How Tony Karrer revolutionized how startups transform their ideas into smart mobile apps

Joining me is a CTO who realized that a lot of the companies he worked for hit a point where they just didn’t need him any more.

Instead of seeing it as a problem, he saw it as an opportunity. Tony Karrer is an entrepreneur who created an outsourced CTO business. TechEmpower allows companies to transform their innovative ideas into smart web/mobile applications.

Tony Karrer

Tony Karrer

TechEmpower

Tony Karrer is the founder of TechEmpower which allows companies to transform their innovative ideas into smart web/mobile applications.

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Full Interview Transcript

Andrew: Hey there freedom fighters, my name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. Joining me today is a guy who is a CTO who discovered that the companies he worked for often would hit a point where they just didn’t need him anymore.

Instead of seeing it as a problem, he saw it as an opportunity. Tony Karrer is the founder of TechEmpower. He’s an entrepreneur who created an outsource CTO business. He comes in, helps companies out and helps them set themselves up and not be dependent on him. TechEmpower, his company, allows companies to transform their innovative ideas into smart Web and mobile applications.

This interview is sponsored by Toptal. And you know last night, I had some entrepreneurs who I interviewed and some fans from Mixergy over to my house for dinner. I said, “Guys, let me practice what I’m going to say in my interview to pitch Toptal.” They said, “All right, good.”

So I said to them, “Guys, you ever have a problem where you couldn’t find the right developer, one that knew the languages that you guys were working in and also who got you with all your quirks?” And they said, “Yeah, absolutely. That’s a problem.”

I said, “Well, Toptal, this company that is now sponsoring Mixergy, is a company of developers. Any entrepreneur or business person can call them up and say, “Here are my problems. Here’s what I’m looking for. Help me out.” Toptal will get a collection of candidates, research them, vet them, test them and present just one or two people that would be a good fit for the company to consider. When the company decides to go for them, they could hire them the next day if they want, and they could hire them full time, part time. Or even if the company has enough of a team but just needs a few extra hours of help, they can do it on an hourly basis. All that’s available from Toptal. You can just go to Toptal.com.”

So I said that to my dinner guests and they said, “Well, this is really helpful. What’s the company, Toptowel?” I said, “No, I’ve got to remember. I have to pronounce it better. Toptal, like talent, Toptalent.’ So, the site is Toptal.com, and I’m going to work on that, on pronouncing them right.”

Welcome to my new sponsor and welcome to you Tony. Thanks for coming.

Tony: Good to see you, Andrew.

Andrew: I want to make sure that people understand how the business works. Before we started recording, we discussed how maybe the work that you did for eHarmony can help the audience understand how it works. So how does an outsource CTO work, and how did you work with eHarmony to do that?

Tony: Yeah. So let me kind of go back and sort of tell the story, the early days of eHarmony and kind of how it progressed. So I met the two original founders of eHarmony. So it was Neil Clark Warren, the gentleman you see in all the commercials who owns it again, and Greg Forgatch, who is the CEO. They had the basic concept, basic idea for it. They had a data scientist who was working on the algorithms that are the fundamental to eHarmony, but they had nobody from a technical standpoint.

So they started talking to me about their concept and what would be required. That conversation evolved into, “Okay, here’s what it would take to build that out.”

So it’s very common that that’s the initial conversation. “Hey Tony, I’ve got this great idea. Help me figure out what’s required from a technology standpoint.” I probably have one of those conversations a day with a new entrepreneur.

Andrew: Still to this day you do.

Tony: Still to this day.

Andrew: Did they look for essentially a co-founder at that point? They had an idea but not anyone who could put it into action?

Tony: Yeah. Almost every entrepreneur is out there looking for that mythical technical co-founder. To me, it’s kind of a funny one though, especially on the CTO side, because most of the time most startups, unless it’s a really super technical kind of solution, don’t need a full-time CTO. And when I say CTO, I’m talking strategic level.

So it’s, “Hey, let me understand the business. Let me understand the product. Okay, what technologies are we going to use? What’s the development team going to look like? How are we going to get this thing built?” Right?

Andrew: Okay.

Tony: Maybe it’s talking about some key technology partnerships, maybe some key customer accounts. With eHarmony, it was a lot of, “Let’s analyze marketing spend. Figure out how we’re going to analyze that and the effectiveness there.”

Andrew: Meaning, “How’s the software going to allow us to hold marketing accountable so we can tell which channels are working and which ads are working?”

Tony: Yes.

Andrew: I see.

Tony: Exactly.

Andrew: And so you’re helping them to think that whole thing through.

Tony: Yes, especially from the, “Hey, how are we going to track this more effectively?” Because early on, let me continue the eHarmony story. So over time, we figured out, “Okay, here’s what it is that needs to get built out.” They were non-technical founders, which is who I primarily work with. So then we said, “Okay great. Tony, now who are we going to get to build it?” So we discussed building up an in-house team. We discussed using my resources, and we discussed some other possible resources.

I’ve got a team of 30 engineers — really, really bright individuals — that I work with. In the case of eHarmony, they knew what they wanted to build. It was going to be about a four month build initially. Then after that they wanted to basically put a hold on any development work. Then they wanted to start market testing it, getting users on and all that kind of stuff.

So it didn’t make any sense to build up an in-house team, because what are you going to do? After three months, you’re gong to fire them all? So we used my resources, built it out, and then we’d go through basically about every six months there’d be a new product rev. But in the meantime, it was all about, “Hey, how are we going to acquire our audience?” With eHarmony, you had to get critical mass in a given geography to get matches to happen. So how do you get critical mass in a geography?” They just tried one thing after another.

Andrew: Is that common, Tony? My understanding was that companies would hire slowly, have a couple of developers on board to help build the first product, but then keep those developers on to keep improving the product, and you know how to improve it day to day because you’re getting a lot of feedback from your customers and your users. Once you grow a little bit further, you can hire more developers and keep on building and continuing. I didn’t realize that there was this build it, get the first version out, and then take a step back type of experience.

Tony: That’s actually very common on early versions that you build it and then want to take a step back, although your step back might go from let’s say three or four developers down to one or two developers. So those one or two developers, having them in-house makes a lot of sense, because exactly for the iteration reasons that you described. In fact, my adage is software never sleeps. So there’s always going to be work. It’s just a question of what the level of that work is and the level of iteration.

So if you can stay pretty constant, then in-house teams make a lot of sense. That’s what I do a lot of times is bring on in-house teams. It’s challenging to find good technical resources these days, especially here in Los Angeles, but still that’s a very common model.

But what do you do when you’re trying to get that first version out and you don’t have those resources? Quite often you augment that staff with outside resources.

Andrew: You said that you still to this day have conversations with entrepreneurs to help them think through what their businesses are, what their technical needs are.

Tony: Well, yeah. They’re talking to me because they want to know about: “Okay, what should I do technically.” That’s how I started the company, and that’s the conversations I have every day. What it often turns out to be though is: “Here’s what I need to know. I need to know about your business. What are you trying to accomplish? What are your major milestones? What’s the product? What are the biggest risk areas, etc.?”

Quite often, I’d say if I’m having five conversations a week, four of those I end up being able to poke holes in whatever they’re telling me, because you don’t want to build anything until you have a good theory of what it is you’re trying to really accomplish, because it’s really expensive to do it in software.

So often I’m saying, “Hey, here’s a way you can go test this. Don’t use me yet. Don’t use any technical resources yet. Go hack together WordPress and go test it out. Just create a landing page.”

Andrew: So you don’t even want people to build an MVP, no minimum viable product. Have a no product at first version.

Tony: That’s a great way to go in a lot of cases.

Andrew: That’s what you mean. And by no product, one example is create WordPress and make it look like the product that you want, right?

Tony: Yes, absolutely.

Andrew: Give me an example of how somebody does that.

Tony: How somebody does a WordPress site that . . .

Andrew: Uses a WordPress site to fake what a web app is supposed to create and what a web app is supposed to do.

Tony: Okay. So the classic example is, “Hey, we’re not sure whether the audience is . . .” Actually I was listening to one of your interviews the other day, and, in fact, you had either a sponsor or something had lead pages. So you can create a lead page, have no product behind it. It’s a very common tactic to just see whether or not, “Can I drive traffic at a reasonable cost and will people convert to some level?” So the product doesn’t exist behind the conversion page. You may or may not actually be charging a credit card. You’re just simply testing, “Can I get my conversion funnel to operate?”

Andrew: I see. Yeah.

Tony: Before you build a piece of software, go test that out.

Andrew: So that’s what Mr. CTO, the guy who’s known for being a developer and for helping companies develop their software, that’s what you say. Go get off-the-shelf software and use it to make it look like the product exists and see if anyone wants the product enough to even register and then develop.

Tony: Absolutely. Why spend a bunch of money building a software product that is going to turn out not to be what customers want. So all of the lean startup, customer development, discovery work, you’ve got to do that. If you’re coming to me and I’m asking you questions and it’s clear you haven’t done that work, then that’s where I’m going to push you to do as much of that work before you engage me or any other technical resource, because it’s like you’re going to spend a lot of money, a lot of effort. You’re going to put this thing out there, and if you’ve got it wrong, and you didn’t ask those questions, now you’d still be wrong, and you’re still going to need to iterate, but do everything you can, pencil and paper through, communications with people, hacking stuff together before you start really engaging developers.

Andrew: The companies where you worked as CTO, you were looking at Knowledge Stream Partners in the mid-’90s and IEC Quisik? Am I pronouncing them right?

Tony: Yes.

Andrew: What were you doing for them?

Tony: So with Quisik, which was IEC, they were basically building multimedia training software. So the big project that sort of launched my career was for Lexus. This was Lexus the automaker. This was when they were first launching, and they wanted to have a radically different sales experience, so not your typical car salesperson, very consultative selling. So they needed training to teach car salespeople how to do consultative selling. So we created this thing that was, for the early ’90s, this was really incredible. They had very specialized machines with MPEG video cards in there so you could do full screen video.

We created interactive. So you’d see the person walking up on video, and you’d get to choose the storyline. Then you’d see it play out, see the video, how it worked. So if you said certain things, the customer would cut you off.

It had all sorts of knowledge, testing, and a big knowledge base, and it was a pretty amazing piece of what’s called e-learning these days, but back then was called multimedia training. It won all the industry awards in ’94 and ’95, and I was out speaking about it. It really kind of launched my career. But it was really an incredible piece of software. It was early on for all of those technologies that I’m talking about, and so I also was beating my head against the wall a lot trying to figure out how to get an MPEG card to work in this interactive way, because it wasn’t designed to do that at all.

Andrew: So Tony, when you do that and it’s cutting edge and it’s new and it pushes the envelope on what technology can use and all kinds of other cliches — I don’t know why I went for all those cliches — but you get what I’m going for.

Tony: Yeah.

Andrew: And the company starts to back off a little bit from their development, why not go in and say, “Look I’m the hotshot who just built this for you. I have another idea, or I know someone else has another idea. Let’s not take our foot off the gas. Let’s go even more. Let’s go faster.”

Tony: So here’s what happened with them is that they were super successful with that, and then they started working with Citibank and with Federal Express. Basically Citibank said, “I love that. Let’s do that again.” Well, you don’t need me to do that again. You need somebody, you need developers. You need a VP of engineering or a lead developer, but you don’t need a CTO.

At the time, the Internet was just coming around, and I’m like, “Hey, we’re going to go,” because this was shipped with six CD-ROM’s and a CD-ROM changer. “That’s going to go away. This is all going to go through the Internet eventually.” Of course, it took like ten years for the Internet to catch up to where we were with those technologies. But it’s like, “You don’t need me anymore as a CTO.” It felt kind of silly. So I left there, and they actually went on to a very successful exit. The founders made a lot of money. So they actually were very smart about it to build up the audience, continue to do the same thing, and they exited well.

Then I went to another company that was taking data mining results for large banks — Credit Suisse was a big client out of Switzerland — and they knew who was likely to leave the bank. But then you had to get the financial advisor to them delivered in a way that would be successful with your customer. So again, lots of innovation at the start, and then once you get it going, you don’t need a CTO as much, and again, very nice exit.

Andrew: Do you get to benefit from those exits? I’ve known you now for a long time. I’ve always wondered that. I can’t ask that in person, but I can as an interviewer. Do you get to benefit from those exits? Did you get to make out financially?

Tony: From the two exits I just described, no, I did not. So that was also part of the reason I left IEC Quisik was that wasn’t part of the equation for me.

For Knowledge Stream, that’s a long story. They exited at a time that wasn’t the best. We basically got equity in a new entity. In the ’90s that was a very common thing. But then that equity didn’t turn into anything.

With other companies, actually the places I’ve exited and had success were mostly smaller companies. Equity is generally a small portion of my comp package with entities. So I’m never that big a player in these entities. But the places that exits have been successful for me have always been things that are singles and doubles. The founders kill it.

There was one company that was doing training for loan officers, and he exited right before the financial meltdown and lived half-time in Tuscany and half-time in Malibu and did extremely well out of the exit. So it’s nice when you get those little bits of . . .

Andrew: And you did well from those exits.

Tony: “Well” is way too strong of a word for the exit that I’m involved in. It’s actually very commonly, unless somebody’s an initial CTO founder, most technical resources are not rich out of an exit. Think of it as a bonus. For me, it’s also a little bit of portfolio theory. So I take small positions in lots of startups, and a few of them turn into little bonuses. But certainly I wouldn’t be able to . . . certainly nothing’s a retirement number. It’s a nice thing, but it’s certainly not a “get rich” kind of deal.

Andrew: Okay. All right. So I see what’s happening. A couple different companies, they need you and then they don’t. You’re seeing an opportunity here, and you say, “I’m going to turn this into something”. When eHarmony founders come to you, they were coming to you looking for consulting help. At what point did you say, “This is something I could offer them, an outsource CTO”?

Tony: Well, I’d already been doing it for a little while when I ran into eHarmony. I’m trying to remember the years. I started doing the part-time CTO thing in ’97. eHarmony probably was 2000-ish. I’m thinking something like that.

Andrew: It had on your LinkedIn profile 1998 to 2001. Does that sound right?

Tony: Okay, maybe. Okay, that seems earlier than what I remember, but that’s fine. So they’re not coming to me necessarily saying, “Hey Tony, I need a CTO.” What they’re often coming to me saying is, “Hey Tony, I need help figuring out what I should build, how I should get it built, who should I use from a technical standpoint? I’m a non-technical founder. Tony, I’m not sure what I should do here. Should I hack something together? Should I start to build the real thing?”

At eHarmony there’s some big scalability issues and things like that and a fairly complex algorithm and some other stuff involved there. So they did have some technical complexities. That fits really well. But, realistically, they’re just looking to go get it built.

So the CTO conversation, I don’t know that we ever officially formalized that I’m the CTO. They don’t have any technical resources. I’m helping fill that role. I’m figuring out what can and should be built. I’m pulling on resources that are going to architect it out. So I’m doing all of the things that a strategic CTO would need to do. In that case, there was never like, “Hey Tony, I need you to be the CTO of eHarmony.” Effectively, that’s the role I was taking, and ultimately I’m getting the resources to bear to get the thing built. In that one, it wasn’t formally called that, but that’s the role I was taking. In hindsight, we all agree that that’s what I was called.

Andrew: In the pre-interview, you told April Dykman here at Mixergy that you are a hard-core developer. Was doing actual coding work part of the job?

Tony: So I was a hard-core developer through about the mid-’90s. Since then, now it’s embarrassing. I touch lines of code in Excel. I don’t really do hard-core development anymore. Every once in a while I’ve got the bug, and I want to go do it and I actually might. My kids were doing some programming, and I got to jump in and do some programming with them. It was fun, but I don’t really do any development. So for eHarmony, I didn’t write a line of code. The developers did all the coding.

Andrew: You were also teaching at the time.

Tony: I was, yeah. So it was a little crazy. I stopped teaching in 2000. With eHarmony and several other startups I’m working with, I’ve got several part-time CTO positions. I’ve got a technology shop that’s got, I think, 20 people at the time, 25 people at the time. The realization was the Christmas party I went to, my company’s Christmas party, and I look around the room and you’ve got all of the people who are employees of TechEmpower and all of their significant others. I’m doing this on a part-time basis. So it was kind of an eye opener of, “Hey, Tony, maybe you should take this a little more seriously. This has become a real entity and a real serious entity.” I love teaching. I still love the development of the folks. I love to see people grow in our company, but I just couldn’t wrap my head around, hey, doing this half-time.

Andrew: The first people you hired, were they your students?

Tony: They were my students. It was a fun experience, again because it kind of goes to that whole I love seeing people develop. So these are really, really bright individuals. I was the top grad my year from LMU. I went to LMU as an undergrad. That’s where I taught. I got my PhD from USC.

But then I was back teaching, and so I had people working, who were my students who were very similar to what I was as an undergrad, the very top students. I’m like, “Man, hey, I’ve got this really cool thing I’m going to be working on. Do you want to come work for me?” They’re like, “Yeah, that’s great.” Actually, let’s see, what year was it? Must have been ’97, no, probably the summer of 98, we actually had about 9 or 10 people working out of one of the computer labs over at Loyola Marymount, and that was just awesome.

We had a great time. It was a really fun summer. It was really fun right until towards the end of the summer the department chair walked in to the computer lab, and he’s like, “Hey Tony, what’s going on here?’ I’m like, “Oh, well, I found all this great work that the students could do, and they could learn a bunch of stuff.” Well, he was actually pretty cool about it, but they instituted a policy of no commercial entities operating out of the computer labs at Loyola after that.

Andrew: I see, but you got your start that way, and then they can go and work from anywhere, from their homes, I’m guessing. Is that what happened next?

Tony: Well, we ended up getting an office after that. I really believe in collaborative work environments, so we still operate out of a single office. We’ve gone through a few of them. So we went and got an office and became a real company after that.

Andrew: I see. September, no, August. Where is that? There it is, August 3, 1998, Technical Empowerment moves into a larger office. See our new contact information for the new place. Is that the first place that you actually moved into?

Tony: Yeah, that was.

Andrew: It is, okay. So the first office was out of the school. The new office was our own real version.

Tony: What was the date on that?

Andrew: 1998, August 3rd.

Tony: There we go. Okay, yup, the end of that summer. So soon after the department chair walked in on us.

Andrew: All right. So then you meet eHarmony. The vision was an outsource CTO who would set up people’s department, right?

Tony: Yeah.

Andrew: How did the reality change from the vision?

Tony: Yeah. So originally I was thinking it would be more my own consulting, right? So I was thinking of myself more as an individual. But what I was finding was that, okay, so I go work with . . . like one of the first startups I with was doing this really cool online system for art archives. So they had a desktop based system, and now they wanted to do it through the Internet. So then I’m like, “Okay, now I’m going to pull a team together that’s going to go build this.” Trying to go find resources for this company, either hiring them in or outsourcing them, it always was like, “Wow, that’s really, really, hard.”

So pretty soon I was like, “Well, you know what? I need to have this SWAT team that I can pull in, who I know can go build this thing out, because otherwise it’s like way too stressful for me.” So I can design out the greatest thing, but if I don’t have good resources that I can count on that can at least manage, like let’s say I’m hiring a couple people in-house. Well, if I’ve got one of my own architects that I know is just going to kill it, then they can make sure that this thing is going to get built right.

So it allowed me to then do more of the strategic level stuff, and I could have resources that I could count on. So it really changed from me doing CTO for hire work. So I still do that, right, but I’m almost like a little island in the company. At least half of the projects that I work on, I’m having significant resources that could be just an architect sort of directing some action or reviewing some code to soup to nuts development. I didn’t really envision TechEmpower as the services firm that it became with 30 developers that work there.

Andrew: That’s what you’re up to now?

Tony: Well, that’s what we are now. But I mean, we’ve been pretty steady over the last 5 to 10 years.

Andrew: There are dev shops in L.A. — like I’m thinking Citrusbyte — that would take an idea that a new entrepreneur has, build it out for them, and then help them hire developers who will continue to build out the idea. How is what you’re doing different from that?

Tony: It’s pretty similar. I know Will pretty well. They have more product strategy/design work designers in-house. They’ve changed their model a little bit. Our core is engineering. We have the engineers that you would want to hire, and we have the CTO you’d want to hire, and we can help you build up an in-house team. I’m not sure if that’s Citrusbyte or not. You said they do.

Andrew: You know what? I’ve lost touch with them, but I remember at one point that’s what they were doing.

Tony: Okay.

Andrew: The reason I’m asking is it seems like, because you call yourself an outsource CTO, you stand out from the pack of people who will develop ideas for entrepreneurs. I always think of you as completely different.

Tony: Yeah. Well . . .

Andrew: I wonder how much of that is marketing versus a real difference in approach.

Tony: I actually think there’s a huge in my attitude and our team’s attitude about these things, meaning that part of where this all came from is also people coming to me and saying, “Hey, Tony, I’m thinking about hiring this firm to go build this thing.”

The analogy I always use is like when I went to do a remodel on a house, oh my gosh, I was so out of my league in terms of what are these contractors doing to me? Luckily, I got introduced to a general contractor who could sort of manage things and make sure that things roughly went according to plan as much as possible.

So non-technical founders trying to evaluate an outsource firm, I have trouble evaluating an outsource firm and knowing whether they’re going to do a good job or not. So it’s like you need somebody, who’s going to be part of your team, that you can really trust.

Now, the funny thing is I come in and I absolutely am part of that team, just like if I was the true CTO there, not doing this part-time or whatever. I don’t know if that’s an attitude thing or what it is. But I am part of their team, and I am living or dying. Now I’m not . . . they’re 100% committed. They’re all in, and I’m doing it on part-time. So yes, there’s a little bit of a difference, but I feel like I’m an employee.

Andrew: I get that feeling. But you then would help them hire a development company to do it, or you do it yourself?

Tony: Yes. Yes. In some cases, I think hiring a development company makes sense for people, given, let’s say, that they’re doing a WordPress hack site. That probably won’t be TechEmpower for that. There’s a lot of dev shops that do it. Or maybe they’re taking a CMS and you need particular skillsets with the CMS. It could be lots of technologies involved where different shops make sense. It could be, “Hey, I’m hiring a few in-house team members.” Each case is a little bit different, what’s going to make sense. So pulling those pieces together is what I’m trying to do with that CTO hat on.

Them going directly to, “Hey, let me go hire a dev shop,” the vast majority of cases I’ve seen . . . now, of course, I’m getting the call because they know that they’re a little out of their league. So I’m sure there are people who are really skilled at doing that, but the people giving me a call are not as skilled, and so they really need some help. You know what? If it’s an hour conversation or a couple of hours, I’m always going to go have that conversation. There’s no charge for that or whatever. I can help somebody figure out whether they’re in good shape or not . . .

Andrew: That brings me to my next set of questions, and that is: How do you get customers? It seems like one of the ways you do is by just being open to helping any entrepreneur think through his idea and technical challenges, and through those conversations you find some customers. Is that one of the ways?

Tony: That’s basically it in a nutshell. I will say I am super bad at marketing and sales and all that stuff. I’m a classic technical guy at some level. Just like I love the idea of development of people, I’m a hopeless entrepreneur. I love when somebody’s got a good idea and we can dig into it. So I’m out there. I run a group called Mentor Night. It’s a start up CEO, round table, and I get super excited every time we get in and drill into somebody’s particular problems. I run the CTO Forum, 300 CTOs. I love getting involved, and giving back is just part and parcel of who I am.

Andrew: That’s a big thing. So let’s dig into that, because I do remember going into your office for one of the morning sessions. You had a group of entrepreneurs around a big conference table, and you basically open it up to any challenges that they had, from what I remember. Technical challenges specifically were welcome, where usually entrepreneurs don’t have someone to talk to about that, and because you understood the tech side of the business, you can give them feedback. Through those kinds of conversations, you help out, but you also introduce your skills to people who are potential customers and to people who know others who are potential customers. That’s one thing that you do.

Tony: Absolutely.

Andrew: I don’t know a lot of developers who do that. I don’t know a lot of people who are looking to, especially junior or newer companies that are trying to find newer dev shops, that are trying to find clients don’t do that. I think that would be a huge thing for them to say, “I will help any entrepreneur, within reason. Come over and let’s go out for dinner, or let’s go have coffee or let’s do some kind of round table, and I’ll help you all out.”

Tony: It’s funny. I don’t know if that’s the case or not. It seems like a lot of dev shops don’t have those sort of senior, strategic level kind of capacity, and they haven’t seen as many things. So there are, I’m sure . . . actually, the CTO Forum has a few people in there that have that senior level expertise, and a lot of them are willing to give back. So I actually will pull some of those resources in.

But you’re right. Dev shops, by and large, are going to take what you tell them, they’re going to price it out, and they’re going to go build what you tell them to build.

Andrew: And when they think about marketing at all, what they think about is blogging. Right?

Tony: Are you talking the dev shops?

Andrew: Yeah.

Tony: Some of them are pretty aggressive with sales and marketing, but they’re . . .

Andrew: What have you seen that works especially well?

Tony: For a dev shop?

Andrew: Yeah.

Tony: Wow. Again, I’m not good at this. So I have a very particular sort of approach to it, and it’s basically a big word of mouth network.

Andrew: I feel you are very good at this, and I fell that that’s something that a lot of other people can learn from. I think one of the reasons why you are good is because you’re not selling, but you’re helping people out, and by doing that, you’re building connections with potential customers and a reputation beyond them.

Tony: Yeah. Every person that I meet, what I want them to walk away with is if you run into somebody who’s got a great concept but doesn’t know technically what they need to do, they should call Tony. If you run into somebody who’s got a technical challenge, they hired a shop and things are not going well, you should call Tony. Tony’s going to help you. That’s as simple as it is, and then the question is how do you get that message out there. And so I get it out through lots of sort of give back kinds of opportunities.

Andrew: How do you have time to do that, to take all those phone calls? That’s a big responsibility. Someone now introduced you to someone else who’s having a big challenge. They can’t wait. They need you urgently. They need you to help them, and you have a business to run.

Tony: It’s an hour long phone call, and it’s something that I’m going to be excited and passionate about. It is not hard to do. I do one a day. If it was five a day, I would have a problem. But at one a day it’s great. Worst case scenario, I’d find other ways to scale up those conversations. But to me, having too many of those conversations, that’s not even part of the equation right now.

Andrew: Okay. So it’s one a day of those. You have the CTO round table. What was the other event that you do?

Tony: Mentor Night.

Andrew: Mentor Night. Mentor Night happens how often?

Tony: Once a month.

Andrew: Once a month. And the CTO round table?

Tony: CTO is once a month plus a few evening events.

Andrew: Okay. So that’s essentially your big marketing.

Tony: That and a big network here in Los Angeles.

Andrew: How do you work your network?

Tony: Not very well. Getting together with people periodically, staying in touch with the people that are the prime referral sources. Like there’s some attorneys that refer business. They run into some people who are forming companies and have great ideas and maybe are going to raise some capital, and they’ll . . .

Andrew: So by networking then with the lawyers, you get to meet their clients who have some funding.

Tony: Yeah, things like that.

Andrew: You know what else I see? The Web Framework Benchmarks. That’s a page that gets you a lot of attention online. What is that?”

Tony: Yeah. I was describing two kinds of calls. The good situation calls are, “Hey I’ve got this great idea. How do I get it built?” The other kinds of calls you get are, “Hey, Tony, we built this thing. It’s creaking. It’s not able to scale. That’s a common one. Or, “Gee, we’ve got lots of problems. We fix one bug and another one pops up.” So those are the other kind of calls that I get.

So on the scaling side of things, because we’ve built a lot of things that have big scales — eHarmony, for example — we’ll often get calls where people are having trouble scaling things up. So, out of that, often they were on PHP or Ruby. We would go in and try to improve the performance, and we always could.

But a certain point, we were like, “Wow, some of these things just, no matter how much we improve it, it just seems like the framework itself, so the PHP framework we’re using, Cake PHP, let’s say it’s prime offender, it’s just seems really slow.”

S the question comes up: “Well, how slow is it?” So we started doing these benchmarks to test out all the different frameworks that are out there. The results are really remarkable. So we realized, wow, there’s a 100x difference in Cake PHP performance versus a top-performing framework.

So if you’re trying to build something scalable, you probably don’t want to base it on that. Otherwise you’re going to need a ton of work to scale it up, tons of servers. There’s going to be a lot of cost that goes along with it.

We started it up ourselves, and then we open sourced it, and now we’ve got contributions from tons and tons of frameworks and individuals. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger. We’ve got some interesting partnerships with people who are helping to get this thing to go.

But ultimately, it’s a help to developers to understand, “Well, what’s the implications of these technologies, particularly with performance, and how much work am I going to need to do?” So in the CTO Forum that I run, several of these frameworks have bad names already, and now there are some numbers behind the bad names and reputations. As well . . .

Andrew: This is one of the big sources of traffic for you.

Tony: It’s a big source of traffic. It certainly . . .

Andrew: And credibility.

Tony: Yeah. It’s certainly increasing. So it’s kind of fun, because we’ll go in — like we’ve got a large gaming company as a client — and when we walked in the door, they were talking about languages. They go, “Yeah, have you seen those frameworks? The framework benchmarks?” We go, “Yeah, that’s ours.” “Oh, my gosh. That’s you guys.”

We didn’t do necessarily as good a job with getting TechEmpower to be a . . . I mean it’s called the TechEmpower Framework Benchmarks, but they hadn’t put the two things together. It really does have a lot of visibility in the developer community, and it’s had a very positive effect on the framework people themselves. Like the Go folks saw some of the performance issues that were surfacing in the benchmarks, and they actually addressed some of those very specifically and got things to happen.

Andrew: The original idea, as I understand it, was eventually to build up this business, hire a bunch of people, and then sell TechEmpower.

Tony: Yeah. So back when I started it, in 1997, there was all the Aviant, Scient, all those consulting companies helping people become digital businesses, right. There was tons and tons of roll up activity. So you’d go buy a TechEmpower in every city, and you would form this thing and go public with it. That happened a lot. In fact, I just had coffee yesterday with a person who was part of that whole wave, and it was kind of interesting to reminisce with him. What often happened, though, was all those things cratered in the meltdown, the 2000 downturn.

But that was my belief for it. Now, what was interesting about it, though, is now when I look at it, I mean unfortunately, in the VC world, lifestyle business is a really bad word. But we are kind of a classic lifestyle business. I just love what I’m doing. I love talking to entrepreneurs about what they’re trying to build and jumping in and trying to figure out, “Well, what is it they need to build?” I would have a hard time defining a better world for me. I’m super excited every day about . . .

Andrew: Even though you can’t have two homes, one on each coast, and three cars in each garage.

Tony: You got it. It’s a great thing. I love doing it. I love the team that I have. They’re just amazing technical people. It’s great. The variety is great. The variety of technologies, it’s sort of an unfair advantage when I go to hire somebody, I get to say, “Hey, you get to work on this technology, for this startup, and that technology for that startup.” So it’s like always new technologies. So it’s kind of like a pipe dream for a technology person, the kind of stuff we’re doing, and the downside is, as you just expressed, if I was the original CTO for eHarmony and a true CTO, then hopefully I would have been able to take money off the table like some of the founders did there. No, I’m not living half-time in Tuscany and half-time in Malibu.

Andrew: The dotcom bust is what sent you in this direction. How did your business, with its new office and its big dreams, how did it deal with the dotcom bomb in 2000?

Tony: That was our most painful time. Well, let me talk about what happened to us and then talk about kind of some decisions we made afterwards. So the dotcom, it was like April that the stock market melted down. We were doing a lot of work for startup clients, about half our business startup clients, half our business larger companies. That’s kind of still the way we are today.

Our startup clients all assured us that things were great, things were moving forward, we’re doing well. Part of it was they were somewhat being assured by their investors that that was the case. Part of it was you don’t want to believe you are heading toward earth, and you’re about to crash. So in December of that year, of 2000, it’s like all of a sudden I got a couple of calls from startup clients. “Hey, by the way, you know that overdue invoice that you were emailing me about? Well, I’m not going to be able to pay that, and I’m not going to be able to pay you going forward. All those developers you’ve got working for me, good luck.” Actually, one of the people that gave me that call, I ended up doing his startup again. He had another one that he did, in I want to say 2009 or ’10, and so we worked together on that. I mean I sort of feel . . .

Andrew: No hard feelings. I’d be pissed. No, I’m not working with you. I can’t count on you. Pay me what you owe me.

Tony: Our payment terms certainly changed.

Andrew: I see.

Tony: So startups, we have to be more aggressive about having payment up front. But honestly, he was hurt as much by his investors and some of the choices they made. He had actually a very interesting, growing business. The investors came in. It was a go-go time, and so they were like, “Hey, let’s buy all of this stuff. Let’s put all these people in place.” So when the meltdown occurred, they couldn’t pull back enough to still have a viable business.

Andrew: Right.

Tony: So they started out with a viable business, and then investment comes in and they make a lot of choices, and now they can’t rein it back in. So it killed the business. So I felt for him. These are my babies too. So yes, upset about that and really hard to . . . we had to let some people go. It was definitely a very hard time for us, bleak time, and it made us make different decisions about growth.

So we were growing, growing, growing as fast as we could. Then we were like, “No, let’s stay relatively the same size.” So we have grown extremely slowly since then. So we were probably 20 people in 2001, and we’re 30 people now. So we accepted, “Hey, we are a lifestyle business. It’s not all about growth. It’s about doing great work, being profitable, managing risk, all of those.”

Andrew: You’re handling that way better than I. I actually as you we’re saying it, usually when people talk I’ll do research on what they just said so I that can come back in with more information. You were saying how you worked with a person who didn’t pay you. I started googling the person who didn’t pay me back then. I’m still upset. I am still upset. You owe me money. I am pissed. I wouldn’t work with him again. I don’t care what new opportunity he has for me. Those were tough times.

Tony: Yeah, those were definitely tough times. What’s funny is I got, let’s see, two calls within a week, and this was right before Christmastime too. One of them I actually didn’t have hard feelings about, and I would have to go back and figure it out. But the way they talked to us through the whole process I think gave us more visibility into it, and so we had sort of insights into what was going on, and I didn’t really hold it against them. They were being very transparent about it, and so I could make choices. I made some dumb choices. So it was kind of on me as much as on them.

Andrew: What do you mean? What’s a dumb choice that you made when they were being transparent?

Tony: I knew they were heading towards earth. I knew that their investors were promising the following things, and I believed the investors. That was a dumb choice. I should have . . .

Andrew: I see. But you know what, you’re right that . . . I’ve had also, there’s someone else that I was thinking of when you said they were being transparent with us. There’s someone who was being transparent with me, and that did make all the difference. I have nothing but positive feelings about them. So that’s a lesson that I can take away from it. Even in those tough times when it feels like you can’t admit failure, you can’t admit what’s going on, to talk to someone who you owe money to and say, “Here are some of the challenges. Give me an opportunity to turn it around, but understand there’s some risk.” That goes a long way.

Tony: Yeah, absolutely.

Andrew: Meanwhile, by so the way, this guy who I’m thinking of, in a bio on another site, a respected site he is saying, he’s listed as having raised a certain amount of money and having sold his company. They sold the business basically in bankruptcy. So still years later you can get credit for having done that.

Tony: Yeah.

Andrew: That’s one of the problems that I have as an interviewer that there are a lot of people who basically had failures and some aspect of the failure was acquired by someone else, like the name, the employees, the floor mat was acquired by another company. Then they claim that they were acquired by a business, and everybody else just starts jumping on that.

They’ll be interviewed by someone else. Then a reporter will see that interview and use it in an article. Then, of course, once it’s in those two places, you can put it on Wikipedia, and then this lie becomes a truth. Then I can get taken in by that as an interviewer.

That’s what keeps me up nights. I worry about that all the time. I don’t want to be one of these interviewers who just says whatever the guest wants him to say or allows the guest to lie to an audience. There’s no way for me to really know 100% of everything.

Tony: You do such a great job on these things though.

Andrew: Thanks. Part of it is by asking jerky questions, like there was someone who did us a favor who said, “Yes, I’ll do an interview.” Then I started looking into the guy’s traffic, and I said, “Look similar web shows you’re not getting much traffic. I don’t know anyone who’s ever bought from you. What’s going on?”

That person said, “All right, I get where you’re coming from.” He showed me his screen, walked me through where the revenues were and explained why no one else knows about it. But I have to be a jerk and ask those questions sometimes in order to get that answer in private.

Tony: Well, that’s not being a jerk. It’s being a good interviewer.

Andrew: You know, you’re right, but I do feel like a jerk saying, “Hey thanks for doing this favor. By the way, are you lying to everyone? Will please tell me that you’re not lying?”

Speaking of again the downturn that happened, you were at a Christmas party soon after.

Tony: Yeah.

Andrew: What happened at that party? Because I think this is an emotional part of business that I’m never ready for.

Tony: Actually, it all comes back to something we were talking earlier. So I was teaching at the time. We’re going through this downturn. I’m at a Christmas party. There’s a lot of people and their significant others there. So that was all at the same time. I’m like, “Wow. this is going to be hard, and I need to definitely take this more seriously and dedicate myself to this, because I can’t leave people in a lurch.”

Andrew: Part of it Tony is you’re looking at a roomful of people, and it’s not as big a room as it would have been a few months before, because you had to let some people go.

Tony: Actually no, the Christmas party was the peak.

Andrew: Oh, I see. Okay. Then it was afterward you let them go.

Tony: Yes. So our big layoffs were in January. But it was those phone calls, actually I think the phone calls came between, because the Christmas party was probably like let’s say December 10 or 12, something like that. The calls come in December 20 saying, “Hey, look we’re not able to pay you.” So it was a pretty brutal. I had actually already made the decision that, hey, I needed to buckle down on this thing.

The problem is, in this kind of business, it’s not like tomorrow I can make a phone call and get a new piece of work. There was nothing I could do. But it certainly said, “Hey look, let’s make some different choices here so . . .” 2007 was a tough time as well, and we weathered that a whole heck of a lot better.

Andrew: What happened in 2007?

Tony: Well, it was the financial crisis of 2007. A lot of companies pulled back, investment pulled back. So we’re working on sort of leading edge of everything. So when people are innovating a lot, which is today, there’s a lot of activity going on. So this time actually reminds me a lot of I’d say ’98, so there’s some very, very strong parallels.

Andrew: You mean 2007 felt like that?

Tony: Well, no ’98 feels like it’s leading up to 2000. In ’97, I don’t know that I had any premonition that things were really frothy then. But certainly lots of innovation, lots of investment. Well, once the financial crisis hits, everybody goes, Whoa, hang on. Let’s not push too hard as our company. Let’s not invest right now.”

So investment activity shuts down. Corporate investment activity shuts down. So when you’re a person who lives on innovation, are you going to do something new and innovative? So in 2007, certainly people were pulling back from innovation, and that was the . . . what was it called — the Great Recession, right?.

Andrew: Yeah.

Tony: So during that time and that was a long one, that’s three or four years, people are doing a lot less innovation. Now that was not nearly the crisis for us that 2000 was and I think partly because we made a lot of different choices going into that.

Andrew: What are the different choices that helped you save yourself?

Tony: We didn’t just grow, grow, grow as fast as we could. We didn’t think we were on this path to an exit. Grow as fast as you can, have as much revenue as you can, even if you’re not profitable. Take lots of risks.

I guess it was 2001, I brought on President and COO who had run firms like ours, and she actually manages everything day-to-day and actually keeps things growing in a very consistent and controlled way and helps us mitigate risks and manage all the things. I want to spend my time being innovative, CTO hat on, and she can spend all of the time operating the business. So she actually I would say is responsible for managing a lot of that risk.

Andrew: How did you find someone like that? How’d you find her?

Tony: She worked at a firm very similar to ours, and that firm basically cratered in 2000. I actually knew the principals of that firm. They’re good people, and they highly recommended this individual. It was great.

Andrew: It’s interesting that you’re saying the business part is handled by her and the tech part by you essentially, right?

Tony: Yes.

Andrew: But you’re entrepreneurial too. When we asked you in the pre-interview, were you always entrepreneurial, you said hopelessly. Even marbles became a business for you. What was that when you were a kid?

Tony: So I had a lot of these stupid little things. This must have been fourth grade. Marbles were a big thing, and I’m probably dating myself now. Everybody had marbles, and there would be various marble games you could play, and I wanted to get everybody’s marbles. So I came up with essentially what were carnival games. They were gambling games. So there was definitely an element of skill to them, but I was the house. I would always win.

I came up with these, and next thing you know I’ve got sacks full of marbles. One thing led to another. I did several gambling related things. I was the bookie, taking bets and all that kind of stuff in school. Then when I was 15, I actually had my first legitimate, well legitimate business might be too strong. The local paper allowed me to run an ad for free. It said any teenager looking for odd jobs over the summer. So I put an ad in. This was out in the desert with really, really hard dirt called caliche. It’s basically clay. Pick axes would bounce off it. I mean it’s really bad stuff. So I offered ditch digging services, sprinkler installation, and man I got amazing responses.

There were only two teenagers who put the ads in, and this was free. Of course, back to our earlier conversation, test it. If nobody replies, nothing. But I got so much response that pretty soon I hired my buddies, and we made a lot of money over that summer. I don’t know. I’ve always been that way.

So now it’s like I got to do a couple companies in the early ’90s, and then since ’97 I’ve gotten to do several companies a year as part of it. Of course, now I have Aggregage as well, which is a startup.

Andrew: Tell me about Aggregage. You’ve been running this now for a while.

Tony: I have been. I basically saw an opportunity. I was a blogger. I’m still a blogger, although I don’t write as much as I used to. I’d go out and I would speak at a conference. I would ask a group of industry professionals, “Hey, how many of you subscribe to my blog?” And only about 5% of the hands would go up.

There was 100 fellow bloggers in this space that they should be reading. These guys are writing the absolute best content. In fact, I’m saying during my presentation, “Well, if you want all the great details behind this, go visit my blog.” I’m sure you find yourself saying that all the time too. “Go check this interview out.”

Yet, people don’t subscribe to it. It’s like, “How do I track all of these things?” Even if I did, there would be way too much content coming at me. So Aggregage is I’m going to pull all this industry content together in a given vertical, and then I’m going to use what the audience does with the content to find the very best stuff. So here’s what your peers in the industry are reading out of all of this amazing content. We partner with associations or events and deliver it out to an audience.

Andrew: Here’s one example, B2BMarketingZone.com, right?

Tony: Yes.

Andrew: That’s an Aggregage created site. It’s all articles on B2B marketing. You put them together by just grabbing the RSS feed of the best blogs and content providers on this topic. What do you do beyond that, to tell you that it’s useful?

Tony: The audience itself tells us. We track a bunch of data about every post, and it’s actually become really complicated over the years. We know what the norms are for that source. We also over time learn who the key influencers are who share good content. We learn who the spammers are.

We can surface . . . let’s say probably B2B Marketing Zone I’ll guess gets 250 pieces of content a week into it, and the system can figure out the audience is finding the following 20 articles are the most popular.

Andrew: So it’s also user submitted stories, not just RSS feeds, that are supplying the content?

Tony: It’s 99% RSS feeds.

Andrew: Ninety-nine, I see.

Tony: But it’s the audience interacting with it. So every time an audience member tweets an article, we pay attention to that. If that person’s a key influencer, we pay even more attention to it. If they share it on LinkedIn, Facebook, clicking on the article, clicking out of the newsletter, there’s a bunch of widgets installed everywhere. It’s kind of like Google’s ranking algorithm. It can go into this vertical industry and figure out here’s what the audience is finding to be the best content in that, and people can even personalize it.

Trade publications are on the big decline, but industry professionals still need thought leadership content. So where are you going to go get that? It’s out there. It’s just, “Hey, let me pull it together for you.”

Andrew: But it doesn’t get a lot of traffic from what I can see, right? B2B Marketing Zone, for example, according to a similar web, is doing less than 5,000 hits a month, isn’t it?

Tony: I think it’s a little higher than that. Probably not a lot higher than that, but I think it’s a little higher than that. Then the other part you’re not seeing is the newsletter. The newsletter is actually probably the larger consumption point.

Andrew: The email?

Tony: Email newsletter, yeah. Most people on sites sit back and just grab the newsletter, and the newsletter has in it here’s the top 20 articles, and it’s the title plus a snippet. There’s a lot of people who only read the newsletter and never even click across the articles. But if you . . .

Andrew: Then they go right over to the articles?

Tony: Yes, exactly. So we’re not going to get that web traffic off of that, but it provides really high value. Of course, we’re inserting ads into that. We’ve got verticals with . . . probably B2B I’m going to guess is 10,000 subscribers. We’re doing a whole bunch of B2B verticals. E-learning probably has 70,000 to 80,000 subscribers. HR is 150,000 subscribers.

Andrew: Really, 150,000 HR subscribers?

Tony: Sure.

Andrew: That’s huge.

Tony: Yes. In B2B, it’s huge. If you’re talking eHarmony, in a consumer space, it’s a tiny number. Each one’s little niche is . . .

Andrew: Yeah, I see what you mean. But HR professionals are hard to reach anyway, and there are a lot of people who have a financial interest in reaching them. So that’s a very valuable list, isn’t it?

Tony: Absolutely.

Andrew: What kind of revenue can you make from that list?

Tony: Do you want what we anticipate over time?

Andrew: Okay.

Tony: We’re early into this. So right now we’re not making a ton on any one of the sites. We think over time we’ll be making hundreds of thousands of dollars each year on verticals. So HR certainly should be generating half a million . . .

Andrew: What is it doing now?

Tony: I can’t disclose that.

Andrew: Is it doing more than $100,000?

Tony: Actually, I don’t want to say. It’s early on into the HR. E-learning site . . .

Andrew: How old is it?

Tony: It’s just launched in the last month.

Andrew: Okay. Wow, and you got 150,000 email subscribers in a month?

Tony: Because we have partnerships. That’s part of the key. If I’m an association or I’m an event . . . let’s take an event. I run a conference that runs once a year or twice a year, and I’ve got an audience of 40,000. What do I do in between conferences? A lot of them, the answer is not a lot.

So we say, “Hey look, why don’t you pull all of the great content in your industry?” When we launched Recruiting Brief, we launched it with social recruiting strategies, and we were like, “Hey, let’s pull content together around recruiting and staffing and deliver it out to your audience on a weekly basis.” It’s co-branded with them. So when we launch, we’ve got 40,000 recipients.

Andrew: I see. That’s a really clever way to do things. I never think in partnerships. I always think, “How do I do this better?” I should be thinking partnerships more.

Tony: It’s funny, because for the first two years or so of this — this has been a long labor of love — for the first two years, I was doing everything through organic growth. I started with a site in e-learning, which is where I came out of. So it slowly, organically would grow. Then I got a partnership with somebody who said, “Man, I’d love to send this out to our audience.” I’ve been working so hard to grow, and then all of a sudden it jumps way, way up. I’m like, okay, all that organic growth, that was crazy because signing one deal all of a sudden our numbers dramatically change.

The other part of it was Google sometimes loves us and sometimes doesn’t. I’ve had some CTOs who were part of the CTO Forum, all of a sudden Google doesn’t love you one day, and your business goes away. I couldn’t raise money worried about that. I couldn’t go forward worrying about that. So the partnership thing is definitely the model we’re going to go forward with. It makes sense for the partners. This delivering value to their audience, it makes sense for us.

Andrew: It gives them another opportunity to earn some revenue from an audience that’s there and they’re sending email to.

Tony: Yup

Andrew: Wow. What about TechEmpower? What size revenue did you guys do 2014?

Tony: We do multiple millions in revenue, but I don’t want to tell you specifics. We’re a private company. We don’t disclose that.

Andrew: My team has here . . . actually we use Pipedrive to keep track of all the guests. Under metrics, they list $5 million to $10 million in revenue. Did that come from you? No.

Tony: No.

Andrew: Is that accurate at all?

Tony: Let’s see how do I answer this without answering it? That sounds a little high to me.

Andrew: Okay. But the interesting thing is, even though you and I have known each other for a while, it was Andrea on the team who found you, and it looks like she just found you on LinkedIn. You didn’t email her or email our system.

Tony: I assume this is . . . I mean I’ve known you forever, and I think I knew you pre-Mixergy even, and so I just assumed it was you.

Andrew: No, that’s the problem. First of all, when they’re people who I know in my life, I don’t think to ask them for an interview often. It just doesn’t come up. Sometimes it does come up, and I ask and then I feel a little bit weird about having done that. Like my wife works at Yahoo!, and I went to a lunch over there. This guy was telling me about the company that he sold to Yahoo!, and I immediately said, “You should do an interview on Mixergy.” Then I realized maybe it’s a little awkward for me to ask this guy who is a friend of my wife’s who they’re working on and told me some things, just because he’s working with Olivia, about what his business was. It’s a little awkward for me to now say, “Come and talk to the world about it.”

Tony: I don’t know. I think you provide tremendous value. I think that there’s so many . . . so Mentor Night, it’s half mentors who are multiple time entrepreneurs, it’s half start-up founders, most of them first-time entrepreneurs. The mentors are very willing to give back. Just like the CTOs are very willing to give back. I can’t imagine that anybody, when you ask, anybody has anything but . . . they could be way too busy, but in the startup world people are all give back.

Andrew: That’s true.

Tony: So I would have, if I’m you, no reservation in asking somebody.

Andrew: That’s a good point. They could always say no if they’re not comfortable doing it.

Tony: Yeah.

Andrew: But that’s one of the reasons why it’s good to have a team. Someone else is thinking in a way that I missed or about something that I missed. Now I’m curious. What’s her process for going through LinkedIn for finding good guests, because that’s also helpful? We keep looking for not new guests necessarily, but new processes for finding new guests, because if I could come up with one new guest, I filled up one slot and that’s it. But if I could come up with a process for searching LinkedIn to find people who are entrepreneurs who have companies that my audience would want to find out about, then I’ve got something I can keep growing with and use for the next year or two to get more guests or maybe even forever.

Tony: Yeah.

Andrew: So now I’ve got to check in with her.

Tony: Yeah. Mentor Night alone could probably fill up quite a few interviews.

Andrew: That’s another thing. That is one place where I do partnerships well, where I’ve said to TechStars, “Will you introduce me to some of your more successful entrepreneurs so that we can we do a TechStars series?” David Cohen, really helpful, he did that and we have a TechStars series. I did a Shopify series, where they introduced me, and a ThemeForest series where apparently there are people making over a million dollars selling themes on ThemeForest. Who fricking knew? So they did a series with me. Collis, the founder, introduced me to some.

So if you have some, I’d love to do a series that’s a TechEmpower series or any way you want to brand it.

Tony: Fantastic. We’ll do a Mentor Night series together.

Andrew: I would love it. All right, we’ll follow up with you. One more thing, before we started, I asked you when you said, “Hey, I love talking to entrepreneurs,” I said, “how about if my audience, if there’s someone out there who’s having a tech issue, would you be open to having a conversation with them?” You said yes, and you said email is the preferred way for them to contact you, right?

Tony: Yup. Absolutely.

Andrew: What’s your email address, or what email address do you feel comfortable saying here in an interview?

Tony: No, they can send it to my TechEmpower email address. It’s akarrer@techempower.com. Hopefully you can post that. Actually, you know what, if they search for Tony Karrer, they’re going to find my blog. On my blog I’ve got my email address. Actually, I’ve got a lot of blog posts on there you maybe should read before you even contact me. There’s even one called Free CTO Consulting, a bunch of questions I’m probably going to want to know the answers to. Check out my blog and . .

Andrew: You don’t want to say, “I can’t help everybody. I will only talk to entrepreneurs who have this, who are this far along or have this kind of problem.”

Tony: Well, I want to talk to somebody who’s got a legitimate shot of going somewhere with it, right? Often I find students are not really going to pursue this thing. But even if you’re super early stage, I can probably point you to some resources you can go for.

That said, most of the people I’m going to add the greatest value to are heading into development. They’ve done a lot of their customer development. They’ve got the idea pretty well figured out. They have some ability to pay developers.

So people who come to me who are looking for equity only developers, it’s like, “Well, I don’t know where those unicorns live.” That’s just too hard to find. So I can give them all the advice in the world, but they’re never going find the developers to do it.

So normally they’ve got a little bit of funding. They’ve got a decent idea that’s going to go somewhere. But even if you’re an entrepreneur and you’ve got an idea and it’s really early stage, I’m happy to talk to you. Maybe I’m going to find out, “Wow Andrew, you’ve got a massive audience here, and I’m about to get swamped.”

Andrew: I try to tell them to not . . . I think the best way to lead is to just say thanks for doing the interview and to start off soft and then come in and say, “I need a little bit of help.” I try to also say if you want to give your email address, maybe you should be a little clearer about who you want to email me so that you don’t get flooded and get overwhelmed. I think you did a great job of it, and you’re right that we should actually even talk about your blog, which is SoCalCTO.com ,right? That’s where your email address is. That’s where people can read about your work and get to know your ideas before they start connecting with you.

All right. Thank you so much for doing this. I actually want to ask you about privately about one of my past interviewees who’s having a challenge. Maybe I can connect the two of you. First I should say thank you so much for doing this interview.

Tony: You’re most welcome. I enjoyed doing the interview, and, Andrew, I’ve loved for years what you’ve been doing here. I listen to you almost every interview, and it’s great service. It’s great to be doing this. I’m super psyched about it.

Andrew: Oh me too. I’ve known you for a long time, and I’m really proud to have you on here. Thanks for doing this interview. If you are out there and you got anything of value out of this or any other interview, don’t just sit back. Contact the person and say thank you. That’s such a great way to get started with a conversation relationship. I’ve known Tony for years. Even if you don’t need anything from him now, especially if you don’t find a way to say thank you, I guarantee it’ll be worth your while. I guarantee you’ll appreciate it later on.

I’m going to say right now, Tony, thanks for doing this interview.

Tony: You’re most welcome.

Andrew: You bet. Thank you for watching.

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