Building Your Company | iCracked CEO AJ Forsythe

So now that you've raised money, now you need to go build the company you said you would build. This is a— there's a fine line. There's a quote like, fake it till you make it. This is a fine line of when we were— when we just started and we're getting iTechs to join us or technicians on board, we would be like, yeah, we have like an international distribution center, which is true. We were shipping packages internationally, but it was out of our garage right here. And so this is our first warehouse. This moves into this line of fake it till you make it. We knew we were going to build hopefully a massive company. We kind of knew how, and we had the direction, and now it was just an execution play. So it's the fine line if you actually make what you said. So this is a picture of our first fulfillment center, and each one of those are kits going out to new technicians that we were bringing on a couple hundred a month. And we were packing it up. So we had, like, we said what we were gonna do, and then we went and executed against it. So things will feel broken and on fire all the time. This is normal. Fix on, work on fixing what are, like, one cold at a time. So there's, like, the difference between being sick and then you're gonna get better, or, like, having a flu or pneumonia that can kill you. In the startup world, you need to look out for the things that can kill you, and then you'll deal with the ailments that just have you sick other times. So on the left, this is one of our suppliers when I was doing one of our supplier visits, and I'm thinking, we're gonna give this guy millions of dollars to build phone parts for us, and he's getting just absolutely wasted drunk. I didn't know this is how business was done, and it felt very broken at the time. The picture on the right is, I was also in China and there was a cat for sale at a street stall and I was like, how much for the cat? And they're like, it was like $2 or $3 US dollars. And so I was like, cool, I'll take the kitten. And they actually bagged it up for food and handed it to me. So this is the kitten being pushed into the bag. We let it go. We didn't eat the cat, but it felt very broken that we're there to do hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for the business, but it ended up working out. It was just a crazy, crazy place. One of the things that you guys are super lucky with is having Draper University and Boost VC across the street. It's so freaking cool that we can surround ourselves with this group of entrepreneurs and and mentors and founders and people that are funding companies. You guys are incredibly lucky to have this. Keep surrounding yourself with people. One of the learnings that I've found out is people are surprisingly willing to help. An example of this is I'm part of a company that is like a turbine-powered jetpack company, which is like you fly around in jetpacks. And I was like, we need to build a board of advisors. And so I reached out, cold emailed a couple astronauts, and they all got back to me, and the guy in the photo actually is probably joining the board of the company. So it's like, if you need help, reach out. Other CEOs, other founders, investors, they're definitely more willing to ask, and you'll never know if you don't reach out and ask. And if you want advice, ask someone for money, and then if you want money, ask someone for advice. It's counterintuitive, but if you say, hey, do you want to invest? People are going to tell you why they're not investing. If you say, how would you recommend we build this product? It makes them feel involved, and then they actually want to help you build the product. So definitely try to follow that advice. Another thing is startups are somewhat overglamorized. It certainly was when we started. This is actual data on the left side that I drew out also in MS Paint last night. So it's like, here's what it's like. It's just constant ups and downs. There's things that happen in your startup journey that feel like you're gonna kill you. From the outside is what people think it's how it's really like. It's definitely not how it's like. It is a ton of ups and downs. It's amazing if you're, I don't know, a masochist. But this is like the what it's like versus how it's like. Just expect the ups and downs. Also, this is some pictures over the years of people sleeping in the offices. I think we had a bedroom in our first couple offices because we were working out of a living room. And so just know that it's just like a metric shit ton of work. But it's generally pretty fun. Buy some energy drinks. We used to have pallets of Red Bull and this energy drink that's been discontinued because I don't think it was healthy for you delivered. This was a pallet coming in and that was what we lived off of. And then the key thing is get great co-founders. So how I define my 2, I guess, litmus tests for a great co-founder is, would you start a company again with them, and then could you live with them for the next 10 years? Chances are your co-founder's gonna be someone that you're within 10 feet of for literally the next 10 years. So assume for the next 10 years you're gonna see them daily. Don't optimize for equity early on. This is something that I made the mistake of where it's like, oh no, it should be 60/40, or it should be 55/45. Like, there's— like, 9 out of 10 companies generally won't work optimizing for equity early on when you have so much that you need to surmount over the next 5 or 10 years is silly. And then someone— I would actually put someone who's smarter or more specialized than you. If it's 2 co-founders who are great at sales, but neither are technical, I would just inspect that. If it's 2 people who are technical that aren't great at sales, How are you gonna sell your product? You can hire salespeople, but definitely look for people that are smarter or more technical than you. Don't bring someone on unless you're 100% on them. If you're 80% or 90% or think that they're gonna change, I would caution against that or just inspect that. And more co-founder issues kill companies than anything else. This is over running out of money. This is over a competitor taking your market share. It's co-founder issues are like the number one things that kill companies. So definitely, definitely spend time doing that. So this comes from, I believe, Eric Ries' Lean Startup, which is build, measure, learn. This is a feedback loop that we use internally where we'll spec out a product, we'll build it, we'll release it out to the market. It could be to our 1,000 technicians. It could be to our customers. We measure the impact, we learn from it, and then we iterate it, so it's a very iterative process. This goes back to definitely talk to your customers, talk to your users. You can't do that enough. For us, it's every new hire that we bring on. We have about 70, I think, full-time people right now. Every new hire we bring on, We send them— the first thing we do is we put them with an iTech, and they go spend a day in the field meeting customers and seeing what it's like to be one of our technicians. So it's definitely like, talk to your users, build, measure, and learn. Thanks, Tim.