For the final stop on this week's Startup Tour, we had a cup of tea with Avi Stopper, Founder and CEO of CaptainU.
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CaptainU was founded in 2008 at the University of Chicago by Avi Stopper and Michael Farb, sports devotees who had long been involved with high school and college athletics -- both as athletes and coaches. By combining their love for sports with their passion for technology, CaptainU was born. CaptainU is a platform that helps high school athletes, college coaches, youth coaches, and events to get organized, promote themselves, and get noticed by others in the youth and college sports world.
What is the purpose of CaptainU, and where did the idea for it come from?
There are many motivations that young athletes, events, coaches, and programs have to get recognition, exporsure, and self-promotion. Our platform provides them with the means to do that and actually reach those they are trying to.
People are able to get their name out to get recognition and advancement. That might mean getting invited to prominent events, getting recognized by a college coach and invited to a camp or to play on that coach’s team. For a college coach, it might mean getting wider recognition from the community in terms of the fact that the program exists and is doing cool things.
I was an athlete growing up and played sports in college. Those were great, formative experiences that in many ways shaped who I am. Then I was a coach at the University of Chicago while I was in business school. Having seen the youth and college sports world from multiple angles and experiencing it from all sides, there were clearly lots of problems.
No one had really applied great tech to that space yet. There are so many apps out there, and tons of them are really great, but this is a community that’s really at a central place in American society – youth and college sports – there's tons of passion and enthusiasm, but products had overlooked the needs of this community. Since it is near and dear to my heart, I saw both the problems and the opprtunitites. It just didn’t feel like there was adequate coverage, so the circles of my life kind of overlapped.
We started the company in 2008 at the University of Chicago. We won a business plan competition there. That included some office space, and we basically bootstrappetd it from that point. Now we have two offices - my co-founder Mike Farbe is in San Francisco and we have a team of ten there and ten here.
You started in Chicago, you have an office in San Francisco, why Denver?
There were a collection of personal and professional reasons that we came here. On the business side, I felt like this was a really awesome place to build a business. The tech community here is evolving and coming into its own, and I wanted to be part of that. What had happened in Chicago over the last 5 years is happening here. It was awesome to be art of that, and I just saw a great opportunity here to really be involved in the blossoming of yet another great tech center in the US. We also felt like there were good folks to hire here, and a good quality of life - it's an easy place to get talent to come to. We strike a nice balance here in terms of working hard and playing hard.
What have been the major bullet points of your success over the years?
I'm actually going to start with a failure: we spent the better part of the first year building a product and not releasing. When it finally came time to release, it just had no adoption and really flopped. It was a lesson very well learned. The most important lessons I’ve learned are really in the realm of risk management. We’ve become such a better company as a result of that painful formative experience. We killed that entire app and started completely over with a new code base and everything. The proverbial select-all-delete. Since then we’ve run really lean and mean.
A lot of things emanate form that. As we stared to realize how to bring the behavioral econonmics we’d studied into our company – testing products, iterating, how we work – we've really come to use our intuition to form our hypothesis and then we test it. When we test there’s a deep sense of humility around whether it works the way we want it to work. Basically when we have a new idea, we try to get a facsimile of what we think this is ultimately going to be, then test it and let the data tell us if it was a success or not.
That’s really freeing and liberating in that I as the founder and CEO don’t have to get it right. Instead of focusing on getting right answer, we focus on a process by which we ultimately arrive at good answers. Everyone is encouraged to fail continually - you redefine failure as learning. Traditional failure is something that doesn’t work. That lesson can inform a ton of stuff down the line – it’s all about managing the risk around learning that lesson.
I guess what I'm saying is that the main milestones for me have been about the evolution of a methodology that is about a constant improvement and constant learning.
One of the things I’m most excited about at the moment is this process. We're continually hacking the way that we work. In the spirit of constant and ongoing learning, we’re really fiddling with the way we build and develop, we're constantly trying all sorts of ideas. It’s totally cool when something falls on its face, because we get to learn from it. We're hacking how we communicate, how teams are organized, how to create more structure as we grow while maintaining the entrepreneurial spirit and agility. That stuff is really interesting. They’re really fun, complicated social challenges.
What are some of the biggest challenges you've faced or that you see other companies face?
I think the biggest challenge that startups face is that too many people are invested in the conventional wisdom of how products need to be built. The status quo right now is that you have to build an app – it’s like you’re not legit until you build an app. That’s created this incredible need for the scare resource of the software developer. You see a lot of well-intentioned but scrambling attempts at filling that need.
I think that the larger economy and startup sceme can benefit if people who are non-technical can explore and test and achieve things without going the traditional route. These are often not actually tech questions – the real question is if the market needs that kind of solution. If it does, what are some non-software ways we can solve the problem?
There are tons of great entrepreneurial stories where people didn’t start as software and ultimately morphed - companies like Craigslist, Priceline, Centro in Chicago - these are companies that started not as tech companies per se. The problems they were trying to solve weren’t tech - it was solving a customer need.
There’s a lot of latent creativitiy in people, and a lot of people who have good ideas and could conceivably execute but aren’t doing it because they can’t find a developer or they don’t have the money for it. That just doesn’t have to be the case. With the preponderance of amazing tools that exist out there that are free, inexpensive, off the shelf, you can do some great stuff. Even if you don’t have software that’s automating it, there are so many ways to test, to figure out how to offer a solution, do it as a service and then wrap tech around it to scale.
You teach a class at the University of Denver. Tell us about that.
The class is called “The Messy Startup” and this is the premise behind it. What I teach my students is that with the passion that you have, the ideas that you have, and the amazing tools that are out there for free right now, you can start to test powerful business ideas, generate revenue and really demonstrate demand.
You don’t have to bootstratp it - you can go out and raise money then because you have a proof of concept. Let’s find an inexpensive and slightly off the beaten path way to test this concept quickly. I think that the larger problem is that if more people were aware and understaoood how to do this kind of thing, there would be so many more interesting businesses out there. There are tons of people who could be solving interesting problems.
The lean startup methodology is very much in vogue right now. But really I think for most people, that’s definted by building a minimally viable software product. The idea of that product should not necessarily imply that you build software. We think about marketing ideas and things – how can we test an idea without development - I wish more people would do that.
People need to reject the premise that products have to be delivered as an app. Ultimately there very well may be a time and place, but not necessarily to start.
What are your words of wisdom for new founders and companies?
The most important kind of thing I've learned is what kind of an entrepreneur I am. Some people set out to build a billion dollar company or bust. I'm not like that. I’m trying to build a really good company with huge growth potential over time. Understanding your own risk profile is important, and then building how you work around that profile is essential. How much do you want to spend, do you want to raise or bootstrap? Understanding that is SO important. That level of introspection helps you find a company that's aligned, and allows you to make key financing and product decisions and hiring decisions.
Talk to us a little more about the hiring piece:
Hiring is certainly a challenge. If you start by really understanding what your need is, then that helps you to fill it better. You have to recognize that your needs may change – someone too highly specialized can be a problem, but you also have to be able to articulate what you need.
Don’t hire until you’re really confident that you need to hire. That’s a risk. I look for people who I think are going to be a good cultural fit. Think about what kinds of people you want to be working with, what values you have, what kind of conversation or dialogue matters. What I probe for when I’m interviewing someone is humility, the ability to rationalize, and a willingness to say, acknowledge, and be comfortable with not being right.
What do you think the community needs to do to make Colorado a better place for all startups?
Expose people to new ideas and new ways of thinking about problems they may be dealing with. This is about building awesome teams, communicating vision, all of those sorts of challenges – how to think about marketing, using social channels. What I don’t like seeing is tons of competition or cannibalization of talent. I think that the shared knowledge that can endow the community with growth opportunities. I think that growth – personal growth and the ability the growth of our human capital is really huge.
I think the notion that we don’t have enough capital in Denver is wrong. Ingenuity needs to trump the whining about lack of liquidity. With enginuity comes capital. Show me something awesome, and you will get cash. So many people are out here selling ideas – just go build it. Show that you have profits, that you have customers, that people buy it. Don’t go to a million meetups asking how to raise money.
I would like to see a vibrant community of people doing things, empowered to do things, and I think we're already making huge progresss in that direction.
Learn more about CaptainU via their company profile, website, on Facebook, or follow them on Twitter at @CaptainU.
This week we also spoke with Ben Nunez at Birdbox and Jim Franklin of SendGrid. Learn more about Built In Denver's Startup Tour and read past weeks' company profiles here.
