How do we maintain faith in our own success during the challenges of a startup?

Founder Vision is a one-on-one podcast that digs into deep conversations with business leaders from emerging markets as they get vulnerable about their experience in the early- to median-stage moments of their founding journey.

Today, Brett’s talking to Albert Santalo, the engineer-cum-multiple-entrepreneur founder and CEO of 8base, a low-code development platform for building digital products. 8base’s offering allows businesses to build, run and grow professional-grade web and mobile applications without a big backend investment. The company was incorporated in 2017, and the product went live for the first time towards the end of 2018. It has been evolving ever since.

Catch the full episode in the player below, or on Spotify, Audible, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts… pretty much wherever you like to listen.

Key Takeaways

F&$% Worrying.

“Worry is a misuse of the imagination,” Albert insists, “and it sometimes can overcome an entrepreneur. It completely paralyzes him, and that’s the worst thing that can happen. You have just got to work the problem and get through it, and you’ll probably solve it. There’s a better chance than not you are going to get through it.”

Don’t Fear the Bootstrap

8base is certainly not Albert’s first rodeo. He stepped down from his former company in 2016 to start working on the business plan for 8base, to put together the kickoff team and raise the initial funding: about a million dollars of angel investment. It was the smallest raise Albert had ever done, but that was on purpose: he wanted to bootstrap 8base’s beginnings with maximal control. It took the team about a year to get the initial product out to the market. They launched in November of 2018.

“I wanted to have total flexibility to sort of drive the vision the way myself and the team wanted to go,” Albert explains. “ I didn’t want early entanglements with institutional investors, and I really wanted to get the company to a point where the flywheel was turning before I would entertain real institutional money. I was in a position where I didn’t need to draw compensation. I could invest my own money. I could sort of do it that way because not everybody is in that position. I wanted to take a very careful, thoughtful approach to how we build the product, and then how we put it in the marketplace and drive product-market fit.”

Become a “Creature of Faith” as Opposed to a “Creature of Logic”

In a lot of founders’ journeys and a lot of startups, there are major pivots that occur — points where you figure out you’ve been running six months in the wrong direction.

”Any time you are trying to get a team of people rowing in the same direction,” Albert notes, “And/or trying to get a product to market — trying to pivot quickly — you’ll have challenges with the team. Finding the right resources, motivating them properly and getting them to do things. There are always challenges there.

“I’ve been dealing with challenges in startups since 2001,” he continues. “So I may be a little more Teflon than most people when it comes to this stuff just because I’ve seen a lot. When I first did this, I evolved as a person. In 2001, when I started my first company, it was a month after 9/11. It was a year after the dot.com bubble had burst. I was a relatively young tech entrepreneur. In those days, tech entrepreneurs were on the cover of all the wrong magazines for having screwed up the economy. Then to compound all that, I had four young kids and a wife who was a schoolteacher at home. I was the breadwinner. I walked away from very, very nice gainful employment to do this, so it was a terrifying experience.”

“So I became a creature of faith,” he says. “Before that, I was a creature of logic. If I didn’t see the road to how I could win, I didn’t start walking down that path. Somewhere along that journey in that first company, I changed because I realized that as long as I continued to work hard and try, impart good judgment (in other words, I didn’t pursue things that weren’t worth pursuing), the doors were going to open up and problems were going to get resolved.”

“A fair amount of cynicism is important,” he adds. “People talk about being able to ‘see around corners.’ Seeing around corners is part judgment, but it is also a lot of experience. You just can’t let the fear of what could happen get in the way of execution because otherwise it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Otherwise, the worst will happen.”

Take It Out of the Office

The shift from logic to faith is not only a very important one for a founder’s journey and for a company, but also for anything else in life — any human pursuit. Brett was curious how that shift has affected Albert’s life outside of business.

“It really, at the end of the day, is a risk-taking philosophy,” Albert answers. “How much risk are you willing to take? Whether that be personal or business, etc., because putting yourself out there can be an ego-damaging thing, potentially.

“I would say I have certainly evolved as a human being as I went through those cycles, but if I look back at my life, the best things that have ever happened to me have been when I have placed big bets on myself, when I have just sort of gone out there, not exactly knowing who I was trying to get to, but just put myself in the situation and good things showed up.”

“I would say that in my personal life to a certain degree,” he adds. “That’s how my wife and I got together, and we have been together for almost 30 years. Certainly in business, when I haven’t been sort of locked at home trying to get work done behind the computer versus touching the outside world and putting myself in these somewhat uncomfortable situations sometimes, that’s when the best things have happened.”

Kill Your Ego

“At the end of the day, the most important thing in all of this — obviously aside from being healthy in body, healthy in mind, and having your family intact,” Albert notes, “When you look at the business side of all this, the most important thing is not your ego. The most important thing is to win. Your ego is secondary. The important thing is to take, if you are a founder, a company from zero to some type of successful exit for yourself and for everybody else involved.”

“Notice I say it in that order,” he adds, “because there are too many times that a founder goes from zero to exit and sometimes that’s not a good thing. A part of this is the founder protecting themselves along the way, protecting their early investors, as more and more rounds of capital come in and more and more demands come in. It can be a very tricky thing, but worthwhile.”