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Frank Mycroft

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27
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2016-07-08
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2016-07-08
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1
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  1. “It's filled with fuel, it's filled with groceries, it's been serviced, and all of these things have just happened for you while you're away. That's kind of a world that we're pretty excited about.”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “One of our core goals or culture in the company is focus. And we believe in doing one thing and doing it one thing really, really well. People forget that about 10% of all consumer spending is fuel. So there isn't much of a need to expand drastically beyond fuel for a long time. And because it's such a large spend, you can do a lot in small geographies for a very long time as well. What I will say about this that does get me excited long term is that we view parking lots as an underutilized asset, especially in this day and age with real estate prices being as high as they are and mobile technology allowing you to pinpoint locations very precisely. And so we believe that there will come a day where you can come back to your car from wherever you've been and”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Gosh, this is a funny one. I honestly, I have to say, given my space background and my now vehicle transportation background, it would have to be Elon Musk. What he's done with Tesla, what he's done with SpaceX, if I could just have his brain for one day, I think it would make me a better entrepreneur. He's taken on two industries that no one ever thought, right? You could take on and he's done all these very nuanced things that are making it work. And I love that.”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “First thing that comes to mind is if you're an engineer looking to go into business, you're probably as lost as I was at how you approach that from the beginning. I would say a business school, especially one like HBS, is phenomenal for taking what may be raw technical talent and providing that layer of people and strategy and networks and connections to give you the tools to do what you're really passionate about.”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Goodness, this is a tough one, but I've got a two year old now, and I've been reading her a book by Dr. Zeus called Oh the Places You'll Go. And I've come to love it because it's a poetic book about the hard things in life, the winds, the losses, and getting to read those stories to my daughter's been pretty special.”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Not at all. I think that there are many tools. There is no one answer to solving a lot of the climate change challenges. I think one big answer that's not frequently talked about is how do you get existing vehicles that use gasoline to be better for the environment? And I look forward to the day where we can partner with some of our large corporate customers and say, would you like to work with us so that all of your employees are using carbon neutral fuels in your vehicles”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, goodness. I can only guess at what Angela is implying. I'll tell you two things that get me really excited about what we're doing in the long term. The first is very environmental. We've studied a lot of clean fuel solutions, and we've looked at a lot of data about electric car adoption and challenges in the Bay Area and other massive metro plexuses where road congestion is a challenge. And we see this big hole in kind of the non-urban world, but the suburban transportation world, traffic is terrible and the environmental challenges over the next five years”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Also, the empathy and the patience and the ability to get that we are looking for voracious growth, but doing that requires an obsessive nature about how do you keep every single customer happy, how do you focus on getting the foundation right before you grow very quickly? We lucked out with Mavron. They have a great team that is very focused on those two things.”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Gosh, Dave is incredible. And what struck out, I remember for me with Dave was a few things. First, a deep understanding of the challenges and uneconomics and the drivers of the business. Someone who had done their homework, someone who was innately curious and passionate about the space because we're all human beings and if you're not innately passionate about a business, you're not going to be able to dive in and really spend those late nights helping in the ways that we need. We also looked for an investor that was very much an entrepreneur's investor, an entrepreneur's entrepreneur, someone who had taken a company through hypergrowth before, had been through those trenches, and as a result could do two things. One could provide that real, tangible experiential knowledge.”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I think at the Series A, what you're looking for is pretty simple. It's, okay, you raise money in your seed and you said you were going to do certain things. For us, it was, we have a growth target, we have a profitability target, and we have a user delight target. And showing that you've made demonstrable progress towards those is really important. I think the key for the Series A, for us, was being able to show product market fit, being able to show that this was a problem we were solving that was very sticky, that people that we never imagined were coming using our product and then never going at a very high rate. And that was something that you have to do to warrant the A.”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, it's a great question. I think the fundraising process, we were blessed in both cases, the seed and the Series A, to have fairly quick financings. A lot of that had to do with the relationships that we had built over time with individuals in all of these firms. People at the seed stage are investing in people and building that relationship cannot happen overnight. There are a lot of really good ideas at any given time. And I think investors at the seed stage are looking for that good idea that's timed right with the market that is led by someone that they can trust and believe in and back. That was the focus in the early days with the seed. It was telling this story and showing enough of the complex nuances and the ability to execute on a vision without resources that gets you over that hurdle.”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “So simply because of how the model works. The key there again is go to the places where those bureaucracies are lesser and work with them early on so that you can provide that example that others can then follow. And that's something that I think more startups could place emphasis on and probably reap rewards in the long term.”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I think you see a lot of that. There's reason for it. Regulators have a hard time moving at the pace of startups. The model with which we create regulations is not one that easily allows for pilots to demonstrate safety and data. One good example is there are many regulators that would have loved to pilot something like an Uber model in the very early days. I know they would have, but they may have been hindered by the fact that if you want to pilot something as a government agency, you have to put out an RFP, you have to make it very blind, you can't just pick a single company. You've got to run this massive behemoth process so that you are not at risk of being sued by some other player and it just slows things down. And that drives a lot of frustration on both ends. We've met many regulators that want to work and innovate but feel so much pressure to not do.”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Are there to make sure that those that aren't have at least as high enough of a bar so that safety and kind of the quality of operations is consistently good? When I look at our business, I have great confidence that mobile refueling can be vastly better than the status quo gas stations. We look at the reduction in crime and the hazards that people have because they pump their own gas relative to”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, it's a great question and we're fortunate one of our seed investors, we were led by Madrona Venture Group up in Seattle and one of their partners was the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency and I can remember vividly him telling me that to win and build meaningful partnerships with regulators, you have to start the conversations very early. And I think I take a different perspective than a lot of our players in this sector in believing that the regulators are a very important part of the ecosystem and that you have to engage them very early in the discussion. And when you do, it can be a very good thing. Two points there. One is that in every new industry there are very good world-class actors and then there are those that aren't.”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “And you may risk upsetting some customers, or you may risk delighting others and really wanting to double down on another. So you need that bench of the ability to experiment before you dive into those human economics. If you do it too soon, you'll end up with this negative feedback cycle. If you do it at the right time, it'll help you grow in a very controllable and thoughtful way.”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, I think there is. And I think it can be generalized to any of these on-demand startup business models. I would say take what you think is your minimum viable scale, right? The minimum level at which you've got the density to make money on a consistent basis. And you should probably multiply that number by five to ten. And you should do that because it's a startup and stuff happens. You should probably have two different markets. You should probably have a wide range of different customers so that you can test different things. But once you have about five to ten times what is your minimum scale of economics, you have enough that you can play with. And what that means is that you have enough different pockets that could be unit economic scale profitable that you can start to apply different experiments to each one.”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Actually, make money utilizing your assets, your people, your vehicles, your procurement funnels in the most efficient way, and then pass those savings on to users so that that positive feedback cycle just grows and grows and grows.”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Actually, it disrupts the status quo. So our investors very much get that vision. And I think that the real trick here with any on-demand company is that if you focus too soon on the union economics, you may never get to the scale and the growth that you need for that engine to actually continue on its own. At the same time, you have to experiment constantly to figure out what is the right model that consumers are both willing to pay on one end, but also gives you the density of users to have that operational efficiency. And that's how we've been approaching kind of every month of the growth is let's not focus just on the top line growth. I don't think that's a very good indicator. Let's focus on healthy growth that has the density to drive our hypothesis about how you can”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, we're really fortunate to have, I can't imagine a better group of investors that are both insightful and patient getting of the big vision that we're building. Fuel is a very low margin business and it's compounded by the fact that I'm sure you know people, you may be one of these people that drive five, 10 miles out of their way to save five cents per gallon. And you can rationally say that doesn't make any sense. I'm burning fuel to get there. I'm wasting time. But a lot of people still do that. And so we've had to really obsess about how do you service a customer that is incredibly price conscious and become a product that isn't just for the, I call it the 1% elites that can try out cool new things and spend some money to test them, but become something that”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Safer and lower cost than taxis to win the big game. They had to get there and they had a very complicated path of black cars and Uber X and markets that they pursued to eventually get there. And in the same way for us to succeed or for any on-demand startup,”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yeah, so I will admit I am guilty of using the moniker Uber for fuel occasionally. It has a ring to it. It's only three words. The short answer is I don't think anything could be farther from the truth of what we're trying to build. And this goes more broadly than what we're creating to the concept of Uber for X. I think that any entrepreneur, any starting company that is trying to simply apply what was a successful business model in a different space to their new vertical is setting themselves up for failure. A lot of people, they say Uber for X and what I think they mean is just that we've created an app or you get to push a button and you get something. I look at Uber and the success there and it's very clear that that was not what drove the success of Uber. Uber had to be better and faster and”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Those entrepreneurs don't know the industry players, don't know the complexities of the business that they're trying to disrupt. You need a lot of naivete to actually jump in and do that. But I think that there are so many naysayers that if you hadn't had that naive nature to begin with, you would not have the potential for success that you end up having.”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I think there are two kinds of entrepreneurs. I think that, and the naivete only really helps one. So there is the entrepreneur who has been in an industry for decades and is a technical leader in their domain, but is frustrated with how kind of the incumbent businesses are producing products. They are an expert. They can go out and create something new with a very high understanding of the market and the niche that they are serving. And I think for those, Naivete has very kind of like limits on its value. It's much more of a practical, disruptive innovation by an expert. I think then you also have a completely different kind of entrepreneur who comes from a different world, a different industry, and looks at a problem from a different way and looks at a market from a very different way, applying what they've learned from a different place.”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “The need for the gas station, I could not let out of my head for months and months and months. And I tell prospective founders this all the time, that you should never start a company. It's actually a pretty irrational thing to do from a probability of outcome perspective. So only do it if it's rubbing at your soul and eating at you every day that you're not going out and creating this idea.”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Vividly remember this moment when I was working these 100 hour weeks and then I would go to the gas station late at night. And I would do this for both my car and my wife's car because I didn't want her going to the gas station at night. It wasn't very safe. But I also didn't enjoy that experience. And so I really got to thinking, is there a better way to deliver fuel to people's cars? Why hasn't the gas station changed in such a long time? I think that I was very lucky that in that moment I was blessed to have the right life experiences necessary to give me this naive thinking that I could actually change the world in this one small way. I had been a private pilot growing up and had actually seen and been involved with the mobile refueling of small airplanes. And this was the one idea.”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “So I've always been intrigued from an early age complex operational challenges in the physical world, not so much the electronic world or the chemical world, but really the physical world around us. This drew me to outer space. I loved NASA and the vision of going back to the moon or going to Mars. Thoughts about how do you send a probe to a distant moon or how do you mine an asteroid and build a business around a futuristic dream like that really drew me to these challenges? And then it's funny. One day I became a father, beautiful daughter, and everything changed. Everything got much more real. And figuratively brought me back to earth. Life is pretty difficult for young parents who are trying to figure things out.”

    2016-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source