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Moisey Uretsky

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30
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2016-10-14
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2016-10-14
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  1. “I think from the personal side, it's a lot more challenging than from the business side. I think from the business side, there's a lot more objectivity you could apply. I mean, you have things like revenue and customers and you have all of these things that you can track and measure. But from the personal side, there's not a lot that you can really track and measure. What's your happiness? You can't really measure that. You kind of know it or you don't know it. And unfortunately, as a subjective human being, we're often really bad at understanding how happy or unhappy we are. And I've also kind of put my personal life a little bit in a separate box for a long time. So I haven't really focused on that too much. So I really have no idea what's going to happen in the next five years.”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Outside of those superstar unicorn companies, there's also a lot of companies like Salesforce, right? You look at their market cap, you look at how much revenue they're doing, and you say, wow, this is amazing. And what gets lost is that that's like almost a 20-year-old company. And that's kind of how I think about VigilOcean. It's like instead of getting lost in the spotlight of these huge companies that are super successful and can do it in five, six years and hit billions in revenue, I look at the companies that took 20 years to get to that billions in revenue or even AWS itself took close to a decade to get to 10 billion in revenue. And I find that journey to be really interesting of like how do you continue to progress and build this large suite of products and take care of a larger and larger group of customers with very different needs. And I think that's really exciting. As for personally, I have no idea. That's why I'm so glad we have a jerry because he's the one who tells me that it's okay to not have any idea and to have things continue to evolve and change.”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Well, for DigitalOcean, I mean, I see those five years. I mean, I think when you first start out, you're thinking about the next day, then you get to the next week, the next month, at some point you think in the quarters. At this point, I kind of think about the next 10 years. And I really think about the companies that I find interesting and I admire in various ways. And I definitely see the interlotion in the next 10 years becoming one of those great companies because the market is definitely large enough. If we continue to be able to expand our culture inside of our company, then I know that the products and services that we bring to the market will resonate with our customers. We'll be able to continue to give them value and have that value reciprocated and return and really thinking about it from the 10-year cycle, if you look at some of the greatest companies in the world, I think it's easy to get distracted sometimes by companies like Uber and Instagram. But the reality is that”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I think the biggest unexpected challenge is one that continues how your personal relationship to the company and your role continues to evolve and change and how it's really difficult to guess what it's going to look like in the future. And then when you find yourself in that situation, like how do you deal with it? Sometimes you have things that are challenging and you kind of have this big thing to work through and that at least keeps you focused. A lot of times you find some success and you get a little bit lost. It's like, well, what am I supposed to do now? How do I adjust and grow? So I think that's been the biggest challenge. It's just navigating the personal journey inside the evolution of a company and like what's required of you and where you can be of most value.”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Favorite blog or newsletter Tom Tungans. I love his blog. I love his blog because he's got these quick, short snippets. It's very factually. He's got a lot of data which I love. And it's just the kind of thing that when you start reading one, you just get to the bottom and you click next and you just get lost for 20, 30 minutes. Just absolutely love his stuff. Very sad focused, very numbers oriented, you know, very analytical. So I definitely enjoy that.”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “The biggest mentor in many ways is probably Jerry Colonna. So he's like our CEO coach. That's what he does. In our case, this mine and Ben's coach, he came about because me and Ben were having some struggles as the company was growing and trying to figure out how to work together. And of course, Peter Levine said, well, why don't you guys just talk to Jerry? He's the best. So he said, okay, let's talk to Jerry. And then kind of begged and pleaded for him to take us on as a client. He's just an incredible human being with an amazing journey. You just need to meet him, listen to this podcast, but better yet meet him. Then you kind of understand why he's super impactful. Besides that, it's our grandmother.”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Oh man, I will say this any relationship that you have prior to founding a company, whether it's brother, husband, and wife, best friends, whatever that relationship looks like before the company, it will look like that during the company, except it's like pouring fuel on the fire. If you have problems, this is just going to get worse. If you guys are great, they'll probably continue to be great. Best thing is, I know that he'll never stab me at the back. Worst thing is, he's my older brother. He's always my older brother. So it's kind of hard disagreements happen quite frequently and we're only a year apart. So there's a bit of that. Much better now than before.”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And if it is a dilemma. Yeah. I mean, because that's the one that as a startup you have to read because that's going to give you the secret to beat out those big incumbent companies. Everything else kind of structures into that. That's the one that you need to really understand where you fit into the market and how to attack a big player.”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “It's timing, you know. He's a very active guy. He does a bunch of crazy stuff. He's probably more crazy than I am, which is why me and him get along pretty well”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “To deal with Peter Leveren and Jason Horowitz, and obviously his experience would GitHub would be on their board was fundamental. He was the CEO of Zen source. So he definitely knows our space. He knows the developer. He's been an operator himself, so he understands the founder journey. He understands the complexity of building a company and scaling a company and what that takes. And he's just somebody that on a personal level, like personality-wise, we could really get along with and just really see as somebody that can help us drive the business, understand it, and give us the space to operate and figure things out as you go through these various growth stages of a company.”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Well, it was really interesting because we basically pushed everybody and the two investors that we loved the most was Jerry Chan from Greylock and Peter Levine from Andreessen Horowitz. I mean, first of all, I mean, those are both top-tier VC firms. They have tremendous portfolio companies and a great reputation. So all of that was kind of table stake. So it really was about the personal relationship with that individual, how well they understood the business, how well they understood the market, how much they kind of believed in what we were doing, and how much we felt that we could really partner with this person and they could really help us drive the business forward and be a mentor to us. And those were the two individuals that we absolutely fell in love with, and they both happened on the last day of a four-day nonstop back-to-back to back to back VC pitching, which was kind of insane. And you say the same thing 20 times and you just get tired of your own voice. And we were just really fortunate that we were able to work.”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, basically, and then he wanted to obviously do diligence and make sure that we weren't selling a dollar for 80 cents. And once that was all cleared up, it was a really fast term sheet and a great turnaround. And we're really happy and excited to have Brad on board. I mean, he's somebody that I think extremely highly of, and we were very fortunate because we didn't really talk to a lot of VCs for the seed round. On the A round, we basically went and pitched every single West Coast VC that you could imagine because we really wanted to have this East Coast West Coast mentorship and obviously a very different network, a very different set of portfolio companies. And that's something that we really value between our first company and DigitalOcean was really having advisors, really having partners that we could work with because the first company we kind of built in a vacuum and we didn't have anyone that we could talk to that could tell us you're doing it right or wrong, but here's how you do it besides our dad. And that's a hard person to listen to when you're a kid growing up.”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And then basically we finally sent an update after we hit product market fifth said, hey, we hit 500K in annual revenue and then basically at that point it took them three weeks to get back to me, which was unusual. And by the time we came into the office, we said, yeah, just so you know, we've already grown 66% in three weeks. At that point, he was like, okay, cha-ching”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Then you can do stupid shit. But if you're not, then I would not do it this way. So for us, it's always whether it was our C round or A or whatever or B round. It was always, hey, we're digital ocean. The second slide is, here's our revenue. And then we go into the story. You know, that was always the big driver for us is that when we finally hit our product market fit, the growth was pretty insane. And then it became really interesting rather quickly. But then the conversation still shifts because at each level you're dealing with a different set of companies, which was really kind of eye-opening. In the seed round, it was relatively straightforward because I ventures was basically I met Brad through that second startup that didn't work out and I kept up that connection and he was the first person that I went to and said, hey, building digital ocean, are you interested? He said, not really for the same exact reasons. Pass us along to tech stars. And then afterwards, just kept it.”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “It's interesting. I mean, we did get certainly a lot of those quizzical kind of looks of how are you different, love, and your product, and you're in a crowded space and your largest competitor is Amazon that likes to crush everybody. This seems like the worst idea on the planet. And I would agree on the surface. It definitely was a bad idea, but I think most great companies start off with bad ideas. Otherwise, everybody would be doing it and they wouldn't be any space for you. You know, as far as a crowded market space, I think there's two ways to look at that. One is you're not changing user behavior and a crowded market space means lots of customers. So I think there's always interesting opportunity to look at those spaces, especially if you firmly believe that the product that they've built is not one that you personally want to use. As far as getting VCs interested, I mean, we give a few talks to tech stars and I say, this is how not to do it unless you're dish.”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Technical due diligence, and this person had this huge technical background, and we're sitting there shooting our pants thinking, oh my God, he's going to look at the code and think like this is a piece of shit.”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “you have to really kind of attack from day one or do you think it's something that you can process and think about as time progresses and you scale? I mean, I think ultimately you're better off attacking it from day one. I think that it's kind of hard to know how to attack it from day one without having some experience. And I think one of the challenges of being in New York, I mean, we've been here for a number of years, you know, several decades really. We really didn't have a tech scene 10 years ago. So when it came time to have a career, there wasn't a company like Google or Facebook to join in New York for the most part. So, you know, our understanding of culture in New York City was a bit limited. Now with all the startups and hopefully us as well paving the way, it's a much more understood process. But that's the kind of thing where you can read about it. You can get questions about it, but it kind of seemed foreign. We remember, you know, having one of our series A potential investors come by and had like our”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Being managers to the founders, becoming not managers, but having VPs and other C-level executives? And how does it permeate a business where you don't have that internet connection with every single individual anymore? And that's a pretty large challenge, I would say.”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Scale, you have to transform what each founder believes, what each founder stands for into an actual culture that then permeates the business. So I don't think that it really makes a difference whether that's a culture of love or a culture of excellence or whatever you want to call it, whatever works for your company. I think the challenge is always how do you actually scale your culture, right? How do you have people think in a way that drives the same kind of value that was originally created, but constantly recreate that process so that you can push out that next thing or the next product or the next service or react to the market forces? And that's basically an ongoing challenge, I think, at all companies. And I mean, certainly one that Apple's facing like, well, how do you recreate the magic that Steve Jobs did now that he's not here? Is our culture strong enough to actually do that without him? Or was that person actually the secret sauce? So I think the challenge is always like, how do you scale your culture as you go from the founders to the founders?”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “scale love and what are the inherent challenges from doing so well I mean I think that the challenges are kind of in some ways similar to any company right I mean I think that we certainly believe that we are at the intersection of a needed and loved kind of product because you know if you think about software eating the world and developers becoming a larger and larger group of people absolutely you need a place to run your code and we kind of saw a gap in the places where you could run your code we didn't really love their products so we decided hey let's build a product for ourselves that we love and maybe somebody else will show up and think that it's pretty cool and decide to use it and then I think you know at the beginning of any company you know basically your culture and your entire foundation is just a collection of founders and you basically spend so much time together that you kind of know each other completely and intimately in any way shape and form so it's it's quite simple to kind of get on the same page or just argue till you get there and I think you know as a company begins to”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “One of my favorites, despite the E. coli scares, is Chipotle, right? We all need to eat. But the way that the customers interact with Chipotle is they really love the product that they're selling. So I think those are rare opportunities and there's not a lot of categories to really find that kind of a market in. The team and the business that you have done with digital ocean.”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I mean, basically, it's glued to my hip. You know, we have that phantom leg syndrome where we think our phone's vibrating, but it actually isn't. That's how attached we are to it. And, you know, basically the iPhone is 40, 50 year journey of the first personal computer because that's the thing that's with you all the time. Now, my laptop doesn't travel with me nearly as much as my cell phone does. If you think about some of the other interesting things that have happened recently is if you take a look at some of the other companies that have some gigantic market caps, kind of like Zara, right, and H&M, that's another intersection of needed and love, right? We all need clothes. Obviously clothing is something that we want to have a connection to that we love. And what they did is they took like, okay, well, let's take these big designers and make these amazing things that are really expensive. And let's basically copy them and sell them for an affordable price to the mass market. And all of a sudden you have these gigantic companies being born. And that's kind of that same intersection. Or on the food space, you could take a look at kind of like.”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Have nowhere else to go. And at some point, somebody's going to disrupt that. And I think if you look at Apple's greatest success, I mean, Apple build great products, but really what gave him this gigantic market cap of being the largest company in the world was the fact that they found this intersection of need and love, right? Everybody in the modern day world needs a cell phone. They made a product that is absolutely loved and all of a sudden it takes off. So when I read online about all of these different pundits talking about what's Apple's next big thing, my answer is there isn't one because it has nothing to do with Apple. It has to do with the market. If you can't find another thing that's as ubiquitous and as needed as the cell phone, there's really nothing that they can do. They can make something amazing like the iPad that will never have the same market penetration because the iPad is not needed. It's love. It's amazing the first time I picked it up. I was like, holy shit, this thing is fucking cool. And then after 30 minutes, I'm like, but I don't know what the fuck to do with it, but it's fucking cool, right? And with the iPhone.”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “That it's a V It does explain itself for anyone. The company's central goal. You said before that it's businesses that succeed are either needed or learned. Mean by this, and what category would you say then digital ocean falls into need or love? Well, I mean, I think those two categories are pretty basic, right? And I think that there's something really unique and interesting that happens when those two categories intersect in life. So, I mean, obviously needed services. You think about the modern day life, what you need is you need clothing, you need food. At this point in time, it's really hard to go to any major city and not find somebody with a cell phone. So those things are really kind of necessities, electricity is a necessity. And oftentimes when you find needed industries for whatever particular reason, love and loving the product and loving the service doesn't really fall into it because oftentimes, you know, the competition is a little bit different because they're needed, they can get by with things that are kind of a little frustrating. I mean, I think the best example in New York City is, you know, cable providers, right? Whether it's internet or television, I mean, they're all horrible, but you're kind of stuck with one or two choices and you kind of”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I would say absolutely. I mean, I think one of the movies that had a pretty dramatic impact in my life is Goodwill Hunting. I mean, obviously, you know, Matt Damon was a math major or math interested. I was a math major, which is a horrible career. We had really bad guidance counselors at NYU who basically say, well, you're doing math. You want to be a math major? I said, sure, why not? That sounds like a good idea. Obviously not. But he had this famous line where he's talking to this Harvard guy in the barn. He says, so basically you got the same education you got for $1.50 in Lage visa at a local library. And I firmly believe that that's the case. I could either try to apply to Harvard Business School and get in and pay 200 grand for that education, or I could read Clayton Christensen's interviews dilemma and pretty much get the same lessons. I think the real challenge around just doing an education that's purely based in books is that you don't have the experience to really draw from.”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “To pause and answer questions to me that seemed backwards because I know what I'm doing and I'm pausing. And it's really getting in the way of me writing code. So how does somebody who doesn't know as much about systems even get through this entire jumbled mess to get their first VM online and start writing their code? And really it's those questions that kind of drive everything. So what's your unique position? How are you going to get to the market? How are you going to be differentiated from your competitors? Those are the tough questions. So there's really no extra work needed to know what the questions are because you can read a few books and find out. The tough work is, okay, how do you answer that actual question for your business?”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Well, I think there's a number of things. I mean, first of all, it's the sort of things that you don't really pay attention to. There's nothing extremely complicated about business. It's really just a set of questions. And the complexity comes in when you have to answer those questions. So, for example, our first business wasn't really positioned well. It was kind of like where server stack. We did the same thing as Rackspace. So why would you go with us instead of Rackspace? So they just had great positioning. It doesn't matter if our service is better or not because the customer never gets to the point of signing up to even compare those things. And the question is really the thing that drives the creativity. So if you're going to start a cloud provider, you have to answer the question of what's your position. And it has to be unique and differentiated. Luckily for us, we kind of saw that every single cloud provider was, you know, a bit clunky. It wasn't really elegance. It wasn't something that you enjoyed using, you know, being a sysadmin and also writing code, like logging into all these cloud providers and struggling through the create process.”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “When you read the book about how to do it right, you have both sides, right? You have here's what we did wrong, here's how we looked at the market, here's what we missed, and here's what a competitor did, and this is how they did it right. And focusing on the emotional aspects of like, why did we do it wrong if these things, when you read about them, seem almost like common sense, what really got in the way of us figuring this out for ourselves”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “That we did along with Jeff. I came to bed and said, okay, if you want to do digital ocean, we now have the people. So let's just jump in and do it. And the basic premise was we had spent close to a decade doing everything wrong. We didn't have any business experience. We didn't take much in the way of business classes. So somewhere about five years into our first company as our dad constantly kept yelling at us that we're a bunch of fucking morons. And if he was running the company, it'd be 10 times bigger when you hit 25, its testosterone drops a little bit, your ears open up, and you finally say, you know what, maybe that has a point. We really don't know what the hell we're doing. So we should read a few books. So at that point, we started reading basically every single business book you could imagine, probably about 200 or so. There's about 30 that I would recommend, you know, but the classic innovator's dilemma, good to great, crossing the chasm. And then basically applying those books to what DigitalOcean ultimately became. And it was really interesting because the experience of having done it wrong for so many years.”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Basically, dropped out of college because I was working as a system administrator. I started doing that during the summer because I was bored. That company went out of business. So me and my brother decided to start our own web hosting company because that was the cool thing to do back in the early 2000s. Did that for about eight years, scaled the company to a few million dollars in revenue, about 20 employees, decided that I wanted to get back to software development left, started a hedge fund analytics company with another friend of mine, which unfortunately didn't go anywhere. It turns out that that's a bit of a difficult product to sell to hedge funds or fund the funds, then came back to the original company, and then we finally decided, okay, we've kind of made enough connections. And Jeff, our technical co-founder, basically applied for a sysadmin position via Craigslist to work at ServerStack. And then looking between the people that I met through the second start.”

    2016-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source