‘6 Month Startup’ Podcast Interview Here!

[Music playing]
Narrator: The Bonfire series where head meets heart in our regional tech industry. Bonfire began as a concept and wish to bring together industry experts throughout our region and beyond to infuse tech startups outside Silicon Valley, and it worked. Our monthly Podcast series, in collaboration with Seven Peaks Ventures, seeks to continue the conversation around the tech industry’s current trends connecting with leaders ready to speak from the heart.
This Podcast is for visionaries, investors, CEO’s and entrepreneurs ready to share stories, explore new solutions, spark real conversations, and maybe start a revolution. Join our host and General Partner, Corey Schmid, as she delves deeper into what it means to support startups in this current ecosystem: the Bonfire Series.
Corey Schmidt: Welcome back to the Bonfire Podcast Series with me, your host Corey Schmid, General Partner at Seven Peaks Ventures. Today we welcome a tireless startup advisor, mentor, inventor and entrepreneurial leader from Seattle, Dave Parker. Dave is a five time founder, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and advisory board member to dozens of companies.
He is formerly the senior vice president of programs at Up Global, Startup Weekend, and Startup America which was purchased by Techstars in 2015. Dave helped launch Startup Week globally and served as the local director for four years. With his team he built Startup Next and launched it globally serving as the Seattle director.
Dave is currently launching a program in Seattle and up and coming entrepreneurial hubs across the United States called 6 Month Startup ‘Road Map Ideation to Revenue’ a prescribed model for systematically incubating and launching new ideas. Dave is an active writer, blogger, and panelist on early stage startup in technology related topics. Recently, Dave joined Seven Peaks Ventures as our Seattle venture partner anchoring our Seattle office. When he’s not starting, cycling or spending time with his family — you can likely find him reading. He has a second year running commitment to read a hundred books, so without further ado please welcome Dave Parker.
Dave Parker: This is awesome! Thanks for having me on the Podcast.
Corey: This is great! I’m glad you are here. So, Dave you’ve got a really phenomenal track record and startups and entrepreneurship and you’ve been at it sometime. I would love to hear a bit about your e-jay your entrepreneurial journey from the early days of Dave Parker to where you are now.
Dave: I started my first company in 1998 in Seattle with a guy that both you and I know Tom Gonser. Tom was running his first company at the time so we were in the same startup community ecosystem in ’98, and sold that company in 2002. I was fortunate enough to grow it from zero to 32 million in revenue, and about 150 employees but if you remember in 2002 it wasn’t a great time to sell a company — it was a little rough. Then following that built four additional companies with the ability to sell three of them having closed two of them, so from a startup math perspective not bad startup math.
Came out of the sales and marketing background which really was, I think, the innovation that we see consistently with Founders is the ability to see things that may not exist yet around problems that happen to be problems they know and industry segments they know. One of the companies I ended up I joining the board called Classmates.com, and we sold that company for a big number, but it was one of the early ones where I remember sitting in the board meeting and talking about two new competitors ‘The Facebook’. I didn’t have an Edu extension to get into and LinkedIn, and talking about how you go pivot to go and compete because they obviously tapped into a much larger market.
So, that started my professional board work so I ended up really around governance and boards because one of the things that we see as an investor now is that bad boards produce bad enterprise values, and dysfunctional boards are really hard. So, that’s a little bit of both me personally and a five company process and then being a board member, and now stepping into a role joining the team of Seven Peaks as an investor.
Corey: Where you a born entrepreneurial or learned entrepreneur?
Dave: I think everybody is a learned entrepreneur. I spent a lot of time in the east and by that I mean Japan and China, and one of the things we tend to over-index on in the West is, “Wow that person is super gifted”. So, for example my son plays lead guitar in a metal band and he’s super gifted because he’s spent 10 thousand hours becoming a great guitarist.
So, I do think the people are clearly born with great opportunities as well and we’ll talk about that I’m sure later. Some people are born with big wing spans right from their parents but generally for entrepreneurship it’s not about taking unreasonable risks, it’s about mitigating your risks and I think that’s one of the things entrepreneurs need to think, about how do they de-risk their startup and their investments just because their the biggest investor in their companies.
Corey: Where going to come back to that. I want to play a quick clip for you. This is from Brian Wong, the Founder of Keep, and you may recall he was one of our keynotes at Bonfire 2016. Just a little snippet about ‘Passion & Drive’ from Brian and I’d like to play that for you.
[Snippet Playing]
Passion comes with just recognizing the opportunity. So, the only way to differentiate is can I tell that you are truly passionate. Will you go above and beyond? Can I call on you? A client calls on you at two AM and will you get it done right. We have guys that are like so persistent and really want to meet with me and really, really want to figure how they can help, and I love those people.
Read the rest of the interview here…
For more information on Seattle startup culture check out Dave’s blog.
