Rick Nucci Startup Meetup Vignette
A Huge Thank You to Rick Nucci, President of Philly Startup Leaders, Co-Founder of Boomi & Guru . He spoke at WSL on Tuesday and we had so much fun.
Excerpt from Rick's Full Startup Meetup
On Startups:
"A lot of people talk about why we do startups in the first place. Startups are becoming almost satirical now. Does anyone watch Silicon Valley? On HBO, anyone heard of that show? Its very funny. Its also amazingly accurate and true! You watch it and think 'imagine if it was actually like that", but it actually is. And you know, thats all the glamour. Those of you who are doing it now or have done it before know that its definitely one of the top three hardest things you'll ever do. Thats because there really is no rule book, no manual. And at the end of the day you have to figure it out on your own. Which is why when you do its very rewarding."
On Founders:
"We had a lot times at Boomi that we were internally focused, which is horrible, horrible, horrible, because one of the great things about a startup is everything is suppose to be democratic and we'll figure it out together and everything will be awesome. We work big companies before with bureaucracy and politics and we were i a startup and we're free, but guess what? We spent all our time having internal meetings and fighting with each other. It comes back to what I've heard over and over again, you have to have a tie breaker, because you eventually reach gridlock, impasses."
On Unique Value:
"Back in 2007, people we're talking about cloud computing like it was a fad. Oracle was dismissing it, Microsoft was dismissing it, IBM was dismissing it, now its all they talk about. Back then it wasn't, we sort of had that first mover advantage... We wanted to do for integration, what salesforce did for CRM, salesforce.com. People would here that analogy and they would get it. So we figured the unique value out, but we were dismal at (promoting/marketing) it. So much so that, it was one of the main reason that Boomi 1.0 really never got growth. Really crowded market, lots of players,all bigger than us, not able to stand out and differentiate."
On Products:
"When we were building Boomi, and now with Guru, (our) startups have been really personal. And if you've done one or your doing one, you already know what I mean. Again, there are no layers between you and the end customer. Were humans, we try things and they don't work, so we get unhappy. And when we try things and they do work we get happy, and thats a natural process. So this piece of advice is somewhat counterintuitive; view you product as a series of experiments to get to something that actaully works. And the more methodical and emotionless you can be about that the greater your chance for success, its a direct correlation. When we were building Boomi 2.o, we indoctrinate this philosophy into everything we did. With Guru, we've plugged it in hard to our product strategy, into our way of thinking."
