James Kubik of Somewear Labs On Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup

An Interview With Doug Noll

Perseverance — Whether founding a startup or joining at the early stage, all startup teams are signing up for a multi-year uphill battle with existential challenges along the way. To ultimately succeed, it takes resilient people ready to will their vision into existence.

Startups have such a glamorous reputation. Companies like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Uber, and Airbnb once started as scrappy startups with huge dreams and huge obstacles. Yet we of course know that most startups don’t end up as success stories. What does a founder or a founding team need to know to create a highly successful startup? In this series, called “Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup” we are talking to experienced and successful founders and business leaders who can share stories from their experiences about what it takes to create a highly successful startup. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing James Kubik, Co-Founder and CEO at Somewear Labs.

James Kubik is the Co-founder and CEO of Somewear Labs — a Silicon Valley startup building the critical communications platform for frontline teams. Prior to running Somewear Labs, James was a product leader at Intuit credited with the creation of the fastest growing new product in North America as well as its expansion to Europe and Australia. When not in the office or with customers, James is an avid outdoorsman and can be found fly fishing, snowboarding or practicing archery.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I’ve been an avid outdoorsman throughout my life and unfortunately experienced the loss of a close friend in a sailing accident. During my time as an engineering and design student at Northwestern, I had the opportunity to start thinking “What could have changed the outcome of that scenario? What could have saved them?” And that’s where the initial concept for Somewear was born — a wearable connection to the outside world that could call in help from anywhere on earth.

What was the “Aha Moment” that led to the idea for your current company? Can you share that story with us?

In the sailing accident, my friend’s boat had all the proper equipment she would need if she were in distress — marine radios, an EPIRB and other safety equipment — but once she was separated from the boat, she lost all access to her gear the moment she needed it most. This tragedy motivated my co-founder and I to set out developing a new communications solution that would always be accessible in the moment of need. For the last 7 years, we have been on a mission to ensure life-saving communications are more accessible and resilient than ever before. What started as an off-grid communications solution for outdoor recreationists has evolved into a robust enterprise communications platform leveraged by public safety, defense, and commercial frontline teams.

Was there somebody in your life who inspired or helped you to start your journey with your business? Can you share a story with us?

At Northwestern University, I took an Industrial Design course taught by Professor Greg Holderfield, Director of the Segal Design Institute. The Segal Design Institute focuses on the intersection of design and engineering and encourages students to put the user at the center of the design process while still considering engineering constraints throughout.

In this course, Professor Holderfield challenged us to “design anything you believe will make a difference in the world” and immediately I thought back to my friend’s tragic sailing accident. I admittedly ignored all of my other coursework and poured all of my focus into this project. What came out of that Industrial Design class was an early concept for what eventually became Somewear Labs.

When the quarter ended, Professor Holderfield offered to work with me on an independent study where we took the initial concept and started building it into a full product and the beginnings of what would become Somewear Labs many years later. We worked through the brand and experience that we could build around this initial concept and it planted a seed that changed the course of my life.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

One of the things that I’ve found our customers and partners often comment on is our efficiency and ability to deliver outsized results compared to our company size. While we are a fast-growing company, our team is much smaller than the other players in our space who employ in the thousands of people. Consistently, our customers assume we also have hundreds or thousands of employees and are shocked to learn the size of our post Series-A organization. This is a testament to our team which is undoubtedly the element of Somewear that stands out the most. Our team is a tight knit group of multi-disciplined, technically talented people who truly care about our customers and want to deliver exceptional product for them.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

At Somewear Labs, we take pride in the fact that our mission and what we are creating is tightly interwoven. Our product is making a direct and positive impact on the world. Take one of our customers for example, an Air Force Rescue Squadron in Alaska. They have successfully completed over 90 rescues in the last 10 months, saving people from the backcountry of remote Alaska while using our technology as the primary communications tool. The goodness that we are able to bring to the world is through giving people a voice in the places where they typically don’t have it. This enables people to a reliable and resilient line of communication and support during some of the toughest moments of their life. We’ve seen firsthand the impact our technology has had in these high-stress situations to ensure all parties involved are able to stay in close contact, no matter the environment.

While this is often as extreme as life and death, Somewear’s technology can also be used to relay joyous moments. My co-founder just summited Kilimanjaro and we were able to connect over Somewear just moments before the summit. We were communicating and celebrating his accomplishment over thousands of miles while he was in an area with zero traditional coverage. Whatever the situation, our mission is to maximize safety, equip teams to overcome challenges, safeguard lives, and help people return home safely.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

When I was 16 years old, my grandfather wrote me a letter that helped shape the leader and person I am today. The two concepts from this letter that I try to embody and have been instrumental in my professional path are as follows:

• “Do the right thing even when you know no one is watching” — Leading an organization means that your actions do not just impact you, but they impact your entire team and your team’s families. As the leader, you also have the least oversight of any other person in the organization. For that reason, I believe true integrity and a deep sense of right vs. wrong is the most critical trait for a business leader.
• “Do no harm” — While this appears overly simple on its face, embracing a mindset to do no harm in business is an incredibly powerful characteristic. It allows a leader to focus on key issues and deliver value to the customer and team. I’m often asked how Somewear stacks up against competition, and instead of highlighting the flaws, gaps, or problems I might be aware of, I strive to show respect for what they do and clearly communicate how our approach is different and leads to unique value for our customers.

Lastly, willingness to not just work hard but do the unglamorous work cannot be understated. I sometimes joke that at a startup you have to be a ‘full stack’ CEO — both willing to be the face of the company getting the glory but also willing to take out the trash behind the scenes.

Often leaders are asked to share the best advice they received. But let’s reverse the question. Can you share a story about advice you’ve received that you now wish you never followed?

There’s no shortage of advice that you receive as a founder, and it’s often from sources that lack firsthand operational experience or a close understanding of the challenges you are facing. This frequently includes input from prospective investors or individuals positioned on the sidelines of business operations. While some advice proves valuable, there’s a crucial distinction to be made between guidance rooted in expertise and insights given from those on the periphery. As a founder, there have been instances where well-intentioned ‘sideline’ advice was implemented, only to realize its limitations. It’s important to seek input from subject matter experts and leaders who are actively on the playing field to ensure more informed and contextually relevant decision-making. Not all advice is good advice and over-optimizing for all the advice you receive is always a worse path than over-optimizing for insights from sources of truth like real customer feedback.

Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey?

My co-founder and I faced a challenging period when we decided to pivot from supporting consumers to enterprise teams about two years into the business. While our consumer business was growing well, we were experiencing really exciting inbound interest from all sorts of enterprise teams — Search and Rescue teams, forestry teams, and even the Department of Homeland Security reached out! After evaluating the market for enterprise frontline teams and how our product could support it, we knew it was the right business decision, but we did not have extensive knowledge of the market landscape or customer.

To bridge this knowledge gap, we recognized the necessity of immersing ourselves in the world of our enterprise customers. For the next year, we committed to a continuous travel schedule, visiting the places they lived and worked, often military installations, and embedding ourselves in the daily lives of our enterprise customers. Living alongside them, understanding what their exercises entailed, jumping on planes with them and gaining firsthand insight into their training routines and deployment became our method of building empathy. This process was immensely rewarding and ultimately allowed us to understand the intricacies of their needs and identify the gaps where our solutions could make the most significant impact. When you are designing a product, building empathy with your customers is essential to understanding what they are really looking for in a solution.

Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard? What strategies or techniques did you use to help overcome those challenges?

Specifically for leaders and founders, you have to believe in the mission of the company to get you through those truly challenging moments. Everyone is going to work hard; everyone is going to have tough times. It’s in those times when everything seems to be going wrong or not in your favor that you have to ground yourself in the belief that what you are doing is right and the good it can bring to the world. Otherwise, it is very easy to lose motivation. For me, it’s always that kind of deep core belief in what we are doing and reminding myself that, even when we hit snags, we are in it for the right reasons. If and when we succeed, our success enables great things — that might mean we helped put out a wildfire, keep track of critical goods in transit, or gave someone the platform to save someone in distress. A genuine belief in the mission is the most motivating of all things when you’re going through tough times.

The journey of an entrepreneur is never easy and is filled with challenges, failures, setbacks, as well as joys, thrills and celebrations. Can you share a few ideas or stories from your experience about how to successfully ride the emotional highs & lows of being a founder?

We have a saying at Somewear — “Stay neutral but believe.” It’s a mantra we’ve adopted across the company. For high growth startups, there is no middle ground, you’re either experience the highest of highs or dealing with the lowest of lows. I learned early on that if I’m going to be a successful leader and a successful family man, I have to figure out how to mentally ride the middle. That means not getting overly excited when there’s a win and also understanding that the lows are going to come back up. My focus is to make sure that when you zoom out from the highs and lows, the trend is climbing upwards. There are hills and valleys, but if the trend is positive, you’re building something great.

Let’s imagine that a young founder comes to you and asks for your advice about whether venture capital or bootstrapping is best for them? What would you advise them? Can you kindly share a few things a founder should look at to determine if fundraising or bootstrapping is the right choice?

It largely depends on the business, the market, and the opportunity, but nine times out of ten, the answer is bootstrapping. There are very few businesses that are well-suited to venture capital, especially in the early days. Venture capital is an excellent tool for accelerating growth, but it can also be the wrong tool for a new company. The most important endeavor for early-stage companies is validating if they have found product-market fit. To best answer the question of funding, ask: Where is the company at in its development? Does it have a product-market fit? If so, does the company know how it is going to bring that product to market at scale? If a company is still developing a product and exploring different customer sets, my advice is to bootstrap for as long as possible. Bringing in institutional capital is wonderful for scaling, but if a company is not ready to scale, it can cause more problems than solutions.

Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Many startups are not successful, and some are very successful. From your experience or perspective, what are the main factors that distinguish successful startups from unsuccessful ones? What are your “Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.

1 . Team — Team composition and quality is the most important factor in building a successful startup. It is as important on day one as it is years into the business. Leaders should be consistently evaluating whether they have the right people in the right places at the right time.

2 . Market — Similar to many other founders I know, I started Somewear because I had a deep sense of purpose to build a solution to what I felt was an unacceptable problem in the world. What I’ve learned many years into building Somewear is that the market opportunity is arguably more important than the product (as a product guy at heart, I did not enjoy writing that). While many teams can build great products, the best startups identify sufficiently large markets that are ripe for disruption, innovation or growth. Understanding macro trends and how those might provide tailwinds for your business is a common factor I’ve seen successful startups leverage.

3 . Product — Nothing can replace the power of building a product that simply and effectively solves a painful problem for your customers. All teams will make mistakes in building their company, but if your product is strong, your customers will support you through the growing pains because they want you to succeed just as much as you do! At Somewear we’ve been blessed with an incredibly supportive customer base that has helped shape the product and business, and that all started because we solved their problems with our product better than anything they had seen before us.

4 . Distribution — There is a quote from the founder of Twitch, Justin Kan, that goes something like “first time founders are obsessed with product while second time founders are obsessed with distribution”. As a first-time founder and former product manager, I learned this lesson early as I over optimized for product and under invested in distribution. Today, we deeply understand that there is no business without distribution.

5 . Perseverance — Whether founding a startup or joining at the early stage, all startup teams are signing up for a multi-year uphill battle with existential challenges along the way. To ultimately succeed, it takes resilient people ready to will their vision into existence.

What are the most common mistakes you have seen CEOs & founders make when they start a business? What can be done to avoid those errors?

One of the most common missteps I’ve observed among CEOs and founders is losing sight of the fundamentals. When leaders deviate focus from supporting their customers and teams, trouble ensues. It boils down to a straightforward message: Are you genuinely supporting your customers in the way they need, and are you empowering your team to execute effectively? If attention is elsewhere, it becomes a problem.

Startup founders often work extremely long hours and it’s easy to burn the candle at both ends. What would you recommend to founders about how to best take care of their physical and mental wellness when starting a company?

While regular exercise has been an exceedingly grounding force in my life and makes me a better leader, in most cases, taking care of your physical and mental well-being while launching and growing a company unfortunately won’t be your number one priority. My advice to fellow founders is to acknowledge that, for the first five years, achieving peak physical or mental wellness likely won’t be in the cards. I often share with young entrepreneurs that this isn’t the time to train for an Ironman or set overly ambitious fitness goals.

Understanding this perspective allows founders to shift their focus to establishing a sustainable cadence for exercise and quality time with loved ones. It’s about integrating these essential activities into your routine without the pressure of achieving peak performance. Scheduling out priorities can help, but embracing flexibility in these pursuits becomes key. The demands of entrepreneurship may necessitate canceling a workout or dinner for a last-minute meeting or unexpected travel, and accepting this reality is important for well-being and a more balanced mindset.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

The only movement I’m interested in starting is the one I’m building right now at Somewear. We are heads down on our mission to ensure front line teams always have reliable communications and situational awareness. Somewear’s ability to enable these teams directly leads to countless lives saved.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

You can follow Somewear Labs at www.somewearlabs.com and on LinkedIn.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success and good health!

About the Interviewer: Douglas E. Noll, JD, MA was born nearly blind, crippled with club feet, partially deaf, and left-handed. He overcame all of these obstacles to become a successful civil trial lawyer. In 2000, he abandoned his law practice to become a peacemaker. His calling is to serve humanity, and he executes his calling at many levels. He is an award-winning author, teacher, and trainer. He is a highly experienced mediator. Doug’s work carries him from international work to helping people resolve deep interpersonal and ideological conflicts. Doug teaches his innovative de-escalation skill that calms any angry person in 90 seconds or less. With Laurel Kaufer, Doug founded Prison of Peace in 2009. The Prison of Peace project trains life and long terms incarcerated people to be powerful peacemakers and mediators. He has been deeply moved by inmates who have learned and applied deep, empathic listening skills, leadership skills, and problem-solving skills to reduce violence in their prison communities. Their dedication to learning, improving, and serving their communities motivates him to expand the principles of Prison of Peace so that every human wanting to learn the skills of peace may do so. Doug’s awards include California Lawyer Magazine Lawyer of the Year, Best Lawyers in America Lawyer of the Year, Purpose Prize Fellow, International Academy of Mediators Syd Leezak Award of Excellence, National Academy of Distinguished Neutrals Neutral of the Year. His four books have won a number of awards and commendations. Doug’s podcast, Listen With Leaders, is now accepting guests. Click on this link to learn more and apply.