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.
All right, today's guest is the co founder and CEO of Anthology, a Seattle based startup that was formerly known as Poachable.
Anthology enables employed tech professionals to explore new career opportunities anonymously.
My guest, along with his co founder, originally launched a startup called Yabli, a consumer to consumer advice site.
When that business didn't get traction, the team pivoted to launch Poachable and then later renamed that to Anthology.
The company has raised around $1.8 million to date and its investors include Vulcan Ventures.
And the companies recruiting through Anthology include Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Dropbox, Facebook, and the list goes on.
So today I'd like to welcome Tom Leong.
Tom, welcome to the show.
Tom Leung (01:18.030)
Thanks for having me, Omer.
I'm excited to have this conversation.
Omer (01:20.910)
Awesome.
Okay, so let's start by getting a success quote from you.
What?
Is there a favorite quote that drives and motivates you to do what you do?
Tom Leung (01:32.310)
Absolutely.
It's often used, so I'm sure your audience has heard it before.
But Wayne Gretzky once said you miss 100% of the shots that you don't take.
And I've tried to live by that logic and reasoning, especially since when I was younger, I didn't have a lot of confidence.
I probably didn't try as many things as I should have.
And over the years I've learned just in life and certainly in business, if you don't take a shot at something, then you definitely are not going to achieve it.
Omer (02:09.360)
So you are a former Microsoftee like myself, and also you spent some time over at Google and working in those kinds of companies.
You know, it's no walk in the park.
There's a lot of challenges and headaches that come with working on any major project in an organization like that.
But at least you have the security of a paycheck, right?
And so when you talk about not having that confidence, of not having tried more earlier, what pushed you to go down the entrepreneurial track?
Tom Leung (02:50.120)
You know, it's something that I had always wanted to do since I was very young and I had done all these things to prepare myself to be the founder and CEO of a company.
So, you know, I started out in management consulting, thinking that would be a good way to, you know, learned about business.
And then I went to business school.
Then I worked at Microsoft and then I worked at someone else's venture backed startup and then Google and I worked at a small cap company.
And at some point I looked up and I realized I was, you know, I was in my late 30s and I hadn't yet started a company.
And I thought, well, you know, at some point you just have to go for it.
And you know, luckily I had sort of enough financial resources saved up to kind of fuel a entrepreneurial journey.
I think it was hard earlier days because I think I was always in checking the box mode, like building the resume, thinking that, oh, I actually remember having breakfast with a VC once when I was, I think I was still at Google.
And I said, oh, you know, how do you guys pick CEOs for your startups that kind of need more adult supervision?
And I thought, oh, he was going to say, well, we look for really smart people like you, Tom.
And he didn't.
He said, well, the best CEOs are people who've done it before, who've run companies and ideally who founded and scaled companies.
And that was kind of a revelation to me because I think up until then from a career point of view, I had been very much focused on getting all the right logos, you know, if you will, on my, on my resume.
And, and, and that, that conversation kind of brought to light, you know, if you, if you want to be good at, at running a startup, you got to run a startup.
And so that combined with my entrepreneurial clock ticking caused me to make that leap back in 2012.
Omer (05:08.180)
Wow.
Okay, let's get into the details of Anthology.
I want to make sure that everyone listening understands more about the business and how the value prop is different to what else is out there in the market today.
So can you just give us a sort of, maybe a better explanation than I did of what Anthology is and the problem that you're trying to solve?
Tom Leung (05:35.600)
Sure.
So the big problem we're trying to solve is that there's a great amount of inefficiency in how labor gets distributed across companies.
And specifically, most of the people changing jobs are these active job seekers who are very unhappy with their current job or they're out of work.
But in reality, the best person for a job may be in another job, but they're just very busy and they don't want to send the wrong signal to their current employer and appear to be one foot out the door.
And so it creates this problem where there are certain dots that should be connected, but they're not because of these artificial barriers.
And the main one being Time and privacy.
What we've done with Anthology is we've built this platform that allows employed people to create private.
It's not like your LinkedIn profile.
No one can see it, your colleagues can't see it, even other recruiters can't see it until we identify a match that you approve.
But based on all this private information, we can then more intelligently identify opportunities that really meet your requirements and just as importantly, where your background skills and experience education meet the requirements of the employer.
And so it turns out that in reality there's really at any given time only a few opportunities that are really kind of two way matches where we think the member would really like the employer and the employer would really like the member.
And then what happens after that is the platform makes it very easy for the member to initially express interest anonymously, protecting their identity from being exposed, waiting for the employer to reciprocate interest based on their anonymous profile.
And then we can progressively reveal more and more information until ultimately we make a direct introduction and, and they have a quick phone call.
Omer (07:54.420)
Okay, I want to talk about how you came up with the idea for this business, but let's kind of go back to 2012 when you launched Yabli, because I think it's a really interesting story on, on the process that you guys went through to get to where you are today.
So you, you started out in 2012 launching this startup with the idea of this consumer to consumer advice site.
But things you, you just didn't get the traction on that business.
And when did you, when did you realize that this business was going to struggle?
Tom Leung (08:36.140)
Oh man, I think there wasn't like, I mean the big sort of cold water in your face realization was at the end of 2014, or maybe it was 13, let's see, 12.
Maybe it was the end of 13 when we realized we were not going to be able to raise any more money.
Up until then we had been pretty effective at raising angel capital.
So I think for yabli we raised 1 1/2 million in about 500k chunks.
So we were always able to buy ourselves more time just by showing some milestones and telling good story and suggesting that, well, we're just on the cusp, yada yada.
And after about two years we, I think our investors said, hey, you know, you can't be continuously on the cusp and you know, we're not, we're not going to keep giving you more money.
And prior to that I think we were always very good at sort of convincing ourselves that that oh, this, this one new feature or this new partnership is going to be the big deal or this new growth hack is going to change everything.
And it didn't because we, we tried it all.
And, and then when the investor said no more money, we were kind of, you know, didn't have any choice but to either close the company, sell the company, or try try a Hail Mary.
Omer (10:24.250)
Why do you think you guys didn't get product market fit with Yabli?
Tom Leung (10:29.280)
Yeah, it's a topic that we discussed a lot over that period of time and Yabli conceptually is pretty cool.
It was like Quora meets Consumer Reports.
It was this kind of community platform for making practical decisions and getting advice from like minded people.
And there was this kind of like karma and reputation system.
And you know, sometimes I actually still miss Yabli because, you know, I'll be in the market for a product and wish there were a way for me to kind of get that kind of authentic community feedback that's customized for me.
But to answer your question, I think the reason we never got product market fit was number one, I don't know that the problem we were solving was big enough.
I mean, it was big.
Like you could convince yourself it was big by saying, well, people spend a trillion dollars a year buying products and if 10% of those products idea decisions are bad, the economy is wasting $100 billion a year.
You can make all these arguments about how the size of the problem, but that's not really the way I think.
In hindsight I now look at how big of a problem is.
Now I look at it by saying, is there someone out there?
Or better yet, are there tons and tons and tons of people out there who are really in huge physical pain or emotional pain or intellectual pain over this problem?
When you think about product purchasing decisions, yeah, people may say, oh, you know, it's kind of annoying having to pick the right coffee maker or the right car or the right lawnmower, but they don't really curse about it.
You know, if you think about calling for a taxi before Uber, that was really a big pain in the butt and it really caused a lot of stress.
Like, oh, are they going to show up?
I'm going to miss my next meeting.
And you know, where the heck is this car?
And so I think number one, product purchasing is not a migraine headache problem.
Number two, even if it were, I think the way we were solving it was incrementally better than reading a bunch of Amazon product reviews.
But it wasn't sort of order of magnitude better.
And I think what we've tried to do with Anthology and I think what I've seen with successful companies is they pick a problem that's really huge.
In our case, it's individuals having a great career or companies filling crucial roles.
That is a big problem.
And then the way we solve it, we think is just fundamentally different than posting on a job board or just emailing people on LinkedIn.
And so yably didn't have that.
It was a problem, but not a big one.
And the way we solved it was better, but not orders of magnitude better.
Omer (13:42.950)
Okay, so no more money's coming in and suddenly I guess you're getting maybe a wake up call that now you guys really are in trouble.
What was the thinking?
What were you guys thinking at the time?
Were you already starting to think about a pivot?
I know you had started the process of trying to sell the company.
So just walk us through a little bit in terms of what you guys were going through then.
Tom Leung (14:16.820)
Yeah, so we tried a lot of small pivots.
So we took this consumer Q and A product sort of community.
And I think one of the first big pivots was I see a lot of consumer companies do, this is, oh, will white label it and we'll sell it to businesses.
So the idea was, okay, Yabli as a standalone community platform isn't scaling and can't acquire customers at scale.
But L.L.
bean or Rei or F.A.O.
schwartz or, you know, whatever, some stores, major retailers, they may want a community and we will sell the software to them and they'll just pay us a monthly fee.
And the argument will be, look, we spent a million and a half dollars creating this platform and this software.
But you don't have to do that.
You can just pay us ten grand a month and you know, it'll be the same cost as one engineer, but you'll have the whole thing and we'll skin it and yada yada.
So we tried that and we actually got a keynote presentation opportunity at the Retail Federation's national conference.
And we thought that was going to be our salvation.
I think we learned that enterprise sales is really hard, takes a long time, and you can't just take a failed B2C product and white label it and call it a B2B product.
Then after that we started trying other things.
Things like we said, okay, what about taking Yabli the Q and A and making a awesome ama, like a ask me anything, kind of like Reddit ama.
What if we built an AMA platform that was like optimized for awesome AMAs.
And so we built that and that did a little better than Yabli, but still didn't break through.
And I think at that point we had a much higher bar for traction.
So when the AMA product came out, it had a great first and second month and then it plateaued.
And immediately after it plateaued, we did not do what we would have done in the old days, which is add like 20 new features, thinking that that was going to kind of turn the thing around.
I now believe that if you're fundamentally solving the right problem, even if your product is kind of hokey, but it's at least close enough, it should have really good growth and good traction without you needing to go through like 50 iterations on the thing.
So then we said, okay, ama is not there.
And then we tried a social planning service.
We called it Yab Lyy A B B L Y.
And that was like a Q and a platform for your friends, like, hey, where should we go to dinner and what movie should we see?
It's kind of like social polling, if you will.
That didn't go anywhere.
And then eventually we ended up building job lead.
We had a lot of LY domains and that was a Q and A to be an alternative or a precursor to an on site interview loop.
So you do it after your phone screen, but before.
So it was like an ama, but it was private and the people on the hiring team could all ask the candidate questions and then they could privately annotate, they could ask video questions.
And that was really cool.
And then another thing we had was called Town hall, which was an ama, a white label AMA for organizations to do kind of virtual town halls.
None of those things worked out.
And so it was Poachable was like the ninth thing that we built as a team.
And honestly, we almost never built it because by the eighth prototype, and after, you know, two years of kind of failure, the team was, was ready to hang it up.
And we had a.
We had an offer to buy the company and our investors were going to make money and, you know, we were ready to sort of declare victory and move on.
But yeah, so it was a long, arduous, winding road to get to poachable.
Omer (18:58.430)
How long?
Yeah, it sounds like quite a roller coaster ride.
How long were you going through this process of these mini pivots?
Over what period did that happen?
And how long were you giving each pivot or idea before you said, okay, this isn't going to work, let's move on to something else?
Tom Leung (19:23.250)
So I think we started it, we started it probably in January of 2014 when we kind of realized, okay, the holiday shopping season is over and we didn't grow the way we wanted to, despite having, I think we actually did a partnership with Consumer Reports, which in the US is like a very large publication that reviews products and stuff.
So by January we're like, okay, we're not going to be able to raise money for Yabli and Yabli's not taking off.
We need to try some other stuff.
And I think the amount of time we spent per experiment might have been, I want to say around a month.
Like we didn't give them that much time.
And I think the logic was at this stage of the game, if we're going to raise any more money, we need something that's going to show traction almost immediately because no one's going to believe us if we say, hey, just give us another two years of Runway and we'll figure it out.
Because that's kind of what we did with Yabli.
And we didn't get anywhere.
And the team wasn't just the investors.
The team was not interested in another 40 years in the desert.
We were tired too.
And so we said, well, if we're not going to sell the company and we're going to keep going, we better have something really good.
And so some experiments were, I think our shortest one was this used car service idea that we had where we could help people sell their used car in a more easy and safer way than through Craigslist.
And then we did some quick research and penciled out the numbers and realized like, we couldn't make it, it wouldn't scale for us and the economics didn't look good.
But then other ones, like AMA was a two or three month, we let that run and we ran a lot of these in parallel because one of the things that we had was a team that was very good at rapid prototyping.
And I've been in product management for a long time at software companies.
We had an amazing front end developer, we had an amazing designer, and we had an amazing full stack backend guy.
And the group of us, we could spit out prototypes pretty much as fast as you could think of them.
And so I guess if Wayne Gretzky was watching, he would say, well, these guys are shooting left and right.
Omer (22:00.810)
Okay.
So then eventually you said the ninth, or about the ninth idea turned into anthology.
And the way you tested this idea from what I understand was super simple, right?
You didn't spend a lot of time trying to build some sophisticated algorithm on the back end to try and match employers with employees.
So what exactly did you guys do?
Tom Leung (22:34.210)
Yeah, I think the original Yabli team would have built the sophisticated algorithms and all that stuff.
The sort of in survival mode, running on fumes, sort of more seasoned Yavli team.
What we did was we bought a domain, we put a one page landing page up and it was, you know, hey, this is postable.
We do anonymous career matching.
This is how it works.
I think we said we have a sophisticated algorithm.
I think we might have even said like artificial intelligence because we knew we were going to make the matches.
So in a way it was like even better than artificial intelligence.
And it was a form and you would quote unquote, create your profile by filling out a simple HTML form.
I don't think it was a secure form even.
We probably didn't buy SSL certificates or anything.
And it just sent me a mail with all of their information and that was poachable and that was all.
Omer (23:42.890)
This is basically a page that somebody could have created in a hour or two.
Tom Leung (23:48.250)
Yes, absolutely.
I remember it was a fierce debating point because our front end dev, he was kind of bored and wanted to be challenged so he wanted to use some new frameworks.
And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, just, we just need a simple page.
Let's just get this thing out asap.
And I think we said if, if we could get five friends to fill this out in the next few days and maybe we have something.
But if the three of us, because that was like the core team, if we can't get five people to fill this thing out, then let's not do any more work on it.
So it was, yeah, it was very, it was a, it was a one, a one page HTML file.
Omer (24:34.000)
Now you didn't have any employers signed up at that time, right?
Tom Leung (24:39.040)
No, no.
So we have this marketplace problem where there's like, you know, the chicken and egg thing.
And so at that time the theory was, well, if we get people to sign up, once we have the people, we'll just go to the employers and say, hey, we have these great people and we'll start with the members and members will attract employers.
And, and yeah, so the original model was we get these members, then we email the employer and say, hey, you know, I know you're looking for a front end developer and we have one that, you know, based on our algorithm would be a great match.
You know, would you be interested in connecting with them?
And so that's that's how we, we started, you know, in the first week.
Omer (25:26.250)
So what did you do to promote this page?
And, and what happened in the first week once you launched?
Tom Leung (25:34.150)
Yeah, so that's where I think serendipity plays a big role.
I tweeted out on the Yabli and my personal Twitter account, hey, you know, Yabli Labs is launching Poachable.
It's this new way to do anonymous sort of career matchmaking.
Check it out.
And then I think we, we even did an AMA on it on Yavli.
You know, we kind of tried everything we could.
And a, a local tech blog called Geekwire saw the tweet and then emailed me, I think like that night, and said the, the reporter, Taylor, he's like, hey, I saw you're doing poach bowl.
Like, can you tell me more about it?
It looks pretty cool.
And I said, yeah, you know, it's this great idea, blah, blah, blah.
And he wrote a story about it the next day.
And then after that we had a bunch of people fill out forms and then even some companies contact us.
And you know, I don't know if we would have done approachable had he not done that story, because I think after we got that initial push, then we got another story in.
It was like fast company or something.
And it just started to snowball.
It was amazing.
Omer (27:04.260)
Wow.
So that's a really fascinating point there about whether you would have continued if you hadn't got that coverage.
And, and I guess that one maybe trap that maybe a lot of startups fall into when they're, when they're in the early stages of launching that business and trying to find product market fit is we just need to get coverage on TechCrunch and everything will work out after that.
Right?
Yeah, and, and I guess,
Tom Leung (27:43.440)
you know,
Omer (27:43.880)
we probably know that that isn't the case.
And in most cases you're going to get probably, you know, an influx of new signups and maybe people who aren't even your target customers who want to just out of curiosity, figure out what your product is about.
But I guess this was a little bit different because it wasn't just signing up, I guess.
How much information were you asking for when people registered?
Tom Leung (28:11.220)
Yeah, so we were asking for a lot of sensitive information like their current salary, the salary they would, the minimum salary they would need to consider a move, the companies that they would want to work at, where they're working now, you know, their LinkedIn profile, public profile, URL, their job function, you know, the current location, a Lot of stuff.
And it was ironic because at Yabli, we could not get anyone to even ask a question for free, you know, about.
And here people were giving us all this stuff, and we're like, whoa, there's an example of if you're solving a problem that people give a darn about, they will do things for you, even take a big chance with sensitive information.
And I agree with your point that the companies that are like, oh, man, if only TechCrunch would write about us, we'd be a success.
I think that's a dangerous model and a dangerous assumption, because that's sort of like a hit of crack.
It might feel good right away, but it doesn't last.
And then you might even make a company that's dependent on that kind of coverage.
I think for us, what was unique was we launched the thing on July 8, and we were supposed to sell the company, I think, on July 21 or something like that.
So we didn't have a lot of time to get data to determine if this thing had legs or not.
And so the GeekWire article got us a lot of members very quickly, you know, literally on day two.
And I'm.
I'm sure we could have got people to sign up without that press coverage, because we do today, but I don't know if we would have been able to get enough people to sign up before the middle of July to have the decision about whether we should recapitalize a company or not.
So I think in the long run, yeah, you can't hang your hat on press coverage, but in this example, we needed some unnatural event to kickstart things, to give us data in a matter of days and then.
And not weeks.
Omer (30:40.440)
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think it's also interesting that you guys seems like you kept going, you know, one.
One idea after the other, trying to quickly validate having a much greater sense of urgency than maybe you had in the early days of Yabli.
And I guess if you'd got the GeekWire coverage and it had just been people signing up to give you an email address to let them know when you launch would not have been as powerful as people giving you all of this.
This personal information.
So it sounds like it.
It became pretty clear very quickly that you were onto something that people needed.
Tom Leung (31:30.030)
That's right.
Yeah.
I think if we had just done a squeeze page, which was like, notify me when you launch that all that would approve was that we can collect emails.
I think we purposely asked for very valuable information, and we were not afraid to have multiple fields on that form because we said we have to.
We have to avoid false positives.
And so we said, let's have a high bar.
Let's ask them how much they're making, let's ask them how much it would take, let's ask them where they're working, all this stuff.
And because they were willing to fill all of that out, it gave us a lot more confidence that, oh, this, this is something, might have hit something here.
So that's.
That's kind of how we thought about it.
And.
And I think one of the lessons learned there is, you know, you have to be willing to ask for the business.
Like, a lot of people don't ask for the business because they're afraid that the person will say no.
Even with.
With poachable.
In the early days, like, we had this, you know, kind of unusual pricing model, and I think deep down inside it was priced really low because we were afraid if we priced it higher, people would say no.
And you have to resist that because you're not trying to just get traction for its own sake.
You need to demonstrate real, sustainable, valuable traction.
And you'd rather have, you know, 1,000 customers paying you real money than 10,000 emails that are worthless.
Omer (33:14.860)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
I want to just kind of recap on what we've talked about here.
And earlier we had had this conversation about, you know, the pendulum sort of swings in two directions.
One is telling startups that they need to pivot quickly and figure out what that next idea is.
And on the other end, you've got people giving advice like, if you never give up, you can't fail.
And the question becomes, well, how long do I keep going before I have to give up or I have to pivot?
So for someone listening who maybe is in that position right now, is there any advice that you would give them on what they could start thinking about or start doing to help figure out how.
When is the right time to make that pivot?
Tom Leung (34:13.070)
Yes, it's really kind of a conversation I'm very passionate about because I kind of did it the wrong way for a long time.
And I think a lot of us who go and are founders, we want to show that we have grit, and we want to show that we have tenacity, which is great.
And I think you absolutely need both to survive and thrive.
However, I think sometimes we mistake that for kind of blind faith in whatever idea you have.
And so what happens is, in the Yabli example, we were tenacious, but we just kept plugging away at consumer Q and A for product decisions.
And we were not willing to challenge assumptions.
We basically had a sacred cow.
And that was that the world needs Quora meets Consumer Reports.
And we weren't willing to, to say maybe the world doesn't.
And I think the reason we weren't willing to do that was honestly because we would have had to admit that we weren't as smart as we thought we were.
And then we'd have to admit that we were wrong.
And secondly, I think we wanted to avoid sounding like we were, quote, unquote, giving up.
I think I remember someone saying to me, oh, well, you're giving up.
It's like this bad thing.
And I think the better way to look at it is you have to be tenacious and you have to be persistent about building a business, a real meaningful business.
But the actual product or service idea like that doesn't need to be etched in stone.
No one gets it right the first, second, usually even third time.
Like, it takes a number of iterations, it takes a number of kind of revolutions of, of the cycle.
And, and so, yeah, like, yeah, you don't have to give up on yourself or on your company, but it's okay.
And it's required to give up on features or products or businesses or business models that aren't working, because generally if it is working and you do have fit, you'll know it.
Omer (36:37.630)
So I think it's about getting as quickly as possible to your validation in terms of either first dollar, first paying customer, or somebody who's willing to give you some type of currency to show that your idea is solving a problem that's important enough like you were doing with asking for all this, this personal information.
And it reminded me of the guys at Optimizely.
And I had Pete Kohman, the co founder of Optimizely, here on the show back on episode 56.
He explained that with their first business, it took them about six months to get from idea to first dollar.
And that business didn't work out eventually.
Then their second business, which also failed, took them about a month and a half to get from idea to first dollar.
But the third time, when they launched Optimizely, they went from idea to revenue in one day and got people, you know, got this validation that people were willing to pay for it before they even built anything.
And I think that there's a really valuable lesson in doing that.
And I think you hit the nail on the head that sometimes it's just easier to build the product because we're afraid to Ask in case they say no.
And then it just destroys everything.
It destroys this great hope and idea and dream that we have about building this, this product and business.
Tom Leung (38:10.400)
Yeah, there's always, oh, this next feature that's going to change everything.
And you know, usually if you can't get some traction in the first few features, adding another 20 or 30 is not going to, not going to move that needle.
So I totally can.
Can.
Can relate to the optimizely kind of pattern where, you know, when you have something good, people gravitate to it very quickly.
And, you know, even when you tell friends about your business, there's like a few different kinds of responses.
One is like, oh, yeah, hey, that sounds cool.
And that generally means, like, they're not going to use it and they're just being nice.
Right?
And then there's like, no way, like, what, wait, what is the, what is the URL?
Like, how do I sign up?
That's the reaction you want.
And if you have a great idea, even if it's poorly executed, it will get traction.
The worst is people like me in the early days where we were really good at executing bad ideas.
And you can always get a little bit of traction.
Someone said to me once, I've never seen a completely bad business.
You know, like, there's always some silver lining.
Like you can always find some data or get some customer to send you some fan mail.
Like, oh, I love your product, but ultimately you gotta, you gotta keep it real.
And, and the, the graph you need to look at is, you know, week over week users or week over week?
Ideally week over week revenue.
Omer (39:49.350)
Yeah.
All right, Tom, it's now time for our lightning round.
I'm gonna ask you a series of questions and I'd like you to answer them as quickly as you can.
You ready?
Tom Leung (39:59.670)
Let's do it.
Omer (40:00.470)
All right, what's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
Tom Leung (40:06.870)
The best piece of business advice, I heard an interview with someone else where they talked about your luck surface area.
And the concept was like, you have to put yourself out there in order for you to catch lucky breaks.
So as an example, I used to never go to, like, networking things because I just, I'm actually a little bit of an introvert in group situations.
But if you don't go, you're not going to randomly run into the reporter or run into the investor or the potential customer.
So your job is to give yourselves as many opportunities to catch that lucky break as you can.
Omer (40:48.320)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Tom Leung (40:52.240)
I've been listening to the audio book for a company called for a book called Nail it and Then Scale It.
It's not sort of groundbreaking, but it's very comprehensive and kind of walks through basically the whole kind of process from finding market fit to scaling.
And it's by Paul Alstrom and Nathan Furr, and so I enjoy that.
Nail it, then Scale It.
Omer (41:21.940)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Tom Leung (41:30.200)
I think a successful entrepreneur has to be honest with him or herself that you have to call BS on yourself.
And when things aren't working, we're generally pretty smart, creative people.
We can always make excuses.
But you have to kind of keep it real and call a spade a spade.
And if something's not working, you got to take action and be truthful to yourself, even when it's kind of hard to say the words.
Omer (41:58.740)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Tom Leung (42:04.260)
I'm a big fan of Mailbox, the email app.
I love how I can triage my inbox and snooze mails for various points in time.
I've never gotten to zero inbox prior to having Mailbox, so it's fantastic.
I highly recommend it.
And those features have been cloned by by Google and Microsoft in their own mail apps.
But I still think Mailbox does a really wonderful job of making it very pure and simple.
Omer (42:37.850)
What's another business idea or something crazy that you have in your head that you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Tom Leung (42:45.930)
Oh man.
I was just talking to my co founder about our next startup, which might not be for five or 10 years, but I like what DraftKings and some of these other guys are doing for fantasy football betting.
I think it would be kind of fun to create betting platforms that apply to other types of things.
I know there are companies I think in Ireland that do that.
But generally, wouldn't it be great to make it very easy for a small group of people to have a micro version of fantasy football but for other types of activities and pastimes?
Omer (43:35.389)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Tom Leung (43:42.270)
Let's see.
They probably don't know that I'm a political junkie and that I probably consume two to three hours of political news a day and I've been watch.
I watch two or three Sunday news shows every.
Every Sunday and I used to want to go into politics.
Wow.
Before I knew.
Before I got smarter.
Omer (44:13.390)
You knew better.
Yeah.
Tom Leung (44:15.970)
Cool.
Omer (44:16.210)
And finally, what is one of your most important Passions outside of your work?
Tom Leung (44:20.610)
Probably raising my two sons with my wife.
I have a 7 year old and a 5 year old.
And, you know, all this stuff that we're talking about for business is super interesting and challenging and important, but, you know, when your son looks up to you and he says, you know, you're my best friend, daddy, it just, you know, it blows everything else away.
Omer (44:45.140)
Yeah.
My kids told me you are putting on weight.
Tom Leung (44:48.100)
I've heard that, too.
I've heard that, too.
Yeah.
Omer (44:51.540)
And I would have never guessed that you were a bit of an introvert.
You know, I saw the, the video that I mentioned earlier before we started recording about you on MSNBC and going and doing the.
The pitch at the south by Southwest accelerator and, you know, you mingling in different places and I was like, you know, you.
You didn't come across as an introvert.
So
Tom Leung (45:13.930)
those scenes were extremely painful for me inside.
I was dying inside.
Omer (45:20.330)
I hear you.
I'm just like that, too.
I kind of just cringe at those group situations.
But the funny thing is that once you get into those situations and you just sort of get over, you know, thinking about yourself and just try to just have conversations with people, I kind of find myself as like, oh, actually, I'm having a bit of fun here now, but it's actually getting there in the first place that I find more uncomfortable.
Tom Leung (45:45.540)
Yeah.
You know, in fact, someone else told me another piece of advice about that that has been amazing.
And he said, you know, if you tell yourself before you go to the event that everybody here is excited to meet me, everybody here wants to talk to me, and you go in with that mindset, it makes it so much easier because I think in the past I would go to these things, I'd be like, oh, my God, nobody's going to want to talk to me.
They're going to find me not that interesting and I don't fit in here.
But when you kind of change your mindset, it changes your body language.
You give off a different vibe and it makes those group events a lot easier.
So I highly recommend that approach.
It's a little bit of a mind game you play with yourself before you.
Before you walk into the.
Into the ballroom.
Omer (46:37.550)
That's a great tip.
All right, so if folks want to find out more about Anthology or they want to go and register, they can go to Anthology Co. And if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Tom Leung (46:53.470)
Yeah, they can follow me on Twitter at Tom L. They can also follow Anthology at Anthology.
And I'm also on LinkedIn.
But yeah, Twitter is a good way.
I generally respond to people who tweet at me.
So if there's anything I can do to be helpful to the audience, just hit me up.
Omer (47:12.740)
And you have a podcast as well, so if you want to give a shout out for that, maybe people interested in listening to that too.
Tom Leung (47:18.660)
Oh, how nice of you.
Yeah, so we just started a podcast a month ago.
It's called Anthology Career Stories.
We have about 10 episodes now.
And they're these long form interviews similar to this show, but it's more focused on people's career decisions.
And we track people from childhood all the way up to where they are now.
And so I just did an interview with someone who's like a VP of policy at the World Wildlife foundation, and then I did another one of a person who was a Yale Law grad that then turned into a children's book author.
And then I've interviewed a bunch of entrepreneurs and kind of walk through like their career arc, if you will.
And obviously it relates to what we do at Anthology, so it's a nice tie in.
Omer (48:11.390)
So I'll include a link to that in the show notes, so if people want to check that out, they can do that as well.
Tom, it's been a pleasure.
I really enjoyed this chat and I'm really glad that you guys were able to, to figure out the right business to that was gonna get you the traction that you guys needed.
And I think it's a really inspirational story as well about not giving up and, and how, you know, persistence and, and some creativity and, and maybe just, you know, a little, little bit of luck, A little bit of luck, you know, all come together and, you know, and, and has resulted in, in a successful outcome.
So I wish you guys all the best and hope to stay in touch.
Tom Leung (49:02.220)
Well, thanks for having me, Omer.
It was a great conversation and I look forward to talking again in the future.
Omer (49:08.460)
Cool.
Thanks again.
Cheers.
Tom Leung (49:10.140)
Take care.
