The Founders of Branch
The first talk in the hackNY summer series was held at Branch’s HQ. Evan pointed out that Branch was chosen as the venue for our first tech talk because Branch is a part of hackNY history and hackNY is part of Branch history.
Hursh, the technical founder at Branch, was working for hackNY the summer before he dropped out of NYU to start Branch. Also, Cemre, Branch’s design founder, and Andrew, Branch’s first hire, were both hackNY fellows.
Before diving into the talk, we were given a brief intro to Branch: Branch is a platform for hosting a conversation around a topic. It was founded by Josh Miller (product), Hursh Agrawal (engineering), and Cemre Gungor (design) in 2011. Some of their investors include Obvious Corp, Betaworks, Lerer Ventures, etc.
Each of the founders took their turn telling us about their experiences in respect to their area of expertise during Branch’s early days.
Josh started off talking about how Branch gained momentum.
“We were very lucky about getting press… it had a large part to do with our initial success.” Josh mentioned that there was a particular Business Insider article about “Startups to Watch Out For” that had Branch on the list with “funding: N/A” … “that sparked a lot of interest.”
After the article, the founders were feeling pretty confident as investors started reaching out. They learned an important lesson when they travelled to San Francisco to interview at YC and were rejected. “Things never go according to plan… there will be bumps in the road but you have to keep believing.”
The Branch founders did just that. They changed their strategy but kept believing. They already had investment meetings lined up in SF after their YC interview but instead of asking for money, they decided to just ask for feedback.
“If we weren’t humble and curious in asking questions, we wouldn’t have met the guys from Twitter. You will receive a much more positive response if you recognize that you don’t know everything and genuinely seek advice.”
Next, Cemre took over to talk about the importance of design, especially in the early days.
“Because the product was so simple, I was able to do a lot with design. As a result, people would visit our site and think we were much bigger as a company than we actually were… we could have overdone it but we didn’t. Limit pages, functionality, etc; whatever you build should look legit.”
He also talked a bit about communication, particularly among founders.
“When it comes to working with people, communication is the most important skill. We used to get in heated debates about silly things, blame each other, etc. It’s ok for there to be problems when building a product. The important thing is how you handle the situation. Don’t be apathetic but don’t get too emotionally invested in a direction; you don’t want to fight with co-founders.”
They found that making important decisions in person (as opposed to email) helped to avoid miunderstanding about tone and intention.
After Cemre finished, Hursh talked about the reality of starting a company. He pointed out that articles on Techcrunch sometimes make it seem as if startups are born overnight. In reality, he pointed out, companies are born out of series of small decisions.
The Branch founders, for example, met at Lean Startup Machine. After winning the competition they decided to keep working on it while continuing their summer jobs. After summer they briefly went back to school. Hursh told Josh, “If you go back to Princeton, this won’t work.” They made the decision to take the semester off. At the end of the semester they received funding and decided to drop-out.
Every step was a series of small decision. “Say yes to making decisions.”
Finally, Hursh urged the Fellows to avoid developing a fetish for the new “hotness”: rails, mongo, node, etc. When Branch was getting started, Hursh was all about using cutting-edge tech. He set up a queuing system based on redis that auto-scaled workers so the queue was never slow. Right after their launch, people started getting emails like crazy (a bug in queueing system was causing requests to stay open). They couldn’t turn-off the workers because they were auto-scaling. One of their engineers had to keep manually clearing the queue for a couple hours as the rest of the team debugged the system.
Luckily the users that were getting emailed were beta testers so they weren’t too upset but it could have been really bad. “Now we like to keep things simple. Don’t add unnecessary complexity; usually not worth it, especially in production.”
And with that they opened it up to Q&A. Some of the questions had to be answered off-the-record but here are some of the more interesting questions that I did get the “ok” to blog about.
Q: “What’s the next step after you have a great idea?”
A: “Get feedback, iterate. Meet really wealthy smart people. Most of the time founders have no idea what will be the most compelling part of their product is. Twitter, for example, didn’t know real-time would be so important or marketing for business.”
Q: “When starting a business you get a lot of feedback in every direction. How do you filter feedback?”
A: “We used to change everything based on feedback. Instead, you should take feedback as data points and find commonality. We used to think we were a media company, then we decided we could build a platform for users. We decided we liked it because we wanted to empower the 90% of people who can’t publish. Also, look at the background of the people giving feedback (i.e. product person giving engineering advice or vice-versa). The people we have worked with that were the best were often least opinionated. Be wary of the people who have an answer to everything…”
Q: “How did you make connections with advisors and investors?”
A: “It started when we began having meetings just to get feedback. We were humble and honest about our problems. If you want advice, ask for money. If you want money, ask for advice. We would have random coffee meetings, get referred to others, etc. Goes back to saying “yes”.
