Dan Moshe, the founder of Tech Guru, and Jim Olson, president of Fourcubed, plan to get a beer one day soon and discuss a common circumstance at fast-growing companies—how to transition from the exciting yet unsustainable founder-driven years to professional management.
The two met at the recent Upsize Growth Challenge workshop, where Olson is one of the winners and Moshe is an adviser.
Moshe, as company founder, spends all his time in the clouds, dreaming up new ideas for his technology consulting firm.
“In my role, I’m the visionary,” he says, referring to a formal title in the scheme known as EOS, or Entrepreneurial Operating System, developed by Gino Wickman. He then adds his informal way of describing himself. “That’s the person who has ADD,” or attention deficit disorder.
“I have an integrator who is the COO,” Moshe explains, again using an EOS term, and putting that person in place has made all the difference for Tech Guru.
“The way he puts it is, I’m the firehose of new ideas and he brings it down to a gentle mist,” Moshe says. “When I was running the company, we burned people out and that ultimately affected the bottom line.”
The discussion is relevant to Olson, because he is the new president of Fourcubed, brought in by founder Chris Carlson this past March specifically to develop and execute an acquisition strategy.
Carlson is a former stock analyst who grew bored at work and started playing poker online, using his wicked math skills to make enough money in six months to quit his day job.
He built Fourcubed to attract online poker players like he used to be, and then serve them up for a fee to gaming companies who are also his advertisers. His company zoomed to $13 million, then crashed back to earth in 2011 after a Justice Department crackdown on the industry.
With fortunes now stable, it’s Olson’s job to start growing again, this time with a well-defined M&A strategy, a board of advisers to add accountability, and himself as the seasoned executive in charge—while still taking advantage of Carlson’s deep connections, instincts and passion for the business only a founder can provide.
Moshe believes such a partnership works best when the parties follow a formal system, in his case EOS, and stick to it religiously.
“We meet weekly for a Level 10 meeting. It’s a formal process in EOS, where we maintain an issues list. We really do stay EOS pure,” he says.
“We don’t add or change goals mid-quarter. We are very picky about the things we bring on.” Even more important, at the insistence of his COO, “we ask ourselves what can we stop doing,” Moshe says.
He recommends the book “Rocket Fuel” to Olson, which is about the integrator/visionary relationship, believing it will be “particularly poignant” for Olson in his new job at Fourcubed.
“I own my entrepreneurial ADD,” Moshe says, and his COO makes sure Moshe can still dream without messing up the operational day-to-day. “I’ve created tech labs, and I do my crazy stuff in those. I can’t do the same stuff for 12 to 18 months” without going mad from boredom.
Knowing yourself. Defining formal roles. Following a strict system. All will be important for Olson at Fourcubed, and for any executive joining an entrepreneurial firm to help it grow up.
That, and allowing the founder to be the founder—crazy ideas, outsized energy and all. Cheers to everyone trying to add yin to the founder’s yang.
