YouSaid · the spoken record

Tooey Courtemanche

lines on the record: 92
first: 2023-12-04
most recent: 2023-12-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“No. It's actually, I did for a long time. I realized that my kind of superpowers are not in the operational activities of the low-level detail. One of my mottos has always been know your strengths and know your weaknesses and higher your weaknesses. So I know what I'm not good at. So I hire these amazing people to supplement my challenging areas where I'm just not empowered and I'm not passionate. I'm gladly giving it away.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to let them fail. Now, you want to minimize the blast radius, right? You can't let them fail with an existential threat, but you have to let them fail. I look at this very much like I look at parenting, right? A lot of parents' big mistakes are they watch their kid start to stumble and fall and they try to catch them and save them from it, right? My parenting style was always like, if Henry was going to stumble and fall, look, I didn't want him to hurt himself, but if he skinned his knee, for instance, and kids get like freaked out and he would look up at me, I would be like, you know, hey, that was quite a tumble you just did as opposed to being like most parents would are like, oh my goodness, like that is the scariest thing I've ever seen. Let me help fix you because you want people to learn from their mistakes and you want to teach them without doing their job for them how to overcome those obstacles. So it takes a lot of like trust in order to do that, but you have to do that.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I had the privilege of mentoring some CEOs of tech companies that are growing their businesses. And one of the things that I impart on them, which I wish somebody had imparted on me, was in the early days of a tech company, you do everything. Your job is to do. Like literally, yeah, I was writing code. I was taking out the trash. I was doing everything. At a certain point in your leadership scale, you have to learn how to stop doing and start leading. And it's a really unnatural motion for people that are just used to getting the job done themselves. And I see it till this day, Harry, with leaders of ProCorps, not senior leaders, but people that are moved into management roles. The difficulty that people have of letting go of doing the actual work and empowering their people. And I think that that's probably one of the biggest challenges with anybody.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I actually have a very strict line at Procore. I do not do deal negotiations anymore, and I haven't for the last five or six years. I build relationships with the customers that I want that I do not want to be transactional. I make it very clear with all of our prospects and all the people that I'm talking to, our customers at Renewal, that I'm not going to be doing the commercial terms. But what I am going to do is I'm going to be a long-term partner of theirs to put together a joint strategy of success. And so I create a very big delineation. I talk to a customer, I think every single day. I think there's nothing more important that a CEO can do than to talk to a customer. And I actually get kind of blamed for it sometimes. Like people are like, are you spending too much time? And I just don't believe you can spend too much time with the people that you're serving.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we did. And as one customer would adopt it, they would actually realize that it gives them the flexibility to buy more or less a procure at any given time, yet they're able to get all of their team members and their collaborators. You know, in construction, if we sell the, you know, hairy construction, right? You're going to invite all your subcontractors onto the platform. Those folks are working on the platform for free. They get all the benefits of ProCor, but you're paying the bill unless they want to become their own customer. So these folks would go and tell other general contractors, hey, I'm using this amazing product. So ultimately, our success kind of was the driver of adoption of this new pricing model. But like I said, even till this day, I was on a call last week with a customer who still wishes that we had a different pricing model.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scales nicely with customer size. So let's adopt this. It was so wildly unpopular with our customers. Even till this day, some of our customers don't love it, but it is the ultimate yardstick and we really believe in it.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, so our mission is to connect everyone in construction on a global platform. I knew from day one that if we went with a seat-based licensing model, which, by the way, remember, I'd run a technology company before this. So that was the only really prevalent model at the time was CPAS. I knew that what would happen was our customers were going to make value decisions based upon who was going to get a seat. But the way that construction done is a team sport. And so you need everyone to have access to the system because everyone needs to contribute. So I realized that I couldn't go with a perceived model because that was going to make it so we were never going to be successful. And so I had to come up with another yardstick. And honestly, the only thing I could come up with was construction volume. One of our customers one day said to me, Harry, I said, how do you buy other things? And he said, well, I buy our insurance based off of our construction volume. So if I'm going to do $10 million with the construction volume next year, I will buy $10 million worth of insurance. And so I thought to myself, well, here's a way that they're used to buying. And it's actually a yardstick that actually...”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what I suggest you do is that you actually deploy your customer success and your field and product marketing folks there first, build that brand, get the ground swell going with the reference of customers, then put your go-to-market team in afterwards to capitalize on that. And I'll kind of candor. We went all in into our early markets thinking like they're going to love us. It's all going to go well. We have learned that there is a playbook here and that you have to really build that brand first. But what we find is the longer that we've been into any particular market, the more success we have. So the way you enter markets matter and you have to be patient. Nothing's going to happen overnight. It took us years to build the brand in the US. And so we have to be patient building brands in Newark.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like to tell people this, which is just a reminder at everyday in ProCore's history, I had never been the CEO of a company of that scale before, right? So like, because it was growing, right? And so everything was, I had to learn a lot as we went. So there were a lot of lessons learned. You know, going internationally, it's really tempting to say what worked in the US market is going to work in another market. I would say some of the biggest lessons learned was you have to build a brand and you have to build loyal customers and referenceable customers in those markets before you really can expect any sort of scale and growth in those markets.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, one thing that we did learn was so when we were selling into Australia and New Zealand market, they had these new laws in place in Australia around if a job site accident led to a death at the construction site and a safety violation had been seen prior to that that wasn't documented, the CEO of the construction company would go to prison for manslaughter. All of a sudden, when we were talking to our customers in Australia and New Zealand, they're like, look, love your project management tool. We need quality and safety because I don't want to go to prison, right? So we're like, okay, so we started building this product for them and we got really good product market fit. And then what we realized is that we took it globally to our global customers. Everybody valued that new product. And so we were able to kind of hyper scale that product because one market demanded it, but the rest of the market needed it. So we learned that we had the opportunity to kind of capitalize on those finite needs and then take them globally. And it worked.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, our project management tool, which is our flagship, was definitely Enterprise Grade. Was a newer product we had just brought into market, and it was kind of becoming wildly successful and to the point where we really had to go back and shore it up to make sure that we could actually deliver on our promises.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“2019 We had to tell our customers looking to you about a lot of features that we're going to be building, we're going to actually pause on this for now. And trust us, you're going to love it. You know what's so cool is that till this day, customers still come up to me and they're like, though that was really hard for us to hear, it was the smartest thing you guys ever did on that product line because now it is completely changed the way we do business and it's completely scalable and it's enterprise grade. So yeah, but that was a hard decision to make.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of lessons in there, right? So, up until 2017, we only had one product. It was our project management tool, and it's still our flagship product. But what we had heard was our customers were, they were sick of having point solutions, and so they really wanted to have our platform be the platform a choice for all of their kind of core business needs. And so we very deliberately force rank those. So we prioritize which are the biggest needs and we kind of worked our way down from there. So one big lesson we learned was, you know, in the early days, you're kind of faking it till you make it. You don't really realize that scale might happen. And so some of our financial product line was a great example was, you know, we had built that very quickly, got it to market, arguably wasn't 100% enterprise grade. So we actually had to stop developing that product at a certain point and go back and rearchit it. So it was enterprise grade. And we literally stopped new future development for a year. But we realized that if we...”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually do believe ignorance sometimes is bliss, not all the time. I also think that you can be too smart for your own good. So us having this singular focus on what we were doing and really not trying to just build a business but actually solve a real problem and satisfy the needs of the customers just kept us really, really focused. And so you can call it naivete or whatever, but like that's all we were really thinking about, you know?”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Million evaluation to a billion, and that we were all like, wow, we've significantly grown this business. And it kind of happened without us thinking about it.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It really started within about a year where we would double and double again and double again and double again. I mean, around 2017, we were rolling. What's really interesting to me, Harry, is in hindsight, we never stopped to kind of think about what the heck was happening. You know, I used to, when I was a kid, I was a skateboarder, right? And so if I was skateboarding down the hill and you got too fast and you get speed wobbles, you have to leap off your skateboard, you're hoping that your feet can run as fast as the speed of the skateboard so you don't fall on your face. Those years were us running as fast as we possibly could. Try not to crash. So we had no time to kind of think about like, what the heck's going on here? I'll never forget when we got a billion dollar valuation on ProQuer, we're raising some private capital. We were all standing in a hotel room somewhere. We were at a conference, the leadership team, and I was talking to our investors about the pricing the round. And it came up to be a billion dollars. And I'll never forget, that was a moment where I'm like, I had missed like.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's funny too the person that said that to me had flown down here on a private jet, so I was kind of not concerned that their deal was going to make it so their kids didn't eat.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the reasons why with Brian and Will was because they were very, very straightforward with me and they just ran a good process.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of my biggest challenges, Harry, is that I like people as we've talked about in the past, and I really get invested in the relationships. And some folks, not the two folks that I'm talking about that are institutional investors, but some investors tried to leverage their ability to kind of manipulate my feelings and making me feel guilty for not going with them and stuff like that. You know, I listened to your discussion with Scott from Atlassian and how they did the closed envelope fundraising. I was thinking to myself, I wish we had done that because it would have taken a lot of this, I mean, I literally would get calls from institutional investors saying like, you know, you're taking food out of my kids' mouths because you're not giving me access to this deal and stuff. It was kind of those kind of like guilty things.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't. I should remember. By the way, I should remember all of this. I don't remember. It was, well, I remember this. I don't know if Brian told you this, but Bessemer had an investment thesis on ProCore that they, of course, they don't tell the company about. The best outside scenario they could come up with was that ProCore was going to be worth $300 million in the future. And we always joke about that because I think we're a little bit beyond that, right? But yeah, and by the way, I don't know if you know this, but we had a co-lead on our Bessemer investment guy named Paul Landris, who was with Brian in the investment. I hired Paul to join Procor after we had done the fundraising. And Paul ended up becoming our CFO. But Paul told me all of the backstories of what the partners were saying about ProCorps during the investment thesis. And it was kind of shocking that they have, you know.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I guess I was saying we were a little intimidated going back, right? Because we had had such a demoralizing experience on our first run at institutional investors. But the good news was we learned it's almost less about the brand of the venture firm and it's more about the partner, right? And so I got to know both Will Griffith and Brian Feinstein personally, deeply personally. And I spent a lot of time with them as well as some other investors that we ended up not going with. I decided that I was going to make sure I was going to be working with people who shared our values and actually were really vested in our success. And it wasn't just another deployment of capital. This was somebody that was going to lean in and be very heavily engaged in this journey. And fortunately for me, we found two amazing institutional investors that till this day are on our board. At till this day, believe in our mission and are 100% behind what we're doing. And yeah, so we got very lucky.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know 2015, 2016, 2017, and we're up raising money, and everyone was like, you guys are geniuses. You figured something out that nobody else has figured out. And it's funny that I'm like, we're still the same person. We're probably more idiots than geniuses. But anyhow, it was just funny to have the same people refer to you now as a genius when they were calling you an idiot.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me take you to an earlier meeting. So we walked up and down Sandhill Road in 2008. We were a little ambitious in 2008. You know, everything was going up into the right. Our customers were doing really, really well. The economy hadn't hit the skid yet. So we walked up and down Sandhill Road and we went into, I'm not going to name their name, but we went into one of the largest institutional investors that everybody knows. And they put us in the back dark conference room with the junior junior analyst and we were pitching them on ProCore. And literally the guy said to me, he goes, look, this is really an interesting idea and there's probably some opportunity here. But if you did it more like Facebook, we would be interested in investing. And I was like, so essentially then they kicked us out of the building and everyone laughed at us. And it was really funny because literally they were calling us idiots. They're like, you're selling software to an industry that can't use your software. Like, what are you doing? You guys are idiots. And then it's funny, you fast forward to, you know.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you have to understand the dichotomy between Steve and myself. So, I'm the carpenter who failed out of college, right? Steve's the Stanford grad who got his MBA at Haas at Berkeley. A lot of these companies, if you think about a lot of big successful companies actually have this kind of dichotomy and co-founders. Steve was very much business focused, and he was the one who was like making all of the kind of recommendations. So he said to me, he's like, too, like, I think we have enough product market fit that we could actually go out and figure this out and raise some capital. I'd always known we were going to and that we were going to have this opportunity. So I was pretty bought in right off the bat. I was a little intimidated, you know, walking up and down Sandhill Road and meeting the likes of Brian Feinstein and Byron Dieter and Will Griffith and, you know.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, trust me, we didn't just wait either. We did a lot of things as a company that supplemented our income in order to make payroll through those lean years. I don't know if those were the best ideas, but they kept us alive. You know, customers would ask us to do custom development on a new application. And if they're going to pay us $30,000 for a month's worth of work, we would literally put two engineers on it and just ship a piece of software that had nothing to do with ProQore for them just to keep the lights on. As they say, the only thing that matters in business is that you survive to fight another day. And so whenever I talk to founders who are like, it looks like it's all over, I'm like, just the oxygen to the business is revenue. Just go generate some freaking revenue and you'll survive.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The market definitely changed to us. We had not changed anything. We have been building the same product for 13 years, but the market finally adopted it”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Steve's arm stopped going to the mailbox every day. Let me tell you what that means. For 13 years, we would every day Steve's on co-founder. We'd go to the mailbox and wait for a check from a customer to make sure that we can make payroll. So every day I would see Steve in the hallway and I'm like, what's going on? He's like, oh, I'm going to get the mail so I see if we can make payroll. One day I caught him in the hallway in 2014-15. And I'm like, what are you doing? He's like, that thing he goes, what I'm not doing is I'm not going to the mailbox. And I said, why? And he goes, we have enough money in our account. You know, we have enough revenue now that I don't have to run to the mailbox every day to check for checks. So we realized at that point we had turned some sort of a corner and that it was time to step on the accelerator we had some product market fit and all we needed to do was go out and raise some capital to bring this idea to market.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first and foremost, the internet really had not made it to the job site. They were all kind of betting on the come, and it just hadn't really been adopted yet. You asked earlier about when was that inflection point, right? We didn't really hit an inflection point until 2015. Between 2002 and 2015, we'd grown revenue from zero dollars to $9.6 million, right? Over that long period of time. But from 2015 on, it started to accelerate. You know, you would have had to survive from 2009-10 all the way to 2015 to see this industry starting to adopt this type of technology. So there just was, you had to have enough resources to stick it through.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and the competitive landscape before the great financial crisis, there were a lot of companies out there that were bigger than ProCor that were trying to kind of digitize the construction industry. I mean, the landscape was just littered with companies. And we were just like a minuscule little player. And honestly, if we didn't have the wherewithal to survive the great financial crisis, thanks primarily to one of our investors who kept pumping money into ProCorp. We wouldn't have survived. And what's really interesting is 2010 rolls around and we look at the competitive landscape, they're all gone. It's a wasteland of just dead companies and we're the only ones surviving.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the risk ratio is an investor, right? It's much higher for those things. By the way, I don't know if you know the story of Qualcomm, but Erwin Jacobs, who started Qualcomm, in order for Erwin Jacobs to be successful at Qualcomm, he needed to invent a technology behind CDMA, which was brand new technology and was barely able to be done. He needed to get all the wireless carriers to take all of their infrastructure out and replace it with new CDMA infrastructure. He needed to create handsets that could use CDMA. So he had to invent a cell phone that would work. And then he would have to invent the chips in order to make this processing actually possible. You look at that investment, the same thing as Procore. Like, that's a high-risk investment. All those things had to become true in order for them to be successful. But with those high-risk investments come tremendous rewards, and I think that's the way I would look at it.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The more things that have to happen in order for a company to be successful, the higher the risk ratio is, right? So I would look at it definitely that way. You know, if you were to invest in Procore in 2002, I didn't even take our first friends and family until 2004. But if you were to invest, then you would have had to believe, first of all, that the construction industry was going to digitize. Second of all, that the people that work in construction were actually going to be proficient enough in technology to use it. Third, that the internet was going to need to make it to the job site. Fourth, that mobile applications were going to be able to untether people from a job site trailer to actually do their job in the field. And fifth is that people would actually look at these tools as productivity gain tools as opposed to documentation tools. So all of those things would have a had div happen in order for you to believe that Procore was going to be successful.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We literally Steve Zahm and I literally buy airline tickets go to a customer. We went to Sea Island, Georgia, which is on the other side of the United States. We went to CompUSA and we bought a router and bought a wireless access point. And then we went to Home Depot and bought a toolbox. And we actually went to the job site. This is what we used to do. And we would install the internet at the job site so a customer could then pay us $95 a month for our service. The answer to the question was the internet was not at the job site. There was no such thing as mobile technology at all. The iPhone didn't come out till 2007, for goodness sakes. iPad in 2011. We just were super, super early. But I knew it was going to happen. It was the last industry I was aware of that had not digitized. And I'd seen all these other industries digitize. And I'm like, it's just a matter of time before it happens. We just have to be patient.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So rewind time to 2002. If you walked onto any construction site in the world, there was no internet at the job site. Yet I had built a vertical SaaS solution to serve an industry that couldn't actually use my technology, right? So those were the tough days.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had this vision that we are going to be able to connect everybody in construction on a global platform. I think I'm running towards this vision of it being done, which I think a lot of founders lie to themselves too, that there will be a nirvana state in the future where everything is going to be where you expect it to be. And I think that's just a survival instinct that we all have. But I think I'm running towards that.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm fortunate that I get to Love What I do. Some founders, Steve Zahn, my co-founder, he had a company he took public before ProQore. I think from founding to IPO, it was like 13 months, right? Some founders are really lucky because you don't have to go through the years of the dark times to get to success. For me, I wouldn't have made it if I didn't love what we did because we just had so many years of just strife and turmoil. I wouldn't have been able to sustain it if I didn't love it.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know what's interesting is I think in hindsight, like, look, I'm 56 years old. When I was in high school and elementary school, I don't think that they had diagnosis for dyslexia or whatever. And I'm sure I'm dyslexic. I'm also an autodidex. So if you give me something that I'm passionate about, I'll blow your socks off and how much of an expert I become at it and whatever else. But I have to be interested in it. And so what changed for me was I found my passion in life, devoted my life to that passion. And that's why I just never stopped because like that's just my personality type. And I think that's why founders are caught cut from a different cloth. You have to have more than just an interest in something in order to succeed.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a really good question. You have to understand let's start with the running from, and then I'll tell you where I was running too. I was a horrible student in school. I was flunking out of school, left, right, and center. My guidance counselor told me that there were probably some good jobs out there for me, but they weren't going to be very lucrative jobs. And I had failed out of college. And I just, I was, and I was a carpenter by trade. So I really had very low expectations of myself as well as what my family thought of me. Thank goodness I had to trade being a carpenter, which I have the most respect for. But I decided one day that I wanted to prove everyone wrong, that I wasn't this person that was kind of a mediocre person at best. And so I was running from that stigma. And I wanted to be prove to myself I was more than what people thought of me as.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think you know instinctually if something's not working. And the other thing is that clearly Procore didn't work for years, right? Like you know the story, right? We didn't really raise institutional money until like our 15th year. It was a long time. But like I think you just know as a founder if it's going to work or it's not. I also believe that founders are usually cut from a different cloth, which is, you know, I always say like, I'm a dog on a bone. Like no one was ever going to take this vision away from me because I just knew it was going to happen. And so I could have made a small business out of it or I could have made a medium sized or a large business out of it. But ultimately, if it wasn't going to work, I think you just know it.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, people ask me this question all the time. And when I think about it kind of in arrears, when I kind of rewind time, I think the one thing about being a founder who's so devoted to the mission is that you don't question it. I knew it was a foregone conclusion that somehow this industry, this construction industry was going to get digitized. And I believed that our approach, I just felt like if people would give me enough time, I was going to figure this out. So I didn't really stop to question it. And I'm grateful for that.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was a really rough time. So we were selling our software to mostly custom home builders prior to the great financial crisis. And of course, the very first part of the construction industry that fell apart was the custom home business market. So our customers all went out of business. And so we had this shift really, really quickly to commercial construction. But in that two-year timeframe that it took for us to kind of make that shift, yeah, myself and Steve Zahn, my co-founder, we had to go without a paycheck. And I'll never forget Harry having to go home and tell my wife, who by the way, at this point, we had sold everything that we had acquired in life. Like I had two mortgages on the house. I'd sold a car. I'd sold to make payroll. I had nothing left to sell. And I told my wife one day when I went home, I'm like, look, we're not going to get paid for a while. And I was scared to death at how she was going to respond. You know, the coolest thing of all is that she was like, look, I believe in this vision as much as you do. Let's make it happen. We were able to go for a couple of years and just scrape by borrowing money from friends and family just to get by.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was running a small tech company up in the Bay Area in the heart of Silicon Valley, and my wife told me one day, hey, guess what? And by the way, I was flying all over the United States servicing clients in a completely different industry. And my wife said to me one day, hey, guess what? We're moving to Santa Barbara. And I said, no, we're not. We live in the Bay Area and I run a business up here. She goes, no, your son and I are moving to Santa Barbara. We haven't seen you in months because all you do is travel. And if you're not, we're not going to see you. We'd rather not see you in Santa Barbara than San Francisco. And so very much against my best judgment, I came down here kind of kicking and screaming. And lo and behold, you know, we started building a house. And, you know, she got sick of me complaining about the challenges of building the house. And so she said to me, like, hey, why don't you just go out and solve this problem and stop complaining about it? And that was the origin story of Procore. So it's all her idea.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I'm equally as excited, Harry. This is a huge fan of what you do. And so this is quite an honor to get to join you today.”
2023-12-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source