The Path to Parallel Entrepreneurship – Ryan Buckley – MicroConf Growth 2018

0:00[Music] [Music] [Applause] hey hey thank you for voting for me first of all appreciate it so I wrote a book exploring the question of is it okay for founders to have side projects it's kind of a taboo um kind of a taboo thing to do but I did it and I'm really glad that I did and I wanted to discover other people who have done it and then like really dive into why they're doing it and and see what I can learn from that so I'm just curious who here has more than one business that they're running right now and can you keep your hand up if those businesses

0:59are doing more than 10k a month so there's actually more than I thought I'm here that's that's quite a bit so everybody's doing it why does it have this stigma like why would your investors if you had investors frown upon that of course there are some super high profile examples of this and I looked at the career trajectories of some of these guys probably all familiar with Jack Dorsey you may not know that in October 2015 within ten days of each other he became the permanent CEO of Twitter after he got kicked out for going to fashion shows and doing yoga or something like that they really didn't like that he had

1:40other interests but they brought him back and within 10 days of that he took his side business Square public on the New York Stock Exchange parallel on Cerner parallel entrepreneurship at the highest level Marsha Kilgore another really interesting story she's been doing parallel entrepreneurship all along so when she first started bliss she actually had a fitness business going on at the same time she was kind of saddened when she had to close that down because Bliss was really taking off she sold bliss to Lou Vuitton who sold it to Starwood she started another business that soap & Glory sold that to boots and then started three other things so she

2:26is now running three businesses at the same time right now and then of course there's this guy just mister superhuman one one interesting fact about Elon Musk he is not the founder of Tesla I didn't really know this until I tried to dissect all of this mess that he's working on he was you know after he made a fortune selling on the on the PayPal sale he started SpaceX he got a CTO he's like cofounders of SpaceX he found the original founders of Tesla and invested in them and then they brought him in to be CEO so again this works at the highest of high levels but I still was

3:06really curious why do it like why are these people doing this and what can I learn from the superhuman parallel entrepreneurs that I could maybe take to my own day job and so I interviewed a whole bunch of people not a whole bunch like really a couple dozen people who kind of like you who raised your hands earlier are running multiple businesses at once and I asked them so why are you doing it number one reason you may not be surprised because it's a passion like they're just super interested in it and I'll go into a couple more ground-level examples of people who are pursuing a

3:48passion with their side businesses even though they are already founders of one business the other one diversification it's taking the principle of portfolio theory and applying it to your own career as an entrepreneur it's asking the question if my investors if you have investors can diversify their risk and invest in multiple companies at once why do they expect me as a founder to only have one business why do I have to be a hundred percent all in on this thing when they get to diversify and the parallel entrepreneurs who are doing this recognize that as kind of a unfair situation so they're starting other businesses in addition to the one that's

4:38maybe paying most of the bills I also had a hypothesis that these entrepreneurs because they're running multiple businesses at once probably have this super broad set of skills so I asked them I had like 24 tasks I said which of these can you do yourself and which of these would you have to outsource and I was kind of expecting it to be broad I didn't think that there would be any clustering there but by far the two most common skills that they would do themselves and not outsource so that they could do themselves and not outsource number one was writing it's like 90 95 percent of them would rather

5:22than outsource rather than have someone else on their team do it they'd write blog posts they'd write a book they do all of their content marketing and then the second one was finance so that would be either building their own books analyzing their own books building their own Excel models surprisingly it was not programming I expected these parallel entrepreneurs to be kind of like most of the people that I'm meeting here like fairly technical like people who would be able to develop their own products in fact less than half of them or it actually developed their own products I kind of I asked some more questions of

6:02them bundled it into a couple of what I'd say broader personality traits one thing that I just kind of gleaned out of these conversations like I interviewed them in depth it's like it's this level of discipline that kind of struck me as unusual or at a higher level than most of the entrepreneurs who I know of course running multiple businesses you really have to keep your head straight doing that you also have to be very efficient at toggling back and forth between multiple businesses kind of like context switching and not have a lot of call it like transaction cost or friction toggling from one business to

6:42the other and they are able to do that by being very regimented and then the other thing because you're kind of strapped for resources you're just like one person or maybe you know one one small team doing multiple projects you really have to be creative about your resources and be able to ask the questions that maybe your competitors are not asking so that curiosity it sort of also bundle in with like creativity and it's not like this really hard super smart like Asperger II high IQ kind of thing like it's just having a lot of discipline and having a lot of curiosity or creativity just because I was curious

7:24I actually pulled all of them like what business structure are you using it's really great that Patrick is now adding an LLC to stripes atlas because by far LLC was the preferred legal mechanism for their businesses so want to leave you with a little bit of parting wisdom from the people who I interviewed max all Schiller is the founder of sales hacker it's a website kind of a media business that does three and a half something million dollars a year he has a small team spends most of his time deep-sea fishing off the coast of Florida he's a master at outsourcing and like the thing that I really took away from his

8:04conversation with me was don't be afraid or I guess be aware of what you're not great at and if you're going to be working on multiple businesses at once be able to outsource your weaknesses and his next company is second company Sutra is a coffee alternatives like this powdery stuff you pour into hot water it looks a little gross but he it actually tastes pretty good he built it because he can't drink coffee and wanted something else so this was a passion case mr. Pigford it's a friendly face around here so I'm earlier one of my favorite entrepreneurs started bear metrics great business small team that

8:48we were a customer of his for a long time and my first business I saw a tweet from him that all of a sudden he's launching this HomeGoods product and I thought wow like here's a software guy doing vases and paperweights in his garage like what's up with that so I asked him about it and he said effectively that it helps keep him sane and because he is a great manager he recognizes that hey if he's allowed to do side projects he's actually going to encourage his own team to do side projects as well and in fact mentors his team in their one-on-ones about their side projects kind of incorporating it

9:28into like the culture of bear metrics and I realized I didn't really introduce myself I'm a recovering venture backed founder sold scripted unfortunately at a loss but I had a side business going at the time that discovers email addresses Toofer pays my bills now and liceo is starting to make money and I'm actually launching my first customer for Vox loca tomorrow somehow to do that in the in the hallway and my word of advice is if you're going to do this again technical audience here I'm a self-taught engineer kind of a shitty engineer but I can build stuff that works I'm able to do that because I don't really deviate from

10:15my tech stack so it is of course appealing to most technologists to chase after the newest JavaScript framework the newest hosting provider I'm like Ruby on Rails Heroku postgrads just regular old JavaScript all the way and that's what I do and I can maintain and I can build without pulling my hair out and that's what I found that works I have all of this and more in this book again that I wrote it's on Amazon now it's called the parallel entrepreneur check it out and thanks for listening [Applause] [Music]