How to build an enterprise software firm in 18 minutes or less: Uwa Agbonile at TEDxLagos
[Music] [Applause] thanks for the intro hello everyone welcome to teds L it's a pleasure to be in your company well let me start by telling you about a site visit a customer site visit I made um not too long ago so typically I like to uh visit customers um and talk to them one onone get a feel get a pulse of what's going on with the customers and also get uh you know 360 feedback from the customers so I go to this customer and um I wait at reception for somebody to come get me to take me to the um uh the MD's office and as I walk to the MD's office I'm walking past this row of people I mean uh employees left and right with their computers you know and on their computers I could see our software running and the software that was running you know on the different screens I can see different people performing different kinds of operations and just doing their job and you know a couple of of feelings hit me at exactly that point you know the first one was exhilaration intense exhilaration I felt really really good really good that we were making a product that wasn't just a product that was out there but people were actually using it I could see it having an impact people were using it to run their business end to end from the financials their operations to their Data Mining and everything you know then at the same time though there's one other feeling that I also had and that feeling was a feeling of intense fear and I mean those two feelings came together at practically the same time and why fear because at that point something also hit me that this was no longer tror you see this company that I was doing this side visit at at that point they were the largest prate investment uh company in the country and I could see that if our software something would to go down something where to go wrong the impact will be significant the impact will be felt people are going to lose money potentially jobs could be lost that fear created this intense uh feeling this feeling of you know the kind of feeling the andren rush and when you get that kind of andrenaline rush there's the typical um U impact that you get which is this idea of fight or flight now for me I'm the kind of person I tend to gravitate towards the fight mode and when you have that fight mode in your belly it creates that adrenaline in was we creates that burning desire that burning desire go out there and do something about that so let me just step back a moment and say our product enterprise software has its nuances and certain things that you kind of have to deal with as you go along with it enterprise software is a complicated rather complicated Bas you know it they to run an entire business you have to do all kinds of things financials um the operational side of things the business Mining and all that kind of stuff but along with that has comes this rather interesting ecosystem which has to do with putting out a lot of fires so I'll give you a couple of instances there was um a product that we were working on basically it had to do with building a bunch of web services that will enable our clients to scale out very complicated we've been working on it for a pretty long time but it got to the point where it was supposed to be done at least we thought it was done and we're going to deliver it then um you know while everything F we everything looked like it was done we now realize you know some little thing needed to be cleaned up and then we started working it well it took us literally 12 hours to get it done and we couldn't let go I couldn't let go because we had a deadline to meet and it was massively critical that we meet that deadline because there would be consequences if we didn't make me it so at the same time there is another kind of example probably rather like 12 hours after that incident we got this other uh client that called us again one of our other big clients and they complained about an issue you know and the issue this time we thought this one was again we looked at it had no clue what to do with it actually at that point and we thought it was going to take a long time but that one actually ended up taking just literally 10 minutes to fix so one of the key points I want to pass across is that in the enterprise software space there is nothing like normal a lot of the time even though the the space itself might appear somewhat boring sometimes there's this thing about being ready put out fires and being ready to have that Adrenaline Rush that's going to keep driving you and that's where we come to the issue of the youth in order to build an Enterprise software company there has to be that view and the Thrive the passion the andrenaline rush and that fire in your belly that propels you forward and makes you do the things that even you did not believe you be able to do so first thing most likely you have to be competitive it's a competitive world and quite frankly to some extent it's like uh like there's a book like I like it's called the act of War to some extent in some areas of it you have to look at this then like a battle like a strategy and sometimes you have to lose some battles in to win some Wars It's a CO strategy that you have to approach and you have to go for it so the you there what I'm trying to say here is that you have to have your own inner Compass you have to have that inner compass that drives you continuously and that serves I mean it propels you forward in the direction that you want to go so for instance um I approached I had a mentor that um I was talking to and asking for advice and I went to him you know and he the he he he basically told me he said okay look yes you're building a very good product here this was in the early days by the way um it looks good and all that but you know what I think you really should do I actually think you should go out and be a distributor go look at these enterprise software companies out there the IBM the Oracle and all the rest of this world and you know just take it sell it implement it that's what everybody else is doing but that's not what I wanted to do I wanted to create that's me that's my passion and that's the message that I would like to give other people here when you're being told here is the direction you should go look at your inner compass and decide what you are about what can you work on for 18 straight hours and not get up except for a bathroom break make sure that that's the thing that you take forward and you drive yourself forward with then there is the act of not just you now for you to succeed you need people around you now I'm going to um ask us to do um a little bit of a thought experiment and it has to do with dealing with people so um the thought experiment is this if Albert Einstein had never existed what would world look like today you all know most likely of the theory of relativity would there have been no theory of relativity or not now to be honest I don't know I don't know how the world would have looked like it's a thought experiment it could have been any could have gone in any direction but my point is this you see people every company would say people are your most valued assets and it's very very true but when you're running a software Enterprise company or quite frankly to a large extent any company that has a lot to do with intellectual property the thing that can sometimes happen is that you can have you could have this situation where certain personas can become Larger than Life and the question is what happens if they just up and leave tomorrow what's your contingency plan so educate your um your your your train your users make I mean not your users your people grow them train them as much as you can but also make sure that you have a 360 Dee view of what you're doing and make sure that you have some sort of contingency plan when you're dealing with people I don't hear that being mentioned a lot people tend to talk you know grow your people work with people that's true but do you have a contingency plan then your customers these again your customer is one of the pillars that form your ability to be successful in whatever you do now when it comes to customers there's a um a saying that I like to say that I tell myself all the time which is that when you're dealing with customers and quite frankly when you're dealing with maybe any kind of category of people is it's my responsibility to make myself understood not the responsibility of the customer to understand me and my point there is that a lot of the time technical people whether you building enterprise software building anything technical we can run into this narrow mentality of the building and they will come which is kind of you guys may have heard about the VHS versus V Mas ble back in the day which is if my product is technically Superior if my product is so good because you can see it so well you know your product is you know it can do everything is better than slice bread but do other people see it so you have to be able to communicate with your customers the other thing also so apart from being able to communicate your value Pro to your customers which you have to do in such a way that you are actually uh listening to them is also I'll call it that how do you go after your customers now when you are in startup mode and before you grow big at least every every customer potential seems like a viable client but the trick is though from what my experience has shown you have to be selective about your customers just like when you picking the people you work with you you you will naturally be selective to make sure you're aligned with your customers also you have to be selected because not every customer necessarily shares the same vision and in the enterprise software space where the customer segment because it's a B2B segment where you're dealing T you tend to be dealing not with the retail segment of millions of people but literally businesses that are mostly hundreds in that space What of mouth is very very very key so if you pick a customer which in my view I consider customers a part as partners that is not well aligned to your objectives and your goals you could really be host so the next um pillar that I talk about are your shareholders now the shareholders um they fall into multiple segments and multiple categories at the beginning you tend to be hunting for fun um you're looking for money to run the business and you're hoping to bootstrap well in the software space I would say we are lucky in the sense that every heard about starting businesses from a garage is a lot of the time you can basically start it with the me my computer and the garage you crank away at AG you even have a regular day job and you can have a side job of the 9 to 12 kind of thing where you're cranking away code and turning away the product so but at some point though you get big enough that people actually come to you to offer you money and to offer you funds well in my journey I think I've been relatively lucky with respect to the kind of um shareholders that we had but I know and by the way one of the reasons why I've been that lucky was because I have looked at the experiences of some of the people that have surrounded myself with not employees at my our company per se but um people uh people that I talk to on a regular basis which is that your shareholders sometimes can be your biggest albatrus because they may have a vision and a direction that doesn't necessarily align with what you where or where you want to go to if the the the the the nature of the returns that they are looking for is more shortterm it can serve to basically derail you and derail and make you move into a wrong direction in the enterprise software space it's a it's much slower to grow it is um more complicated it's a complicated Beast even to develop and to come up with a product so you tend to have need to have a quite frankly a more long-term view of where you're going and therefore you need people and shareholders that share that long-term View and can help support you in driving your business in the right direction then um this slide I would say there is story about the overnight success I think really literally the best the real true overnight success that we can potentially really point to most of the time is the guy that wins the lottery and I'm sure anybody that's good at math know the odds of winning a lottery is pretty low that's why the lotteries tends to be called four month's tax or maybe people are just deficient in math so the overnight success most of the time and most people say tends to take 10 years to make and actually statistics have shown that so the point here is that there really is literally nothing basically not much like the overnight success there will be the few exceptions that you can point to or those few exceptions even in the real space um like you some people point to the Facebooks and not Facebook itself but some examples that exist out there they are the exceptions they are like the guy that wins the lot the question is do you want to base your business do you want to base your what you're trying to do on winning the lottery or not you might but remember the odds are you probably wouldn't and you don't you do not want to um frustrate yourself in that regard so to round this up right the thing to note is that um like I said there is the youu to round this up there's the youu you need to have your inner Compass you need to have your passion that drive you you need to surround yourself the right type of people you have to find the right kind of customers of course you have to make sure you have the right product line and then of and shareholders and then finally no matter what should have fun you're going to be spending most of your time at work you're going to be spending usually when you start 8 12 hours at work if it's not something you have fun at then it's not worth it so with that I'll say thank you for listening [Applause] [Music]