OTL Ventures: An Origin Story
Writing the first blog for your new(ish) company isn’t as fun as it should be. If you’ve never done it, you’d think it would be wildly exciting, but in reality it feels like a ton of pressure. From what I can see there are two possibilities: (1) OTL Ventures turns out to be a flop in which any time and effort put into the first, second, or 1000th blog is kind of wasted. Or (2) we have the desired impact and as such this first blog post is an artifact that fanboys/girls will be bookmarking as gospel for years to come.
I’m going to proceed with a healthy amount of optimism and as such look at this first post as having a tremendous amount of historical significance. I wouldn’t say US Constitution importance but probably somewhere along the lines of the Federalist Papers.
The “O T L” stands for On The Line…
Not Outside The Lines (copyright ESPN). OTL is a throwback to running Cross Country in college. The beautiful thing about Cross Country is that everyone lines up on the same starting line with the same goal; to reach the finish line as fast as possible. Through collegiate Cross Country, I had the opportunity to build and lead a team of gritty individuals all committed to a common goal.
With that in mind, I started to lay out what I wanted my company to be. I wanted talented, committed, and gritty individuals who were willing to get “On The Line” together to exceed expectations. As a constant reminder of what that team should operate and the level of success it should aspire to achieve, I named the company OTL Ventures.
Product Team for Hire
“What is OTL Ventures?” is a great question with a constantly evolving answer. In short, our expertise lies in building great software products. Today the majority of our time is spent helping seed stage startups deliver value to their customers through thoughtful software. We’ve done our best to describe us and who we work with on our website: otlventures.com.
OTL Ventures exists because it needs to.
It also kinda exists because I wanted my team and a paycheck too. I took leaving QwipIt (a startup I co-founded in 2015) as an opportunity to go back to the drawing board. Two things were clear to me. I wanted to surround myself with people that would push me, and I couldn’t go another year without a paycheck.
So I started taking all those coffee and beer requests I was previously too stressed to take. I started to get a clearer picture of who was doing what in Northern Colorado and some themes kept jumping out at me.
- The small, young startups I could see myself working for didn’t have the money to build the entire Product Team they would need to be successful.
- Industry experts make great founders because they know where to find the first customers and how to sell to them.
- On the flip side, industry experts know they need a great product but have a really hard time finding and evaluating individuals to build that product.
- Building a team of amazing people I’d love to work with was doable, but I hadn’t yet experienced that eureka moment of a problem I wanted to dedicate my time to solving.
With those themes in mind, I went into problem-solving mode. Hmm… maybe instead of building my own product I can walk alongside some of the brilliant founders I was meeting and build great products with them. I had never considered starting an agency, dev shop, or consulting company before but those themes were too great to ignore.
Building a Team worthy of the OTL name
If you build it they will come? while a classic movie line, is also a joke in nerdy startup circles. The situation I found myself in was more along the lines of They are here, will you build it? I had founders knocking on my door, so it was time to assemble my product team! Funny enough the first call was to a Product Designer I had never worked with before. We are 14 months into OTL Ventures and he is still the only person on the team that I didn’t work with previously or meet through a mutual connection.
Luciano Vizza is the epitome of exceeding expectations. Upon first meeting him I was caught off guard by his lack of exotic swagger that I’d experienced in other great designers I’d worked with. However, his soft-spoken demeanor was replaced by a fleury of energy as he started explaining why he felt user research was imperative, high fidelity prototyping sped up development time, or why line spacing was often overlooked but so important for a thoughtful interface. I walked away from our first meeting with two things… (1) he was a doer and (2) he relished in explaining his strong opinions around all aspects of product design.
I refer to Luciano as a full stack designer. He sees no task as beneath him and no challenge too great. We agreed to a trial run on my first project, and within two months I was taking all of his time. They say you should hire people better than you and Luciano clearly is. Now 14 months as a co-founder he still exceeds my expectations on a daily basis with everything he does, whether it is user research interviews, UI design, or running brainstorming workshops with our clients.
Michael Kilburg was on my must hire hit list before I started OTL Ventures. Through working together at two previous companies, it had become obvious that Michael was a necessary ingredient to building and shipping great products. He is that unique combination of someone with the grit to dig into an issue and the intelligence to come up with an innovative solution. His knack for QA, leading a development team, and user experience design makes him the ideal Product Manager. One of the true measures of a great PM is how the developers they work with feel about them. There is not a single developer that Michael has worked with that wouldn’t run through a brick wall (or pull an all-nighter…) for the guy. He is that kind of a team member.
What can you expect from this blog…
Other than jokes that don’t really land? It is my hope that we can provide some thoughtful information about lessons we’ve learned and things we don’t yet know. We’ll approach our blog in the same way we do any product we build… iteratively and honestly.
