15 minutes with Sean O’Sullivan

Listening to other successful people and learning from their experiences is an integral part of any entrepreneur. And that is something which we follow religiously at Zify. As part of engagement activities, we often reach out to successful entrepreneurs, for a quick chat with the whole team and, this time it was none other than Sean O’Sullivan.

Sean O’Sullivan is an entrepreneur, inventor and investor, born in New York City and currently living in County Cork, Ireland. He is best known for co-founding MapInfo Corporation, which popularized street maps on computers, and for coining the term “Cloud Computing“. He is managing director at Carma, a global software company, and at SOSV, a $250m venture capital operation. O’Sullivan has had an unusually diverse career, being described as a “renaissance man”.

The charitable O’Sullivan has funded the Khan Academy, CoderDojo programming education centers and the MATHletes Challenge with 20,000 euros in prizes. In 2003 O’Sullivan founded both the O’Sullivan Foundation and the humanitarian organization JumpStart International, to empower Iraqis through employment projects.

Sean is one of the investors in Zify and whenever I get a chance, I do not shy away from proudly taking and even bragging about him being associated with Zify in a big way.

It was 7:50 pm already and the team had still not settled down for the video conference, which made me a bit uncomfortable. By 7:57 pm, everyone assembled around the TV with their cup of evening cup of coffee, wondering why was I restless. Sensing their concern, I challenged them “Guys, 3 minutes to 8 and believe me, he would call at the exact time!”. The whole team accepted the challenge and were eager to see if he comes online in 3 minutes. As the clock struck 8, everybody saw a video call notification pop up on the TV screen, it was Sean calling and the first lesson of punctuality was learnt. Let me also tell you all, Sean was at airport and traveling to San Francisco in the next 25 minutes and the second lesson was learnt there that respect and value the appointments you make. No matter what and how!!!

Sean was really happy to see that the team had grown in size and there were more young faces. He started the conversation by talking about his struggles and challenges faced by him and trust me I was so relieved to hear about it. Why?? Because even we at Zify are also facing similar challenges and it simply shows that we are in the right direction and one day we will make it big.

• Get the rider and the car owner at the same (Chicken-egg problem that the carpooling industry is facing)
• Taxicabs are working well but carpooling in other ways is not working well.
• Everything is commercialized. Appealing to people for carpooling among themselves is the biggest problem in itself.

Answering the question that how Zify can differentiate themselves with companies like Uber and Ola, Sean discussed about the business model of Lyft, the neo taxi services that provide “real time taxi hailing” and how they are running the business with an asset heavy model. According to Sean, Carma also has an asset heavy model with hundreds of cars being provided on rent. But at the end of the discussion the most important thing he said was, “Never break laws. It helps you to live a peaceful life”.

Sean has a different take on technology. According to him, the ultimate aim to use technology should be to give a joyful experience to the users. If you think that you are able to provide that experience to the users, then your technology is playing the right role.

Sean is not just a mentor to us, but in a way, a guardian who always guides us. We spoke about aligning the personal goals with the goals with the company. He said,

“If there is growth in the Company, then the personal growth will be automatically achieved.”

The CEO and the CTO of any startup, play very important roles in this regard, by recognizing the talents who are doing well for the company and who are making a product that the users will love to use. They should encourage such talents. The company should always have growth within it. If the company grows from 10 to 100 and then from 100 to 1000, there will be more people who can contribute to the company and more leaders will emerge who will take the company to new heights.

After talking about all this, his alarm rang and he told us that you have exactly 3 minutes time to ask your last question. And we had an interesting question for him. “What does it take to build a Billion Dollar Company?” And he had an even interesting answer it and one of the shortest yet apt answers that I have ever heard. He said, “At the beginning, I would not care much about revenues. But what I would definitely care about is, 100 happy customers!” He explained that revenue is an important part of running a business. But the most important part is having happy customers. Your first 100 happy customers will 100,000 happy customers, then the company has achieved its goal and the revenue will be generated automatically.

At that moment when the Skype call ended, I felt that those 15 minutes just flew and that that we could have spent some more time with him to get some more gyan from him. But today, when wrote this blog, I am just feeling that if an individual and a company is able to follow even 60% of what he has said in those 15 minutes, then that individual and company will be in a position where no one can beat them.