YouSaid · the spoken record

Ryan Holmes

lines on the record
23
first
2016-10-28
most recent
2016-10-28
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. “Yeah, next five years, it's kind of mind-boggling to think we're just over seven years old. Next five, where does this go? And we couldn't have imagined getting to where we are today on the product. I think we just continue to help service our customers. And with regards to the ecosystem, I think that we've seen the customer now, every interaction point is in social. So whether it's from discovery through marketing, through sales and social selling, or on the other end customer support and creating customer advocates, that is where people are gravitating towards is social. And so brands need to go there to help their customers. And so we want to help them with that full journey, the full customer experience. And that's really just where we're focused.”

    2016-10-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Oh man, I hugely bullish on Snapchat. 10 billion views daily at Facebook's at 8 billion. Huge audience, very engaged audience. Recently, this yesterday, memories coming out, that all of a sudden is really interesting seeing your archive of Snap that you've created. And I think that there is just so much runway for that platform. And so I think they've discovered a really exciting medium. And yeah, I'm absolutely bullish on it.”

    2016-10-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I read that often. I, of course, would be remiss in not mentioning my newsletter, but that's a little biased.”

    2016-10-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I love all my children. I love all of the social networks. We work with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. I think they're all great for their various purposes. And I love a varied ecosystem.”

    2016-10-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “There's no right answer there. It's chocolate or vanilla. I think that a blend is good. It wasn't the right thing for me. I think it's the right thing for a ton of other people, and I think it can be a really valuable.”

    2016-10-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “It's called the long walk, and it is a really great book about the human spirit ability to overcome adversity. Yeah, check it out. It's an awesome read. And it makes you realize that we have things real easy here.”

    2016-10-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “You know who I always love is Mark Schuster. He's like, so when we first started getting going in Twitter 2008, 9, he was crushing it then. He's now crushing it on Snapchat and doing really interesting stuff. There's a creative guy. So I always give him props from VC World. Branson also is doing a great job building his brand and social.”

    2016-10-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Camp for social media. Yeah, it was a great one. And so we were thinking, hey, Basecamp for social media, that's where we want to go. And so, anyways, we ended up shopping pretty broadly to ultimately find some partners to come on board. We did find those partners. They stepped up with the Capitol. And, you know, we were able to just continue to build out. We used our initial 1.9 million to get to cash flow neutral in about a year. So that was fantastic. And then we knew we had an amazing product market fit. We could see the economic engine. And we then just looked at how we could put more dollars into the company to really add velocity to the growth.”

    2016-10-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “That had recently gone through, done their tour and got funded up. So unfortunately, we were kind of like the number fourth coming along. And a lot of people just were, they'd already seen the show and talked to people. You know, our slant on it was a little different. A lot of people, you know, early competitors, TweetDeck, seismic, co-tweet. Those were, as I said, early competitors. They were more focused on building a social browser, a consumer-based social browser. That wasn't our vision. We wanted to build tools for business. We wanted to build, I don't know if you know 37 Signals Basecamp product. We wanted to build base camp.”

    2016-10-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “So the time that we were fundraising, you know, it was 2008-9. In terms of the capital markets, I think that it was an all right time. I think over the, you know, the last year was one of the best times ever. And I still think that it's a fairly good time to be fundraising. I think that there right now is an appetite and a theme around profitability, path to profitability. I think that people are batting down the hatches a little bit. Cash will break even is important for a lot of larger and later stage companies like ourselves. But I think that it is a great time. So when we were fundraising 2008-9, we were headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. There were not a level of sophistication in Vancouver around social media, let alone cloud and SaaS. So ultimately ended up going to San Francisco and New York. There were a number of early day competitive.”

    2016-10-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, you know, I really believe in that statement. You know, early days, you have nothing to risk. You are scrappy. You're iterating quick. You should be getting something out there.”

    2016-10-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Think that there's any one right philosophy. I think sometimes we'll do longer sprints on projects or multiple sprints on projects and other times we'll do tighter, quick release, validate and feedback. I think we also want to bucket into is this a feature? Is it a usability issue and trying to figure out which kind of balancing we put into? Do our customers concern more about new features and functionality or are they more concerned about usability? And I think that's something that often gets missed as people get into a feature war in terms of adding the next, next, next, next feature. And ultimately, you have something that looks like you've just stapled on a bunch of brochures and maybe you don't realize that your customers are actually just caring about usability and simplicity. And so, you know, we try to really balance out those friction points.”

    2016-10-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “That's an age old question and something that we love. And I think in the world of social, the transparency, customer transparency is so incredible. We push updates and we hear back immediately from our customers whether they love and hate it. And we do always try to get informed customer decision and feedback at the forefront of releasing new product. But sometimes when you're working with an agile and rapid release environment, you just want to get it out and let people play with it. And there also is this friction of done perfect or done. And sometimes you want to do something that we believe is a bit of an epic and it's going to take a lot of time to get that out. And it's not going to be possible to get a micro release out around it to gauge what customers response to it is. So I think it's a blended approach.”

    2016-10-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Meeting the whole meeting really, I think very often wasn't worth value. And so those are a few strategies. Capping time, putting time constraints on, Keterina Fake, I think she came up with this idea on the four-liter water meeting. Everybody sits around and chugs water until somebody has to do a bio break. I thought that's a pretty hilarious meeting hack where just people are squirming to get out of a meeting. But having time constraints to meeting, I think, is hugely important also.”

    2016-10-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “It's so funny, how many books, how many blog posts, how many podcasts talk about how much meetings suck? And we were still there, right? Yeah, and I'm sure 10, 20 years from now, people will still be talking about the same. There's a lot of hacks. I think just getting down to the basics, you know, who's calling the meeting? Why are they calling the meeting? Who has been asked to join the meeting and why they've been asked? And is this meeting going to be important for them? You know, one of the things we have is a policy of, you know, if you don't feel like you're going to be adding value or the meeting isn't useful for you, you just excuse yourself. It's not a mandatory have to sit in unless you're contributing to the meeting or you're getting something of value from it. There's no point you being there. And I feel often, you know, I'd really like to get meetings down to a small group of people where you're really on towards a goal. I think the next bit that gets all too frequently passed up is, you know, like, especially early stage when you're starting to get better at doing meetings. But who is the secretary? Who's keeping the key takeaways and creating accountability and notes out of the meeting? Because if you don't have outcomes out of”

    2016-10-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Tried in kind of like a pre industrial era would splinter very often. They didn't maintain cohesion past a few hundred people and the human brain kind of on its own unaided with Rolodex's and other stuff on average kind of stops being effective around over 100 relationships. And so I think that's a way of thinking about how we are maybe naturally wired and how we should be thinking about workforce and departments and groups.”

    2016-10-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, I really like the alphabet concept. I think it's smart. I think maintaining, as we've grown, one lesson that I've learned is that communication and alignment becomes more important in a bigger part of my job. And I believe that once you get to the scale of, say, alphabet and have ambitious plans like they do to go and chase down other large opportunities, the communication and alignment of vision becomes more and more difficult. And so that cellular division, I believe, is a very smart one. I think then it allows the leaders to create a more tightly aligned vision for a smaller group of people. And I think that's a very smart move on behalf of Google. I think it's going to allow them to shoot off and to multiple directions. You know, there's sociological theory, and I can't remember who the, you know, it's an easy wiki around tribe sizes of kind of like 130, I think, and at a certain point.”

    2016-10-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “And not get punished for that or not get chastised for that. We have in our business, we started at, I think, an early age. We started a labs division of our company. Everybody is responsible and accountable for some innovation, and we don't tell everybody that isn't in the labs group to turn off your entrepreneurial mind.”

    2016-10-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, well, I think when companies lose that entrepreneurial spark, that's the day that they start to die. And if you think about, there are so many large organizations, you search and search for what people call a cash cow. What is a great economic engine to fuel your business? And what I believe happens is once you find that cash cow, that economic engine, you bring in systems to make sure that the engine stays healthy. You bring in processes to make sure that it doesn't get accidentally turned off. So you bring in legal aspects, policy, compliance, security, and all of these other great parts of a business that are important. But the risk of that is that you over systemize and you ultimately, I think demotivate people that are more entrepreneurial thinkers. And so you need to create an area, I believe, where those types of people can think outside of the”

    2016-10-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I'm passionate about in areas that I need to backfill and to get other specialists in. Look, in terms of just take finance, I know how to read an income statement, a balance sheet, a cap table, but it's not my passion. If I had to do that every day, I wouldn't be the happiest Ryan. But I have a CFO, and guess what? He loves doing that. And the finance team, they love doing that. That's their passion. And so the great thing about humans is that there is somebody that's passionate about all sorts of different interests, everything on the planet. And you just need to find those people that get passionate about things that maybe you're not and backfill those.”

    2016-10-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, so working as a restauranteur or a small business owner in general, I talk about small businesses are fantastic because ultimately full accountability rolls up to you, one person. You have to ultimately develop a skill set. You have to be good at a lot of different things. So you have to be the marketer, the salesperson, the operations person, the janitor, ultimately everything when you're a small business. And so that is a mini MBA. I think what you do also learn out of it is what are your core competencies? What do you like doing the most? How do you ultimately find people and backfill people into areas that you're not passionate about? And as I've looked at what I'm doing today in terms of managing a nearly 1,000 person company, did develop a holistic skill set in running my restaurant. I figured out the areas that I”

    2016-10-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Vancouver, Canada based did a hybrid of services work for clients and then also built out products and built out a string of different products over the years from 2000 to ultimately 2008 when we launched out Hootsuite as a product that we felt like there was a need for in the market. And what we saw pretty much right out of the gates was very viral uptake in the product usage. We had great product market fit. People were talking about it and sharing it with friends. And as I say, the rest is history. I've been doing that since working on Hootsweep since 2008. We worked for the first year. It was bootstrapped within the agency and classic entrepreneurial story. We had seven people from 21 person team working on a zero revenue product. And so that started getting a little bit expensive. The hosting bills were getting expensive. The credit cards were getting a little bit maxed out. And so we went.”

    2016-10-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, well, I guess there's a bit of a lead up, and you did set me up with the university dropout part. I'm a longtime entrepreneur. I started my first business in high school. It was a paintball company. Did that through high school, which was an amazing high school job, obviously. Got to post high school and knew I wanted to get into business. I went to B school and did a couple years there. And then I just got kind of impatient. I wanted to get out in the world. I wanted to cut my teeth. I was a very hands-on learner and I wanted just to go and do business and kind of not theorize about it. And so I decided to drop out and I actually did a stint. I started a restaurant, did that for a couple of years, two years, and very hard business, so much respect for restaurant tours and people that are able to be wildly successful at that business. It is a tough, tough industry, but I learned so much. Sold that business and started an agency in 2000. And the agency...”

    2016-10-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source