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This is Luke Baird and welcome to yet another episode of the Cult of Startup podcast where it's my job to meet with entrepreneurs and drill into the specifics of why they have succeeded or failed and how you can learn from it. Today's guest is Todd Nelson, who is the eighth employee of Amazon. And in this interview we talk about what the early days of Amazon were like. The topics range from PR stunts to unorthodox hiring practices to Jeff Bezos leadership style on down to what you learned for packaging someone else's books.
Without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Todd Nelson. Awesome. Thank you for being a guest on the show. I am ecstatic to actually do this interview because I know you have a very unique background and excited to learn more about your experiences and being one of the early employees at Amazon.
But before we hop into all that, tell me a little bit about what you're doing today. Well, now I'm the Executive Director of the center of Innovation Entrepreneurship. We are Cal Poly center where we help students fulfill their entrepreneurial vision. We do it both on campus and postgraduate.
So if you're a student and you have an entrepreneurial idea, we give you all the resources and programs that you need in order to build a business venture. And then when you're ready to actually launch that venture. We have a couple programs in our space downtown in the heart of slow. We have our summer accelerator program where we give you $10,000 in seed money and put you through like a three or three month business boot camp.
You know all about it because you did it last year, I think twice. It is an accele and it does accelerate you to either success or failure, as you also know. Yes, but it's better to fail quick than it is to do spin your wheels for two years. So you know, failure is not a bad thing in our program or an entrepreneurship at all because you learn so much from the things that got you towards that failure.
We also have a two year incubator program. So once you've graduated from the accelerator program, if you're still alive, you still have adventure, you can start paying us rent and we'll put together a two year program for you. I start your rent at 50 bucks a month. That doubles every six months until the end of the year.
The two year program, you're paying about $600 a month. It's kind of, you know, leave the nest in the community. But during those two years, we give you again all the tools and resources and mentorship workshops you need to make your business succeed. And I love you guys program here because it's a little bit different than maybe other accelerator programs in the sense that it's based on the fact you guys want teams to really be honed in on the practices before they launch out of here.
Yes, absolutely. We believe strongly and searching for the business plan. The old way of doing entrepreneurship is you write a five year business plan. You'd invest in your technology, hire a bunch of engineers, you could waste millions of dollars building a product and then you take it to market and no one wants to buy it.
So what we teach here is that you need to find out that there's a product market fit before you go to market. So you go out, you get out of the building, you talk to customers, you tell them, you find out what their problems are, what their pains are, what makes them happy, and build a product specifically for that customer that puts a value on it. It's a much quicker way to achieve success. It's not easy to do.
Most people resent what we call the search, are afraid of customer development. Talking to people is hard. You're exposing yourself to them. But it does really amplify your chances of succeeding.
A term that I often use. I don't know if you were the one who coined it, but you Said goobing goo. I think maybe Steve Blank coined that. But I definitely, when I was teaching entrepreneurship, I preached it.
I said in my class, if I ask a question and you don't have the answer, just say goob. Because chances are that's the, that's the answer. So goob is short for get out of the building. There's no answers.
Sitting at a desk, looking at a computer. The answers are outside the building. You want to watch. You want to see the pupils on your customer dilate when they fall in love with your product.
You want people literally, I mean this literally cramming money in your hands to buy your crappy prototype before. If that doesn't happen, you don't have anything. And we actually have some companies in our summer accelerator right now that have been out with their prototypes, talking to customers and people are actually like, I'll buy this now. This is your crappy prototype right off your back.
And it's literally off the back because what they're building is a speaker that sets into your camelback backpack. And they're going to like EDM events, dance music. They just had a three day rave. They put their backpack on 500 customers and the vast majority of them are like, I'll buy this.
I'll buy this right now. So what it does, what the speaker does, is it picks up the ambient noise and the music and transfers it to a very powerful bass speaker in the backpack. So your whole body vibrates so you literally feel the music. Oh, it's incredible.
It's pretty fun. A whole nother level at a rage. Yes. As well as the drugs on the whole other level.
Yeah. Awesome. And I love this process that you guys have established here. I am super curious to learn more about your experiences and first initially coming in contact with Amazon.
Oh, so I first started Amazon. Well, so I got my degree in creative writing. Taught writing for a while. Didn't enjoy academy that much, at least from that side of it.
Launched my own freelance writing career. Wrote for a few companies as well. I worked for a research writing company, whereas a research writer, it was a travel company as a research writer. And that's where I started using some of the fledgling Internet databases then to do research for them.
Fell in love with the Internet and saw its possibility was living in. Just gotten divorced, living in Spokane, Washington at the time. It was time to get out of town. So I went to Seattle hoping to get a job with an Internet company.
So because my writing skills, actually most of the writers I knew were working at Microsoft with Encarta which is a CD ROM encyclopedia. That technology doesn't even exist anymore. Sounds like a dancer. Yeah.
So I was trying to get a job with Microsoft and Carta with my writing skills. So I went to a tech agency and took some tests and I don't know if I did that well on the tests. I did really well. They sent me out to work in a warehouse packing books for Internet book company.
Had no idea that you could even sell things online yet. Oh really? There was very few I couldn't have named an e commerce company at the time. And I had no idea like what so bizarre.
I didn't want to work in a warehouse. That's what I saw myself as big. You know, I'm mfa, I'm a writer, I taught college. You know, I really packed books for a living.
But I went that first day and was blown away by what was happening. I first of all, I met the people around me. The guy walked across from me was a lawyer. The woman next to him was literally a rocket scientist.
And she also won the script selling me when she was a teenager. Brilliant person. And then I met Japanese. So these weren't warehouse workers.
These were smart people working passionately to build something. I got that right away. And actually the actual work of putting books in and sending was actually a lot of fun because you got this like insight into people's lifestyles, you know, customers. Unique three set of three books that they bought.
You can almost see what they were into that day. Oh, really? Yeah. And we were selling a lot of the early books that were being written to help build the Internet, like creating killer websites and HTML for dummies and things like that.
This one, the number one book was like how to start your own website. I think, I think creating killer websites had to be one. That might have been the title, that might have been it. But you know, but then people also bought weird fiction and books that you wouldn't want to be seen by in a bookstore.
So it's really fun to be around books. And as a writer, as a book lover, I love that aspect of it. But what really, what I really realized was opportunity. There was not only talking to Jeff and seeing his vision and realizing how smart and he's a very charismatic leader and then also seeing the scale things were growing.
So we had a computer set up in the early days that would ring ding every time a book assault. Everyone cheer. They get back to work a little while later, ring again. Well, they turn that thing off quickly after about two weeks.
Oh, something's happening here. You can literally see the explosive growth from day to day. You know, on Monday you chip X number of books. On Tuesday it was twice as much.
On Wednesday it was bigger. So we had to scale operations really quick. And he couldn't survive there if he did not scale. Oh, yeah, sure, I'm sure.
So tell me a little bit more about working in this environment. So you get hired and you're like kind of blown away by all the stuff that's going on. Did you sense that there was something hot happening here? Absolutely.
And what were your feelings at the time? Were you like, I'm not going to jump ship or I'm going to stick with this. You'll be working more hours than we can possibly comprehend? No, I was all in from day one.
I loved it. I drank the koolaid. But it also mean we quickly became apparent that we were building something very cool very quickly. And it was catching fire earlier, like overnight, you know, we started getting the press five months into.
I only worked as ran operations in the warehouse for about four months. And at five months I was working at a couple of departments. I started departmental content, usually how you transfer content onto the website. And also so working with editorial, we're writing book reviews, things like that, interviewing authors.
And I sat down to my desk one morning and read an article on Wired.com about the coolest job in the world. It was my job. Oh, really? Yes.
I imagine sitting at a desk and reviewing books and this is what [email protected] do. I was like, oh my God, I do have the coolest job in the world. You know, we were the darlings on the Internet at the time. I'm not talking five months after I started, I was an employee.
We were already the garbage Internet and just got bigger and bigger and bigger and we got more and more great press and good attention and bad attention, but we just, it never stopped growing. It never leveled out. We never had that trough of despair that suddenly started us go through. It was nothing but exponential growth.
Yeah. Just to give our listeners a perspective, the domain Amazon.com was purchased in 1994 and Todd started working in 1995. Yeah, I started in the fall of 95. So it's lined up just as soon as he chose that as a backstory why he chose that name as well.
That actually didn't start selling books until July of 95. I came on in, you know, November, maybe October, November of 95. Okay. And I signed my first contract for $18,000 a year and I worked ungodly hours.
I Didn't take days off, worked weekends. At one point, me and another guy at the same time I did figured out we were making something like 3 cents an hour or something like that based on our salaries. But because we work for so little and worked so long, we did receive stock options as a result. So as one of the, you know, target motivated to work for $18,000 a year.
It's really easy to work for that if you see your stock grow, you know. Wow. Yeah, my stock is going in more than my pay. Oh, well, way more.
Way more. I remember once at Amazon, my highest salary at Amazon was 32,000. Really? Yeah.
To retire the first time at the age of 37. But retirement wasn't for me. Yeah, yeah. Can you tell me a little bit more about some of the characteristics of Jeff's leadership that you experienced?
He was very charismatic, smartest guy in the room, but didn't feel like he had to show it to you. Really. He was kind, he's funny. He laughed all of the time.
Okay, what do I laugh at? You? Oh, it's his big booming. Like you hear it from so far away.
And he was constant. It was constant. Some people were annoyed by it. I wasn't great.
You know, I were there. We talked before this interview about the book, the everything store and he comes off a little more abrasive in the book. And other than maybe once or twice, I never saw that side of him. Really nothing but charismatic, funny, encouraging, thankful.
When I left, he hugged me and said, we couldn't have met it without you. You know, he didn't have to even know who I was at that point. Yeah, so yeah, he was, he's pretty amazing. Again, super smart, but also open to listening to other people.
In the early days, everybody that worked there was a part of the hiring meeting. So come in, we'd all interview them and we'd have a meeting. And you had to be unanimous. You know, it was a strong hire, strong no hire or you know, in the middle.
And you had to get a lot of strong hires from the entire group and one person could sway everyone else from, from that hire. And there was one time when there was a candidate come in and everyone was no higher and I was strong hire and including Jeff was a no hire. And I was able to convince him that indeed this candidate was wor the job. And so he listened.
He was able to listen. He wasn't just rooted in his opinions. Interesting, interesting. So I want to hear some more about your day to day life at Amazon.
Like, did you not Go home every night. What was maybe a typical day at the first two years that you're there was never a typical day because your job changed constantly. I probably had 15 different offices. We didn't really have job titles in the beginning.
But if I go back and put a title on what I did, my job changed every five, six months. And you would be working three jobs at once. You know, in the early days it was a flat hierarchy. We were all Amazon associates.
Okay. We all reported Jeff. That changed of course, and again became middle management, things like that. But it was always completely different.
You had to be open to doing anything and learning something fast. So I'll just quickly run through a few things. I did. I ran operations.
Then I started catalog and content. Then I started editorial for a few other people. I started publishing relations on my own, author relations. I helped launch the team of music and video which is our first non book products.
I helped launch Amazon in Germany. Amazon books of music, music and video in Germany. I was an editor, I was a rock editor. I was a book editor, as a features editor.
It just constantly changed. And you had to be open to like not necessarily knowing what your job was all the time. But it was intense. We were growing fast.
Especially in the early days. You felt if you didn't show up for work, the place wouldn't run without you. Oh, everybody rolled out. Yeah.
And sometimes, you know, we helped each other out, but it was like you just had to be there because if you didn't, you couldn't get your job done. So I put in, like I said, ungodly hours. Had a relationship at a time that didn't survive those hours and you know, but eventually it became more of a company and things evened. Got to actually have friendships and see the sun.
I did the sun for six months, I think. Really? Yeah. Well, in the beginning we were in a windowless basement underneath a color tile.
It was gruesome, it was cold. And I go to work in the dark. And when the last shipment, I couldn't leave until the last shipment of books went out and I write the Friday later up and the DPS guy this crate of books and it was dark. And that was, you know, that was the end of my polar day.
And because the other anecdote I like to tells you I met all these smart people. I realized I was, I wasn't smart person in the room, clearly. So I had to provide my worth. So I tried to work hard with everybody else.
I tried to get to work before everybody else. I tried to leave after everyone had gone, I also had ambition and I wanted. I knew that we had a million titles, many books, and none of them had reviews. I knew that one of my future values to the company would be as a critic, as a reviewer.
So I started just putting in extra hours, helping our fledgling editorial team. Scanned covers, write reviews, did it all on my own time, outside of the scope, my normal job. I was able to transition out to the editorial team after that. Okay, this is perfect segment.
I read on your LinkedIn page that you helped John Updike participate in some sort of huge PR cube coupe. And I tried to find the exact story online and I couldn't. It's probably well hidden. Then that's perfect.
I'd love to hear it. So that was actually one of the coolest things I did in my career and also that we did at Amazon. So as we grew and we, as we, what we were able to do online got bigger and better and more vibrant, we decided we would do this project where we get a famous author to start a story and then our customers would contribute the chapters and you know, add on to it was called the Greatest Story Ever Told. Okay.
So I was a publisher relations manager at the time. So my job was to evangelize Amazon with the publishing community. I traveled to York all the time, met with publishers and authors and made sure that we knew about all the good books that were coming out and that all the socialists on our site, we have databases and all that. So I knew most of the publishers.
So they came to me and said, Todd, you want me to do great story? We were told, who can you get? And I had a relationship with them. What was Random House books?
I was thinking someone like Stephen King or something like that. I forget who it was. I had someone in mind. So I called them and they immediately said, oh, you have the perfect person in mind.
And I'm like, who? They're like John Fyke. My jaw dropped because he's a literally lion, one of my all time favorite authors. I would never have dreamed that John Fyke would be willing to experiment in this wildly world Internet.
But his new book coming out at the time was sci fi oriented and he very bravely and kindly agreed to start the story. I still own the letter. If it came from him, it was writt. His typewriter was addressed to me where he said I will put my head in the mouth of the electronic literary line or something like that.
It's signed and penned by him. It's one of my most treasured things. And I also have the three beginnings of a short story that he offered us. The story itself, once it got into the hands of the masses, was pretty awful.
Yes. It became some really weird murder mystery, cat romance, weird story. Public. The experiment of creating an online narrative with mass participation failed.
Pretty. But it was a huge PR poo for Amazon. It was on the front page. I was actually in New York City having breakfast and opened up New York Times, and there it is, front page.
Amazon and John F. Dyke collaborate. It was really. It was fun at the time.
And I'm sure John F. Dyke was glad when. That's right. That very.
Yeah, I'm sure. But that's awesome. Super interesting. And what a feeling to be sitting down and realize, I just made a friend of New York Times.
Whoa. I impacted the world. A lot of people read that newspaper. Yeah.
It was also pretty surreal when picking up Time magazine and Jeff Bezos was the man of the year. And we realized I had something to do with this. Yeah. At the very beginning, from almost the inception of Amazon, basically.
Could you maybe tell us your craziest day that you had at Amazon? I'm sure there are many, but one of them pops right in your head like, oh, my gosh, this day was wild. Oh, there's so many. There's so many.
I'd say one of the ways when. So at one point, I had this really strange office that three music editors were sharing. It wasn't really an office. It was a hallway with a door at either end.
We were growing so fast. And so I was the punk rock editor at the time, and I had, appropriately, punk rock posters on the wall of our closet or hallway, and we played loud music. And so we had a lot of people touring, and they often showed us our offices. Sort of like, this is the Amazon aesthetic.
We were kind of like monkeys on a cage. And they brought Dickie Gephardt, who was the leader of the House representatives at the time, and Al Gore by. And they came through to our office, and Al Gore looks at this poster on the wall, which was a punk rock band called the Makers. There's a Malefinger, and he looks at his.
That's very interesting. And he walked on. I said, that was Al Gore. Al Gore.
It was really cool. You know, just things like that. Just, you know, because we were like the poster child of the Internet and the fast pace of things. There was you know, just sort of surreal moments, you know, of celebrities and authors and, you know, and also watching Jeff Bezos become a celebrity, you know, coming through the space and visiting in my own side.
I got to New York a lot and you know, visit publishers offices, offices and the authors and you know, just open doors that I probably would never open if I continue along just being a, you know, freelance writer. Yeah, I mean, what one hell of a ride you had just by making that one. I'm going to go interview Amazon. I wanted to ask about this a little bit earlier, but we can probably touch on both points here.
Talk about Amazon's hiring practices a little bit more and what your interview experience was because from what I understand that Amazon's very elitist in how they would hire at the very beginning. It might not be that now, but if you didn't have a 4.0 through college and we're valedictorian, whatever it may be. Yeah, well, they weren't elitist as so much as they were very rigorous and it was a pretty intense process. I will say though that this is kind of a weird addition but like I got my job by working my ass off and rolling up my sleeves.
I don't want to go home. I literally just like they offered me a full time job like a week into it. My interview was more of a conversation that I was having with Jeff. So I never really got the rigorous run through that everyone else said.
Was it just you and Jeff? No, I went out to lunch with him and his wife for, you know, you could not talk to him. We were across the desk from each other packing books and just had a lot of open ended, long ranging conversations about what we love and about the industry and what his vision was. And I had the job offer, you know, with him just a very short period of time and never had to go through the, you know, this series of questions.
One of the questions was, and it was typical to throw you this oddball question to see how you thought. And I was asked how many gas stations are there in America? And it doesn't matter if you have answer is right. The answer they want to see what process you went through to answer.
So I knew the town my parents were from was Larry, Wyoming. There's 25,000 people. I probably can't do the math now. 25,000 people there.
There's four gas stations. I just assumed that, you know, that it's pretty typical town in America and that four gas stations serves about 25,000 people there. You can extrapolate, you know, 40 gas stations for X number of people, 400X number of people and actually came pretty damn close to how many gas stations are really in America. But what they wanted to see, what he wanted to see was your ability to take something small, minute information and scale it.
Because we were the fastest growing company at the time of all time. And we had to put in. You couldn't put in an operation or a process or start a job that didn't scale at a rapid pace because it would fail. So if you could do it, if you could do something for 10 people, you had to think, can I do this for 10 million?
You know, and if you didn't, there was no reason to put that in place, you know, because it would fail, it would break. So you always constantly thought about scalability when you worked at Amazon. I love that element, that this attribute lines up with potential. Amazon, yes.
That if you could correlate it to, all right, this person likely is going to fit in with our team because they can rapidly think and scale on such. Fascinating, fascinating stuff to hear. So I ask that question a lot of times, you know, like when I tell you stories like, now say this one. No.
What's your answer for how many gas stations they've got? The best answer I've heard was a young woman in John York's class said, not enough. I said, why is that? Just because you have to drive to get to one.
Okay, that's a very creative, cool answer. I love that. I love that. So I love that.
That's awesome. So I'll tell you something else about the Amazon, which I think is very important for young entrepreneurs. Jeff's theory, and I think it's true, is that a people hire Bs, Bs hire Cs, and pretty soon you have a company bogged down by mediocre people. So our theory is when you hire someone, you had to hire someone that added to the overall excellence of the organization.
You had to hire people better than you. And because I started so many different programs, departments, Amazon, I was constantly hiring my replacement. Go out, put together a department or program. I'd hire 30 people, grow it real big, fast, and then I have to go find someone who could do my job way better than I go hired to the department because I had to go somewhere else, you know, So I constantly was hiring, interviewing, hiring people that were like 50 times more brilliant than I was, you know, and eventually got so good at my job that I was one of those people.
But I was, you know, but, you know, so constantly was bringing the best, the brightest of these people that went on to become leaders in, at Amazon or in, you know, in the United States. I think Juicing Kyla, who's former CFO of Hulu, was one of our hires. Andy Jassy, who runs aws, Keith Moore, who runs ibooks and itunes for Apple. I mean, just a ton of brilliant people that you sat directly across from and said, we're gonna hire you.
I was a part of the hiring process. So everyone that came in would be interviewed by several different people. Meet me up and have a up down. Oh yeah, I was a head resource.
So that was almost 30% of our job in the early days was hiring, interviewing and hiring people because we were our model then we had several models was get big fast. So we were hiring an astounding clip. And so it took a lot of your resources so it just to handle how much business was coming in. Yeah, I was like trying to chase down more business because you go knows how to handle what was coming in again, fastest growing company of all time.
We were obsessed with customer service. So any break in that service, any break in, any chink in the armor could be disastrous. We want to keep our trajectory, so we poured a lot of people on fire. At one point we had a Toyota department was probably larger than any other toilet department, probably bigger than the New York Times.
You know, we threw so many writers at the Internet because we realized content is candy. People can't make purchase decisions, you know. And so we just, you know, we have things called review fest where you can really sit down, review 150 books or 150 albums a day. Wow.
Sounds bad. If you like, you just listen to all those albums and write reviews for it. That was fun. All right, I want to hear about your last day at Amazon.
What was that like? Walking, outdoor, going. I'm not going to be turning back to work here anymore. Feelings, sentiments.
What was in your head? As much fun as Amazon was, as much as I loved my career there, I was ready to go. It was five years. Also, things were pretty gruesome around then.
Amazon had just gone through its first fire, its first downsize. They fired about 10% of the workforce. It was, you know, the dot com bubble burst before I left, wiped out billions and billions of dollars. There's people at Amazon walking in the hallways that were literally millionaires one day and owing the government money the next day because of some weird.
Some alternative impacts. Oh, lots. It was brutal. It was the launcher, stock options, whatever.
But they had to tax the money Zach had before. Amazon's share went from its high of $440, I think down to about $4 a share so that you Know, and then, you know, there was people in that thought Amazon was gonna make it. Several businesses did not make it through the dot com because we were the poster child of the dot com economy in the bubble. You know, a lot of people didn't think we were gonna survive.
So there's empty offices for the first time really. We weren't hiring rapidly for the first time. I mean to the credit of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, they came roaring back unlike any other. I mean look at me, where the stock is now.
Yeah, they're either. But it was hard to see that future at the time. Plus I was burned out. I mean five years of that work ethic, that lifestyle, that, you know, constant pace.
It was, it was difficult to sustain. And by then I met my soon to be wife and I was more interested in having a life with her. And financially I was in a place where I could step away. Like I said, my time, it was 13,000 a year.
It wasn't worth to keep working for that because the stock option weren't there anymore. I was done. I was a five year investing schedule and pretty much my last batch of stocks that were best were essentially worthless. So there's no financial statistic not saying that that's what motivated me the entire time because I truly was motivated by how wonderful the place was and how great the work was and how much fun and exciting it was.
But by the end I was a little burned out, I imagine so. Yeah, so. But I took some time off after that. But leaving the building itself was, was surreal.
You know, we had another guy was leaving at the same time as me and we had a farewell party and you know, it's definitely emotional. Same divide. The people that worked hard with and sweated and cried with the last few years. So very bittersweet.
Bittersweet, yes. So you concluded at Amazon and you did it mainly because you felt, okay, I'm done. I want to take my life to a different place. I want to start a family and have all this stuff.
You had your stock options, what did you do next? Initially I was going to start a magazine and it went pretty far down the route of starting a magazine. And it was going to be a print publication, no more Internet. I love magazines, I love New York.
I read obsessively, read ton of magazines. I had a pretty cool idea for what the magazine would be, but it turns out that in order to run a magazine you have to write a business. You know, I could have sustained it a little bit for a while, which is my own money, but eventually it's a business and it's a monthly business. It's selling advertising.
It's not a business. I wanted to be. And then I copy. So I played poker, played a lot of poker, played in some big tournaments, became a fairly accomplished poker player, both online and that.
And that was fun. But that eventually got boring. That's how it turned. Magazines.
Exactly. I did some angel and seed investing, but again the dot com bubble burst and I was all wiped out. I did a lot of reading. I did a couple of startups with a couple friends.
You know, we got to a certain point but again, we never found the product market fit there. What we thought were cool ideas, but there was no market there. Learned a lot from doing that. Became a stay at home dad, which is the best job I've ever had and being like the super stay at home dad, you know, volunteered in the classroom and stuff like that.
But as my daughter, she needed me less and less and you know, for someone to had a startup idea that always come to me. So I ended up consulting with a lot of startups and I realized that what I learned at Amazon, being able to scale rapidly, listening to the customer, how to iterate prototype really helps people start their own business. I became a pretty cool, pretty good consultant. I thought it was good advice.
One of the companies I was consulting with was doing some work with John York who's the co founder of the cie, he teaches entrepreneurship at Cal Poly. And they invited me into the classroom. Actually I got an email from saying they got an email from. Do you know anyone who knows how to monetize a website?
They're like, yeah, Todd Nelson knows how to monetize a website. So I worked with one of the young teams in John's senior class that was working on the startup idea. And I met John, I spoke in the classroom. I worked the team as a mentor and just fell completely in love with what's going on here at Cal Poly.
In support of entrepreneurship, I realized I actually had something to add to the con. So I joke that I got my job here this time. I got Amazon. I showed up all my sleep, started working and they were dumb and no one told me go home.
So I started volunteering as a mentor, started teaching class, teaching entrepreneurship at Cal Poly. Eventually when I started looking for an executive director. Stuck around. Yeah, stuck around.
I've actually got a question here from a listener about mentorship. How can someone be mentor? Give back and offer value to your mentor. And this is from Dylan Wirtz.
Wait, this is live I get questions live on Snapchat. I was so astonished that we had someone writing in ask a question. I didn't hear the question. Yeah, sure.
So the question comes in from Dylan Wirtz. How can someone being mentor give back and offer value to their mentor? Because you mentioned a handful of times of your experience here. Boy, you know, being a mentor is not standing on top of a mountain and putting your ways to roll your ways downhill.
It's a conversation. Yeah. So I get in the times I've been mentoring the other students I've mentored, it's. I learned as much from them as they do for me.
In fact, I entered into my mentorship wide open to discovery because I'm often not only wrong, I want to search with the mentee student for what's right. You know, the imparting wisdom or saying things need to be a certain way is not a learning experience. Searching for the answer with someone else and supporting that search and supporting, you know, the difficulties of code you finding. I think it's a much better way to be a mentor.
I also believe, you know, if you've succeeded, if your success is dependent on the wisdom of others, time to get back and share. Share with people that need help. Yes. Yes.
This is something I almost say in every single episode. When you reach a certain level of success, I feel like it's the right that person to give back to the community in some way. Like it's an honorable note. You think most people would believe that, but there's a select group of people that actually come here and what they want is to give and not take.
One of the big challenges, I think, with our center and what we do here is a lot of people come to the building, want something from us. When we're helping people build businesses, they want us to build their business. I will help you build your business. Don't get me wrong.
We'll give you all the tools and resources to build your business, but you're the one that has to do it. We can't do it for you. So. And then there's some people that come through and they.
They want to benefit, they want to exploit. You know, they're getting on the action of some of the values being created in the building. And I really am most interested in people that come through to help help us help people start the business ventures. Yeah, I love that vending process that you guys have for mentors.
It's a key attribute to have somebody's willing to give more. And I also really appreciate what you said about you as a mentor, have sort of sat back and listened sometimes to teams. Oh, absolutely. Help them problem solve.
Not necessarily going, here's your solution. Yeah. And what do you think is so bad about the mentor to saying, here's the solution? Well, because chances are you're wrong.
You know, sometimes you come in and I mean, I know that for a fact, because some of these times when I have said, here's your solution, I'm wrong. Like, I just made that mistake today with a company we're preparing for our midpoint check, and all the companies are working on their demo decks. And I've always been of this opinion that this company, which is doing X, should be doing Y and so waking their deck. And I said, why are you doing Y?
You know, I've been telling you how long you should be doing Y. And they, like, looked at me, like, kind of nervous, like, because we talk to people and, you know, this is what we believe. God, I'm doing it, you know, doing that thing. Here's what you should do.
What happens here is we have so many great mentors coming through. It's only people that have strong opinions that they get. They hear from 10 people, it's the same old guy, the same question, they get 10 answers. So they're confused.
So part of what we have to help them do is sort through those answers and find the ones that are best for them. Yeah, Yeah. I think that's extremely difficult as a startup because if an adult, let's say somebody older, more experience, says you should do it this way, you're. You're inclined your mind, like, I gotta respect this person.
This isn't this. And really, entrepreneur as this is, you should know best. In some cases, you should be able to take all the answers and synthesize them, analyze them, and come up with the best answer for you if you know your business best. That said, you know, it's.
It's hard to know what your business is until you've really gotten out there and talk to your customers. And those are the people you listen to. Yeah, I mean, you know, and then once you've discovered what it is your customer wants, then go to those domain experts and find out, how do I do distribution? How do I do content marketing?
How do I do? And then you really got to listen to those things. Awesome. I'd like to have you maybe shed a little bit more light on your academic experience and entrepreneurship and teaching students, because this is an area that I think there's a little bit of conflict.
Impossibly, some Entrepreneurs, you can't teach entrepreneurship. And I might say, yeah, you can. What are some of your thoughts on how you should approach the academic setting? As an entrepreneur?
I absolutely think it can be taught. And it's kind of very. The way we teach it at Cal Poly is very geek. It's truly learned by doing.
I mean, I don't lecture. Yeah, I put. And a team. And a team starts a business and going through that process and doing customer development, which is the heart of what we teach.
You will learn a ton about how to start a business. And there are so many resources available to entrepreneurs now. It's easier to start a business than ever. And there's.
It's noisy, but, you know, the tools are there. So it's cheaper to start business than ever. So you can start a website than ever. There's a lot of great philosophy behind how to start a business, especially at startup phase.
So also, the value doesn't necessarily have to come from starting a business. By going through the process of customer development, having empathy, you become a better person. I think you become a better worker. You become more valuable to.
As an employee of a company or the next startup you go to. You become more valuable as a. Or a father, as a spouse, you know, because to be a good entrepreneur, you really have to be open to the world around you. You're constantly problem solving.
You're constantly looking at pain and problems and finding solutions. You're constantly looking around. You can see what makes people happy and can I create something that will make them happier? You just don't stop looking at the world that way.
So, yeah, it's absolutely. It can be taught. I completely agree that entrepreneurship does give you a different perspective on the world. You.
You get a more human taste of what's going on around you and people. Everybody has problems, they have issues, they have needs. Like, we're all human, you know, I need to get to here faster like that. So problem solve for that.
Interesting. Interesting. I would like you to touch on a point that we've discussed previously about. Let's say you go through a startup and it doesn't pan out and you're kind of bound, oh, my startup failed.
You might have revenue or something like that. What would you give to somebody who's in that position as advice? Oh, pick yourself up and do again. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, if you have what it takes to do it. Failure is not a bad thing in entrepreneurship. It just means you didn't find that product market fit. You didn't, but that's what you failed if you didn't working hard enough, that's a bad thing.
But you know, the people here in our program are so motivated, so they work so hard for little to nothing. And what you learn when you're in a start too is you don't learn how to be a marketer, you'll learn just a marketer, you'll learn how to just write code. You write, you learn all the about, you learn how to market, you learn how to be a business leader, you learn how to write code, you learn how to do your financials, you learn how to do social media, you learn everything you know and it makes you a much more. So if you do fail, okay, you can, you can say to yourself, what's next?
So if you don't have the taste for not a failure, you go out and get a great job. Because employers are looking for people with the skill set that you just acquired. You know, people who are innovative and are business leaders and have empathy and can do customer development. Those are really valuable inside of the corporation.
I was just talking to a C level person at Northrop Grant Grubbing and he's really excited to hear about our program because I was telling about one of our entrepreneurs here, Shay Rucker. She was here in the building for three years working harder than everybody else to launch his product. It just never found traction. But he learned so much in that process that he went out and got another job.
You know, he wasn't the CEO anymore. We got a job at a startup where he delivered nothing but great value. He's loving life right now. And when I told him this, his eyes look, that's what we need to hire tons of workers.
We hire so many people that can work. We want people that can innovate, we want people that have, that can lead. It's really hard to find those people. Really, really hard to find those people in among young people.
You know, usually that's something you acquire over time, but if you do a startup, you spend two years of, you know, trying to get that thing to a market and do all the customer development, wear all the hats, it's necessary, you learn. It's a life type of education in a very short period of time. I've had a number of people who've been through our summer accelerator program, which is a three month program, say that what they learned at the end of the program was the equivalent of getting a Harvard mba because you learn so much going through the process. I will contest that.
My experience of going through the accelerator program here twice is definitely Somebody micro mba. Yes. That I walk away going, this is stuff I would have never learned on my own. I'd have to sit down with big time entrepreneurs locally here and pick their brains when they would come speak to us.
I would be forced to learn how to do marketing on social media. Yeah. I'd be forced to not incorporate how to do financials. Like this is crap I didn't even touch in school.
Like it's. There's theoretical stuff. It's applying school. Not necessarily entirely practical things that understanding how business operates brings up in a lower price and selling it for higher.
Like that's the. No one never told me that. No one ever told me that school. It's never seen that specifically.
And it drives me nuts. And I appreciate your guys working for educating in that way. All right, I want to learn a little bit more about what are you doing today? What's your day here at cie?
Well, at the center for Innovation. So I joke that 100% of my job is fundraising to keep the center open. We are almost entirely reliant on donor funds. So 100% my job is fundraising.
The of my job is right in the center. So we have several programs both on campus and in the community. They are very intense programs. They deliver a lot of value.
We have an overworked staff that gets paid too little and does too much. We're also getting the summer accelerator underway. We have eight teams in this accelerator right now. They're frantically working on their decks and their pitches.
So we're giving them feedback and advice. We're about to go on a fundraising trip to the Bay Area. You know, just. It's very much like working at Amazon again.
It's a startup. We're a startup that helps startups. So we're constantly hustling not only to keep the operations alive here, we're hustling to keep the companies in our program alive and get the funds for them. And we're constantly trying to improve our own operations.
We been a startup for too long. You know, we. We're now just getting to a place where we can become a more mature organization. We just took possession of 15,000 square feet of space downtown.
We were created a small space. I had five people in my office recently. Now we have some room to grow. We're running a co working program too, which is growing very, very fast.
Membership community come in and rent that space from us. And it's one of the ways we raise revenue to keep the doors open. People lights on people lights on people. But it's you know, it's a lot of work, but it's super cool.
Like, last night, we had a visiting entrepreneur. His name is Russ Nash. He's a Cal Poly alumni. He bought everybody pizza.
And he talked about his entrepreneur, you know, his, his. What he did in his life. He had other recent graduates of our program who have businesses now talk about how difficult it is to be working a startup and how goddamn fun it is. Yeah, you know, it's like the hardest, but it's.
You look back and it's really funny. We had a recent visiting entrepreneur who said, you never tell your stories to your kids about the days that it was easy. You made money, you signed up customers. Now you tell them about the days when you had scrounged the trash to find a 2 for 1 coupon to buy a pulley.
Burl. You literally worked until you fell asleep at your desk, you know, or slept under your desk. You know, the days when you would go into the couch cushions, the fresh crowns, you earn enough money to go buy some top ramen. Those are the days that are fun.
The only ones, remember, those are the stories you tell your kids or your grandkids. I love that. And I think sort of hearing those war stories gives you an element of perspective on where things could eventually be in the end. I've got a handful of questions here just to conclude with the rapid fire questions.
I got one from a listener and I've got two sort of in between questions, like your favorite book or something like that. But this one comes from. His name is Nick Longo, and his question is, in the beginning of Amazon, how did you, Jeff and others keep great company culture while quickly growing and scaling the company? It just happened.
It was like. It was fun. It was. We were building something.
We were building something that had never been done before, and the work was great. I mean, it was hard work, and there's a lot of tears, a lot of days, oh, God, I can't do it. But again, it's like I just said, it's those early days are the most ecstatic days, you know, so also, like, company culture. I don't really sure what that means.
It's like, show up, do your work. Be proud of the work you do. Do good work. Also make mistakes, and don't, you know, cry about it.
Okay, you messed up. What did we learn? How do we not make that mistake again? So, yeah, there's no, you know, there's no, like, rulebook on how to create code company culture, but it was a lot of fun.
Yeah, that relates to a lot of what you said about Shay and hiring. An entrepreneur has those attributes to sort of weather those times where it's not ideal. Stick it. I'm happy.
I'm gonna go to the next day and continue. Also, how it works. People came to Amazon to fail, and the ones that failed are the ones that were waiting around to be told what to do at Amazon. You didn't know what to do.
Find, Find out. You know, teach yourself, you know. We started writing features for ebook interviews with authors. And so my boss said, you know, you have to write this thing in HTML.