Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to Intentional growth, a show that teaches you as a business owner and entrepreneur to view and run your company like a financial asset, which will allow you to enjoy work, create wealth and make an impact. This mindset will help you focus on building a more valuable business and give you the choices to grow, acquire, reinvest, or exit. Live the life you plan for all with intention.
And now, here's your host, Ryan Tansom.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Welcome back everybody. Thanks for tuning in and Happy New Year. I am very pumped to start 2024 with an episode with Chris Hively, who is the co founder of MapQuest as well as the startup Factory. He's invested in over 42 companies.
[00:00:46] Speaker C: He's the author of building the Fort.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: Where his book talks about building a fort and how it's very similar to building a business and being an entrepreneur. And Chris is going to tell stories about his journey of building Mapquest as well as investing in these startups. Using the language from his book of building the fort, he's going to dive into things like entrepreneurship and innovation, the impact of technology on society, the cultural shift in entrepreneurship over the last handful of decades, as well as how to maintain your personal growth and passion and have a good relationship with your business and your goals while you're growing your business or businesses. And he uses his building the fort framework to have these discussions and tell these stories. I know you're absolutely going to love this conversation. If you like this podcast, my one request would be is go on to your podcast player that you're listening to right now. Leave the show a review because we want to keep getting great guests like Chris and we're going to be leveling up our 2024 podcast content as we continue to add more miniseries and themes. So that way we're helping deliver a lot of education as well as good stories and economic and m a updates. So thanks everybody for tuning in and.
[00:01:51] Speaker C: I really hope you enjoy this interview with Chris.
[00:01:54] Speaker A: This episode is brought to you by Arcona's fractional CFO services. Arcona's fractional cfos integrate into your management team and assume the responsibility of the CFO. They become your strategic financial partner to help you run the business, create your value growth plan, and build the financial roadmap to the valuation you want to achieve.
[00:02:16] Speaker B: Chris, how are you?
[00:02:18] Speaker D: I am just peachy keen.
[00:02:20] Speaker B: I love, I'm very, very excited for.
[00:02:22] Speaker C: This conversation, even just getting a little bit of background before we hit record. I am excited because I think we're sharing similar views on entrepreneurship and what it takes to get what we want and as I had mentioned, I have this uncanny ability to read the book after I go through the misery. And I think hopefully, what we can do is shed some light on. I think you have some really cool philosophies on entrepreneurship. Maybe just kind of give us the 50,000 foot overview of the book, kind of a little bit of your background on the wall and pack it.
[00:02:54] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:02:55] Speaker D: I think why we're connecting is maybe I shouldn't tell your audience I was a terrible student. No.
[00:03:03] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:03:03] Speaker D: No, they know it.
It's all good. They know.
[00:03:07] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:03:08] Speaker D: So I was just an average student. Didn't know what I was going to do in high school. Went to college for a year, dropped out after a year. I'm the only guy I know that had to drop out of college because of bad grades, not because I had too much fun, just because.
[00:03:23] Speaker E: I didn't.
[00:03:23] Speaker D: Have the fun nor the smarts to actually figure this shit out.
It's like, if you're going to get asked to leave, you might as well go out burning. Right? Building. Burn the boats on the way back. On the way out.
[00:03:36] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:03:38] Speaker D: And it's just too young and immature to kind of figure out how the game was played. What's interesting is I was a pipe fitter around Philadelphia for about a year and a half, and there's nothing like doing that at $5.50 an hour to figure out that maybe college wasn't too hard. Maybe I could give it another shot.
[00:03:56] Speaker C: Oh, no way. Where was this, Chris? Because in some of your background stuff, you said that you wanted to be, what's the word?
Geography Degree.
[00:04:08] Speaker D: Yeah. Perfect.
[00:04:09] Speaker C: Where did that come into that?
[00:04:10] Speaker D: So, after a year and a half, I decided to go back to college. To the same college, by the way. And my dad's brother, my uncle, had been a graduate of that place and knew a lot of the professors and stuff. He said, why don't you take a night class? A buddy of mine teaches it. Not that you're going to get an a, but why don't you just kind of dip your toe in big gloves? And he was a geography teacher professor, so I did. Okay. And so I decided to go back. My dad was like, I'm really excited for you. First one was on me. This one's on you.
Let's just be clear, it's not by today's financial standards. I think my tuition every semester was about $600.
[00:04:51] Speaker C: Oh, my God.
[00:04:52] Speaker D: So it was a state school. I had to figure out in the summer how to make $1,200 to pay.
[00:04:58] Speaker C: For which by the way, the minimum wage was about the same when I graduated too, because I was earning 675 at journeys the shoe store while I was going to college. And it definitely did not fund my college. It funded my cheap booze experience.
[00:05:11] Speaker D: I had to work my ass over the summer and barely make enough money to pay for the next two semesters anyway. Like many of us, because that guy had got me, I went back to full time. One of the first classes that first full semester was a computer mapping class, and my brain just went, this is fucking cool.
[00:05:31] Speaker C: That's awesome.
[00:05:32] Speaker D: Now let's put in perspective. There's no desktop computers. It's all mainframe. And it was the wild, wild west. We were just learning how to do some of this stuff. And what I've now figured out is anything where people haven't figured shit out, that's where I want to be.
I want to be on that forefront of wild, wild west chaos.
[00:05:53] Speaker C: Where do you think that comes?
[00:05:56] Speaker D: You know, I tell you where I think it comes from. I'm going, here comes.
I want to have more control over things.
And by the way, I'm not trying to control the chaos, but if I'm in the chaos, I want to manage me. I don't want someone else.
The best way to decide what you want to do and to control your decisions is to be the person who makes the decision and have nobody. I don't know, I'm kind of comfortable.
[00:06:31] Speaker C: It's interesting, based on your background, because I resonate with this. I don't want to project my own situation on yours, but I find a lot of enjoyment of creating order out of chaos for control.
That's my own situation. But it kind of ties into your building the fort. A fort starts with nothing, right?
[00:06:50] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:06:53] Speaker D: Not only to start with nothing, but you can kind of figure it out as you go because you're ten years old and you don't have the capacity, the strategy, the time, the patience. You're not building a six month house like if you're not done in three days, not a big deal.
And by the way, I talk about control a lot, about giving up control. So this is a different thing. I want to be in the middle and kind of be figuring it out. Maybe there's a little control element, but I don't need to control everything because I don't think you can. And I think that's when you take the pain into the ground, is when you try to control everything. So I'm not a control freak, but I like to be in control of me.
[00:07:39] Speaker C: What I gather from the book, too, and from your experience, is the evolution. It's controlling the process. Is that maybe an interesting way of putting it? Because your whole book is about with the five steps. It's getting feedback, getting the right people. So it's all about like you said, but it's more controlling the process, maybe necessarily, than. Because if you're too rigid, you're going to fail, which you highlight quite a few times.
[00:08:03] Speaker D: Yeah, exactly. I think you may be onto something. I've never kind of scratched at it like we're doing right now. So. Yeah, I think that's kind of. What kind of? Because even when I left college, when I didn't even know you could be an entrepreneur, never heard of the word, didn't know people started businesses. They were just always out there. And I worked for the US government, U. S. State Department for three, four years. I went to work for a large printing company that had a map company buried in know. So I was in these very structured, big hierarchical things. But in hindsight, when I look, I was still disrupting, I was still controlling how we did things, why we did things, pitching people and why to do things, shucking and jiving and doing my thing. So even in those things, I think I didn't know what it was. Maybe entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurial, I don't know.
[00:08:57] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:08:57] Speaker C: Interesting. So you're sitting there and they're mapping geography with computers.
What was the experience like where you realized that you're on the forefront of this movement?
[00:09:10] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:09:10] Speaker D: I can tell you a perfect story related to what I've already told everyone. So I go back to college. Since I'm paying for it, I got to live at home. The college is about 15 to 18 miles away, pretty much on one road. I'm either like, if my car is working, I'm using my car. If my car is not working, I'm sticking my thumb out. If that doesn't work, I'm getting the bus, right?
So I'd go do that. I'm a commuter, right? So I don't have a dorm to go. What do I do? Right? So I end up spending time in professors offices, right? And I'd be like, so we just had this class. And it was mostly this one guy who was learning computer mapping the same time I was. He had taught a very generic flat class. I'm like, hey, I really like this stuff. Let's do.
Became Ryan. We almost became peers for a long time. And so I would sit in his office and know back then, because it was a mainframe computer. You had a computer room, right? So he's, let's. I got this tape from this first mapping software from Harvard. Let's figure out how to get it loaded up and play with it. I'm like, yeah, give it to me. I'll walk it over there. Know, hey, could you load this on the computer?
And to answer your question, you know you're onto something. Personally, when I would then go home, have dinner, and then say to my parents, can I borrow the car? I want to go back out to school. And while now is like, screw around time, like, computer is free. It's not busy. Can I go back? Right.
When you're leaning into that stuff, I think, you know, you're onto something.
And they were like, that's awesome. Yeah, go for it.
[00:10:57] Speaker C: Well, and I think that's super interesting because it ties into this purpose, and I think that's one of your deals. And what I found really cool about that story you just said is that the professor wasn't pretending to know it all, and it was fostering, like, hey, you were on this journey together, which is not necessarily always that common, because I think a lot of people think that they have to explain that they've got it all figured out. So how does that translate to map in your book? You don't talk a ton about the linear, and I know it's probably not linear as you talk about. There's a lot more circular. But how did you end up doing that? And then also, Chris was under the umbrella of that entrepreneurship. I think a lot of people, maybe more my age, realize that it was not a thing like you had mentioned already, and I think that's a positive. But also, I think we have some narratives nowadays that I think need to be broken out that you and I are going to touch on. But how did you think about what you were going to do with all this?
[00:11:58] Speaker D: Well, remember we started. We've laid the found work of Hively here, that he's a disruptor. He likes to have a little bit of control over the process. He sees stuff that maybe others don't see.
He wants to kind of be on that kind of leading, bleeding edge of stuff.
I left graduate school where I really went headseep. Oh, by the way, as an undergrad.
[00:12:20] Speaker C: It was until you went from undergrad to graduate school, too.
[00:12:23] Speaker D: Nine days later.
[00:12:24] Speaker C: Oh, my gosh.
[00:12:26] Speaker D: Now, it's not like an MBA where you're supposed to wait a couple of know, I think, and everything, but this was such a wild, wild west. I had met there was three colleges that had a graduate program in what we now call gis, geographic information systems, then just computer mapping. And Ryan, really weirdly, as a geography major, we're talking, by the way, guys, to let you know, it's like 79, 80, 81. I'm finishing college.
I ended up with twelve to 15 hours of computer science credits. I was the only non computer science major in those classes. But I had taken one programming class and went, this is freaking cool.
[00:13:06] Speaker C: That's awesome.
[00:13:07] Speaker D: Now I can control what is happening inside the computer a little bit more. So if you think about the mapping side with geography and the computer side, and a lot of great ideas come when you jam two things together that never been jammed together before. So I go to graduate school, University of South Carolina, and there's a lab full of guys like me. And the guy that ran the lab, who was a geographer, says, so you told me you know how to write code. I go, yeah. And he goes, here's a brand new thing called an IBM PC, and here's an Apple Lisa. He goes, make them draw maps. That was my know. And you're like, God, this is the greatest thing in the world. This couldn't be any more mean.
[00:13:52] Speaker C: I was watching the Tim Ferriss clip where he was talking about the evolution of AI and how people my generation and below have outsourced mean, mind you, Chris, my first, I mean, my sales group, my sales jobs that I was telling you about in copiers, I did have a king's atlas, dude.
I remember getting into almost like head on collisions because you're going from b 17 to d 88 while you're going 70 miles an hour down the freeway.
[00:14:23] Speaker D: But when you're thinking about it, I'll give you the quick little arc of the story. I leave graduate school, it's still new age.
[00:14:31] Speaker E: Stop.
[00:14:32] Speaker D: I go to the US State Department and work for the office of Geographer and build a mapping system on pcs where it used to take them four days to make a map inside the state department. Now it takes them 4 hours, right? So you can see what we're doing here, right? And I'm a hack, Ryan. I'm bringing a little this, a little that. I'm not going to invent too many stuff. I'm just going to pull shit together in a really fast way. And then this mapping company up in Pennsylvania asked me if they had 30, 40 cartographers. Hey, could you come? Like you were doing it now for four at the state Department, could you do it for 35 of them and figure out how to use maps so we could make them faster. And here's where the fun comes. So we did that for about a year, but there were some other things starting to smell around the edges and not smell bad, but, like, opportunities. And one of which was, how do we make it so that you and I, as consumers, you're not sitting with that atlas anymore, right, driving down the road or the big road atlas. How can we automate some of that stuff and just make that a better experience for consumers? So the quick arc goes, and your parents know this. You not so much, but you used to have to go to.
[00:15:51] Speaker E: Right.
[00:15:52] Speaker D: And get a trip tick to go from Stillwater, Minnesota, down to Disney World. Right in the back of the station wagon, we had one of those wood.
[00:16:02] Speaker C: Panel station wagons, Chris.
[00:16:03] Speaker D: Wood panels with the seat that was.
[00:16:06] Speaker E: Yeah, yeah.
[00:16:07] Speaker C: With no seatbelts, just staring at the people behind.
[00:16:09] Speaker D: Yep, exactly. Making fun of them and know. And your dad's running the trip tick. Right, which is little four inch by nine inch. But that was the standard. And we're like, well, that's stupid. So we automated that for every auto club in the United States and sold them a system for that. And then I started going out to California on trips and started seeing cdroms show up on desktop. So now that stuff, you don't have to go to your auto club now you can do it at home because you have this big disk, right, that has lots of storage, and we put it there. We're the first ones to do that. And then we did a couple of other things that didn't work along the way. But eventually, in 19, 96, 95, we started hearing about this thing called the Internet, and we threw Mapquest on the Internet to see what would happen.
That's the quick little art.
[00:16:59] Speaker C: Yeah, no, that's so helpful, Chris. And where I was going with my thoughts, too, is the momentum of why maps first? Because I think I'm 37 for some context, and I remember the map or the atlas and all that stuff. And my specific cohort, I think is very interesting because I don't know if there's any science behind this or any research, but there's like this five or six year window where, I mean, I grew up with no Internet, man, until AOL came out in my high school. And I got the next to walkie talkie when I was like 17 or some shit like that.
But I remember my first sales job, Chris. I literally came in and there was 24 salespeople, and it was like I walk in and I have a printout of my map quest of all of my cold calls I'm going to do that day. And then these older guys are like, how did you do that? They would just get in a car and make shit up. But the reason I'm bringing this all up is the momentum of change, and the rate of change has just exploded. And you seem like, to be on the forefront. Where was maps and mapping of geography on that? Because compared to, I think, a lot of times now, we're looking at all the different rates of change, of different other technology. But it's difficult, I think, for even myself to go back and say how important it was to map the geography into computers. It's ridiculous.
[00:18:27] Speaker D: So I told you we're in Pennsylvania. So we're not in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh. We're in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, home of 150,000 amish people. Still in horse and buggies.
[00:18:37] Speaker E: Right.
[00:18:39] Speaker D: It's a cool little place, but it's one of the more backwards places you ever meet. I'm telling you that to understand that. I think in this kind of being very intentional and kind of in this arc, I don't think we knew better. Okay. All I know is that we had a bunch of really passionate people that were passionate about maps and geography.
[00:19:00] Speaker E: Right.
[00:19:00] Speaker D: And map making, and we were willing to experiment. I think if we were other places, we would have been told no. But there was no one to tell us no where. Today, you and I, as adults, and this gets to the whole build the fort mentality. We probably know too much and can convince ourselves what's not a good idea. I think we were young enough and we had enough room to go experiment and try things out and just go. I think that could be better.
A. I think we were motivated because we're all a bunch of map geeks sitting around at lunch going, how can.
[00:19:37] Speaker C: We love it so much?
[00:19:38] Speaker D: Can we do more map geeking stuff? And at the same time, we had none of that adult kind of, like, why is that a good idea? Like pushback that if you get today, and especially if you other people are for yourself?
[00:19:50] Speaker C: Like you said, it could come from external or internal.
[00:19:53] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:19:54] Speaker D: So I think in hindsight, I think that was.
We had a lot of fun. We had a really great.
Everyone worked together on stuff. Very little politics, very little hierarchy, and kind of like company shit. I mean, we threw Christmas parties at my house and other people's houses. When I think back on it, we had a really fantastic culture, either by choice or by luck.
[00:20:22] Speaker C: Well, and I think it ties into some of the stuff that you wrote in the book about a shared common vision and stuff like that. I think some of this that you're referring to potentially ties into what you and I were talking about before we hit record, which was the mindset.
Entrepreneurship wasn't really a coined term back then. You guys were all passionate about a certain thing, and you guys just kept using your creativity. And I think this ties into your analogy of building a fort.
What do you think is different about the mindset of entrepreneurship now compared to what you just described? Because I think the building the fort resembles what you just described, but I see differences in today's world, what people are driving towards. You and I were talking about the goal, like, what are people trying to accomplish? And you guys are trying to have fun and accomplish a specific thing.
[00:21:13] Speaker D: Yeah.
The good news is we have access to tons of information, data and stuff.
The bad news is we have access to tons of stuff.
[00:21:24] Speaker E: Right.
[00:21:25] Speaker D: So we didn't have access to that. We only had access to each other.
And so the idea of fort building is that the major meta message is, as adults, we overcomplicate, we overthink, we overanalyze a lot. That's not to say we shouldn't do some thinking, some pondering, right? Some analysis, but we do way too much. In other words, we get access to too much information.
And I think that creates a wrong journey for entrepreneurship. So I'll riff on something my dad used to say. My dad used to say, if you had to make a pro con list of having a kid, you would never have a kid, right.
[00:22:13] Speaker C: We would cease to exist pretty fast.
[00:22:15] Speaker D: Right.
And I really think that the lesson is also with entrepreneurship. If you have to make a pro con list of whether you should start a company, I think you're already done. You're already dead in the water. It defies logic.
It's a leap. It's faith. Right? I see something no one else sees.
To bring it back to the build the fort mindset is to say, let's try to cut out a bunch of that noise. Let's try to kind of act like we're more like ten or twelve years old building this fort. Let's make that more a series of experiments and iterations. Let's see what happens, adjust from there, as opposed to this idea that I have to actually chart out the entire next three years path and make 1000 decisions along the way, and everyone has to be the perfect one. Anybody who thinks like that today, and I think the access to the Internet and the access to information creates this wrong journey, right? And I want you to say, go back to being ten and just start screwing around.
[00:23:17] Speaker E: Right?
[00:23:18] Speaker B: Pardon a quick brief interruption. I hope you're enjoying the conversation with Chris. The reason I want to drop a note is I can't believe how much Chris surprised me with his answer about he was wildly okay with what ended up happening with MapQuest. We all know that Google Maps, Apple Maps and Waze came into the marketplace hyper competitive, and he was just totally okay because he knew who he was, what he wanted from his business, and why. And he knew that MapQuest was a stepping stone. And I just want that level of clarity for you because that is exactly what Bo talks about. The one out of four people that are happy with their business long term, they knew all of these things and had this kind of clarity. And if this resonates with you, all you have to do is go into the link in the show notes below. Schedule a discovery call with me where we can talk about the two different ways that we might be able to help. One is the coaching program that's based on the intention, growth principles and the academy. So we use the academy and some coaching calls to get you this level of clarity so you know who you are, what you want from the company, and why you have a target equity valuation and the income that you want on the way, and how you can align your partners and your leadership team to get towards that target. Point B or the second thing is the complementary financial assessment that my team offers. If you want to jump right in and create a financial roadmap and understand how to actually get visibility into that target equity evaluation and all the data and the roadmap that can help you get there, just use that link in the show notes below and we just will have a quick conversation to see if there's a fit on either of those two options. Thanks everybody for tuning in. I hope you enjoy the rest of.
[00:24:46] Speaker C: The conversation with Chris. Well, I think that ties into Chris. I think well said is, what are you solving for? You know what I mean? And like you said, something that really resonated with me, which is you see something that no one else sees, and that's an opportunity came from your own experience or your own passion. Where I think about part, correct me if you think I'm wrong or you see it a little bit differently, is like what we're all seeing is people raising money. And there's these vanity reasons which I told you my story about our business, dude, we're on the ink 5000 a year. We lost a million bucks. Who cares? It's the stupidest thing ever.
And whether there's kind of this spectrum I see of acquisition entrepreneurs who are going out and buying companies purely for wealth perspectives, which I don't knock, but it's like, well, why? At some point, there has to be a bigger reason, or starting a company to promote yourself, how much money you raised.
It's almost like the soul that's missing, which is the creative vision that you're talking about inside of the fort building. And I don't know, man, because otherwise, every micro decision, like you said, stems from the reason of why you're doing it.
[00:26:01] Speaker D: Well, I kind of said, if the fort takes more than three days to build, you're not in.
[00:26:05] Speaker E: Right.
[00:26:06] Speaker D: So I don't know an entrepreneur that has started something that's been successful three, five, eight years down the road, where the thing that was successful is the same thing you started.
[00:26:17] Speaker E: Right.
[00:26:18] Speaker D: So we all know there's this winding kind of. We call them pivots or whatever. And if you're lucky enough to actually create a good foundation and start building your company, there'll be new challenges, new technologies, new markets. There'll be this series of discovery over and over and over again. And so getting, I think back to your thought is, at every one of those is a question. Am I still enjoying what I'm doing?
For what reason? I don't think it matters what reason, but you better be very clear what that goal is, because you have too many goals, and it goes wishy washy. And you're trying to be a little bit of everything to everybody. You're trying to build the Taj Mahal of your fort when you're a bunch of ten year olds and you don't need a bathroom or a skylight.
[00:27:06] Speaker C: Using this analogy, too, because as forts evolve, and my twin daughters are seven, Chris, we're building lots of forts.
[00:27:14] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:27:15] Speaker C: And then I whip out, like, hey, here are some clips and duct tape. And it just blows their mind of what else we can.
It's. Their vision is evolving. And I think about in your five. I don't know if you call them principles or what they are in the book, but one of the things that I wanted to ask you is, as the vision evolves, I've struggled with personally, because turning around a business that had an infrastructure is different than starting one. Over the last ten years that I've lived, like I said, I did not learn.
Your book resonated with me because of all the. I shared the issues of what I've been through, but is how to evolve the vision in an appropriate way while you're then evolving the people and then the money, because you're iterating, you're listening, and if you're too rigid, then it's not going to succeed. But then things are constantly.
Does the question make sense? That process I've sucked with, I guess I've sucked at that of evolving by listening to the marketplace of what they want and how it changes and then making sure that the right people are next to you and then the right capital and cost structure.
[00:28:27] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:28:27] Speaker D: And even then, that works for a while, and it needs to be.
So a couple of keywords. So one is, it is, I think, a continual process of discovery.
So here's one of the things that I think is missing out of still a lot of entrepreneurs today and what I've learned and kind of, it's like principle one, which is go out and socialize your idea with as many people as possible. Now, that's counter to some people who think someone's going to steal your idea. They're not.
Or that you need to protect your idea. Ideas aren't worth anything.
[00:29:00] Speaker E: Right.
[00:29:00] Speaker D: We all know, like you said in.
[00:29:01] Speaker C: Your book, there's probably a bunch of other people that have got the same.
[00:29:04] Speaker D: Problem, tens if not hundreds people trying to solve the same thing you're trying to solve.
So go out and talk to lots of people.
I've gotten better at this as I've gotten older, which is I have the squishiest of ideas.
I'll reach out to four or five people and say, what do you think?
Do you see this? Am I thinking about it? And that process? And by the way, you don't have to just do that with an idea.
Let's talk about mentorship or having an advisor.
I think the idea of you being this kind of mogul who gets to sit at your desk, in your basement or in your office and making all the decisions outside of input to me, is just the stupidest thing in the world.
[00:29:50] Speaker E: Right.
[00:29:51] Speaker D: So at every stage of your business, there's going to be challenges. I want to figure out how other people did it. What have they done? So what I find is that people don't do that as much as I'd like to see them do.
[00:30:06] Speaker C: I agree. And I think that I've been very good at that, honestly, Chris. And I don't want to use only.
[00:30:12] Speaker B: Myself as an example.
[00:30:16] Speaker C: Mean, my God, I don't want to screw this up, and I want to know if other people are going to pay for this. But what I've seen do you say that this is true or not? Or to some degree of people get, their ego gets stuck on their original idea, and then they have this fear version of people bashing their, it's almost like their identity gets infused with that original idea. What are your thoughts around that?
[00:30:40] Speaker D: Yeah, I see it all the time.
I go back to that discovery, like, listen, fantastic, you're starting with the thesis. You have something that you think you see. Well, let's go out and prove that. And by the way, maybe it's not that, maybe it's a slight version of that, or it's something, a different market, a different product, different service. Why don't you go out and figure that out? Because what I want to do, I say to them is I want to save you time and money.
Startups fail because they run out of time and or money.
And so the last thing I want you to do is quit your job, work off your savings for a year, throwing 40, 50, 80 grand, whatever it is, away, and come to the end of the year and go, yeah, I don't know anything more than I knew back then.
And so I think this is that I get back to mindset. I want to give you a discovery mindset, not, you know, it all, everything.
To be honest with you, Ryan, I think there's less and less people who come in going, I know exactly how this is going to play out.
[00:31:39] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:31:40] Speaker C: You know, I could see that with the startup world, Chris. I think about the traditional businesses that are out there that need to continue to evolve, too, where it becomes. There's this Harvard Business review article from the stages of growth. I don't know if you're familiar with this, but they talk about in stage three where essentially the owner and their personal situation will dictate kind of the innovation of it, because you can essentially just clip coupons and use this thing as this piggy bank, but then you're not going to continue to listen and to evolve. I think this is very applicable to companies that have a traditional business that also need to continue to think about like, hey, how are their customers evolving, too?
[00:32:21] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:32:22] Speaker D: And the first thing is go and ask your customers or look at who your customers are. Have they changed over time? Because if you're not adapting with them, then there's risk. I mean, I think about restaurants, I think about marketing services.
One of my favorite stories, Ricky woman is this unbelievable marketer, tech marketer back in the day, and her customers are paying her to help her market, and all of a sudden this goes back ten years. Facebook changed their whole model.
And she's like, how the hell do I help my customers market on Facebook when they've changed the whole how they're going to do marketing and advertising? So she creates this little sandbox, a little side company. She's interested in books, and she's going to use that as a sandbox so she could learn to see what happened. So she can take that and go back to her customers. A year later, that thing takes off so big. She's been running that now with her husband for six years. And it's a huge, it's called free booksie. Fantastic thing, mostly for fiction, not nonfiction. But I love that story that there was like, okay, I don't know. I got to go figure it out. I got to get smarter. I'm going to go do this side thing that ends up being something that's that serendipity that comes again if you have a control mindset, that you can control every decision and make every perfect decision and continue to make those on and on, whether it's a menu for a restaurant, whatever it is, I just say, God, if you are, you're really special. You're like one in 1000.
[00:34:03] Speaker C: I think it goes back.
[00:34:04] Speaker D: Probably not, by the way.
[00:34:05] Speaker C: Right. You just look at all the dictators over history.
They isolate themselves into think that they're going to be the ultimate, and then we all know what happens over time.
[00:34:16] Speaker D: Emperor.
[00:34:17] Speaker C: Right. And I think it goes back to controlling the process of chaos, because the one thing that we have that's consistent is change. But there's a process to managing that change is, I think, what your five steps have. And the second one of identifying the people around you, I found interesting because I've personally struggled where as the idea has evolved, then the people become different.
[00:34:45] Speaker E: Yes.
[00:34:45] Speaker C: That's hard.
[00:34:47] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:34:47] Speaker C: So how do you manage that? And again, it's controlling the process. I think this is what I'm driving on right now. But it's like, how do you communicate and continue to evolve the people around you to help your evolution of this process?
[00:35:03] Speaker D: Well, some won't, as you know, and you're implying.
[00:35:06] Speaker E: Right.
[00:35:06] Speaker D: So to me, it's just business. And business, when we're around or in the business, it's got to be what's best for the business, not best for us as a founder or CEO or best for whatever roles in there.
I have pivoted businesses. I spent twelve years parachuting into other companies to kind of fix them for a while, which, as you know, it's not as fun as it looks.
Back to starting them.
But my point of that is that if you gather enough data, if you talk to enough people, if you start to craft a new vision or altered vision or whatever, maybe it's the same vision and you share that with your staff, some people are going to be on and some people are not going to be on. And as long as you're communicating those things often and honestly and authentically, then there's going to be certain times when people just go like, this isn't a match anymore. And maybe they say it, maybe you say it, and it happens both ways. And I think you got to be okay with that, because what's right for the business has to trump all of those individual things.
[00:36:17] Speaker C: How do you balance those two, Chris? So how do you balance where, I think the echo chamber that people could get into with their people. So let's say, for example, I don't know. I wasn't going to draw it, but it's like you had this trajectory where you see that it's one plus one equals three. But then as the rate of change and things evolve, it kind of diverges. How do you stay sane as far as what is right for the business versus the narrative that has been told amongst the key team members?
[00:36:47] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:36:49] Speaker D: On a personal level, not saying it's right for everyone, but it's the way that I did it is just I always viewed my team members as peers and that we're all kind of rowing the boat together. And I always wanted to be an active listener. I always wanted to get different perspectives. At the end of the day, someone's got to make the decision. And if you're the CEO or founder or president or whatever, you make that decision and you go forward. And I think if you bring enough people in and you collectively say, all right, we're going to go in this direction, then there's no surprises.
We had our what if meeting, now we're going to do the how meeting. And if you didn't express yourself in the what if meeting, then you can't change it in a how meeting. We've already moved on from.
[00:37:40] Speaker C: That.
[00:37:40] Speaker D: The business is going to evolve. Or, I mean, let's get back Clayton Christensen and the innovators dilemma.
The only thing you can control is really understanding who your customers are, constantly doing that, getting that feedback, making sure you're not over adjusting, but you're making sure all that information and knowledge comes in and keep making decisions. And if you are really good at communicating back to your staff, your people, then I think more times than not. That'll be a successful journey forward, at least internally speaking and people. But invariably, there's going to be at least one person that says, I don't believe in this, I don't want to do that anymore, and I think we should go back to doing the old thing.
[00:38:29] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:38:29] Speaker C: Then hard conversations would be had.
[00:38:31] Speaker D: Hard conversations, no surprises.
[00:38:34] Speaker E: Right.
[00:38:34] Speaker D: In that process.
[00:38:36] Speaker E: Right.
[00:38:36] Speaker C: And hopefully there's a process to deal with that, instead of that being a surprise in itself. How did this unfold with mean? Because we all know that obviously, Google Maps and Apple maps and waze and all this stuff came out. How did this unfold when you guys were such at the forefront?
[00:38:53] Speaker D: Well, I'll tell you on a personal I.
Soon after we launched MapQuest and had a lot of success, I ended up joining that parent company and sitting on the board of directors of Mapquest. And so now my roles almost switched. Not that it's hierarchical, but now I'm a board member, not an active producer. At one point, we had kind of merged in a different company that helped us do all of this kind of digital mapping stuff. And there was a guy, Barry Glick, who was, I think, nine years or something older than me, and he wasn't obviously going to be the CEO. And I was okay with that. I had my ego in check, even though at times I thought I could do that job. Right. I mean, we wouldn't be who we were.
And now, all of a sudden, I'm sitting on his board, right? And now I'm talking about compensation and all these things. I think we managed that really well.
But at some point, before we took MapQuest public first, in 1999, when all the crazy stuff was happening, all the Internet companies, it was obvious that they needed a professional board for a public company. And this 35 year old, 36 year old, very strongly opinionated, maybe not as calm and cool and collective as you are when you get a little older. Shouldn't be part of that. And I recognize that maybe even before they did.
[00:40:24] Speaker C: That's got to be tough.
[00:40:25] Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, it wasn't tough.
[00:40:29] Speaker C: Oh, really?
[00:40:30] Speaker D: It wasn't?
[00:40:32] Speaker C: Because how come?
What led it to be not so tough?
[00:40:38] Speaker D: I'll go back to what I said, what was right for the business, and I could kind of subjugate my own.
[00:40:48] Speaker C: Get. How did you get there, Chris? And here's why I'm asking. Because what set me on my journey is, after we sold, I read this book called Finish Big by Bo Burlingham. I don't know if you're familiar with the book. Bo was the editor of Ink magazine for seven years and love the guy and his whole deal is that one out of four people are happy when they sell their company, the other three out of four aren't. And that's what set me on my entire journey. And one of the main reasons are people didn't know who they were, what they wanted from their business, and why. And a lot of it has to do with this role identity infusion, kind of like their business is their baby, it's their identity.
Was that ever a thing in your situation?
[00:41:27] Speaker D: That's a fantastic question.
Maybe because I was starting a little bit of transition over a couple of years, right.
And so it wasn't such a light switch kind of moment.
It was a little bit more gradual. But what I'll tell you is that if I can jump forward a little bit, I went through about a five to six year period where I did, like, four different things, like switch pivot. So maybe not consciously, but maybe subconsciously, to your point, I was struggling with, well, what am I going to be next? Right, okay.
And it was funny because it was probably about six or so years later, I'm now in Chicago, had been for a few years. I'm at this.
And, Ryan, not that I ever thought that I'd ever do one job for a long time, but I'd done these, like, three switches in six years and was feeling a little unstable. Know, wife and kids and the wife's, you know, WTF? What's going on here?
[00:42:38] Speaker C: I've heard that conversation. I had that conversation before.
[00:42:41] Speaker D: Yeah, exactly. We all know it. Very.
Um. But, Ryan, I woke up one day, God, I tell this story all the time. It's just amazing. I woke up one.
And because, you know, stressed, right, that I couldn't find whatever the next path was, not that I was regretting the old path, just where is the next thing that I can sink my teeth through that has a little more legs than the three things in six years kind of thing?
And what I realized for me, I believe I was about 42 at the time, as best as I can remember. I woke up one day and I said, this is who I am. I'm going to be doing a series of three to five year things. It's just who I am. Chris, look at your past. Look at what you've done the last six years. Yeah, a little bit more floppy, but this is who I am. So you can either sit there and go, what the fuck? Why am I like that? Or I could lean and go, that's who I am. And let's manage to that. And so I remember taking that to my wife, and she's like, really? I'm like, no, it's good news.
[00:43:47] Speaker C: I spun this around, and I'm going to tell you why this craziness is actually a good thing. I love it.
[00:43:52] Speaker D: But what I can do is now, and I talk about this in the book, managing your emotions, imagining your psychology, your finances, and your physical being. And so what it made me do is to say, all right, listen, here's how I'm going to manage the finances. Great. Here's how I'm going to. I know that each of these little mini chapters will come to an end. My choice, their choice, market's choice. And at the end of those, instead of the psychology being going, oh, shit, I just shit the bed again. It's going to be great. All right, this chapter is coming to.
[00:44:27] Speaker E: Done.
[00:44:27] Speaker D: Let's figure out what the next chapter is going to be, which is what you enjoy anyway.
[00:44:31] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:44:32] Speaker D: And so it's played out almost exactly like that. And every time something has come to a close, I've had a much different attitude about that, which saves me, like, the trough of disillusionment.
[00:44:45] Speaker C: Oh, that is so helpful, Chris. And I'm thinking about your analogy of the, like, I tell my girls, you can't have that fort past Sunday because.
[00:44:56] Speaker B: We got to go back, but we.
[00:44:57] Speaker C: Can build another one. So you're a fort builder, but you didn't have your identity built into that one fort.
[00:45:04] Speaker D: I think that's a fantastic tie in. Yeah, there'll just be more forts.
[00:45:08] Speaker C: Super fascinating, Chris, because in kind of the spirit of what we teach, too, is by understanding what people are trying to solve for, they can figure out how many forts, I guess, using your analogy, how many forts they want. But usually what I hear over the. I mean, almost 400 podcasts is people have that, they're stuck on that one fort, and then what happens is the control of the ownership changes, and then that ownership wants different things for the equity or the distributions on the mechanical side. And then there's this massive misalignment, and then it's resentment, and it's just like this decoupling the identity, psychology and money, all of this at once. And it just is very painful for people. So it's very fascinating how you got to the point where you identified with the Ford building, not the Ford.
[00:46:00] Speaker D: Over time, I'm going to have to steal this, because you've done a fantastic job of, I think, summing it up in a sentence.
[00:46:06] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:46:06] Speaker D: And that's for know, I think if you're an entrepreneur, you're not going to just do one thing, right. You're going to do multiple things.
Don't have to be companies. They could be nonprofits, they could be anything, right?
[00:46:19] Speaker C: Agree 100%. Chris. What I like to say is, I'm curious, as you reflect on the founders and the startups that you've been involved in. I say in my workshops, my keynotes, I don't give a shit what you want. Just identify what you want. So if you really like that fort, make sure it's stable and you can live in it forever. You know what I mean? But if you don't. So I don't think it's right or wrong. It's more of like this misalignment of what the hell someone wants. And then them just going back to Ink magazine being like, this is what everybody's doing. So I went public, and next thing. You mean, for God's sakes, the guys that wrote conscious capitalism, I don't understand. So John Mackey, who wrote conscious capitalism, he sold the Jerry. It was the Ben and Jerry's ice cream. They're so conscious. Capitalism led, and then they went public, and then they're in shareholder battles all the time.
[00:47:11] Speaker E: Right.
[00:47:11] Speaker C: So it's like, what are you doing if that's not like there's a misalignment? Yeah.
[00:47:17] Speaker D: I think that comes down to awareness, really good self awareness of what you want and what's important. And when you take someone else's money, you're giving up control. So just, you set that course. They didn't set that course.
Investors have a thing. Don't be surprised by their actions.
I would say investors. Investors only have two tools in their toolbox. One is they give you money, and second is they fire you.
It's the only tool tools they have.
And by the way, they don't want to fire you. They only fire you when you didn't execute what you said you would, what your shared vision was. So if you charted this vision of where the company is going to grow to in order to take their money, and the company doesn't go there, it's.
[00:48:07] Speaker C: The shared vision of the company. But also there's a lot of people listening that are constantly getting bombarded by private equity. It's like internal rate of return within one period of time.
[00:48:20] Speaker D: Freaking book here.
[00:48:22] Speaker C: I know, right?
[00:48:24] Speaker D: And by the way. So you can say to yourself, so you have a couple of options here. One you could say is, that's not my vision for why my company is I'm going to pass on the potential large dollars that comes with the PE deal in order. Because what's more important to me is running this company and on a nice, slow, steady basis. Okay, option one. Option two is I'll take their money and I'm going to fight them the whole time, and I'm going to be surprised and I'm going to battle this. I'm like, okay, it's going to happen. You're going to have, by the way.
[00:48:55] Speaker C: I will provide you therapist the entire ride.
[00:48:57] Speaker D: Right.
And by the way, then good luck with your divorce and your children not talking to you anymore.
[00:49:03] Speaker E: Right?
[00:49:04] Speaker D: Because you're going to be a miserable sob.
[00:49:06] Speaker E: Right.
[00:49:06] Speaker D: And maybe the third option is, hey, listen, I'm going to remember that this isn't about me. It's about the company. We'll take the money, we'll start doing this stuff, and at some point, there's a very good chance that the roads will split. And at that point, I need to look at myself and say, I'm not the best person for this company anymore. I knew this was not a matter of if, it was only a matter of when. And I'm going to use that as a place to close that chapter and start my next chapter. Aka, I understand on it that I'm a fort builder more than I'm into this fort. Make your choice. Eyes wide open.
[00:49:43] Speaker C: That's awesome. So fort Builder versus this fort.
[00:49:47] Speaker D: I'm telling you, it's going to show up in all my keynotes now. I love it.
[00:49:51] Speaker C: Yeah, it's your analogy, man.
[00:49:53] Speaker D: You just made it a little better.
[00:49:55] Speaker C: That's awesome. But how many of the founders that you come across have this kind of clarity?
[00:50:01] Speaker D: Chris, it's not many. It's in the ten to 20%.
But, Ryan, I think I was really lucky. I think I had the epiphany. But if you look hard enough, there's more examples of the media we talked about. The media highlights. The Jeff Bezos, the Steve Jobs, the Mark Zuckerbergs. They highlight the sole person who goes from beginning all the way to end.
[00:50:30] Speaker E: Right.
[00:50:30] Speaker D: I mean, that is like, point something of something of the whole. And so I think maybe I was curious, maybe I was doing my socializing bit, but I met more people who managed their exit or their role change, going from CEO to CTO. Hey, we've now got this company. Robbie Allen, great friend, built this company up 50 employees, which is usually a magic mark in companies, right? At 50, you don't know everyone post more than 50 hr company hierarchies. You now have a hierarchy. Your job changes. CEO, he's like, not as much fun. I'm out. And twice he's kind of exited his own startup with that mindset. So I think if you look hard enough, there's really good examples of people who, very self aware, understand what they're good at and what they enjoy. And at some point, fantastic, congratulations. You've built your company to this level. Now let's bring in someone who's really good at taking it from that level, who's wired that way, who wakes up every day making the trains run on time.
[00:51:38] Speaker C: With all your investments that you've made. Now in founders and companies, what weight do you put on this characteristic?
[00:51:45] Speaker D: Huge.
[00:51:46] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:51:47] Speaker D: In fact, more so than even the idea.
[00:51:49] Speaker E: Yeah, right.
[00:51:50] Speaker C: I would get. Because, oh my God, the drama and the conflict and the tension that would result if not having that is just ridiculous.
[00:51:57] Speaker D: And they say that good investors become good because of pattern recognition. And unlike you, I had to learn that post haste on many occasions.
But I ran an accelerator, my own accelerator, with a partner for two different ones over about a six year period and 42 investments and probably 3000 applicants for those 42. And you start to see stuff and you start to see how people react and you kind of figure out a couple of questions to ask to kind of see how they react. And by the way, I'm not saying you're not a Jeff Bezos. You may be, you're just not going to play the game that I believe in. So why work together, right? Go do your own thing. Be a lone wolf.
Have all the answers already. Fantastic. Just don't take my money.
[00:52:56] Speaker C: It's just about alignment.
So what's your goals or your wish for build the fort? Because you said you're looking at a series, right?
[00:53:06] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:53:07] Speaker D: So 2015, build a fort. How to start anything really, for founders. In April of this year, I released build a fort, the startup community builders field guide. So my startup over the last five to six years, and maybe even ten, depending on how an account are, Ryan is how do startup communities built?
How can you in your city, Birmingham, Alabama, Durham, North Carolina, even Stillwater, Minnesota, what are the things that the leaders, economic development folks, university folks, government, investors, entrepreneurs, how do they all work together to create an environment where more entrepreneurs can be successful? Because I believe we were talking keynotes and stuff, and usually from stage I say raise your hand if you've had an idea for a business and you know this, like 98% of the hands go up. I like keep your hands up if you've taken the first step towards that, and 98% of the hands go down. And I'm like, I'd like to help fix that.
Because I think my view is that somewhere around three to 5% of every city are entrepreneurs, broadly defined, waiting to happen. I don't have any math on that, just all my reading and all my observations. So the question is, if the number is really, like half a percent, and it could be as many as three to 5%, what can I do to help? People who have an Inkling don't know what you would do as your first step. Hence the book. The first book, second book.
How can others create an environment for those people to lean in and say, I'm going to try something. And so that's been my journey for last five years. I've consulted all over the world in helping economic development people hopefully do it better. Help their own economy, help their own citizens.
[00:55:01] Speaker C: Yeah, I think we need it. We need it for the right reasons, too, not just kind of the surface ones that we were talking about. Because I think the amount of joy that I think comes from being an entrepreneur, too, especially if you can eliminate the bumps and bruises like you lay out in your book. I mean, there's a way to do it in a less painful way than I know that I've experienced, and we've seen other people go through it.
[00:55:24] Speaker D: So back to a little bit of your question. Build the fort is a mindset. How to simplify things, how to eliminate some noise, how to take four or five easy steps, maybe to just get started. There's some other versions of that that I'm thinking about. I'm starting to get the itch to write again.
When you write something, you might finish your writing, like for me, about this time last year. But then there's four to five months of changes and covers and pictures and formatting and research to make sure you said the right things. Then there's a whole publication of the book, and then there's another six months of helping to market it, meeting great people on podcasts and standing on stage in front of people. So it's been a year since I've been, other than my blog that I've been writing.
[00:56:16] Speaker C: Where can everybody find you? And the books, the writing, et cetera.
[00:56:20] Speaker D: So both books are available on Amazon. Just search for Chris Hively. H-E-I-V-L-Y-I also have my own website called hively.com. I produce a weekly email, comes out Thursdays. They're kind of fun. They're short.
[00:56:36] Speaker E: Very.
[00:56:36] Speaker D: I wrote 275 or so articles for Ink magazine back in the day. Nice. So I don't do that anymore. But they taught me how to really short.
[00:56:46] Speaker C: To the point, point out, yeah.
[00:56:49] Speaker D: Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat.
And I do hit the stage usually somewhere between 15 and 20 times a year all over the country, hoping to get a few more of those. So if you're an event, it's organized.
[00:57:01] Speaker C: I got a couple of ideas of events that you should go to. A friend of mine, Matt Paulson, down in Cedar Rapids. I think it's Cedar rapids or. No, it'sioux falls. I got a couple of other places that I think would really enjoy this topic. So I got a list of a couple of people that we'll have to put in touch with.
[00:57:15] Speaker D: Chris, this is how this works, right?
Our network connects. We build meaningful connections. We help each other out.
[00:57:22] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:57:22] Speaker D: And that's me. And I showed you my nice little lake view. And I'm 64. This is the first time. I just had a birthday last week, so I had to figure out. I've been telling people the Beatles wrote a song about me when I'm 64. Anyway, I love it.
[00:57:39] Speaker C: And now you're. Now you're playing it.
[00:57:40] Speaker D: Right now I'm playing it. Exactly.
I have open office hours, by the way, so hivelay.com, go to my office hours. I meet probably five to eight entrepreneurs every week. Anybody can sign up. There's no gate, no judgment. And we have 20 minutes conversations, and that's how I stay current.
[00:58:01] Speaker E: Right. I love it.
[00:58:02] Speaker C: We'll put all those links in the show notes.
[00:58:04] Speaker E: Chris.
[00:58:04] Speaker D: Yeah, thanks.
[00:58:06] Speaker C: This has been a blast. Chris, thanks so much for coming on the show and spending time with me.
[00:58:09] Speaker E: Ryan.
[00:58:09] Speaker D: It's been my pleasure. Great to connect, and I look forward to doing more together.
[00:58:16] Speaker B: Thanks for listening into that conversation. I hope you found the time valuable. If you enjoyed the conversation, please leave the show. A review on your podcast player. We're constantly trying to up those reviews. It helps a lot with the visibility, and if you didn't catch the commercial in the middle of that episode, there's two different ways that we can help you. One is if you want that kind of clarity, we have a coaching program that is based on the five intention growth principles and uses the material to help you get that kind of clarity on your target equity, valuation, and income that you need on the way towards that valuation. What you want from the business long term and why, and then how to get aligned with your leadership and your partners. So that way everybody's working in the right direction. To get you what you want. And the second way is if you want to jump right into the data and you want to actually build out your financial roadmap with your three statements and tie your financials and your operational data to that target equity valuation, my team offers a complimentary financial facial assessment. Either way, all you have to do is go use the link in the show notes below. Schedule a discovery call with me. We can walk through your situation, figure out if there's a fit or not, and if not, I can point you.
[00:59:20] Speaker C: In the right direction.
[00:59:21] Speaker B: Thanks everybody for tuning in and I hope you enjoyed this episode and I.
[00:59:23] Speaker C: Will see you next weekend.
