Why I Joined Compass
The Snapchat for Pets Story
Well, I thought it would never come, but it is the 19 day anniversary of me joining Compass. To commemorate this day, I wanted to revisit why I joined Compass, all those fortnight ago.
Joining Compass was a decision that took about month, during which I was exploring several opportunities, and working with different teams. Before starting my search, I outlined the criteria by which I would evaluate every opportunity, which broke down into three categories: Market, Team, and Personal Happiness Factor.
The tech world is filled with ergonomic chairs and free yoga lessons, but the glory is in the 24 hour coding binges and eating ramen because PG said it was profitable. Building something consumes you in a way that shrinks everything else, so maximizing the minimal non-build time matters. This roughly broke down into two factors for me: location, and relationship with the co-founders.
Philadelphia is a good place to build a company (access to capital, low cost of living, lots of tech talent), and a great place to live. The two things I care about most in a city are size and weather. Philly’s size means there is always something to do when taking a break, I have a network here, and Tinder is, well, active. The winters are gross, though. But you know what is great about Compass? (he asks the text editor…) We are completely location-agnostic. There is no reason to spend the entirety of November — March under North Eastern snows, when we can work out of a Craigslist sublet on the Carolina Coast for a couple months.
And we’ve talked about doing just that. I’ve known Mike and Taylor for almost two years now, and we think about building our lives in similar ways. We are friends outside the office, and I know things are going to be fun, even when the going gets tough.
I also trust the hell out of these guys. This is a hard thing to explain, as trust is a common refrain in advice on choosing co-founders, yet the concept does not seem to transfer well through anything but experience. It’s a mix of knowing that they will be available at 11pm on Saturday, after I’ve nuked a server and need them to handle support while I clean up my mess; they won’t give up when the first five potential investors say ‘no’; and that they will fucking deliver. I can’t stress the last part enough. A lot of non-technical people are interested in building Tech companies, yet they spend their time looking for technical co-founders. Mike and Taylor faked it, identifying the problem, iterating, and validating the need to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars in revenue. They built a tech company, without the tech.
We also have highly complementary skill sets. Mike is not only excellent at Sales, but has all the makings of a prototypical CEO, including all of the critical but less-talked about skills (giving continuous feedback, balancing constant conflicting advice, knowing what he doesn’t know and actively learning to compensate).
Taylor is the most productive person I have ever met, and is able to balance 400 different things at once. He is able to accomplish short-term objectives and leave behind a trail of constantly improving, efficient systems, while also constantly pulling from, and iterating on, long-term goals.
Plus, they found a big problem, in a bigger market. The vision is to be the General Contractor for digital services (starting with web design), the market for which, focusing on small businesses alone, clocks in at an unseemly $110B. And the market is deceptively fractured. It’s easy to look at the multiple Billion Dollar Companies in the space (Squarespace, Yodle, Wix, etc) and assume the market has already been won. But 1B is 0.9% of the market — no one has figured this out yet.
And the current players don’t seem to even understand the problem, instead trying to take a product that is great for other markets, and backfit it onto small businesses. Take Squarespace: Squarespace created an excellent visual website builder, vastly reducing the barriers to creating a site. But creating a website takes more than code: a quality site needs imagery, copy, an understanding of site structure, on-page SEO, UX design (and visual design, though Squarespace helps here), etc. Creating a 20 page site on Squarespace takes me, someone who has built many websites and worked in both product and growth roles, upwards of 20–30 hours, when all the content already exists. There is a reason 98% of people who try to create sites on tools like Squarespace give up. Taylor and Mike started with really, truly understanding the problem, before trying to create a solution.
We are already building better websites for small businesses. Check back in a year, and we will be doing a lot more.
