In a replay of one of my favorite Startup Grind interviews of all-time, Tony Conrad (True Ventures and About.me) delivers great insights on being an entrepreneur in this era and time, how About.me and Wordpress were founded, and why you should know Branch Rickey. Full video and transcript included below.
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STARTUP GRIND INTERVIEW FEATURING TONY CONRAD, August 2011
[00:00:15] I’d like to introduce Tony Conrad everyone. Come on. Tony Conrad [Applause]. Cat calls out there. That’s kind of new. I can tell you MG did not get any cat calls.
[00:00:35] TONY: Oh, Good.
[00:00:36] Yeah
[00:00:37] TONY: How’s it going everyone? I know he thinks he’s gonna control this but I’m gonna start. How’s that? I’ve got some questions for you guys.
[00:00:44] Great
[00:00:45] TONY: How many people have downloaded Editions? The new AOL iPod app? Only one? You guys should try it. I don’t normally pin products, but it’s slick. It’s very good. How many here have a WordPress blog? All right. That’s pretty good. How many people have an About.me profile page? Nice. Very, very nice. All right. Just a couple more things I want to figure out like who this audience is. How many of you are first time entrepreneurs? Great. How many of you have done it several times? Feel like you’re old bears at this point? All right. That’s great. All right, that’s helpful.
[00:01:28] QUESTION: How many of you have iPhones? Okay. So, we are so excited to have Tony. We’ve had this on the calendar for a long time and we really appreciate you coming. And you don’t really need an introduction but we’ll give you a little introduction. Tony grew up in the great city of Indiana. Attended the Indiana University of Bloomington. Graduated in Business and Journalism. He then went to the New York City, France, and across the world working for Dannon, a French yogurt. Some of you may be familiar with Activia. It’s a Dannon?
[00:02:13] TONY: Dannon.
[00:02:14] QUESTION:Dannon. Excuse me. Subsequently came to Silicon Valley, invested in a number of companies, Outpost, which was later acquired by Yahoo, turned into Yahoo Mail. WordPress, several -- co-founded a company called Sphere which was acquired by AOL. The building which is owned -- which we sit in today. Also, a co-founder of True Ventures, which is investing companies like Milk, Plan Cast, Kissmetrics, OraBrush -- that’s one of the new ones which is kind of a cool, interesting investment. And then of course About.me which was founded in 2009 and bought in 2010. So, tell us a little about Indiana. Tell us about your background -- kind of what were your parents’ background. Were they in tech? Tell us about where you’re from.
[00:03:17] TONY: Yes. I grew up in a very small farming community called North Manchester, Indiana, which is in the northeast corner part of the state. And, it’s extremely small. About 5,000, maybe 6,000 on a good year living there. Mainly, as I said, a farming community with one manufacturing plant which my father’s and mother’s family was involved with. Turned out to be a fairly large book binding business, but that was about as close to technology as my family got.
[00:03:48]QUESTION: Is it still there?
[00:03:50] TONY: The binding factory has since been sold, but it’s still there. But, I had about 120 kids in my high school class. I think 9 went to college. Our idea of preparing for the SAT was on a Thursday was told that on Saturday if I was gonna go to college I should probably show up and take the SAT test. And that’s about the way it kind of worked there.
[00:04:17] QUESTION:And you did not attend the Milan High School. Is that right? Can we confirm that?
[00:04:27] TONY: So, he’s referring to the -- it’s a true story. It’s a basketball story where the smallest school in the state ended up playing the largest school in the state and what was further complicated about that was that the largest school was obviously integrated with people of all races. So the basketball team ended being all, I think 100% African American versus 100% Caucasians. And a guy named Bobby Plump hit a shot at I think…
[00:04:54] QUESTION:I thought it was Jimmy Chitwood. No?
[00:04:57] TONY: In the movie. And but my dad actually played basketball against him.
[00:05:01] Oh wow. Cool.
[00:05:02] TONY: He was in a neighboring town.
[00:05:03] QUESTION:So you went to college in Indiana. What did you plan to do when you came out of college? You studied Journalism and Business. Were you thinking, I’m gonna be a news anchor? Were you thinking? What were you thinking?
[00:05:20] TONY: When I was in high school, one of the things I did was I ran the yearbook, and when I was running the high school yearbook, the local newspaper approached me when I was I think 15. They said, “Hey, maybe you’d like to cover the local sports and write a column for us in the weekly newspaper”. So I started doing that, and I kind of fancied at that point in time that I would go into a Journalism career. What I realized when I got to college was I sucked at it. I’m a Grinder, and on top of it I’m a bit dyslexic. In fact, I am dyslexic. But, at the time I didn’t know that, but I am clearly that. So, I wasn’t a great writer. I wasn’t fast, but I could plow through and churn stuff out. So, that was why I chose that as a major. Indiana has one of the top five journalism programs in the country. So, that was another thing that interested me.
[00:06:16] QUESTION:And so you graduated from college and you, if I have it right. You moved to New York originally right? And you accept this job. Or did, you were working for someone else and you made your way to France. So tell us the story.
[00:06:30] TONY: So, I ended up in New York working for BSN, which is a very large, I think the third largest consumer package goods company and I worked for them in product management. Great company. And after a couple years I thought I’d go to school and actually applied and had gotten into some great schools. I approached them about that. I’m gonna check out here at the end of summer. And they ended up offering me a great job in France. I talked with my father and mother and they were kinda like go do that. So I deferred school and I deferred it again and I deferred it again. One thing led to another but I ended up living in France for about 4 years. 3 of them in Paris, one of them in southern France, and I had a -- so the southern France stint was at the beginning because I wanted to perfect my linguistic skills, and I wanted to get as far out of Paris to do that as possible. So, I went to the southern part of the country on the border of Spain where most people speak Spanish as a second language, not English. And I worked in their merchandising department and eventually their sales department. But my best all time job -- true story. It was when they issued me a little blue uniform with my name Tony and a little beret hat and I would go to the grocery stores and like 3 AM. I would literally reset their shelves, which was a glorified way of saying clean the shelves and reset them. I think that was probably the best job I’ve ever had.
[00:08:13] QUESTION:Yeah, but by many accounts it wasn’t a glamorous job.
[00:08:17] TONY: It wasn’t, but it was fantastic, yeah.
[00:08:21] QUESTION:Is it true that even in the -- when you were there during the late 80s and early 90s you were setting the seeds for the future Jimmy Curtis activity campaign? Do you take any part in that?
[00:08:33] TONY: No.
[00:08:34] QUESTION:No, you don’t?
[00:08:35] TONY: I don’t.
[00:08:36]QUESTION: Well, my information is misinformed. Apparently don’t have a lot of tv watchers in the room. What -- how has living around the world -- how did it influence your career, your perspective?
[00:08:50] TONY: I think it’s a continuation of some things that probably -- you know I talked to Evan Williams about this a little bit because he grew up in even a smaller town in Nebraska and maybe he would know. I think one of the things that happens is it’s not really handed to you like the SATs 2 days before. You kinda gotta go get it. In my community I kinda grew up in somewhat of a privileged household because we employed a lot of my friends families and what not. So, I think that I probably took 2 very good skills from that. One is figure out what I’m gonna do and go do it because nobody is really going to do it for me. The second one is how to fit in. When your employing your friends’ fathers and mothers, that’s a weird thing in itself. And, so you know, those were really good lessons. When I got to France, nobody said to me go live in southern France. You know, now that sounds glamorous to you but Paris was pretty glamorous to me too. And actually I just met my girlfriend who became my wife. So, furthermore I didn’t really want to move to the southern part of France, but I knew that was the right decision. And so I did that. Because I knew it would help me linguistically, and when I came back to Paris, I had to be able too -- this is an A+ level company, and I had to be able to play at that level and play in their language. And so I took a lot away from that. And then the Indonesian experience, you know I just think once again you’re trying to assimilate into cultures. There’s a lot of sensitivity that’s almost right brain to left brain switch. When you move out of a western society in an Asian society. And once again fitting in and figuring out how to navigate the system.
[00:10:47] QUESTION:Yeah. So, you have all these great experiences across the world. Eventually you make your way back here in the early 2000s, 2003, 2004. And, you know, at that time, give us a sense of just very quickly, in 2003, how hard was it to get a meeting with Tony Conrad?
[00:11:12] TONY: Not very hard.
[00:11:13] QUESTION:Yeah, you came in. And please tell us, not that you were a nobody, but you kind of came in as this new person in the area, right?
[00:11:23] TONY: Yeah, and actually I showed up in the valley scene kind of in the late 90s. You know, so I got the… I had the privilege of going through the first boom, of investing in a partnership called VSP, and turned out there was a good lesson there as well. It turned out that was not a great partnership, great fit for me. But, by the time the 2003, 2004 time period rolled around, I think we saw a while new breed of entrepreneur and I just think most people didn’t recognize it. And I was fortunate enough to be in those circles and I could see it. And so you know, I made an investment in a company a lot of you probably know called OddPost. I invested behind Ethan Diamond and Ian Lamb and then my good friend and partner Tony Schneider subsequently founded a business. I sat on its board at WordPress today and he’s a partner of mine at True Ventures. But, you know I saw that lean, mean methodology and play before anybody was really doing it. They’re working out of libraries. They still, even today, true story -- Ben Camp. As famous as he is, and as good as he is. His new startup for the last year has been out of a library, even though he had funding. You know, just keep it real. So, that… and that time period was very easy getting a meeting with me. The question was could I get a meeting with anyone? But, the OddPost deal ended up being one of those very quick turn deals. And, because it invented Ajax and put Ajax on the map. You know, there was a certain cache that came with that, that facilitates introductions and makes a lot of things possible.
[00:13:15] QUESTION:So, in that same year you co-founded Sphere? Talk about some of the things you learned there. I mean, you were a full on co-founder, partner, and the kind of experiences you learned there.
[00:13:29] TONY: Turns out ‘04 and ‘05 were vintage years, and I made a decision in ‘04 that I was going to go back to some basics. And the guiding principle for me was that I was going to work with people that I was jazzed to work with. And I can’t underscore this enough, this is the basic principle of life. If you’re not in it, go find it. It changes everything. So, I looked at Tony Schneider as somebody I really wanted to partner with. Phil Black, John Callahan; these are all my buddies that now we’ve formed up. Turned out that that period was a good period. We founded in the course of 3 or 4 months: Sphere, where I was co-founder. I helped Matt as co-founder with WordPress. I helped that become funded and structured. We ended up funding that. And that’s I think got a huge future in front of it. And True Ventures, our first fund where we raised $175,000,000. That turned out to be a pretty good time period, maybe lucky. You create your own luck.
[00:14:46] QUESTION:And so Sphere was later acquired by AOL. Talk about, I mean that, that was no overnight success right? I mean, it was…
[00:14:58] TONY: No, that took 31 months, which is still somewhat short, but that was… you know that was a slog. And it ended up working out, not just because we -- the thing I’m proud about there is not that we got acquired. You know, that’s nice. It’s a bit of a byproduct that one point in time Sphere was ubiquitous. It was everywhere on the Web, and we created what I think is arguably you know the first widget that would live on top of everyone else’s sites. What we did technologically was very interesting. I think that our ability to get distribution in a space where we had no domain expertise, we had no inside baseball unfair advantages, right? For those of you working in a space where you don’t have that domain expertise. To me, that’s opportunity, right? You know, because you can reach out, you can do things that maybe would be a little bit too shy to do. People from outside tech all the time say can I have coffee with you tomorrow morning. People in tech won’t do that, right? So…
[00:16:05] QUESTION:Do you meet with them?
[00:16:06] TONY: No, I can’t, but they try. You know ,there is a point -- sometimes maybe. I mean. I actually did recently, but… But, you know…
[00:16:20] QUESTION:They’re bold. They’re bold because they don’t know any better.
[00:16:22] TONY: They’re bold because you don’t know any better. So, with Sphere, that was 31 months. We ended up have multiple acquisition offers from all of the people that you would imagine here in the valley and we ended up choosing AOL because quite frankly they had the easiest terms. Not the most money, but the easiest terms. And they were the coolest about the fact that I had this dual-life between straddling between being at Venture Fund -- investing and being a founder in a business. And they just got that. And so, other people didn’t get that. They wanted me to stop doing the True Venture stuff. And I thought like, are you crazy?
[00:17:05] QUESTION:Yeah, to me that’s what makes you guys so unique. As you talk to founders that you guys work with, which I did kind of look in preparing for this and that’s the first thing they say is they’ll say the true guys, they’ve been there and people say that all the time. But, literally, not only have you been there but you are there. I mean your partners are, you know, are in WordPress, or they’re -- everyone kinda -- I’m sure you’ll do something else before long. So, you guys, you have this mentality of hey I’m always going to be an entrepreneur. We’re also investing. We have this fund. But it feels like it’s very easy to relate to you and the companies that…
[00:17:47] TONY: Thank you. It’s a big unfair advantage -- the way the True Venture is structured -- and we’ve all known each other forever. We’ve been each other’s investors, we’ve been each other’s advisors, we’ve been each other’s shoulders to cry on, we’ve been co-investors, you know, we’ve just done a lot together before we started the fund. And one of the things that we just thought we would try at the formation was Tony had his job at WordPress and I had my job at Sphere and we both just kind of started that stuff. And, I think, I can’t speak for Tony but I can speak for myself. I always thought that I would kickstart it, get it going, and then hire my replacement and treat it almost like I do my investments. And, I could never give it up, right? I just, too much of an ego or too much passion for it, and I just want to keep rolling and so I think where that creates an unfair advantage needs to be working with this community is that there’s this certain authenticity and I choose that word very carefully because it can be pretentious. But, I think we are incredibly authentic. When John Callahan said we started this firm to serve the needs of entrepreneurs, it means something. It’s not a throwaway line. You’ll see that in a lot of places, but it’s genuine, because we are serving ourselves in a lot of ways. So having that active DNA and the partnership creates a sensitivity to the issues that early-stage companies might be going through in a way that I think is really powerful.
[00:19:24] QUESTION:This is a question from the app. Another shout-out. Bernie. Bernie, where’s Bernie? Hey, Bernie, Thanks. Tony, what mistake are you most proud of?
[00:19:40] TONY: Wow, wow, wow. That’s a loaded question. I’ll tell ya -- I’ll go back to France which is actually a really good one. So, I took this job. I thought I could speak French. I really did. I thought like oh gosh -- I’m a smart guy. I know how to navigate. I speak enough -- I’ll get there. And I got there and trust me, it was a mistake. I mean the guy who could speak Oxford English was like oh. He would still speak to me in French and I’m like dude, break it down and be real for a minute. And so, I’d realized I made a colossal error in judgment, and once again, you get to own up to it and I did. I self corrected. I went to them. I didn’t wait for them to come to me. I went to them. I said, hey this is not gonna work. It’s just not. I go out on weekends and people speak to me in English -- I’m doing this, they’re speaking in English. I order coffee, they speak to me in English. Can I go someplace where I have to speak French? He said, what do you want to do and I said sales. He said you can’t speak sales because you don’t speak French. I was like yeah! Exactly! And you know what? I crushed it. I crushed it because I think everybody felt so sorry for me. They would just take. I’d just say please. And they’d say no we can’t order that much. I said, I’d look up oh I don’t understand what no means. I look it up and then they’d laugh. All right dude, you just go away. That turned out to be a very good mistake because -- I had a tremendous amount of fun. I learned a lot. I was very proud of myself at the end. I persevered. I succeeded.
[00:21:34] QUESTION:Well, you speak great French right? Jeff Clavvy walked in here with you and he immediately began speaking French. And I lived in France as a kid and I don’t speak very good French but he was speaking real French. He was not beating around the bush. I mean, he was talking to you like you were a French guy. So you learned French. So, tell us, we’re gonna talk about About.me and a couple of different things around that. Who’s heard the story of the domain name? Purchasing the domain name. This story is amazing. Please tell.
[00:22:13] TONY: So when we started About.me, first of all it was a goofy idea. In a lot of ways it remains a goofy idea, but incredibly powerful. So, I would refer to it as About.me, or About Me, but there was no way we could get that URL, and so when we’re forming the company at the last second we had to name it, and my co-founder, Ryan Frades, let’s call it Pumpkin Head, and I’m like oh great. I don’t have a better idea, so let’s just do that. I actually, I remember I asked him can we get the dot com? Thinking we might actually use this thing, and he said no, but we can call it Pumpkin Head Inc, and I’m like great. So, we did that and I remember, I had a couple months later, we weren’t really working on it yet, and Ron Conway, in that way Ron can be, he just grabbed me he goes like -- nope. And my partners didn’t even really know what I was doing. And he’s like tell me about About.me. And I was like, what are you talking about? There is no About.me. He was like, but that’s what you’re working on. So, I started to understand, okay, we’re going to go get this name. So, I got this guy through O-Mallick, one of my partners, an advisor to us. So, I said I need to get this domain; he goes you gotta talk to Crudle, he’ll decide. He just knows how to navigate those corners and figure it out and I’m like okay. Crudle comes back; it’s a tough one because it’s owned by the government of Montenegro and I’m not sure I know how to get this one but I’ll do some research and I’ll figure out who we can talk to. I’m like great. Go do that. We finally started to exchange with them and we had to do a presentation which I asked Crudle to pull to together. I give him total credit for this. He got me on the phone with Natassa, and that call was at about 12:30 at night, our time. For an old guy like me it’s still late. So, we did the call and we subsequently did about a dozen calls, and every one of them was between 1 and 4 am. And, I just, I like to say I just shook this thing down. I just shook it off the tree, I grabbed it and I wrestled the government of Montenegro down and I’m like I’m going to have this url. And there was, I think in the 6th or 7th call they said you can have it. And, I said, well, let’s hold on, I haven’t talked, like I really wanted them to be fully invested in us having it. So, we ended up doing another 4 or 5 calls with them at the time and me walking them through the idea, getting every single person in the food chain involved. I didn’t want. You know, Montenegro, I think of myself as a world traveler; I had no idea where it was.
[00:25:40] QUESTION:Where is it?
[00:25:41] TONY: It’s right below Croatia, right by Yugoslavia.
[00:25:45] QUESTION:We have any Montenegro nationals in here? Wow, really tough crowd. Even the guys in the back there? What about you with the hair? You’re not from Montenegro? Where are you from? Okay. Fair enough.
[00:26:04] TONY: You’re clearly Canadian.
[00:26:07] QUESTION:I love it man. You stand out. We want to know what you do in a minute. We’re still going to shave your head at the end right?
[00:26:17] TONY: Absolutely. So, we ended up getting the url and I convinced them basically to give it to us. To not pay, and not give any equity. We ended up paying a little bit and ended up giving no equity. What I promised them was I was going to bring them together an incredible group of people that were gonna create presence for this url if we were successful in a way that money just really couldn’t buy. And, that’s kind of what we ended up doing. Then we had to navigate with New York Times, who owns About.com. That was particularly difficult because Marten Eisenholtz runs digital there. And they were very gracious, and they empowered us to do it and they became investors in the company, shareholders. I just can’t thank them enough for being cool. They are also investors in Truce Funds, so that helped a little bit.
[00:27:23] QUESTION:Wow. That to me is a kind of a consistent flow through all of your things. I mean, you have this ability to one, to really sell vision. I mean it’s interesting, that early on you are pre-code, right? Yeah, so, you’re selling these images or designs or something or maybe not, maybe it’s just key note. But you’re selling this huge vision. How do you do that? Is that just an innate thing? Or do you, is that something somebody has an idea -- how do I sell this vision that will revolutionize the industry it’s in.
[00:28:03] TONY: Well, vision’s interesting. You know, you should always talk about your vision. The more you talk about it, the more you realize it needs to be refined or it resonates. And, we got lucky. Ours resonated. It didn’t need a lot of refinement. But, once you’re able to really buy into it yourself, it’s a very empowering thing. I think you convince anybody, you know, to join you. And I think that’s why, not because I call myself a great leader but I think that’s what great leaders do. I think that’s what great founders and entrepreneurs are capable of doing, which is unique to the valley.
[00:28:43] QUESTION:So, December, 2009, this infamous Christmas party. Errington writes about you in TechCrunch.
[00:28:50] TONY: He did.
[00:28:52] QUESTION:And then the product actually -- and I think it’s good to look at this. You all were talking about this even before then in the Fall. It’s not like something like we didn’t even launch this thing and it already gets spoken about. But it didn’t. You guys spent, 2009 you were working on this, and you guys did an official Beta launch in September of 2010 of last year. So, a year ago. And were you -- did you have an alpha stage where you had people in or was Beta like -- September you had zero users or you had users before that?
[00:29:30] TONY: So one of the things we did. So Errington actually, he did corner me at Ron’s party that December. And I have a rule with the press, and I think I’ve always had a good relationship with the press in that I tell them everything. Especially when my hands are caught in the cookie jar. I’ll tell them what cookie I’m getting, how many I’m going to eat, how fast I’m going to eat it.
[00:29:57] QUESTION:Why do you do that?
[00:29:59] TONY: Well, Mike had figured out that we were doing something, and he wanted to write a story about it. And I just said, here look Mike, here’s everything that we’re doing and here’s who’s funding this and here’s who’s involved and here’s the idea. And if you really want to be helpful, it’s not by writing an article right now. So, he ended up writing just a little thing -- I think Luke, who’s from About.me by the way-- I don’t know if Heidi or anyone else is here right now, if you are, raise your hands. He ended up -- and Luke was our first hire, so Luke’s super special in a lot of different ways. Nobody poach him. But, he was there for the whole ride. And, so Mike just wrote a little thing that we were getting funded. Didn’t really talk about what we were doing. But, in September, he called me up. I can’t remember how this all went down. I think he called me up for something else. He was like, by the way, are you ever going to launch this thing? And I said, yeah, we’re starting to work on it in earnest. He said, you know, so what’s new with it? I said ,well we got the url About.me. He said that’s killer, that’s great. Can I write about it? I’m like no, please, not yet. That’s just going to create a bunch of work on our end that’s not going to be helpful. So, a week went by and he called me back. He said I’ve been thinking about this, and I really think you should let me write. I know you think I’m being self-serving but I’m not in this case. I have a great idea in this case. Since the url is so killer, why don’t you allow people to pre-register their name because people lost their names on the web a long time ago, and it’s like, you can get your name. And I kinda thought about that, and so Luke did a quick little sign-up page for us. And we put it out there and I think Luke was calling me; he called me the next day I was going up to an O’Reilly camp. He said, we are signing up like 3 people per second. It was just crazy.
[00:32:10] QUESTION:Wow, this is after the article had hit?
[00:32:12] TONY: Yeah, after the article had gone. It was through the entire weekend, and we had a good couple of hundred thousand people that had pre-registered for a product. And, what that told me and told us was that the value proposition, no matter how thin the product was going to be, the value proposition really resonated, that there was a massive audience of people out there that do not have a kind of presence on the Web. Most this crowd is unique. Either know how to code it yourself or know how to do WordPress, but most people don’t have that. I’d say 99.5% of people that use the Web don’t have that.
[00:32:53] QUESTION:Can you talk -- I know you’ve got some really cool slides here. Can you talk through you know, how to startups differentiate, and how do they -- where does -- who’s a founder in here? Do we have a good group of founders? How many people work at a startup including founders? Okay, basically the same amount. Can you talk a little bit about how a starter would differentiate?
[00:33:16] TONY: Sure, in fact I can just show some slides here. I wasn’t going to bore you with a PowerPoint presentation. Thanks. But, let me just. Let me kind of flip through here. All right, so, this right here, to me, is the first thing. This was the first point of differentiation. It goes back to what we were just talking about. And the power of having a name that is really a perfect fit with what you’re trying to do, which is giving people a place to curate their identity on the Web. I cannot think of a better name than About.me and to be able to put my name against it. This was something that we really thought through long and hard and we weren’t going to settle. We weren’t going to settle for Pumpkin Head, we weren’t going to settle for Traveler. I’m sure it’s appropriate for what they’re doing. Actually, Evan Williams is an investor. Great! Shout-out to him. But anyways, this was kind of our first point of differentiation. The reserve your name thing, I thought they were showing the product and we were getting Mike to write about it. That was really great. Then we talk about, hold on, let me. This was, and this to me is the key. This is it. This is the slide. And what we did in this time period was we were, as Luke will remember, we were a 3 person and then a 4 person team, and we had 26 advisors. And I remember thinking that’s crazy. You’re supposed to only have 4 or 5, and I thought well, why? Why 4 or 5? Why 1? Why not hundreds? And I know so many people in this community at this point, so many people I like, big names, little names, people I’m impressed by. I want to have them involved in our project, and if we can have them involved it’s a good thing. And so, what I didn’t understand, was the power of this in helping us to recruit what is arguably one of the most talented, certainly one of the most talented development teams that I’ve had the pleasure of working with, both as an investor and founder. But, it also enable us to get a lot of unfair advantages in terms of resources, people willing to do things for us. And, then this group of people, I never really thought about it, but the exposure. Just the fact that these folks were going to become the face of our company in a lot of ways. We were going to be the first people to set up pages and then to Tweet those pages and then to establish the behavior of our product. Everybody has this group of people. You may now have Devin Rowes, or Dick Costello, but you have your group of people. And that’s where it starts. Zuckerberg had his group of people, right? He had his group of users. It was different. He didn’t have advisors in this way, but he had faces that he could associate with the product. And so, the one thing I would encourage you all is have a big net and just find people spontaneously and those people may be targeted but find people you can get involved in your project because it makes sense. So, this group of people here divides up into people that I think have specific expertise, so Crudle is one there that we talked about. Heaton Shaw who understands as much if not more than conversion and fundamental marketing than anyone on the Web. That helped us a lot with morality. To Brom Rickey, who is our CFO at True Ventures and did our bookkeeping, so very tactical. I need something out of them. To people I didn’t need anything from, and I didn’t expect anything from. I didn’t ask Kevin Rowes or Kris Sciacca to do anything, and I wouldn’t. I gave them shares to be in the company as more as a token of we’re all in this together. I vested those shares 100%. I had a very simple two page thing that would just cover us for an exit when we sold the company. I know you have to do that. But there was nothing in there that outlined you’re going to do this or Tweet once a week. No, that’s silly. People do things because they want to and that’s the most powerful. And so, that group of people are people that I think have built massive presence on the Web, right? They’ve built their identity on the Web, and hence that was a perfect fit with our product. The French benefit was that they had 20+ million Twitter followers in aggregate. And that, you see me smiling, because that was awesome. Awesome. And, you know, we just saw that. You people -- most of you probably don’t know, we don’t publish our stats, but we are 241 days old today. We’re definitely, we have grown much faster than LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, any of these sites at this stage. I’m really impressed by that, for our team, because this is not download an app type product. I’m not diminishing that. It’s not that simple. You still have to go do something. It’s powerful to see the virility and adoption on this product, and a lot of it’s thanks to these guys. The other thing, this gets back to that url. It’s exclusive right? Because it is your name and that’s a really great incentive, but we also tied into physical artifacts. Web companies don’t do this. Web companies think about virality, and I think those are table stakes now. I think that’s the minimum poker. To enter the game you have to have viral loops. But what makes it cool and special is when you take a step back. People’s identity lives both on and offline, and they’re merging. So how can we play a role in that? So, one of our guys, Fuji Bear, came up with this idea for business cards. In hindsight, you go duh. It’s a easy idea. About.me product is an easy idea, but we execute incredibly well. And we have a ton of people out there handing out free business cards we gave them, with their picture on it so everyone can remember you and your about.me url and qr code and your -- you put whatever information you want on the back. We give them free to all of our users when they start. It’s really a way of differentiating. We did physical billboards. So, think about that, right? So, you see billboards. Big companies use them all the time but little companies don’t. And when you have a product which enables you to leverage the visual identity in the narrative of your user base, to be able to put that in place, such as, physical billboards, is amazing. You put Kevin Rowes up, what do you think happens? Kevin Tweets it. There’s your connection to virality. You don’t think of it that way, but it promotes such reach. Even he’s like wow, I’m on a billboard. We haven’t put Kevin up yet, but we will do that. We’ve done a bunch of people. We’ve put a bunch of people on taxi screens like Veronica Belmont. And they tweet and then all the people that are following them tweet and they think it’s cool and people see the brand and they come and sign up. So, we do a lot of those kinds of things. Here’s a tweet from Veronica. How many of you have signed up for our Times Square billboard contest? All right, for all of you who have about.me pages, go login and you can enter your page and we’re going to pick 10 people and we’re going to put them up in Times Square, on billboards. We’re gonna make sure to level-set the contest so it’s fair. There’ll be people from every kind of aspect on the web. But, here’s what Veronica did. Look at this, I don’t pander for things much, but I would love some votes to help put my about.me profile on Times Square. That’s going out to 1.7 million followers. That is huge. You can’t buy that. So these are the kinds of things that we’ve done to differentiate.
[00:42:35] QUESTION:So, I’m sitting in this chair and looking at these faces. These 25 jaw drops, if I get one of those it’d be amazing. You’ve got all of them. So, where does someone start? Your new to the valley or you’re new to the startup, like. I think it was interesting, they don’t have to have a million followers, they just have to be real people, your community or whoever they are. How does one get one of these people let alone all of these people? Where do I start?
[00:43:03] TONY: I think you have to be patient. You have to invest. You may not be able to get them for the startup, but you need to be in the scene. I always say it’s a contact sport. You have to out there, even at my age, I’m out there, you know, and that’s tricky. I’ve got a family and I’ve got other things to navigate. But, I thin you have to, if you’re going to be an entrepreneur, you have to think of it as a career. I don’t think enough people do that. And think about the steps and be patient about the things that you’re going to learn, the relationships you’re going to develop over time. How you’re going to be able to engage those relationships. You don’t have to get it all on the first date. It’s like wow. Sorry. It always comes back to that, doesn’t it. But you don’t have to, you know you don’t have to go from zero to marriage. It’s like, somebody here tonight hopefully I’ll get to know and then bump into you again and maybe one day I’ll be inclined to say yeah, sure, let’s do that. Because I know you a lot better. It just takes a long term view. In the short term I encourage you still, even if you have an enterprise product, actually it doesn’t matter. You should get your posse around the table and try to stretch and find the most interesting biggest name, highest value person that is a lay-up for you. You know? That is just a very simple person to ask and it wouldn’t be out of place and to get them and then anchor around that person and build. True story. Kevin Rose is one of the last people I asked here because Kevin and I know each other. I’m one of his lead investors in his new company. Kevin and I know each other, but we really didn’t know each other, and I thought asking him to be an advisor in my company, given kind of his stature on the Web, I thought that was a pretty big ask. So, I waited until I had a lot of these other folks. So, he understood what he was opting into in addition to something I was involved in. When I asked him, he was like well yes it’s such a great group of people, of course I want to be a part of it. And he was very gracious to join us. So, that’s how.
[00:45:36] QUESTION:A question from Kris. Where’s Kris? Kris Dugan. How much of launching a project is about luck and timing and how much is idea versus execution in your opinion?
[00:45:50] TONY: Well, let’s go back to the first slide. Here we go. So, this is Branch Rickey, and you know, what’s interesting about Branch Rickey is a lot of people thought he was lucky, but he was the first guy to set up Farm Leagues. So he created his own talent pool. He was the first person to integrate baseball. He did a lot of remarkable things. He respected if you liked the Dodgers or not. I like to say people create their own luck. And I think you know, with About.me, we were thinking through these steps, everyone one of these steps in a very serious way. Months, almost a year before we were launching, we were thinking about the url. You know, that’s not luck. You go get it. People say what a great url. You know, I had to earn that url. It didn’t just fall in my lap. I had to go get it. You know, it’s getting these people in place. Very patient. That group of people up there, that took us a year, right up until launch to kind of complete that roster. So we were always adding people in, and then. So, I think, you know, the question. I think the answer is both, right? You need to create your own luck but you need to execute to put yourself in luck’s way. And, kinda go back to earlier lessons in my life. It wasn’t handed to me, right? And so I had to kind of network and I had to put myself in a position where I could be lucky, whereas mixing with interesting people could be helpful, where I could learn from. And I think we applied those lessons here. You know I think Luke, I point to Luke. Luke is in the beginning of his entrepreneurial career. He’s going to do a lot of great things. He’s put himself in luck’s way. He got involved with a great team; he’s being patient. That’s my plea. Don’t go. He’s being patient, he’s working with us, he’s generating tremendous good will, and when he goes to do his next thing he’s enhanced his chances 10-fold, if not 100-fold. So, he’s taking a very calculated, methodical approach to managing his career and something he might be doing way down the road, and I think that’s powerful.
[00:48:30] QUESTION: Daniel Cooperman, where are you at Daniel? Has a question which will lead into something else, but how do you spot a startup worth investing in? And I want to direct that to companies you have invested in? How about the first is MakerBot. What’s special about MakerBot? What was it when you met them?
[00:48:50] TONY: Everyone know about MakerBot? Nobody does. That’s not good. Actually, just did a big round led by Foundery, Brad Foundery who has a reputation for investing. So, Bree Pettis is a guy who has been around robotics for a long time. He was a school teacher, not a techie. But became very fascinated with making things. One of the founders of a magazine for O’Reilly’s group and became a bit of a face for that and was involved in a lot of stuff around robotics and got this idea 3 years ago that he wanted to make 3-dimensional printers, which can print physical objects and you know, he built some really crude prototypes. I think this is a little bit like Apple. I think we’re so privileged to be part of this company because it reminds me of those first Macs or those first Apple computers. I mean, he made it out of wood, and had all the electronic and digital or lasers and all that stuff inside. But he kept it real. Now they have a really incredible product. So, I think what made Bree special is that he had such credibility, and I think he’ll continue down this path as we look at people. He had such credibility in his domain that I knew that he could assemble that group of people for his community. No problem. He could do that. If Bree calls, someone’s going to be honored to at least have been asked. They might not do it, but they’ll be honored and take the call. So, I think that improves his chances for success. Plus, I want to be a part of stuff that’s not just tech, like traditional tech the way we think about it. I’m curious, I’m intellectually curious. I have a lot of interests and I think my partners are great and that they empowered me to do something so wacky and it looks like it’s killing and selling tons and tons and tons of units, to a point where he could get a very major round from a major investor.
[00:51:10] QUESTION:What about Kevin Rowes at Milk?
[00:51:15] TONY: You know, Kevin’s gonna launch his thing and most people in this room are gonna go try it. I think that he’s gone through his experience at Digg; I think that’s an incredible plus for him. I think it’s remarkable. It’s remarkable somebody like Kevin who has a very public life is as close to a digital star, a Hollywood kind of start, a cross-over in ways as I think we have in our community. And, you know, I think he’s incredibly humble, and in a way, very shy. And, but I think there’s something scary about him. People kill for him. Everybody in the valley wanted to fund him -- everybody wanted to fund him, literally. And, I think that, you know, whatever products they build, which I know what they are, when they put them out there, they’re going to get exposure, in a really major way. And I think he has a gift for product.
[00:52:25] QUESTION:The last one is automatic WordPress, and I just want to read one stat before you say, and you Tweeted this out the other day. That 14.7% of all websites run on WordPress, but 22% of all new websites created last year were built on WordPress. That is insane.
[00:52:45] TONY: That is insane. What that means it’s not a blogging platform. That means it’s become end-of-the-line CMS of the web. And it’s, when you get that kind of growth, that 14.7 to 22% in a year, what that means it’s a certain virality. That number will continue to go up. I think Matt Mollenweg -- I pinch myself I get to sit around in rooms with at times. I think Matt, not to exclude anyone else on the list, but, I think Matt may be one of the most special entrepreneurs of this last decade. I call him once in a generation type engineer. And, he takes an incredibly long-term view. He understands product. When I met Matt, he was incredibly young. He’s still young. He’s 27 now, hard to believe. He was a robust 18 or something like that. When we started talking in Houston; he’d never seen snow. There was a certain naïve thing about him that was amazing. But, I got on the phone and the way I got connected to Matt was O’Mallick; this is back to Odd Post -- he was writing a cover story for Business 2.0. And he asked me to come in -- this is how I met him actually. And at the end of the meeting I do something -- I always ask people -- so what do you see? What’s cool out there? Got anything I should take a look at? Oh, there’s this web blogging thing or journal stuff and you know, not many people are doing it yet. This is 2002, something like that. Not many people are doing it yet, but it’s interesting, and you know, whatever. I said, any company? Well, there’s this Google type thing but I think it’s already being funded, and there’s this thing Press. And I’m like great. So I scratched it down. I got back to my office; I was looking at my notes. I googled it and figured it out. Then, we got introduced. And, I just start talking to Matt for a good year, just on the phone, you know. I remember the first time I hung up from him I was like wow, that is a special guy. He could talk product in a way that was very human, and at the same time, so beyond my comprehension.
[00:55:17] QUESTION:He is a human right?
[00:55:19] TONY: He is, he’s a superhuman. He is. And so, when we funded WordPress, bloggers out there, all these guys, and you know, I’m really proud to be a part of that.
[00:55:36] QUESTION:So, this is going to embarrass you just a little bit, but I have one of your -- I won’t say who it is -- but one of your entrepreneurs sent me something about you from one of the companies you funded and this is what he said about Tony. I first met Tony the day after a Herd meeting with other investors that sent my nerves skyrocketing. This is your sad moment by the way. I don’t have any Kleenex’s. Tony suggested we meet at a local café and just chat. There was no pressure, just a guide and general complication and guide with what our company was doing and just helping us do it. The meeting was so different and I was so impressed with him I told my parents that night I want to be like Tony when I grow up. Just let that soak in for a minute.
[00:56:32] TONY: Could you tell my son?
[00:56:38] QUESTION:Having gotten to know Tony better since the first meeting, I’m happier than ever. Our company is a True Venture’s company. There are so many things that make him awesome, it’s hard to quantify. Maybe it’s that he’s an active entrepreneur himself so he understands our pain. Maybe it’s that his advice is always spot on. Maybe it’s just that he’s genuine. All I know is screw being like Tony Conrad when I grow up, I want to be like Tony Conrad now. Let’s give a round of applause. I didn’t know you guys funded poets, but this guy is a good writer -- really good. Somebody’s getting a bonus! But I think, you know, there aren’t a lot of people here that are funded by you, including myself, but I would say your impact on our community is greatly felt by people who aren’t close to you but people who see you and appreciate what you’ve done, and I think that sets you guys apart and it’s part of what makes you guys so successful and get to work with such great entrepreneurs. We appreciate you coming to Startup Grind.
[00:57:50] TONY: Truly a pleasure. How many of you have seen Midnight in Paris. I’ve been saying this for years, and I finally have something to point to. For those of you who haven’t seen it, I don’t think I’ll spoil any plot line here. The interesting thing here is in art, if you’re into art, and I am. If you’re into architecture, which I am, there are periods, great periods that there is stuff that is happening, and it has cultural significance. It’s not just, you know, community significance, but cultural cross-over significance. The 1920s was kind of that period, one of those great periods. There were these amazing people, and the thing that was so incredible about it was they were all living in Paris and they all hung out. They all went to cafes, they all went to the same parties, they all hung out. And it was because there was nobody else in the world more interesting in that moment of our planet. And, I think that some of us are going to be successful, some of us aren’t. But the gift all of us truly get is that we’re part of that moment. That is what this is, right? There’s nothing more interesting or culturally impact in my opinion than the tech community. While it can burn you out sometimes, it’s incredible guys. If everyone can just stop, and pinch yourself. I mean, we’re gonna look back, 50 years from now people will look back at this moment and go wow, wow. That is the Coffee Table Book that my generation’s parents have. I don’t know about you guys. You guys are all young enough, most of you, that maybe it’s not, we’ve already passed that. But, you walk into my house and there’s art books on the glass coffee table. You flip through, and it’s incredible figures, and that’s what we got here. I’ll just lean into it and have fun, build great stuff, and not get too arrogant about it. I think we’ll look back and go wow. Magic.
[1:00:18] Let’s give Tony another round of applause [APPLAUSE]
END OF INTERVIEW