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Insights on Problem Solving with Wil Eyi
5 Plays3 years ago
One of our favorite parts of this podcast is learning more about our guest's founder origin stories and how that inspires their business. Today we're talking with an entrepreneur who's building a solution inspired by a problem he faced as a student. Join us in today's conversation with Wil Eyi, Founder & CEO of Toolbox, and investor Curt Roberts of Kickstart (a VC firm for startups in Utah, Colorado, and the Mountain West) as we bring you both sides of a Perfect Pitch. In this episode, we'll talk about:
- How Wil's immigration and college story impacted his startup
- The importance of spending time in the problem your company is solving
- An investor's perspective on a startup's pivot
- Why an obsession with your customer is a necessary component for a successful startup
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guests
00:00:00
Speaker
One of my favorite parts of this podcast is learning more about our guest's founder origin stories and how that inspires their business.
00:00:07
Speaker
Today, we're talking with an entrepreneur who's building a solution inspired by a problem he faced as a student.
00:00:13
Speaker
Join us in today's conversation with Will Ayi, founder and CEO of Toolbox and investor Kurt Roberts as we bring you both sides of A Perfect Pitch.
00:00:31
Speaker
Perfect Pitch is a podcast from Kickstart that reveals the minds of both investors and entrepreneurs throughout a startup's journey.
00:00:41
Speaker
I'm your host, Karen Zelnick, and I'm excited to introduce you to today's guests.
Will Ayi's Education and Early Experiences
00:00:45
Speaker
Will, welcome to the show.
00:00:46
Speaker
So excited to have you.
00:00:48
Speaker
You immigrated to the US at 16.
00:00:50
Speaker
You earned a degree in finance from BYU before earning an MBA from Harvard Business School.
00:00:56
Speaker
And you have a wealth of volunteer experience as a board member at CoAfrica, an organization that provides education for children in Africa and as an advisor for Future Africa, where you help early stage African startups.
00:01:08
Speaker
Is there anything else that you would like us to know about you?
00:01:11
Speaker
Thank you, Karen.
00:01:13
Speaker
I just want to quickly add, I also do have an associate's degree in chemistry and an associate's degree in biology, both from Grayson County College, which at the time I went there was the cheapest community college in the US.
00:01:25
Speaker
And it's going to be very important later on for the story of Toolboxe.
00:01:29
Speaker
And also CoAfrica is a very construction-heavy nonprofit because we're building additional classroom capacity for existing schools.
00:01:37
Speaker
So think you see a school with children studying on the floor or studying outside.
00:01:42
Speaker
So a lot of the time that I spend there is reviewing construction bids and working with construction contractors on project management type things.
00:01:50
Speaker
And so it very much plays directly into what I do day-to-day at Toolbox as well.
00:01:55
Speaker
Well, I'm so excited to dive
Global Trends and Toolbox Introduction
00:01:57
Speaker
into that.
00:01:58
Speaker
And Kurt, of course, it's always great to have you back on the show.
00:02:01
Speaker
As always, we'll have a link to your bio in our show notes.
00:02:04
Speaker
In our last episode, we talked about your love for travel.
00:02:07
Speaker
Today, I'd love to hear something that excites you about the future.
00:02:11
Speaker
This is going to sound a little bit geeky, but I've been doing a lot of reading as of late and paying a lot of attention to what I think is going on at the level of sort of societies and governments around the world.
00:02:24
Speaker
And while things can look pretty scary in a lot of ways right now, I think there's a larger trend that will play out over time that is going to be quite positive.
00:02:35
Speaker
And that is...
00:02:37
Speaker
a general direction toward devolution of power closer to the individual, the neighborhood, the community, the city, province, state, whatever, and less in huge national governments because they're
00:02:57
Speaker
proving to not be horribly effective at a lot of what they do.
00:03:00
Speaker
And I think people around the world are getting quite frustrated.
00:03:04
Speaker
And I think that's going to result in some changes in many, many countries that will be quite positive.
00:03:11
Speaker
It's really geeky, but something I'm spending a lot of time thinking about right now.
00:03:16
Speaker
This is why we have you on the show, Kurt.
00:03:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:19
Speaker
Well, many listeners might fall asleep during that explanation, but hopefully not.
00:03:24
Speaker
So Karen, we also want to hear from you.
00:03:27
Speaker
What are you looking forward to in the future?
00:03:30
Speaker
I'm looking forward to going to England after Christmas because my husband is from there and his family is still there and he hasn't seen them since 2019.
00:03:38
Speaker
So that's what I'm looking forward to.
00:03:41
Speaker
Getting into the discussion today about Toolbox, Will, your founder story is going to be the focus of the conversation.
00:03:46
Speaker
But before we dive into that, would you please tell us a little bit about Toolbox?
00:03:51
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:03:52
Speaker
We think of Toolbox as a financial operating system for construction, maintenance, and repair contractors.
00:04:00
Speaker
So you think your plumbing contractor, your electrical contractor, your general contractor working with Toolbox as a financial operating system.
00:04:07
Speaker
Today, these industries, they're very project-based and therefore they have to track profitability on a project basis.
00:04:14
Speaker
And they have to either know whether they're making payroll or not based on whether a project is making money or not.
00:04:21
Speaker
But all the systems that are available to them are not project-based and they're still working with
00:04:26
Speaker
antiquated systems, a lot of Excel files, a lot of WhatsApp messages, a lot of emails to try to figure out what they can spend on a project.
00:04:34
Speaker
And they're sending all of that into their accounting data and trying to make sense of it with a quick enough turnaround to be able to know what change orders they need to have on a project or whether or not a project is worth pursuing in the future as they're trying to grow their business.
00:04:48
Speaker
And so...
Challenges and Solutions in Construction Finance
00:04:49
Speaker
We're giving them access to a way to make payments.
00:04:53
Speaker
And that comes in the perspective of whether it's a charge card or additional things that we're going to be adding here very soon.
00:04:59
Speaker
And making payments, managing those payments, the spend management to go there, the project-based classification for those payments, and being able to know where they're making money and growing in a more profitable way as a result.
00:05:12
Speaker
Thank you, Will.
00:05:13
Speaker
So let's rewind and talk about your story because it's incredible and it really helps explain why you found a toolbox.
00:05:20
Speaker
So tell us a little bit more about yourself.
00:05:23
Speaker
So I'm originally from a country called Gabon, which is in Central West Africa.
00:05:27
Speaker
I come from a city called Liberville, which is the capital city.
00:05:30
Speaker
First arrived to the US when I was 16.
00:05:33
Speaker
I was actually 15.
00:05:35
Speaker
And the US was the only country that would allow you to...
00:05:39
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essentially go to college on your own as a 16 year old without needing parental supervision or host family of some sort.
00:05:48
Speaker
So came here, actually had $300, which my mother had me put in my socks because she didn't want anyone to steal it from me.
00:05:57
Speaker
Although today she says it's $600, it was $300.
00:06:00
Speaker
She had also taken this loan, which was enough to pay for the plane ticket, the visa process, and one month at this language center in Kentucky, which is where I went first.
00:06:12
Speaker
But there was only about $2,000 left on that loan.
00:06:15
Speaker
So at the time...
Personal Struggles and Academic Shifts
00:06:17
Speaker
The language center cost about, I think it was $1,000 to $1,200 a month.
00:06:21
Speaker
So I figured, okay, I only have two more months and then I'm out.
00:06:24
Speaker
And so I ended up learning about this community college in North Texas through someone that worked for the U.S. Embassy in my country.
00:06:33
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And it was a super cheap community college.
00:06:35
Speaker
I think the cheapest community college in America back then.
00:06:37
Speaker
And so...
00:06:38
Speaker
Ended up taking a Greyhound bus from Louisville, Kentucky, down to Sherman, Texas, which is about an hour north of Dallas.
00:06:47
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Showed up, took the TAPS, the Texas Entrance Exam, basically for community colleges.
00:06:54
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Thankfully passed it and enrolled that semester.
00:06:57
Speaker
And so started working there, but I knew I only had one semester worth of funds.
00:07:01
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And then I had to either get a scholarship or figure it out.
00:07:05
Speaker
I did end up getting a scholarship from my country, but then by the second semester, I
00:07:10
Speaker
I guess they weren't paying the scholarship for whatever reason, which is when I decided I had to go and figure out how to pay for that.
00:07:19
Speaker
I only had to pay for school, but I also had to pay for my apartment that I was living in with roommates.
00:07:24
Speaker
And at this point, we had piled, I don't know, like six people in an apartment or something to try to figure out rent and utilities and whatnot.
00:07:33
Speaker
And so... And food, home places and public trance.
00:07:37
Speaker
Just man...
00:07:39
Speaker
Exactly.
00:07:39
Speaker
And this is Texas.
00:07:40
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So there is no public transportation.
00:07:43
Speaker
And also, you have to have a car to do anything.
00:07:45
Speaker
And obviously, I didn't have a car.
00:07:47
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Although, thankfully, one of my friends, who I'm still very close friends with today, he had a car.
00:07:51
Speaker
And so I had to wait for rides.
00:07:54
Speaker
And that saved me from walking as much as I was doing before.
00:07:57
Speaker
And so I was originally going to do computer science.
00:08:00
Speaker
So both of my parents had done computer science.
00:08:03
Speaker
Unfortunately, they ended up working for the government, which meant they didn't make any money.
00:08:07
Speaker
But my mom actually is a really good COBOL programmer and ended up training almost every COBOL programmer that I know of in Gabon was trained by my mom.
00:08:18
Speaker
And so very good software engineer.
00:08:20
Speaker
So I wanted to study computer science when I first got here, but I took my first computer science class and I got a C because I didn't understand what was going on.
00:08:29
Speaker
Everything was just complete jargon and I just couldn't figure it out.
00:08:32
Speaker
But I knew that I had done organic chemistry and biology in high school.
00:08:36
Speaker
And so I switched to biology and chemistry because I could do those without speaking English too much.
00:08:41
Speaker
And so did biology and chemistry, was able to do that actually for
00:08:45
Speaker
three years, end up transferring to Brigham Young University on account of people that I'd met in Texas.
00:08:52
Speaker
And when I get to BYU, I'm a junior in
Discovering Passion for Finance and Entrepreneurship
00:08:57
Speaker
biochemistry, taking 400 level classes and doing
00:09:01
Speaker
Pretty cool labs, actually, in terms of biology, chemistry labs, and thinking that I was going to do an MD-PhD at the time.
00:09:08
Speaker
I ended up, through a friend, enrolling in a private equity case competition, which was my first foreign to anything finance.
00:09:16
Speaker
But as I go through it, I realize...
00:09:19
Speaker
there was this whole thing where you could create businesses, you could fund businesses, you could grow businesses, and you could create these economies.
00:09:28
Speaker
And that's the way the world actually worked.
00:09:29
Speaker
And you were creating these things.
00:09:31
Speaker
And I became fascinated with it.
00:09:33
Speaker
And especially for Africa, because I do have a plan in before I die to create more economic growth in Africa, which obviously me working with Future Africa today is a way of fulfilling that dream.
00:09:48
Speaker
And to me, it was so fascinating that you could do that.
00:09:52
Speaker
And I thought, okay, if I do an MD-PhD, maybe I end up being a doctor and maybe I research a protein or I research something that ends up creating more benefit for humanity.
00:10:04
Speaker
But truly, there are billions of people...
00:10:07
Speaker
in Africa that still need access, including someone like my mother, that still need access to a lot of things.
00:10:13
Speaker
You think about my mother, a software engineer, was able to get essentially a scholarship from the government to go to France and do what at the time was very novel.
00:10:21
Speaker
This was in the early 90s to do software engineering.
00:10:24
Speaker
It was very much a novel thing to learn COBOL.
00:10:26
Speaker
And so she did that in France, came back to Gabon, ended up building the payments infrastructure for my country.
00:10:34
Speaker
And as a result...
00:10:36
Speaker
of that, you would think she would be able to get a mortgage.
00:10:40
Speaker
You think she'd be able to save and invest.
00:10:43
Speaker
You think she'd be able to have access to these things, but she doesn't have access to any of those things.
00:10:47
Speaker
Which is why getting a $3,000 loan after having worked for the government for something like 25 years by the time she got it was still an extremely difficult thing to do.
00:10:57
Speaker
And it shouldn't be because she had all the experiences necessary to show that she should be able to earn money to make that back.
00:11:05
Speaker
And so
00:11:06
Speaker
In any case, as I saw what you could do with investing, with creating businesses, growing businesses, I became absolutely fascinated with that.
00:11:16
Speaker
And I made a request to change my major.
00:11:18
Speaker
I do the private equity case competition.
00:11:20
Speaker
I'm doing all kinds of things.
00:11:21
Speaker
And obviously, I'm moving from biochemistry to finance in the middle of what should have been my senior year.
00:11:27
Speaker
So having to deal with all those changes.
00:11:29
Speaker
And eventually, I settled on private equity investing, which I think I viewed a little bit differently than
00:11:35
Speaker
than it really is.
00:11:36
Speaker
Probably would have zoomed in closer to venture capital if I understood what was happening at the time.
00:11:42
Speaker
But that's what I zoom in on.
00:11:44
Speaker
And so I start working towards that.
00:11:45
Speaker
I do what was then the University Impact Fund.
00:11:48
Speaker
It's not a Sorensen, I think, Global Center for Impact.
00:11:51
Speaker
That was, again, transformational because I see impact investing.
00:11:54
Speaker
I see social entrepreneurship.
00:11:56
Speaker
I'm working with entrepreneurs.
00:11:57
Speaker
I'm really learning this.
00:11:59
Speaker
End up going to Goldman Sachs.
00:12:01
Speaker
Getting to Goldman Sachs was fascinating because I remember I showed up
00:12:04
Speaker
I still have the receipt to this.
00:12:06
Speaker
I had spent all my savings that I'd gotten from my jobs to be able to fly myself to New York, meet with people, do all the networking.
00:12:16
Speaker
By the time I actually show up for my internship,
00:12:19
Speaker
Like I basically had zero.
00:12:21
Speaker
And at the time, I couldn't get a credit card because I didn't have credit really in the US.
00:12:25
Speaker
And so my brother had to send me $100.
00:12:27
Speaker
And I knew that's what I had until the first paycheck at Goldman Sachs.
00:12:33
Speaker
Because I also had to prepay my housing.
00:12:36
Speaker
And so I was basically wiped clean.
00:12:38
Speaker
And I had to get this $100.
00:12:39
Speaker
And I still have this receipt in my journal that my brother sent me to be able to not stop during my first two weeks at Goldman Sachs until our first paycheck.
00:12:49
Speaker
Oh,
00:12:49
Speaker
So a lot of $1 New York pizzas during those 2 weeks.
00:12:53
Speaker
And so I worked at Goldman, but I always knew that I was eventually trying to go towards private equity, which I thought was going to be this thing that was going to teach me all these things about starting businesses and building businesses.
00:13:05
Speaker
And so eventually make the move to a different group at Goldman and then go out to private equity.
00:13:11
Speaker
And in private equity, learned...
00:13:13
Speaker
An amazing law.
00:13:14
Speaker
Again, Warburg Pincus, another really, really great place where I learned absolutely fascinating things that I just didn't think or even things that I could learn.
00:13:24
Speaker
And so learned a lot about businesses, about the economy, ended up working on actually one thing in my country, believe it or not, in Gabon.
00:13:32
Speaker
Probably the only private equity deal that was being done in Gabon in that period of time.
00:13:36
Speaker
And so I ended up seeing a lot and spend a lot of different industries.
00:13:41
Speaker
And at this point, I'm
Inspiration and Development of Toolbox
00:13:43
Speaker
certain.
00:13:43
Speaker
So when I'm going to business school, I'm certain that I'm just going to hop over the Atlantic and start investing in African companies because that was the goal.
00:13:53
Speaker
And 3 years later, turns out I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur.
00:13:57
Speaker
I just had no idea that I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
00:14:00
Speaker
And I think that original feeling that I had back then during that private equity case competition was actually the original feeling of you can start something and grow it and make it happen.
00:14:11
Speaker
And I thought, well, I could do that through investing.
00:14:13
Speaker
And I realized, no, actually, you could do that.
00:14:15
Speaker
You want to build it.
00:14:17
Speaker
Exactly.
00:14:18
Speaker
And so that was interesting.
00:14:19
Speaker
And that was a very difficult decision.
00:14:21
Speaker
You can imagine, right?
00:14:21
Speaker
You go through business school and you come out of it and say, Oh, I'm actually going to make less than a third of what I used to make before business school.
00:14:29
Speaker
That doesn't feel good at all.
00:14:31
Speaker
You have more resilience than I think I have in my pinky.
00:14:35
Speaker
That's amazing.
00:14:36
Speaker
It's really amazing.
00:14:38
Speaker
Was there ever a time you doubted yourself or just felt completely overwhelmed by all of this?
00:14:44
Speaker
So on that Greyhound bus, there were three or four other people from Africa...
00:14:48
Speaker
Not all of us were from Gabon, from different countries, but we were all at the same language center and we all took the same Greyhound bus.
00:14:55
Speaker
And then when I was looking for work, there were other Africans that were also looking for work.
00:14:59
Speaker
So I think there was an element of we were all going through it together.
00:15:03
Speaker
So I may not have necessarily...
00:15:05
Speaker
quite taken the time to realize just what was going on because you're there with friends.
00:15:11
Speaker
We're all looking for work and we're all doing different things to look for work and others had found work.
00:15:16
Speaker
So I don't think I quite fully understood what was happening at the time.
00:15:21
Speaker
And the only time I really paused to realize I had just lost... It was actually a grand uncle, but he grew up
00:15:29
Speaker
with us because my mom was renting from her father in this communal house type thing.
00:15:34
Speaker
So I grew up in the same house with this granduncle.
00:15:38
Speaker
Losing him, the scholarship not paying, me realizing I wasn't going to make rent.
00:15:45
Speaker
I think that was probably the one time that I paused and I thought, what am I doing?
00:15:53
Speaker
I should just go home.
00:15:55
Speaker
I remember it was probably about a week.
00:15:57
Speaker
And at the end of that week is when I decided, I don't care what it takes because I decide enough is enough.
00:16:02
Speaker
I'm just going to figure it out.
00:16:04
Speaker
Well, thank you so much for sharing all of that with us.
00:16:07
Speaker
I know it's sometimes really hard to talk about yourself, but it actually ties in perfectly to your founding story.
00:16:14
Speaker
So we're going to pivot a little bit.
00:16:16
Speaker
And I'd like to hear more about what led you to founding Toolbox.
00:16:20
Speaker
Going back to my days of Grayson County College, when I first came to the US, I was very naive in how things work.
00:16:29
Speaker
I graduated high school three years early.
00:16:31
Speaker
So I really thought I could show up here, apply for scholarships and just get people to pay for college for me.
00:16:36
Speaker
But of course, it doesn't work that way, which means that I ended up having to get a lot of blue collar jobs to pay for college.
00:16:42
Speaker
And so fast forward to the time where I'm now at HBS and I am...
00:16:47
Speaker
actually walking and I was heading to something that had nothing to do with construction, but I ran into these two construction workers that are outside of a job site and they are doing exactly what I'd been doing 10 years prior.
00:17:00
Speaker
They're looking for work.
00:17:01
Speaker
They're looking to fill a shift.
00:17:04
Speaker
I think to myself, okay, it's been 10 years and yet people are still looking for these jobs.
00:17:09
Speaker
These industries still work in very similar ways to how they were 10 years prior.
00:17:13
Speaker
And so that's what throws me into these job sites.
00:17:17
Speaker
And I'm meeting with contractors.
00:17:18
Speaker
I'm meeting with project managers.
00:17:19
Speaker
I'm really figuring out why is it that 10 years have gone by and things still work the exact same way they worked when I was around this 10 years ago.
00:17:28
Speaker
And that's the catalyst for deciding to spend time there and eventually to starting Toolbox.
00:17:33
Speaker
When you say filling a shift, you were going on site to construction sites, hoping to just get a job that day.
00:17:41
Speaker
It was anything, restaurants, gas stations.
00:17:44
Speaker
And so I actually was just in the Dallas area recently.
00:17:48
Speaker
And I just realized going there because I was driving in this rental car, I realized that I was walking on the side of what actually is a freeway.
00:17:56
Speaker
I didn't realize it was a freeway when I was walking by there, but I went back and I realized it's like a 50, 60 mile an hour freeway.
00:18:03
Speaker
And I was just walking on the side as I was looking for work.
00:18:06
Speaker
And so now I realize just the danger of what I was doing.
00:18:08
Speaker
But back then, that's just what I did.
00:18:11
Speaker
And that's just what other people did too, by the way.
00:18:13
Speaker
It wasn't just me.
00:18:14
Speaker
So combining seeing people doing the same thing that I'd been doing right when I was 16 and 17 just really left an impression that ended up being the catalyst for everything that I've done so far with Toolbox.
00:18:28
Speaker
That's really impressive.
00:18:29
Speaker
And Kurt, when Will first pitched Toolbox, what were your initial impressions?
00:18:35
Speaker
Well, they were all positive.
00:18:38
Speaker
So positive, in fact, that I made an offer to participate in the round about two-thirds of the way into Will's one-hour pitch.
00:18:50
Speaker
It is the one and only time I have ever done that in my almost eight years in this business.
00:18:56
Speaker
What impressed me was not just Will's understanding of the customer that he wanted to serve by having lived the problem.
00:19:05
Speaker
It was more his deep, deep appreciation for the nuances of those problems.
00:19:14
Speaker
Yeah, so we had actually built Toolbox slightly differently when
Toolbox's Evolution and Customer-Centric Approach
00:19:18
Speaker
we first started.
00:19:18
Speaker
So for the first year and a half of Toolbox, we were building a labor marketplace for this market.
00:19:24
Speaker
It was a managed labor marketplace.
00:19:26
Speaker
And so as we were helping contractors scale up and down at various projects, we also started building a lot of project tooling for the projects that we were helping them staff up and down.
00:19:36
Speaker
And with that tooling came a lot of financial tooling around invoicing and so forth.
00:19:40
Speaker
And that's when we started realizing really what the screaming need and the screaming pain was for these contractors.
00:19:45
Speaker
And even before we launched the labor marketplace, I spent about the better part of a year with contractors when I was in business school, spent time on job sites, really figuring out what was really the problem that they were dealing with and how could we solve it best.
00:19:59
Speaker
And so launching Toolbox today as a financial operating system was really a couple of years in the making, two and a half years in the making of
00:20:07
Speaker
really working with these contractors and fully understanding what their issues are, how they're solving these problems, and seeing what the screaming pain was on the financial management side.
00:20:18
Speaker
I'd love if you could talk a bit about how did you get there?
00:20:22
Speaker
What insights can entrepreneurs learn from you with that pivot?
00:20:26
Speaker
One thing you always have to worry about as an entrepreneur is you may be solving a screaming need, but it may just be that either A, the current environment just does not allow for your solution to work.
00:20:40
Speaker
you also have to recognize that it may be a screaming problem, but it may not be one that your users are willing to pay a certain amount for.
00:20:48
Speaker
So you may also be priced out from the perspective of my contribution margin will always be very bad.
00:20:55
Speaker
If I try to scale this, I'm just going to burn so much money.
00:20:58
Speaker
And at that time, we had already seen some of the flows that were going on.
00:21:02
Speaker
And so I think I grew frustrated of the back and forth of trying to figure out what the exact model was.
00:21:09
Speaker
So I woke up super early 4th of July, started putting together landing pages and just sent it out to a few people and put some ads towards it and try to figure out, okay, what could I actually get if this was a landing page, if this was what we were selling?
00:21:23
Speaker
And by the next day, came back to a lot of emails.
00:21:28
Speaker
So decided, okay, let me add a second form.
00:21:30
Speaker
Just send them a second form to say, okay, you filled out this information.
00:21:33
Speaker
Give me more information.
00:21:34
Speaker
Give me some banking information.
00:21:37
Speaker
Give me your EIN.
00:21:38
Speaker
Give me more information.
00:21:39
Speaker
Because I really want to see if you're serious about this.
00:21:41
Speaker
And sure enough, a few days later, I come back and they're sending me more information.
00:21:45
Speaker
And then I say, okay, let's schedule a demo.
00:21:46
Speaker
So I scheduled a demo call and I actually took a screenshot of my calendar.
00:21:49
Speaker
I think I sent it to Kurt and Tanner and...
00:21:53
Speaker
for I can't remember how many days.
00:21:55
Speaker
It was back-to-back calls.
00:21:57
Speaker
My calendar was filled with demo calls.
00:21:59
Speaker
I could not do anything other than taking a demo call.
00:22:03
Speaker
And that's when I knew that we had really hit on something that people truly wanted.
00:22:08
Speaker
And they were willing to, over 4th of July weekend and so forth, take the time to sign up, sign up on the second forms, schedule a demo call, attend the demo call with me.
00:22:19
Speaker
And that's when we knew that we had something going on.
00:22:22
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's really impressive.
00:22:24
Speaker
And it speaks to your resilience.
00:22:25
Speaker
I also like the fact that you didn't have to wait for that to be perfect to go out and get that customer input.
00:22:32
Speaker
That's important.
00:22:32
Speaker
And that's something that people might wait to do.
00:22:35
Speaker
But you're highlighting that it's not really necessary.
00:22:37
Speaker
Get enough to get the right information that you need to then move forward.
00:22:41
Speaker
Any thoughts on that, Kurt?
00:22:42
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's, again, just an illustration of how effectively Will created the insights about this change in direction.
00:22:53
Speaker
He took it in bite-sized chunks.
00:22:55
Speaker
Start with a little idea, go out and get some feedback on it.
00:22:58
Speaker
If that idea is confirmed, now get the next little piece of information.
00:23:02
Speaker
When a lot of money and funding had already been spent on building the prior business, and the realization that in some respects,
00:23:13
Speaker
we were starting over.
00:23:15
Speaker
Not completely.
00:23:17
Speaker
We were still going to serve the same business, the same customer, but now with a solution that was nothing like what we were previously anticipating the toolbox was going to do.
00:23:31
Speaker
And so to run this insight gathering process and to turn those insights into
00:23:39
Speaker
into quick and dirty versions of product that customers could react to, that prospective customers could react to, so that you're honing in on the thing that ultimately will sell is just an extremely powerful method to build a company.
00:23:57
Speaker
And the best and most effective founders do this really, really well.
00:24:04
Speaker
And as an investor, you're not turned off by a pivot as long as it's well thought out, right?
00:24:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:10
Speaker
We fully anticipate at the stage where we invest a pre-seed company or a seed stage company, the vast majority will make pretty meaningful pivots during the journey.
00:24:24
Speaker
It's one of the reasons...
00:24:26
Speaker
why when we're evaluating an investment opportunity, we pay so much attention to the qualities of the founding team because you want to make sure you're backing some people who've got a great insight, know what kind of business opportunity exists,
00:24:42
Speaker
But also have that humility that you have a sense that they will be able to learn along the way and that they'll be able to translate that learning into changes in the company when it's obvious the signals you're getting back from the market are that change needs to happen.
00:25:01
Speaker
This, I think, was one of the more significant changes we've seen, at least in the investments that I've done.
00:25:09
Speaker
But at the stage at which we invest, this will happen almost always.
00:25:15
Speaker
Some version of a pivot will happen almost always.
00:25:17
Speaker
And so it's up to us as investors to make sure that we are choosing founders that we know will handle those signals in the right way when the signals are telling them a pivot is necessary.
00:25:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:32
Speaker
And how do you know you've found a founder who can handle that?
00:25:36
Speaker
Well, some of that can come from past experience.
00:25:39
Speaker
I don't know that there was necessarily anything in Will's resume that would have suggested that to us.
00:25:46
Speaker
If you find a founder that's built a company before, and in the process of getting to know them, you hear that they actually went through that experience.
00:25:54
Speaker
You know, okay, they've seen this before.
00:25:56
Speaker
They went through the process of having to do it.
00:25:58
Speaker
And so you have the confidence they'll be able to do it again.
00:26:02
Speaker
We didn't necessarily see that in Will, but
00:26:05
Speaker
What we did see was, as we were talking about in this very first pitch meeting, even as we were talking about the company he was trying to build, it was clear to me that he was the type of person that really was going to pay very, very careful attention to signal that he was getting.
00:26:22
Speaker
And so that in combination with Tanner's personal experience with Will, because they were classmates at business school, we could take shortcuts and
00:26:32
Speaker
I think to seeing that he had that capability and that predisposition in his mindset.
00:26:39
Speaker
Well, you have a unique perspective in that you are effectively running a startup in an industry that's notoriously difficult for technology founders.
00:26:47
Speaker
What do you see in your users that pushes you to continue building after all these years?
00:26:53
Speaker
To me, it's seeing their excitement at features that we're prepping, that we're building, that we're testing, and seeing the real impact that it has on their businesses, on their employees, on their livelihood.
00:27:07
Speaker
And unlike...
00:27:09
Speaker
say, a startup founder who loves having an additional piece of software to make things more efficient.
00:27:14
Speaker
Oftentimes for them, it means, okay, am I profitable this year?
00:27:17
Speaker
Am I not profitable?
00:27:19
Speaker
I'm actually able to take some money home to have a vacation or am I just going to have to get back on the grind and hope I have a vacation next year?
00:27:27
Speaker
So it makes a very big difference.
00:27:28
Speaker
So to me, that's what pushes me because I see the real impact that it has on their lives and it makes me want to have a better product for them.
00:27:36
Speaker
What Will said is an insight that I think applies to some of the best companies we've ever funded, which is there are problems that aren't as interesting, fascinating, sexy, interesting.
00:27:53
Speaker
obviously large, that they get routinely overlooked in venture funding.
00:27:58
Speaker
And I think a formula that has worked quite well for us and pretty consistently for us is to find founders that see those kinds of problems
00:28:09
Speaker
that take advantage of the opportunity to fix them when everybody else is ignoring them because they just don't seem all that interesting or big.
00:28:16
Speaker
And when you really stop and pay attention, you dive into an understanding of what those problems are, you realize in many, many cases that they desperately need to be solved, that a customer would gladly pay to have it solved, and that the opportunity is significantly larger than it appears on the surface.
The Role of Feedback in Innovation
00:28:38
Speaker
Will, I'd love to explore a little bit how you go about innovation within your company.
00:28:44
Speaker
How do you handle that?
00:28:45
Speaker
How are you discovering these opportunities for growth in an area that Kurt mentioned?
00:28:50
Speaker
It can not seem like it's really that big to start.
00:28:54
Speaker
I'd say we're still learning how to do this properly.
00:28:57
Speaker
Emotionally, I think we're there.
00:29:00
Speaker
But tactically, we're still learning.
00:29:02
Speaker
And that's obsession with the customer and the customer problem.
00:29:06
Speaker
I was listening to something from Dylan Field of Figma, who is in the process of selling his company for $20 billion to Adobe.
00:29:15
Speaker
And he was mentioning how at some point they were actually building a meme generator and then ended up deciding that a meme generator may not be the best use of their time.
00:29:24
Speaker
And obviously they ended up building the Figma that we know today, which I think we're all grateful for Figma today.
00:29:28
Speaker
And I'm sure I would have been grateful for a meme generator, but this one seems a lot more useful for society.
00:29:33
Speaker
It's not as grateful.
00:29:35
Speaker
Yes, exactly.
00:29:37
Speaker
And so I would say, frankly, we're still learning how to not follow the distractions.
00:29:43
Speaker
But it really goes back to customer obsession.
00:29:46
Speaker
For example, we had a pretty long discussion this morning for about two hours about a specific...
00:29:51
Speaker
problem that we're trying to address with features and so forth.
00:29:55
Speaker
And we had a conclusion.
00:29:56
Speaker
And then we decided for the next two weeks, my calendar is going to be filled with meetings with customers.
00:30:02
Speaker
And I'm probably going to also fly out to meet with some of them because we're trying to answer this specific problem.
00:30:09
Speaker
We could have just said, Hey, we did our strategic analysis and we figured out what the answer is.
00:30:12
Speaker
Great, which we did.
00:30:14
Speaker
But now we're going back to the customer and saying, Okay, let's really test these assumptions to figure out if this is truly...
00:30:20
Speaker
the problem that they're facing?
00:30:21
Speaker
Is this the way they would describe it?
00:30:22
Speaker
And is this the way that we should be building it?
00:30:24
Speaker
And so I think that customer obsession and getting the answer from the customer is really critical.
00:30:30
Speaker
Kurt, Will was just talking about an obsession with the customer.
00:30:32
Speaker
Do you see that as a necessary component for successful startups?
00:30:37
Speaker
Not only is it necessary, but in Will's case, it's his superpower.
00:30:42
Speaker
I will never forget an update call that Will did with myself and Tanner on our team.
00:30:49
Speaker
It was at a time when the original business model was showing some cracks in
00:30:55
Speaker
unbeknownst to us at the time, Will was already starting to think about what the pivot for Toolbox might need to look like.
00:31:04
Speaker
By the time we did the update call, he had already not just concepted the idea, but had put out an invitation to beta users on a basic platform, had already started to establish a waiting list.
00:31:18
Speaker
He had identified the types of contractors that
00:31:21
Speaker
that might be the best first customers.
00:31:25
Speaker
He was getting early engagement.
00:31:27
Speaker
And this was in a matter of days.
00:31:30
Speaker
I remember leaving that call and walking out of my office and poking my head into Tanner's office, a principal on the investment team at Kickstart.
00:31:40
Speaker
And I said, I don't know where this is going to go, but I have as much confidence as I possibly could have that Will's going to figure it out.
00:31:52
Speaker
That does sound like an absolute superpower.
00:31:55
Speaker
Not only do you not follow distractions as far as new products and things to build, and you focus it on the customer, but you also don't follow the distraction of coming up against a roadblock.
00:32:03
Speaker
It'd be easy to just focus on that and try to continue banging your head on it.
00:32:07
Speaker
But it's a really impressive pivot that you guys have taken.
00:32:10
Speaker
And Kurt, I have a follow-up question for you.
00:32:14
Speaker
Do you ever find that a strong founder market fit leads to blind spots or biases?
00:32:19
Speaker
There's no question it can cut both ways.
00:32:22
Speaker
Someone who spent a lot of time in an industry can make shortcut assumptions about what they know about what a problem is without possibly really investing the time and effort
00:32:37
Speaker
to dive deep with the stakeholders that are most closely associated with that problem.
00:32:43
Speaker
So Mark Frank, who runs Sondermind, Mark had had several years of experience in healthcare.
00:32:51
Speaker
He had family members that were in the profession of mental health counseling.
00:32:57
Speaker
And it would be relatively easy for a founder like that to believe that between understanding the U.S. health care system, how things get paid for, what insurance contracts look like, how they get negotiated, and a family member or two that he could speak to,
00:33:14
Speaker
to think about how to start a business in behavioral health, it would be really easy to make assumptions that would then lead to locking in on a product, spending a lot of time and money building that product, only to trot it out to the market and realize that there were some nuances that would make an enormous difference in ultimately whether it would be adopted and the degree to which it would actually solve the problem.
00:33:41
Speaker
And so there's this magic combination, I think, that exists between being smart enough to know what questions to ask and being able to speak the customer's language while also turning off your own assumptions and biases while the customer answers your questions.
Founders' Traits and Personal Insights
00:34:00
Speaker
That's a very hard skill to get right.
00:34:03
Speaker
And I think it's
00:34:04
Speaker
Most commonly reflected in founders that just have a nice combination of both maturity, curiosity, and humility when they go about that process of finding those insights.
00:34:18
Speaker
Would you say that Will has that?
00:34:20
Speaker
No pressure.
00:34:23
Speaker
Will has bucket loads of that.
00:34:26
Speaker
That's what I thought.
00:34:27
Speaker
That's what I thought.
00:34:27
Speaker
That's why I felt safe asking that.
00:34:29
Speaker
But how did you handle combating those blind spots?
00:34:32
Speaker
Or what measures did you put in place?
00:34:34
Speaker
Or how did you develop your team to make sure you didn't have those?
00:34:39
Speaker
That has to be one of the scariest things for a founder.
00:34:43
Speaker
Because one thing I always have to remind myself is, I will not know whether or not I'm a good CEO until 5-7 years into Toolbox.
00:34:56
Speaker
Because the reality is, product market fit is something that
00:35:03
Speaker
many people luck into and therefore makes them feel like they have superpowers because they found product market fit.
00:35:12
Speaker
And oftentimes, it just happens to be that they just found product market fit as a result of sometimes pure luck.
00:35:19
Speaker
And I think for me as a founder, as much as we can put systems in place and trying to hire a certain way, we have a take-home portion of our interview where we ask people pretty deep questions about their lives, just better understand who they are as a person, at least at the executive levels.
00:35:37
Speaker
And all those things are very helpful.
00:35:39
Speaker
But at the end of the day, if we don't have product market fit, none of these things will ever matter to anyone.
00:35:44
Speaker
And if we have product market fit, everyone will think that's the secret sauce to figuring out all life's problems.
00:35:49
Speaker
And that's one of the things that you always have to be wary of.
00:35:51
Speaker
And so I would say I do try to...
00:35:54
Speaker
make sure first in hiring to try to make sure that we have people from different enough backgrounds.
00:36:00
Speaker
And we have some Ivy Leaguers.
00:36:02
Speaker
We have some people who never went to college or dropped out of college or went into a community college and dropped out.
00:36:08
Speaker
We have people who work at...
00:36:11
Speaker
leading tech companies, multi-billion dollar tech companies.
00:36:14
Speaker
We have people where this is their first or second experience in tech.
00:36:18
Speaker
And their first one was an even smaller company than Toolbox.
00:36:21
Speaker
And so I think having that true diversity of thought on the team is one step.
00:36:27
Speaker
And then also making sure
00:36:29
Speaker
to gather ideas in different ways, in ways that people don't feel like they have to be in a room with someone else and convince someone else of something.
00:36:37
Speaker
And being able to have silos where you ask people the same question and get different answers and then filter that through your own lens.
00:36:44
Speaker
I think all of that is very important.
00:36:47
Speaker
And
00:36:48
Speaker
All of that will hopefully bear fruit as we get out of the figuring out how to scale into the scaling massively.
00:36:57
Speaker
And at that point, we'll probably have to rethink some of our systems as well.
00:37:01
Speaker
I love that insight about making sure that you have thought diversity on a leadership team.
00:37:06
Speaker
And Kurt, how have you seen a lack of thought diversity on a leadership team impact a startup?
00:37:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:11
Speaker
You know, I suppose I haven't really seen too many examples of this in the Kickstart portfolio, mostly because in a very rapidly growing company, you oftentimes don't have the luxury of always finding people whose backgrounds completely line up, not only with the job and the role that they're going to take, but with experience in
00:37:37
Speaker
the industry that you're going after, the business model, let's say, whether it be like a SaaS company or a marketplace company, you're never going to get all of those factors to line up in candidates for any position.
00:37:49
Speaker
And so I think...
00:37:51
Speaker
Thought diversity in a rapidly growing company will oftentimes come almost as a natural default of just having to do a whole ton of hiring very, very quickly.
00:38:04
Speaker
That said, the smartest CEOs, particularly at the leadership level, the executive level, are intentional about that.
00:38:13
Speaker
very much seek in the design of role descriptions and as they source candidates for positions to really find that nice combination of someone who can clearly hit the ground running and will be effective from their first day on the job because of their past experience.
00:38:32
Speaker
And yet at the same time,
00:38:35
Speaker
will come with fresh perspectives because they've done other things from which insights could be brought over and possibly bring ideas that otherwise usually wouldn't occur to people who've lived their entire careers in the type of business that company is building.
00:38:57
Speaker
Did you find that, Will, a little bit when you were building your team?
00:39:01
Speaker
I would say absolutely true that the people that you have access to, you can't just say, okay, I want someone who worked out of fintech with SMBs.
00:39:10
Speaker
That number of people is very, very small.
00:39:13
Speaker
One thing that I love is talking slope versus intercept in terms of saying, well, this person is on the right trajectory to get to what I need in terms of someone in my leadership team.
00:39:22
Speaker
And so, yes, I'd say the pool of candidates already has to be broad enough that saves you a lot of time.
00:39:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:28
Speaker
Thank you.
00:39:29
Speaker
And I'm always hesitant to wrap up the conversations.
00:39:31
Speaker
There never just seems to be a point where I'm like, great.
00:39:33
Speaker
Okay.
00:39:34
Speaker
We're done.
00:39:34
Speaker
I could talk forever with all of our founders and our partners, but we do have to wrap it up.
00:39:40
Speaker
And Will, we'd like to end these episodes with a question to everybody.
00:39:44
Speaker
And that is what's an effective practice you've implemented in your work or personal life that you think has had a great impact on your success?
00:39:52
Speaker
I would say this is a newer practice for me, but one that has been pretty much invaluable is writing.
00:40:02
Speaker
You always have a million things in your mind and trying to figure out...
00:40:07
Speaker
different decisions you're trying to make and so forth.
00:40:09
Speaker
And I've found that by the time you're done writing, you either realize that the way you were thinking through it was just completely wrong.
00:40:17
Speaker
Or you get an insight from saying, okay, now that I've put my thoughts down, I actually get it.
00:40:22
Speaker
And even in my personal life, I would say that's also been very helpful.
00:40:25
Speaker
So writing is something that I would encourage every founder to do as you come across decision points.
00:40:31
Speaker
write memos to yourself and write memos to your team and use that as the background for discussion.
00:40:38
Speaker
I think it's been very helpful for me.
00:40:40
Speaker
One time I was doing a thing called Morning Pages where you just write freehand the first three pages of whatever comes to your mind.
00:40:46
Speaker
And it's really, really interesting.
00:40:48
Speaker
Kurt, any thoughts on writing?
00:40:50
Speaker
You're a great writer.
00:40:51
Speaker
I don't know that I'm a great writer, but I do really enjoy it.
00:40:54
Speaker
And I have experienced exactly what Will has experienced.
00:41:01
Speaker
I'm not going to get this saying right, but...
00:41:04
Speaker
I really do believe that there's a lot of truth in the notion that reading helps you gather information, but writing is what's required to really learn.
00:41:14
Speaker
It is such a good forcing mechanism to really make you think through in very, very clear ways what it is you believe and why.
00:41:25
Speaker
And I just truly believe there is no way to get that without writing, especially as people are going through their formal schooling years.
00:41:35
Speaker
They often don't really have a full appreciation for how powerful writing can be, not just in communicating to others and being persuasive, but just how powerful it is to force you to be a more clear thinker about what you believe and why.
00:41:51
Speaker
It's well worth the effort to hone that skill.
00:41:55
Speaker
So we're all going to go out and buy a journal now is what we're going to do.
00:41:58
Speaker
There you go.
00:42:00
Speaker
Well, Kurt, thank you so much for being here today.
00:42:03
Speaker
Thank you, Karen.
00:42:04
Speaker
Thank you, Karen.
00:42:05
Speaker
Always a pleasure.
00:42:06
Speaker
And of course, thank you for listening as we dive deep into what it takes to create the perfect pitch.
00:42:11
Speaker
If you want to learn more about our investor, Kurt Roberts from Kickstart or our founder, Will A.E.
00:42:16
Speaker
from Toolbox, we'll have a link to the company and a longer bio in our show notes at kickstartfund.com.
00:42:22
Speaker
You can listen to more episodes of Perfect Pitch wherever you listen to your podcasts.
00:42:26
Speaker
And if you like what you're learning, leave us a review or rating.
00:42:29
Speaker
We'll be back next time with more insights from entrepreneurs and the investors who fund them.
00:42:33
Speaker
So be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a thing.