🎧(Podcast Fridays) Walker & Co.

#42

This is a new thing I’m trying to start. Every Friday, the post would be an extended piece (my notes😅) on a podcast episode I listened to during the week. Hope you enjoy. And I’m aware today is Saturday btw. Had a rough day yesterday, can’t blame me😂.

Jeph encouraged (read: pestered) me to listen to this episode on How I Built This with Guy Raz where Guy interviews Tristan Walker (@tristanwalker), founder of Walker & Co., the company that came up with Bevel. Read about the company here. And it resonated so much with my personal experiences, my thoughts on building, and life philosophy. If you don’t do anything at all this weekend, I’d encourage you to listen to this podcast episode. A lot of wisdom in there. And btw, when I use this emoji—🤓 in a comment in parentheses, that’s my personal comment/ addition. Find my notes below: 

• Goal as a youngin was to “get wealthy as quickly as possible.”

• Went to private boarding school, Hotchkiss and for the first time, he “got to see how the other half lived” because he went to school with students with influential names like Rockefeller and Ford

• Learnt a couple of things while he was at Hotchkiss:

  1. Name matters; 👏🏾

  2. Being wealthy isn’t the same as being rich; 👏🏾👏🏾

  3. He could compete with each and every one of them 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾

• Even after Hotchkiss, was still focused on getting wealthy and thought finance (investment banking) was the way to go.

• This extreme focus led him to go through the two worst years of his life as a trader. He was not happy, and was just chasing money 🤑.

• Here’s what he observed: Wall Street has a way to lock you in. Over time, the opportunity cost gets so high that you can’t leave your job. He didn’t like that.

• Tristan talks about having and moving by faith a lot.

• Went to the Valley and saw how people his age were “changing the world” with their ideas.

• Got his job at Foursquare through sheer persistence. Found the founder’s email online and sent 8 emails to the founder- got a reply on the 8th email.

• In these emails, he was sharing ideas on how Foursquare could be better. (Note: he was showing how he could create value. That’s the only reason someone would give your cold email the light of day. (🤓Refer back to my earlier posts 39, 33, 32, 24, 22 post on creating value .)

• He was employee No. 3.5 at Foursquare. His goal was to sign up 30 merchants in his first week. He signed up 300/400. The ideas he was sending were about how Foursquare could sign up more merchants so he proved his value!

• Foursquare gave him a couple of things: a family, chance to make a difference, an education through constant learning and engaging, that he wouldn’t have got anywhere else.

• He utilized his network in meeting and engaging Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz)of a16z and author of The Hard Things About Hard Things.

• Ben encouraged him to become and Entrepreneur in Residence at a16z. EiRs basically get paid to think of ideas all day. Tristan thought that was an inauthentic way of coming up with business ideas and just didn’t enjoy it.

  “You have to understand. You need to do the thing you fundamentally believe you’re the best person in the world to do. That you have a unique proposition given your story to solve that problem.”

• Tristan spent his time trying to come up with a good idea. Learnt a big lesson from Ben again.

  "What usually looks like good ideas are bad ideas. What looks like bad (🤓really, it’s crazy) ideas are good ideas. Problem with good ideas is that everyone tries to do them so there’s so many people working on the same things (🤓 like fintech in Africa?🤔) and there’s no value being created.” (🤓Check out my posts 31 and 4 on what makes people like Elon different.)

• Ex. Airbnb is a crazy idea—who in their right mind would rent a room in their house to a complete stranger. But look where we are now.

• Tristan has a personal story connected to Bevel. He’s the first customer. And he was solving his own problem.

• He did his market research by talking to real people

• Timing plays a key role in everything. He got into this business at the right time and he was the right person to do it.

• He bartered his skills and leveraged his network well to get started with producing an awesome pitch deck. (🤓 Get creative!)

  Q: “What is your unfair advantage?”

• It’s an investor’s job to be wrong 90% of the time

• He focused on delivering experiences (🤓the way you make people feel is how they’d remember you and your business.)

• Don’t make relationships transactional. build for the long term. He knew journalists and kept in touch with them since his Foursquare days. He could easily reach out again…or rather they reach out to him and willingly write about whatever he was doing.

  “Every single problem I’ve had was a result of having raised money. The thing about raising money is that people forget that they need to pay it back.

• Next time you’re impressed by someone raising XXM USD, remember the headache they’re about to go through to return those funds.

• Some investors would make you do things for the short term. (🤓this is funny because investors would almost always pitch you the idea of being with you for the long term smh. Go for investors who want to marry you, not just hit and quit.)

• Most VCs have a 10 year horizon (meaning they need to return funds to their LPs—unlike Sequoia) so don’t rush to raise money. Or don’t do it just because of the money, they’d force you to grow too quickly.

• Pay attention to your customers and talk to them. That’s the only way you’d understand how your product or service is doing.

• Find partners with whom your values are aligned. Find investors that are strategic—not just rich.

• (🤓 Now I have a diagram here on how Bevel is aligned with Proctor & Gamble (their eventual acquirers) and I’m not too sure how to put this into words but I’ll try

  Bevel: We want an uber competitive way to serve our audience.

  P&G: Yup, we feel you and we bring value in a couple of ways: Our products reach 5B people a day of whom a majority are people of color, your desired market. We believe in your product; we think it’s authentic and unique and necessary because no one is addressing this problem. Oh, and we want you to remain independent. We’re not a baby sitter. But we’d provide access to our customers worldwide, no problem.

  Bevel: 😳😳😳😳

  P&G: Oh and btw, you don’t ever have to worry about raising money again. We’d fund you and give you the billions you need for R&D. No problem. We just want you to maximize your ability to serve y(our) customers.

  Bevel: 😵😵😵 *3 months later* Deal is done.

• As a youngin, his goal was to become wealthy, but this vision changed after his son was born. He’s more focused on being a virtuous person and lead by example.

• There’s purpose in name—accountability. He wants his companies to outlive him.

  Tristan talks a lot about faith—having a faith thats strong enough to get you to the end of your bad seasons is important. Life is all about seasons: there will be good seasons and bad seasons. And they’d both end at some point. Knowing that the good seasons will end too is very important. Faith will get you to the next good one and the next and the next.

  Fortunate, blessed and thankful is how Tristan feels now.

Notes are a bit long but I hope you learnt something.

Remember folks: “Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.”