Startup Founder David Okuniev
In 2016, Wired called them one of Europe’s hottest startups: The Barcelona based ‘online survey-tool’ Typeform. We had the opportunity at the Next Web conference to sit down with David Okuniev. He is the co-founder, co-CEO and lead designer of Typeform. Originally, David is from Belgium, but he spent a large part of his life in the UK. David first set out to become a musician, but he ended up transitioning to (web) design. For the last ten years, he’s been living in Barcelona, where he founded Typeform together with Robert Muñoz.
What inspired you to become an entrepreneur?
I ran a small agency in Barcelona before I set up Typeform. But I was getting a little bit of itchy feet. We always liked doing project-based work for clients, which meant you always were starting something new. I always wanted to have a project that I could just concentrate on for a long time, thus doing one thing. I had this itch to actually be an entrepreneur. But it actually happened by accident, because I didn’t say “OK I’m looking for an idea now, I’m going to be an entrepreneur”.
Typeform came around by accident too. It was one of the projects I had with my co-founder; Typeform was born out of that project. The story is that this bathroom company asked us to create a form which would sit in one of the exhibition spaces to collect data for people as they were leaving, meant for follow ups, like lead generation. So instead of building a normal form we tried something completely different. We tried something a bit more conversational. The film War Games, which is an eighties film with Matthew Broderick inspired us. If you’ve seen the film there’s a scene where Broderick is talking to the computer — he’s interacting with a form, but it feels like a conversation. And that’s more delightful than just filling in some boxes. That inspired us to build that kind of concept within the project for this company.
Can you remember what the biggest barriers to entry entrepreneurship were for you?
I think to be a successful entrepreneur you have to have vision. And you have to you be fearless. Fear of failure can’t be an option. Well, you don’t necessarily need experience because you can learn as you go through it. Myself and my co-founder we’ve never done anything on this scale. But over the years we’ve learned to deal with this kind of stuff and that is how organizations work basically.
We just had blind faith in what we’re doing and the rest just came along. And we’re still not that great at managing companies, we’re still figuring it out. It’s messy, but building a start up is messy. But the important thing is that we have a product that people really love, and they are using it. We’re just trying to get better as an organization all the time.
What does success look like to you personally?
We’ve been successful, but there is still a super big journey to go. For me success is getting as many people as possible in the world to be using the product that we make. That’s success, because that means that the people using it have a use case for the product. That’s success. But it’s also about reaching your potential. I guess. And we haven’t reached that potential yet.
What does a productive day for you look like?
On Wednesdays I try to work from home and that’s when I can really do some stuff. Most other days, it’s a lot of meetings and casual conversations. Dipping in and out of context all the time. But. Wednesday is more productive. So, productivity to me looks like me not having to switch context all the time and having a longer period of time to focus on one thing at a time. And that makes you more efficient.
Which problem are you solving with Typeform?
The problem we’re solving is that there’s a lack of empathy in the way most companies out there are asking people for data. The standard way for doing stuff is, you know, you put a list of questions with boxes and people go through that. We think that the better way to do this is try and make it feel more like a conversation. So the form interaction that we have is more like a conversation, [which is like] one thing at a time.
Where does your motivation to solve this problem come from?
I have a background in design. And design is [to] try to solve problems. We saw forms as a problem when we set up the project. We thought that we couldn’t put a form in this showroom, which is all really nicely set up: we need to do something more interactive. So that was a problem. We thought, “OK, how can we make this more human?” or interactive, and we’ve built Typeform that way.
Talking about that making things a little more human, that is the company’s vision. We’re trying to not just make a product that is more human, but actually humanize everything in the company. That doesn’t mean we’re the most human company in the world but we’re trying to be more human each time. Just to be a bit better each time. Sometimes we do stuff, and think “sh*t, that’s a bit sh*tty”, so how can we make it a bit better next time?
To me, it is a good vision. It’s something you can never get to, right? You can always make things a little more human. I think it’s important, and I would like to spread the message to other companies. It’s not just about making money. Money is an output from having a super successful business where people deliver a lot of value. But do you want to deliver that value and make money at the expense of having a great company culture or treating people well?
Which one thing would you love to tell your younger self?
Put a lot of focus… I mean, if you’re going to be in a company is growing really fast. Put a lot of focus on managing that growth, in terms of like slowing it down, or in terms of putting the right processes in place so that the growth is healthy. I think our lack of experience with growth inevitably led to some growing pains and we’re spending a lot of time trying to fix stuff because of this rapid growth all the time
What would you highly recommend aspiring entrepreneurs to do?
The first part of entrepreneurship is just focusing on getting the right product out there, and really focusing on getting the user experience of your product really well polished, really well done, and make sure that you’re really connecting to people with your service on a human level. That’s our ethos in terms of how we try to think about our product. You’re filling a need in their life, but you want to create some of the life around that as well. So yeah, just focus on product because if you get the product right, the rest will come. That will be kind of your early growth engine or driver growth. Because if you have a sh*tty product, it doesn’t matter how much sales you can put on top of it, nowadays the kids are not going to stick around if they have an average user experience.
What’s growth like?
It’s hard. It’s like it’s constant change all the time. Whatever you put in place of 30 people, and you’re like 160 people, which we are today, those early processes don’t work anymore. You have to continually reinvent yourself. You need to be very ready for change and be very adaptable.
What do you consider your biggest failure??
Not thinking enough about the organizational stuff early on, I think that that’s been like our major challenge. I wouldn’t say it’s a failure, I just think it’s meant [to be] that we’ve had to put a lot of focus on something that we could have avoided. At the moment we tend to have a lot of conversations in the leadership team about stuff to do with the organization, as opposed to thinking like “hey where does a product need to be”. Those conversations are happening, across the teams, but they’re not that much happening in the leadership. Like, how to deal with performance, how to fire people. We’ve never been good at this stuff, or really feeling comfortable in finding a process that really works and is fair and quick. These are difficult questions that we’ve kind of struggled with.
What are you currently struggling with?
Because we have a very open culture, it’s all about being a little more human. It kind of makes people feel really comfortable, but how do you balance that? To be able to deliver a good performance, while keeping a relaxed and human atmosphere. So it’s kind of [finding a] balance in those two things and sometimes it’s a bit ambiguous.
Yet it fits our ideals. But making those ideals like fully work is challenging at times.
We do look at other companies for examples, like Zappos that has implemented holocracy, and they’re looking at the failures and the benefits of it. When you’re ideological about something, you have a dream, you want to do it. Still these ideologies don’t always work for every company, but they can work in varying degrees. For us, for example, we want to push trust as much as possible down the organization. And decision making too. That’s our ideology. Whether this is going to be a success in the long run, we don’t know yet. Maybe we’ll be a little less successful, but if we fulfill the ideology, maybe we’ll be happy with that. I don’t know, it’s a question of balance.
What makes you worry?
We’re creating this new category for our product called conversational data collection. It’s not necessary a worry, but I’m anxious to reach our goal in terms of really putting this category on the map. We’re the best product to this [category], but people don’t know that this is a category. So the stuff that really keeps me awake at night is just thinking like “are we going to get there?”, “how can we fulfill our potential?”. That’s a worry for sure. I think every entrepreneur has worries like “can I ship out fast enough”, “is the culture in good shape”, “is the business financials in good shape”, et cetera.
It’s all about meeting the expectations that you set yourself. The worry comes from feeling that you might not reach those expectations. Or the potential.
As an entrepreneur, you need to have an edge. There needs to be this competitive drive, something pushing it forward. Maybe in some utopian world like, everyone was just super laidback, but I think worrying about the work is part of being an entrepreneur, and leading a company. The work becomes your life. If you’re not worried about it, then I wonder if you’re seeing the whole picture.
Who is your favorite super hero?
I really like Ghandi. I won’t just say that because it’s a universal thing, but the idea just to be able to create a movement with a still and quiet attitude, I think that requires amazing strength of mind and peace, and inner peace. I admire most leaders that show this incredible humility at the same time. And I don’t tend to gravitate or really like leaders that are super successful, or trying to be big superstars. I respect humility a lot.
Challenges expressed are in no way meant to solicit commercial acquisition.
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