Serial CTO & CEO Tony Kelly on startup product development
This is a transcript of an interview you can watch here.
Wiktor Żołnowski: Welcome to Pragmatic Talks, a podcast and video series where we discuss startups, contemporary digital product development, modern Technologies, and product management. I am Wiktor Żołnowski, a CEO of Pragmatic Coders, the First Choice Software Development Partners for startup Founders. For today’s episode, we invited Tony Kelly, a Serial CTO, CEO, and founder of various startups. Currently, Tony is working on a very interesting web3 startup that is still in stealth mode. Today we will be talking about the most important startup success factors, common mistakes, and selecting the right Partners on your startup Journey.
Introduction and Tony Kelly’s Background (1996 – Present)
Wiktor Żołnowski: Hello Tony, it’s great to have you here. How are you today?.
Tony Kelly: Good, I’m good. I’m enjoying the Polish weather. It’s pretty cold in February.
Wiktor Żołnowski: So I have a first question that I always ask to all of our guests: Who is Tony Kelly and what is your story?
Tony Kelly: What’s my story… I guess my story started back in 1996 when the word of the Internet and the World Wide Web kind of came to Ireland, and I got very interested in this. So I started teaching myself, and after a couple of months, I started working with Intel. So over the next couple of years, we worked on quite a lot of e-learning products, including one that won an award from the United Nations. So from that I got into game-based learning, and within a few years, I was working in the video games industry. I’m kind of also into the internet technology in general, but I think most of my career has been in and around video games. And then about, I guess, about eight or nine years ago, I left, which is where I’ve been working for Activision Blizzard making video games. I wanted to go back to working with startups and having a much more varied exposure to different technologies, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.
Tony Kelly’s Startup Journey and Role as a Consultant/VC Assessor
Wiktor Żołnowski: Great, that leads us to my next question about your history of working with startups. I know that you’ve been working, as you mentioned, for the last nine years with many startups. I know you’ve been playing a role of a CTO or Chief Product Officer in various startups, so could you tell us a little bit more about this part of your journey.
Tony Kelly: My startup Journey actually, I guess, began while I was working with Intel back in the early 2000s. I was involved with a number of video game development groups, and there were a lot of Indie companies starting up, so I ended up mentoring two or three companies, and I kept in touch with these people, and I’ve always been in and out of startups. But I guess after I’d been at Intel for about eight years. I was then working with startups, helping them get funding through various Irish and European sources. And then later, when I was working at Activision, I was working less with startups, but I was actually working on the opposite side where, as part of the Activision leadership team, I would often have to assess startups and companies from a merger and acquisition’s point of view. And from there, when I left Activision, I was working more with startups on both sides. Sometimes I was looking for funding myself in startups I was helping start. In other places, I was working for the VCs and the investors where I would do due diligence on the startups. so my experience is quite broad, and it changes from time to time. Once again, I’m now in a startup looking for funding, and the startup I’m working on now is actually about acquiring funding for startups as well. So it’s kind of very—I don’t know—we’ll get to that later on, I’m talking about the project, focus on right now.
The Absolute Critical Factor: Product-Market Fit and Marketing
Wiktor Żołnowski: But maybe you can tell us a little bit more about that, because you’re also working as a consultant for startups. So, what are the tips that you are giving the most often to your clients who came to you with startup ideas?
Tony Kelly: That’s a very good question, and it hasn’t changed in 20 years, it’s the same story. You need to find Product-Market Fit. You can have the best idea in the world, but if you’re not able to implement it, get it in front of a customer who’s willing to pay you for it (and obviously they only pay you for it if it solves a problem for them). You’re not going to get very far either in acquiring the funding, or sometimes you even get the funding and then you still fail because you haven’t managed to close the gap between your vision and what the customer actually needs. so to me, the main lesson for startups has always been the same: you have to find Product Market Fit. It’s not about implementing your vision. So, finding a customer who has a pain point you want to solve, okay? And that’s even the technology; my background is technology, but people are often surprised that when I say the technology is the easy part. Fixing a problem for a customer and getting a customer to pay for it—that’s the hard part.
Wiktor Żołnowski: And this is something we always also tell to our clients: that, the building a product, the technology, that’s the easy part, that’s the easy part. And usually this is something that we see: that some of our clients focus too much on this part, on that part, and also invest too much money on that part, instead of investing marketing and research and working with the clients, with their clients.
Tony Kelly: 100%. As a VC or when you’re working for a VC, depending on the particular venture capitalist or investor you’re working for, they will have a list, like a checklist of things that they’re going to be looking for, and almost always it’s about managing risk, right?. Do you have a good Market opportunity? Is the team the right team to get to Market? Do you have a technology risk?. But inevitably, I would say 80 to 90% of startups fail due diligence because they don’t have a good marketing plan. They literally have a great idea, they might have even found the right customer, but there’s no plan for going to Market and putting the product in front of the user. So very much, product market fit and the marketing piece at the end of it are absolutely critical.
Strategies for Finding Product-Market Fit: Dialogue, Iteration, and Lean Startup
Wiktor Żołnowski: Yeah, so maybe from the other end, so maybe you have some stories, or you’ve seen some best approach is to find the product market fit by the startup Founders, and then you can share it?. Maybe some stories like this, I wish, something that surprised you when you saw it for the first time that someone did it and it was like, “Whoa, it’s all fun?”.
Tony Kelly: That’s a tough one. I don’t think there’s only one solution. I think one of the things I despair about as I get older is, with blogging and social media now, the when I started in product developments, we didn’t have product managers; that didn’t exist as a concept. And like the video game industry borrowed the idea of producers from the film industry. And it’s only in the last 10 to 15 years you hear people talk about product management and even product owners, I guess in general. So I don’t believe there is a book or a silver bullet or a framework that you can follow that will get you product market fit. I really don’t. I think every situation is different, but I’m a big believer in lean startup. I believe you cannot sit in a room and decide what your customer needs. You need to be talking to your customers; you need to ask them. And I think one of the best if I need to give general advice to somebody is: your go to market strategy starts at the product development stage. You’re constantly in a dialogue with your customers about what the problem is, what the fit is. And if you do that right, by the time you’ve actually hit the market, you already have some loyal customers. I think there’s a great story. Like the lean startup book is quite famous, but it’s also quite famous for its limitations, which is it’s a set of theories; there’s no techniques really in it. But then also called Ash Maurya wrote a follow-up, I think it’s called Running Lean. And the whole book, he basically put the idea for the book online, got people to give him feedback on the outline. Then he would go and write the outline and put that in front of people to get feedback on that. And by the time he’d finished that process, he’d written the book with the customers, and he’s also already got about 50,000 sales by the time he’d finish the book. And I think that’s a perfect, probably the best framework for going to Market that I’ve seen: it’s just constant dialogue with your customers and iterating and improving as you go.
Data vs. Customer Voice: The Importance of Measuring Usage
Wiktor Żołnowski: It just reminds me my story that when I was trying to write a book the same way, I was using Leanpub for publishing it when writing it. I have like a thousand or three users who could read the book, but I never finished it. So, same on me.
Tony Kelly: We all have loads of those projects we’ve never finished it, I’m sure.
Wiktor Żołnowski: Okay, but it’s easy to say, “find a product market fit”. I say that there is no one way to do that, that will fit all, etc. But what does it—and you said that—”talk to your customers every day”—what does it mean actually?. Because this is something that many people read about in the blog post, in the books, as you mentioned: “talk to your customers,” but what does it mean?.
Tony Kelly: so it could mean many different things, and I don’t think there’s only just one answer here. So, let me try and give you a couple of examples. Well, one: when I left Demonware, I ended up working with one of my managers from Intel 20 years previously. He was now working as an Innovation Management Consultant. So he taught like design thinking, agile, lean. He would do this for Enterprises; he did this for banks and things like that. But he and a partner of his were trying to figure out how can we turn that into like a Software as a Service?. So I got on board with them. And rather than sit down and just tell people, “This is how you should go and do Agile, this is how you should do Innovation Management in your Enterprise,” we just went and spoke to all his customers and his previous colleagues in Banks, MasterCard, Citibank. And we spoke to some semi semi-state bodies in Aberdeen who worked with the oil industry. And we went and asked them about the problems they were trying to fix by implementing the various solutions. And we just tried to identify where the common problems were and try to put minimal viable product in front of them that didn’t necessarily solve the full problem but got them part of the way there. And we just kept getting feedback from them, and we would just iterate basically to figure out what was the minimal amount of solution we could put in place that would suit the maximum amount of customers that we had. And so that was one solution. And another one: a startup I’m advising at the moment. This guy is trying to figure out how can we make it easier for game developers who want to implement something on the blockchain but don’t know where to begin because it’s a very different set of Technologies. He hasn’t even gone out and raised funding yet. He spent a year and a half traveling around the world talking to Independent game developers. And in the end he thought he was going to go out and find a solution that would work on Xbox and PlayStation, but he actually found a much bigger Market of Indie developers: he just wanted to publish browser-based games. So he has a list of 150 startups that are working with him, and he’s trying to solve a problem for all of them. So, instead of going out and trying to find a solution he could sell to, a triple-A game studio for ten thousand dollars a year, he’s trying to solve a problem for $5.99 a month for indie developers. But he’s already—he doesn’t even need to take external funding. Now they’re working with him day by day, and he’s actually building a product with them. And again, I think some of it will come down to—sometimes it comes down to personality as well. One criticism I would have for many startup Founders is they’re stubbornly set on building what they think people want. I call it hopes and dreams syndromes. You love to build your hopes and dreams, but I don’t want to pay you for your hopes and dreams, right?. I want to build a product for real people with a real need. So unless you have an audience of people who are prepared to work with you or be vocal about what the problem is, you’re designing in isolation, you’re going to be making it up as you go along. Another piece I would add to that: the first startup I worked in when I left my Activision Blizzard and Demonware was run by two friends of mine. Actually, I’d helped found this company; it was partly my idea—we had this idea in a bar a long time ago. And what they were trying to do was figure out a way to bring heuristics and measurement into a bit of science into UX. One was a really award-winning product designer, the other one was a programmer. And in the end, they actually built what today is the first WYSIWYG in-browser design tool for fluid software. They launched this; they had 400,000 users in three months, right? 400,000 users. They got so caught up in talking to their customers that they forgot to actually measure how the customers were using the product. So I came on board a year later; the team was now nine people, but they were running out of money, and I had to go in and just look at the data. And they kept saying, “All our customers are saying X is the problem, this is the problem”. The reason people were leaving the platform wasn’t the problem they thought it was. People were leaving the platform because the technology choice they had made earlier on was a little bit unstable; it was very early. So they showed me some bad decisions on the JavaScript architecture, and that meant that some users under heavy loads, it looked like their design was disappearing. So everyone thought, “I’ve lost my data”. And we never lost anyone’s data, but the customer perceived they’d lost their data, so they couldn’t trust us. Nobody wants to come in and spend eight hours a day or several months on a fantastic design with the risk of it disappearing overnight, right?. So by looking at the data, I literally went through every single cancellation reason people had given us in a big spreadsheet. It took me nine hours; I didn’t do it by hand. I worked out what—tried to figure out what the sentiment was among our users. And 99% of them were leaving because the product appeared too unstable. Four weeks of development fixed that problem. The retention went up, the lifetime value of customers went up, the churn went down. Now, we still didn’t manage to ultimately make the product a success, but we actually resolved a lot of issues for our customers by focusing on the data and not on what the customers were saying. And that, I thought, was a big lesson for me, actually—that you can’t just trust what customers are saying; you actually have to go and see what are they actually doing.
Wiktor Żołnowski: We have a lot of customers, then listen, everyone, everyone has a different opinion and different expectations.
Tony Kelly: 100%. And you’ll even find the same on the startup team: you have lots of people’s opinions, but you have to base it on what’s best for the business and the shortest path to getting to that resolution. I think one of the issues the guys found was, part of it was, they were getting a lot of acclaim. Designers hadn’t had this—this is before Figma, it was before Sketch; there was nothing like that available at the time. So they had customers from Google and NASA. And that was one of the things I did, as a testimonial, when one customer said, “If it’s good enough for Google and NASA, it’s good enough for me,” I put it on t-shirts, I put it up on posters, I put it everywhere. But you actually have to go and look at the data because they were so caught up with the customer support and dealing with the support issues on the Forum. Actually, that’s a good example for product market issue as well. They were kind of trying to do the right thing, but they did it in the wrong way. They were spending all day chatting with people and customers online, but not measuring what they were actually doing and what the outcomes were. So I think you have to have a little bit of perspective where you have to ask people what they want, but you actually have to watch what they do as well. Such famous story (apocryphal, I know) about Henry Ford: “Well, if I asked people what they wanted, they would have had a faster horse”. And then you’ve got the opposite one, where you’ve Steve Jobs saying, “You don’t ask customers what they want; you give them what they need, and it’s your job to figure out what they need before they do”. So the truth is probably somewhere in that middle, but it’s always about product market fit; it’s always about the voice of the customer, but you have to put it in the context of the business as well.
Wiktor Żołnowski: Don’t you think that it also depends on the stage where the startup Founders are? Like, at the very beginning, it’s more valuable to actually talk to the customers and get direct responses, opinions? See how they solve the current problems that you want to solve—how they are solving it on their own without your solutions? And then later on, when you already have customers who are paying for your services (or by paying, I mean they could, for example, use your services and pay by their time that they are spending in the product). And then when they are at this stage, when you are at the stage with a startup, then you can actually, when you have the data, you can look at the data, and you can always balance between the comments and the data.
Tony Kelly: Yeah, like it’s definitely an element of—I guess a lot of feedback you get is very subjective. So, a good example would be from Fluids, where the engineering partner always used to come to me and say, “People are complaining the product’s too expensive, the product’s too expensive”. And I said to him one day, he said, “How many people?” What did I say to him? I said, “Well, people are always going to complain about the price; that’s a kind of a silly thing to focus on. Like, you want to give it to them for free? No”. So you have to figure out what the right price is. In the end when we’d fix that stability problem, we put the price up. Nobody complained, right?. So it’s not even a case of just listening to what people are going to say and do. What am I trying to say? I think you need to look at the sentiment of the feedback as well and what the context is. Like the feedback you get when somebody is canceling a product—asking them why you’re cancelling the product is one of the best innovations, I think, people put that emerge there for SaaS services. Not everybody will fill that in, but the ones who do generally tend to be giving you very honest and informed feedback about what they think about your product. So just looking at cancellations, or the numbers on its own, was not enough. What was the context you got the feedback in? You also need to look at the context of the user. A student with no money trying to do a design project is going to have a very different perspective than, for example, someone in American Airlines or NASA who’s using that day to day. So knowing your audience—and actually, that again is where the marketing piece comes in we talked about earlier on. You have to segment the audience into what you know, whether it’s demographics, location, their use case. So all those data points have to be pulled in. But I think—and everybody’s got a limited experience with this—but I think these days with the data mining and the processing tools you can use for sentiment analysis can provide a huge amount of context. So again, not even just looking at when people cancel, or why they say they’re canceling, but trying to look for those kind of signals before they cancel can be quite important as well. I read a study just recently on LinkedIn where PayPal brought in an intern to do some data mining. And we’re actually able to drastically improve the experience for, I think it was, 199,000 customers, by just basically not just asking them what they said, but looking at each stage for context around why people were creating. For example, a lot of people use PayPal for once-off payments. We can’t really necessarily turn them into a repeat customer; they just don’t have that use case. So let’s ignore that set of users and go and look at the set of users who do recurring payments. And they just drilled down, I think it was through five different stages. So they ended up fixing a problem for a quite a small subset of PayPal users, but that was the number that increased the revenue and the engagement and the retention and the lifetime value by just focusing on the problem they could address quickly for a small set of users. But because of the context, that was the one that made the difference. You could spend a lot of money and time try to fix a problem for the other eight hundred thousand users that had a problem, but that might not be enough to move the needle, or you might fix the problem for the wrong user. I don’t know if that answers your question.
Wiktor Żołnowski: No, definitely. This is like a great example of what the product managers should do, actually, regardless if they are, the product lead, or CTO, or just a product manager or product owner. It’s definitely the basing the decision on the data and the feedback from the users. This is perfect again.
Tony Kelly: Can I give you? I’ll give you one more example, because this is one I often—it’s one of my proudest career achievements. I saved Activision 146 million dollars by looking at a spreadsheet that no one else looked at. That’s all I did. I just looked at it and kind of went, “We were spending this is how much: 146 million dollars over five years”. I did another one actually, but maybe this is a better one. Call of Duty at one point: we tried to build a web service around Call of Duty, and this is something the marketing department had wanted to do for years. But the independent studios at Activision worked independently, and a number of studios worked on Call of Duty, and they didn’t want to bring in more monetization and that kind of thing. Long story short, after two years they’d built this huge service around Call of Duty, but it was always having trouble with its infrastructure. So after a little while, I decided I would go and have a look at the spreadsheet, and I realized they were spending 1.8 million dollars per month on AWS Services no one was using. And again, that was just because I took a product manager bottoms-up approach, and I went and looked up, “What are you using it for? Where are we spending the money? Look, there’s a big mismatch!”. And that saved, I don’t know, 20 million dollars per year. But again, just looking at the data other people don’t look at.
Assessing Startup Potential: Focus on the Founding Team and Resilience
Wiktor Żołnowski: That does recall one of our clients from a few years ago. When we used to work with the corporates as well, where they were negotiating with us the price increase like a small five percent price increase just because of the inflation. And at the same time they were overpaying for the AWS like a hundreds of thousand dollars, which was more than actually all of our teams cost for a month.
Tony Kelly: That’s a common story, yes. But when we pointed it out and we showed them where they could save more money, they actually came to us and said, “Okay, you’re worth it, no problem,” exactly.
Wiktor Żołnowski: Okay, so you actually already asked the question that I’m going to ask, but maybe you have other ideas as well? So, how to recognize a startup or startup Founders who has a potential to become like a unicorn, or maybe just became successful (like not everyone need to be a unicorn)?.
Tony Kelly: I think this is one of those questions we all wish we had the skill to be able to identify. There’s no simple answer. And every VC will have like a 10x or 100x return. Now we’re having this discussion ourselves on the startup I’m working out at the moment, where we’re basically going to be—without going into too much detail because it’s still under stealth mode—we’ll effectively be helping some of these projects get funded. But because we’re the middleman, we’re trying to figure out what is the due diligence we would want the customers on one side to do on the startups on the other so they have the confidence to invest in. So we’re looking at these pieces ourselves. And one of the things I realized is that no matter which checklist we used (the one I’ve used for years, or the Andreessen Horowitz—they have a 12-point checklist they use for managing assessing risks in a startup), I said it to the guys, we could literally find startups that tick every box, they look perfect, and they could still screw up because they didn’t achieve product market fit or because the market went against them. So there’s no one-size-fits-all. But I can tell you, every investor looks for the same couple of areas in the startup. They’ll look for the opportunity size in the market, if there’s a technical or implementation risk. But almost everybody will invest if the founding team looks strong enough and capable to deliver on the vision. Because conditions will change, technology changes—you can adapt to all those things. But if the team doesn’t have the right chemistry, they don’t have the right mix of skills. Maybe they have all of those, but they don’t have the endurance to stay through the grind that it takes sometimes. So it’s a mix of soft skills and hard skills you’re looking for in a team. You want to make sure they’re either capable enough. If you do notice a gap—let’s say you have a great COO on the team and a great CEO, but they’re missing a product person, for example—you want to assess, are they aware enough to know that they don’t have the skills themselves, and are they aware enough to know the kind of skills and the kind of people they need to hire to fulfill the vision?. You’re also looking to see their past experience as well. I think sometimes people come across—it might be their first time doing a startup, but they might be amazing at what they do; they have a great idea. But because they haven’t done it before, nobody has any frame of reference to see if they’re going to be able to stick on the journey. No matter what size your founding team is, doing a startup it’s a lonely journey at heart; it’s just problem after a problem. I say to our team, we always say, “With an infinite amount of problems and a tiny amount of resources, we have to choose very carefully what we’re going to do each day”. Because you can run around doing lots of things, but if it doesn’t help you move forward, you’re just wasting time, right? So, I think people will look for—you’ll very rarely find an investor who invests into a company, no matter how great the opportunity is, if they don’t like the team or if they don’t think the team chemistry is right. And I don’t think a lot of people could tell you what the formula is for getting the right team, but we can absolutely tell you when the formula is wrong. So again, I don’t think that really helps you very much, but I think at a minimum, they want the capability and the skills that are required or the self-awareness to know what they don’t know. You also want that sense of integrity and transparency. I think some startups take investors for fools and that they can hide lots of things and not answer certain questions. And what they don’t realize is that unless you can answer every question perfectly, you’re going nowhere because they can’t trust you if you can’t show them where you were actually at. Because for sure you’re going to run into problems; they want to help you solve the problems. So integrity and that transparency and honesty is important. And then from my own kind of journey, as I get older, I’m looking at younger and younger Founders I’m finding coming in. You can also look at the data itself, right? I think something like 69% of startups that get to a Series A or beyond, and they’re not all young Founders. There tends to be a much older mix of people. And the success rate for startups that reach unicorn status, the average age I found is 49 years old. And part of that, I think, is not because there is lots more experience necessarily, but it is because they’re a little bit wiser. They’re used to dealing with the disappointments and the knockbacks and just getting up and moving forward. That’s what I think it is; I could be wrong, but that’s my personal experience. So I do think there’s a certain amount of stability, I guess, that you’re looking for, or a certain amount of resilience in the founders. You can be surprised. I’ve met younger Founders who just so impressed me; they’re so mature, and you think this girl or this guy could just handle anything that’s thrown at them. I don’t need to worry about that side of things. So again, not sure I completely answered your question, but it’s a soft thing. I think you can feel when there’s a connection or a chemistry among the team, and you can feel when there’s not. I’ve seen so many startups, really promising startups, fail because the founders fell out or the chemistry wasn’t quite there. And I was involved in one startup myself which—long story short—it was very promising. We were getting write-ups by Forbes as one of the most promising startups in Europe, and it looked like a fantastic opportunity. But some of the other founders on the team had never done startups before; they came straight out of corporate jobs. And it was so difficult over the next two or three years, because I was used to doing an MVP, rolling up my sleeves, and doing whatever needed to be done. But the CEO had only ever worked as a lawyer, so he literally couldn’t do anything when it didn’t involve a contract. He didn’t want to be sitting in front of customers talking about customer support. And so we got to a point where I left the startup and moved on. I wrote it off; I thought it was never going to go anywhere. And then last year, I got notified it’s just been acquired by another company; it’s now part of a big fintech unicorn. But I don’t think I would have got there with me still in that company, because the chemistry between me and the other Founders was never going to sustain us over the long term and through that grind. So I think I made the right decision leaving at the time. And that’s something I just couldn’t have predicted at the beginning, because again, on paper it looks like, “Perfect team,” but it just didn’t work over time.
Major Challenges and Testing Team Chemistry During Hiring
Wiktor Żołnowski: So, but what about the solopreneurs—people who want to start the startup when there is no team?.
Tony Kelly: That’s very true. And again, it depends on what their, I guess, their goal is. I tried being a solo founder—I tried it briefly—when I left Demonware, it didn’t work for me. I just felt I was leaving the games industry—not because I wanted to leave the games industry, but because I wanted a bigger, more of a mix of variety, I guess, in the problems I solved. But in addition, we had such success at Demonware, I kind of thought I’d like to be able to see, “Could I do this again somewhere else?”. It wasn’t until about, I’d say, six to nine months into the journey that I realized I was miserable. I’d gotten everything I wanted, but I was miserable because I’m used to working in a team; I work much better as part of a team. So since then, I’ve been trying not to work in startups that are very small, because I don’t want to be running around 14 hours a day, 18 hours a day, working hard on my own. I want to be with other people; I want to be helping solve problems with other people. So I have nothing but admiration for the people who do it on their own. But to me it just makes a hard journey harder. So if I was on the investment side, I would be personally a lot more reluctant to invest in a solopreneur unless the kind of project they were working on was suited to a single-person project.
Wiktor Żołnowski: Okay, yeah. Maybe let’s go to the next question. So, what was the biggest challenges you faced as a person working with startups as a CTO/CPO in the last years?.
Tony Kelly: Well, sooner or later, a lot of startups run out of money or start running out of money, and it’s never pleasant. So the way I think about it now for every project I go into (even the one I’m currently in, which is well funded), I always look ahead of the roadmap and I see how much oxygen I have. And I tell all the teams that we’ve got: “We’re in a room, we’ve got a locked door; there’s only so much oxygen in the room. You’ve got to make sure everything you’re doing is moving us towards that goal in that time frame”. So that’s a constant kind of challenge, I guess, of worry every entrepreneur has: “Can I pay my salaries this week? Can I make the payroll?”. Biggest challenges are that, and I think the one or two projects I worked on where there wasn’t chemistry with the other Founders, because people have very different approaches to solving problems. If you haven’t been brought up in a lean or agile type methodology, it’s kind of alien as a way of working. And people who come from a corporate background, whether it’s law or even in corporate tech companies, they get quite a shock when they go to a startup. And so I was going to start up again working with an old colleague of mine from Intel. And at one point—I can’t remember what we were disagreeing about—but it was literally only me and him. He was the guy working with the customers face to face, and I’m building the product, the tech. And at one point he said, “But I’m the CEO, Tony”. And I laughed and I went, “CEO of what? It’s two people in a room with no money! That’s the reality of it”. That we have to figure that out between us. But if you can forget about the hierarchy, forget about anything else, it’s just you and me. So I’d say as a species of problem, it’s probably getting the right fit with the right team, because again, startups are not for everyone. And it’s great to pat everyone on the back and hand out big bonus checks when things are going well. It’s quite different when things are not going well and you’re struggling. So you kind of need to make sure that the team you’re working with are not just wanting to go in the same direction, but you want to go at the same pace, and you want to do it in the same way. And that’s kind of a harder thing to figure out at the beginning. But I think that’s probably one of the most difficult things to get right, but one of the most important.
Wiktor Żołnowski: Okay.
Tony Kelly: Like what we said earlier, all the technology problems you’ll sort out one way or the other eventually. Product market fit is essential to sort out, or you have no business. But being able to have that resilience to go through the tough times and make sure that you really do share the same values and vision is very important.
Wiktor Żołnowski: Have you been hiring people for the startups you’ve been working with? Yeah, quite often. Because you mentioned having the same Vision, Values, etc. So how can you test it?.
Tony Kelly: I think that the problem—this is probably one of the weaknesses I have, like everybody else—which is it can be very hard to make explicit what you want or don’t want sometimes, or what you like and don’t like. I find, I’ll give you an example: I was involved when we were working for a mobile game studio. We were trying to hire in a really Senior Games artist from abroad. On paper he looked amazing; the phone interview, he was fantastic. So we decided, the ultimate test is we’ll bring them over here for a day, and we’ll spend the day with them and see how it works out. He met with the product designers and the design team in the morning; they loved him. We went for lunch, and in the hour and a half over lunch, we realized he’s not a pleasant person at all outside of the interview, just casually having a conversation. Lots of things came up he was saying that we were all like, “I don’t want to work with this guy”. So he kind of talked—he had the interview, he had the job, he was locked in. But as soon as he came back from lunch, he was like, “No, he’s a no”. So game studios used to have—I don’t know if they still do it—but many game studios would have this policy: if only one person on the team didn’t want to hire that person, you wouldn’t hire them. I found that—I thought that was a bit strange when I heard it first. But even more, as a good example: when I joined that company, it was 13 people, and a lot of them had gone to college together, right? So everyone was very similar. So we decided, as we were going to go forward, that everything was going to be like a group decision. So every person who got interviewed in that company would have to be—they wouldn’t be interviewed by everyone in the company, but before they were hired, they would meet everyone in the company. And that worked really well, and that came from that initial startup where we had brought in the artist and over lunch went, “No, don’t want to work with this guy”. So as a test, that worked very well. But again, it’s still a very soft kind of test, I suppose. I’m not sure there is a full explicit kind of test you could do in an interview, but I think you need to get across at least your values in the company, what’s important to the company. Not just, “This is what we’re about, this is the product we’re trying to build,” but here’s the vision for the company. And the vision, to me, should always include the way you want to do it, not just what you’re doing. If you don’t have that piece in there, I think it kind of shows that, if I’m outside looking in, it might not be the kind of job I want to apply for. But certainly, when you meet the team face to face, you want to really get a sense from the candidates, as well as the candidates getting a sense from you, of what you’re about and what makes you tick. And I think it’s as important for you to let them know so that they might realize, “This is not a fit for me”. How you do that, I guess—I’m not sure how you do that. I think for me, I always make it clear some of the attitudes we have in the company, like letting them know what some of your policies are, letting them know the things that you do value and the things you don’t value. The games industry is a good example where people are used to working out of passion. People come in to those jobs, and they will work around the clock. Sometimes I’ve worked in games companies where you have to force people to go home, right? “I won’t go, I can’t, I’m sleeping under my desk”. So when we started hiring at Demonware, we made it clear to everyone, “Look, we don’t want people working 24/7“. Working here nine to five, go home, spend the time with your family, and you come back tomorrow; you’ll be much better able to actually engage in what you do. You need to get that work-life balance right. So we tell people in the interview we don’t value people working 24/7. You’re not getting any extra credit for it. You have the same work and goals and objectives as everyone else. One guy, on his first day, I said, “Look, the way I think about this is really simple: you guys are all adults, you’re being paid to do a job, you’ve got goals and objectives. If you come in on Monday morning, and by Tuesday afternoon your week’s work is done, don’t come in on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I don’t care, you still get paid. The company got what we needed, you got what you needed”. That’s me getting a sense of those kind of examples and letting the candidate know that somebody senior in the company really values that you’re going to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. That’s very important. And then seeing how they respond to that. Also, giving an example: what exactly is the work? But I think I always try and, when we’re wrapping up an interview and we’re giving them some of these pieces, I don’t mind almost asking them one or two difficult questions to see how they respond to. Because again, it’s easy to assess people when things are going well. But what you want to see is: how’s that person going to respond when they hear something they don’t like or come across circumstances that are going to be tough? You kind of need to assess how you’re going to work in those circumstances. Because a partner of mine once said, “Look, a startup is like a marriage”. Say, in a marriage, maybe you’re having a bad day, and you let your wife know, and she’s there supporting you. Maybe the next day she’s having a bad day, and you need to give her some slack and help her out. If you’re both having a bad day, maybe you both need to stay a little time apart. But you need to have that self-awareness. He said startups are exactly the same way. So I think it’s back to that chemistry and testing for: Is this person I’m going to be happy to work 12 hours a day with and then go and have a pint at a bar? Or if I have to go away to a conference, am I going to be happy sharing a hotel room with this person for the next two weeks? And if not, maybe we’re not the right people to work together. I went through this a good few times.
Differences/Similarities between Gaming and Non-Gaming Startups
Wiktor Żołnowski: Maybe let’s get back to your experience from the game industry? You already mentioned a lot about it. Do you notice any differences between the game industry and non-gaming startups, or maybe some similarities and then differences?.
Tony Kelly: Yeah, so the gaming industry is weird. On one side, I would have the big corporate tech companies like Microsoft and AMD and Intel. And on the other, I’d probably put the, a typical startup. And the games industry is somewhere in the middle. The games industry—now I was going to say it’s a lot more grown up than it used to be, but it’s kind of not. It’s like the games industry is very much fueled by people that are passionate about what they do, just like the music industry or the film industry. Lots of people aspire to work there, so the wages generally tend to be lower. I can show you video game developers who are making less than a hundred thousand dollars a year. A Facebook engineer in New York gets $300,000 a year—pretty much the same kind of work ethic, same kind of hard problems to be solved. The people in the games industry tend to make things up as they go along to an extent, and sometimes that’s out of necessity. So what do I mean by that? Before we had the “games as a live service” phenomena, your game was shipping and was going to go live whether you liked it or not. The example will be Call of Duty, where, until a couple of years ago, Call of Duty launched on the first Tuesday in November every year, on the DOT. That means that two years before then, Activision negotiated with Activision how many units were going to be sold and how many discs needed to be pressed. The supply chain was all set up. So quite often when a game looked like it was going to sell even more before launch, that causes a huge amount of problems, because all of a sudden we needed an extra 18 million discs that had to be pressed, right? So that puts people under a lot of pressure, like, “Your game is going to ship whether you’re ready or not”. So game developers get used to taking shortcuts. If you look at the source code for most video game projects, it’s horrific; it’s not documented; it might not even be stable. I’m still waiting to see the game design document for Black Ops One, nevertheless, the game shipped sold billions of copies. But that’s just how the games industry is. Whereas you wouldn’t get away with that in working for Microsoft or AMD; you certainly wouldn’t get away with it in Intel. So I think Indies and startups tend to be a lot more operating from the hip and just trying to build an MVP. But I think where these days there’s a lot more maturity perhaps, and there’s a lot more widespread knowledge about product development and learnings that have been taken from companies like Facebook and Amazon and Google that we can all apply. But generally speaking, I would say startups and game developers are a lot more about getting something out, working fast, and fix it later if you need to. Whereas traditionally, traditional software companies are much more waterfall, that kind of thing. I think generally speaking, the game developments—and like some of the best engineers and developers I’ve ever worked with are in the games industry, don’t get me wrong—but they don’t have the same kind of discipline or rigor, or they don’t value those kind of process or perhaps as much as a lot of say corporate companies would. And these days when you meet founders, especially technical Founders, they tend to have a lot more knowledge about the passing knowledge about things like agile or how to measure velocity or whatever it might be. That’s a lot more common than it used to be, I would argue. Again, I’m not sure I’ve answered the question very well, but it can vary massively. I’ve also worked with a company run by the former executive team from IBM India, and I was horrified by the way they did software development. I thought of all people, they’d come in, they’ll be able to tell me, I will learn something from them. It was awful experience, awful experience. In fact, it was one of the reasons that led me to meeting Pragmatic Coders; they’re one of the companies we rejected earlier on in the cycle, before we chose you guys.
Current Web3 Stealth Project: Vision and Challenge
Wiktor Żołnowski: Perfect, great. I will have some questions about it though later. But maybe let’s move. We already started talking about the project that you’re working right now. We cannot provide the name because it’s in a stealth mode. But maybe there is something you can share about it?.
Tony Kelly: Yeah, where can I start? So, it’s related to blockchain. It uses blockchain technology quite a bit. And we are trying to do something that it’s actually never been done before. But if I sit down and just gave you a couple of bullet points, it sounds like every other blockchain startup to an extent. But I think it’s the way we’re doing it and the way we’re approaching solving some of those problems that’s different. I find blockchain technology incredibly interesting from a technical perspective and from a societal point of view in terms of its implications. I don’t agree necessarily with a lot of the drivers of the narrative around cryptocurrency and blockchain, but as an enabling technology, I think it’s going to be groundbreaking. What we’re trying to do: I think if you look at the way web3 or blockchain apps are built today from the way they’re used, it’s an awful user experience. It can be a very insecure experience in the sense that there’s so many parts that need to work properly. And I kind of despair when I look at the way people use some of these products and the way they’ve gotten used to working with them. I feel that now, the way we’re working now, what we’re trying to do is: I want to take the best of that technology and that experience, but I want to bring it into a bit more of a web 2 experience. In the sense that you’ll have a technology or a protocol, but I want to wrap it in a service. I want to smooth out some of those rough edges. I think if we’re really going to get a technology like blockchain to be (which is incredibly useful and highly valuable), if we’re going to get that into the hands of everybody, the infrastructure needs to disappear. No one should have to care about the wallet or learning about the difference between MetaMask and WalletConnect or whatever it might be; that should be irrelevant. When I get into a car, I don’t sit there and worry about how the internal combustion engine work. I don’t worry about which part of the engine was made by which supplier. You kind of have to do that in web3 at the moment to have a fully rounded experience. so we’re trying to iron out a lot of those problems and fix a lot of those hard problems. It’s pretty challenging. We’re even working with various folks at the moment who are experts in their fields, and you bring them in, you’re trying to explain what we’re trying to do, and they start scratching their heads going, “I don’t know how we’re going to do that”. That’s the whole point—it’s our job to figure out our problems, right? That’s the problem we’re trying to fix for our users. And sure enough, some of the problems we fixed users didn’t know they had. But they can get the experience and they can see, “There’s quite a contrast here”. So again, without going into the specifics, we’re tackling a lot of those harder problems. And we’re trying to do it in a way that is going to work for the current generation of users, but also the next billion users to come on to blockchain.
Working with Pragmatic Coders and Final Advice
Wiktor Żołnowski: What’s the plan so far? What was the hardest decisions you already made? You talk about decisions that we were making in the previous project, but in this project particular, what was the hardest decisions that you had to make so far?
Tony Kelly: I take this in two aspects, too. One is a particular problem with usability where there’s a difficulty in using: if you’re coming to any blockchain project now, or any project that’s using some element of blockchain, you need to have a wallet. To educate people about what it is, how to add one, how to use it, and some of the difficulties and dangers of even using a wallet is an incredibly tough experience. So we have started integrating some technology and doing some tests, and we’ve actually figured out a much slicker, a much smoother way to fix that problem. The difficulty is, it’s almost as difficult from a friction point of view with the way we’ve solved it. Our solution is almost has as much friction and education to be done as the problem did. I’m sitting here at the moment, I’m still trying to figure out, is that actually worthwhile doing that? Because for existing web3 users, that’s not really going to be of much benefit. But for new users, it’s going to be a benefit only if they read the tutorials in front of them? So you’ve got that whole problem of people just skipping, “go next, next,” but they don’t realize they’ve made a really critical decision that’s going to affect their experience forever more. I still haven’t figured out that one yet, but I’m trying to find what the balance is there and which way we should go. And that’s partly again because we’ve got two very different audience groups. And the second problem is just the nature of blockchain: the decentralized projects in general. We’re actually—we’re again putting our money where our mouth is; we’re kind of walking the walk, and we’re actually building this as a community. We didn’t fund it by VC money; we funded it from the community. We’re building it with the community; we’re going to run it with the community. So trying to get everybody on the same page can be very difficult. I know the team is scattered over the world as well, so even just trying to get everybody on a phone call to agree what the problem is to fix the problem can be difficult. So I think that’s more of a cooperation and organizational issue, let’s say, than a technical or product one, but that’s proving to be a challenge.
Wiktor Żołnowski: So at what stage are you right now, and what are your plans for the near future?
Tony Kelly: Yeah, so we’ve already gone through one round of funding with the community fundraising. We’re doing another one—the main one, actually—in a couple of months time. So right now, we’re just getting ready to reveal the project. We’re building the websites and putting together the support materials. So I think in approximately two months time we’ll be revealing the project and starting the next round of fundraising. And then, we’re already building the products. We’ve prototyped some parts of it, and we’re designing the rest of it currently. We’ve already started hiring. So watch this space for the next two or three months, and hopefully we’ll have a big announcement to make. We’ve got one thing we have done really well is we’ve actually managed to attract a rockstar team. We have people from Intel, Activision, myself, but we’ve got folks from Google, Facebook, Cardano, and Wire—also some of the big crypto companies. And we have the chief marketing officer from Liverpool Football Club, which is unusual. She’s got a very unusual background, but she’s kind of an expert in crypto and originally came from sports, which is interesting.
Wiktor Żołnowski: I hope we’ll have a chance to talk again in a couple of months to see where you will be at that moment and make some update for people who will be watching us. That’d be great. So you’re already invited for that, thank you. You already mentioned that you changed some software development Partners to work with Pragmatic Coders. This is the question that I always ask our clients, since we are working together on this project: Was there anything that surprised you the most when you started the cooperation with Pragmatic Coders?.
Tony Kelly: I won’t say it surprised me, but there’s definitely something. I’ll tell you the process we went through. When I’m choosing vendors or suppliers for a project, I don’t tend to want somebody to come in and do one job and then go away. I don’t know why lots of people do it that way; I much prefer to build a longer term relationship with someone. So I do a lot of due diligence at the beginning, a lot more than most people do. And I follow the process that was instilled into me when I was in Intel. Which is you get a minimum of three to five different people to compete for the process. Give them all the same brief. It takes longer to do it; you have to qualify five companies instead of one. But it gives you a chance to see how different people’s perspective on the project might be. So we did that, and on this project as well, we had one company in Vietnam. They would answer all the questions, but I was convinced by their answers that they didn’t even read the brief properly. They’re just throwing out generic answers. We took them through two weeks of phone calls and everything else before I realized, “You’re just wasting your time,” and we eliminated them. We had two more companies: a really accomplished company in the space from the US. They just didn’t want to. They wanted us to work their way, and there’s just no compromise whatsoever. We just thought that’s just not going to work for us. So they’re very inflexible; we just left them aside. And that brought it down to Pragmatic Coders and one other company. And on paper the two companies were quite different. They could all do software; they all claimed they could do product. But my experience with software development companies over the years is, I think I’ve found three companies in 28 years who actually can do product. To me, product is something that’s almost kind of personal. I understand why people build it in-house. So working with an external partner, you’re not just trusting their processes and that they’ll write good code; you’re also trusting they get all the soft pieces around it as well, especially product. Pragmatic Coders—I was attracted to them because it seemed to be product first. You talked about product; you can talk with software development, you talk about products. And what was very interesting when we came down to it was the other company was actually going to be slightly more cost effective than working with you guys. And their leadership team, as I mentioned (one of them was the former head of IBM Blockchain in India), and we asked them some really basic questions about security, and they refused to answer the questions. For me that was the first red flag. I was like, “Okay, that’s just something wrong there; I’m not going right there”. But when we met their Chief Product Officer, I just didn’t get any kind of sense of faith from him that he was going to have the same dedication for product and customer experience that I had. But what was interesting was my colleague at the time (there’s only two of us on the project) had never worked in technology before; he was an analyst. He was picking up exactly the same signals in the meeting. He got, “I don’t believe these guys can do products”. I said, “That’s really interesting,” right? And then the next day he was on the call with yourselves, and before the meeting was finished, he was texting me in Telegram. He said, “I love these guys, love these guys”. That’s continued every stage of the journey. And every time—when we came over and met you guys over here as well—the entire Focus was on the product and the customer. I loved that. It was really back to the first principles, working from there up. And even though I had a very definite sense of the problem I was trying to solve, and even pieces of the problem that I knew we should do, I kind of went on the journey with the team and watched them come to some of the same conclusions. But because they were coming from that inside-out approach—like a customer problem first and then out—it just got easier and easier and easier. And even on this visit (my third visit, fourth visit to you guys), the team is turning up with solutions to a problem I didn’t know we had. So before I left Ireland and came here a couple of weeks ago, I was telling the leadership team that I still don’t feel I’ve quite got a feel for the products. We’re not at that tipping point where, like, “now we’re doing exactly the right thing and it’s just a matter of time”. I’m still feeling my way through some parts of the problem. But coming over here and arriving and having the team go, “We saw this meeting; this is a better way of doing it,” and you go, “That’s 10 times better than the way we were going to do it, and we didn’t even realize that was a problem”—that’s the kind of solution that you want to have in a partner, right?
Wiktor Żołnowski: So from your perspective as a client, what are the most important tips that you would give to the other of our clients or potential clients would like to work with us? What they should prepare, or how they should work with companies like ours? I know it’s a hard question.
Tony Kelly: I can only give, I guess, generic advice to some extent. But sorry, I better finish answering the first question you asked me. Because one of the things that stuck out, apart from the product approach that you guys had, one of the things that really stuck out (and I have to make note of) was your usability and UX team. I’ve told them this: after a couple of weeks of working with them, I’ve worked with three UX teams in the world that I would say are the equivalent of yours, honestly. My background: I introduced the concept of usability at Intel. I used to lecture on it to a few people for 10 years. No one really got the value of UX. So to find people who eat, sleep, and breathe the issues in usability that are very hard to articulate and you don’t even quite know you have—that’s special. Right? Generally speaking, I found that in—I found a couple of individuals and even business partners of mine that had that. But to find it in a company that specializes in solving other people’s problems with software—that’s special. I have to note this. Your new question was for advice for other customers. The generic advice I give anyone working with a software development team, whether in-house or external, is to honor the process. The value of a customer-centric, user-centric approach to software development: too many people come along, and by the time they go looking for someone to do software development with them, they have a very fixed idea in their mind of what they want to build. I get frustrated with my own business partners and say, “I wanted to go and do this,” and I go, “No, no, that’s your solution. Tell me what the problem was. Let me figure it out from first principles. Let me figure that out. But you have to help me with telling me what the problem is you’re trying to solve”. Starting off coming with a pre-baked solution usually means you’re going off slightly in the wrong direction. We’ve had that a number of times on the project we’re on now, where almost no one else on this project has worked in software before. But some of the principals are very involved for many years in blockchain. But they’re coming up, “But we need to go and do this,” and I’m going, “No, that’s a terrible experience for the user. What’s the problem you want to solve?”. And in every single instance, we found a better way of doing it. We have to go and have that argument with them first. So I would say to all customers of all levels of experience: if you’re going to work with a partner, and you’re trusting them enough to work with them and give them the work, honor the process. And invest in figuring out or learning why they want to do it that way. There’s almost always value to it. Even, when we came here first, I was with the first Workshop, I was beginning to get irritated, going, “I’m not going to sit down and do the whole business model canvas. I already know why I’m doing this stuff”. And then I kind of got, “Exactly, I know that, but these guys don’t. And if I want them to own this project and I want them to feel like it’s theirs, I have to get there. I have to share the DNA with them and let them figure that out as they went along”. And that was even—it was even frustrating for my partner on the phone. He’s kind of going, “Why are we doing this?”. I said, “Well, it’s not for you, it’s for them. Because in three months time when you and I are busy, they’ll be solving problems we didn’t even know we had”. And that’s actually what’s happening now. So engage in the process and trust in the process.
Wiktor Żołnowski: That’s a really great perspective. That actually I haven’t thought about before. I know that we are doing this for our clients, but you’re right, we are doing mostly for ourselves to actually later on deliver more value. Of course, somebody can give you an implementation, say, “Yeah, go and build it,” but building a piece of the—that’s the mantra we keep talking to the team about.
Tony Kelly: Some of your team already know the story, but I’ve been banging on about this for a long time—is: you don’t build software once. I think you have to build the software three times: build it, build it right, and then polish it. And it’s when it’s polished and when it’s refined enough, and then you really know you’ve hit the product market fit, that’s when you give it to the user. I’m saying “giving it to the user,” but my understanding is you’re working with the user all the way along. You’d never get it right first time around. Sure, I might have buttons and clicks and links and everything else, but that might not be the refined user experience you want. It might not have solved enough problems for the user. I’ll give you an example: I worked on an Esports platform for two years in the Middle East that had been built by a team in the Ukraine, an Outsourcing team. But the founders had never worked in software before. So they went and told these guys, “Give me the best of everything, solve all the problems”. The first time I went and looked at the software to create a tournament for people to participate online, there were 23 pages of forms to fill in. Twenty-three! Right? 50% of the customers who try to use it failed to complete a single tournament. If there’s ever a better experience or example of a waste of money, that was it. That was 47 people spent nine months and 1.8 million dollars building that prototype. It took me nine months to fix it, but by the time I fixed it, you could create a tournament in two clicks. So those are two clicks, right? And when before—in front of the customer—he went, “Beautiful!”. I thought, “When a customer describes what you’ve done as ‘beautiful,’ that’s product market fit,” at least it’s one sign of product market fit—the first step. Exactly, it’s the first step, right? But it takes that. It’s easy to say, “build a piece of software,” and sure you can download a repo off GitHub and I can put an interface on it, and there is your software. That’s not the same thing as really understanding the problem and working from the inside out. That’s where retention comes from; that’s where engagement in your product comes from. The Holy Grail we all want is getting to the stage of the customer Journey where the customer becomes your Advocate and shares it because, “This is great!”. That’s the stage you want to get to. Then, you spend less money on marketing. You’ve listened to your customers; now you’ve got that virtuous circle, and that’s the Holy Grail.
Wiktor Żołnowski: Okay, so my almost last question: if you could provide three tips for the startup Founders who are just starting and doing their very first startup—the best three one-sentence tips.
Tony Kelly: I think I’ve given you two of them probably already. A ruthless focus on product market fit, which means starting with your customer. Making sure the problem you’re trying to solve or the reason you’re doing the startup is good enough that it will sustain you through all the difficult periods ahead, and including making sure you’ve got the right founder. And the third one, not a very popular one, but really: be sure that this is what you want to do. Startups are not for everyone. Just because it’s easy these days, in certain parts of Europe, it’s really easy to get funding to start a startup. It’s easy to go and go into GitHub and find a piece of software that almost does what you wanted to do. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. My argument would be: just make sure it’s a tough life; make sure you’re in it for the long haul, and it’s something you really want to do. It’s very rewarding, but it’s also very tough.
Wiktor Żołnowski: I remember a few of my friends who wanted to start startups. After one hour discussion with me, they came to the conclusion that, “Okay, it’s not for them”. They are not going to do everything alone; they don’t want to learn new things. They don’t want to involve too much. They want to hire people, as long as who will be paid for them? Or, “Do you have money?” “No, we have a few investors, but until before we will have investors, you will have to do a lot of work on your own”.
Tony Kelly: Exactly. But to me, it’s even more fundamental than that. I think everybody thinks when they think about starting a company, “I’m going to be My Own Boss”. They’re visualizing themselves as Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg making their big decisions. When you start a business, 80% of your time is going to be on your product—it’s going to be on payroll, dealing with your accountant, dealing with your lawyers, hiring people, firing people. That’s the day-to-day of running a business. Particularly the more senior we’re in the company, the less time you’ll spend on the product, just the facts. So you get into something because of your passion, and then you realize, “20% of my—less than one day a week—I get to spend on the thing I like. The rest of it’s just all the horrible stuff I didn’t have to deal with in my job because somebody else was doing that. Now I have to do it all”. And there is nothing like the pressure of, “We’ve no money to pay Everyone by the end of the month,” to make you realize how tough it actually is.
Wiktor Żołnowski: Okay, is there anything else, any questions that I should ask you and I haven’t so far?.
Tony Kelly: Nothing I can think of. We’ve covered quite a lot in there, right? It was a really good discussion.
Wiktor Żołnowski: I’m pretty sure that it will be very valuable for people who will watch it later or listen. I hope so. Thank you very much for your time. I’m glad that we had a chance to speak today. And I hope we’ll have a chance to see again in some time when you will be already in production, and there will be more information that you can share about the project that you are working currently, that I’m pretty sure is going to be successful.
Tony Kelly: No, thank you very much. I look forward to that; hopefully we’ll be able to do it very soon. Thank you very much.
Wiktor Żołnowski: Thank you. Pragmatic Talks is delivered to you by Pragmatic Coders, the First Choice Software Development Partners for startup Founders. Be sure to catch all new episodes. Subscribe to our YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcast channels. And if you are thinking about building your own startup or struggling with product development, contact us and find out what we can do together.
