Tag Archives: Founder

Mike Filbey (left) and Mike Salguero (right).

6 things I’ve learned by being a co-founder twice by age 26

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I usually like to keep my business life separate from my personal life, but for some reason, I recently felt compelled to share a quick update on life and work on Facebook. The response has been great, so I thought I’d share with the ButcherBox family as well.

In the last four years, I’ve experienced a great deal.

I have started a company, dropped out of college, closed down a company, started another company, and read a lot of books. My hope is that sharing the key things I’ve learned may be valuable. 

Knowledge is worthless unless shared.

You can divide my 26 years on this earth into two periods. The time before I dropped out of college and that after I dropped out. I dropped out after my junior year; I was 22 and it was summer. I had just turned down an internship with Ford because I wanted to focus on growing my startup.

Instead, I moved from Wisconsin to Boston and brought my two co-founders with me. We were at a stage where we had hacked through the jungle for two years without success. It was a humbling experience. We were pushing a boulder uphill and I was too naïve to admit it; the business we were hoping to build could not work.

Eventually, they moved on from the startup — as they should have — and I was back to where I was when this all started at age 19. Except, this time, I had nothing in a bank account and was now 24-years-old.

At this point, I had to decide whether to go back to school and get my degree or to continue in the startup world. Everyone I talked to agreed that I should get my degree, after all, I only had one year remaining. So I re-enrolled and chose some classes. About a month before school was going to begin, there was something that just didn’t feel right. I felt like I was going backward not forwards.

The thing was, I wasn’t ready to go back.

So I shopped myself around the job market and got a few offers. One was a way to help cancer patients, one was a startup hoping to disrupt the airline industry, and another was this radical idea to sell grass-fed beef through the mail.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I eventually decided to sell grass-fed beef in the mail at ButcherBox.

Why? Because of the company’s founder, Mike Salguero.

Mike was someone I knew and trusted. He was my go-to advisor with my first company. I was confident that I would learn a ton from working with Mike, and, even if the business went nowhere, it would be a valuable experience.

There’s a key lesson here: Don’t make decisions around money, make decisions around opportunities to learn. I never got into ButcherBox thinking I’d one day make a bunch of money, far from it.

Fast forward nearly two years to today and I am happier than ever. I haven’t made a bunch of money, but I have learned a lot, a lot a lot. This business could collapse tomorrow and I’d be fine, I’d be happy; because it’s been one hell of a ride so far.

And so, here are the six more valuable lessons that I have learned up til now, having grown a lot since dropping out and being a co-founder twice:

1.  Life is all about how we treat each other.

2.  When it comes to work, follow the advice Bill Belichick got from his dad Steve, “Keep your head down, work hard, keep your mouth shut.” Be humble. Nobody likes a show-off.

3. Self-care is extremely important. To be your best you need to feel your best. This means taking care of yourself. Make time to work out, eat healthily, and spend time with friends. You are doing your friends, family, and work a disservice if you don’t first take care of yourself first.

4. There is only one YOU. You are unique. Only you know what makes you happy. Not your parents, not your friends, not your boss, YOU. So make your own decisions and believe in yourself.

5. Read books. They open new worlds and can teach you how to live a better life. I attribute a lot of my recent success to two books, Traction by Justin Mares and Guide To the Good Life by William Irvine. The former is about marketing; the latter about philosophy.

6. Talk less, listen more. By listening, you show respect, learn, and become more likable.

So on that note, I’d love to hear from you. What do you feel compelled to share? Thanks for reading. 

co-founder-twice

The growing ButcherBox team.

Now comes the hard part: Developing hierarchy in a growth stage startup

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One surprise that you discover when running a business is that success leads to new stages of growth. It is during these moments of scaling an organization that you realize that you need to completely rethink the strategies that got you there.

Often, companies need to be transformed into something wholly different from what they previously were. In most instances when as business needs to “scale,” as they say, the team is likely already behind where it should be in this growth process.

Take, for example, the transition from an early-stage startup to what’s called a growth stage business. This is the period when a small group of founders and early employees have done well enough to need to add more operational constraints on a business. Roles get more defined and holes in the company’s structure get filled.

Without anyone telling you, you need to evolve from a company that values hustling and hard work — all while trying to to find its market and customers — to an organization that needs to maximize both its people and its finances.

The best way to explain this evolution is through one of my favorite allegories to explain how we’ve built ButcherBox so far. The way I see it, building a startup is like a team of adventurers making its way through the jungle towards some group achievement. You have an idea where you are going, but more often than not, you are hacking your way through as best as you know how.

It’s great to work with incredible people at this stage. You are all in it together; someone takes a leadership role for various phases of the expedition, and there are no egos involved. You are all having fun, taking enormous risk together, knowing something great awaits whenever you reach whatever the destination may be.

(This is a little easier if you’ve already done the startup thing once before, as I have as a co-founder of another early-stage venture, CustomMade. But, it’s not a huge advantage if you are also in a vastly different industry. Getting back to the analogy above, it’s like before you have to go off hacking through the jungle, you’re allowed to climb an observation tower to give you a hint about which direction you should start trekking in. But the actual journey is still through new terrain, and, the challenges posed are just as unforgiving.)

And then you do it…You hack your way through the jungle, and you hit a dirt road. And then you realize that now you need a someone to lead those same machete hackers to drive cars to the next destination. You also now need a lot more cars and drivers on that road, and, oh yeah, you need someone to help you fill all these suddenly vital new roles.

While the idea of adding 10 to 20 new employees to an organization may not seem like that overwhelming a task — large corporations do this nearly every day — the implications for small businesses cannot only be disruptive, they can often cripple an organization.

And we’ve seen it happen time and time again.

Right now, we are currently undertaking the task of growing while bootstrapping. This is a dramatically different experience than scaling after taking institutional funding and having a board of directors interested in the day-to-day operations. For one, we are deciding on our own when and how to evolve as an organization; which is a great thing.

Here are a few key things we’ve done to survive to this point:

-We hire for experience. We’ve done this by bringing in key people for important roles as we’ve grown.

-We hire for cultural fit. To do this, the number one quality we screen for in new hires is humility.

-We hire opportunistically. Oftentimes, we take risks on people that others may have passed over.

So now we are at the point where we have been hacking through the jungle for two years, and then…Boom! Now we are on this road that we have to figure out how to navigate.

We need people with different skill sets for some of this growth, and we also need to figure out how to help the team while transitioning to the next level.

For me, the current challenge is adding more “hierarchy” to what has previously been quite successful without having had to focus too much on who stands where in the organization and what roles need to be changed.

There is a lot of nuance to doing this correctly, but I believe that the team we’ve built understands and is ready for this next stage of development for ButcherBox.

I know I’m ready to see where this road takes us from here.