00:10:05 · Bob Tinker
[00:10:05] S5: The idea behind Airespace was to enable people to use WiFi at work. We probably all laugh about now. Oh my God. There was a time when we did not use WiFi at work, but this was 2002. Intel had just put WiFi built into their very first laptop. And people were like, how do I use this? What can I attach it to? And all of a sudden now people are bringing to work saying, how do I attach this to a network? And they were putting Linksys access points under their desks and creating holes into the network and creating huge security issues. Airespace's mission was to bring WiFi to the enterprise. That worked out pretty well. We timed that right. There was a wave of change with laptops now enabled with WiFi. There was a big pain because enterprises were like, uh-oh, now what do we do? And we built a solution for that. At Airespace, we tackled a problem that had both pain and urgency. We went from zero to $80,000,000 over the course of about three years. How do you get your first 10 customers? Every startup really wrestles with that because it's hard. If you think about it from the point of view of your customers, imagine you're a person going into a hospital and you need surgery and the doctor says, You're gonna be my very first patient. You'd be like, I don't want you to operate on me. I don't want you as my doctor. Your challenge as an early startup is you have to convince customers to buy your product when nobody else has. Like, how do you do that? Sometimes it comes from previous relationships where you've been able to work at other companies and had customer relationships where they trust you. That can help. But the real thing you need to do is make sure you're solving a pain that has urgency. Because when people have a pain that's urgent, they're willing to take risks on buying from a smaller company. The second thing that's important in terms of finding and winning your early customers is listen to them. One of the things we did that worked really well is we had this concept called a teaching customer. When you're out talking to early prospects, some say yes, some say no, some say maybe, and you get a lot of feedback. It's hard to figure out, like, who do you listen to? Figuring out which
00:12:08 · S0, S1, S2
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00:13:35 · S4
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00:14:33 · Bob Tinker
[00:14:33] S5: Customers are the ones you really want to listen to and index on their feedback because you believe there are other customers out there like them. We called those teaching customers. What we found was if we picked the right teaching customers and indexed on their feedback, that allowed us to get from one customer to three customers to five customers to 10. It's a rough road though. Your first couple deployments are usually really bumpy. Your product doesn't work really well. It's brand new. There are things that go wrong. It's hard, but that's part of the fun. If you do a good job, you become friends with them because you solved a problem for them that helped them become a hero. They become vested in the success of your company and care about it. It's really, really hard to win early customers, but if you get a couple great early customers, they'll say good things to other customers and start the flywheel of credibility that allows you to find product market fit. The thing we did a really good job of at Airespace was finding channel partners that would help Airespace sell to large enterprise customers. Because one of the challenges that as a small startup you have selling to big, large established companies is they look at you and be like, you're a little company. Why should I buy from you? So by having big friends who work with you to help sell your product, it enabled us to win a lot of very large customers, which really helped accelerate our growth. We grew very quickly in 2005. We're at $80,000,000 The business is cranking. We had unified effectively all the companies that hated Cisco against Cisco. We called it the ABC Strategy, anybody but Cisco strategy. It worked. Then what happened is Cisco came knocking and said, We'd like to buy you. You know, my feelings were mixed actually, because on one hand we were super excited to be building airspace. We felt like we had a path to really grow the business in front of us. So on that hand, I was like, Ugh, I don't really want to sell to Cisco. But then the other side of it was, it was a huge compliment that Cisco reached out and said, look, we believe you're a great business, great product, great team. We'd like to have you part of our company. It was kind of confusing actually, because I had these two very different reactions to it.
00:16:40 · Bob Tinker, Tae Hea Nahm
But at the end of the day, we felt that the combination of sort of number one, the opportunity to merge with the market leader and to be able to sell airspace products through the entire Cisco sales channel was just like, wow, we can make a huge difference. So many people will get to use aerospace product. That was really compelling. The second thing that was really compelling was frankly, you know, they offered a good price for the company and we looked at that and said, that's probably the right thing to do for our investors. So we decided to do it. You know, it was still hard though, because when you sort of give up on running your own independent company and become part of a larger company, it is the end of an era. So it's bittersweet because you have to say goodbye to airspace, move out of your office, the logo goes away, all the things you worked on so hard go away. [00:17:28] S6: Well, was a controversial decision and it was tough. In hindsight, you know, people could say we made the wrong decision. We were, ahead of companies like Aruba and Ruckus, much bigger at the time, and they became multibillion dollar companies, unicorns. [00:17:46] S5: One of the things I'm most proud of is that it was either two or three years later, Cisco sold almost a billion dollars of aerospace equipment to customers.
00:17:46 · Bob Tinker, Tae Hea Nahm
[00:17:46] S5: One of the things I'm most proud of is that it was either two or three years later, Cisco sold almost a billion dollars of aerospace equipment to customers. [00:17:57] S6: I would say it impacted me, one, in a good way and a bad way. In a bad way, it made me believe that I could fix companies because I could run the company, I know what to do, so I felt like I could fix companies. And so I made some poor investments where I believed that I could coach the founder or the CEO and make the company successful. That was a bad lesson I learned from Airespace that I had to change how I invested. In terms of good, I mean, it gave me the confidence and a formula on how to make good future investments, which is identify a wave and be able to catch the wave and surf the wave. [00:18:43] S5: So this is sort of an embarrassing story. After product market fit, there's a missing link that didn't even really have a name. The advice that investors gave us and that other startups said, well, [00:18:53] S6: just go hire some salespeople. Turned out, that's not actually what happens. I was super frustrated by that. Heroic selling doesn't work. You need a simple, repeatable process that you can hire ordinary people, not founders, not clone founders. That's what we said is that product market fit is not enough. You need this repeatable, scalable process that we call the go to market fit.