GreenHornConnect's Founder's Friday With Yours Truly
This Q&A appeared in http://GreenHornConnect.com on April 8th 2011. You can read the original here. Reproduced here for archival reasons:
Who are the faces behind a company? How did the company get started? These are common question you may have about startups you see and hear about. If you don't get a chance to personally meet the founders, you're unlikely to ever know their story. That's what Founder Fridays is all about.
This week we are profiling Andres Douglas, CEO and Founder of Bakodo, a company changing the use of barcodes.
1) What is your current Startup? (Name & URL)
Bakodo - http://bako.do (Bakodo means Barcode in Japanese)
2) What's the elevator pitch?
We're doing awesome things with barcodes. Our first product is Bakodo Scanner, one of the most popular barcode scanners for the iPhone, which is growing like a weed: in the last six months it has been downloaded close 1 million times. It's about to get a LOT better, so keep your eyes open.
Next: we're going to revolutionize the way people shop, focusing a lot on groceries. That's all I can say for now.
3) When did you know you wanted to be an entrepreneur?
My sophomore year in college I interned for Google, and the year after that I went to work for Apple on the iPhone Software team. Although I had gotten a lot out of working for those two companies, and met great people, it turned out a lot of the things I learnt were because I had gone out of my way to do it myself, and these mainly came from resources available outside of these companies. During my time at Brown I really enjoyed doing a lot more than just coding, specially working in large groups of people with different abilities, backgrounds and interests, and wanted to continue doing this after graduation. Realizing that these companies were not going away any time soon, and that the market was ripe for the idea I was interested in were the two final key factors to taking the plunge.
4) How did you meet your co-founders?
I met most of the people I'm working with whilst at Brown, either because we worked together on projects or was introduced to them through friends. The best people you will meet are through personal connections that refer you to each other.
5) What was the best advice you ever got?
That advice is only good for one thing: to pass it on. As a founder you get told a lot of times that what you're doing is not worth it, that you won't make it, that there is a lot of competition out there, etc. You should probably ignore a lot of what people say, and follow your instinct.
There are some people whose advice you learn to trust. Jimmy Van Allen is one of our advisors who always gives me great little morsels. One thing he always reminds me of, which is applicable to everything in life is "If you say you're going to do something, you better do it. But if you ARE going to do something, tell people you are going to do so". I think this is specially important for first-time entrepreneurs without a track record. When you go to talk to an investor it's not the same to show them where you are right now, but to show progress. So the moral of the story is to let people know what you're doing early on, and this way you will start building your track record.
6) What Startup(s) are you most excited about today? Why?
Despite all its controversy, I think Color has a lot of potential. If you use it with enough people, it turns into a really fascinating experience. Tracelytics is something I'm also really excited about. There are some others that haven't launched yet, so I'm sworn to secrecy, but I think are going to be incredible.
There are a lot of really interesting Open Source projects out there that are also fascinating, and create outputs of extremely high quality. I would encourage everyone to try to get involved in one of them, as you will learn a lot from the project and from the community, and perhaps meet people you might like to work with. Just think of an open source tool or framework that you use (Ruby? Django?) and head over to their github and start reading through code. You can probably find something interesting, or a way to get involved. You will most definitely learn something.
7) What's your favorite part about being an entrepreneur?
Being able to meet all types of people, specially the ones that will rope me into these types of interviews. Essentially knowing that every day is going to be different, and fun, and that what you are doing, might just change the world. Even if it's just a little.
8) If you could recommend one book for entrepreneur's to read, what would it be and why?
Their own: keep track of what you do in a diary, and go back and read it. See how you've changed, and if you've done the things you thought you were going to do. It will also help you reflect on the past, and how the shape of things change with the perspective of time.
For a published book: The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch. Pausch was an amazing guy. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and given just a few months to live. The way he tackled adversity was truly inspiring. Instead of giving up, he fought up to the last moment, and always kept an amazing attitude. You can also watch "The Last Lecture : Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" video. Warning: it will make you cry. His lecture on time management is also worth taking a look at. The underlying message I think Randy Pausch was trying to leave us with was that you shouldn't give up. No matter what other people say, if you believe in what you're doing, keep calm, and carry on.
