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00:00:01
Joe Waltman
155 Plays10 months ago
Pilar takes one for the team and allows me to bore everybody with stories about my mediocre attempts at tech companies and start ups.
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Transcript
Introduction to Joe Waltman
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello. I get to interview Joe Waltman today. This is the most exciting thing that has happened in a long time. Joe, are you nervous to be on the other side? I actually am a little nervous, yes. But thank you for doing this, Pilar. Oh, it's a real pleasure. So Joe, I'm just going to follow your format.
Career Beginnings at Qualcomm
00:00:23
Speaker
Please remind us what you were doing before insert and what have you been doing in the 20 years since?
00:00:30
Speaker
I'll try to be brief. Please move me along if I'm going to slowly in certain parts. I graduated with a computer science degree thanks to a well-placed sister-in-law who was able to get a job at a company called Qualcomm. They were back about 30 years ago. They were kind of a big deal. They built
00:00:48
Speaker
a lot of the chips that were using our phones right now, but they were also building wireless networks. This is before they were real digital, i.e. getting data on your phone networks around the world. What year were you talking about? I got the job in 1996 and had it for three or four years. I was at the company and then I bounced around a little, eventually got a great job in there.
00:01:09
Speaker
what they call network engineering group, where basically these are the people who would run around the world building these networks. All my colleagues at the time were these 40 or 50 year old, doesn't that sound old, men mostly who had kids and lived in beautiful San Diego. So the last place they wanted to go is like India or Mexico. And I was of course raising my hand saying, yes, I'll go, I'll go. So I got the chance to travel around the world and actually lived in Mexico for a few years. And that was maybe what kind of sparked my interest in doing quote unquote international stuff.
Entrepreneurial Ventures and Challenges
00:01:38
Speaker
But what was your actual job? I was a network engineer. I would build what's called backhaul. So connecting wireless networks is a bunch of towers with antennas on them. You need to connect those antennas back to the main network. And many times in more developing countries, there's no infrastructure to do that. So you actually have to build what's usually a microwave network to do that. And it's about as dry as it sounds.
00:02:06
Speaker
From there, I caught the entrepreneurial bug and made probably an unwise decision to move to Miami and be an early employee at a dot-com, a Latin American sports dot-com. This is back in the late 90s when people thought that was going to be a big thing.
00:02:25
Speaker
But needless to say, it didn't last very long. A few months or maybe a year and a half later, I was looking for a new job and took one with this company called Akamai, which if you work in the tech, you might know it. It's like content delivery. It was my first time working for a company where I didn't have a friendly insider and I quickly learned that I'm not very well-suited for
00:02:45
Speaker
big cutthroat businesses because I got fired within about a year and a half, two years for valid reasons. I wasn't very good at my job and also I wasn't very good at reading the organizational tea leaves and understanding how to
Education and New Opportunities in France
00:02:57
Speaker
behave. I had a couple of black eyes or some scar tissue and thought, why don't I take a little, press the reset button in my career and go to business school.
00:03:08
Speaker
I applied to the usual suspects in the US and this silly little Mickey Mouse school in France that I'd only really heard of through a friend of a friend. Unfortunately, I didn't get into any of the US schools that I wanted to go to. I think I got waitlisted at Columbia or something.
00:03:24
Speaker
for that but i got it yet and i thought i should check this place out and actually what there for a little you know a two day trip your state at one of the crappy hotels and you don't have fun to blue had never i'd maybe back back to france when i was you know eighteen but never really spend any time in france and i just happen to be hanging out in the cafe there and this
00:03:45
Speaker
this current student now would be like a year ahead of us or before us, was like, hey, we're going to a party tonight. You want to come along. So I was able to tag along like a chateau party. Totally random. Totally random. And I was like, yeah, as you can imagine, I was like, this place is amazing. This is where this is, this I need to come here. So that sort of sold me out of it and had a great time, probably spent a little too much time doing that kind of stuff and not studying or looking for work because upon graduation, I had, you know,
00:04:14
Speaker
been rejected from about every company that interviewed on campus and really had no idea what I was going to do. And frankly, didn't really even know what people, like I barely heard of McKinsey. I still don't know what investment bankers do. I was woefully sort of naive as the whole, like, you know, what is it that, you know, MBA non-engineered to kind of my role before do in
Struggles in London and Return to California
00:04:37
Speaker
the real world. So ended up having to kind of take a really crappy job with some actually in Seattle alum based in London doing
00:04:44
Speaker
It could be generously called Boutique Consultancy. It was really just a sweatshop where we were working for mostly premiership football clubs, which sounds sexy from the outside, but it was doing the same very unglamorous
00:05:01
Speaker
ERM implementation project over and over again so it's kind of like a crappy Accenture job but working for a kind of sexy client these these you know arsenal and whatnot the bad news is the pay was awful and you kind of as a consultant what's great is you go do like HR for a bank and then you go do you know
00:05:19
Speaker
e r p for a petroleum company this was the same project within about six months the learnings ceased and i was making. Effectively zero it was costing me money to live in london and work this job so i can find the i want one mile the humor that i was actually living with.
00:05:35
Speaker
bread, bomb bush and dev of energy for a part of that stint. They were both at McKinsey and McKinsey was doing some like team building initiative where they would let the, uh, the low level people like Brett and Deva take each other to dinner once a week. And I would, I would, I would never afford to go out to eat. I would say like Nando's, you know, four nights a week.
00:05:54
Speaker
I would beg them, I was like, hey guys, if you got any spots, can I please come with you on these dinners because it'll give me a chance to actually have a nice meal every once in a while. Did they take it? Occasionally, yeah. When somebody would cancel, I'd get to go along. It was definitely ... My whole ... Anyhow, maybe I didn't explain. I was in London for three or four years after Indiana. I definitely felt like I was on the outside looking in both financially and work-wise and whatnot.
00:06:20
Speaker
really struggling to make it work in London. I almost started up a burrito fast casual restaurant, which I wasn't the right person to do that. It would actually end up being a good business. Chipotle came in and killed it. Joe Waltman would not have been a good person to start a restaurant in a foreign city, in a foreign country. On that note, I realized
00:06:46
Speaker
What am I doing here in London? I'm from California. Why don't I go back to where I've got a little bit of home field advantage? I started positioning myself and looking for jobs in California. Ended up getting one at what's called MVNO. It's like a mobile phone company without any infrastructure. They just do the sales and the branding and whatnot. I was doing what was then called business development. If you remember these bad old days before the App Store and the iPhone, in order to do anything on your phone, which is probably some crappy little flip thing,
00:07:15
Speaker
you had to go to what's called the deck of like Vodafone or Sprinter Verizon and download these apps. So my job was to identify and negotiate partnerships and manage partnerships like these app developers who were building apps for these crappy flip phones back then or now doing it for iPhones and Androids. But it was like a privileged position from which to sort of survey the California tech ecosystem because these guys were sort of
00:07:44
Speaker
they were trying to get on our deck so they would make time for you. This is back in California, in Southern California in a silly place called Orange County where actually I was born and raised. It was very much home field advantage.
Startup Success and Acquisition by Twitter
00:08:02
Speaker
After doing that for a few years, I got the maybe
00:08:06
Speaker
overconfidence to think that I could become one of these startup people myself. I, again, probably made the unwise decision to leave this very comfortable, not very interesting, but very comfortable, somewhat well-paid job at this mobile phone company to go move up to San Francisco and try my hand as a startup guy. It was as clichรฉ and as
00:08:29
Speaker
Wait, wait, wait. Explain how you do that. It's really hard to get into that world. So you just move to San Francisco and start calling people?
00:08:38
Speaker
Effectively, I had an idea. It was so bad, I can't even remember what it was. It was quickly dismissed within a few weeks. San Francisco and Silicon Valley more broadly is actually well-suited for idiots who want to do that. There's all sorts of networking events, many of which are worthless and whatnot, but unlike other industries where if you want to break into finance, you're probably not getting meetings with anybody of any importance if you just cold call them and
00:09:03
Speaker
banks at London or like record companies in LA or New York or whatnot. Whereas tech in Silicon Valley, there is sort of a hippie vibe to sort of leave the ladder down for people trying to make it. So you can take advantage of that or you could back then to a certain degree. So the kind of the quick story there is I had this crap idea.
00:09:24
Speaker
ended up meeting somebody within a month or two who had a much better idea. It was specifically working for, if you remember back in the battle days of Facebook, they had these silly, to call them games isn't even fair, like Farmville and whatnot, where you're basically just grinding away on these silly things. Facebook was about to change something about the emailing on the platform and all these apps were going to quickly need the kind of company that this guy had worked out in the past.
00:09:52
Speaker
you know i was like the sales guy he was like the technician we started basically service writer for these facebook apps and it quickly went really well because of the changes facebook made in it and he wisely knew they're gonna need this kind of company but you know this this was this was a very quick little bump
00:10:10
Speaker
with these companies where within about a year, our clients were all going out of business or really struggling to pay their bills. We quickly had some existential problems. I, as a sales guy, reached out to somebody I knew at Twitter who might have some influence. We had a very surreal sales meeting with these Twitter people. They basically called me later that day and said,
00:10:36
Speaker
We like what you're doing. We think it's interesting, but we're like 10 times the size of all of your clients combined. We're way too big to be your customer. Why don't you just join our team and we'll acquire you. By that point, my partner and I had basically hated each other.
00:10:54
Speaker
Our clients are going out of business. It was a complete life raft that was given to us. Now, either more sad or more humorous part of the story is it was very much a talent acquisition, which is kind of a thing in Silicon Valley. You want to gobble up some engineers. Since I don't possess any talent, I was not part of the field.
00:11:15
Speaker
So instead, they wrote me a fairly, at the time, a big check, but in hindsight, kind of a modest check for me to walk away and they gobbled up the team.
00:11:25
Speaker
I don't know. No, no, no. Again, it was a very small check. If you woke up with that check in your bank account, you'd jump out of a window. Your network as that check, you would not get it. From there, that was right at the time my wife was having our first child. We took a little time off, did a little round the world trip. We actually ended up at the 10-year reunion in Fontainebleau with our child and with me being able to be like,
00:11:52
Speaker
tell people that I sold my company to Twitter, which sounds a lot better than- That sounds amazing. At that high level, yes. As long as you don't see the commercial terms, it sounds incredible. From there- This is 2013. Exactly. Yeah, this is more like, is it that? No, it was more like 2000. The deal was done in like
00:12:14
Speaker
12, 13. No, the deal was done in 12,
Startup Failures and Personal Struggles
00:12:19
Speaker
and then about a year later with the reunions, so it was about 13, yeah. So we're in Fontainebleau 10-year reunion right now. So we get back to California after this great trip, had spent a good chunk of this money already that didn't do the smart thing like put a down payment at a house. Good on you.
00:12:35
Speaker
Yes and no. But then at this point, I'm beginning to think that I'm actually good at this shit. I'm like a startup guy and I'm going to do this. So I sort of did a full analysis like where's their opportunity and decided that the world needed like an Uber for veterinarians, like house call veterinary service, which is one of these things what are called
00:13:00
Speaker
like mirages or sort of pitfalls where they seem like they're a good idea, but for reasons that people who see all of these old VCs, see like 20 of these a day, they can tell you quickly, it's bad for this and this and this reason. But if you're naive and or stubborn or whatnot, it takes you two or three years of working in the trenches to realize, oh, that's why this is a bad idea.
00:13:23
Speaker
So we ended up getting some funding. We actually went through this incubator program called Y Combinator. It's like a big deal amongst startups. It's supposedly one of the more prestigious ones. And that maybe gave us a little bit more misplaced confidence that we're going to make this work. We were even raising money from some INSEAD people. Sorry, by the way, if you invested because you lost all your money. I hope one day, hope to be able to make it up to you. Nobody in our class.
00:13:49
Speaker
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Some people in our class. Yeah. Some people who've already been on the podcast as a matter of fact. Oh really? I'll save their names to protect them from being criticized a week so dumb as to investigate. Oh come on.
00:14:02
Speaker
The business didn't work very well and it was for reasons that maybe aren't interesting to talk about. But the more interesting anecdote and maybe kind of sad anecdote is I still remember this like it was yesterday. So my wife was pregnant with our third child. She was doing scheduled C-sections and she had a C-section schedule for that Monday. So number three was common.
00:14:23
Speaker
the Friday before we do an exhaustive review of our finances. We know things aren't going great, but we realize things are going horribly. One, not only is this business in a nosedive that it's unlikely to get corrected. Maybe we could do some sale, but that's very unlikely, especially in that situation. Two, we'd have to stop paying ourselves and try to salvage something out of this.
00:14:45
Speaker
Walk home with my tail between my legs that that night and tell my like morbidly pregnant wife that you know one This this little like poker chip that we thought we had that don't like this equity my turn or something That's gonna be zero and two. I'm not making any more money now for the foreseeable future So it was a very that was that was a dark period She loves you. She loves you. Yeah, I hope so. I hope so. Yeah, she's still we're still together So that that maybe that that that validates that
00:15:12
Speaker
So, that was brutal. That was truly the depths and bad. I mean, while the Gretzky things are still very privileged and it wasn't really- The Instagram philosopher would tell you, you learned lessons from mistakes and all that.
00:15:31
Speaker
prevailing wisdom or more recent prevailing wisdom, that's kind of bullshit. You learn one kind of mistake. There's plenty of other mistakes to make that you're not aware of yet.
00:15:45
Speaker
So after this, you know, very, very, you know, very much, you know, skinned my knees, had some scar tissue, took a little bit more time off, like did some odds and ends to make it. I mean, we weren't broke. We had negative money at that point. And number three kid, thankfully, my wife had a job. Number three kid had just arrived. And I was like, you feel like a loser. You know, it's really still like, yeah. So anyhow,
00:16:08
Speaker
ended up through this incubator, Y Combinator, a number of very well-known big companies went through this like Airbnb and Stripe and Dropbox.
Innovative Work with Blockchain and Contentment
00:16:20
Speaker
One of these other big companies was Coinbase, which is a cryptocurrency exchange, if you're not familiar with it. The founder was looking, he was at this point already a billionaire on paper.
00:16:30
Speaker
He was looking for somebody to start up his personal foundation, which was, his vision was to leverage this blockchain and crypto technology to find new ways to help people in need.
00:16:41
Speaker
I raised my hand and he liked the fact that I was a startup person, not a charity person. So we end up working together. He basically hired me to head up his foundation and it was really fun work. Kind of some of the best of both worlds of like a new startup thing without a lot of the downside of doing a startup, like you're making a real salary. So we spent a few years like
00:17:03
Speaker
experimenting with some fun stuff like using crypto to help people in refugee camps or in Venezuela, which I know sounds ridiculous. I think we did some good, but some of it was definitely an elaborate marketing plan for Coinbase and for cryptocurrency in general. The way this, like many other stories, it doesn't have a great, super happy ending.
00:17:30
Speaker
As we got a little bit bigger and did a little bit more work, the people at Coinbase wanted us to be a part of their product group. I gladly allowed us to be folded into Coinbase to be totally transparent. Then I was going to get some equity in this company that was about to go public, which seemed very interesting to me.
00:17:55
Speaker
plausibly claim we could potentially help more, blah, blah, blah. So within about six months, again, I was in one of these
00:18:04
Speaker
At the time, these were all the best and the brightest from Facebook and Google who jumped over to Coinbase to hopefully make a bunch of money from their IPO. These are heavy, heavy hitters. I am not anywhere close to their league. It's almost like a little puppy being put in a den of wolves. I just got completely outmaneuvered. It's not that they were all evil and mean. I was also pretty bad at working within these larger organizations. I got fired about seven months after that happened.
00:18:34
Speaker
had wished I had stayed independent and stayed away from that sort of an organization. Now, that was about two years ago. Fortunately, I was partially compensated in this silly internet money that appreciated a whole bunch. While I don't have FU or retirement money, I got a little bit of a cushion.
00:18:53
Speaker
now to take my time and figure out what's next. After these two or three or four bruising incidents with either big tech companies or trying to get some start of you going, I've realized I no longer have any or I am not God's gift entrepreneurship. Frankly, I don't really want to work in these big tech, very competitive companies anymore. I simply want to find
00:19:18
Speaker
ways to support the lifestyle that I'm leading, playing with my kids, playing golf, going surfing occasionally, and maximize the ratio of income earned to effort extended.
00:19:33
Speaker
And also, I should say that during COVID, we moved down from, we were up in the Bay Area, moved down to Southern California, this sleepy little beach town, which is fantastic for me. I've got a golf cart with a surf rack. I drive my board down to the beach in the golf cart and go surfing. It's a lovely, lovely lifestyle. And I'm close to where I grew up, so I've got a bunch of friends that I've known for like 40 years. It's great. Couldn't be happier. But in the end, this is what it's all about, quite honestly.
00:20:03
Speaker
And you seem very, very happy to me. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, it's- What a roller coaster. There's a funny Buddhist or whatever quote where desire is unhappiness or something to that effect. I'm already butchering it. But yeah, I've lost all ambition, all desire. I know exactly what I want to be doing. I just need to find ways to financially support that.
00:20:27
Speaker
And you have time for your family, which is... Yeah, almost too much time. Almost too much time. No, I don't think so. I don't think so. Joe, this has been a roller coaster. Your life story is incredible. Incredible is a bit of an exaggeration, but thank you.
00:20:49
Speaker
But you also have probably a great network. So this is going to lead me to my next question, the one that you always ask. Aside from doing this amazing thing to record all these podcasts and listen to all of us, you know, show off or whatever, what else can you do for the insert community? How else do you think you could be useful?
00:21:10
Speaker
Yeah, good question. I do have, in a very small sense, somewhat of a Silicon Valley network. What's almost most valuable is this conduit I have into this thing called Y Combinator.
00:21:28
Speaker
Now, there have been two or three thousand startups funded by and gone through, many of which are dead and out of business. There are some big deals in terms of companies and people that have gone through this thing. If people, for whatever reason, want to get involved in startups in Silicon Valley, which the first thing I do when everybody tells me is stop. Don't. Trust me. The numbers are not in your favor.
00:21:53
Speaker
You're just going to be one variable on a venture capitalist, best case scenario, portfolio strategy and more often than not, you're going to go to zero and they're just going to be waiting for their one or two hits out of 50. So anyhow, I'll stop. I'll get on my soapbox. But yeah, if somebody is looking for a potential line into Silicon Valley, I may be able to help with that.
00:22:16
Speaker
As I mentioned, we moved down to San Diego, the city called Encinitas, a sleepy little beach town. Like I said, I've got the golf cart. I've got a bunch of surfboards. If I find out that you are in Southern California and I don't hear from you, and I'm speaking to everybody now who's listening, my heart will be broken. At a minimum, we should get a lunch, you get a drink. I've also got a few guest rooms here if you want to stay for a couple days. I'll get you and your family up on surfboards at our local beach. I've never had anybody who's not gotten up on their first day of surfing.
00:22:44
Speaker
No. That's amazing. Please come to San Diego. Also, I think you and a few other people have admitted these supposedly worldly, well-traveled INSEAD people.
Podcast Inspiration and Conclusion
00:22:56
Speaker
A good chunk of you have never been to California, which I'm offended by that. Yeah, I've never been. I think it's absurd. I've been to Tahoe to a wedding once. I think, yeah, attend INSEAD. Okay, okay. I guess you stepped over the state line for an hour or two and then went back to the West. Yeah, and then went back to Las Vegas.
00:23:14
Speaker
All right, and what could the internet community listen to this podcast do for you?
00:23:20
Speaker
Well, they're kind of already doing it. Well, okay, I'll be shameless and self-aware. One little thing I've done is I bought a franchise in this horrible, like, not horrible, I should say, just very boring, accounting, like niche accounting consulting franchise. It's called Cost Reduction. So if you or anybody you know, like owns or affiliated with a company based in North America who maybe could reduce what they're spending, please hit me up. I'd love to help them out. I'm actually doing something for-
00:23:48
Speaker
It's a little bit more what this company does. Honestly, it's so boring. I don't want to talk about it. It's so embarrassing. It's just a way to make money. And we do some good. Basically, we help companies reduce what they spend on boring, dumb stuff like shipping and merchant services and whatnot. So anyhow, if you know of a company that might like maybe you're on the board of or your buddy started one that's gotten big, we can help them out. We're doing something for James Cook's company right now. And I think we're helping them out. So that's the one thing, the one shameless plug I'll make
00:24:17
Speaker
No, but otherwise, I plan on, we're going to be in Europe next summer. I will be visiting. I hope to see some goats. You've been coming to the goats. Alex came already. They're real. They're real. Yeah, there was a lot of jokes there to be made about Alex in the countryside. I'm proud of my discipline. He was okay. I think except the flies, that was not so bad for him, except everything else he was a trooper. One more question that I am really interested in, and I'm sure the rest of us as well, is
00:24:46
Speaker
Why did you decide to do this podcast? It's just so amazing, so generous, and so wonderful of you. Well, it's not that generous. It's embarrassing how little time I spend on these things. I tell everybody. If you don't know, I tell everybody that. By the way, if you want to do the podcast, just reach out to me. There's no rhyme or reason. Jopra cannot be replaced.
00:25:05
Speaker
No, no, no. If you want to be interviewed, just reach out to me. I'm telling people who, like, there's no rhyme or reason to these people I'm choosing. They're the ones that just say yes when I ask them. And by the way, some people say no, which is funny. I think that we've got some shady people in our promotion. Oh, you and I are going to talk about that offline. Oh, no, no. I'll draw. Like, Monsey, Monsey's doing something really shady. She refuses to talk to me.
00:25:24
Speaker
She must be a spy or something like that. Yeah, Moncey needs to be named and shamed. The reason why I'm leading up to the last reunion of the 20 year, I found out about the other promotion. They were doing these podcasts to hype up the reunion, get people excited about it. I only found out about it at the reunion, which I thought was a brilliant idea. The best parts of these reunions for me, and I imagine everybody else, is these
00:25:51
Speaker
quick 15, 20 minute chats you have with people who you either lost touch with and sometimes forgot they even existed. And you're like, wow, you're doing amazing, amazing stuff. So I thought, well, if I can replicate that via podcast, that would be a lot of fun. And I mean, the truth is, this is kind of a selfish endeavor. I'm really enjoying these conversations. We just happened to record them and put them on a podcast. So I'd be doing it even if we... I would like to think I'd be doing it whether or not we were recording them.
00:26:20
Speaker
Well, Joe, on behalf of all of us, you're doing an amazing job. I'm serious. Don't be so modest. You've been so modest and downplaying everything. I don't know. You could be British for all I know, not Californian. But you're doing an amazing job. Seriously, we all enjoy them. We all listen to them. And thank you so much, really. Thank you. It's been such a pleasure talking to you. Much like my recent colonoscopy, this is a lot less painful than I thought it was going to be. Thank you, Pilar. You know, everybody can listen to this.
00:26:51
Speaker
I regret nothing. I regret nothing. Bye, Pilar. Thank you. Thank you. Bye.