Position : Co-Founder of HOTorNOT.com, Co-Founder savemyass.com, previously worked in Strategy Consulting, and in the High Tech Industry at HP
Rohit’s Intro to interview
James is a great example of someone that observed what was going on around him and created a company that leveraged existing behavior in a new way.
Q: You mentioned that you decided to be an entrepreneur first and then looked for the idea. What made you decide that? Was it something at MBA school?
No. The way I figured it was the older you get the more liabilities you accumulate. As you get older you get married, you start raising kids, maybe you have to pay the rent or maybe you want to buy a house or something like that. Also as you start making money your lifestyle changes to where you start spending that money and you get used to it. So I figured that, some people think “oh I shouldn’t be an entrepreneur until I’m more experienced and ready and older.” But in my opinion that seemed backwards, you should really do it when you’re younger and have nothing to lose and you have no responsibilities. The best time is when you’re young and living in your parent’s house and eating cheap food on the streets or from wherever. It’s not a problem. You’re not used to eating in nice restaurants. The bottom line is that I don’t care where you are in the world, the older you get the more responsibilities you have and especially with regard to family. So why wouldn’t you do it when you’re young. That’s when you can take the risk. So I decided that after business school, I had offers from consulting companies and all the standard MBA type of jobs and instead I just turned it down and said, okay, I’m not going to make any money but I’m going to figure out what kind of company I can start.
Q: How do you pick an idea for the company?
Every week we’d go to a different café. We tried to change the environment and I would usually try to pick some theme or something to talk about and we would just get together and start talking about it and then start generating ideas. Usually when you have a small group of like three or four people, it’s a healthy size where you can listen to each other talk and feed on each other. If you say something, I hear you and then something comes to my mind and I say it and it becomes a dialogue.
Q: What is the importance of having conviction while remaining flexible?
We all committed to being entrepreneurs but you never tie yourself down to one idea which means your company might have to adjust to what it does. You might have to change how you see your company or you might have to close down that company and start a new one. With that company, Dealspring, it was actually my second company. The first one was when I started out of business school that I helped write the business plan for and raised money but my heart wasn’t in it. And so I ended up just saying – I didn’t really enjoy working on it – so I said forget it, I don’t want to work on it anymore. I think it’s really important that people work on things that they’re passionate about because the amount of time that you go through as an entrepreneur and the ups and downs emotionally. If you don’t love it, you’re not going to deal with it. You just don’t want to get up in the mornings. But right now with HOTorNOT I’m so excited about the challenges that I’ve taken on since I’ve just come back as CEO that I wake up in the morning thinking oh I need to get into the office, I want to get to work. Whereas if you don’t like the idea, if you don’t like what you’re working on, you wake up in the morning and you’re like, you just want to stay asleep. You’re like, I don’t want to get out of bed. It makes a huge difference right? The only way that you’ll succeed is if you can deal with the pain. And the only way to deal with the pain is if you love what you’re doing.
