Advice from CEO of Blackboard
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When he was a graduate in an MBA program he invented a program that would allow students to upload papers over the Internet to their teachers. He showed it to some schools and VCs and they wondered why anyone would need that. However, a teacher thought it was a great idea, and Blackboard was born.
He tried to raise money from several VCs, but they turned him down. “I went to 50 meetings with 50 different VCs and I can assure you VCs do not invest in companies that are looking for money to develop their product.”
They found an investor that was a friend of a friend’s brother’s sisters’ wife’s husband… they heard he might invest in the space, and kept harassing him until he said yes.
Early on they found another company doing the same thing (a bunch of graduate students as well) and they merged together doubling the size of the company.
For him it was all about sales. To get started they gave away the product to 2 schools. Then sold it super cheap to 2 schools. From there they sold it to ten at full price, and so on.
If you can sell it once, you can sell it ten times, if you can sell it ten times, you can sell it 100 times.
A lot of teachers approach him and say “I really want to come work for you. The online education space is the future.” He asks two questions: can you program? Can you sell? If you can’t do either then you don’t bring any value to the company.
The product is never finished. When BB started to grow, they had competitors with better products. It didn’t matter. They outsold the competition (and eventually bought them out.)
FB, Twitter, Google they won the lottery. Companies can win the lottery too. He had a friend that was a plumber and won 10 million in the lottery. If he was going to do something that was advertising based, he would rather quit, become a plumber, and try to win the lottery.
The most important thing: sell, sell, sell.