YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Williams

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23
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2015-07-31
most recent
2015-07-31
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1
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  1. “Well, the vision is to build the best place for customers to find book and pay for any local services. And we're starting in and around the home, and that is the industry focus that we have today. But the vision truly is to make the kind of lack of transparency, the lack of immediacy of access, the simplicity of being able to book and pay for a local service much easier than it is today. So that's what's in store for pro.com is to bring that to reality.”

    2015-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I would say never lose determination when you're starting a company and always continue to have that drive that is the rare bit that entrepreneurs have.”

    2015-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “How out of my career was selling my company at the age of 27 and being a part of a much larger business and picture at Amazon”

    2015-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Favorite book, I would say is good to great because it really takes a data-driven analysis of what makes a company great.”

    2015-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And so, you know, the opportunity to work with individuals who very strong willed and have clear opinions about different industries and different businesses and different business models really formed who I am today. And I'm just very thankful for that opportunity, both on the product side in terms of working directly with Jeff and then on the kind of the company building side in terms of getting to work closely with Mark Benn and the rest of the team at Andreason.”

    2015-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Well, I think it's probably the single biggest takeaway is just simply the people that I worked with. I have been very lucky in life to work with some of the most remarkable individuals and kind of leaders. And so I have the chance and opportunity to work very closely with Jeff at Amazon, including shadowing him for a period of time. Got a chance to work very closely with kind of Ben and Mark when I was both at Dig and then a part of the Andreessen team. Frankly, the entire team at Amazon was phenomenal, both from the executive level all the way through and through. Amazon has a very high bar for bringing in kind of phenomenal talent. Andreessen, the same, the team at Andreessen is just top notch, and they're truly building a different model in the industry.”

    2015-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I think it's different for every VC, and I think it is what you make of it. I think in some VCs, it is a desk for you to just have and figure out what you want to do next. And I think on the other kind of end of the spectrum, you really directly engage and help the portfolio companies. You evaluate new investments. You take on some projects and then figure out what you want to do next. And that is exactly what I did spending my time at Andreessen. I got a chance to work with a number of the portfolio companies, especially on the consumer side. I got a chance to run a couple of projects of my own that I was interested in that were some data related projects. And then helped evaluate Some of the investments that were being made at the time, and then ultimately figured out that I wanted to build and launch this marketplace for pro.com.”

    2015-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Well, we decided to sell the company and sell Dig and ended up running a process and really working that process very, very thoroughly. And we ultimately completed that. We're able to get some money back for investors. And the team positioned in a great place. We lost very few people on the team during that process, which I was very thankful and proud of. And then I ended up having a couple of opportunities to be entrepreneur in residence and joined Andreessen. Andreessen had been an early investor in Dig and participants on the board and were very helpful, both Ben and Mark in the ups and downs and the trials and tribulations of Dig.”

    2015-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Well, I think that probably would have more quickly brought in some additional talent that hadn't kind of lived through the pain of the V4 launch and brought in new blood more quickly to really help not only carry new perspective, but also carry a stronger kind of will and drive to make it happen. So that's probably the only thing that I could think of that would have been most immediate upon joining.”

    2015-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And it's really required an immediate look at the financials, the headcount, the community. And so I spent a lot of time trying to understand what the community needed, what the team that we needed to be able to build that and to run that. And so it was a really hard kind of first six weeks, which included laying off about 40% of the staff. And so I think if you look back on something like that, And really just understand your customer, talk to the community.”

    2015-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Sure. The experience at DIG was really a kind of fascinating one, an amazing history. And frankly, one of the top high flyers of traffic, especially in its space. It was, in fact, one of the top, I think, three traffic news websites at one time in its history with 40 plus million monthly unique visitors. And it had stagnated when I came in and then was in a major kind of turnaround scenario. And I'll be really candid. It was the hardest job of my life because a situation where I had come in and the community was already in turmoil over the most recent release that was made by the team before I”

    2015-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “then you'll fit in great as an entrepreneur. I think if you're joining a legacy company that is not kind of anything described as entrepreneurial or kind of inventive, you might have a hard time. And I think the very few people, very few founders ever kind of last longer than two or three years at most startups that then get acquired. I think there are very few I happen to be one of the rare kind of rare ones that I was at Amazon for about 12 years after being acquired.”

    2015-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And my stepfather owned his own construction company and was a contractor. And so having learned a lot, I knew that my path was going to be one of entrepreneurial nature, but that ultimately I needed to get career experience. So I started with a fairly large company. The only advice I guess I would give is that there's a lot of similarity between being an entrepreneur and an entrepreneur. It's just truly the drive that you have, the impact that you want to make, and frankly the environment. And so if you're being acquired by a company that is highly inventive, innovative, that wants to, that truly wants to take the next step in whether it's a product division or whether it's as a company. And Amazon is, I think, one of the best, if not the best examples in the world of such”

    2015-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Right, well, prior to starting live bid, I was actually a business analyst turned into a tech leader inside of NCR Corporation, which was at the time 45,000 people. So I had some early career experience in very large companies, and I'd actually kind of blazed a trail of self-taught programming, pick up some tools, learned myself, built some tools inside the company that ended up getting rolled out kind of company-wide. So I definitely had an appreciation for the dynamics of large companies, but I come from a family of entrepreneurs. My mother, father, stepfather, they all started different businesses in different industries. My father in the radio industry, my mother, one of the largest Montessori schools on the West Coast,”

    2015-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “In the context of arrays, but in the context of here's what I'm thinking about doing, and I've already gotten some feedback and traction in a beta, right? Or in kind of customer surveying that I've done or whatever the case may be. So it really depends on the entrepreneur and the stage and what industry they're going into.”

    2015-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “trying to raise kind of seed capital or growth capital, I think it's, you know, you want to prove out the model, the market opportunity is huge. I think that still is the primary factor that most VCs are looking at. Is it the right time and right place? And it's something that Mark Andreessen has said many times in terms of what can kill a startup is being in the wrong place at the wrong time in terms of not having a market opportunity that is a groundswell. And so I think that if you have found that kind of market opportunity, then it's a matter of being able to demonstrate that you've got the right team and the right beginning of a product if you're going to go raise a seed round and being able to kind of get feedback along the way from VCs, not necessarily in a...”

    2015-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “It really depends on the timing of where they are as a company and really the history of the founding team. So if it's a relatively new founding team that's never founded another company, my advice is quite simple, which is to bootstrap as long as you can until you see some very clear traction, some very clear product market fit for the offering that you have. And it doesn't have to be huge, but it has to be kind of demonstrated product market fit that you're in the right space at the right time and that there's significant demand for what you're offering. I think if you have a kind of a track record of successful startups and you are”

    2015-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “That I was already at the point of starting to put salaries on my credit card for those employees that had families. So it was a very tumultuous time. And that's really when we started seeing kind of product market fit and traction for these auction events. And I then personally went and did all of the capital raising myself instead of relying on some others who were helping us and ended up closing And we had one of the largest auction events that's ever been broadcast online, which is the OJ Simpson estate sale. So it's a combination of factors, but really just believing in the team, believing in the product, believing in myself and gritting through a tough capital raise and ultimately continuing to drive the business forward getting high profile auctions.”

    2015-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Well, so when we built the company, it was heavily fueled off of our revenues. And so we had originally built the company off of doing web technology for the enterprise and for many different products for businesses. So we were heavily self-funded. We raised a very small amount of seed capital. And I had an advisory board that was helping me kind of construct a capital raise and bring in some additional management team. And it was particularly hard because I had direct feedback from my advisory board to shut down and that we just weren't going to be able to raise the capital. We needed to bring in a CEO because I was very young.”

    2015-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Well, we had partnered with a company that was kind of the foremost auction list online. And through combination of partnerships like that, we actually had quite a few connections to auctioneers. And so we had a small direct sales team and started going after the most interesting and hard to find inventory. We had a lot of classic cars. In fact, sold the Batmobile online through our platform from one of the Batman movies.”

    2015-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “The first real time engine for competing in a physical auction for online bidding. And so you can imagine whether it be a Sotheby's, Christie's, or a local regional auctioneer that has an entire collection of Coca-Cola memorabilia or a classic car auction. We had hard-to-find items that were in high demand through physical auctioneers getting connected to our platform. So we took a very kind of very circuitous route to get to the point of having a product and an offering for the auction industry and partnered with somebody, built the product under the live bid name. And in about a year, we're able to amass close to $100 million in inventory. That was being offered through auction through our website, which at the time was quite a bit. And we then had interest from eBay, Yahoo, and Amazon for acquisition.”

    2015-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Well, it's a great question. It was a very circuitous route, as I think many startups are. We started the company actually as a web technology shop, just kind of building many different products for different people in the industry. And we did some work in the radio industry. We did some work with some banks in terms of transaction handling. We built one of the earliest survey products. So what today might be SurveyMonkey, we built one of the earliest Java search engines. So we actually had built quite a few different products and business lines. And one of them was working with auctioneers. We realized that it was kind of the right time and right place with eBay and at the time on sale and a number of others that were getting hot. And we decided to focus the entire company on the auction space and built”

    2015-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Sure, happy to do so. Today I am founder and CEO of Pro dot com, a marketplace for connecting up homeowners with pros to get anything done in and around the home. And we've been out for about a year out in the kind of public offering in terms of our website and offering. We've been in business for just about two years. We were kind of stealth mode for the first year. Before that, I was entrepreneurial in residence at Andreessen Horowitz, and before that CEO of Dig.com and was at Amazon for about 12 years prior to that as a GM of a number of different businesses in Amazon, including community, the web store platform and GM of consumer payments before leaving. Prior to that, I started a company called LiveBit that was founded back in'96 and sold to Amazon in'99 for about a 10x return to investors. And that's how I came into Amazon.”

    2015-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source