everyone. This is Stella

TFT, and this is heating Shah. And today, on the startup chat, we're gonna talk about this concept called parallel entrepreneurship. You like talking about more than just sales

and market? We just want a bullshit and chat about business and life. And hopefully, while we're doing that, provide long value to be the best business for people trying to get shit way. Don't want to give you feedback.

That's bullshit. You want you

to do your best? Who? Yes. And this question came from Stewart. Brent, That's part of the startup group on Facebook. You can goto the startup dot com slash and be for Facebook and join if you haven't yet. And we asked people to ask some of their questions and one of the questions that Stuart had was love to hear. You guys thought on parallel entrepreneurism. And if it can work for certain people and how to make it work, if at all possible. And I told you I wanted to talk about this you like Ah, yeah, maybe. Okay, let's talk about this. Let's see if we can tritium so much.

So I'll ask you right away. Because you, sir, I think Well known for running at least two companies any given time, Correct? Yeah. Yes. So you don't even a ton of shit? And I for at least a year was running two companies at the time, but mostly was running one company in times of experience in both you do too. So outright. If I asked you heating. If I'm an entrepreneur, if I ask you Hey, can I run multiple startups at the time? Should I start multiple startups at a time?

Is that a good idea? Bad idea. What's your general advice on this first round, you do it. Why?

I think you're just adding adding more challenges to yourself. I think it takes It takes much, much different mindset to do more than one thing at the same time. Especially if they're both businesses. You're trying to start at the same time, and it takes Ah, I don't want to say most people can't do it, cause that's not true. I think anyone could do anything. It's ah mindset. So I would I would start. I would absolutely say no. I would just say, Well, why do you want to do it? What's your intent A lot of folks want to do it because they're trying to hedge. What if one of them doesn't work?

That's not the reason to do it at all. And that's probably the most common reason I here, which is like, Oh, you know, I'm hedging. Another reason I here, which might be a little better, is very slumber. To my my reason, at least originally, which was we had a consulting company and we wanted better, better revenue. We wanted room or repeatable, more scalable things. We want to get into businesses that had higher multiples from evaluation standpoint.

So we got into software and at that time, SAS and subscription businesses for SAS software businesses, where you could get higher multiples even today. And it's a higher multiple in a consulting business. For example, if a consulting business makes $1 million a year, it's probably only worth about $1 million. Maybe a little bit more. If a SAS business makes a $1,000,000 a year, it's probably worth at least a few 1,000,003 45 million by General valuation metrics. And so if you're gonna put all this effort into making money, why not put effort into making money went into a business that's gonna be worth more. So there are situations where it makes a ton ascent. But like what we did is we actually shut down the consulting company eventually. That doesn't mean you had to do that. And that still means we're still doing multiple software businesses right now.

My co founder or not, and a lot of it is situational. So But in a typical forum, like if you're gonna go like raise money for your company and things like that, even investors want to see that you're working on one thing. Otherwise, it's literally not even difficult to raise money. It's pretty much impossible.

So I love it. Beautiful that, like you were looking at the reasons right. The first reason why would somebody want to do this? That you brought was, you know, hedging your risks, saying Well, I don't know which started, we're gonna succeed. So I'd rather be in both in three different startup. Straight from that is a bad reason. You know, we can go into ah, lot of vetoes on why, but a lot of times you're going to do poor performance, hedging your risk you know,

being an entrepreneur might not be having all your priorities at the right place at the right time. The second reason you didn't really split out explicitly. But you said, you know, we were having a services business or consulting business, and we're launching a product business that is so that

reason to run to you do that. You do that?

Yes, we did the exact same thing Exactly.

I think that's a common reason to have two at once. But you ended up shutting down the consultant company as soon as you were happy with where the other

company exactly, exactly. Right, so that

we did the same.

So that reason for running two businesses of the time is that one is funding off financing the other one. But you're really you're really using the current business to invest into a business that you want to run long term? That is better. For whatever reasons you've decided. It's not that you want to just keep adding businesses. You're making the church that the business we're running in today's not the business want to run forever, so we're gonna use the money and the resource of expertise. We have in this business to start another one, right? So it's it's kind of your your financing vehicle for it, so that's a good reason. Another reason a lot of people will mention is the I'm just so creative. I get bored really quickly. I'm interested in multiple things on How about Elon Musk? So are often like these examples or Richard Branson, although I don't want to start that can with, like,

the 100 million their virgin businesses, of which, you know, maybe not everyone is really that great. But

there is also it's also more like a holding company. Yes, it's really one business one brand that he's extending into many thing. Maybe fix a consumer, Brent right? So, yeah, I know. I know you didn't want to dig into that one, but like that, that one's a little bit different. I'd say you, unless clearly, is more than one thing, but he's also emerged a couple of them now, and he's got other people working on another one, whether he's involved too much or not or so.

But it's interesting. I mean, these are the outliers. Yeah, right now that

these outlying Yeah, yeah, I remember seeing This is a funny thing. And we talked in a prior episode about believes that entrepreneurs have. So I remember distinctly that when I came to the valley 10 years ago and I wanted to at this, you know, the ambition for for my startup That was way beyond my capabilities at the time, in my execution of the time, so that the company didn't succeed. But I I didn't just want it to be successful. I wanted it to be. And I believed it would be the next Google the next apple, the next Facebook. It would change the world. And any time I heard an expert like you and I talking a podcast about Well, those are the outliers. You can't be Mark Zuckerberg or you can't be this on that.

And I know we didn't say these words, right? We just said we didn't say those. Wright, this is These are important. I remember saying, Well, fuck you. If

yeah, I wouldn't. You wouldn't tell anyone. They can't stand these people. That's not

the intent. But the thing that's important is that to know is that if you wanna if you wanna be one of these people you need to know that you're banking on being You're basically banking on something that is very, very little chances of success, right? You're saying I'm gonna be I'm setting my I'm trying to cover something just not just as hard or as difficult as being a successful entrepreneur. But I want to be 10 levels above that. A successful entrepreneur had multiple ventures at the same time. All right, so you're just making things a lot harder and your decreasing your chances for success. But if you succeed, you know, you've got got a multiple in terms of reward. But I don't know, like the thing that that bothers me about people that go out while I'm just easily bored about things or have so many interests, And he must does this, too. And he's really mind my idol or whatever.

The thing that bothers me about this is that I mean a being easily bored by something. I think a lot of people use this excuse for I'm not consistent. I'm not disciplined, and I only want to work on things that are fun. A lot of people that have this attitude really will explain it and excuse it away with. I'm just so creative. I need to be involved in multiple things. I get bored easily. I'm like, I want to tell people Fuck yourself when that when people tell me they get bored easily because to me means you haven't like you haven't found like things are going to get challenging. There's gonna be lots of interesting things to work on as you go along. They're just not as fun and easy as they are in the beginning. But also like when I look at people that have successfully started and ran multiple businesses, a lot of these people doesn't seem like that Was ever they intent? I don't feel like that's part of the identity They I've never heard, even must say,

Well, I just loved I'm just easily bored and I'm so creative and I just love running multiple things. Any time he talks about this, he's like, Well, it's probably a really bad idea and it really sucks that it's very, very hard and he felt my interpretation of the situation that at multiple stages he almost felt forced to go and do this because he felt so strongly that it needed to be done and nobody else was doing it right. So it was like, I sucks, but I probably gonna have to start this business and push it forward versus I'm just so creative that I'm bored running this huge thing. And I'm going to just start another thing and run that too. So I know to me people that say they need to run Pearl Ventures at the same time because they're bored because they're so creative. And they have so many ideas that they need to live all of them in parallel immediately. Just I think that's a bad reason to

do that. Yeah, I agree. It's hard to start from zero and say I'm gonna have more than one thing. It's not even hard. It's just like, how you going to do that, right? It takes It takes a lot different discipline than what we're used to when you start one thing and you're maniacally focused on it. So, yeah, parallel entrepreneurship is definitely a really interesting topic that I pretty much feel like if you're if you haven't started something before, and you think you're gonna start more than one thing, you probably want to reconsider and really think about, like, how are you gonna accomplish both of them and hit the meaningful goals and both of those businesses at the same time?

Yeah, let's add two more two more things and then wrap this up with tips at two more examples that I can think of top of my head unless you have more examples. One is your current. Well, we kind of mentioned this, but but I don't know if this is a separate example, but I know people that are running a startup and it's not going and they have this other idea for another start up. And what they're currently doing is not going as well, not occupying them as much. They get very excited about this new thing, so they will start a new start up. Basically, the main reason why they started you started that want to run two things in parallel is that the current thing that doing is not working, but they're not willing to just shut it down. And this is I think, the sinking in the situation where the start of your writing right now is not gonna be financing the next start up the sub. You run right now is not making money,

not working, and you want to start another thing. But you're just not willing to kill the other. Maybe that's hedging your bets. Maybe that fits into

that example. It totally fits into hedging. It's like, Look, if you're things not working and got new bright ideas I mean, I've invested a lot of companies have talked in a lot of investors about things like this. At the end of the day, once the founders done, they're done. The business is done. So if you're a founder and you have a company and you have another idea is stop working under current company or rethink the other idea and say, OK, I'm gonna shelve that and actually work on my company that I already have because, you know, it's it's it's absurd. I mean, you owe it to your team. Members and other folks toe be focused on what you're doing, even if it's not working or shut it down. And I think that's a big challenge. Especially like I often hear this from venture funded companies like seed funding

or something like that. The other reason that I want to bring up is. Sometimes you have things like company builders, right? It's like you have a team and the whole idea of that companies that they're gonna be picking up new ideas, starting a prototype, putting together team, raising the first round of funding and then push that out as a separate venture that keeps hopefully growing and raising more money outside of that. So there they're launching multiple startups. But it's the core business model, and they have usually our expertise in starting things and raising money for things

that that's like That's like Expo are Beta works that way? Call that an accelerator and incubator. I don't I know that those are not. Those things are product studio, our startup studio. There's a bunch of names for these things. So yeah, that is definitely what some founders have done and said I could do. I want to do multiple things. I'm gonna find teams of people. But the way those things are structured is the the one person like let's say, Garrett Camp and expert. He's not sitting there saying I'm gonna be CEO of all these things, Yeah, yeah is like, I want to start these. I want a significant share in them.

Maybe I don't even know if there if he's considered a founder in them, necessarily. But his business expert does have a ton of equity in these businesses, and they have CEOs that, you know, run them and go out and raise more money. And expert ends up just being another investor in the long room. You know, I'm sure they add more value. Of course, are they should? But they become, you know, another investor. They look very similar to investor in the long run.

Yeah, its core view like that's the business you're starting is a business that's gonna be investing or starting businesses. It's very different. And usually again, there's always an exception to everything we say right? There's

a counter example to anything

I think off in life. But usually the success the ones that do this successfully are people that have started successful businesses before, so they kind of know the formula. They've done it maybe once or twice. Now they've decided that they want to do this in a more formulaic process. It's not first time entrepreneurs that go. I'm going to start a company building. We're gonna be launching 10 companies a year that will most likely not work out as well. So all right, let's wrap it up in tip time, and I'm gonna give well, three tips. One if you haven't successfully started a company and brought it to some level of success that was satisfying to you. Don't don't try to run multiple stops at once. There's two exceptions to this one. We, we said,

is You know you're running a certain business. You don't like anyone that to fund the other business. We have an episode Episode 54 of the startup Check when we talk about how to run the services and consulting business and use that to launch a product business. So listen to that episode. You're in that situation and the other situation where I think that kind of doing two things at once in the entrepreneurial world make sense is when you have a job and you want to start a side business until it hits a certain level of success. And that's kind of the same model. You have something today that you're not happy with, and you use that to finance the next thing. And that's episode number 126 100. Start a side business. Listen to that. Episodes of those are my three tips for

this one. Since I'm the parallel entrepreneur currently on the car, I'm gonna describe how I do it and turn that into a tip. So I acted while while I s so I have a cell phone in business that started in 05 It's called Crazy Egg. And we tried raising money for it and were unsuccessful. And then we had another idea that was very timely. And we raised money for it on and it turned into kiss metrics while we were working on Kiss Metrics, my co founder and I, we didn't spend any time at all on Crazy, and we essentially spent the equivalent of a hobby time. My wife, who's actually his sister. So I'm married to his sister and he's my brother and lie. He's my co founder. She was actually running crazy egg for that period of time. Technically, in terms of who was working on it,

she was also doing a lot of stuff for kiss metrics. But she was parallel entrepreneur another that at that point for sure, and we were So we spent all our energy on kiss Metric for many years, and then over time we came back to Crazy Egg. Once we sort of left kiss metrics. And since then we've We also started another company called Quick Sprout. And right now I'm also working on a few other things, and so is Neil, and those other things have to do with our brands and stuff like that. And for us, it's it's been since the early days. We just love business like we just can't get away from the variety of it, the different types of businesses he loves, helping founders and businesses and small businesses, large businesses. I love helping startups and Corporates as well sometimes,

and the thing that we've learned about ourselves is that we get a lot of learnings, energy fulfillment, out of having that variety of learning about other businesses. And we wanted to create lives where we could do that, and so we both have, and they're in quite a bit different ways to. But the thing I'll say is the parallel things I'm doing are more than two, and it just comes out of this attitude and this perspective that we learned by having crazy egg and yet being full time on kiss metrics, which is that software companies could be run really efficiently. They can be run with very few team members, and not everyone has to be fully dedicating 100% of the time to the business to be dedicated to the business, for example, that these are all experiments like this is the way we think about our businesses at this point. At Crazy Act, the head of engineering owns a significant percentage of the company. Camino,

like Neil and I own the vast majority, but he owns a significant percentage, and he only works 10 hours a week. And, you know, lately has been working a little bit more, and we were talking about that the other day, and we found a way to make him mitt go back to his 10 hours cause that's what he's optimizing his life for, and as business partners to him way. Cherish that for him. Way. Admire that we we love that we want to help him have the life he wants and a lot of the other folks on the team. The team is remote. They go spend like three hours a day doing, you know, surfing or mountain biking or gardening or whatever it is they're into.

And there's still full time in the company. They get a normal salary, just like anyone else would. That would work in a start up or whatever. They're not underpaid or anything like that. And it's just a big experiment for us because we've found a way to do it different. And and so, yeah, if there's anybody listening that really is into efficiency and doing that, happy to talk My tip is just like you don't have to do it, how everyone else wants to or everyone else thinks you should. Everyone else meeting everyone else doing things. The only caveat is, if you've raised money for your company, I would not recommend doing parallel entrepreneurship because you're you're not just beholding to yourself in your team. You're also beholding to investors that have put in money in your company for equity,

and they are there. I don't want to say investors are a priority, but they entrusted their money with you, and if you're not spending your time and energy on the thing, they gave you money for and it's not and you know it doesn't do well, it's on you, you know, I really is on you. So I can't stress that enough, because when we were who we took investment, we took that very seriously. One of the reasons Neil and I did it despite having crazy egg was one we couldn't raise money for. Crazy act for a bunch of reasons. And, you know, in hindsight,

that was a great thing, because we still have it. And it's great for us. But to we wanted to learn what having investors felt like and and what that really you know, was all, like, you know, when we could have an influx of capital and figure out what to do with it. So we learned and and I don't really I know I've talked about before. I don't have an opinion either way. I really love self funded businesses, and I totally value what investors bring to the table when it comes to money in value to grow a business. So, yeah, my tip is like, you know, if you really are insistent on doing it your way, by all means, like, give it a shot.

Love it. Thank you so much.