Everything communicates: Shift talks with Andrew Goldner from GrowthX

Welcome to the third and final installment of our Edmonton Startup Week podcast series.

On today's episode I sat down with the mind-expanding Andrew Goldner from GrowthX to learn about the work he and his partners are doing to help build innovation and venture capital opportunities in Alberta and beyond. (You'll learn more about the Alberta Innovates Revenue Accelerator in our interview.)

GrowthX is an early-stage venture capital fund, but they do things differently.

They've sequenced the path to product-market fit to help founders reduce the time it takes to get investment-ready.  By working with founders, GrowthX then generates reliable insights that earns them the opportunity to invest.

A few of our many stops along the way include a discussion around what Andrew calls the signal to noise ratio and how founders need to protect their time, the importance of humility and the need to learn from our mistakes, and his mantra that everything communicates.

Welcome to Shift!

Bio   
 
Andrew Goldner is a Founding Partner of GrowthX, an pre-Series A venture fund that he started in Silicon Valley with three other go-to-market experts.

Andrew has been in the technology sector since 1998, based in New York City, Hong Kong, Singapore, Palo Alto and Nashville.

Andrew began his career in technology as a lawyer for the early Internet pioneers in Search (Alta Vista and Yahoo), AdTech (DoubleClick), SaaS (Salesforce) and others while practicing law. He left private practice at Skadden Arps to join DoubleClick leading up to the Google acquisition and then co-founded a financial news business at Thomson Financial leading to the Reuters acquisition. He then served as Publisher of Reuters News and then Co-Founder and Managing Director of the company’s legal media business in Asia Pacific and the Middle East.

In Silicon Valley, Andrew was early at Guidespark, an employee communication SaaS startup, and BrightTalk, a content marketing SaaS startup. He then co-founded GoodMoney to democratize high-performance, values-based investing. During that “wonderful learning opportunity,” Andrew met his current partners and co-founded GrowthX.

Andrew is a Kauffman Fellow, Regional Board Member of Venture for America, and a Mentor at Endeavor, Alchemist Accelerator and Galvanize. Andrew is a visiting lecturer at Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management where he teaches two popular multi-day seminars: Entreprenurial Sales and Venture Capital. Andrew received his undergraduate degree from the University of Cincinnati and his law degree from Georgetown University.

Shift by Alberta Innovates focuses on the people, businesses and organizations that are contributing to Alberta's strong tech ecosystem.

Transcript

Jon:

Well, this morning when I got up and had my coffee, I knew I had this interview lined up. I knew we were going to be talking about business and entrepreneurialism. I didn't know we'd start talking about privilege and non-linear journeys towards objectives. Like our two previous podcasts on Monday and Tuesday, there's some wisdom here to be mined by this guest. So I encourage you to sit back, pour yourself a nice big old cup of herbal tea, strap in, enjoy.

Good morning everybody. Welcome to Shift. I'm Jon Hagan. On today's show we have Andrew Goldner, CEO of Palo California's GrowthX. Am I right on that? Palo Alto, California?

Andrew:

Well, I founded it with some people while I was living in Palo Alto, and they were in San Francisco. We invested in Rising Cities. And so now, even though we founded it in the Valley, none of us live in the Valley.

Jon:

Okay.

Andrew:

And so we have a decentralized fund, where we don't have a home office, We are where our partners are.

Jon:

Oh, that is so cool, aye?

Andrew:

Yeah.

Jon:

And I think it's interesting because when COVID hit, and we realized, as Alberta Innovates, that a lot of us can work from a hybrids setup, home offices. It's really become the way to go now.

Andrew:

And by the way, for what we do, and for founders, we think it's been the way to do it for a long time. One of the first core beliefs we had when we started GrowthX was founders shouldn't have to leave their homes to build a great company. Why are they moving away from their families and their communities, the relatively low cost, the high standard of living, to move to the most expensive rat race in America just so they could be close to their capitalist?

Jon:

Right. Yeah.

Andrew:

Didn't make any sense. The pull is still strong to the Valley, but I think COVID accelerated, it also helped decouple capital in geography. And so I think more people are giving themselves permission to build great companies in Edmonton. Why do they have to be in Silicon Valley? Especially when they're doing things where Edmonton has an advantage, such as AI.

Jon:

Right. Yeah, no kidding. Let's step back a little bit now, and tell me about GrowthX-

Andrew:

Sure.

Jon:

... its genesis, what you guys do, and the business model, and that sort of thing.

Andrew:

Sure. Yeah. The true genesis was a Caltrain ride I was on from my home in Palo Alto to San Francisco. My marbles were still a bit jumbled because I had returned to the United States from about seven years in Asia, and I was just trying to figure out what I was going to do. And I just had this [inaudible 00:02:52]. It just occurred to me on the Caltrain that if you know how to build products and you start a company, they call you a founder. But if you know how to sell products and you start a company, they call you a non-technical founder.

Jon:

Oh, okay.

Andrew:

And it's not meant as a compliment. It was definitely a second class status of citizen, the salesperson versus the builder, the coder. And it just struck me as something that really needed to be delved into, because I was raised to believe that it ain't dog food unless until I see a dog eating it. That's when it becomes dog food. Nothing happens until someone sells something.

Jon:

Right. Yeah.

Andrew:

Mark Andresen had famously blogged that software was eating the world. And I think what he was talking about is what we referred to as the age of applied technology. The complexity of technology is reduced, the cost of it is reduced. The availability of people who have been trained and have experience building and deploying it has increased rapidly. And so differentiation for most founders doesn't come from features and functions. It comes from actually commercializing it, getting it into the hands of customers, and growing that way.

And so along that journey, having those thoughts, and then beginning to bump into people like my co-founder, Max, who shared a worldview with me, we crowded GrowthX as a venture fund because the idea was if we could solve the most difficult problem for a founder before we invested, wouldn't that give us the information we needed to select the better investments? And wouldn't we have earned a seat at that table to get selected to be the investor through that kind of process?

And that really was the origin of GrowthX, is let's look at Rising Cities, so founders don't have to leave their homes to build great companies. And let's focus on solving the sales problem as a means to select and earn the right to invest in great founders.

Jon:

So now when you talk about helping those businesses, before you dive in and invest, but helping them build their approach, their business plans, I assume, that strikes me as very innovative.

Andrew:

Well, it certainly at the time was a very, very different approach to venture capital. And frankly, we're still a bit of an outlier in terms of our focus on helping founders to make money instead of helping them raise money. I think too many accelerators are focused on helping founders to raise money. They equate investor readiness with a good story pitched well, when it really is the bottom-up business building of go to market that matters. Colleges and universities around your country and mine are a wash in computer science degrees, but very few of them even have a single credit bearing course on entrepreneurial selling.

And so it's no wonder that the empirical data has now shown that literally the single largest, by far, reason why founders fail before they raise their series A is no market need. Now, what's really interesting about that is I think mainstream media and the people that are doing that research and putting out that data have a bit of a surface headline; No market need is the reason why founders fail. Again, I think that makes for a good headline, but we've gone a lot deeper. And the reality is it's not that there isn't a market need. Founders are solving problems in interesting ways, but they're wandering the desert to find product market fit. And so they're running out of money before they fit with the market need.

Certainly, sometimes there's no market need, but most of the time, when we work with founders, and where we see it doesn't work out, it's not because there was a market need. In fact, most of the time it's that there are so many different market needs, so many different use cases, so many different customer types that actually could potentially benefit from the technology, that founders end up dying of overeating and not starvation.

Jon:

Oh.

Andrew:

It's that they're trying to sell to too many people, some of whom aren't qualified, some of whom who don't have the problem as much as a priority, some of them who don't feel it as acutely. Just a variety of reasons. And so interestingly enough, again, back to that headline of most founders fail not because of the product features, but because of no market need, it's a market problem, but it's not necessarily no market need. It's that they haven't found the market need before they ran out of money, or they're trying to serve too many market needs, and therefore they run out of money.

Jon:

Okay. Help me understand, if you will, this whole idea of someone comes up with an idea, or a technology, and they become very passionate about that technology, and they think, "Man, I just built this thing. The world is going to love it."

Andrew:

Yeah.

Jon:

But maybe the world doesn't love it, but they're so married to their technology. Does this fit into, play into what you're talking about, market need and these different-

Andrew:

Sure. And then I think that is often how the journey of the entrepreneur does begin. Our perspective is where the journey should begin, is who are the people we're going to serve, and what problem are we going to solve. It does often start with the technology that I want to build, the product that I want to build, the software that I want to code, the interesting hardware. It is often not coming from a place of the problem. And even when it does initially start out... One of the heuristics of a great founder in our view is a founder who's intimate with a problem. They don't just think something is interesting to do.

A classic example is I work at a company. Part of our job is to solve a certain problem. I'm trying to solve this problem. I even have a budget, and I'm trying to find a vendor to help me solve the problem. And nobody is really solving it. And why is it so difficult to find it? And when I do get it, it's really just not working really well. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm going to go leave, because someone needs to go solve this problem. So I'm going to leave the company and I'm going to go solve this problem, because I know it's a problem. I had the problem professionally. I tried to solve it, I couldn't with the existing choices. So now I'm going to go start a company. It's a great heuristic.

The challenge is almost from that point forward, what the person tends to focus on is the features and the functions of the product. And they start to get farther and farther away from the needs of the people that they're going to ultimately serve. And that's where we find there is the gap. And so, for instance, in the language of Alberta Innovates, and why they brought us here is looking at the ecosystem for founders in Alberta and being thoughtful, intentional about mapping what's here and what's missing and filling those gaps. That's exactly what Alberta Innovates has been doing. They recognize the commercialization gap.

Founders were certainly being enabled through computer science degrees and coding boot camps to build products. And oh, by the way, in this age we have low code/no code tools, code repositories, software development frameworks, things that make it easier, even for the so-called non-technical founder to build their product. And then there's this massive emphasis on helping them understand how to raise venture capital, how to put together a pitch deck, how to do well at a demo day. But there's this gap on getting it into the hands of the customers who are willing to pay for it.

Jon:

Right. So now is this then where GrowthX will step in, help those companies start to build that knowledge, that approach to get to that-

Andrew:

That's exactly right. And Alberta Invades is a wonderful example, and it's a privilege of ours to be a partner. That is our MO around the world. We'll get invited into a rising ecosystem by a forward thinking economic development agency like Alberta Innovates. It might also be an accelerator, a tech hub. It may be even local investors. But we will get invited in, not to just bring our capital. We will get invited in not as a venture capital fund. We will get invited in as experts who've programmatized and systematized a way to help founders go to market and find product market fit, and then get ready for scale.

And of course, it's during that work, where we build the relationships, we learn what we need, where we like to say help is our due diligence, and then of course our venture capital follows. And so that really is our bat signal.

Jon:

Right.

Andrew:

Right?

Jon:

Yeah, yeah.

Andrew:

Our bat signal is not just our expertise, because that's not enough nowadays. You have to have a platform, especially if you're doing it to look for venture investments. That means we have to do it at scale, because it's a small cohort of people who are able to be successful entrepreneurs. It's even a smaller cohort of people who are venture capable entrepreneurs. The quick way to describe that is someone who can take nothing and create at least a billion dollars of value in under 10 years. That is an extraordinary thing to do that the vast majority of the people aren't capable of doing-

Jon:

Right.

Andrew:

... don't want to put the time and energy into doing. And so we obviously have to have a large pool of opportunities in order to earn our way and select the ones that are going to be that power law, that far outlier who creates that kind of value for my investors, which is how I get to continue being to be a venture capitalist.

And so it is... Over the course of GrowthX, since we founded it in 2015, it has been a journey to first take our expertise and create a system out of it, so that we could take the experiences that we've had doing it, and the knowledge that we have from doing it, and systematize it so that we can organize it in a way that we can also enable it and empower other people to do it. And that's where it started.

And then along the journey, it was, okay, how do we start doing this in a way that's more scalable? Because we carbon based life forms don't scale very well. And so that is when we built our platform, we call it MXP Online. MXP stands for Market Acceleration Program. It's what we've always called the program that we've run since we founded it, the Market Acceleration Program. And so when we built a web-based version of it, we got creative and said, "How about MXP Online?"

Jon:

It works.

Andrew:

And that is now a web-based library and set of playbooks that are the knowledge, the skills, the tools for founders to understand what the sequence of steps are to product market fit, how to take each one of them, have the reference points from best practices in case studies to take those steps, and then have a trained coach in the weeds alongside of you so that they're there with you while you are entrepreneuring. And that's where the real revenue results come from. And that's what enabled us to now do this at scale around the world.

Jon:

That's really cool. So here, walk me through it. I'm an entrepreneur listening to this podcast. You've talked about MXP Online. We haven't officially mentioned the Alberta Innovates Revenue Accelerator, but I'm assuming that's a... And we'll flesh that out a bit more.

Andrew:

Good. Yeah.

Jon:

But people see that and they go, "Wow, this is a great opportunity for me to get involved. I've also got a technology development advisor from Alberta Innovates. Maybe I'm working with one of the accelerators or pre-accelerator." What should they do?

Andrew:

Yeah. No, that's a really great question. Again, I hold Albert Innovates out as an example around the world. And I'm not just saying that because I'm doing the podcast here in Edmonton. As a shining example, again, of an ecosystem that's being very thoughtful and intentional, and as an economic development agency that's being courageous, because economic development and government and politics, there's a real push necessarily to help as many people as you can. But that creates a necessary tension with entrepreneurism, especially venture entrepreneurism, because at some point you have to start really just backing the winners, and push and push them to go.

Now, more people need to have opportunity to participate. There are excluded people that we need to be affirmative and intentional about activating, and welcoming, and empowering to be a part of the entrepreneurship ecosystem; women, people of color, indigenous, previously excluded people. So when I say that it's not for everybody, that's not what I'm talking about, because diversity makes everything better. The data proves it. I actually have to think that it's just a more enjoyable existence. But that's important.

But from that pool of open and diverse people who want to be entrepreneurs, at some point you do have to start making decisions and continue to put more resources behind those that are continuing to move forward. And that includes the programs that are being funded. Not everybody can be funded. And what I've seen Alberta Innovates do that very few other ecosystems have been doing is making courageous decisions, based on their data, about what's working and not working, and funding only things that are working. And I know that that sounds obvious, but again, when you're a political body, when you're answering to a government, there are other factors that matter, that necessarily need to be considered.

And so what I've-

Andrew:

... necessarily need to be considered.

Jon:

Mm-hmm.

Andrew:

So what I've seen Alberta Innovates do, and it's to your question, is really map the ecosystem from idea to exit and begin to be intentional about making sure that founders are resourced along that entire relay race, so that at each leg of the relay, there are trained resources available to enable that founder and to make sure that when that leg of the race is run, there's not a gap. So nobody's sitting there and waiting.

Jon:

Right.

Andrew:

And there's not a baton that gets dropped. There's someone there who's poised and ready and who is more capable at that next leg of the relay to perform that leg of the race. So you've talked about the pre-accelerators, you've talked about the other coaching resources that are available, the scale up programs, the revenue accelerator that we run. Those are examples of the continuum of resources that Alberta Innovates has now thoughtfully made available to founders to meet the founders where they are, enable and empower them to more successfully, at a more rapid pace and at a higher success rate, complete the leg of the journey they're on and have someone meeting them at the next leg of the journey.

So for founders in Alberta, they're very fortunate because there are so many resources that will meet them where they are. And that's really the most important thing is. Founders need to determine where they are in their journey, use Alberta Innovates as a resource to help match up where they are in the leg of their journey to the most appropriate resources. The early stage of bringing innovation to market from idea through exit follows a fairly particular set of steps and base camps to get to the top. So whether you are an idea stage founder, even a student at a university working on something that may come through tech transfer, whether you've tinkered and have come up with something and are now just starting to think about, "Maybe I'll quit my job and do this full time," whether you're now starting to focus on what are the other things that I need to be a great founder, there are resources to meet you at each step of that journey in Alberta.

The Alberta Innovates Revenue Accelerator is there to fill the commercialization gap between those that have what's colloquially referred to as a minimally viable product. We like to call it just some unit of value and those that have product market fit. And that's exactly where we exist. So you have a product, you do not have product market fit. We can talk about that too because product market fit is not a feeling, and it's a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in ecosystems and very few people define it. So we can certainly talk later about the objective definition of that. But we were brought in specifically to work with founders who have maybe gone through a pre-accelerator or maybe they've just simply accelerated themself to the point that they're now ready to begin commercialization or the notion of customer development and market development.

Typically with innovation and bringing it to market, the four phases generally are product development, customer development, market development, and sales and marketing. Prior to having product market fit, you're actually not doing sales because sales is the pursuit of revenue for the purpose of profit. Before you have product market fit, you're doing market development and customer development, which is the pursuit of revenue for the purpose of learning, because learning proceeds revenue. Sales and marketing by definition is scale. You hire a VP of sales when you have the playbook because VPs of sales execute playbooks. They don't write the playbooks. Right? So this is a classic mistake that founders make, is they think sales, they think they need to do sales, they think they need to be scaling. They need to be going out. They need to be filling the top of their funnel. They need to be running email campaigns. They need to be all over LinkedIn.

The challenge is, what they're creating is a signal to noise problem because they haven't defined their signal. So they're out there, and what they're actually doing is filling their calendar with a bunch of noise. And that's what practically ends up having them run out of money before they find product market fit and that market need, is because they actually filled up all their valuable time and used their valuable money much less effectively and efficiently because they're dealing with a lot of noise where they should just be focused on the signal. So you think of customer market development as defining your signal.

Jon:

That is absolutely fascinating. You talk about you'll run out of money, you'll run out of time, patience, mental well-being.

Andrew:

All of those things.

Jon:

Yeah.

Andrew:

My partner Max has a phrase that I've picked up because I love it, and that is that, if you're a founder by definition, you are the bouncer at the hottest nightclub in the world, and your nightclub is your calendar.

Jon:

Right.

Andrew:

You got to work that velvet rope. You can't just let anybody in that nightclub. You got to be very thoughtful about that. So many founders aren't that thoughtful about it. They really need to protect their valuable time and their calendar because everything communicates. And for a variety of reasons, what's good for running a business and building it of enduring value is the same things that us VCs are looking for. And when a founder is wasting a lot of their time, it's a signal to us that they're also going to waste our money.

Jon:

Let's pause for some station identification.

AD 1:

I am an innovator, industry disruptor, business owner, problem solver, pioneer, creator, futurist. I am an Alberta entrepreneur, taking industry to the next level with new technology and innovation.

Alberta Innovates is here to help you on your journey with programs, for funding, connections, supports, expanding to new markets, investors and more. Come talk to us.

Jon:

And we're back with part two of our interview with Andrew Goldner.

Andrew:

Again, everything communicates. So when you're running around throwing spaghetti at a ceiling, hoping some of it will stick, why should we believe you're not going to use our capital for that same inefficient purpose? And again, then you're going to run out of money and then come back to us before you have what you need for that next leg of your journey. So the Alberta Innovates Revenue Accelerator is all about helping founders understand the sequential steps that every founder who's bringing innovation to market needs to take in order to get to the place where they're ready for sales and marketing, where they have that source of signal, where they have market informed, if not confirmed, market informed data that backs up their hypothesis about where in their market they're going to focus to get the most use out of the limited resources they have now to continue getting to that next base camp to ultimately scale to the top of that mountain.

Jon:

Mm-hmm.

Andrew:

So again, traditionally, that's customer development, which then leads to market development, and it's industry and sector agnostic. The path to product market fit does not matter what your product or your market is. The sequential steps you take are exactly the same. Now, depending on how capitally intense your initiative is, it may elongate your path to product market fit. You may be doing hardware, which is more capitally intense than software. You may be doing something that has some regulatory hurdles that you need to get through before you're even legally permitted to commercialize. It won't change the steps that you're taking. It'll just delay them or elongate them, but you're going to take the exact same steps.

So what we've done is just sequence those steps, and we enable and empower founders to understand what they are and how to take them. The framework is that combination of platform so that founders can do a lot of self educating, so that when they come to the intense coaching, it produces real results. So you're not just stepping into what we like to joke as a mentor chat roulette session, which so many accelerators rely on.

Jon:

Okay.

Andrew:

This is not just a successful entrepreneur wandering in the room saying, "Hey, what do you want to talk about today?" They're not here to motivate you. They're not here to show you how smart they think they are. They're here to work on a very specific step that they know you're at in the sequence to product market fit. They want to know the work you've done so far to verify and collect the data you need and the learnings you need, to verify that you're ready to take that next step. They're there to help you work through the challenges, to give you more reference points so as a founder, you start to know what working looks like. Because that's one of the problems when you're going to market as a founder. When your product doesn't work, you know it.

Jon:

Right. Yep.

Andrew:

The market doesn't often communicate this clearly because it's humans, it's not technology. So helping founders understand what working looks like enables them to then put their confidence and ultimately their conviction behind decisions. And that ultimately is what makes the best founders. The greatest opportunities that we read about and we see the movies made of and venture are not one or two large judgment calls. They are a series of micro judgment calls that have been made along the way by the founders and their teams and their advisors that ultimately add up to those big wins. And that's hard when you're a founder. There is no answer key.

Jon:

Right. Yeah.

Andrew:

And you're super passionate. Your life is on the line. You care so much, and your ego, and like, "I don't know if this is what I should be doing. I don't know if this is what should be happening." The confidence and conviction to make those judgment calls along the way is ultimately what makes the best type of founder. So it's the coaching on top of the platform. And that's a big part of what we do. We're proud to do it in Alberta because it's not just GrowthX and a team of experts that swoop in, we're creating local capacity. Our coaches, including Rick, he coached during the pilot project that we ran. That's how we got to know him. I mean, he's amazing.

Jon:

Yep.

Andrew:

But he'll tell you, even with all of his experience and all of his success, having the platform and having the program made him even more bionic. People like David Bocking who is an incredible coach. People like Kristina Milke from Sprout.vc. That's another wonderful example. I mean, Kristina is running a VC fund. She's coaching for the same reason we do it because she's inside of company's diligence in a way she could never do as a micro VC. The resources just don't work out that way. She has a competitive advantage that she has recognized. So she's helping, right?

Jon:

Mm-hmm.

Andrew:

Helping is her due diligence. She's coaching and enabling and empowering these founders. She's also building relationships for her fund so that when she spots a winner, Sprout's going to get selected for that investment opportunity.

Jon:

Right. It's a win-win right across the board.

Andrew:

It absolutely is. And again, it's even a deeper win-win because the approach that Kristina and Sprout have taken, the worst case outcome is, I've helped you.

Jon:

Right. Yeah.

Andrew:

That's the worst case. It's not a couple of meetings from coffees and a no.

Jon:

Yeah.

Andrew:

And maybe not even a satisfying no and a no with a no reason. When Kristina and Sprout don't invest, and Kristina has worked through those, or her partner have worked with these founders, it's very clear why it's a no or not yet. And it's not even like it's a typical VC decision where we go off into our hallowed buildings and we have our hallowed Monday partner meeting and we come out and we pronounce who's getting funding and who's not.

Jon:

Right.

Andrew:

It's a relationship that she is building with founders, and founders know when the appropriate time even is to pitch and they know what she's going to be looking for because of what's missing. And it happens more naturally and organically.

Jon:

That's very interesting. You know what? Quite often we talk about an entrepreneurialism failing fast. Some people may look at that as a failure, but it's really a learning opportunity.

Andrew:

It is.

Jon:

How can they refine their playbook and build on that to then become-

Andrew:

That's right. I mean, this is where Bob Ross continues to teach us lessons. There are no-

Jon:

Bob Ross, the painter.

Andrew:

Yeah. No mistakes, just happy accidents.

Jon:

I like it.

Andrew:

If you've learned from it, it's not a mistake.

Jon:

Right.

Andrew:

I mean, experience is what you get when you don't get what you want. I'm a very experienced person. Right? So it's not just fail fast, it's fail forward.

Jon:

Fail forward, yeah. Okay.

Andrew:

I reserve the right to be less wrong tomorrow than I am today. That's my goal. And why the best founders are those that set aside their ego, they have an orientation towards winning. Like good scientists, they don't look to prove themselves right. They're just in search of the truth. They want to be market informed. They want to be hypothesis driven. Right?

Jon:

Yeah.

Andrew:

Ultimately, that is what an early stage startup is. It is a learning organization. It is an experiment in search of a business model where that learning is what informs everything. So that insatiable curiosity for learning, which you see in any really good true entrepreneur, someone who is always thinking about how something can be done differently or better. But again, it's not about being right, it's not about the ego. It's about how do I get on a journey to learn, and not just to get to a place but to get there efficiently. Because most founders don't have the luxury of gobs of time and money to waste. Right? They have to get there efficiently.

Jon:

Mm-hmm.

Andrew:

You look at corporate innovation, and they're failing at even a higher rate than startups, and they're failing for the same reasons. Corporations have a lot of resources that they waste along in the journey. It takes them longer to fail, and they fall from a higher tree when they do. Founders typically don't have that luxury. We need to just get there. We also need to get there efficiently. So again, following the sequential path. But it's on us to do that because if the colleges and universities aren't teaching it, if the accelerators are focused on raising money, not making money, whose fault is it that these founders don't know how to do this?

Jon:

Right.

Andrew:

Why should they know how to do that?

Jon:

Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about status quo. And let me flush this out a little bit. We had James Keirstead from Levven Electronics on yesterday.

Andrew:

Yeah, yeah.

Jon:

It's a fantastic conversation like because this one is.

Andrew:

Thank you.

Jon:

He was flushing out this idea of the status quo for a quasi-governmental organization. You want to maintain that approach because if you're too adventurous or too creative, and this would apply to any organization, if you go outside of that swim lane of what's expected, you run the risk of failing. Now, not everybody's going to look at, it's failing forward. So how do you get people and organizations to embody that spirit of not just, "I'm going to drive and try something uninformed," but to try something that's maybe a little risky? Let's make status quo risky, is what James said, and I loved that notion.

Andrew:

Yeah. I mean, listen, our world is focused on the founders who are building the great companies. We've been involved in corporate innovation, both as partners individually in our careers and some of the stuff we used to do at GrowthX-

Andrew:

... partners individually in our careers, and some of the stuff we used to do at GrowthX. Yeah, it's a complex question, so it has a complex answer, but to boil it down simply, what gets measured gets done, and so if you look inside of large organizations, there certainly has to be the culture and the appetite for risk and failure so that it is not ... I don't necessarily think you need to celebrate failure, but you do have to understand that there's going to be a lot of trips along the way. And as long as you're learning and tripping and falling forward, for corporations, you're obviously not going to put the sacred cow ... The family jewels are not going to be where we're experimenting, so that the failures are materially impacting the company. But what gets measured gets done.

I mean, often inside of big companies, innovation happens between P&Ls, and that's a dangerous place to be, because what gets measured gets done. And when you're between P&Ls, and the people who run those P&Ls aren't getting measured on your success, and the amount of trailing zeros on their P&L make it impossible for them to focus on anything so small, where they're not going to get any credit if this goes well, but if it doesn't go well, they're certainly going to take a hit, because they have key performance indicators, KPIs, that they need to get done for the company.

And so innovation is definitely a hard thing to do inside of a company too, because by its very nature, those that are drawn to it typically don't want to be institutionalized inside of a big corporation. And so for those reasons, and for a variety of others, and it's not impossible to do, there are definitely companies that are doing it extremely well, but what you see and how they're doing it well is because it's top-down. It's coming from a president, it's coming from a board, and the way that they've organized and incentivized and enabled cross-functional behaviors, not silos, where there are real performance measurements around scaling up the mountain and achieving some of those base camp milestones along the way, and partnering with other organizations that can enable and help them to do it better, you're seeing that happen. But certainly for founders, what your risk appetite is is a big part of enabling you to be a founder.

There certainly is a lot of conscious bias. There certainly is a lot of prejudice that remains in this world, but there's also some just practical realities of being a founder that make it relatively more difficult for certain people to participate in the opportunity, to create wealth for themselves and their families, because of that risk appetite. I'm a very privileged person. I come from a privileged place. Before I was even cognizant of myself as a human, I had won the two parent lottery. I had won the zip code lottery. I had won a lot of lotteries before I even knew I was a human. And so if I do this and it doesn't work out, I'm not going to be on the street. My family's not going to be on the street. I'm privileged to have an education. I'm privileged to have experience. And so if I need to, I can go get a job.

Jon:

Right.

Andrew:

I had the opportunity to participate in the economy, and create a credit, and save money. And all of these things that we, you and I, as privileged people, take for granted-

Jon:

Right.

Andrew:

... happen to be part of what makes it relatively and oftentimes absolutely more difficult for different types of people to be able to participate in this opportunity.

And so I think to your previous guest's point, I 100% agree. We need to be very thoughtful, intentional, though, about how we can spread out and enable people who have previously not been afforded the same things we have. This is not a handout culture that we're talking about. This is not socialism that we're talking about. It is not a zero sum game. I'm not taking it from one to give to the other. Everything is better, everything works better, and the data shows that your performance goes up, your value goes up, the more diversity, the more you respect the supply chain, the differential between the most expensive and the least expensive person. These sustainability things, sustainability is certainly not just an environmental choice.

Jon:

Yup.

Andrew:

We're talking about making long term, healthy, sustainable, non-violent relationships that have proven to create better performance. And I don't think it takes a genius to understand why. People are happier. They have more opportunity. I mean, just from a woman perspective, there's roughly, if not a little more than 50% of the population, that has not had the same opportunity to participate. Extraordinary amount of talent that the global economy is just somehow talking politely at a cocktail party about being on the sidelines.

Jon:

Yeah.

Andrew:

And so I think, again, all these things have to come into the mix. We do the best we can from our perch and our small place at GrowthX. The fund that we're raising right now, in addition to focusing on founders in rising cities, in addition to focusing on founders where we have the insights that we need from programmatically helping them find product market fit, in addition to having local co-investors, which we require, because it's better and it's necessary, We're also going to be biasing in favor of women founders.

Jon:

Okay.

Andrew:

And again, just from a performance perspective. And so, yeah. I strayed a little from your question.

Jon:

No. That's okay. No. I loved it. I think there's a lot of real ... You offered a lot of really mindful and thoughtful perspectives, and a lot of organizations are becoming more like that, but it takes an active approach. You can't just go, "Oh, yeah. That's kind of what we do." And then hope that inertia takes over.

Andrew:

Yeah. Amen. Amen. I was just having this conversation with the founder yesterday, and it's one of the blessings of being a founder. For us, it's not just the company you build, but the company you keep.

Jon:

Exactly. Yeah.

Andrew:

You get to choose that as a founder. Why are you missing this wonderful opportunity, what we consider to be a blessing, by not being more thoughtful about that, deciding what the worldview is based on the founders and the team. What's the worldview of this company going to be? And put that out there, and invite the people who share your worldview to nurture themselves towards you and give them opportunities to do that. And for those that don't, give them equal opportunity to nurture themselves away from you.

Jon:

Right.

Andrew:

As long as they do it peacefully and quickly. We want them to go in peace and be happy in their right. But I think what you're talking about there, before, you were talking about brand. I've always thought of a brand as the promise of experience, and whether that's your or my personal brand, whether that's the brand of this podcast you run, whether it's Startup Edmonton, or Edmonton Unlimited, or the Alberta Province, or GrowthX, there is a promise of experience, and that means we have to communicate what we want to be held accountable to, and then we ask and invite people to hold us accountable to that, recognizing that we're fallible and we'll make mistakes. But to know that we want to be held accountable to certain standards, because collectively that does become our brand. And being aware that everything communicates.

Jon:

That's a great message, by the way. And you've mentioned it a couple of times. Everything communicates. I have to apologize for interjecting.

Andrew:

No, please.

Jon:

But that's a really great message for people to take away from this.

Andrew:

Thank you. Anybody who knows me hears it all the time. It's hard to have a conversation with me and not hear it. It's something that I was taught by a dear friend of mine who worked for one of the greatest Chief Marketing Officers of all time, Sergio Zyman, and he's the person who first said that.

Jon:

Oh, okay.

Andrew:

And the second I heard it, I understood it, and I've picked it up and certainly made it my own. It's so true, and it's so important, because that ultimately ... For the founders that think that brand is something they need to be thinking about later, understand that that brand is going to happen whether you like it or not. Do you want to be intentional and thoughtful and live up to that brand that you want to represent your promise of experience? Or do you want it to be something else? Because everything communicates. You are getting a brand. You and I are getting a brand every time we talk with someone.

Jon:

Right.

Andrew:

Everything that we say, everything we do, everything we don't do, everything we don't say, everything we do communicates. You can't not communicate. That's the corollary. Those things add up to your brand, and so you need to be thoughtful and intentional about that, because we are always communicating.

And by the way, for founders going to market, the market is also always communicating. And it's not just when you're looking for customers, what they've written on their website, or what they may have told you in a conversation. You have to do your research. You have to be attuned and have this professional catharsis so that you're aware of the signals that you should be looking for, and understanding how to read them and analyze them. Because everything communicates.

Jon:

Right.

Andrew:

Right? An easy example that we always use for founders that are always looking for early adopters, because that's what founders need to do, because the only people that do business with startups are definitionally early adopters. Nobody else does business with unproven things. So, "Well, Andrew, it's not like someone's website says, 'I'm an early adopter.'" No, that's true. But if you're selling to a company, do they have a corporate venture capital unit? Because early adopters are looking for startups to work with. Have they acquired startups before? Do they participate in, do they sponsor accelerators? Do they speak at conferences on the subject? Do they have a blog that is active? When you go to a company's website and their last blog on the blog site is two years old, chances are, they may not be as much of an early adopter. They are communicating to you that they are an early adopter.

And by the way, it's not just the company. The people within the company. Because companies don't buy. People do. And so when you're looking for the person that you want to speak to, who is blogging personally a lot? Who is updating their LinkedIn a lot? Who is being invited and speaking at conferences a lot? Because people who are passionate, the early adopters who are passionate and are innovative and try new things, this is how they behave. So this person is communicating without saying, "I am an early adopter."

Jon:

Right. Yeah. Geez, you're blowing my mind, Andrew. No, this is great.

Andrew:

Thank you.

Jon:

And it's interesting, because as you talk about this, I'm going, "Yeah. Of course. That makes so much sense." But it's nothing that I've necessarily intellectualized. But then as you start to flush it out, I'm like, "Yeah. Wow."

Andrew:

And that is it. And for our founders that ask, I mean, I hope you have some of the founders that go through the revenue [inaudible 00:49:10] program. They're going to say the same thing you just did. Like, "Oh, I hit my head."

Jon:

Right.

Andrew:

It's like, "Oh my goodness. This is so obvious. How could I not have realized?" Yeah. None of what we're doing is rocket science. It's not even long division. I mean, it is not complex, but if you're not oriented towards it, if nobody's teaching you or helping you think about it this way, it's in front of you and you've missed it.

AD 2:

When I started this journey of entrepreneurship, I knew the stats for the numbers of businesses that actually survive were low, and thought, "I will be one of the elites to make it." I started strong. But as I wade in the weeds, I'm realizing that I need support, funding, and outside perspective to help me strategically [inaudible 00:50:13] my journey. I need help.

Alberta Innovates is here to help. Come talk to us.

Jon:

Right. Right. That's absolutely ... It's really very cool. Now, I have to say, for our listeners, Andrew's got a number of programs coming up today.

Andrew:

Yeah.

Jon:

We're at 10 to 10 now.

Andrew:

Yeah.

Jon:

I can go on.

Andrew:

I can go on.

Jon:

Oh, you're good?

Andrew:

Yeah.

Jon:

We're good for time?

Andrew:

Yeah. I think my workshop's at 11.

Jon:

Okay. Well-

Andrew:

And I think it's-

Jon:

Right next door. Perfect.

Andrew:

... right out the window I'm looking through.

Jon:

Well, if you're good, I'd like to chat for a bit more.

Andrew:

Let's keep going.

Jon:

Cool. Now, you were talking earlier about a privileged position, as I come from as well. Can we get a little more personal about it?

Andrew:

Sure.

Jon:

Because when we first started talking, you said you had been in Asia for a while, and you were taking this train in Palo Alto when you had the epiphany for GrowthX to become this venture capitalist. Now, as soon as someone hears venture capitalist, they think, "Well, this person's got some fat stacks to deal with."

Andrew:

Yeah.

Jon:

And you've obviously got a great amount of experience and wisdom. Where did all this come from?

Andrew:

Well, so I don't know about the wisdom. The experience I certainly have, as I said.

Jon:

That leads to wisdom.

Andrew:

I definitely have wisdom too, from just the longitude of time. As we get older, you and I have earned our gray hairs.

Jon:

Hey, don't look at me.

Andrew:

We've earned our gray hairs. There's definitely wisdom in age. The youth definitely is wasted on the young.

Jon:

Hallelujah, by the way.

Andrew:

I've just been very fortunate in that I've had a bit of a non-linear path. I've paid attention along the journey, and I've had people for reasons that sometimes I'm just not even sure have taken a liking to me, and have shared their wisdom, because they saw something in me that reminded them of who they were when they were my age, at the time. And they were willing to give me a little of their time and their attention. And I've benefited my whole life from mentors, people that literally changed my world. People that don't even know they're a mentor of mine, that they said something they thought was ... They probably, I'm sure, never even remember saying it to me.

Jon:

Right.

Andrew:

And it's not always just those that sat there and regularly worked with me as a mentor. There are people that, in a certain situation, gave me a perspective that I didn't have before, that was a gift. Feedback is a gift.

Jon:

Right. Yeah.

Andrew:

And so they gave me that gift, and I've just always ... And I don't know why, but I've always been very thoughtful about those gifts, and paying attention to them, and internalizing them. I've never had much of an ego that way. I am the first, as my wife and daughters will tell you, I'm the first person to apologize. I apologize a lot in my house, because I make a lot of mistakes. But I apologize. I recognize it. I listen to the feedback and I get better. It's always been my approach. I've never had a problem admitting I was wrong, and I've never had a problem taking advice from somebody, because feedback is given as a gift. It's with love.

Jon:

Yeah.

Andrew:

And so with that, I just went on this non-linear journey, and I've always been probably more thoughtful about-

Andrew:

 Probably more thoughtful about decisions that I'm making and why I'm making them and maybe even at times as youth intense about my focus. And that's, by the way, a double sided coin that can be a real turnoff. And it certainly was for a lot of people when I was younger. But I started my career as a lawyer, so I'm a recovering lawyer right now. And I came out of law school and the internet was first commercializing and so I just got lucky because my brother was very involved in the internet. He was running a bulletin board out of our basement in the early eighties-

Jon:

Oh wow.

Andrew:

... in Cleveland, Ohio. And so through my brother, I knew how the internet worked. And when I came out of law school, most people didn't how the internet worked. And very few lawyers even today, but seriously, at that time, very few lawyers knew how the internet worked. And because I knew how the internet worked, I was able to start getting involved as a lawyer that didn't have any idea how to be a lawyer, in things that I otherwise wouldn't been able to do. And I loved it because I was passionate about this subject.

And so I recognized that. I recognized how lucky I was based on the timing to be coming out of law school when this thing was happening. The internet was commercializing, and I knew more about it than a lot of other lawyers, even though I didn't know anything about being a lawyer. I used that to my advantage and that took me on a really fun ride. I ended up joining a company called DoubleClick, which ultimately got acquired by Google and formed the basis of how Google initially made all of its money. That was its advertising engine, that's DoubleClick.

Jon:

Wow.

Andrew:

And then interestingly enough, I was just fortunate enough to get connected to the Thompson family here in Canada. I was given an opportunity to start working for them as they were beginning to operate more of the portfolio of companies that they had previously held and start thinking about, from a portfolio theory, how these different companies could be operating with a lot of adjacencies. And so I went into Thompson Financial doing sophisticated FinTech transactions because sophisticated transactions is what I knew how to do. And that was a very interesting time for the Thompson family of companies, Woodbridge Corporation. And again, fortunate because of my "new media background" to be staffed on a deal for the Thompsons to renegotiate a license with Dow Jones.

Unlike Bloomberg, at the time, the Thompsons didn't own a critical part of their workflow solution, which is a lesson learned. They outsourced it through licensing to people like Dow Jones, where-

Jon:

I don't know what that means.

Andrew:

So Bloomberg has Bloomberg News. So Bloomberg has financial terminals. Bloomberg serves the financial markets, They have proprietary news. At the time, Thompson did not have proprietary news. They licensed news. So if you were a Thompson customer and you were a bank or a trader, it was obviously critical to have news. That news didn't come from Thompson. It came through Thompson from companies like Dow Jones. And so when we renegotiated that deal, it was a very tough renegotiation because Dow Jones had all the bargaining power.

Jon:

For sure.

Andrew:

And a small group at Thompson Financial basically said, "Well, how difficult would it be to just start our own news business?" And so Thompson's made a very courageous decision to invite Dow Jones to leave the platform and we started Thompson Financial News. And so that's when I officially hung up my legal hat and became Head of New Strategy and Operations and that led to us buying Reuters. So when we became Thompson Reuters, I became the publisher of Reuters News. In the process, I had made an acquisition of a news bureau in Asia and had the opportunity to move my family to Hong Kong to do Thompson Financial News Asia. And when the Reuters deal settled through antitrust and we became Thompson Reuters, obviously Thompson Financial News was immediately folded into Reuters, one of the most storied news institutions in the history of the world.

I decided to stay in Asia because it was a better place to innovate, relative to the United States or London, especially at a company like Thompson Reuters and with the Reuters News Agency and how it was organized and the Writer's Guild. And Asia, it was again, more of just a pioneering place. So, when I became publisher of Reuters News, what I wanted to do with that position was to bring the voice of the customer into the newsroom and innovation.

I became publisher about the same time as Twitter was founded and again, because I had this history that I was lucky to have, having been a lawyer when the internet was first commercializing and having been at some of the earliest pioneers as their lawyer, I had a perspective that I wouldn't have otherwise probably had. And so I was able to see early, among a group of people who saw early, this impact that Twitter and entering what we would call the age of information, what impact that would have on the most storied news institution in the history of the world. And so we brought the voice of the customer in and we did innovation and I did that over in Asia for many years. And then, yeah, it was just time to come back to the United States.

And so that non-linear journey, and by the way, certainly, I've been working my whole life. I mean, I was a newspaper boy delivering newspapers when I was 12 years old. I've had a lot of jobs and a lot of internships. I went to the University of Cincinnati, which invented the co-op program and so cooperative education, that's where it was founded. And so even through college, every other quarter, I was working in a job. Working for the US Congress, working as a financial analyst for IBM in a semiconductor fabrication plant. This cooperative opportunity at the University of Cincinnati gave me and put that together with all these other non-linear opportunities I've had. It just set me up so that when I came back to the United States, I was away for a long time, and I knew that if I was ever going to go out and do something truly entrepreneurial on my own, that was the time.

If I transferred back to the United States with Thompson Reuters, I just didn't think it was going to happen. I've had that fire in my belly. I was privileged to do entrepreneurial things inside of that company, but I wanted to do something. As I said, when I left the company, "It's been a privilege to make money for the Thompson family. It's time to make money for the Goldner family."

Jon:

Fascinating. Quickly, thinking about going back to the whole notion of status quo, there's two times that the status quo was kind of blown out there when it became Thompson Writers. You guys decided to not maintain the status quo.

Andrew:

For sure, not.

Jon:

And then you being gainfully employed and having quite a bit of success with them deciding that, "Nope, it's time to do this for the Goldner family.

Andrew:

Yeah. I mean again-

Jon:

A tough decision, I'm sure.

Andrew:

A very tough decision. But again, it's never been that difficult for me to do that. Throughout my whole life I've been able to make those decisions. When I did that, and I had good friends at Thompson Reuters and it was a privileged seven years that I was with Thompson, I learned a ton, I met amazing people. People who had and still have an influence on me that they may not even know they have. I just remember when I left, I resigned, there was all this jealousy, and I was like, "Well, you can quit your job too."

Jon:

Right, the shackles aren't-

Andrew:

You can quit. So, "Oh, I wish I could do that." Well, I know these people I'm talking about are privileged, like I am. These are experienced people. These are smart people. If they quit and it didn't work out, they would get a job somewhere. But yeah, again, it was courageous. It did take courage. I have that kind of just decision making and well power, I always have. I didn't wake up one morning and do it. I have a family, I'm responsible. But that risk tolerance, that risk profile, I'm actually happier with a high risk than with low risk. But again, that's all relative. For me, I knew what my worst case scenario was going to be, and it didn't include being homeless.

Jon:

Right? Yes, yeah, that's huge.

Andrew:

It's enormous. And by the way, just the experience of living in a different society for so many years, and I think especially important for Americans to get outside of America. Travel on holiday is one thing, but really integrating into a different community and seeing the different ways things can be done, and surprisingly, dare I say, even better in many regards and then come back and try to do my part at home. So all that. What we're really talking about is just continually putting yourself outside of your comfort zone.

Jon:

Yeah. I love it.

Andrew:

Because that's where the learning takes place,

Jon:

And that's the personal brand, everything communicates. And this has been a fantastic conversation.

Andrew:

Thank you.

Jon:

I want to go back and talk about the definition of things and-

Andrew:

Oh yeah, we didn't get to that.

Jon:

... I feel like that we've hit the top of the mountain, but in one trajectory of the conversation and that personal stuff, it's fantastic.

Andrew:

Well, I appreciate it. I'm happy to come back anytime. I really appreciate the opportunity to be on your show, and I mean that. I'm happy to do it anytime you want. What I would also say to your listeners, we also have a continuum of resources on the website, growthx.com/blog. This is not your typical blog. These are multimedia resources that are practical, tactical. And there's playbooks you can download, there's templates you can download, there's step by step instructions, there's videos to enable you to do the things you need to do to be a successful entrepreneur. So we didn't get to cover the definition of product market fit, but if you go to growthx.com/blog, you're going to see a blog that walks you through, in specific detail, the five very specific and objective things you need to accomplish to have product market fit.

There is an ICP starter kit, Ideal Customer Profile starter kit, which is the most critical first step any entrepreneur can take once they have their MBP. And it's a video of my partner Max, an hour, telling you about ICP. Going through the ICP exercise using a company in our portfolio as an example. And then there is a template to download for you to do that work. And it comes with an invitation from us, which is, "Don't send us your pitch deck. Send us the work you're doing to go to market and let us help you. And that is how we will begin to get to know each other." You don't even know if I should get your pitch deck, right?

Jon:

Right.

Andrew:

Remember that nightclub. Let me get onto it. And then of course, you had the Alberta Innovates Revenue Accelerator. It's the thing we're most privileged to do here in the province. Growthx.com/taira, which just stands for the Alberta Innovates Revenue Accelerator. It's full transparency. It's everything you need to know. The platform we talked about, MXP Online, any of your listeners through a click with a good button can have full access to it. Check out what it is, right? Look at it. Start using it, See if it's something you think that could be helpful.

You can download the full curriculum. There's tons of FAQs, and most importantly, there's the words of the founders who have gone through it who have benefited. Not because we're smarter, but because I think we care more and because we've created a system and a program to enable great coaches like Christina and David and Rick and others to work alongside you. So we do hope founders avail themselves of that.

There's a lot of great programs in this province. We're not a competition with any of them. Plug and play here doing amazing, amazing work in AI. 500 startups, alchemists with their focus, these are great scale up programs. Founders are choosing Growth X not in place of, not in competition to, but when they're ready to prioritize going to market, that's when they're choosing Growth X.

Jon:

Right on. So an incredible pleasure to have you on, Andrew.

Andrew:

Thank you. This has been wonderful.

Jon:

Yes, I will get you wonderful again very soon.

Andrew:

Good.

Jon:

You've got lots going on today as part of Edmonton's Startup Week. Look forward to checking more of that out, and you heard it from Andrew himself. Check out all those resources and we'll talk real soon.

Andrew:

Thank you. Very grateful to be here.

Jon:

My pleasure.

Thank you very much for listening in to Shift Today, and thank you very much to Andrew Goldner for being our guest. You can find shift online at shift@albertainnovates.ca. Or email us at shift@albertainnovates.ca. Until next time, I'm Jon. Take it easy. Have a great day.