McKay Thomas | Blog

Technically Thinking, III

The Summer of 2010

Life got really strange after UpLoot. It was around this time that Kimball Thomas and Davis Smith moved from their respective east coast cities to Silicon Valley to ignite their next venture. Coming off of UpLoot was sobering. The titans I had read about in TechCrunch and other places were different from me. I would read stories about these people who would do crazy stuff to get their business off the ground and it was beginning to settle in me that maybe I wasn’t like them. Maybe I was missing the germ. The germ that throws off your risk profile enough to where crazy risk is palatable. 

I wanted to know what it was that I lacked and how I could overcome it. During the first few weeks of the summer Davis Smith was doing an internship at a small fledging VC firm in Mexico while Kimball was getting going in Silicon Valley. With Davis out of the country, I became Kimball’s sounding board. It felt good to be in that position again. After UpLoot, I wondered if I would be able to get that fix.

There were a few ideas that were being worked on, but the one that caught our eye the most was a service which would allow customers to text local businesses. It was a huge problem with a huge need for a great product. I even went out to Palo Alto for the fourth of July weekend so we could meet face to face to solve some of the product’s problems. It was fun and fulfilling to be involved, but it never felt like mine the way UpLoot did. There was a clear divide.

After we had a design together and had figured out how the backend was going to work given an impossibly small budget (stay lean, right!) Kimball went door to door and sold the idea to a bunch of hair salons. I think we were both really reticent on how this whole thing was going. It was a huge problem and we were basically testing the validity of this HUGE idea with $500. It never felt like it was going to work. In the mean time, Davis was working on a parallel track with an idea to sell baby products in Brazil. After the first few weeks with the texting idea, all resources were moved to the baby ecommerce idea. I was involved in some things and wasn’t in other things. Anytime help was needed I offered. I actually called and told Kimball that I believed in the idea and wanted to join the team (I’ve posted on this before), but nothing came of it.

PoolTables.com in Flux

It was around this time that some crazy things began happening with PoolTables.com, formerly BilliardEx. There was a possible acquisition in the works. It was crazy exciting, but also a little unnerving. This was also around the time when I got my first job offer at a previously established company.

There would end up being two in around a months time. It was validating and confusing all wrapped in to one. I felt like an entrepreneur inside. I felt the drive to be disruptive and make great products for people to use. But the money I was being offered was significantly better and some of the projects I would be involved in weren’t entirely uninteresting. It really came down to what I wanted my life to become. I looked at these positions and saw where they would lead. I talked with people that worked at these places and saw where their lives led. I read a lot of TechCrunch. I spoke with both Kimball and Davis about it as well. With PoolTables.com in flux and a possible acquisition at the door, I was nervous about sticking around.

Great Teams Build Great People

I read an article by Chris Dixon (I currently can’t find it, or I’d link to it) about the three most important things at a startup. The top one was team. Part of the article had to do with who you surround yourself with and how that rubs off. I decided that the way my life would have the best outcome would be if I surrounded myself with the very best people. I looked at the two companies who had offered me positions and I looked at who worked there. It’s not that they were bad people. They weren’t. They were great people. But were they the kind of people that could help be develop in to what I wanted to become? The answer was no.

That was really the moment (or one of a few moments combined) where I knew where I wanted my life to head. I wanted to change the world. I still do. World changing ideas come from startups and top teams cracking the big problems. This is what I wanted in my life. I stayed at PoolTables.com to stay with the team. It wasn’t 6 months later that I was brought on as co-founder of Baby.com.br and as the UX designer and marketer.

I still have the itch inside me to build something on my own. Not sure what will pacify it. But I can’t keep my mind from wandering even now… where will I be next?