Inhibitions of an Entrepreneur and Best Kept Secrets

Starting and growing a business changed me. I wanted to write about what building companies did to me, how it changed me and helped me conquer some of my own fears and inhibitions. This isn't something investors pay for or that you'll find in a pitch deck. I'm writing this for me in the hope that some others can gain something from it.

I learned to sell, learned about products, and after a wakeup call from Andrew Feldman, learned to lead. My next challenge is to learn and practice marketing and I'm still afraid of it!

Coding mode (the comfort zone)

I was always most comfortable at a keyboard programming, or sometimes posting or contributing online. My partner Brini and I started our first business when I was 20. We did OS, firmware and toolchain development, selling products and support as well as doing consulting for US clients. At school and at Uni, all I wanted to do was sit in the computer lab and hack code while occasionally joining the odd online flame war.

Initially, we had one contract, enough to pay one salary, and if we wanted to do more and get paid, someone else had to find more business. I was getting close to graduation and needed a salary because the family couldn't support me. Brini was the bigger technical brain, and I knew I didn't want to work at a large UK company, so necessity forced me to go out and drum up business.

Selling mode (the necessity)

I built a web site and worked out how to sell stuff in person and online. I had no idea what I was doing but the outcome was good and the lessons proved invaluable.

We created activity by contributing to the open-source project NetBSD (something like Linux). We used our knowledge to write and contribute to mailing lists and newsgroups (something like a free version of Reddit), and got stuff published in some paper magazines. We found a couple of great hardware partners who would embed our software; 10 years later I learned that was called a "channel."

Although we exhibited at shows and sold software to punters wanting an OS, most of the additional business was found by opportunistic outreach and inbound interest as a result of these activities. I became comfortable writing, showing up to meetings, pitching our wares and capabilities and selling our stuff. Building in-person rapport somehow came naturally, as though I was a different me, in a different mode from how I normally operated. It turns out introverts can be outgoing too in the right situation.

Orders came in, invoices went out and payments were received. In hindsight, like most engineers I likely priced everything too low, but it still felt great. As Yellowbrick co-founder Jim Dawson taught me, more sales solves all business problems. Selling more, faster, lets you out-execute any other issues. Without sales, a company is nothing, and this was a critical tool to add to the toolbox.

Whole product mode (learning strategy)

In subsequent years at Liberate I mostly did architecture and hacked code, sitting in cubicles and offices, rarely undertaking business travel and leaving sales and marketing to others. Things weren't going well after the dot com crash: We had built products our prospects weren't buying, and we weren't trying to sell what we had to buyers that might be interested. So I took to the road, talked to customers, partners and mapped out the whole production value chain, and realised that we'd not really solved a problem that people wanted solved.

I joined BMC and found a product with really good market fit but learned the relevant of timing. We did a good job of moving the Remedy product to the web, but subsequently missed the SaaS revolution. Everdream was also a timing failure; Elon Musk needed money to fund Tesla, so we were forced to sell. We'd built amazing distributed device management technology just before smartphones became popular. A few years after we sold there was a company worth north of a billion dollars doing what we did. I worked on M&A at Everdream, because the product and I were a key part of the package we were selling. Buying and selling companies didn't feel much different from selling product or anything else, but next time we built something we needed a well-defined product into a market that existed with interested buyers. I learned to not fear public speaking after pulling off a product demo with Michael Dell and Mark Benioff at Moscone; it turns out there’s no difference between presenting to 100 people and presenting to 10,000.

CEO mode (wake-up call)

Starting and founding Yellowbrick Data, I relied on my CTO experience to produce a compelling product that did hundreds of millions of dollars of business, along with tons of sales engagements. This didn’t get me out of my inherent insecurity - shyness, though, a desire to be out of the spotlight in the back room, to make things happen without being seen to be making them happen.

After the first CEO didn’t work out, I had to take the job. I was afraid of even putting the title on my business card: Would I have to be the frontman, in the spotlight? Deliver the sorts of rousing speeches that motivates some employees but makes us engineers cringe? I didn’t want to do that, so I kept building, until a wake-up call came one day. I asked Andrew Feldman, now running amazing wafer-scale computing company Cerebras, to come in and give a talk to the employees. They were asking all sorts of non-technical, “what happens next” type questions for our business that I couldn’t answer. Andrew could, and his responses were incredibly motivating to everyone.

Andrew hit me on the head after the meeting: “You’ve got great people but there's no leadership in this company. If you don’t solve this, your company will be dead.” Slap in the face, I woke up.

I got out of my comfort zone, led the company through funding rounds, ups and downs, dealing with investors, board members, partners, happy customers, angry customers, lawyers and the rest. Yellowbrick has done a great deal of business and powers so many exciting services we all use and rely upon every day, yet most people don't know about it. That's my fault.

Marketing mode? (next frontier)

My never-ending desire to keep a low profile continued to hurt us. I didn't want to have my name out there, my likeness online, I didn't want to meet strangers or analysts I didn't know, afraid of rejection. Awareness, finding customers and supporting sales was a marketing problem. Although our COO complemented my skills in almost every way, he could do almost everything I couldn't and vice-versa, unfortunately he had the same inhibitions towards marketing that I had. After all, it's quite literally an activity for attention-seekers.

We churned CMOs and marketing staff – I'm sorry to those that didn't succeed here – and continued to be the best kept secret in data while Snowflake, Databricks and even smaller businesses had far more visibility than us.

Marketers and sellers were always a different type of animal from me: Emotional, less logical, optimising for human attention not for logical behaviour. I've learned that this is why engineers frequently struggle to manage salespeople. Like most inhibitions, the insecurities that make some of us want to keep a low profile can be traced to childhood trauma or upbringing; in my case, keeping a low profile kept me out of trouble. It's why for the longest time, my LinkedIn photo was a parrot and why I stay off social media, although that's turned out to be a big mental health win after all.

Now it's time to deal with this. We've started a new business called Floe, that I'm leading. It's related in many ways to Yellowbrick, and we've got many of the same amazing people working our our new product. You can learn more about what we're up to by looking at the video on the website.

I’ve accepted that shying away and relying on someone else to “do marketing” will lead to the same outcome for Floe as Yellowbrick, and it’s time for me to get over it and do what everyone expects of me. I hope other staff in the company can join me on this journey, despite whatever inhibitions they might have too. The LinkedIn photo is now real and I’m going to be showing up in audio and video content and at events. I did the voiceover for the video on our website; I still hate the sound of my own voice but others tell me it's not so bad. Our new business is amazing, our investors and board members are the most kind and supportive you’ll ever find, and our employees are fantastic. These people all need me to come out of the hole and finally just f***ing get on with it and build something that people actually know and care about. I don’t want to build another amazing product nobody’s heard of, and miss the opportunity again!

Do follow Floe on LinkedIn here, our company blog here, or my personal blog here.

This article was written by me, not by GPT.