Monday, June 13, 2011

Charlie Crystle audio story - not knowing he didn't need outside experts to be successful

This story is from Charlie Crystle, who founded Chilisoft, a web infrastructure provider which in 1999 was sold to Cobalt Networks for $70 million. He and two partners later started Mission Research, which offers low-cost business software to support nonprofits.

His new venture is Jawaya.com, a social search site. You can sign up for the private beta of Jawaya here.

Charlie describes moving his business to Seattle and hiring a team of experts on the advice of a consultant... and later realizing the business did better with the old team of non-experts.

Charlie Crystle - not realizing he didn't need to hire outsiders to succeed (2:10)

Transcript:

There was a series of mistakes around personnel that I definitely made. It started out that I didn't know what a great professional was. I didn't know what I didn't know. So when I moved everything out to Seattle, I hired a consultant to help me out. He was telling me we needed to hire a CEO and get a management team, and who the good players were in town. We ended up hiring this management team, they really weren't great performers. You know, they had resumes, but... We didn't know what we didn't know.

It turned out that, for instance, we got more press and more interesting press and more momentum before we took venture capital than after. Before we hired a management team and a VP of Marketing than after.

For me the lesson there was: we knew how to do it. We just didn't know we were doing the right thing. We ended up deferring to people that we thought knew better than we did, and sort of ignored the fact that we had really good results. Then again, we didn't have anything to compare it to. It's one of those things where, you want to trust other people, but you don't have anything to measure it against.

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