Cool. Thanks.

Last question.

Hello, Mike. Great energy. Like you said, vibrant. My question goes more for like the team building when you first kind of like started Eloqua. How did you go and kind of like some of the lessons So first off, the first part is actually, how did you go around building the valuable team? And then the second one is if you had like pearls of wisdom around the team. Yeah, I think about team a lot. At Eloqua, the only choice we had was to hire all our friends. So, but I mean, the good thing is I went to a good school and we had some pretty smart friends. So I was pretty lucky. I mean, we had some amazing people that joined our team. At the early days, and because we had bonds of friendship, and because we were all young— I was 25 when I started Eloqua, and I was the oldest person in the company. So there were a lot of young people that were frankly just excited to show the world what they could do, right? Instead of being stuck in a big company. And that is one lesson that I took with me. Every hiring mistake that I've ever done Every single one was when I hired experience. Which is a remarkable thing. 'Cause all the VCs are gonna tell you, "Oh, you're gonna hire the best people you can find." And you do have to hire the best you can find. That doesn't mean you hire someone who can do the job in their sleep. So on my team today, my head of sales, global head of sales has never run global sales before. My head of marketing has never run marketing before, like the whole thing. He's done every part of the marketing job but never done the whole thing. I had a BD, it's the first time I had a BD. So they're excited to come to work every single day because they're learning and growing. And one of the things I've learned is that the learning and growth for really great people, like for class A people, learning and growth is worth more to them than even a huge paycheck. And I've had people on my team that have taken literally 75% pay cuts to come in and join because they feel like they're going to learn so much right, then in the long run, that they're going to do well. So I could talk forever about how to build a team, but there's one thing I've learned that I think is really important is they've got to have a lot of fun to come into work. It can't just be about paycheck. Thanks. Thank you, Mark.