Alex Austin
Alex Austin is the CEO and Co-Founder of Branch Metrics, the mobile marketing and linking platform to supercharge your app growth. He is hiring!
What were the earliest signs of your creative streak?
As a kid, I inherited a giant collection of Legos. I spent the vast majority of my childhood in my room, creating new worlds out of those Legos, complete with whole storylines I imagined up. I wasn’t particularly entrepreneurial — I worked for other people throughout my entire childhood, mostly doing yard work for my dad. But I did have this innate driving force to constantly create. And that remains my main driving force today: to create something entirely new that can impact the world at a very large scale.
Do you still find time to create?
It’s important to me that I still contribute to code on a regular basis. It helps us maintain a solid engineering culture. Everyone sees that if there’s an urgent issue, I’m happy to roll up my sleeves and dive in. I try to allocate my day time to my employees here at the office. My hours in the evenings and on weekends are for coding and writing product specs. For a recent project we’ve been working on, I’ve probably built 30 to 40% of it myself.
How do you recognize those individual contributions while also building a cohesive culture?
I started Branch with four co-founders, and all four of us are still here. We’ve been able to divide and conquer and maintain a culture that is pretty consistent across all four of us. I think the strongest bond we have is that each of us still contributes at an IC level. Our goal is to make as much progress as we humanly can. It’s an all-hands-on-deck-24/7 attitude. When we hire, we bring on managers who have that same intensity. Our managers aren’t just a person sitting at a desk telling you what to do and barely working, but rather someone that you respect and who encourages you to do better work. Whether this can scale is the big question.
How did you meet your co-founders?
We started working together at Stanford. Three of us were in business school together, and one was a freshman software engineer who then dropped out partway through his sophomore year. We were originally working on something very different than Branch, but in the process of building that product we built what would become Branch.
Failure’s inevitable. How did you deal with it, the first time?
When I start working on something, I make it my world. I find joy in what I’m able to create. That’s the reason I’m here on this planet. And I’ve never found a hobby or activity that gives me as much joy as delivering products to market. When there was clear evidence that our first idea wasn’t working, it felt like my world was destroyed. I had trouble getting out of bed. I had to face the fact that the thing I’d dedicated myself to for a year wasn’t what I’d built it up to be.
I’m pretty good at channeling grief or negativity into motivation to do better and prove people wrong. I end up working even harder than I was before. I spent that weekend mulling over my learnings from our prior venture and came up with the core idea of Branch. It was something we had thought about and built but we hadn’t realized its potential. I think I had the idea at 1pm on a Sunday. By evening, we’d called 20 potential customers. We started writing code on Monday.
You’ve raised over $100M at this point for Branch. How did raising that first $2M compare to later rounds?
Maybe it was me being immature, or the business being nascent, or the market being yet undefined. There was so little proof when we were just getting started. I found the experience of walking into a room and trying to convince somebody to invest based on such little information to be a challenging thing to do. Today, I can fundraise armed with data and a customer list. It’s a very different thing.
When there was clear evidence that our first idea wasn’t working, it felt like my world was destroyed. I had trouble getting out of bed. I had to face the fact that the thing I’d dedicated myself to for a year wasn’t what I’d built it up to be.
What’s your advice to the student who wants to someday start a company?
People too often say that they want to start a company but that they’re waiting for an idea. That idea will never come. And if there is an idea, most likely it’s wrong. If you actually want to build your own business — whether venture funded or no — you just need to start doing it. The first ten things you try are going to fail miserably. But if you continue to iterate and learn after each individual failure you’ll eventually learn and grow your way into something real.
