Summary

In this conversation, Jothy Rosenberg interviews B Randall Willis, discussing topics such as the importance of a name, their backgrounds in Detroit and Boston, the evolution of digital media, the characteristics of successful startups, the role of processes in startups, and the importance of storytelling and grit in entrepreneurship.

Takeaways

The importance of one's name and its impact on personal and professional identity

The influence of Detroit and Boston on his entrepreneurial journeys

The evolution of digital media and the challenges and opportunities it presents

The characteristics of successful startups, including a good idea, strong leadership, and adequate funding

The role of processes in startups and the need for a balance between structure and flexibility

The power of storytelling in engaging audiences and conveying a company's value proposition

The importance of grit and perseverance in the face of challenges and setbacks

Sound Bites

"My records got completely screwed up [because of my name]. Everything was under a different name."

"The internet as a business center has gotten extremely complicated."

"Is it a good idea and is the market receptive to that good idea?”

Links

B Randall’s RightAngle Consulting: https://therightangleconsulting.com/

Please leave us a review: https://www.podchaser.com/AdventuresOnTheCanDo

The book Think Like a Startup Founder (early access): https://www.manning.com/books/think-like-a-startup-founder

Jothy’s site for speaking, podcasting, and ruminating: https://jothyrosenberg.com

Jothy’s non-profit foundation The Who Says I Can’t Foundation: https://whosaysicant.org

Jothy’s TEDx talk on why people with a disability over-achieve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNtOawXAx5A

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and The Significance of a Name

03:04 From Detroit to Boston: An Entrepreneurial Journey

07:41 Characteristics of Successful Startups

22:23 The Power of Storytelling in Entrepreneurship

29:36 The Role of Grit in Startup Success

And here's Randall. Hi Randall.

Hi. Hi, Dorothy. Nice to see you.

Nice to see you as well. So I've always been wanting to know, and so I'm going to ask it, what is the B for? B, Randall.

so I was, B. Randall, I was actually, at birth I was named Brian Randall Willis, but always called by my middle name. My grandmothers went by her mother name, Bella Rose. So over the years, my records got completely screwed up. Everything was under a different name. B. Randall, Brian R., Randall B., Randy Willis, everything was under a different name. My father being the attorney that he is, when I turned 18 said,

Hey, let's go to court and just change your name to B. Randall. And I thought, sounds pretty cool to me. So since 18, I've been B. Randall, no middle name, last name Willis. And of course, one more anecdote to that whole story. Now in today's world, my name comes up as B first name, Randall middle name a lot. And that unto itself has caused controversy because I found out when renewing my passport,

that when the government sees a one letter first name, it sends off a red signal. And there was, well, it's probably indicative of spam or fictitious robotic creation, anything of that nature. So that was just what I was told. Because when I went for a renew to my passport, they had additional round of questioning for me.

Why?

And it was primarily around the fact that my name came up as B first name, Randall middle name. And the B and that's what they explained. The B tickled the system.

Well, that's funny. In the South, a lot of people go by their middle name. I had a friend who was named Charles Derward Rogers. But he went by Derward, and no one even knew. Most people didn't even know that his actual first name or what it was. So.

Yeah, I would. Please go.

Well, I don't want to move off the cool name discussion until we...

No, no, it's not the conversation, but I would sit in doctor's offices when they would call Brian Willis and I would look around and go, wow, someone with the same last name as me, how cool. It wouldn't dawn on me they were calling me.

You

Okay, so I'm always curious where people are originally from and where do you live right now?

I'm from the Detroit area. I was born and raised in Michigan, moved to Boston in 1983, where I spent the next 40 years in Boston and New York, and just recently returned to Michigan to spend some time with family.

So you know I'm from the Detroit area too. But we're up on 13 Mile Road and that's part of Birmingham.

Yeah.

I'm just, just north, yeah, I'm just northwest of that. I'm in Troy, I'm at 15 mile and Coolidge, which as you know, goes into Birmingham. So I'm within three miles of where you're talking about.

Yeah. Yeah. When we first lived there, we lived on Maple, which is 15 mile. So very close. OK. So probably good for you to talk about what, well, first of all, in your bio, it talks about the various agencies that you've built, at least three, along the way to

Right, right.

your current company. So you've done things like public relations and why don't you talk a little bit about the sort of buildup to where your current company is, which is called Right Angle.

Correct. So I, for better or worse, got involved in what we now call digital in 1998. It was really not really even digital back then. We called it multimedia. And I was fortunate enough to meet some people from Harvard and MIT who said to me, you know, this computer that you're using for word processing or desktop publishing is really a medium. And I've been on the ride ever since then.

through the various iterations and permutations of how digital has seeped into our life from both being a novelty to a necessity to a business center. And along the way I built two agencies, one in Boston is called Hunt and Gather. It was really in the early days of all of this, a lot of focus on CD -ROM and touchscreen technology. And a lot of was focused on.

how media companies, which were traditionally book or magazine companies, were transitioning into this new medium that they didn't really understand. And certainly was involved in the web the day that Tim Berners -Lee reduced, excuse me, released Mozilla. And then moved to the second agency in New York, an agency called Iron Paper, which was really more focused on how businesses integrate the internet into their business models.

for revenue growth. Along the way, I have always stayed true to the fact that it's not about technology or technique. It's about really understanding your customer, their problems, their needs, how your product and services align with that. And that's been at the core of my success in building agencies and from great relationships along the way. Where I'm focused now, so I...

puts tremendous pressure on business leaders to have to have all the answers where they used to go to one agency or one relationship. Now they have to go to half a dozen. It's affected budgets for the same point. Suddenly they have to have relationships with a variety. And in a lot of cases it's had an inverse effect of decreasing effectiveness. For instance, business leaders dabble in lots of areas and not are effective in any of them. Or business leaders are so...

are concerned about being effective that they do nothing. And my goal and the goal of Right Angle is to build strategies that are designed to help business leaders get the results they're looking for by simplifying executions and strategies and really being focused on what's the most important thing of all, which is your value proposition. Are we articulating to the proper markets that our product is a good solution for them? And I do that by working with their teams in most cases.

So a lot of what you've done in the past and certainly what you're doing now is working with startups, right?

Startups are an important set, yes.

I mean.

Yeah, so what I think it's going to be really interesting for us to dig into here is because by working with a whole bunch of different startups, you've now, I think, got to have come up with pattern matching or some form of analysis that helps you understand what are the characteristics, what are the things you would look for.

in the leader and the company to tell you whether they're on track for success.

It's a great question, Jothi. And in answering it, I want to make sure I answer it in sort of two, from two eyeballs. One is of course, how I might look at something in my evaluation of the viability of a startup, but also I would argue for the leaders of the startup themselves to understand what they should be looking for in their characteristics for success. And there are really three characteristics that I look at. One is, it may seem obvious, but it's just to say it out loud.

Is it a good idea and is the market receptive to that good idea? We all knew the segue was a great idea, but the market wasn't receptive to that great idea and consequently it had its troubles. So is it a good idea and is the market receptive to that good idea? Number two, is there leadership that can really stand up and have an impact in the market and is in it for the long haul because startups don't succeed overnight?

Really, even in the best case scenarios, it takes 18 months minimum to really begin to build some traction. Is leadership really in it and representative in a way that's going to permeate in the market? And three, is there funding in place? Again, funding is a variable, $1 to $1 million, but we all know that $0 is not a good answer. So is there adequate funding in place relative to the short and long term goals?

A lot of people talk about this magic number of, I've heard this applied to lots of different things, that it takes 10 ,000 hours to become good at something. I've heard you use that term applied to certain aspects of startups as well.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I, I think two things. One is there needs to be a global understanding that great entrepreneurs who build startups have a vision for the company and understand that the market's not just sitting around waiting for them. They have to go out there and attack and build a level of maturity. Something that I actually refer to as legitimatize and differentiate. And I'll come back to that. And it takes time. It takes 10 ,000, you know,

10 ,000 hours to mature an organization to a point where it's having an impact in the market. Alongside that, however, is the understanding that we as entrepreneurs control how quickly we achieve those 10 ,000 hours. If you're doing this as a hobby, if you're doing it nights and weekends, it's going to take you more years to fertilize an idea to a point that it's showing maturity versus if you're working 20 hours a day. Now, I'm not saying that

either solution is the right or wrong solution. I'm just making that understanding that as entrepreneurs, we control how quickly we can attack those 10 ,000 hours.

Is it 10 ,000 hours for the whole organization or is it, if it's five people working for an organization, are you adding up all of the five people's hours?

It's a great, it's actually a great question. And in candor, I've never thought about it from that perspective. And I'll tell you why I say that. First of all, we all understand that you put a seed in the ground and it takes a certain amount of time for that seed to create roots and for the stem to come above ground and for it to flower, for it to survive elements and to show its maturity. So on one level, the time is linear because there's no substitute for that process.

But on the other hand, in the real world, no, your investment of time and money in certain skill sets and parallel skill sets, I think, accelerates those 10 ,000 hours for sure.

There's a lot about the success of a startup that's going to be in the attitudes, in the demeanor of the, you know, at least, you know, the founders, the CEO, the leaders of the company. And some of it is just, it's like simple, like talking about we are versus we will be, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's funny because you'll hear that from people. And early in my career, I wouldn't have noticed that difference. But then once you've done it a few times, a few startups, you're very sensitive to that exact formulation because it's almost unconscious the difference it places in the listener's mind. We are versus we will be.

It's amazing. It's, it's, it's a hugely impactful. It's so subtle and yet so hugely impactful. And also the line between we are, and we will, we will be, and we are is just one pixel to the left or one pixel to the right. Like it's not, so what does that mean? Well, first of all, we, we all see with entrepreneurs, especially more seasoned entrepreneurs, that there's this sort of belief that we have to be perfect before we tell anybody about it because.

We're going to be judged, especially for more seasoned business people, entrepreneurs. And my premise is no, you got to get in the market as quickly as possible. Both because you don't know how the market's going to respond to something until you're actually in the market, getting feedback and response. And number two, that's the, that's that line between we will be and we are simply putting, you know, getting something into the market. Again, I'm not saying that you put crap in the market.

But you don't, on the other hand, and you and I have talked about this before, there's a magic phrase in our world and the phrase is beta. You can slap the word beta on something and suddenly it's a get out of jail free card. yeah, yeah, we know all the functionality is not in place. It's a beta. no, no, we know that there's a few bugs. It's a beta. So there's a way to actually get into the game even before the product is fully ready.

Hehehe.

If you are proactively understanding that, that is the strategy. You don't do it, you know, you don't do it by accident. You do it as with purpose.

And that works for a lot of things, especially if you're, like for example, if you're developing a SaaS application, that works great. If you're putting out messaging that you can change through your website or whatever, that works too. It's a little harder if what you're shipping is hardware.

that's a, that is a great point. there's obviously an inherent strategy under the hood around that, but even there, I would suggest you can begin to, market and, and articulate your product in the marketplace, begin to talk about the value of your product, ship, pilot app, versions of the hardware for initial testing or pilot programs. You can make smaller decisions that get you going knowing that you may have to.

send somebody an updated router in six months because you know that you're sending them a partial display. Again, I think the key is to understand the global strategy and where you're trying to get to and strategize inherent iterations along that path that have positive benefit to the company. So if sending out a router that is 70, again, no bugs, but 75 % of its functionality is in place because it allows you to go tell the market you actually have a set of clients.

Is that worth the cost benefit?

There's a, speaking of routers actually, there's a device that I found out about probably through one of these like GoFundMe type of things, but it wasn't called that. It had another name and it was a device that is called Eero, E -E -R -O, and it creates a mesh network in your house. And it's like, it's been one of those few products which I got like at the very earliest stage.

They definitely called it beta. It's been one of the few products that's been absolutely transformational magic for me. Because if you just put another router on the same, you know, with the same IP address, then each one cuts the bandwidth in your house in half. So, it's a bad idea. And then these guys come along and it's a mesh network. It doesn't decrease the bandwidth at all.

Mm -hmm.

It just covers your house with coverage. And then, you know, they were probably out in the market after they'd said, okay, good. Thanks for all the feedback people. We're, you know, we're for real now. And within a year, Amazon bought them. And it's, do you know the product? Do you know what I'm talking about?

Yeah.

I do know the product. I had looked at them in the past. In my case, I hadn't needed, I hadn't had the problem. I almost solved the problem that I didn't have with them, but I think they were a cool company. But I am familiar, yes.

But they did do what you just suggested, which is they did do beta. They did do a small number of customers. And they found those customers through a creative way, that try it sort of site. And they've been a huge success. So that's actually someone with hardware that did exactly what you suggested.

Well, and as you know, in the end, you have to be in the market to be able to do a better test sampling. Again, you've got the mass market. No, to your point, but even having a user base of under a hundred is going to give you meaningful feedback and allow you to be in the game. So there's pros and cons, but I think in the end, the quicker you get in the market properly, the farther along in that journey you're going to get.

So to me, you made what I think is a controversial statement that SOPs are a waste of time.

I don't know what you're talking about. well, let me explain why I said that. There's a couple of reasons. The first is I think we spend, there's a, there's a natural tendency to spend a lot of time in, in the conference room or in the office charting out how the business is going to work from processes, procedures, and, in reality, you have to have clients.

to see how it's going to work. And number two, SOPs change because how you manage 15, 50 and 500 clients are very different. So are you writing for the 500 on day one or are you writing for the 15? And as, so you're ultimately setting yourself up to know that you're going to be iterating your SOPs along the way anyway, versus the most, what I believe is the most important premise, which is get in the market, start getting clients.

And as that's occurring, you're going to learn the best processes through that. I believe that you can define your processes while in the market. And that's saying you... Please.

I was going to say I hate to use too much jargon. So let me explain. Standard operating procedures is what we're talking about. OK.

Correct. And there's one more point that I don't think most people think about, right? If I define that our process, our standard operating procedure is everybody has to use a black pencil, okay? We naturally introduce the premise that says somebody has to police that. What happens if they don't use a black pencil? What's the process there? So it's easy to define what we want to expect the people to do. I think what happens where it falls off a cliff is that no one...

It's very few people define what happens if they don't. And that sets up a conversation under itself. Do you really want to spend your day policing pencils? Is that ultimately the most important problem or is there a more organic way to solve the color led issue?

So staying on the topic of process, so one of the, as someone who's founded a bunch of companies and I've also worked at some big companies and you and I both know and I'm sure everybody listening to this knows that big companies have lots and lots of process. And one of the fun things about a little company is,

They don't have very much process. But it turns out, and I'm sure because you've seen lots of different startups at different scale, that as a leader of a startup, you have to be careful not to leave it with no process for very long, for too long. You have to start introducing just the right amount of process at the right time. Because if you don't, then you're not going to have sort of this

Correct.

repeatable process, a repeatable thing that gets the right results, that your quality will start to, the quality not just of what you're building, but the quality of how you operate as a group of people will start to decline because bigger company means harder to communicate. And what do you do about, go ahead, yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

So no, no, I agree. I agree with you. And first and foremost, mature companies all need to have processes and cause and effect and quality control against those processes. Absolutely. What I'm saying is that I've seen too many people say, well, before we launch, we have to get our processes nailed down so that when we launch, we're ready to go and we have everything all figured out. What I'm saying is yes, there has to be method to methodologies, but

the quicker you get in the market and start getting actual clients and customers, the quicker you're going to apparently understand where those processes need to fall. What you said is very important. There's a pacing and timing of when those processes roll out. And I completely agree with you. But my point, I've seen too many people be scared to start because they don't have all the processes figured out prior. Or as I mentioned a moment ago,

they build these long dissertation documents of process and then nobody reads it or nobody polices it or it creates inherent cause and effect. How many times have you heard, it's in our SOP? I'm like, yeah, but I just wanna know what color pencil to use. You know what I'm saying? Like, I get it, it's in our SOP. But, you know, see.

There was, I have one funny story about overdoing it with process. So there was a, you know, small startup. It wasn't exactly a startup because it was many years old and it just had been kind of struggling. And they did, their category was document management, which is of course like process on steroids, right? I mean,

Yeah.

And the customers were pharmaceutical manufacturers. So this was about how the recipe for a pharmaceutical gets created, approved by a bazillion people and whatnot. And so this was the software company that made this kind of stuff. And when I got there, they had basically asked me to come in and take over the company. The previous CEO had kind of

Well, not done well. And so the board had me come in and I started to just walk around and get to know everybody. And they were explaining to me that they were really proud that they'd had these process improvement groups and they'd been improving these processes and writing everything down. And the more I heard this, the more I thought, this is really bad. In fact, they hadn't paid attention to what

process improvement group spelled.

Hahaha!

Yeah, I'm sure the people in the back room were laughing about that all day long.

We unraveled a lot of that because they had decided to spend all their time doing process improvement and not doing any actual process.

Yeah. And I want to be clear, it's process is vitally important. You can't scale without it. You can't create redundancy. You can't create quality control. And obviously in the real world, you have to know what's etched in stone. So for instance, in your, in your point with pharmaceutical, there are compliance and legal and regulatory issues across the board. They can't be fudged over. The real question is, does it keep you from getting into the market? And

Do you understand that success means you're going to grow and therefore your process is going to unfold? You know, again, we all hit a stage where you introduce middle management because you're at a certain size where you have to have layers of management. It changes the whole process. So there's just a balance. And that's my core sort of message. That gets back to your point about getting in the market. My core premise is let's get in the market. Because I don't.

I think red is the right answer. My research has shown me the right answer. But I got to get in the market and see what the customer says. Maybe it's blue, you know?

Right.

So if you will, tell us a story, your favorite story of a startup that you can keep the name anonymous that needed your help, that you helped, that Right Angle helped, and what was the outcome? What's your favorite story like that?

it's a great question. What I would say is with, and I'm going to stay true to entrepreneurs and startups in early stages, the understanding the vision of where a company is trying to get to their other, their other, their quarter, their day in week in month in KPIs and metrics for success. And then there's a vision about where they're trying to get to. Eros is a good example. They all, they probably had buyout on their mind for a lot.

period of time. And where I really enjoy, where we've had successes in understanding the ultimate goals and creating strategies within strategies to get to those goals. So can opening a new market help us achieve a greater market share, which is going to allow us to get more visibility in a buyer who might not have otherwise known we existed. So there's, again, there's always your day in day out KPIs in terms of

customer engagement and prospecting, et cetera, et cetera. But when you have it, when you understand the bigger goal and when you work with a team, both on this side, but also on the client side, who's true to that vision, who has a belief on what's possible and where we're trying to get at the company and understands that the day in day out decisions are part of a larger story and a larger journey. I think that's the healthiest way. It's certainly the most enticing from my perspective, but also I think.

Those are the companies that do the wellest.

Okay, so there's a topic I always love to explore with anyone who has themselves done startups, which you have, your agencies were startups, your current one is. And especially someone who's working with a ton of different startups. And that is the question of you can't do what you're doing without grit.

Mm -hmm.

and where does yours come from?

Where does, where does my grip personally come from? Or what is the book that would have did the entrepreneur? Wow. again, great question. I, you know, my, the thread, the thread that I've had throughout this journey has been, I, I love storytelling and I love being able to understand who our audiences and how to tell a compelling story on our case on behalf of a business or a brand.

Nope, you.

That's going to engage with the audience. That's been a constant when I worked in television, when I had a publishing company and when I discovered digital as my primary medium. Storytelling has certainly risen to the surface as at the core. And as I've gone along and I really enjoy working with business leaders who are truly engaged in what they're doing and truly believe in what they're doing. And in many cases too close to what they're doing. So.

They don't necessarily see the trees through the forest. And it keeps me completely engaged. I look forward to the next relationship of that nature, as well as my current relationships. And that that really excites me is this, and especially as I said earlier in today's world where it's gotten so complicated that it's really stymied a lot of otherwise really smart people.

And I love unplugging that. Unplugging that.

Yeah. And do you think growing up in the Detroit area helped in?

I think living in New York helped with that. No, Detroit, no, listen, as you know, Detroit is a, Michigan is a wonderful state. And if you were to, in my opinion, if you were to put the 50 states on a list, Michigan is top 10, maybe some could argue even top six. You know I mean? The Great Lakes are a phenomenon, the land that it,

yeah, that's probably more so.

Mm -hmm.

They fertilize is amazing. The industry that the automotive industry brings fundamentally to the table and the life that's occurred around that, because of not just the auto industry, but all its subsequent other affected industries. Motown was not a fluke. There's a lot of great creativity and a lot of great energy. So I think Michigan is a phenomenal state.

Then there's the Upper Peninsula, which as we know is where people go that don't want to be found. And honestly, I would recommend Michigan to anybody. It's a great place to be. And I also think I've been fortunate to spend so much time on the Northeast. Boston is a phenomenal and inspiring city in terms of the entrepreneurship, the various industries such as biotech and technology that are brought to the table.

the continual influx of youthful energy in the college system. And then New York is, well, you know, you could talk about New York forever. It's everything and more that people think it is. So there's, I think that variation has been very healthy for me.

Did you go to college in Michigan or did you leave Michigan to go to college?

I went to Boston University.

you came to Boston for that. Yeah, I went to the other edge of the state from Detroit and went to Kalamazoo College.

Correct.

Got you. So what got you out to Massachusetts?

Well, after college, I went to grad school in at Duke in North Carolina. And after 10 years there of PhD and then, yeah, 10 years there of PhD and five years as a professor at Duke, I was working on something that was so cool. I had to try to turn it into a company. So we went to Silicon Valley for 10 years. And then I happened to be at a company that.

Mmm. Mmm.

was acquiring someone in Boston and we came to Boston. That was 28 years ago.

And I'm assuming you're happy there.

Jothi, I'm assuming you're happy in Boston.

Yeah.

we love it here. We absolutely love it here. we, we raised our kids through, you know, they, they, they, they went to junior high and high school here after we'd moved from California. And, and the reason, by the way, we were asked to come out for a one year kind of thing. And, and, and I was assuming I would really do it for just one year, but we were here a few months and went to the back to school night.

And there had been a steady decline in the quality of the schools in California because of a Proposition 13 that really kind of cut the oxygen funding from the schools. And so when we came here, we said, wait a minute, you guys have art and music? We don't have that anymore. You have foreign languages required in Massachusetts schools from sixth grade on.

You

And in California, which is almost 50 % non -English speaking people, there wasn't any foreign language at our kids' school. And so we just said, wait a minute, we would be the worst parents in the world to do that. So we stayed. We kind of said to the company back there, not going back.

Yeah, no, it's a great state and a great city. Boston is a great way to live an urban lifestyle, but in a very community oriented way. My son went to Pheasant. I never thought he'd go to an all boys school, Navy blazers and red ties every day, but what an education he received. And yeah, no, Massachusetts is a great state and Boston does a great job of really taking care of itself. It's phenomenal.

Yeah. Well, if I'm ever in the Detroit area, I know where to find you now.

Absolutely, absolutely. And I would welcome it.

And we met when you were doing Hunt and Gather.

We met back in my second to last agency, which was still a euphoric time. I'm sure that we could have a whole conversation on this, but at that time, all of this was so new and so coming onto the scene that things that we were doing, we were doing for the first time, yourself included, right? And there was just so much euphoria around this medium and this technologies and data and databases and servers and...

everything that's included. It was a euphoric time.

Yeah, yep, it was. But it's all good now too. So as long as you're continuing to have fun. Well, I really appreciate you being on. I think what you talk about here was very helpful for people who want to learn and gain from your experience. So that's fantastic. Thank you for doing this.

Yeah.

My pleasure, I'm glad I was able to support your endeavors.