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Kevin Hale is the founder of Wufoo, a company and web service that makes it easy to build online forms. The company puts a heavy emphasis on design and user experience, which turns the otherwise tedious task of building forms into a fun and simple activity. Wufoo went on to be acquired by Survey Monkey. In this interview, Nick Pettit talks to Kevin about the early days of Wufoo, creativity, and several other topics.
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[Treehouse Friends]
0:00
[Nick Pettit] Well, Kevin, thanks for being here with us today.
0:02
Really appreciate you coming out. For people who don't know who you are,
0:04
how would you describe what it is that you do? Who are you?
0:08
[Kevin Hale] [Small laugh] I was one of the cofounders
0:12
of a company called Infinity Box, Inc.
0:14
We were a YC-seeded company back in winter of 2006,
0:16
and we built a product called Wufoo, and I did all the design
0:21
and UX work over there.
0:24
Last year, in April 2011, we were acquired by SurveyMonkey,
0:28
and now I work as a Senior Product Manager at SurveyMonkey.
0:32
So I work on several different projects there, just basically focusing on
0:35
modernizing their app and also maintaining
0:39
a high-quality user experience for all of their products.
0:41
[Pettit] I think you're in this interesting space between
0:45
design and entrepreneurship that is pretty unique.
0:47
Would you describe yourself as mostly a designer
0:52
or mostly an entrepreneur or this mix of both?
0:54
[Hale] I think I fill whatever role is needed of me at the time,
0:59
so if it needs to be copywriting I'll figure that out,
1:05
and that's part of just being an entrepreneur.
1:07
But most of my background is in design, so a lot of my expertise
1:10
and stuff I can dive deep on is in terms of UX,
1:13
usability, HTML 5, all that kind of stuff.
1:17
That makes it really useful, because I get to use that lens,
1:21
in terms of how I look at everything, in terms of using design thinking
1:23
to solve everything from copywriting to business tactics
1:26
to personal issues and all that other kind of stuff
1:30
that comes up when you're trying to make any kind of organization run successfully.
1:32
[Pettit] So I want to go back to the beginning.
1:37
Where did you grow up, and what were you interested in when you were growing up?
1:39
[Hale] My father was in the Air Force, and so he met my mother in Korea,
1:44
and then when I was about 4 or 5, we got stationed
1:50
in Tampa, Florida, at MacDill Air Force Base.
1:53
Because he did cryptography there, we were really lucky,
1:55
because there are not too many other bases that do that kind of work.
1:59
So he stayed there for the rest of his career in the military.
2:02
I grew up on the east coast, in Florida,
2:08
and the stuff I was interested in when I was young,
2:12
actually was in--not so much design but video work.
2:14
So a lot of stuff I studied in college was video production stuff.
2:18
I also worked on the newspaper, so I had a very strong background in publication,
2:23
and actually rose up on the newspaper at my college through the design track.
2:28
So I did all the advertising design and college design,
2:32
but I also loved writing so I was also a dual major in modern American literature.
2:35
As a result, I did a lot of writing for the newspaper
2:40
and editorials, and I ended up becoming Editor-in-Chief,
2:42
ultimately, of that publication.
2:45
The other thing I studied in college was digital arts,
2:47
which was an interesting liberal arts degree
2:49
that combined computer science, art and music.
2:51
I worked on interfaces for museums,
2:54
doing interactive displays,
2:58
designing virtual musical instruments
3:01
and doing a lot of different fine art exhibits.
3:03
That sort of helped hone a lot of interesting ways
3:07
to think about not just design but art in general,
3:10
and how I should create experiences for people, especially in a public space.
3:12
[Pettit] So it's very directly related to what you're doing now.
3:16
[Hale] Yeah, interesting enough, all those skills
3:18
prepared me for what I do right now, in terms of--
3:22
running a software project is not unlike running any kind of publication project,
3:27
where you have to hash out development in regards to regular publication schedules
3:31
for code deployment, and whether it's writing good code
3:35
or writing good copy, really good thinking
3:40
that surrounds those ideas are oftentimes one and the same.
3:44
And then all the stuff for the digital arts, it helped shape
3:51
the kind of software that I was interested in.
3:53
Software that would engage people, even if
3:55
the primary task was to do something as mundane
3:59
as create a form or deploy an online survey.
4:02
I felt like there's all these litte touches you can do
4:05
in terms of making there be an emotional response,
4:07
and also there being a holistic understanding
4:10
that this doesn't have to remind you that you work in a cubicle,
4:13
but when you use the software, we can add
4:16
a little bit of delight for the small amount of time that you're going to have using it.
4:19
[Pettit] Right. I feel like a lot of people coming out of college right now
4:22
just come out unemployed.
4:28
They learn all these skills that aren't really directly
4:31
applicable to what it is that they want to do.
4:34
How did you, personally, make that transition?
4:37
Were you employed right away, did you have an internship,
4:40
or did you freelance, or--?
4:43
[Hale] I had an interesting path. After college, my goal was to take a year off
4:45
and then eventually apply for graduate school,
4:50
and get my MFA and teach art to hippies.
4:53
So that was my big dream. >>Right on.
4:55
[Hale] What ended up happening is, in that year off,
5:00
I worked with some guys who ended up being the cofounders
5:02
with the company that I helped found.
5:04
You know, I easily get bored, and we're working in a university environment,
5:09
and we're building all these simple database applications.
5:12
As a side project, we were like, there's lots of things
5:16
that are interesting that we could do,
5:18
because the job wasn't fulfilling in and of itself.
5:20
As we learned these skills,
5:25
which were really interesting, what ultimately catalyzed us
5:28
into deciding that we were going to make a company
5:31
was we went to a conference called South by Southwest.
5:33
I think that was in 2004 or 2005.
5:38
We saw Jason Fried speak about doing big things with small teams,
5:41
and that totally inspired us, because we felt like, there's nobody in that room
5:46
that was any better in terms of their skill set
5:48
than any one of us in our group.
5:52
So we decided, if they can do it, there's no reason
5:54
that we can't try and do this on a small scale and just see how it goes.
5:56
Because that all took off, and we were able to make that all work,
6:01
we ultimately were able to take all the experiments that we had worked on
6:05
and all the articles that we had written, because we did a collective blog,
6:09
and turn that into a really high-quality Y Combinator application.
6:13
We were lucky because we were in the right place at the right time.
6:19
I mean, to ultimately answer the question,
6:24
after college, basically, I was not interested in having my brain turned off.
6:26
And so there's lots of learning that happened out there,
6:32
and all the skills that I use now,
6:34
while most of them--what I do on a day-to-day basis
6:36
in terms of technical skill, aren't what I learned in college,
6:41
all the background skills in terms of learning critical thinking,
6:44
communication, those were all learned inside of college.
6:49
I feel like those are the places where you should spend the most amount of time
6:51
honing those skills, because those end up being
6:55
the ones you can carry to any kind of job or endeavor.
6:57
[Pettit] Starting a business, you must have had
7:00
a lot of other ideas besides Wufoo.
7:03
I mean, why did you decide that you wanted to build surveys, or forms?
7:06
[Hale] Actually, when we applied to Y Combinator, we had 2 ideas.
7:13
The forms--we knew there was a market for it,
7:17
because we worked in a university environment and were asked
7:21
to build these simple database applications, and we knew that
7:23
we didn't like creating these things, and they're extremely tedious for everyone else out there.
7:26
So if we could design something that people can build themselves,
7:32
and especially at that time, there weren't as many
7:34
easy, do-it-yourself sort of form builders out there, especially that were web-hosted.
7:37
We knew that this was a problem that needed solving.
7:41
The other idea we had was--it's hard for me to remember.
7:44
It was something with an affiliate system that was like a marketplace, and
7:47
what ultimately lead us to one direction was Paul and the other Y Combinator people
7:51
were like, we're not interested in online marketplaces and stuff like that.
7:55
We did that when we were doing Viaweb, and so it was like,
7:59
let's look at this online-form thing.
8:01
Initially, the way we pitched it,
8:05
we talked about it as a content manager.
8:07
Because at that time, WordPress had just been created,
8:09
and it was sort of the hot thing, and Movable Type was a giant organization
8:12
and on the rise, and so we were like, what's missing
8:17
from regular content managers was this idea that
8:20
you could do unlimited fields, but turn them around and collect them from the public.
8:22
So we called these "reversible forms."
8:28
It was just really bad marketing copy and explanation.
8:30
It was really--I have to give credit to Paul Graham.
8:35
He looked at the situation; he was like, why do you want to pitch yourselves as content managers?
8:38
How about as online form builders?
8:42
And we looked at that space, and we were like, that's not sexy.
8:44
All the other competitors there were really sort of gross and ugly,
8:47
and they weren't doing interesting work, and we thought, we don't want to be grouped with them,
8:51
not realizing that that is where the market opportunity was.
8:53
So that was one of the key things that led us down that path,
8:56
where we changed--instead of talking about this weird, reversible form
8:58
in content manager, we said, it's an online form builder,
9:01
and what you see is what you get, in terms of,
9:04
whatever way that you want the data--is supposed to be collected in a visual way,
9:07
would be how we'd figure out how to structurally
9:10
make it work for you like magic on our end.
9:12
That was going to be what made it interesting.
9:15
[Pettit] Now, this was a Y Combinator project, but you did
9:18
all of this outside the Bay Area.
9:21
I mean, you did this in Tampa, Florida, right?
9:23
[Hale] Well, that's where we did most of the development for Wufoo.
9:26
We pitched it to Y Combinator, and we got accepted in the program.
9:30
So we flew out to Mountain View--when was that?
9:34
January, 2006, and then we worked from January until April,
9:37
working on the project, and we pitched it to a room full of investors.
9:44
At that point, we secured angel funding from 2 different investors.
9:47
And after we got that money, we flew back to Tampa,
9:51
and then we worked from there, in 2006 until 2011.
9:55
We just operated from the east coast.
10:00
One of the reasons we left Silicon Valley was partly having to do with, it was so expensive.
10:04
We just looked at the numbers and we knew what our growth curve was going to be.
10:09
We hadn't even launched at the time, and we felt like, even while we were out here
10:14
for that short 4-month period, there was a lot of distractions.
10:17
We were like, we need to be cost-efficient,
10:20
and we need to hole up again
10:24
and get this thing launched, and then we'll figure it out from there.
10:29
So our actual plan was, we'd go back to Florida,
10:33
get it finished, get it launched, and then, eventually,
10:35
come back to the Bay Area to operate the thing.
10:37
But once we got it launched and we saw everything was going really well,
10:39
and we had a good routine going,
10:43
there was never a strong business case, never a strong need
10:46
for us to come back out again.
10:49
It's just interesting, how that developed.
10:53
At the time, we just needed to be as scrappy as possible,
10:55
and that was what lead to the initial decision to leave.
10:58
But then, once we realized we didn't feel like we were missing out on anything,
11:00
we saw there's no reason to go back.
11:04
[Pettit] So it made financial sense, and it was a distraction-free environment.
11:06
That's interesting. So a lot of startup founders place so much emphasis
11:10
on the technology side of things, but I feel like Wufoo,
11:14
it solves a problem really well, but you guys
11:19
put an emphasis on the personality of the product.
11:23
How did you build a company around that?
11:27
How did you sell that idea to investors?
11:29
[Hale] I give a lot of credit to the investors, in that
11:32
they never dictated how the product was going to be developed
11:35
or the direction that it had.
11:38
Our investors were pretty much--they invested in the team,
11:41
and they trust the team wholeheartedly, and once
11:44
they made that decision, whatever decision we make
11:46
they feel like is being done for the best interests of the company.
11:49
We never had to worry about their thoughts and reflections.
11:54
In terms of how we wanted to approach things on the business side
11:56
it made sense, just in terms of
11:59
good moral and ethical decision-making in regards to
12:03
what we had to do for supporting customers.
12:05
A lot of people, when they start getting the money they try
12:08
to outsource the pain points of the creation process,
12:10
and they say, all this customer support, I'm going to have someone else work on it.
12:13
For us, partly because we wanted to be scrappy,
12:17
but also because we knew that there's some kind of secret there,
12:19
in regards to our customers.
12:24
Like the more we listen to them and the more we interacted with them,
12:26
the more delighted they were.
12:28
[Pettit] I remember you telling this story about how you wrote
12:32
hand-written thank you cards to all of your customers.
12:35
That's just amazing that a company could be so customer-service driven.
12:39
[Hale] I think that came out of--it was super easy
12:45
to think about, in regards to, where does humility
12:47
and gratitude play a role in a startup?
12:53
And at the time, Chris Campbell,
12:57
he had one Christmas where he had written a bunch of thank you cards
13:00
due to the advice of his parents, and he noticed
13:04
the following year that all his extended family,
13:06
they gave better presents the following year.
13:10
It's like they could tell that they were grateful for it.
13:12
And we figured that principle, especially after reading
13:15
a couple things on positive psychology, that should work inside of our company.
13:17
So we just played it as an experiment, just to see,
13:22
all right, well, we have some time, and we have a manageable number of paying customers.
13:25
Let's write them all hand-written thank you cards, and it should be a nice surprise for them.
13:28
It took us about 2 days, that first Christmas,
13:32
to write Christmas cards to all of them, showing our appreciation.
13:36
And what led to us doing the thank you cards regularly
13:41
was, the following Christmas, we had so many customers
13:43
that there was no way that the 3 of us could write out
13:48
all these Christmas cards to all these users.
13:50
So we had read in a couple books that the customer set
13:53
that you should focus on the most was the one that's the most profitable.
13:58
So we sent out only hand-written thank you cards
14:01
to our most profitable customers, and sent those out,
14:03
and what ended up happening in the new year
14:06
was some customers writing us, saying, hey, I really love
14:08
that you sent me a Christmas card the first year that I used your service,
14:12
but I was really disappointed to see that you guys didn't extend that to this year.
14:14
I was really looking forward to see what you guys were going to do.
14:17
And so we knew that our biggest problem was
14:20
we had set this expectation for our behavior, but it was not scalable.
14:23
So we changed the policy to just say, we'll just make it
14:28
so that we know that we're never going to catch up and write
14:30
these Christmas cards to everyone,
14:33
so we changed it to every single week, the company,
14:34
all of us, would just write like 10 thank you cards
14:37
to customers that are paying, and that ended up--
14:41
as an experiment, we thought that would sort of help our bottom line,
14:46
and while we have some evidence to show that,
14:48
the bigger thing was that it changed how
14:50
our developers, how everyone in the company looks at our customers.
14:52
You inject a sense of humility because they realize,
14:57
I have to, in addition to support the people that pay my paycheck,
15:00
I also thank the people that pay my paycheck.
15:03
And you don't have this cynicism and interaction
15:05
between the people who are building the product and the people who support the product.
15:08
They realize that there's a connection of the dots
15:11
between the customers that are using it and the thing that I build
15:15
and the livelihood that I have and the work-life balance that I can achieve.
15:18
And I only get this if I'm serving them properly.
15:21
I think creating that strong relationship,
15:24
once we saw how it impacted how we did development
15:28
and changed how our software got developed,
15:31
we realized that had to be a core principle in the company.
15:33
And that's something that happened naturally and organically over time,
15:35
but once we realized what was going on,
15:38
we immediately tried to do our best to codify that,
15:41
so that it would be a deep part of our culture.
15:43
[Pettit] And that's present in the app and in everything that you do.
15:46
I feel like, with building forms, there was probably
15:50
this big temptation to make them look really professional
15:54
or something like that, but you have this myriad of colors on your home page,
15:57
and there's this T-Rex when you click the login button.
16:02
What drove decisions like that?
16:06
[Hale] Part of it had to do with, I was allowed to be
16:08
as creative as I want on the site, so I could give credit
16:10
to Chris and Ryan for giving me all the design
16:14
and creative direction that I wanted to implement on there.
16:16
The other part of it had to do with--
16:20
I was not going to do a startup with them, I told them ahead of time,
16:23
unless it was interesting to me and I could do it
16:26
with a personality that kept the project interesting to me.
16:28
And so if we were going to build a form builder,
16:34
which is not something any artist strives to want to build or design,
16:36
I said, I'm going to do it in a way that makes it interesting
16:40
and makes people realize, hey this can be fun, too.
16:44
I think a lot of people, they'll look at that and they'll see
16:47
a lot of risk in that kind of behavior, but I feel like
16:49
companies and products are like people,
16:53
in that people who interact with those things have relationships with them.
16:56
And people don't want to have a relationship with something boring and stodgy and safe, right?
17:00
People want to have a relationship with things that are interesting, unique and witty.
17:04
And I think there are ways that you can do that in an app, whether it's good copy
17:07
or making it lively in terms of the color palate.
17:10
All those little decisions could shape and change
17:14
the relationship, and the more dynamic you can make that relationship,
17:17
whether it's through the design or the interaction they have with the people of your company,
17:22
the stronger it is,
17:26
and extremely necessary when you need that relationship to be strong.
17:29
For example, when you make a mistake or you have
17:32
an issue, or they run into a problem,
17:34
they give you the benefit of the doubt, because they see that you care
17:36
that this product is a product that's made by humans.
17:39
And there are just all these interesting things that came down the line.
17:43
We never had a problem with other companies
17:46
and cultures who you think would be
17:49
enterprising or extremely conservative having problems with the flavor of our app.
17:52
There was lots of customization there, but in terms of
17:59
when they interacted with it, it would always be some kind of person behind the scenes,
18:01
and they enjoyed that experience of using the software
18:04
and allowed them to look good regardless of
18:07
whatever sort of interesting thing that we tried to do.
18:11
The hard part about our software,
18:14
and what people tried to emulate sometimes and they get wrong,
18:16
is that it is a funny app, and I think a sense of humor
18:19
is a difficult thing to balance.
18:24
I think a lot of people try to do funny as opposed to witty,
18:28
and then, especially when there are things that go wrong,
18:31
I don't think those are the times when you have a sense of humor.
18:33
So always you see this dividing line.
18:35
Things that we want to try to introduce to people
18:38
we try to be interesting, and then when things go wrong
18:40
we're very straightforward and try to be as clear as possible,
18:43
so that people feel safe when we have problems and issues.
18:46
Kind of what you'd want to expect from people in terms of changing their tone
18:50
depending on the circumstances at hand.
18:53
[Pettit] Now, when you talk about relationships, you really mean that.
18:56
I've seen you talk about this at conferences,
18:59
where you say that these apps are really like a marriage,
19:03
or you should apply strategies for good relationships to web apps.
19:08
That's really interesting. So Wufoo was acquired by SurveyMonkey about a year ago.
19:14
Were you looking to get acquired, or was that
19:21
just something that came at the right time, or what's the story there?
19:24
[Hale] Over the 5 years that we operated Wufoo,
19:28
we got multiple acquisition offers.
19:30
We never had a problem with people being interested
19:33
and leveraging our app; we just never found a suitor that felt right to us.
19:35
SurveyMonkey had approached us a year before
19:39
we had even started doing the talks, and we had turned them down
19:42
quite easily, then, because we weren't interested.
19:45
But we keep in touch with everyone.
19:47
We do a really good job of making sure
19:49
that anybody interested in a relationship with our team
19:50
and interested in our product we kept up to date with.
19:55
In about 2003, a private equity firm was interested in SurveyMonkey,
19:57
and the brothers' sole control interested them,
20:03
and they put in a new CEO, Dave Goldberg, in place.
20:06
He hired a whole new technical team
20:09
and engineering staff out here in Palo Alto.
20:11
So essentially, what they were doing was building a whole new app.
20:15
They were rewriting the app from scratch,
20:18
helping it deploy in other languages and in other markets,
20:20
and those were things that we were actually interested in for Wufoo, eventually.
20:23
And they told us that they had already done this.
20:27
Essentially, their culture, because they were building it from the ground up
20:30
in a new place, was kind of like a startup
20:33
in that anything can happen and anyone can have a whole lot of responsibility.
20:36
The one thing that was really interesting about them is that they had lots of revenue.
20:42
So they weren't going to have to be beholden to VCs or what have you
20:46
to change the direction or answer a lot of different questions.
20:48
And they were still private at the time.
20:53
When they talked to us, they said, "We love what you're doing
20:55
at Wufoo, and we love the DNA of the product."
20:58
They, unlike a lot of other companies and suitors that were interested in us,
21:00
weren't interested in shutting it down. They knew our business well,
21:04
because it was very similar to their own.
21:06
They wanted Wufoo to stay on, and if anything, they wanted
21:08
more of the Wufoo personality and style to make it inside of the SurveyMonkey product.
21:10
We met with their team, we met with the executive board,
21:16
and we just felt like all our interests were aligned,
21:18
and it just made a good fit.
21:23
We made sure that we got a great package for all of our employees,
21:26
and when we sat down with them,
21:29
we said, this is what's going to happen,
21:31
and we think this is going to be better for everyone, in terms of
21:35
there's a lot of resposibility that is up for the taking, if you're interested.
21:37
You guys are held in high regard, because you're part of the Wufoo team,
21:41
so if you want your career to move forward
21:44
from here on out and be able to run other products and what have you,
21:49
you should come with us to SurveyMonkey.
21:54
We were really blessed to have every single employee
21:56
of ours, we had 10 people at the time, agree to it,
21:58
and they all moved out here to the west coast, uprooted their families.
22:01
And it's not something that we had expected,
22:06
but it showed that they had a lot of trust and faith in us.
22:08
They basically said, well, if you think this is the right thing to do,
22:11
you guys have always done right by us.
22:14
We'll follow you wherever you need to go.
22:16
[Pettit] So you were 10 people at the time; how big was SurveyMonkey?
22:18
[Hale] There were a little over a hundred people at the time.
22:21
[Pettit] Okay. And today, how large are they?
22:23
[Hale] There are about 200 people.
22:25
Part of that large increase happened due to--
22:28
they acquired another company called Zoomerang,
22:30
which is sort of number 2 in the survey space, and they're a very large company.
22:33
What's interesting about their product was that
22:37
all their features are being rolled into SurveyMonkey,
22:41
and then all of those users are getting migrated over,
22:43
while Wufoo will continue to stay on as a separate product.
22:45
What's interesting about that is that the Wufoo
22:49
customer base does not intersect with a lot of the SurveyMonkey user base.
22:52
As a result, we're achieving the same kind of growth
22:57
that SurveyMonkey is, but with a completely different user base.
23:01
Like, the people who use Wufoo tend not to use SurveyMonkey.
23:04
That's just been really exciting to see,
23:09
because I do not envy the people who are migrating over
23:11
the Zoomerang stuff into SurveyMonkey and making that work.
23:14
[Pettit] Do you feel like you've been able to successfully inject
23:18
a lot of Wufoo's personality and culture into SurveyMonkey?
23:21
[Hale] Yeah. And that has to do with the receptiveness of the SurveyMonkey team.
23:25
Everyone was very excited about having us on, and we were really lucky
23:31
to be able to make key decisions in terms of helping hire new people,
23:34
bringing on new staff, direct the copy of things,
23:40
and even when I started working on the project to redesign
23:44
and rewrite the survey creation experience in SurveyMonkey,
23:48
I was able to do it in a way that fit the personality that we usually use inside of Wufoo.
23:51
So were able to add creative things into the product,
23:55
but we were also able to develop it in the open.
23:58
We were able to do interface demos,
24:02
talk with lots of our user base,
24:04
meet with our customer support people up in Portland,
24:08
and interact with them really closely to make sure that the stuff that we're solving
24:10
solves their problems as well.
24:13
There's not too many large enterprise organizations
24:16
that would give a team like ours a lot of flexibility, and it's been really great.
24:19
[Pettit] I feel like you're a lot more hands-on than most startup founders.
24:24
Do you feel like it's important for a founder
24:28
or a CEO to know how to code and design?
24:31
Should they know how to build their own product?
24:35
[Hale] I think there are lots of examples
24:37
of successful CEOs and founders with all ranges of skills.
24:39
I think it definitely helps if you're a technical founder,
24:45
but I do know that there's lots of pitfalls with being a technical cofounder,
24:50
because sometimes you don't migrate on to work on your decisions,
24:53
or you end up getting caught in this trap of micromanaging,
24:58
because you know how things should be working.
25:02
As your organization grows,
25:06
the real trick is transitioning along with the roles that are needed.
25:09
As a product manager, I am more hands-on than most others,
25:15
just because I can fulfill the role of either UX, design,
25:17
do the copywriting or handle doing the marketing.
25:20
And so that helps, in terms of, I don't need to have
25:23
as large of a team to accomplish the same sorts of things that other teams do.
25:25
But what I try to do is make sure that whatever roles
25:29
are done by other people that we eventually decide to have,
25:32
you give them full autonomy to do what needs to be done.
25:35
If you hire correctly,
25:40
you should rely on the expertise that you've brought on.
25:43
Therefore, it makes it a lot easier to work on stuff.
25:46
For example, the redesign of the SurveyMonkey app,
25:48
we have a lead design--SurveyMonkey already has a lead designer over there.
25:52
So I'm working mostly with them in terms of making it work,
25:55
but he leads the role on the design.
25:58
I can, say, offer improvements and offer suggestions,
26:00
but I don't redo the mocks when I don't like something.
26:04
For nontechnical cofounders, I think
26:08
it's still important to make sure that you are focused on the right things.
26:11
And you can be focused on product
26:14
and focused on customer service, which, I think,
26:17
are always the 2 primary things that make really good products successful
26:19
without having to know them in extreme detail,
26:25
in regards to whether it's knowing how to do support well
26:29
or being able to answer every FAQ and do all that stuff.
26:34
But also, having to know JavaScript or HTML,
26:37
I don't think you need to know that to know that a product should
26:39
have a certain level of quality to it when you interact with it.
26:43
It's a matter of figuring out
26:46
what your strengths are, and if you leverage those
26:48
correctly and then you're also leveraging other people's strengths correctly,
26:51
it doesn't matter what your skill set is.
26:54
As a founder, you're always trying to exude enthusiasm,
26:58
because lots of startups are usually high-risk,
27:03
and you're trying to figure out high-growth,
27:06
and you're trying to figure out making sure that everyone feels passionate about something,
27:09
and making sure that no one's freaking out.
27:12
So having a sense of, 'I have control of this situation
27:15
that feels like it should be going out of control at any second,' is difficult.
27:18
Could we, at Wufoo, have done it without a technical cofounder?
27:23
I don't know. I don't think so, just because
27:26
we had so little money at the time that we started this thing
27:29
and we needed every man on deck doing everything possible.
27:32
So yes, I had to do design, but everyone else
27:37
had to also do marketing, everyone else had to look for bugs,
27:40
everyone had to do customer support.
27:42
That result lead to the culture that we created at Wufoo,
27:44
in regards to everyone being sort of a mini Renaissance man.
27:48
And when you have those kinds of people brought on
27:52
inside of a startup, it makes it a whole lot easier
27:55
to scale out and find other people that are also Renaissance types.
27:57
Then anything that needs to be done can be fulfilled by anybody,
28:03
regardless of where people want to sit comfortably in their seats.
28:06
[Pettit] That's really fascinating.
28:13
So, wrapping up, for designers, developers,
28:15
and entrepreneurs that are newer to the space,
28:18
what piece of advice would you give them?
28:22
I mean, what do you think has helped you grow your career more than anything else?
28:25
[Hale] There is this quote by Charles Eames.
28:30
He made really incredible modern furniture,
28:36
and the way he ran his creative agency was,
28:41
he had this motto that said, "Never delegate understanding."
28:44
And the idea was, don't take anyone else's assumptions
28:49
or learnings about a particular knowledge or space.
28:53
You can always explore it in your own way
28:56
and do your own kind of experiments
29:00
and be able to see if there's alternatives to the solution at hand.
29:02
A lot of times, whether you're trying to solve a design problem
29:05
or solve a company problem, in regards to the hiring
29:08
or figuring out benefit packages or doing basic human resources kind of stuff
29:12
or programming some kind of function or feature,
29:17
there's always a way that you can say,
29:24
are there assumptions that are being made about the decision that I'm going to make here?
29:27
And is there a better way to do it than what's the standard practice?
29:32
And I think always starting from this point
29:35
where you can say, "I can explore this further
29:38
and then expand my knowledge," allowed me to access
29:40
a lot of other knowledge disciplines all at once,
29:46
because each exploration, for every single decision I had made,
29:50
made me stronger and allowed me to also make connections across disciplines
29:54
and across the different types of decisions that we had to make.
29:57
We were able to make bridges in terms of what was going on
30:02
in relationship research out there
30:05
in the psychology field, and say, okay,
30:07
by seeing what's happening there, are there things that we can apply in a technology startup?
30:12
And I think there's always stuff that can be learned from there.
30:16
It happens when you start off with the fact that
30:18
learning is not something that you stop doing
30:22
when you get out of college or get out of school.
30:24
It's something that you either live and breathe it every single day
30:26
or you basically become stagnant.
30:30
If you carry only the knowledge that you have going forward,
30:34
it makes it really difficult to handle things
30:37
when things either get tough or your paradigm shifts
30:40
without your permission.
30:44
[Pettit] Very cool stuff. Well, Kevin, thanks so much for hanging out with us. >>All right. Thanks.
30:50
[Treehouse Friends]
30:54
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