Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
Okay, today's interview is with Ben Congleton.
Ben is the co founder and CEO of Olark, a tool that brings hassle free live chat to your website.
Olark is a Y Combinator startup that was founded in 2009.
Today Olark has over 5000 customers in 151 countries and has grown into a multi million dollar business.
Ben, welcome to the show.
Ben (00:55.440)
Omer.
Thanks to be here.
Omer (00:57.760)
So I've told our audience just a little bit about you.
Tell us in your own words a little bit more about you personally and then give us an overview of your product and business.
Ben (01:05.600)
Sure.
I'll try to keep the overview kind of brief.
For me, I've sort of been an entrepreneur for, I would say almost all my life.
Like I've never really worked for someone else.
So even when I was in high school, most kids on the side had like little odd jobs or whatever.
I was online on the Internet doing consulting services.
And so through high school, through undergraduate, and then I was actually working on a PhD when I was, you know, before I left that to go found Olark.
I've always basically just done schooling and entrepreneurship as sort of my entire source of income and just what I've been up to.
I founded my first company when I was in high school.
I think right around 1998.
I started this company called Nethernet that was doing web consulting which sort of spun into a web hosting company.
And so I ran this web hosting company when I was in undergrad, throughout undergrad, and ended up selling it right around the same time that we started started Olark.
So I don't know, I've been, I've been doing this stuff for a while personally, I think, you know, I really enjoy learning.
I think that that's part of the journey of being an entrepreneur is just, you know, going and attacking problems that you don't really know a lot about and learning as much about that problem and trying to solve it and just doing that over and over again.
So it's worked out pretty well.
And then on the side, you know, I enjoy a crazy adventure here and there or you know, playing, playing competitive team sports and doing rock climbing when I can.
Omer (02:58.410)
Awesome.
Now we'll, we'll probably talk about this a little bit later in terms of, you know, company and company culture.
But I got to say, when I was doing research for this show, I watched the video that you guys have on the about page on olock.with the team.
Yeah, I got to say, I mean I've seen a lot of like, you know, corporate company type kind of videos created which kind of more look like propaganda, but I actually believed all those people that they really loved working with, you know, with you and Olak.
So yeah, great video.
Now before we dive into more details, we like to kick things off with a success quote to better understand what drives and motivates our guests.
What is one of your favorite success quotes?
Ben (03:42.730)
I thought about this for a little bit and I figured I could always pull something out of from good to great, but I decided to go a little bit non traditional for you.
So this is my quote.
My quote is practice not doing and everything will fall into place.
And this is a quote from the Daode Cheng.
And so the reason I like this quote is because in a way it's kind of making you think about work and, and the stuff that you do as something you don't really need to overthink.
Like something that you just need to sort of do and not stress out about.
I think that thinking about the efforts that we put forth, as in sort of helping us get into flow or helping us like really just do what needs to be done and not like sit back and worry about like the, you know, a thousand different potential outcomes or whatever can be a really, really liberating.
Omer (04:40.540)
I'm looking forward to talking about Ola, but you have such an interesting story before you even started that company that I really just want to spend a little bit of time talking a little bit more about what you were doing before you founded this business.
So let's go back to like the, you know, the early days when you created that first business and just tell me a little bit more about how that happened.
Ben (05:03.420)
Sure, sure.
So this was, we're going way back now, so we're like right at the beginning of high school, this is like freshman year of high school and so freshman year of high school, like most sort of computer enthusiasts, I would like hang out on IRC and I would just kind of, I was interested in security back then, more or less.
So I always kind of mess around in that world.
But at the same time I felt like I was just wasting my time doing that and then playing video games.
And I decided that, you know what, I'm spending all this time on my computer, I should figure out some way that I can get someone to Pay me money to do this.
And so I started off just doing little odd jobs for people, so installing PHP scripts or just like little basic stuff for people that I'd met on irc.
And people would just mail me checks in the mail to do this work for them.
And that was pretty cool.
So I recruited some friends to help me, some friends who are also programmers to sort of help build software for these other random people I'd met online while I was a freshman or sophomore in high school.
And we managed to save up enough money that we could by a server, just like a machine.
And back then, none of us had driver's licenses, so my dad had to drive us over to this data center where we were going to put this computer we had bought.
And it turned out to be in some guy's basement, which is kind of funny, but this company called wdn.com so we go in this house, pretty nice house, and you go down to the basement.
It's all set up like an office, and you go into basically the guy's laundry room, and he has all these racks full of servers and a lot of flicking lights.
So we're like, this is a little weird, but let's try it out.
So we got a server there, and I think by the time we left wdn, we were one of their biggest customers because we had really figured out this need for web hosting back in 1998, and really trying to simplify the process with good customer service around it.
And by my senior year of high school, we pulled in, I think, somewhere around like $170,000 a year, which is a lot of money back there in high school.
Omer (07:34.910)
Did you know at a young age that you wanted to become an entrepreneur or was this really just kind of a hobby for you, that you were just.
It was just fun what you were doing.
Ben (07:46.990)
That's a good question.
Maybe this is just my Zen, like, tendencies.
For me, it's always been a lot of fun.
Honestly, I don't even think I knew the term entrepreneur or how to pronounce the term entrepreneur for a long time.
I'm not sure when I finally learned that term.
For me, it was always just about, hey, I enjoy working for myself and I enjoy kind of controlling my own destiny.
And so to do that, I need to get people to give me money and I need to provide them value for that money.
And I think it's where things started.
And then as time went on, I think I became more interested in just sort of providing this amazing experience to others, to solving other people's problems and really just helping other people in a scalable way.
Omer (08:38.900)
What drove your interest in doing a PhD?
Was it just to stay in education for as long as possible or did you have a kind of a longer term game plan in terms of where you were headed once you had the PhD?
Ben (08:51.840)
That's a good question.
I think so.
My father is a professor, so I saw that life and it seemed pretty awesome in the sense that he got to control his own time to a large extent and in a way control a lot of his own destiny and the work that he was doing.
So you get to work on his passion.
And so for me, a PhD seemed to be one potential path to be able to sit back and work on your passion a lot and really be self directed.
Omer (09:21.660)
Okay, let's talk about Olark.
How did you come up with the idea for that business?
Ben (09:27.340)
The origin story of Olark is pretty interesting.
It actually is called Abla back then.
And so, and this is, we'll go Back to like 2007.
So I'm in, I mean basically the intro seminar courses, doing the PhD at University of Michigan.
We had to read this article by a Harvard Business School professor named, I'm going to butcher the name, but it was like Shosama Zubrov.
And in this article it was talking about this future of disintermediation.
So the idea that what the Internet does is allows more producers and more consumers to conduct business with less middlemen.
You can go out and if you're a software vendor, you can sell direct to consumer.
If you're a manufacturer, you can sell direct to consumer.
It's just easier to do that.
And so that sort of sparked this idea in my mind that, well, how are these people going to talk to each other?
Previously when we had ran the web hosting company back in the 90s, we had used live chat software to help us talk to our customers.
And it had been immensely valuable.
It helped build real relationships.
It helped us really understand our customers and deliver a high quality of service.
I mean, it was sort of weird because we'd only offer live chat after we got home from school, but I guess it was still valuable.
You didn't even have to offer it 247 to get something out of it.
And so we looked around.
So I had this idea in my mind like, okay, there needs to be a good way for a business to talk to consumers.
Live chat worked really well back in the 90s.
I wonder what's going on with that.
And so we looked around and it was the Same guys from the 90s.
This is like 2007, the same, like four or five big companies that do live chat.
You got Live Person.
Then you had other companies like Bold Chat, provide support and instant service.
All these guys are like two English words.
And as far as I could tell, they were just trying to copy LivePerson so, you know, deliver something that was cheaper than live person to a slightly different audience, compete on sales, stuff like that.
And so we're like, oh wow, you know what, like if this, if this future exists where everyone will need a way of talking, you know, if you're a consumer talking to your business.
And existing live chat solutions haven't really changed in 10 years and are just as sort of clunky as they used to be 10 years ago.
I think there's an opportunity here, I think there's an opportunity to open up that live chat market to a large number of people who previously wouldn't be served by the existing players in the market.
Omer (12:13.590)
How did you get started by building the first version of the product?
Ben (12:19.750)
Well, the thing is, we were all engineers, as I said.
We had this hosting company, there was three of us, and we had actually tried to build a few other pieces of software too, because we really, the hosting company had kind of gotten this like maintenance mode, like the four hour work week mode, which is really, you know, it was just basically we were just running into the ground because we stopped caring about customer service.
And it was, you know, really bad, but it was still generating revenue, but offset that revenue.
We were also doing consulting, so we'd build software for other startups, but we really hated building software for other people because first of all we thought that we were fairly opinionated and I guess the people who are contracting us, we felt we could do a better job designing their product than they could.
And maybe we wanted to solve more important problems.
We actually ended up building a few, or at least prototyping a few other other company ideas, launching one of them, which is an audio plugin for GarageBand, which honestly I think if we had built it into an iPhone app like two years later, it could have been huge.
So we had this team of talented technical people that could build products and what we would do is we bill out our consulting hours and we were just really dumb back then and we should have charged a lot more money.
But let's say we build out our consulting hours for like $50 an hour.
We'd pay ourselves like $20 an hour and the rest of the time we'd pay out to ourselves over Just to work on abla.
So like, we'd spend.
Well, just to make the math easier.
We'd spend like two thirds of our time working on abla, which became Olark, and one third of our time doing consulting to fund that effort.
And that's kind of how we got the original prototype going, because the original prototype was launched, I think, in March or April of 2007.
And we just sort of had this thing on the side, project on the side for almost two years before we launched a paid account or decided to quit our jobs and make this thing like a real company.
It was just this fun side project.
We were had a lot of free users who kept demanding things and we'd have to go in and keep the servers up.
But once we had enough free users who kept wanting things from us, we decided, well, you know what, we can probably deliver some of these things that all these people keep asking us for and charge them money for it.
Omer (14:55.960)
And how were people finding out about this product?
Ben (14:59.000)
We built the simplest possible prototype, which is basically something that would take chat messages on your website.
I think we modeled ourselves after the little gtalk chat box inside Gmail.
We're like, look, if they can do it inside Gmail, I bet we can do it on any website.
And so we built a little thing that looked like the little Gchat box and decided to put it on, make it work on any website.
And so we did that and then we went out to forums and just started talking about it because people were asking questions like, hey, I want to be able to like chat with visitors on my website.
How should I do that?
And so we would just go respond to their forum posts.
Omer (15:38.300)
At what point did you guys realize that you had a potential business on your hands, that this could be the one thing that you could focus on?
Ben (15:49.580)
That's a good question.
That's a really good question.
I think at the time, like, we were fairly risk adverse.
So we were, let's think.
So it was me, Roland and Kevin back then.
And I think what happened here, here's actually the moment that made this thing real.
It's kind of funny that this is how it went down, but more or less, Meebo.
I've been very active on Meebo's forums, just trying to like more or less just steal users from them because they, I mean, like, Meebo me wasn't their core product.
And I was just like, oh, well, there's all these people who keep asking for features for Meebo Me.
Well, I'll just Give them those features in Abla and it says it's free.
Like, why not just them use Abla?
So I was very active there and somehow they kind of got wind of us through that.
And so I think it was in 2008, Meebo, I think Seth, their CEO, shot me an email or something like that and said, hey, we're interested in possibly acquiring.
I don't know if he said possibly acquiring your company, or maybe he just was like, hey, I want to meet you guys.
And so he.
He flew me, Roland and Kevin out to Mountain View, and we were just like, oh, man, we're going to make it big.
We're going to get all this money.
We didn't really know anything about venture capital or Silicon Valley or anything.
I think at the time I thought Silicon Valley was just some place out in the wilderness somewhere.
I didn't realize it was right next to San Francisco.
But in any case, we made it out there and met the team and it felt surprisingly like a job interview.
And we were just like, huh?
Why are we.
Like, why aren't we talking more about our technology?
And why are we spending all this time more or less informal interview style?
I don't think that they did a very good job setting our expectations there, but they're a pretty young company and I totally understand where they're coming from.
So anyway, at the end of that, what happened is Seth was like, hey, we're interested in buying your company.
We'll offer you tens of thousands of dollars for it.
Are you interested?
And I was just like, no way.
That's not really enough money to make it interesting to me.
Then he said, also, I want to try to hire Kevin.
And so I was like, well, you know what?
We're not going to sell the company, but you can try to hire Kevin if you want to.
Seth tried very hard to hire Kevin to come work at Meebo and do engineering there.
And Kevin turned them down a couple of times.
And I think finally they baked Kevin cookies and Seth flew out there to Virginia to go hang out with him for a while and talk about life.
And finally they managed to convince Kevin to go join them.
At the time, it was just me and Roland.
I was working my PhD.
Roland was.
He was doing freelance consulting, more or less a lot of design work, and kind of thinking about going back to architecture school.
And so Roland, I were sitting there and we're like, well, Kevin's gone.
And Kevin was basically the tech lead.
Both me and Roland were fairly technical, but Kevin was genius.
He went To Internationals for Computer Olympiad stuff.
Really, really bright programmer, one of the smartest guys I know.
Well, knew before Olark.
I think now I've hired a lot of people who are a ton better than me at programming, but back then I was very impressed by skills.
So it was basically me and Roland, we're kind of like, well, do we make this thing real or do we just kill it?
Because we can't kind of keep going through life just thinking that this thing is sort of like pipe dream company of ours.
And so basically what we ended up doing is I think Roland applied to yc.
Like, Roland sort of took the lead on applying the YC to sail it to.
And then we sort of decided like, hey, we're gonna go try to find some more co founders because I don't think we can do this alone and then try to make this thing real.
So we.
So I think it was kind of like August or September of 2008.
Yeah, August or August or September 2008.
We really decided like, hey, you know, we're not going to kill it, we're going to try to make it real.
And so once we decided to try to make it real, I started working, even working harder on the product.
I think that I spent a lot of time just talking to people, trying to network in the Ann Arbor technology community, meeting other people who are like avid technologists.
We went through a bunch of different sort of potential co founders to bring in friends from college or other people we met.
And eventually I ended up meeting Matt, who sort of is this genius who works with me and Roland at Olark, and also this guy named Zach, who's another incredibly bright, very talented developer, manager, everything.
And so it's actually quite to our advantage that Kevin ended up leaving and going out to Meebo, because through that it pushed me to really extend my network and meet other really amazing people who had different experiences for me that really helped form those original four people to make this thing real.
Omer (21:28.880)
So you guys went through Y Combinator and then launched Olog in 2009?
Ben (21:36.310)
Yeah, in 2009.
So you can call the launch or whatever.
We changed the name to Olark from Abla in like, I don't know, we'll call it like July of 2009.
And then we launched on TechCrunch as Olark at the end of August in 2009.
Omer (21:56.310)
When did you get your first paying customer?
Ben (21:59.990)
Probably before we went through yc.
So we worked really, really hard to launch paid before we actually went out to California because our approach to this whole thing was sort of like.
So actually what ended up happening, Roland sort of set the things the most you apply to yc.
We actually got the option to defer going to YC back then.
The market was horrible and YC offered our batch.
Probably the only time they'll ever do this opportunity to defer because they weren't sure anyone's going to be able to get fund in January of 2009.
So we pushed it back.
We decided to push it back six months, our application back six months and just worked really, really hard.
I think we actually launched paid before our YC interview.
So during that time.
So during the spring of 2009 we applied to Techstars.
We started going to conferences and presenting our product there.
Just trying to like build awareness.
We were, we were basically very committed on making this thing real whether we got into Y Combinator or not.
Omer (23:07.880)
How did you position the product against these competitive offerings that had been around for quite some time and had a lot more functionality than anything you guys were offering?
So how did you try to differentiate yourselves?
Ben (23:28.290)
We focused on a few things.
One is we focused on beauty.
We wanted to make ours beautiful and have an incredibly good ux.
I think that no one else in the space was really concerned at all about user experience because they built their products in the 90s and hadn't really iterated that much.
I think mostly what they had done is they had expanded horizontally and had a very like sales driven culture because they're mostly selling like Fortune 500, right?
They weren't really selling direct to direct to consumer more or less like in the sense where it would be a turnkey purchase.
And so because all these guys sort of had that older model of like, hey, we're focused on like a bunch like a few big fish and not just everyone.
We were able to sort of enter that space and say like, hey, we're interested in everyone that they don't care about.
And I think that our messaging and the way that we sort of define the product and the way that we supported it really resonated with a large number of people who had previously thought that live chat was something that Comcast and the banks had and wasn't really something that would be on your hip new shopping startup or something that WordPress.com would use.
Now I think we've proven that live chat is for everyone.
But back then I think that it was really thought of this sort of older and more clunky technology similar to a call center.
And I think at the time you could almost Position yourself as we're not live person.
And everyone would be like, whoa, we love you.
Because live person has certain incentives and they care a lot more about the people that pay them $10 million a year than the people who pay them $1,000 a year.
And that's just like economics of their situation.
And so there's a lot of these people that we are able to make money off of that.
Honestly, live person wouldn't care about that much because given their scale, what's like a thousand little guys when you could get one big guy?
Omer (25:39.010)
Okay, so you've, you've turned this idea into a product.
You've rebranded as Olock.
You guys have got some, some revenue coming in and you've gone through, through yc, what were the main things that you guys were doing to acquire new customers.
Ben (26:01.340)
So I mean, one thing that we do is, you know, Olark has our branding on it, right?
So whenever you're using an Olark chat widget on your website, for the most part, unless the customer's white labeled it, you'll know that it's Olark.
So that certainly has helped us a bit because we've had a lot of really awesome, progressive, great companies using Olark.
So that has been very valuable to us.
The other thing that we've done is focused and invested heavily in customer service.
So at Olark, everyone on our team does a rotation on customer service.
Customer service is not this, this silo that communicates with product via like a PM or like a head of customer service or via JIRA or something like that.
Like customer service is the lifeblood of Olark.
So every new hire goes through the customer service onboarding process.
When we interview, we make sure people want to talk to customers.
We have a triage team that deals with tougher issues very quickly.
Like a team of engineers just dedicated to solving issues very quickly for customers.
And I think that having a very strong word of mouth referral from our existing customers has been valuable.
And then we've also done some partnerships which drive.
They don't make or break your business, but they certainly help.
So working with.
So for example, we have many, many customers who use Olark and Salesforce together.
We have many, many customers that use Olark and Shopify together.
Olark and Magenta or Olark and BigCommerce.
And so we're.
So we make sure that we are in the places where and finding partners where we have common customers where together we can provide a much better solution than a part.
Omer (27:57.270)
How much revenue were you guys doing in your first year after you launched?
Ben (28:01.590)
That's a good question.
Like probably under 200k or something like that.
I mean, so it was pretty low that first year.
So yeah, definitely under 200k I think is a pretty easy thing.
It could have been even under 100k.
I'm just having trouble remembering.
Exactly.
Omer (28:21.160)
And had you hired any people by then?
Ben (28:23.560)
Oh, no.
I mean, we bootstrapped this thing for a while.
So we went through YC go through demo day and now demo day is this feeding frenzy.
But back then in a tough market and Olark wasn't the sexiest company that came out of YC back then we had some offers to raise money, but it seemed like they wanted a lot of control and we felt like we could build the business without needing to give up control for money.
What we ended up doing was just raising about 60k.
So our total outside capital that was put into Abla or Olark is $85,000.
So to give you an idea of like what the initial outside capital ally
Omer (29:10.790)
was total to date is 85,000.
Ben (29:13.670)
Total to date.
Total to date.
Omer (29:15.910)
So at what point did you feel that you had traction and the business was really starting to grow?
And at what point did you start hiring people into the company?
Ben (29:25.670)
I mean, honestly the way we looked at it is it was just cash flow based.
So we felt like we had traction and probably like we were very naive or maybe the market wasn't so frothy as it is today, but we just didn't have the cash to hire people.
So we waited until we had the cash to pay ourselves and then we pay our rent, pay us some money and then we hired someone.
I think our first, we had one contractor we hired towards the end of 2010, but honestly we just didn't have enough money to pay him what he was worth back then.
He ended up going off working at another company, is now founding his own company now and he uses Olark.
So I thought that was pretty excited about that.
And then our first full time hire was I think in February of 2011.
Omer (30:18.710)
So let's talk about the business today.
How many people do you currently have working at Olark?
Ben (30:22.710)
I'm always a little bit unclear of the exact number, but we'll go with 30.
We have 30 people, give or take two I would say is probably the best way of describing.
Omer (30:31.490)
So the cash flow situation has improved.
Ben (30:35.890)
Yeah, you could say that.
We definitely, I mean we're definitely in a position where, you know, we're still entirely funded off of our customers paying their bills.
Right.
We have the 85,000 is, you know, it helped us pay our rent basically right at the beginning, but it really hasn't helped much since then.
Cash has grown quite a bit.
You can estimate out, I assume.
Given what you can assume for headcount, I would say we've built a pretty exciting and interesting business.
Omer (31:16.030)
What's your revenue looking like these days?
Ben (31:19.070)
I still use multimillions is my term.
You can project whatever you want but, well, the public number is multi millions.
Omer (31:27.040)
So I did some digging around and I found a number somewhere.
I can't remember where it was.
Right.
Ben (31:33.360)
We've never given a public number, so whatever number is out there is probably
Omer (31:36.560)
speculation, so maybe somebody made it up.
But I find a number of about 7 million.
I don't know if that's close or not.
Ben (31:44.480)
I won't comment on one way or another, but.
Omer (31:49.500)
All right, so what's the one thing in your business that you're most excited about right now?
Ben (31:56.300)
So there's a lot of things that I'm excited about, but I think the number one thing that I'm currently excited about is that we're about to roll out some really interesting changes to our product to help our customers sort of track the quality of their interactions in a much stronger way.
And we're doing this not as some tool to help managers have better oversight, but to really help individual operators who use Olark to chat to improve, to self improve and just get really, really good at helping customers and help them track when they do a really excellent job and track when maybe they don't do quite a great job and also really tease out the difference between the operator doing a good job and the product being unsuccessful or a policy being unsuccessful.
Because I think a lot of feedback that people get support is very much like Boolean.
It's very much like, oh, thumbs up, thumbs down, five star, two star, whatever.
And the response rates on, on surveys that are sent out after a ticket is closed is less than 30%.
A lot of people say they're lucky if they get 10% response rate.
What we're trying to do is to really add an element of feedback into the chat experience that's designed for everyone who's using Olark, not just as a high end enterprise feature that we can get people to pay us more money for, but really to elevate the quality and the expectation of quality for anyone who interacts with the customer over Olark.
So I'm very excited about that.
Omer (33:41.870)
You know, one example, personal example that comes to mind for me is, you know, I use UMA for my phone system and, you know, those guys offer a live chat, but every time I've contacted them on live chat, if it.
If it's anything more complicated than having to restart my device, they always tell me to call on the phone.
And it's.
And it's pretty obvious that they're using maybe less experienced people on the chat side.
And if you really want to talk to somebody who knows what they're doing, you have to get on the phone.
So I think that's more of a policy decision than necessarily the operator or the software.
Ben (34:23.320)
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think that that type of experience is, sure, it's useful to mean just daylighting that experience that you're having to the company in a.
In a way that they can react to.
It is important.
And so, you know, when we think about reporting, we think about reporting this not just for management, but is also for, you know, individual operators, because we think that a lot of times, you know, the way problems get solved are very much like bottom up.
And so we're like, very, very interested in helping, you know, anyone on the front line have data that's going to help them make changes inside their organization.
Omer (35:08.850)
All right, Ben, it's now time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions and I'd just like you to answer them as quickly as you can.
Are you ready?
Ben (35:15.970)
Yeah, absolutely.
Let's do this.
Omer (35:17.650)
Great.
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
Ben (35:22.370)
I was going to hammer on.
Talk to your customers.
I think early in the early stage of business, understanding your customers as much as you can will really help shape your product, shape the services you deliver, and shape you as an organization.
So the better you understand your customers, the better off you are.
I'm going to go for a double lightning round, though, because I have a second one, which is Paul Graham talks a lot about how business is learning.
So I think just thinking about your business as, as a learning exercise, about anytime you make a feature or you take an action, what does the outcome of this action tell me about my customers, about my business?
If you can learn really fast and treat everything you do as an opportunity to learn, that is how you build a successful business.
Omer (36:14.390)
You broke the rules.
But those are both great pieces of advice, so I appreciate that.
Thank you.
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Ben (36:22.600)
All right, so I'll be nice on this one.
I did have two in my notes, but I'll go on.
Omer (36:28.440)
It's fine, too.
Ben (36:29.800)
I'll Shoot for two.
All right.
I like Breaking Rules.
So my first recommendation is Leadership and Self Deception.
This is a book, It's a management book, but it's mostly talking about self awareness.
I think that understanding yourself and sort of your internal biases and how you look at the world is incredibly important as a manager and as an entrepreneur, because you're going to deal with a lot of conflict when you're just building a company.
That's natural.
But understanding your internal biases when you go into that conflict is going to affect the outcome.
And then the second book I'm going to recommend is it's kind of a funny book.
It's called the Lapsed Anarchist Approach to Building a Great Business.
It's by the guy who founded this deli called Zingerman's in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
And the reason I'm recommending this book is because I think that Ari does a really, really good job of breaking down mission and vision, which sort of drives a lot of entrepreneurial endeavors like setting your mission and setting your vision in a set of very concrete steps with a very well defined definition.
And the reason I think that's important is because if you go out there and you do searches online or if you look around or if you're thinking about setting your mission and setting your vision, I think there's about, I don't know, like a hundred different definitions of what exactly that means.
I think that in Ari's book, he does a really good job of giving you some concrete working definitions that will sort of help you make mission and vision much more actionable for your company.
Omer (38:13.520)
Great recommendations.
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Ben (38:19.520)
So I'll go back to self awareness.
I think self awareness is essential and helps with your conflict resolution and helps you build companies and cultures that you want to be a part of.
Omer (38:33.360)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Ben (38:37.750)
I'm probably the worst at this, but I would say, personally, I don't stress inbox zero and I only check email a few times a day.
I would say don't stress being really, really quick about responding to things.
Understanding the difference between urgent and important is incredibly.
It's a very, very good lesson to learn.
I think that a lot of things will come in that people want very speedy resolution to, but it may not be important.
It might be implied that it is urgent, but it could easily be neither.
Omer (39:15.710)
I used to work with a guy who used to have a sign on in his office which said bad planning on your part doesn't constitute an emergency on mine.
I used to love that.
All right, if you had to start over tomorrow, how would you go about finding that next business opportunity?
Ben (39:35.460)
You know what?
I think that's a really hard question right now.
I'm very, very dedicated to this current mission of trying to improve the relationships between businesses and customers.
Live chat's one way that we're doing that right now.
There's one other problem that I think is very interesting, but basically untractable.
And so maybe a challenge to entrepreneurs, but let's say we solve businesses and customers.
My next startup, I'd probably want to look at structural unemployment.
I think that technology creates a lot of opportunities for technologists and people that are surrounded by technologists.
I think that it is not.
I don't think we've quite figured out how the information revolution affects everyone who's not like, you know, directly part of writing the software that increases productivity.
So I think it's a really interesting challenge to try to try to figure out how to create more jobs.
Omer (40:38.310)
I love that.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Ben (40:44.310)
All right, so I'll give you sort of a little anecdote.
So when right after founding Olark, we, we started off in this really dinky little house in Mountain View when we were doing Y Combinator, where we probably would have all gone crazy, the place that we moved to from that little townhouse was this big Victorian house in Palo Alto.
And it used to be an old Stanford sorority house.
The other thing it used to be is it used to be rented by Elon Musk.
So we used to get Elon Musk's junk mail at that house.
It wasn't just like someone to pretend to be Elon Musk.
We talked to our landlord and she actually had rented Elon Musk for one of his earlier companies in the 90s.
So I thought that was pretty hilarious.
And then the one thing on top of that, it was like the perfect startup house.
It turned out that Mark Zuckerberg had actually rented the apartment next door to that house in the past too.
So we just felt like this is our arrival in Silicon Valley.
But another sort of related fun fact that very few people know about me is in the backyard of this house, there was a 70 foot high redwood tree.
And when I saw this redwood tree and we first moved to the place, I saw this challenge, I was like, I am going to buy enough gear that I can climb to the top of this thing safely.
And so through many trips to rei, I accumulated enough rope and harnesses and safety gear that I felt comfortable climbing to the top of this thing.
So, like, for on the holidays, Olark had this tradition called the lighting of the redwood.
And so what the lighting of the redwood would be is I would climb, or me and one of my friends, Wilson, would climb to the top of this tree.
75ft up, amazing view.
You could see the bay.
You could see like the Stanford Hoover Tower.
It's like having your own private mountain in your backyard.
And we would hoist up a bunch of crazy lights to the top of this tree.
And so for one of these holidays, we actually hoisted up like a little minicomputer to the top that ran a bunch of crazy LED lights and created an iPhone web app that you could go and like, change the color of the lights that would sort of shoot up the tree into this, like, top thing.
And you'd actually go to Palo Alto on University Avenue and like, see the tree from the train station and fire these lights up.
That was so much fun.
It was a good adventure, I think, along the way.
Omer (43:15.830)
All right, and finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Ben (43:20.790)
I think quite honestly, it's definitely spending time with my wife.
I mean, I think she's been incredibly supportive to me and I think behind any successful entrepreneurs, they're friends and family that support them through ups and downs and, you know, really, you know, you're not going to have a good day every day.
And so it's good to have, you know, people to talk to and people who, you know, understand you and understand that you're more than your company and you're really, you know, have other passions and stuff outside of that.
So.
Omer (43:53.649)
And it kind of reminds me as well with my, I'm very lucky.
I've got a great wife.
And when I was thinking about, you know, quitting my very comfortable six figure job and wanting to kind of go out and do something on my own, I thought I was going to have to, you know, the biggest hurdle was going to be my wife, right?
I mean, trying to persuade her that I was gonna give all this up and go and do something completely different.
And, you know, when I kind of, you know, I prepared myself and I kind of went and sort of brought the subject up with her and she was like, okay, do it.
And I was like, what?
Ben (44:26.860)
What?
Omer (44:27.340)
You know, are we supposed to have like this big, big discussion and whatever?
And she was like, no, you know, if it doesn't work out, you can always get another job.
And that was it.
Yeah.
Ben (44:36.760)
Yeah, for sure.
For sure.
One thing I think that's great about entrepreneurship in the software industry.
I feel like it's sort of like starting a band, except for you can always go get a real job.
It's like a no risk going out to Hollywood and trying to do the band.
Omer (44:52.520)
All right, Ben, I want to thank you for joining me today.
It's been a pleasure talking to you and learning about ologies.
I really appreciate you sharing your experiences and your insights, and thank you for letting us get to know you personally as well.
If folks want to find out more about Olark, they can go to olark.com and if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Ben (45:13.730)
Honestly, Just shoot me an email.
Benolark.com youm can try me on Twitter Amandben, but you know, just shoot me an email or Twitter is probably the best.
The best option.
I try to be pretty accessible, but I am slow at responding to email.
It's one of my productivity tips, so.
Omer (45:32.050)
All right, thanks again, Ben.
Ben (45:33.650)
All right, great meeting you, Omer.
Omer (45:35.250)
Take care.
Bye.
