Adam Miller, Instil — Founder Q&A
In my second act, I’m trying to have real impact, and the impact Instil will have is a key part of that plan.
An extraordinary portion of life-changing services are provided globally by nonprofits. In the US alone, better health, improved education, increased safety and security — all are enhanced through the efforts of hundreds of thousands of small and large nonprofits laboring to deliver superior outcomes in complex social domains. They provide essential social services, but their operating needs are misunderstood and overlooked.
Instil was co-founded by Adam Miller to deliver modern software systems to cost-effectively manage nonprofits.
Q: Talk a little bit about your early days growing up, your family, and how it shaped your priorities and values.
I was born in New York City. I grew up in Western New Jersey in a small town that was more rural than a suburb. Generally, it was a lower-middle-class town, part of Mount Olive Township.
Up through middle school, I very much was a follower. Also, I was short and scrawny for my age. As I got older, two things changed. First, one summer at sleep-away camp, I had a counselor that saw something in me and really pushed me to act and be a leader. He started putting me in “leadership roles.” He really mentored me and encouraged me. I discovered I was comfortable in a leadership role, and kind of good at it.
I was still small, though. I guess my body hadn’t yet caught up to my mind, at least in terms of identifying myself as a leader. However, when I entered high school, I hit my growth spurt. I got a lot taller and stronger and became more athletic. By the time I graduated, I was the editor of the school paper and high school president and captain of the swim team. It was a time of huge growth for me.
The other thing that I developed — and this comes back to something I am today — was an acute sense of social justice. But I guess it wasn’t just a sense, it was also a drive for social action. I became very involved in certain causes and that has kind of carried on through my life.
At the University of Pennsylvania, I started working on a variety of causes that just moved me, like helping vets returning from the first Gulf War and seeking out approaches to lessen homelessness. But I also got involved in local issues. At the time, West Philly, where Penn is situated, was pretty dodgy and unsafe. The school was a relatively small oasis in a larger neighborhood that experienced a lot of crime — muggings and robberies — which greatly impacted student life. I wanted to try to change the dynamic, so I created something called “Penn Watch,” which basically created a partnership between sororities and fraternities and the local police departments to establish a resource for escorting people to and from destinations. That became a thing that lasted for many years. It’s obsolete now with changes to the campus and school services, but that whole experience showed me how a bit of dedication and effort to making things better can have a real positive impact.
Q: How did that experience of making change happen translate into becoming an entrepreneur?
My first truly entrepreneurial effort occurred during the summer before I went to grad school. I came out to Los Angeles to see what it was like to be on the West Coast. I’d never been west of the Mississippi, and I just wanted to experience it. So, a friend and I went to LA and had an amazing summer.
I got a job bartending in a restaurant. I’d taught myself bartending and used it to help pay my way through Penn. At the end of the summer, the restaurant’s general manager approached me and suggested we start a restaurant. I was intrigued, so we started exploring different ideas for different types of restaurants. In retrospect, it’s clear he wanted me to stay and help him start a new restaurant or chain of restaurants, but I knew I couldn’t drop out of college for that, so I went back to school.
I went back for my senior year at Penn and took more business classes, which I enjoyed. In the middle of the first semester, the restauranteur calls me up and says, “You’re not gonna believe this, but the restaurant we were working at is up for sale and I think we can get the seller to finance it for us. How’d you like to go into business together?” We ended up buying the restaurant.
I put a little of my own money into the restaurant, money I’d saved up to buy a car. Then, I ended up getting admitted to UCLA Law School. I had a little bit of a quandary: I had law school and I had this restaurant. But I ended up doing both.
I was the youngest of the partners that bought the restaurant. There is a huge loophole in the law that says you can’t go into a bar before you’re 21, but at 21 you can acquire a liquor license. My closest partner in age was 15 years older than me. The rest of them were 25 years older than me. I recruited my friends from high school to come out and work in the restaurant with me. It was a little bit like the TV show “Entourage,” where hometown best friends come together to build something.
Q: That’s a serious workload: UCLA Law School and a restaurant refresh! How did you handle that?
It was an incredible experience.
One thing that helped was that the restaurant was situated right near UCLA. I’d wake up early and go to school in the morning. During lunch, I would go to the restaurant just to check in, see what was going on, then go back to school in the afternoon. At the end of the school day, I’d go home and wake up my friends (who typically were still sleeping). We’d hang out for a little while until around 5 o’clock and then we would go to work at the restaurant. I had the manager night shift. They were working at the bar or on the floor as waiters and we would work until we closed the place at 1:00 AM. Then, I’d have to close out the books while they hung out and had fun. Then, we’d go home.
I had to be super disciplined about studying. When I got to the restaurant at 5:00 PM, I’d run the checklist and then study until it started getting busy. If I was manning the bar, I would study at the bar until it got crowded. Usually, I could get a couple of hours of studying in.
As I became more familiar with the tasks and responsibilities of managing a restaurant, I came to realize that I still had a lot to learn about business if I wanted to do it well. I applied for the joint JD/MBA program at UCLA and got it, which added to my workload. It was very intense. Normally, it’s a four-year commitment, but I did it in three and a half years. If you see pictures of me from back then, I looked like a zombie because basically I never slept.
Q: What would you say were the biggest lessons you learned?
So many, but here are five big ones.
First, and most importantly, I learned that, insofar as managing people in a startup goes, “What goes around, comes around.” How you treat people has a huge impact on how they work and perform and their willingness to adjust roles and expectations and habits as business conditions change. At the restaurant, I was the boss of both a group of young people, mostly friends, and a group of older, longer-term restaurant workers. And I had to assert my expectations with my much older partners. It was a super dynamic environment that required nimble management. I think that’s a feature of all startups.
Second, I learned to be very careful about who I hitch my wagon to. Because of some partner challenges at the restaurant, when I started Cornerstone, I did it myself, and then brought in the “founding team.”
Third, I learned that to be a great entrepreneur, you need to know how to do every job. You didn’t have to be great at every job, just know how to do every job. At the restaurant, for example, on Sundays in particular, some of the kitchen staff would show up to work drunk, incapable of handling a shift. I would have to send them home. That left me without a cook. So, I had to either overstaff the busy Sunday night kitchen shift, which was too expensive, or I had to learn how to cook so that I could fill in and not compromise overall kitchen performance. So, I learned how to cook. By the time I left the restaurant, I could competently handle all restaurant tasks: I knew how to bartend. I knew how to do the books. I knew how to be a waiter. I knew how the dishwasher worked. I knew every aspect of that restaurant, and that enabled me to be much more flexible as a manager. That was an important lesson.
The fourth thing I learned is the importance of understanding the numbers. If you don’t understand the numbers, not only can the business start drifting without you knowing it, but suddenly really bad things can just happen. I don’t like downside surprises. I was decent at reading the books, but I decided accounting was so important to really understanding the business that I got a CPA. So, yeah, I’m a JD/MBA/CPA. To this day, I really try to understand how all the business, operations, financing, and accounting things come together. It’s much harder to be successful if you don’t have a firm understanding of the numbers.
The fifth thing I learned has been an ongoing source of fun for me. Going to business school while I was running the restaurant meant I could learn a business theory in school, and then test it out in reality at the company. It was like a lab for business school, which was totally unique. I tested out a number of business concepts from school, to see what worked for me and what had less impact. I found that really cool then and I still love to “learn, apply, test, and adjust” in business.
Q: Few jobs are more local than working in a restaurant. What was your path from there to global business founder?
As I mentioned, I like trying things out, testing them, before going all in on them, whether in business or in personal pursuits. I was going to law school, but never had a real law job. I wanted to better understand the priorities, activities, and pace of working in a law firm, so I found a boutique firm that needed an associate. In truth, I really was an intern. I worked for the woman who ran the firm. She was an author, too, and was writing a book. She put me on her research and writing project and the work went well enough that we ended up authoring two books together. The books weren’t on any best-seller lists, but I learned a lot about content creation and how the big publishing houses work, and I pocketed about $25,000 from the book advances.
I’d finished school and decided to use that money to fund a literally global trip. I purchased an around-the-world airline ticket and went exploring. That was another huge learning experience, because it taught me to be very independent. I had many experiences with good and bad folks, but I definitely learned that the good outweighs the bad. If people are given the chance to do the right thing, they often would. Very few people get to see the world as I did. Even at the time, I realized I wasn’t just seeing a new place; I was touring Earth.
That trip had a huge impact on my business career. Because of it, I became a big believer in the power of global commerce to be a force of improving the human condition and to impact people’s lives. I knew that whatever business I started had to be a global business. To impact change the way I wanted to, my business would have to operate internationally while paying close attention to local details.
Then, I came home, like, back to the Tri-State area. I’m 27. I took a job at an investment bank, Schroeders, which became part of Citigroup, partly to prove to my parents and, to a degree, my friends that I could get a real job. But during those two years, I also acquired the last missing pieces in my business education, the hard-core finance pieces: how companies go public and how M&A works. I didn’t really love that finance job; for me, it was more of an extension of school.
Q: I’m going to pick up on two themes you’ve mentioned: A passion for learning and a drive to foster change. How have these two features of your personality translated to your entrepreneurial pursuits?
Yeah, my passion for learning led to Cornerstone, my first very successful endeavor. A drive to foster change has been a major motivating force behind Instil. I’ll talk about Cornerstone first.
When I was in business school, a classmate of mine and I entered a business planning competition. We were very intrigued by the opportunity to use CD-ROMs to improve adult education. That idea percolated until I came out of school fixated on the idea of using technology to improve access to education. My partner wanted me to drop out of school to start a company, but I knew that CD-ROM was the wrong technology. The web was maturing rapidly, and it was obvious to me that the right business would be an internet company.
So, I finished grad school, took the global trip, finished my education on Wall Street, and then started a company. By then, web-based content was becoming richer, more complex and more interactive. Having seen the CD-ROM industry rise and fall, I decided it would be better to focus on distribution than content development. So, I founded CyberU, which we later renamed as Cornerstone, to improve global access to adult e-learning.
Over the course of 20 years, Cornerstone did just that. We became the largest training and development company in the world. During my tenure, we delivered about two billion classes to adults in 192 countries in dozens of different languages to help people realize their potential. I ran Cornerstone for 10 years as a private company CEO and then for 10 years as a public company CEO. Then I took it private again.
Cornerstone absolutely was an outgrowth of my desire to constantly keep learning. I mean, I’m a lifelong learner. For example, when I started Cornerstone, it was a tiny company. When I left, it was 3,000 employees in 25 countries. You can’t remain the same person over a journey like that. You have to keep learning, or the whole thing stops in its tracks. You have to stay curious. Whether I learned from peers or board members or other CEOs or the management team, I would constantly try to learn and improve and evolve as a leader. I think that’s super important.
Q: That’s an amazing accomplishment. What about your drive to foster change? How did that lead to Instil?
From college on, I’d always invested time working with nonprofits in an effort to improve things that matter to me. At first, locally, and then as my reach grew, globally. But there are limits to how much impact an individual person can have, right? I mean, there’s just so many hours in a day. But nonprofits can address so many challenges on both local and global scale. I decided that if I could build a company that’s supporting nonprofits, then I could dramatically scale my impact. We could have a multiplier effect by helping to maximize the impact of hundreds or thousands of nonprofits.
During my two decades at Cornerstone, I was very involved with nonprofits. I decided early on that I wasn’t going to accept invitations to sit on any boards of for-profit companies. Instead, I’d seek out opportunities to sit on boards of nonprofit organizations with missions that aligned with my interests. I got involved with several nonprofits. With my for-profit operational experience, I usually became very involved in governance of operations and management. That role meant that I typically was very active in building and scaling these organizations.
The best-known example is Team Rubicon, that I started with when it was really just three Marines with an idea: veteran-led disaster relief services that helped both communities and veterans. I became the chairman, and over the next decade, this dual-purpose mission proved very effective. We turned it into a huge nonprofit, scaling Team Rubicon to 150,000 volunteers.
Through those experiences, I saw firsthand that the systems nonprofits were using were seriously suboptimal. Typically, the tooling was either specifically designed for nonprofits, and the tech was either bad and barely functional, or it was adopted from highly functional but very complex tooling designed for commercial entities, but poorly implemented for nonprofits. I thought somebody would build a vertical SaaS solution for nonprofits that would be modern, easily adopted, and could solve this problem. It’s a huge opportunity! I told myself that when somebody does this, I’ll invest in it. I really wanted to be supportive of the idea. But I kept waiting for it and waiting for it and it never happened. So, I decided to do it.
When I was winding down from Cornerstone, I decided the time was right, and that’s how Instil got started: to help nonprofits operate in today’s world by bringing modern technology purpose-built to help them more holistically manage a community.
Q: Where are you right now? What are nonprofits able to do with this modern tech that they couldn’t do before?
At Instil, we are building a solution that is optimized for the operations of nonprofits, which is different in many ways from the way that corporations operate. We are able to deal with the nuances of major gifts forecasting and campaign management. We understand that a single constituent could be a donor, a member, a volunteer, and a client. We know that nonprofit fundraising is often more about families than individuals, and that tracking every interaction matters.
The feedback we get during demos and from our existing partner base is extremely positive. They love the mobile-first design, the ability to track all aspects of their community members, and the chance to democratize information across the team and the board.
We also get high marks from tech and operations people at the nonprofits. Most alternatives in this space have weak support for mobile, employ closed architectures, and don’t scale. Instil is unique in all those dimensions. They also like our ability to handle advanced permissioning. Remember, a lot of the people engaged in the missions of nonprofits aren’t employees; they’re volunteers or work in other organizations and may only engage the systems temporarily. Instil makes it easy to stand up to transient resources, operate them, and then take them back down when the time comes. We’re changing that whole game. I truly believe that Instil will dramatically improve the effectiveness as well as the efficiency of nonprofits.
Like many other SaaS companies that started out focused on serving smaller businesses, Instil was originally built to serve smaller nonprofits. However, we decided to spend the last year rebuilding our platform to enable it to scale for very large nonprofits. We made the investment in time and resources to build a system that’s extremely scalable — truly enterprise class — and can meet the needs of larger nonprofits. We’re helping them manage their donors, their volunteers, their members, and even their clients with tools to manage programs and membership or contribution drives to be more effective as organizations have even bigger impacts than they’ve had before.
Q: You mentioned that the nonprofit opportunity is huge. Can you quantify that?
Most people don’t understand something important about nonprofits. Our experience with nonprofits usually revolves around solicitations for money. It’s natural to assume, then, that the typical nonprofit is a few days from being broke. But, in fact, nonprofits constitute one of the economy’s biggest sectors. It’s a multi-trillion-dollar sector of the US economy. There are 1.5 million nonprofits in the US. It’s a very large market opportunity. Now, a lot of those are very small, but if you focus only on the top 10% of the sector, we’re talking about a market of nearly 150,000 large, enterprise-scale organizations in the US alone. These are entities with big teams, big donor bases, big revenue streams, and big constituencies to serve. This is the group we’re predominantly working with now.
Another thing about nonprofits is that they include organizations and institutions that provide essential services to entire communities, like universities and school districts and hospitals. Nonprofits don’t just serve communities with special needs; they serve all needs in communities. That’s another reason why it’s such a big sector. Ultimately, we’ll work with all these organizations.
Q: As you build a company to serve nonprofits, is there a cause that has captured your attention?
I want to help eradicate homelessness. It’s an epidemic in LA, as it is in most cities on the West Coast, but the scale of the problem in LA is unique. Government structure, geographic size, magnitude of the homeless population — all contribute to making homelessness in LA an especially acute problem. But I think it’s a solvable problem. I founded an organization called Better Angels to really activate the LA community around holistically addressing the homelessness crisis. We view this as a giant proof of concept. We’re focusing on LA at first, but if we can put a big dent in the homeless problem in LA, we can export the solutions everywhere. We’re documenting everything we’re doing. We’re making sure we’re doing it in a way that people could learn from it and apply it in other locations.
In my second act, I’m trying to have real impact, and the impact Instil will have is a key part of that plan.
