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Successful entrepreneurs should have ‘propensity for action,’ according to Colopy Ventures head Joe Colopy BY M I C H A E L M C E L R OY | P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F C O L O P Y V E N T U R E S
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tartups bud from Durham’s fertile soil into a bright, nourishing sunlight that makes full bloom inevitable. That’s how easy it is here to turn the seed of your next big idea into a vibrant blossom. Right? We wondered. What exactly makes a successful startup leader? What are the keys to sustainability? What, specifically, makes these Durham gardens grow? We took our questions to Joe Colopy, whose green thumb helped grow his email marketing company Bronto from a seedling into a $40 million business, and then into a $200 million sale to NetSuite in 2016. (Later that year, Oracle bought NetSuite.) He is the now the head of Colopy Ventures, a “seed stage investor who helps teams be lean and mean to create the next great thing.” Last year, the company launched GrepBeat, a newsletter aggregation and analysis of Durham’s tech news. Here is an interview with Colopy, condensed and edited for clarity.
Tell me a little about your history. How did you get into the startup world? I’ve always been interested in startups and software. I was one of those 10-year-old kids who got a computer and was programming and making games and doing whatever. And this was in the early ’80s, so this is before such things were en vogue. I had a modem. In the sixth grade, I ran a bulletin board, which is the predecessor to a website. If anyone was aware of what was going on with the internet, it would have been me. I graduated from Harvard in May 1993, and then I went into the Peace Corps. I went to the Seychelles Islands, and almost immediately the world wide web came out in a real way. So I kind of missed it. The only way I would learn about it was reading Newsweek on the islands.
You were at Red Hat in 2001, right before you decided to go out on your own with Bronto. What was the biggest challenge with your first startup? The most common reason that early stage startups fail is they build something no one wants. It might be nice, it might be pretty, but at the end of the day it’s a
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“nice to have,” not a “need to have.” It’s about defining what you’re doing, and not trying to be all things to all people. I think the truth is, with startups, people get into it thinking that if they do more, it means more. And the reality is, it’s better to do fewer things and to be focused for a particular audience. It’s called product market fit. What do people really want? After leaving Red Hat, I came up with an online database app. I really used it as a vehicle to learn how to become a software developer. I basically developed a product that no one wanted. It was too vague, and I needed something more tactile. I reframed it as an email newsletter service, which is more tangible, made it about the customer first and rebranded it as Bronto mail. That was in January 2002. Right off the bat, someone was interested in using it.
So you have to ask what a customer wants from your product? Absolutely. Figure out what people really need, articulate it, and then deliver it to them. That’s the key. And as obvious as that sounds, it’s the hardest thing.
Because sometimes when you deliver it, it’s not exactly what the people are saying. You have to listen to them and decide what they need, or you have to read the market and cobble together something that may be obvious, but the way to get there is elusive. Take Alexa. I have a million of these Alexas. I had a Bluetooth speaker before, I had Siri, but you put them together and you do a good job, and that’s product market fit. And if you do that well, you really have something. So as an investor and a builder of startups, I’m always pushing product market fit and asking, “How do we get there?”
How does a startup get there? In the early stages it’s almost entirely about the individual. Because the markets change, products change, their understanding of the product will change. So, does this person have the drive to just make things happen? It is insanely difficult to take a startup from 0 to 1. To give it any momentum, it’s like moving an immovable object. To do that, the folks have to be persistent, they have to be able to go through long periods of being