Episode 312 – Enlai Chu – Founder, Productive App

  The Productive App will prepare you for the call before you even answer the call. This app is really useful, especially in real estate, because of all the little details you can have in your calls. The Productive Call Assistant will take notes for you and remind you of all the important info. Join Bill Risser as he talks to Enlai Chu about his Productive app and what it does. Enlai is the Founder & CEO of Productive.app. He has over 20 years of experience in messaging, voice, and video communications. He will show you how to solve one of the biggest pain points for real estate agents; double data entry. Make it so that once you're done with your call, you're done with your work today! --- Enlai Chu - Founder, Productive App I have got a great episode for you. A piece of technology, first of all, that I never knew existed about. We have got the founder of the company. The tool is called Productive. It is a productive app and it changes the way you will use your mobile phone. You got to read as we are going to be sharing this with you. He is up in the Bay Area, where all the great technology comes out of. He has got some great stuff to share and I can’t wait to get this thing started. --- Enlai, welcome to the show. Thank you, I’m happy to be here. You and I met not too long ago and we are both working with EXIT Realty on some cool project they are doing. It was nice to chat with you because 1) You have this amazing technology that I might have drilled you with a bunch of questions about, but 2) It is cool that we have products that are going to be able to play off and help each other. It is a nice situation. I’m excited to be here and talking to you again. Thanks for the invite. The very first thing I ask on the show is where you grew up or where you are from, so I will start that off with you. What was home for you? I grew up in Vancouver, Canada. If you are from the Pacific Northwest, the question is always, “Is that VC or Washington?” I grew up in Vancouver, BC, Canada. I went down and finished off my school there and did my university at the University of British Columbia. I spent a few years working there. My cousins had moved there and liked it. The family decided to head over and my brother as well, so we all went there. Great food and weather if you are okay with the rain. It was a wonderful place to grow up. It is the trade-off with any of the Pacific Northwest is the rain, but I have been to Vancouver. My wife and I journeyed up there in 1984 for the World’s Fair. You were not there yet, I’m guessing. It is such a beautiful city. I feel it is the most European city that I have ever been to in the United States, is that kind of flow? It is multicultural, and that was one of the things that were great to explore. You have got the bilingual language thing going on with French and English, and then going to different parts of the country. You feel that European side of the country, but that was one of the big reasons why it was so comfortable, and it was almost like having the experience of traveling the world in a single location. [bctt tweet="As an entrepreneur, thinking about the strategic reasons why your company can get acquired is good to have in mind." username="billrisser"] The rain thing was interesting because it does rain a lot, but it is also one of those opportunities for appreciation of sunshine. When the wind stopped, the clouds are parted, you can hear the angels singing, and everybody is out. Obviously, the air outside was clean and fresh almost all the time. I loved it here. We made the quick trip over to Victoria, which is a whole other world. It is a cool place. If you love to ski, you will love it. I love Vancouver. Did you get up to Whistler or any of the local mountains? We were there in the summertime. We did go to Banff and Lake Louise and all that good stuff. That was the fun part and getting up into the Rockies. You got everything, skiing, hiking, and city life all in the same location. Let’s get back to work. You get a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of British Columbia. What was the first gig out of school? I had a good friend of mine who said, “It is not the first gig you get out of school. It is the second job that matters more.” I would like to find out what that first one was. My first gig was in the semiconductor industry, and Electrical Engineering gives you the option to venture into either software or hardware and different industries like Chip Design. I started out in the application side of semiconductors, building software that controls the robots and manufacturing for chips. I got the travel to fabs and where the bunny suits. I did that as my first job out of school. In high school, you knew you were going to start your own company. You had that entrepreneurial drive in you. Is that right or wrong? I did. I wanted to invent, create, and build stuff. Interestingly, I did not know what an entrepreneur was. I did not know what that word meant in high school. I remember in one of my college interviews, one of the questions was, “Who is an entrepreneur that you respect the most?” This was back when I was in high school, and I did not know who to say. I said Lee Iacocca because back at that time, he was changing things around. I do not think that was the answer that the interviewer was expecting, but that was the first introduction to that word. You are right. Once I got accustomed to thinking about it, I had to make a decision on what major I was going to go through in university. It was a choice between engineering or business. I remember my conclusion was that if I started with engineering, I could go off and do an MBA or a Business Degree afterwards, but I couldn’t do it the other way around. I couldn’t do a Business undergrad and then get a grad in Engineering. That was how I started out in engineering. Let’s continue the path. You then ended up moving down to the Bay Area, San Francisco, South of the Bay in Silicon Valley, and you went to school and got your MBA there. [caption id="attachment_4184" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Productive App: Productive will prepare you for the call, so you're not trying to remember who or why someone is calling you. They basically prepare you for the call before you even answer the call.[/caption]   I did. I had joined a startup company in the Bay Area. A good friend of mine moved down, and they needed engineers. This was one of the first Voice over IP companies that were starting at that time. Working in telecom has always intrigued me because it is a rapidly growing industry. I jumped at the opportunity to come down to the Bay Area. While I was here, I did my MBA at UC Berkeley because I knew I wanted to round out my skill sets on the business side. I was going to start a company. I came down here and did the engineering thing and the end of the school thing. It was a wonderful experience. While looking at your CV, you have been involved with seven different companies that have been acquired. Some of those were your companies. I’m going to call you an expert in the process of working at a company that gets acquired. There got to be some pros and cons to that process. It would be neat to know that because I have never been able to ask that question to a guest. I wouldn’t say that I’m an expert because I did not make them all happen. I have been part of companies that were acquired and they were all acquired for different reasons. The first one was acquired for strategic reasons. The first company I was at was a company that was acquired by Cisco. Back then, the Voice over IP space had started to boom and it was going to drive a lot of data traffic. For Cisco, it was a strategic opportunity, but it has been a whole series of opportunities through the acquisitions. The hostile acquisition is the formal word of having stock bought up of a public company. What I learned through it all was thinking about the strategic reasons why acquire a company. It was good to have in mind, especially when I started my own company. I had a previous company that was acquired by Skype and to them, it was a strategic reason. We were in the messaging space, Skype was strong in the voice space, and it was a good fit with IP. Going forward, it is always good to have in mind high-level thinking of, “What could potentially happen down the road?” As an entrepreneur, that is critical that you have to think ahead and see what the possible paths for your company are. It seems to me that a lot of the young entrepreneurs have an idea to get going with it and are thinking too hard about the exit up front instead of maybe working hard on the product. It is never a bad idea to think about exits, especially if you are raising money. If you are building a company as a cashflow business, you are not as worried about what the outcomes are from an exit perspective, but if you have...