Tony Antoniades from the ATDC introduced me to Lance Weatherby as somebody to talk to about business strategy. This morning we met for coffee downtown at the Technology Square Starbucks. The Georgia Tech students are coming back to school and the place was full of people. Great to see the excitement, fear and youthful social ackwardness in their eyes.
Lance worked at Mindspring. I loved Mindspring, until they changed after the Earthlink merger. I could have spent the entire meeting listening to Lance talk about Mindspring. I want to build a company with team members just as excited and evangelistic. Why would anybody care who provides their internet access? Bits and bytes over a phone line? Well, they did care... because the culture of Mindspring was addictive. Meeting with anybody from Mindspring is always fun for me... I feel like I'm cheating... learning just a little bit about how Charles Brewer did it.
Lance asks questions well. He doesn't mind sitting back and just asking for a while. He shapes the conversation and learns what he wants to know with simple questions. This gave me some time to talk... and led me into an amateur mistake: diffussion.
Mindspring had core values. And they had focus. Lance echoed this when he said that Mindspring was a consumer internet access company. Not a hosting company. Not a networking provider. A consumer internet access company. From there decisions could be made.
I didn't share the story with Lance today, but I remember a Mindspringer telling me about a meeting he had with Charles Brewer, the founder of Mindspring. The two of them were out evaluating a new technology. Over hours of very impressive presentations Charles and the Mindspringer were told that this new company could make money in sixteen ways. Money here. Revenue stream there. They were gonna rake in the bucks all over the place. Afterwards, Charles asked the Mindspringer what he thought about the fact that they had so many revenue streams. The Mindspringer said that it sounded promising and that they were diversified, robust because of them. Charles responded "it sounds like they don't know where they're gonna make money." And left. The lesson to the Mindspringer was clear: you must know precisely how to make money.
Reger.com is at the point where we have a number of possible and existing revenue streams. I described some of them to Lance. He kindly listened but then challenged "what do you want to be when you grow up?" On this issue he didn't simply pose the question... he delved into its importance. Knowing what you want to be gives you backbone. It allows you to focus your efforts. It allows you to avoid ending up somewhere you don't want to be. If you don't know what you want to be when you grow up, as a company and as an entrepreneur, you can't make decisions to get you there.
He challenged me. I was talking about enterprise opportunities, but clearly my excitement was with the consumer side... giving everybody in the world a tool to capture and mine their personal data store. Lance sensed this dichotomy... this bizdev oxymoron. "If you get on a freeway to Brooklyn, you won't end up in Queens," he said.
He's right. But there are challenges, which I raised. Being small I can't jump into the consumer space. I need revenue today to build the team to go after the consumer space. I think there's much validity in the notion that intranet usage inside the enterprise can help me hone the app for consumers. Lots of hand waving on my part to defend selling into the enterprise as a knowledge management tool. But Lance challenged the efficacy of this approach. Essentially he said, if you want something, go get it... don't waste your time on anything else.
The long term vision for me is and has been crystal clear for six years. It's changed little. I want to provide the personal repository for people to capture their lives online. Photos, videos, writing, data, etc. The challenges they face in doing so are also faced by corporations. So how far apart are the two? Am I wasting valuable energy?
One important point for me came when I had accepted Lance's vision of focus. I knew that Lance was right... I had to choose a focus. But I also knew that I wouldn't likely make money in the consumer space in the next year. Then Lance asked about Earthlink and blogs. We discussed this notion of offering blogs to service providers. This may be something of a silver bullet for me. It allows me to sell to an enterprise, but also attack the consumer market. Newspapers, radio stations, ISPs, tv stations, online magazines, etc. They all have large user bases who they could offer blogs to. This is a market we've looked at before. The takeaway isn't the market, it's the challenge from Lance that I choose a market and focus on it. This service provider consumer/enterprise thing may fit the bill. That said, it's much harder to do... a service provider sell is harder than getting an IT manager to install behind the firewall and offer to internal employees. More thinking required.
So, this was my amateur mistake for the day: diffusion. I presented too many possible business opportunities.
Lance knows a lot more than he lets on. It's always hard to gauge how technical a discussion should be. In the end, I may have under-geeked the talk with Lance. Late in the conversation he said some things about the social networking market, p2p market and IP that made me realize he had been holding back.
One of my goals for the day was to figure out how to generate sales for Reger.com. I have a small fixed budget and I wanted to brainstorm possibilities with Lance. He was a willing participant. He has a consulting company that may be able to help. Along the path of the conversation, however, he cautioned focus. Making sure that whoever does it needs to have a clear market with a clear product.
Quote of the day: "There's nobody else like me." - Lance ~10:30AM.
I wanted to know how to attract guys like Lance to Reger.com. No clear answers... it's a tough question. I need enthusiastic people like him who understand technology and want to see the long term vision succeed.
Lance started an online p2p storage company after reading one of Bob Cringely's articles. I mentioned PubSub to him. And Web 2.0.
Obviously a lot more happened at the meeting. These are my high level takeaways.
So Lance and I will get together again soon. I enjoyed the discussion. Thanks to Lance for the time and to Tony for the introduction.
Update 12:29PM: A little more thinking about the meeting. You know, the thing that really felt good was when Lance said that he's a consumer market guy, not an enterprise guy. His clarity was a powerful demonstration of focus. And it felt good to hear somebody enthusiastic about the consumer market. It resonates with me. It's where I want to go. Over the years of talking to people I've been conditioned to not mention consumer markets. They're too big. Too unweildy. Too fickle. Everybody pushes you towards the enterprise, because there are quick gains to be had. But the consumer market is clearly where my heart lies. Lance helped me remember this and, in a way, gave me some permission to want the consumer market. That's refreshing. That's one of the big takeaways from the meeting. That feeling of excitement of going after the consumer market.
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