Episode 2! Aaron and I hosted product & growth wizard Bryan Pollard this week on the pod. We ran through a wide range of topics: from interning in Turks and Caicos to flipping baseball cards to Unicorn Startups he’s worked at (Bird, Route) to what keeps him motivated every day as he builds out his company Ask Alex.
Some themes and takeaways from our discussion:
There are a million paths to business success, but the best way to learn “how to do business” is to just do it rather than reading it in a textbook. Bryan started ith flipping baseball cards and those first entrepreneurial repetitions (i.e. negotiation, seeking value “investments”) still serve him today 15 years later
It takes a bit of delusion to succeed as a founder of anything—having to run through stop signs of people telling you something can’t work makes you either an idiot or a visionary…or both
99 times out of 100 you have to take some big Ls before getting a W. Bryan minted 5 Bored Ape NFTs for $120 each in early 2021—for the unaware, these NFTs peaked at about $400k PER NFT in 2021/2022. Experiences like this can teach you how/when to take money off the table next time—"there’s no such thing as taking profits too early”
Bryan shared some growth hacks he used at Bird (the Scooter company) to help the company become the fastest company (at the time) to ever reach a billion-dollar valuation
When raising venture capital, find the people who align with what you’re doing rather than trying to change people’s (i.e. investor’s) minds! Oh and this search process may very well take 100 conversations so mentally prepare with that in mind
You WILL have to pivot—the word pivot often comes with negative stigma but the best founders and companies continually pivot towards the best opportunities to apply their resources against. Bryan and Jordon Durst started Ask Alex as a B2C text concierge for restaurants (in 2021 before ChatGPT was cool) and throughout the last 2 years pivoted their way towards what they are today—an AI-powered B2B solution for brick-and-mortar companies (restaurants, retail, etc.). Pivoting and staying in the game has paid off—they’ve recently landed multiple recurring contracts, including a franchise-wide deal with a billion-dollar company
Bryan predicts Messaging (i.e. SMS) as the next wave
