YouSaid · the spoken record

Paul Berberian

lines on the record
28
first
2016-08-19
most recent
2016-08-19
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Well, the thing is, we have to, right? We've now reached a size of, you can only sell so many robot balls. So you have to start selling some other products. And so you have to expand your line. But each line is very, very focused on what their core objective is. And so it's building multiple businesses inside of one business so that you can continue to grow. And so I think in the next five years, you will see us become one of the dominant, if not the continued to be the continued dominant connected play company. And I think you're going to see toys really transform from the plastic by the pound into some really amazing robotic entertainment experiences.”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think you're going to see some really cool products coming out. We're now developing multiple products simultaneously every year.”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It's all about managing people. It's all about getting people to move towards a common goal. What the military really teaches you is to kind of develop that focus and that communication skill to get everyone aligned around a common objective.”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “It's a great book on leadership under pressure, right? How you behave in an aircraft right before a crash is going to determine largely if you're going to live or die. And it's great to see the different personalities. And that's what I think is fascinating about that book. Sorry, I diverge.”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, well, sometimes, you know, like what a stupid question. What if you take all the nukes and put them in one pile and you detonate them? What would happen? It's like, that's a silly question. But some of them are really fascinating. And since I was a pilot for 10 years, I love all the aviation stuff. And there's a great book that something that just came up. There's a book called Black Box, Voice Recorders right before planes crash. But they pull out the black box and then they transcribe the...”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I started thinking about this. I have a lot of feeds, you know, so I've been getting a little bit addicted to quora, getting some of these interesting questions, and I go down a rat hole there for a while.”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “The company was burst through tech stars, really. Ian and Adam didn't have enough momentum to actually start their business until they got into TechSars. And then TechStars put them in contact with a whole bunch of mentors as well as expose them to investors. So the business got birthed really through TechSars. And for me personally, that's how I became associated. And then they ran a second program with Disney Accelerator in 2014. Going through that and the exposure we got into the Walt Disney company has transformed the business. I mean, it accelerator doesn't, you know, it gave us work drive. That's what happened when we came out of Disney. It was just incredible what happened with Star Wars.”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “You don't like. I don't read a lot of business books. And part of the reason is it's like going on vacation in your own backyard. It's too familiar. I really like to read books that expand my thinking into areas that I'm not thinking about all the time. You know, I love reading about science and math and especially the people around them and kind of hearing the stories around some discovery. I love reading books of lifestyles that I would never encounter living in the Middle East or going to war or something like that. So I always try to, and then of course science fiction, which is, of course, in the future and contemplates a world that doesn't yet exist. But I always try to go on vacation when I read. So I'm doing something completely different than what I do on a day-to-day basis.”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I don't have favorites. So, all your favorite questions, I'm not going to be answered. So I'll tell you what I don't like, right?”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Being transformed, and it's now this software enabled experience and the economics of manufacturing are significantly different than they were 20 years ago. There's very few VCs that actually think like that. Most of them are just dabbling, in my opinion.”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I think just that decisiveness, right? They're not trying to hedge their bet. They're not trying to get optionality. No one wants to miss a good deal. They have to have their own belief system around an investment thesis. So some of them, I remember early on, like it was our Series B or Series C, I couldn't even get a face-to-face meeting. I talked to 20 VCs. I have a spreadsheet. I could get a phone call, but I couldn't get a face-to-face meeting. And I remember Brad saying, says, you have to go out and get a face-to-face meeting. I go, Brad, no one wants to see us. They don't want to invest in us. And it was a struggle because there's not a lot of VCs that invest in hardware. Every VC has one or two investments, but it's not a serious vector for them. It's not an investment theme. And so you're always trying to get the one-off investment. And those typically are relationships, right? You know, it's like, oh, he was my best buddy or he was the best man at my wedding. And so I'm going to invest in his company. They're not really strong thesis around hardware.”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “It's the same thing. It's the same thing time and time again. You could just change the name of the company, change it like, oh, software as a service now or we're making physical products. The story changes, but the behavior of the investors is pretty much the same. Term sheets may change a little bit depending on the wins, economic wins of the day, but the experience is always the same. You go into some beautiful office that nicely appointed, you're paying your whole way there, you get an hour with them, you do your pitch, you do your demo, seven out of ten of them won't give you a response. They'll always go into the maybe category and hedge their vets. A couple of them will be like, this isn't for us, and a couple of them is saying, I'm interested, let's have a second meeting.”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yes, I agree that you want to start raising money as early as possible. Nine months is a great runway. I mean, in my case, that means I would have never stopped fundraising, which was pretty much the case. But typically five months, four to five months is when I would start aggressively looking for money and going out on road shows and start trying to close new investors. It's always better to use a rifle than a shotgun. Every time I've gone out and tried to meet with 20 investors, inevitably I will get 20 no's. You know, where I go to Sandhill Road and I go up and down and have three meetings on one day and two meetings on the next. And it's like, it's always a struggle. It's just never, and I've done it so many times in my life, you know, between the, I've had three venture-backed companies and that's all you do.”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “It's been fucking hard. This has been one hard business to raise money for. There is a healthy amount of skepticism when you go into any potential investor's office. They're like, well, it's hardware. It's a hit-driven business. It's capital intensive. They come with all this baggage of views on the hardware industry, especially on a business such as ours that is driven by hits and is driven by media, what's happening in terms of pop culture and things like that. And so raising money for this company has been absolutely, I wouldn't say brutal, right? Because brutal was the solar panel company that we couldn't raise a dime for. What made the difference for us is we had one VC that believed in us time and time again, and that was Brad Phelp in the foundry group. Those guys have been awesome. They kept investing in us as we showed measured progress in the execution.”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Communications and you want to do it, you want to communicate in advance of the board meeting, one-on-one with each board member. So make sure you have a phone call a week or two before the board meeting with each board member, or better yet, go spend some face-to-face time with them, really kind of share with them the business outside of the construct of the board meeting, which is more formal, that has an agenda. You talked about the business, talk about your issues, so that they are more in sync with you. Another thing is that I've been doing with this company is I've been using a tool called Voxer and we're doing a bunch of asynchronous communications where we can leave these walkie-talkie messages for each other so that we can have an ongoing dialogue post-board meeting about some strategic issues.”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Strategy of the company with the board. So, how do you keep a happy board? The way to keep a happy board is to never surprise them. Always get in front of them. When you go to the board meeting, there shouldn't be any information that's presented where they're going to look at and go, what the hell is this? I've had that happen several times in my career, and even though I should know better, something is so familiar to you because you're dealing with it on a daily basis that you think your board absolutely knows about it. And it turns out that maybe they didn't, they can get surprised.”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Those are several questions wrapped into one. So, when you disagree with your board, what do you do? I think the first thing you do is you need to listen intently and you need to be thoughtful and take it in as opposed to just react and get into an argument with your board. If you are arguing with your board in the middle of the board meeting, you need a mental, you know, some little light needs to go off saying you're doing something wrong. They're there to help you become better as a company and as a CEO. So first thing is you listen and then I process it and then I try to come back to them with something thoughtful or I see if they can sway me in their viewpoint. Oftentimes I will take it as a challenge. Like, okay, they didn't understand what I was communicating here and so they had a difference of opinion. So I have to go back to them with more data, more information, a better plan to convince them. I always try to get unanimous decisions around, you know, the”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Well, I can tell you what was seen as a trend. We started off maybe having 10% direct to consumer. And that's, I consider sites like Amazon more direct to consumer than brick and mortar traditional retail. That's now shift to closer to 25% in the last couple of years. And last year was quite significant. We moved quite a bit through online channels. We move about 10% through our website directly. I mean, we're bullish on that because it's obviously better margin for us, but it's a US phenomenon primarily. It may be a little bit in the UK. In other markets, it's still very much brick and mortar. And so you have to take an omnichannel approach. There's no way to really expand your business rapidly unless you can get your product in front of consumers. In the U.S., we're so conditioned that, well, if I can't get it at my store across the street, I'll just go on Amazon, buy it, and it'll show up the next day. But it's not the case in most places in the world.”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Everyone kind of rallied around that date, and we made it. So having external launch dates is actually a really interesting component for a company like ours, because when you launch software, you can kind of fudge your release date because you're always updating it. When you sell into retail, they say, okay, we're going to launch you on October 15th. So you have to back everything up from that date. And having external dates like that, which is very interesting for a company like ours, really drives the internal development cycle. It's been helpful to drive focus because as we try to add more stuff in, inevitably that data is looming in the future. So you're constantly putting stuff in and taking things out just so that you can make that data. And you try to make it the best product you can within that condensed timeframe.”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “We do, but the problem when you have internal deadlines is it's kind of like a child pushing on their parent against the rules of the family. If you're absolutely rigid with your child, then you become this totalitarian regime within your household. And it's the same within a company. If you are so rigid on internal deadlines and people are busting their ass to get to these internal deadlines, you feel like you're a cruel person because they're not being able to spend time with their families. They're giving up children's birthday parties and family vacations just to make these guidelines that are artificially constrained within the business. When it's external, you don't have to play the bad cop there. It just happens. One of the big external drivers for us was the launch of the new Star Wars toy line, which was called Force Friday. That was a hard deadline. We had to get our product on the shelves and the software had to be done. There was no if-ands or buts about it. That's when the product hit shelves.”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Well, that's our constant struggle every day within the company. It's a challenge. The first thing is just recognizing that it is a challenge and that you have to get the teams talking to each other and working together. For us, what was a driving moment, having a major event where we needed to have the product kind of be put on display. So we've had a couple of major defining moments in our company. And they always center around an event where the team is rallying to make a specific goal because it's an external event that we can't control the date. So the very first one was CES 2011, which was just a few months after the TechSars program ended. And we needed to show some traction for a little bit of venture money that we raised up until that point. We only had about a million dollars in the bank. And we're spending a lot of money making all these prototypes and stuff. So we have to kind of gain some traction so we could get some more money. So the hard date was first week of January 2011.”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “To the product can drive your team crazy because they're just trying to get the basic thing out the door. If I were to kind of constantly reflect on myself, it's trying to find that essence of the products that I think we need to create to be successful in the marketplace and not try to keep throwing stuff into it because I think it would be cool or that's something I would want to really kind of be a little bit more patient and drive the team to become more focused.”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “At least my vision of a leader is you have resources, you have people and you have money, and you get to focus them on some objective. And it's driving those people towards an objective. So in my case, I'm a very product-focused CEO, and I think you can be multiple types of CEOs, but I'm very focused on what are we delivering to the customer. And I become extremely focused and maniacal about it. And I think in some of the cases where it hasn't gone well is what you mentioned in my description of one of my failed businesses is lack of focus, is I can process quite a bit of information and I can make a business overly complex or I need to add this feature and this capability and make it do this and that in any struggles I may have in the marketplace is because I haven't made the product more and more sophisticated. As I look at my leadership style, that intense focus on trying to add more and more stuff.”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “So in August of 2010, I became the CEO. So there was the three of us, Ian, Adam, and myself, and that was the beginning of what's now sure.”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Exactly, especially you throw the lava lamp in there. And then I went toward something serious, which was making this really cool high-tech solar panel for commercial real estate. And we just couldn't get any funding. It was impossible to raise money in the 2009 timeframe. So in 2010, I had several successes earlier in my career. I had a couple of failures back to back, and I didn't know what to do next. And I spoke to Brad Feld, and he suggested that I get really involved with TechStars. I was always a mentor with TechSar since their founding, but particular program in 2010, I had nothing to do. So I went all in as mentor so much so they didn't know where to put me in the office because they didn't have space for mentors that hung around all the time. And I ended up becoming really close to Ian and Adam, the two founders of Sphero. And about halfway through the program, they asked me to be the CEO and I felt it was best to join them post they're finishing the program.”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Roll up of mystery shopping companies. These are companies that go in and they pretend to be customers in stores and fast food restaurants and then we take that data and we sell it back to those stores and restaurants. Fascinating business. I started it and then I moved into a board role and then I took some time off with my family to travel the world. I came back. I had two businesses that didn't do well. Both of them failed. One of them was a lava lamp, meets social network, meets online web series, meets photo sharing. And it sounds like a crazy idea and it was.”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Well, you know, I know it may sound lucrative, but it's not. And then I went into video conferencing where we provided multi-way video conferencing services. That company was called LinkVTC. It was completely self-funded with money from our families. And that business did great. And we sold it in 1995. And in the process, we ended up moving from Southern California to Boulder, Colorado. And I've been in Boulder ever since. After that business sold, Jim Legio and I and a gentleman by name of Todd Vernon, we started a company called Brain Dance Communications, went through several iterations, but eventually went public in 2000 and sold in 2006. I left that company in 2003 because my family and I were in a really horrific car accident, went through a recovery period for about a year, and then I had some time to get back into business. My wife was still going through recovery. And I started a company called Market Force Information, which was a”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Well, let me start with my background. This is my seventh company, and I started running businesses when I got out of the Air Force in 1992. And my very first business was making plastic badges like, hello, my name is Paul. Welcome to Albertson Supermarket. That was an absolutely terrible business. I was running it in Southern California. So to all your listeners, do not go into the badge business. But from then, I think many...”

    2016-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source