The Transcript

Building a Business at the Intersection of Art and Commerce

Jonny Nastor: This is Rainmaker.FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker Platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at HacktheEntrepreneur.com/Rainmaker.

Voiceover: Welcome to Hack the Entrepreneur, the show which reveals the fears, habits and inner battles behind big-name entrepreneurs and those on their way to joining them. Now, here is your host, Jon Nastor.

Jonny Nastor: Welcome back to Hack the Entrepreneur. I’m so glad you decided to join me today. I’m your host, Jon Nastor, but you can call me Jonny.

Today’s guest is an artist, musician, and entrepreneur who made his first record when he was 12, began playing in clubs when he was 14, and started his own music publishing company at 18. My guest s passion for music and technology led him to found music licensing firm Rumblefish in his college dorm room.

The company quickly achieved the industry s first podcast license, created a fully automated online music licensing store, and inked a groundbreaking micro-licensing deal with YouTube. Rumblefish became the largest music licensing company for independent music in the world and was acquired in 2014 by a private equity firm. My guest was kept on as president and CEO to lead it into the next phase of growth.

He’s a devoted member of the entrepreneurial and creative communities in the Pacific Northwest as the co-founder of popular guitar pedal company Spaceman Effects, startup accelerator Starve Ups, and TEDxPortland. Now, let’s hack Paul Anthony Troiano.

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Welcome back to Hack the Entrepreneur. Today we have a very special guest. Paul, welcome to the show.

Paul Anthony Troiano: Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.

Jonny Nastor: It’s all my pleasure, Paul. Paul, let’s jump straight into this first question.

Paul, as an entrepreneur, can you tell me, what is the one thing that you do that you feel has been the biggest contributor to your successes so far?

How Perseverance Became His Greatest Ally

Paul Anthony Troiano: Not giving up. It’s really easy to give in to the various pressures when you’re an entrepreneur. In any venture, there’s family pressures, economic pressures, business model pressures, financing from investors, or not getting finance from investors — you name it. I think perseverance is your greatest ally, especially in the early days, because I think you’re a fool as an entrepreneur to assume you have it all figured out when you start.

Your business plan is guaranteed to cost three times as much as you thought it would and take five times as long. Above and beyond that, if you don’t have perseverance in your corner, you’re not going to make it. I think the most important thing that I’ve done as an entrepreneur, if I just had to pick one thing, is definitely that: staying in the game.

Jonny Nastor: Did you always have that in you, that idea of, “I ve just got to put my head down and keep going,” or is this something that’s evolved within you?

Paul Anthony Troiano: I’m really stubborn.

Jonny Nastor: We all are.

Paul Anthony Troiano: I’m always been stubborn, and I think I just learned as I got older to take that negative element of my personality and capitalize on it as an entrepreneur.

Jonny Nastor: Excellent.

Paul Anthony Troiano: Yeah.

Jonny Nastor: I like that. All right, there seems to be a time in every entrepreneur s life when they realize one of two things. Either they have this calling to make something big and make a difference in the world, or what seems to mostly be the case, is they simply cannot work for somebody else. Paul, can you tell me which side of the fence you fall on and when you discovered this about yourself?

Paul Anthony Troiano: That’s an interesting way to put it. I never thought of it as an either/or, but I’ve been fired from every job I ever had before Rumblefish. Maybe that answers the question.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah, it might. You simply cannot stay employed anywhere else.

Paul Anthony Troiano: I’m unemployable. Therefore I’m an entrepreneur. I flipped burgers. I managed apartment complexes. I brought audio/visual equipment to classrooms at the University of Oregon.

What always happened in those situations was I remember one time that really stood out. My manager was watching me when I was washing the side of a building that I was the assistant manager for at the University of Oregon.

I got a call from a radio station, and they said, “Hey, Sarah McLachlan is in town. We need someone to come and produce some acoustic singles, and she just won a Grammy,” and they said, “Can you come?” I said, “Sure, when?” they said, “Right now.” I literally dropped the brush I was scrubbing the building with, got in my car, and drove away with my manager staring at me like, “What does this guy think he’s doing?”

It s like a hundred versions of that, which led to my imminent termination in all my different jobs. I guess I was just always drawn to music and art, and that’s how it turned out for me.

Jonny Nastor: Was it worth it for the Sarah McLachlan session?

Paul Anthony Troiano: It was totally worth it.

Jonny Nastor: Yes, that’s the answer I wanted.

Paul Anthony Troiano: They were all worth it. It was worth getting fired by Donna from Hammy’s because I left my burger-flipping station to do this music thing. It was all worth it.

Jonny Nastor: You rarely regret the things that you do, it seems. You always regret the things you don’t do, so that’s it right there.

Paul Anthony Troiano: I regret a lot of things I’ve done like right after.

Jonny Nastor: Oh really?

Paul Anthony Troiano: But you can’t hold on to it, right? You got to move forward and learn from it and make the best of it.

Jonny Nastor: Exactly, but if you were still sitting here talking and being like, “I could have produced Sarah McLachlan that one time, but I just kept painting.” That wouldn t have been cool.

Paul Anthony Troiano: Yeah, that would have made the bar-talk conversation, I guess. Yeah, totally.

Jonny Nastor: Exactly. So, you’re a terrible employee. How does this work for you now being a boss and having employees? Is there anything that you’ve taken from what you totally just couldn’t work with or didn’t like as being an employee that you’ve decided to do differently now that you’re the one in charge?

Paul Anthony Troiano: A good question. I realized that I was a terrible employee because I always have the wrong jobs. It s not that I m a terrible employee across the board. I think entrepreneurs are terrible employees for companies when they’re punching the clock or they don’t feel like they’re making a difference in the world. Or they just see this problem that needs to be solved, and no one is solving it, or the people who are solving it are solving it either ineffectively or too slow or thinking small.

I figured out that actually, I am a really great employee. And oddly enough, now that Rumblefish was acquired, I actually am an employee of the organization. Once you’re doing what you feel like you’re meant to do, then it’s not a job.

It feels like you’re painting a picture, and only you can see the entire picture laid out on the full canvas, and you’re forced to go about it one pixel at a time. It doesn’t feel like a job that way. It feels more like I have the privilege of coordinating a group of incredible people to paint this picture and achieve that objective.

For me, that’s always been related to music and artists and helping artists get compensated for their work and helping creators use music to make better movies and videos.

Jonny Nastor: Wow. You are an employee now, and it was that you didn’t have the right job. I like that. Is there a chance that you could have found the right job before, and then Rumblefish would never exist if you didn’t come up with it, though? Isn’t that interesting?

Paul Anthony Troiano: That is.

Jonny Nastor: It helps a lot of people.

Why Building Stuff Is His Perfect Job

Paul Anthony Troiano: The right job for me was, I learned about myself as an entrepreneur that I’m a builder, that I’m happy when I’m building. I was the president of my grade school. I was the president of my fraternity. I run my Burning Man camp. I like to build stuff and group people together and take an idea and make into reality.

The right job for me is to build stuff. And that could be a music company. It could be a camp. It could be whatever, but that’s the role that I’m comfortable in. The more ambitious the idea and the more it s centralized around art and music, the more excited about it I get. That’s how I think of it, at least.

Jonny Nastor: Nice. You’re a builder, and your one thing is perseverance and not giving up. All the experts now talk about the 80/20 rule in business and in life in general. I do 20 percent, and you’re going to get 80 percent of the results. Do what you’re good at. Delegate the rest.

Paul, can you tell me something in your business that you are absolutely not good at?

Cultivating a Constant Process of Letting Go

Paul Anthony Troiano: Yeah, where do I begin? This has been from when you conceive the business until any number of milestones down the road. It’s a constant process of letting go of things that you’re bad at and also things that you’re good at, because you find people who are great at it. I always feel like the ultimate success of an entrepreneur is to surround themselves with people who are great at what they re bad at. I say that a lot.

That’s what you constantly searching for. Things that I’m bad at — I’m not a great operations person. I’m not an engineer. I don’t understand code. I don’t understand high finance. I understand most finance. A lot of things that have to do with HR and the nuts and bolts of, in essence, if the train is running on time or not.

How He Learned from the Great People He Surrounded Himself With

Paul Anthony Troiano: My strength as an operator, my strength is building the new product, sales, and seeing where the market is going to be in five, six, seven years and most of the times, being correct. Those are my strengths. And building a culture. I’m great at building a culture. All the other things need to learn from hiring great people that you can surround yourself with. You turn them loose, and you watch and learn from them.

Jonny Nastor: Do you remember, with Rumblefish, the first employees or people you got to hire?

Paul Anthony Troiano: Yeah, Tanya Ortiz was our first employee.

Jonny Nastor: Nice, and what did she do? I just want to know, what’s the first thing that you were like, “Okay, we have to get somebody else to do this, because I can’t do this.”

Paul Anthony Troiano: That’s a good question. I wish it were that simple. We had an intern army. I started the company in my dorm room at the University of Oregon. Our first several years, I had 10 to 15 interns that were earning four credits that were working for Rumblefish for free, and so they did all sorts of things. They did anything that needed to get done, and it could have been helping with scores. It could have been finding bands that we were placing in films. It could have been literally anything.

We started with an intern army, and then shortly thereafter, the people that I hired to help out were managing the catalog. They were a bookkeeper to help with the financials, anything in the category that I m bad at, which I generally say is keeping the trains running on time and being operationally excellent. I’m good at growing, not at managing.

Jonny Nastor: Was it your idea to get this intern army?

Paul Anthony Troiano: Yeah.

Jonny Nastor: That s brilliant. That s amazing.

Paul Anthony Troiano: I went to the career development center at the University of Oregon and sat down with them as — well, my name is Paul Anthony Troiano, but a lot of people call me Paul Anthony — so when I sat down with them to ask them questions as Paul Anthony, the owner of this business, they didn’t understand that I was a student. They started telling me, “How many interns do you need? and They can get four credits, and If you put program together, we can staff it up.” I was like, “How many can I get?” “As many as you need.”

I was like, “Wow, free labor. Great.” I had a large intern army, and I may have also been an intern for Rumblefish.

Jonny Nastor: You’re not sure?

Paul Anthony Troiano: Eight credits, but whatever.

Jonny Nastor: Wow, so you are — you’re a builder. You didn’t look at this idea of wanting to start Rumblefish and be like, “I don’t have money to hire employees. I don’t have people.” You just figured out a way to do it.

Paul Anthony Troiano: Yeah, that’s the perseverance part, right? If you really want to do it, you can do it. You ve just got to figure out how to make it happen.

Jonny Nastor: Okay. I understand you have to make things happen, but as you’re making these things happen, as you grew it from an intern army to a company that later got acquired, there’s probably things that went wrong. Because as human beings, and that just gets pulled over to when you turn into an entrepreneur as well, one of our greatest struggles, it seems, is the fear of being wrong and making a mistake.

Paul, could you walk us through how to be wrong in something that you thought was the right decision in your business? You pushed the business in that direction, and then the feedback comes from...