Our First Interview
This past Tuesday Sarah and I were interviewed by Russ Capper of The Businessmakers’ Show. It is the first time we have been interviewed together about Door Space and I think it went pretty well. I did a little prep watching a few of Russ’s interviews of early stage startups. He asks the right questions and makes it easy to tell our story. I also searched the internet on how to give a good radio interview for your startup and I found a lot of great tips. This Quora answer by Gideon Lichfield was especially helpful. Overall, other than just texting back and forth to get on the same page on a few things, Sarah and I went in fresh with only a few minutes of collective preparation.
What was great about it for me was that it allowed us to look back at how all of this started and take in the importance of how far we have come. That is hard to do when you are struggling to survive in a primarily bootstrapped business and getting a working pilot up and running.
I feel like my time is swallowed up so quickly. We have converted the sun room in Sarah’s house into our office. Our floor to ceiling window overlooks her courtyard and sometimes, during particularly productive days, that is my only view of the outside world. Many days I walk in and sit down to work and blink and it’s the end of the day. Working with Sarah is so natural, she is a great friend and we have built an amazing team.
It is hard to see the big picture when you are focusing on the necessary details. So talking with Russ on his show really took me back and let me remember things I haven’t thought about in a long time. I still remember the very moment I wanted to dive into this with Sarah. And after that moment I was all in. Of course this was in my brain only since I was working a wall to wall work schedule with a law firm (for whom I am still of counsel). I described this moment to Russ:
I went to a conference called Collision in Las Vegas last year, about a year ago, and there were a lot of VCs and SaaS, and Cloud based companies speaking there who had been successful, and who were giving us advice. Giving the audience where they think the industry is going and where we should focus. And these were things that Sarah had been telling me for 5 years. I called her from the conference, from Vegas, and said, ok I’m in, I’m doing it. When you get your stuff together I will help you do that and I will come on full time eventually.
For a few years I was just making introductions and absorbing Sarah’s ideas. Her ideas and vision expressed in those early days — which I didn’t always entirely understand — formed the DNA of our company. Then something clicked and she asked me to quit working full-time for the firm and come work with her as a real employee of Door Space. It was a very scary change but so worth it. We are still so new. We have so much to learn. We have so far to go. But we’ve laid the tracks and we are all in.
