Do More Faster India, 2nd Edition

Chapter 21Entrepreneurship Is a Group Sport

Mark O’ Sullivan

Mark was the founder and CEO of Vanilla, which makes forum software that is used to power discussions on more than 300,000 sites across the Web. Vanilla raised $500,000 after completing Techstars in 2009. While Vanilla continues to thrive as a business, Mark departed and is currently a senior engineering manager at Adobe.

Before Techstars, all of the work I did on Vanilla was done alone. Sure, members of the Vanilla community helped me with features and bugs, but all new initiatives were mine and all final decisions were made by me. If I decided not to do anything, nothing got done. When I first spoke with David Cohen, he immediately stressed the importance of having at least one cofounder. Having been working alone for so long, I really didn’t understand why he felt it was so important. I was absolutely positive that I’d be fine on my own, and, in retrospect, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

When I set out to find a cofounder, my list of candidates was very short. I needed someone I could trust implicitly, had the skills and dedication to do the work, and who I would work well with. These requirements brought the list down to two people. One person was working at Microsoft in Seattle and had just bought a house. He simply couldn’t afford to quit working and try to start up a new company. The other person was single, had money saved in the bank, and was coming to the end of a consulting contract. All I needed to do ...