Fireside Chat with KlipFolio

On March 23rd, SESA hosted an Informal interview in front of a fire with Klipfolio president, Allan Wille. Throughout the chat, we got to learn more about Klipfolio, Allan, and especially entrepreneurship as a whole.

The beginning of the interview started with Allan’s past, before founding Klipfolio. We learned his dad was also an entrepreneur and was a big inspiration, and that he has always been a builder. He got into entrepreneurship quite young, he was selling second-hand model cars out of his basement at 12, which grew into a model car “camp” that was approved by his city when he was only 14! But one thing to understand with Allan is that while he had many successes, he didn’t ace everything on his first try. When he was learning how to do bookkeeping, he didn’t realize there was a global standard for the way it was done and instead he simply did it his own way. He needed serious correction from an accountant to put everything in order. But the message Allan got across is that even if you make mistakes, you can still improve and move forward, and fearing mistakes halts progress.

These are the lessons he took with him into his first serious startup, Espial. Espial started out as a web design company In 1996. They weren’t the typical 9–5 company instead they worked odd hours often coming in late but “before noon” and staying in until 11pm, often working weekends as well. However in the process of their work, they managed to create an incredibly small and lightweight java-runtime. They pivoted and went in the direction of putting their small java-runtime into phones, which at the time weren’t as powerful as the ones today, and needed as much minimization in their resource usage as they could get.

His work with Espial, where he dabbled around and waited until they saw a great oppurtunity to capitalize on, highlights the “poke and probe” mentally Allan has with business. Instead of risking everything and “betting the house” on ideas, he looks for strong validation of demand before hand. This lends itself to the bootstrapping ideology, where a startup on grows as much as it can financially handle, instead of borrowing a lot of seed money risking large debt (hence losing the house) in the case of failure. He did this with Klipfolio as well. First, a step back to understand what Klipfolio does: as their website states, they provide “automated data retrieval from hundreds of data services”. This means instead of manually taking data from multiple different locations, you can just put the list of sources you want into Klipfolio and get them automatically. This was originally done through a consumer application. However, some of their clients started hinting the need to for a cloud version, or a product that scales outside of individual physical machines on one platform. The Ipad came out and many business execs wanted to run it off their devices, larger companies needed it for more and more users, many signs came from different sources. That is what led to complete redesign of the infrastructure to move into a cloud in 2012. This move might have seemed like a gamble from the outside, but in truth, there was a lot of validation that went into the decision.

Allan also talked about some general principles of effective employees and employers. He mentioned how the late nights he worked with on Espial gave way to a more balanced 8:30–4:30 work day. He stressed the importance of this: Putting in crazy hours does not necessarily mean massive results, maintaining a work-life balance is vital to staying effective. 37–40 hour work week is enough. The key is to get an effective team, since quality employees will pay dividends in the long run. In his opinion employees are the worst aspect of a business to screw up, because mistakes can have rippling effects throughout the company. Regular meetings (for example 10 minutes a week) and an indepth hiring process help avoid these issues. In terms of management, three founders are a good amount, but often you will eventually run into an issue where a founder does not scale into management as well as the company grows bigger. At this point you have the option to either bring in managers from the outside or promote from within, but one must recognize that both can of issues and in either case you must validate that they can handle the change in environment/roles.

So there you have it, our little chat with Klipfolio gave us. Covering everything from risk analysis to human resources, it was a great time for everyone involved.

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