Diatribes by Joah

A Real Warrior

A couple days ago, I was at an event with a lot of tech leaders, founders and investors in Austin and my investor Brett Hurt, one of the best serial entrepreneurs this city has, was introducing me to one of the founders of TrueCar. The amount of pride Brett expressed in being one of my investors was plenty, but then he added, "Joah is a real warrior." It's probably the favorite thing I've had a fellow entrepreneur, a highly-successful one at that, say about me. I get that there's a time and place and value to things like experience and talent and being able to call up a bunch of VCs and raise millions of dollars, perhaps all things I don't have in spades. But what I get even more is that there's a time and place and value for attributes like drive, determination, dedication and passion. That's what I have in spades. That's what my entrepreneurial experience has entailed over the last four-plus years. I left my last day job the week of Labor Day 2012. Since then I've been paid less money in 4 years than what I made in my last year of a 9-to-5. But, no doubt, it's been worth it. There are a lot of competitors in the sector Localeur is in, but none of them will EVER beat us because we lacked or were outmatched when it comes to grit and perseverance. There's no real secret sauce to Localeur that makes us grow and continue to thrive. There are no patents. And, honestly, we don't really have any trade secrets. We simply have a team that understands authenticity, quality and cares about local more than anyone else, and I know that tone starts - as it did over four years ago - with me. Other startups can raise more money, hire more developers, get more followers on Instagram or whatever, and pay more writers, but they will simply never beat us on the key attributes that lead someone like Brett to describe me to another serial entrepreneur as "a real warrior." That much I'm certain. I should put it on my business card.

Things that don't scale. My thoughts.

For those in the startup world, surely you've heard the phrase "Do things that don't scale" coined by YCombinator founder Paul Graham.

I think about that particular post a lot because I look at my entrepreneurial history, from cutting grass for neighbors at 11 to selling bubble gum to classmates at 12 to advising companies like FedEx on social media at 25 to launching Sneak Attack then Style X and eventually landing on Localeur, truly my life's work (for now). I think about how fortunate I am, a kid who can remember all of one family vacation and once missed a 5th grade field trip because it costs $90, to be able to hop on a plane and experience new things.

I'm on a quick trip to Asia right now, having just spent three days in Tokyo then heading to Hong Kong before returning for SXSW, and after thinking through it thoroughly, I have reached a conclusion:

The #1 thing that does not scale is travel.

I learned this first-hand when I co-authored "Real Role Models" a book UT published a few years back and embarked on my own self-promoted book tour, speaking in dozens of Teach for America classrooms around the country. It worked then, and it works now.

Travel is what gets those all-too-important, face-to-face interactions that lead to product evangelism, community growth, and, yes, revenue generation. Fittingly, two of Localeur's main business partners are other travel companies: JetBlue Airways and Tablet Hotels.

Community management scales with community managers. Yelp proved that. Content strategy scales with tools like Hootsuite and other social CRM tools. Big brands can testify to that. Sales operations scales with tools like Salesforce. Software sales has verified that much. Hell, even hiring scales to a great degree with the great many online and service-related offerings for HR and recruiting professionals.

But travel absolutely does not scale.

I don't care how much you use Ctrip or how often you rely on your hard-earned airline miles or how frequently you get tips from TripAdvisor and cheap flights from Priceline. There's just no way around one person having to make decisions about where to spend money, what flights to take, what hotels or lodging option to choose or where to go eat or drink once you arrive in the new city.

In his now-legendary post, Graham wrote, "One of the most common types of advice we give at YCombinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't...Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going."

I can testify to this first hand. Chase and I probably spent two years trying to find some silver bullet in the product to make Localeur become viral like SnapChat or Facebook, but over the last 6 months especially I've realized that the push Paul is referring to is more like an Atlas stone workout. You're literally holding a heavy ball above your head (your concept) and walking it uphill one step at a time. Most people fail, some miserably, and very few find that narrow path up to the top. Very very very few are Facebook or Instagram where it just happens and users come in as fast as Trump voters realized they didn't make America great again by any definition of the phrase. Still probably even faster for those aforementioned startups.

"The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them...There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users individually. One is a combination of shyness and laziness. The other reason founders ignore this path is that the absolute numbers seem so small at first. This can't be how the big, famous startups got started they think," Graham continues.

I can also testify to this first-hand. Not all my investors thought the big 35-city road trip I took last spring was well considered. It seemed like one of those things a founder/CEO does when he wants to avoid a more significant task.

But what I realized last spring was that the most important thing I could do for Localeur, as we continued to toil away at fundraising, was make sure that even if we didn't have the adoration of VCs, we maintained our strong ties to our community of locals. So I did the ultimate thing that doesn't scale. I traveled. I actually got into my car and drove solo for almost all of 17,000 miles over 43 days between April and June of last year.

The result? We've expanded from 20 cities at the start of 2016 to 45 cities today, largely based on relationships I built meeting locals and local business owners one by one. People like Greg Noire in Houston, a super talented music photographer who has nearly 30k Instagram followers and was introduced to me by Austin Localeur and my friend Cristina Fisher. People like Larry Robertson in Columbus who Carlie Anne introduced me to when she saw on Facebook that I was looking to connect with locals there during the roadtrip. Larry is hands-down one of the most creative, interesting people I know and I'm sure that's what anyone in CBUS would tell you too. Same for Toni Smailagić in Jacksonville, Florida. I didn't know a soul in Jacksonville, but one of our Atlanta Localeurs texted a friend of his in JAX the day I was driving in and I ended up meeting Toni that night. He's one of the most talented fashion / natural light photographers I've met. Check out his work on Instagram @tonismailagic.

The caliber of the Localeur community is what distinguishes us from Yelp or TripAdvisor or any other startup that is trying to go after "local" or "experiences". Local isn't just a buzzword or a sexy endeavor for us, this is a true, long-standing area of passion.

Traveling 150 days a year these last four years, plus the 100+ days a year I was logging for four straight years before Localeur existed, is one of the key points of insight and advantage for this business. There is no shyness when it comes to meeting locals and no laziness when it comes to figuring out how best to launch a new city or expand our community, even if it means adding just one new local at a time, which I still spend considerable time doing.

And, the funny thing is, one of the main questions I used to get from investors when we started Localeur was "can you actually scale local?" or "can you really scale cool?" I vividly remember Brian Alexander Watson asking me this when he was an Analyst at Union Square Ventures, the top VC firm in New York, back in 2013/14. Well, we're in 45 cities...having just launched Toronto, Vancouver and London, our first non-US markets, and needless to say the answer is a resounding yes. We can scale. (I'm blessed to say Brian is now a member of our esteemed Advisory Board, too!)

There were about 100 to 200 cities I dreamed of having Localeur in, and London was always a huge landmark city, and Tokyo (where I'm currently sitting) is definitely one, too. We'll get there. I know it. What we've built is simply too authentic, too differentiated and too true to what millennial and discerning travels are seeking to be denied.

"Airbnb is a classic example of this technique," wrote Graham. "When I remember the Airbnbs during YC, I picture them with rolly bags, because when they showed up for Tuesday dinners they'd always just flown back from somewhere."

I'm not saying Localeur is going to make billions like Airbnb. Not every business has the same ceiling or path.

What I'm pointing out is that the ultimate thing that doesn't scale is travel, and for my particular startup, this has been a real benefit not only for the continued growth of our community and future prospects, but also for me personally because whether I'm on a US roadtrip launching cities in Ohio or halfway across the world in Tokyo getting inspiration for the next wave of growth for Localeur, I know that every mile I log and every local I meet is valuable.

It doesn't have to scale, it just has to get us closer to fulfilling our mission. It didn't take me the last four years to know that, but it may have taken this long to undeniably prove it.

Devil's Advocate

I try really hard not to play devil's advocate on other entrepreneurs or creatives. It's probably one of my biggest pet peeves. It's like some saying, "Hey, I know you've been doing this business for years and have thought about millions of things and had thousands of interactions with users and pitched hundreds of smart investors, but in the last 20 seconds since you first told me about your business, I had an idea that is definitely better than anything you or your team ever thought of and I have some feedback on your product that I haven't even taken the time to use yet. But I'm just trying to help. Really." OK, then.

Micro-managing

Micro-managing is neither something I was a fan of as an employee nor something I like doing as a manager. I've built my team around accountability, efficiency and trust as I recently pointed out. Micro-managing is a bit like a fire extinguisher approach to be used only in extreme situations. When you're feeling more pressure as a leader (because make no mistake, leaders get exposed to the organizational "fires" first) trying to literally push the team to a new level of execution, sometimes you have no choice but to apply more pressure until the new bar of excellence becomes the standard. This is why making key hires and having that trust and accountability is so essential.

On People Management

Since I travel 150-160 days a year and probably closer to 180 this year as we expand from 40 to as many as 100 cities, I've decided to maintain a pretty distributed team. We all get together every 3 months or so and speak weekly by teleconference, but I connect with each individual a bit more frequently often through text and email (still not a huge fan of Slack). My content lead is based in Seattle. My brand lead is based in Atlanta. My video/photography lead is based in DC. My engineering and UX leads are here in Austin. What makes the entire Localeur operation work - 1.5 million total users across 40+ cities with just 6 employees - and what's helped us to really hit our stride so visibly since I fully assembled this team last November is a level of accountability and efficiency that I've never seen nor experienced at any point in my professional journey. Simply put, accountability and efficiency are the bars by which I measure effectiveness both for the business and for my team on an individual basis. I've had to let quite a few people go over the years not just with Localeur but with other businesses I've run and usually it's a factor of someone not demonstrating the level of accountability or efficiency that I expect for the role or need for the business. Usually the high accountability bar I set or the high efficiency standard I require is unmet when one of two things happen: 1) the role stops being an area of passion and simply becomes a job and paycheck (whenever I've noticed this, it's usually as soon as 2-3 pay periods and not much longer) and 2) things happening in the person's personal life are overwhelming their ability to focus on the requirements of their professional life. When the first thing happens, it's usually a fairly clear-cut decision on my part to let the person go. Startups move too quickly for someone to re-energize themselves into a role I have several qualified candidates for. However, when the second thing happens, that's where it requires a bit more patience, empathy and discussion. We've all been there before where things in our personal lives suddenly take over for a minute and put our jobs/business in the backseat. My general rule of thumb there is to give the person a few weeks to try and work it out for themselves then, if it persist, interject with an open, heartfelt conversation about what's going on. I'm not an expert in business or people management, but the results I'm getting from my team right now are a true reflection of a level of personal and collective accountability and efficiency that makes me extremely proud of my hires and excited to get to work with these folks each day. It's all a reflection of shared passion and focus.

The B-School Rejection Comeback Story

As you may know, yesterday I had the privilege of being a guest lecturer at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas.

It wasn't until I was on the phone with my mother last night that she reminded me that I'd actually been rejected from this very business school which is how I ended up being a public relations major at UT instead.

Thankfully it all worked out for the best - doing media relations for the Texas Longhorns, speechwriting in DC, advising FedEx, Sneak Attack, Style X, Bazaarvoice, Localeur - from a professional standpoint, but it's funny how university admissions officers don't fully understand how to measure aptitude and potential, especially if they're looking at first-generation college graduates. It reminds me a lot of venture capitalists today.

Needless to say, yesterday was a bit of a microcosm for what it's been like for me to be a Black man and tech founder in America.

I was standing in a room that I was deemed unworthy and unqualified of sitting in as a student some 15 years ago, despite winning over two dozen academic scholarships to attend UT, but there I was yesterday lecturing to students who have more academic training than me and are likely more "qualified" to get VC backing on paper.

During the B-school courses, I asked these very well-educated, professionally-trained, MBA students if any of them could name a single African-American founder in tech. Only the professor - a woman who studies entrepreneurship - knew of a single one.

So, think about this, I literally just became the very first, I repeat, the first African-American person that these second-year business students at a highly prestigious university (spanning several nationalities not to mention work experience in numerous industries) knew who had ever founded a tech startup. And tech is one of the biggest sources of innovation and job creation in the world!

This is the barrier I'm up against.

On one hand, people interested in entrepreneurship and business aren't accustomed to people like me - that goes all the way up to serial entrepreneurs (more than you'd think), boards and investors.

On the other hand, I have to live in a world where people who actually make decisions about the potential of someone - college admissions boards and VCs, namely - are still ill-informed and Ill-equipped to make sound decisions about the abilities of people they seldom experience.

We still have a long way to go, and I'm going to work as hard as possible to be one of the people who makes a difference.

There were a lot of Black baseball players better than Jackie Robinson, but his grit matched with skill is what made him memorable.