I’ve completed the second step of my recovery from being a venture capitalist* and am now the head of marketing at Pixily, an online document management service focused on the small business customers. (Yes, it’s Prasad’s company!) I’ve had the opportunity to get close to a number of startups since I left Atlas earlier this year, and have loved a bunch of them - particularly some of the ones over at TechStars. But I found myself slowly spending more and more time at Pixily, from a few days a week to 30 hours a week to 60 hours a week plus lots of brainstorming time in bed at night when I was supposed to be sleeping. Eventually Prasad and I decided that I might as well take the plunge and go full time.
I’m really excited about working with Prasad and the team at Pixily for a bunch of reasons:
- We are growing, and growing fast. Guess what - growth is fun! Even more fun on the inside of the company vs. being an investor looking in from the board level.
- It’s new to me. I’d been an investor/finance type for my whole career. But marketing is totally new. I think I’ve got a feel for what I want things to look like from a high level from my days as an investor, but actually getting there is the challenge.
- I still get to play with numbers, since marketing is now a metrics driven function. I always liked running different scenarios for potential portfolio companies - now I just get to do it in real time…
- Working at Pixily has really stepped up my passion level. Passion matters more than when I was an investor. One of the greatest investors I worked with was a partner at Summit Partners. He had the uncanny ability to dispassionately evaluate every little detail of a deal, and had no “sunk cost” fallacies. If an important part of a deal didn’t check out he would walk away, regardless of the amount of time we’d spent working on it - even if we’d spent a year and a half and had spent hundreds of thousands on due diligence. I think that is part of the reason he was such an amazing investor. But when you are company trying to grow, you can’t be dispassionate. You have to believe that what you are doing is going to work, even when little things go off the rails. So, while the ups are great, it is the excitement I feel for the company’s potential that keeps me chugging on through the occasional setback.
- It’s really cool to do something that actually, directly helps customers. I’m getting a lot of the passion I just mentioned from customers. It was after taking a few customer support calls that I really “got” the problem that Pixily was solving. Small businesses really like this service and they are changing the way the work and integrating Pixily into their everyday processes. There is a real, unmet need in the market - small companies are still paper-based and a new generation of business owners want to manage their businesses’ information online, not in filing cabinets, and from their phones, not from their desktop. Helping people make this change is really exciting!
There are a ton of other things I’m finding really fun - but the one thing I do miss (besides the deep, peaceful slumber of the money man) is having time to blog more. I hope to pick back up the blogging pace, since I’m experiencing all kinds of new things and want to share and get people’s opinions.
Finally, sign up for a free trial for your startup! Send us your paper documents, upload your digital files, and start using Pixily as a search engine for all of your companies’ paper! And you can use the “HJ2009″ coupon code for $5.00 off when you sign up for a paying plan.
*The first step was acknowledging that I had a problem
