Speaker 1: 0:10

Hi everyone out there. I'm your host, stacy Santee, and I'm joined by my co-host, ira Gordon, and you are listening to the Accidental Entrepreneur. In just a few minutes, we're going to be spinning a wheel that has over 50 questions about startup journey. But before we get into that, how's it going, ira it?

Speaker 2: 0:31

is going great. Thank you for asking. How are you doing?

Speaker 1: 0:34

Stacy, I'm doing well. I have to admit, I'm a little stressed out today. Okay, I'm living on this ranch outside of Phoenix and we have horses and chickens and dogs and cats and the whole thing, and this is a fence out area apparently. So when I woke up this morning and he's getting ready I saw all these cows in my yard, basically.

Speaker 2: 1:01

My goodness.

Speaker 1: 1:02

And I had to run out there in my bathrobe and chase them away. It's just a free range. Cows that come in and they, oh my gosh they ate my brand new hibiscus plant. They ate a bunch of branches off my trees and they got into all the horse hay and it was all stacked so nice, and so now it's all demolished and then there's like 5 million cow pies that I have to go scoop up. So I'm super frustrated.

Speaker 2: 1:31

Really my goodness.

Speaker 1: 1:36

What's going on in your neck of the woods?

Speaker 2: 1:38

Oh, I don't know. So my wife's traveling yesterday and today for work and our nanny is also traveling for pleasure today, so I'm trying to hold down the household while doing everything else, which is fun. It was good to have some extra time with my boys.

Speaker 1: 1:55

So do you have to plan all the meals?

Speaker 2: 1:59

I will be doing a little bit of cooking later. I think I'm going to. Actually, they usually spend Friday nights with my parents-in-law, so I may let them be in charge of dinner, which means almost certainly some type of unhealthy takeout. But hey, what are grandparents for?

Speaker 1: 2:16

For sure. All right, so let's start digging into this. All right, guys, you can't see what we're looking at, but I have loaded over 50 questions into this giant wheel of fortune thing. It's called Wheel of Names. It's actually really fun if you want to go to wheelofnamescom and make your own wheel and I'm going to spin it and then Ira and I are going to answer the question. Are you ready?

Speaker 2: 2:41

Not really.

Speaker 1: 2:43

Here we go.

Speaker 2: 2:52

Who were some of your investors?

Speaker 1: 3:01

Okay, that's a good question. So Ira Tellis for Vet Prep, who was your first investor, do you remember?

Speaker 2: 3:09

I do. So we were all vet students when we started that prep, so we had basically no money and we had a friend that was going to develop the software for us, but we needed to come up with about $10,000 for that and we figured we'd have about $10,000 and other expenses that we needed to get the business going. And me and my the two classmates that started it with me didn't have that kind of money, and so we had to figure out how to get it. Fortunately for me, I was able to get a loan from my parents, so very fortunate that I had that luxury.

Speaker 2: 3:47

But one of my partners, mauricio, didn't have that kind of luxury, and so he actually went to his mentor, who is a vet at the San Diego what at the time was called the Wild Animal Park Now it's called the zoo safari park guy named Jeff Zuba the coolest and nicest guy in the world and told him about what we were thinking about doing and that we needed a little bit of money to get it started up. And he loaned Mauricio $7,000, what we all had to put in and I have 100% confidence that he called it alone, but he had no expectation that he was ever going to see that money again and he just did it as really a favor to his mentee and somebody who he wanted to support and that he believed in. And luckily we were actually able to pay him back and invited him to all of our annual meetings and really got to know him extremely well and spent a lot of time with him. So it was actually quite fortunate that we had probably the best investor in the world.

Speaker 1: 4:55

So there are four of you guys.

Speaker 2: 4:58

Yes, so there was me. I had two vet school classmates. We really were initially started it and then we hired a fantastic software developer. We didn't know how fantastic he was at the time, and he became our fourth partner a little bit later because we realized that he was incredible and we couldn't possibly live without him.

Speaker 1: 5:17

And did you give everybody, like your parents and this guy from the zoo? Did you give them equity?

Speaker 2: 5:28

No, so we really treated all of those investments as loans. So I guess they weren't sort of formally investors in the business per se, but I still think of them as the investors in business.

Speaker 1: 5:38

Yeah, for sure, and I think that brings up there are different types of investors some people that you're going to give equity to, some people that are more just in your corner, kind of a they're there to. Maybe they've had some success in the past and they're wanting to see you, wanting to see you have the good fortune of doing what they did, and I find that there are shockingly a lot of people that are willing to help you.

Speaker 2: 6:06

Indeed, I think we were really really lucky at Vet Prep that with that small initial $7,000 of personal investment we were able to launch a company and then developed enough revenue through that company that we could continue to just invest back into it and build and do new things. That has not been my reality since then. I don't think it is a reality for 99% of businesses, but we were really lucky in that way.

Speaker 1: 6:35

How long did that many last you?

Speaker 2: 6:38

Well, it took us about 18 months to actually launch the product, which we thought was going to take us three to six months to put together. It lasted us until then, got us launched and then, within a month or two of launching the initial website for Vet Prep, we started having customers coming in. I guess it got us to there.

Speaker 1: 7:02

Did you have to take on more investors at that point?

Speaker 2: 7:05

No, we never took on another investor. We just grew it slowly and added users and then added products.

Speaker 1: 7:14

Wow, I love that For me. I was so naive. I was really naive on this. It never crossed my mind that random people would give you money for-.

Speaker 2: 7:25

No, it's so weird, right. Who would do that?

Speaker 1: 7:27

Yeah, I never even thought to ask, because who would do that? I figured you can only buy what you can afford and you pay as you go. I guess that's the part of being an accidental entrepreneur.

Speaker 2: 7:44

That's so old fashioned of you, Stacy.

Speaker 1: 7:48

It reminds me of this Saturday Night Live skit have you seen it? Where it's one of their commercials for this new product to help people save money? The whole concept is you don't buy it if you don't have the money. The people are all wait a minute. You're saying if I don't have the money, I shouldn't buy it.

Speaker 3: 8:09

They're like yes, it's Saturday Night Live. Did you know? Millions of Americans live with debt they cannot control. That's why I developed this unique new program for managing your debt. It's called Don't Buy Stuff you Cannot Afford. Oh, let me see that If you don't have any money, you should not buy anything. Sounds interesting, sounds confusing.

Speaker 2: 8:43

I don't know honey.

Speaker 3: 8:44

This makes a lot of sense. There's a whole section here on how to buy expensive things using money you save.

Speaker 2: 8:51

Give me that, and where would you get this?

Speaker 3: 8:55

saved money. I tell you where and how in Chapter 3. Okay, but what if I want something but I don't have any money? You don't buy it.

Speaker 2: 9:07

It is a revolutionary thought, for sure. But no, I know exactly what you're saying. I think that idea that somebody would just say yes, if you asked for money for your idea was completely sort of foreign to me as well.

Speaker 1: 9:23

Yeah, ludacris. So I was for my first investor. I was just working my. I guess I was my first investor because I was just working my veterinary job, taking any extra money I could, you know, squander away and stick it back into the company, and I had some early customers right away, so I would take the first customer and use it to pay to build the second customer's mobile app, and I kind of did it that way. But eventually, of course, I needed some money and I stumbled on it in the weirdest way, so I decided that it was 2016.

Speaker 1: 10:06

I'd watched a lot of episodes of Shark Tank by this point and I knew I couldn't continue to be successful if I had one foot in each camp so one foot being a full time veterinarian managing my practice, the other in vet to pet. So I decided I'm going to go for it Like I'm going to go all in with vet to pet. So I quit my vet job, I put in my notice, I quit, and then I had to send a email, a letter out to all my clients that I've been taking care of all these years and I had a lot of great clients and so I crafted up this email and sent it out, letting everyone know that I was going to be leaving Riverview Animal Hospital and I was going to start this new tech company. And I got an email response back from one of my clients and they said I had no idea you're doing this. This is really awesome. I would be happy to help you if you ever want to have coffee or need any advice, and I'm going to go ahead and drop a copy of my book by your clinic for you and let's just keep in touch. And I was like drop your book by.

Speaker 1: 11:19

Oh, who's this guy? I think he's hot stuff. Well, he drops his book by and I I mostly had dealt with his wife, with the animals, for years and years. I knew him, but I mostly dealt with the wife. So I start googling him and I realized this guy's a big deal. His name is Marty Kagan and he was one of the original engineers for Netscape with Mark Andreessen, and he actually was one of the early people in eBay and helped build the whole thing of the shopping basket experience and he's an advisor to people like Jeff Bezos and Sergey at Google. All these big people like he's a big deal.

Speaker 1: 12:07

And here I had no idea. So I said well, yes, let's go for coffee. So we go for coffee and he starts telling me, you know, asking me lots of questions. And it was so funny I'll never forget, because he licked at me and he goes you have no idea what you're doing. And I said it's true, I've been discovered. I have no idea what I'm doing. And he said well, you're going to need some money and I'm going to give you $50,000. And I'm like what? And he's like I'd be happy to help you. I like your idea. I like I know what kind of person you are and if you pay me back someday, great, if you don't, whatever. But I want you to have a good chance. And that was the beginning.

Speaker 2: 12:55

That's so funny and amazing. It's a little bit like Dr Zuba, just like here you go and, if you pay me back, great I think. Yeah, it's wild how you sort of run into people and they help you in these ways that you never would have expected or they turn out to be people who are not what you expected.

Speaker 2: 13:14

I mentioned our fourth partner, eric, our software developer. Like he was just like a friend of a friend of Steve's my other partner right, who we knew was a software developer that we ended up talking to and he just seemed like he's really smart and he's fun to talk to and he is confident and knows how to build what we want to build. And when we met him, all he told us is that he was just getting started on this new company that was going to be doing bill paying. It was like him and the CEO. They were just kind of starting this little startup and now we know that that company is a major publicly traded company called billcom and they built all this great stuff and Eric built it and he was, you know, like we had no idea.

Speaker 2: 14:04

I mean, we figured out he was a genius but we had no idea sort of what he was doing or just how incredible the guy was.

Speaker 1: 14:14

It's true, we're just nobodies, really. Who are we to receive this kind of help? But you know what? We're just like everybody else. We're the same, so we do deserve to receive the help that's out there. I think that's a mindset that I had to get right with over the time is why not me Like? Why not?

Speaker 2: 14:37

Yeah, I mean that, why not me? Sentiment is something I think about all the time. I think it's not something I always had, right, yeah, and I actually took one of my partners one day to sort of say, well, you know, if nobody else is going to do something like this for us, like, why not us, right, why don't we do it? And we couldn't come up with a good answer for why not? Except we're idiots and we're vet students, and why should we be the ones to, you know, build something like this? But then I was like, well, maybe that is the reason why, like, we're vet students, we actually know this problem right and we need to be studying anyway. Why don't we start to build content, right? So it's, yeah, it's a weird thing, but once you realize that that question of why me is really not one that needs to be answered, it should be why not you?

Speaker 1: 15:28

Yeah, totally. I want to also say that after I had the 50,000 and I started growing more, I became evident I needed more money. Like that's the funny thing about it as you start going, you've got to have money to make it go to the next phase. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention two other amazing people that helped me out Well, three actually. So my parents.

Speaker 1: 15:59

I also got a loan from the PNB, the parent national bank and I remember I took my parents out for lunch and I explained I'm going to be doing this thing, I'm quitting my job and I need some money. And my dad was like okay, honey, let me get this straight. You went to veterinary school, you have a very good career and now you're going to do something that you know nothing about. I'm like, yes, and he said him mom, both were like no problem, we believe in you. And that was really great. And they neither of them went to college. They worked for the railroad their whole life and they have made a very nice living for themselves, but a hundred percent on labor, right, like they didn't inherit a bunch of money. They have worked. All their money comes from working from the time they were like 20 till they retired and at the same job for the railroad. They both worked for the railroad all these years, so taking that money was like serious for me, because I don't want to lose that money.

Speaker 2: 17:11

That's pressure right there.

Speaker 1: 17:12

That's some pressure. And then my uncle my dad's brother also. He had ended up in his career, he was a struggling engineer for a long time and he ended up creating this digital scale, basically that goes in the back of trucks and it weighs how much load is in the truck, and he ended up having a really lucrative deal with the government for the trucks in Iraq and he was like I love entrepreneurs, so let me help you too, and I was just really blessed to come up with basically $150,000 just from nice people, nice people.

Speaker 2: 17:54

Fantastic.

Speaker 1: 17:57

And I didn't have to give away any equity. Like, I did give them equity but they didn't ask for it, and I think that's important for someone starting out. You don't think your equity is worth anything, so you feel more inclined to give it away, but you should probably try not to if you can, because in the end it matters.

Speaker 2: 18:18

Yeah, that's a good point, and maybe even more importantly than that in my mind would be if you give equity to somebody, they're sort of your partner at that point, right, you guys are then in this together and I suppose if it's your parents or your uncle, hopefully that's a good thing and not a bad thing. But you never know, and certainly with outside parties, you need to be really thoughtful about who you want to be a thought partner and a decision partner, and with you in your business.

Speaker 1: 18:49

Yeah, Marty asked me. Oh, I said do you want equity? He goes, I guess, how about 1%? I'm like, OK, Turns out to be a lot of money for him in the end.

Speaker 2: 19:02

Yeah, worked out all right.

Speaker 1: 19:03

OK, so let's share with our listeners now something that is either a favorite quote of yours, a favorite book, a favorite technology tool or a favorite mentor, and we're going to do this at the end of every episode, so we'll share our favorite things over time.

Speaker 2: 19:22

So I have to admit that this quote, when it was first told to me, I thought was like the dumbest quote, and so I'm a little bit embarrassed that this is going to be the one I'm going to share now, because since that time.

Speaker 2: 19:37

I just find myself repeating it in my head all the time, and this comes from one of my mentors, ames Prentice, who was the CEO of EthosFedHealth, when I was there and we were dealing with some difficult decisions, and I just remember him saying to me said you know, ira, so many things in life just come down to timing. And I thought, yeah, obviously. But since he said that to me, I feel like it actually was far more profound than I sort of appreciated to be at the time and I think that so many things really encompasses far more than most people really think about or appreciate.

Speaker 1: 20:24

Wow, that's so powerful, really timing. Ok for me. I'm going to share this quote. I really really like If I had a problem with being a squirrel in the beginning and getting. There are so many problems to solve in veterinary medicine and there were so many ideas I had.

Speaker 1: 20:46

I had a real hard time staying in one link and it was so important that I learned to be disciplined in this. I had a big chalkboard in my office and I wrote stick to the plan, because there was a point in time that I had a plan and then I would just get all distracted and stray away from my plan. And I really love this quote that says the future you is depending on the current you to keep the promises you made to yourself yesterday. And for me it was really important that I also adopted this other saying from Game of Thrones not today. And I got the whole sighing from Game of Thrones in a sword and I put it also right in front of me and so when I would think about new ideas or people would ask me to do stuff that was off course from my plan, I would just say not today, like I love it, but not today.

Speaker 2: 21:46

I love it. It reminds me of something I used to say to myself a lot. I haven't had to do as much recently, but would be similarly when having something that really wasn't on that list of things that I really needed to focus on. I would say I'm going to save this problem for future me.

Speaker 1: 22:05

Oh yeah, that's good.

Speaker 2: 22:06

And but then I had this realization that future me oftentimes really hates present day me when it comes to saving this problem for him.

Speaker 1: 22:18

Oh funny. All right, guys, little things for listening to our episode and we're going to go ahead and spend the wheel to see what's coming up next time. Okay, what is some of the worst advice you hear people telling founders?

Speaker 2: 22:52

Well.

Speaker 1: 22:53

I got a good one. I look forward to talking to you next time.

Speaker 2: 22:57

You too, Stacey.

Speaker 1: 23:00

Thanks for listening to the show today. If you want to learn more about my story or Irestory, be sure to check out episodes two and three. And if you are an accidental entrepreneur and would like to be a guest cohost on the show and spin the wheel, just message B a cohost no spaces to 1-833-463-9727 and tell us your story. See you next time.