Andrew Lacy
speaker
125 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Andrew Lacy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I became an accidental entrepreneur. I couldn't get a job at a technology company.
Prunuvo was one of the more interesting fundraising stories because we struggle to raise money. The more crazy the idea is that you're pursuing, the more people just reject it outright. Be very aware and conscious of all the ways in which you might handicap yourself and your potential for success. And one of those might be, I never experienced more low points than I did building a company.
I also never experienced as many high points. Being an entrepreneur is very, very difficult. I've had falling outs with co-founders. We got kicked off the app store. I was completely drained.
I've always been a big believer in it.
I don't know if you can tell from the accent, but I grew up in Melbourne, Australia. So about as far from Silicon Valley as you can get. You know, I grew up during that first dot-com boom. And I remember going online and looking at websites and I thought to myself, this is kind of cool, but I never really imagined that there were companies and people behind these things.
That's how far I was from the startup ecosystem. And in Australia, for better or worse, the process of going to college is kind of simple. You do a standardized test, you get a score from zero to 100, and then every single course you could possibly do had a score. And if your score was higher than that score, you could do that course.
You didn't have to write an application describing why you're passionate about becoming a doctor or a lawyer or studying accounting or becoming a speech pathologist or whatever it is. You got the score, you could go in. And the downside of this was, of course, when you looked at the score that you got, you're like, what's a cool thing I could do here?
What's going to make me money or what's going to make my family proud? And pretty far down the list was what actually do I think will I find fulfilling? So I ended up getting a pretty high score and that enabled me to go to probably one of the better universities in Australia to study economics and law. I never grew up thinking I wanted to be a lawyer.
I never grew up feeling like I wanted to learn economics, but my score allowed it. So that's the school that I went to. I think the US is a bit different. Obviously, people have to make the case for why they want to do what they want to do. But still, I think a lot of people, they don't put a lot of thought into where they decide to spend their early career.
So I started working with lawyers during and post-degree. I ended up representing a whole bunch of not wonderful actors, defended mining companies that poisoned the environment. And I was told to work for the gun lobby at one point and some developers that swindled a whole bunch of money for people. I mean, it was not a great experience.
And I was just thinking to myself, wow, if this is my life for the next 20 years, I'm not even sure I want to live that life. So I built up the courage to leave Lore and I moved into consulting. And I worked at a consulting firm called McKinsey. And there, during this dot-com bubble, there were a lot of big companies that wanted to get into digital technology but didn't really know how to do that.
So they brought us in and... We were supposed to be the experts. I didn't feel like much of an expert when I started, but we would do these highly compressed studies where we worked 80 hours a week trying to learn how to do product or trying to learn how to build technology. And it sounds kind of ridiculous today, but 20, 25 years ago, no one really knew anything. So people paid us to do this.
And in the process, I learned a lot about the business side of how to build tech companies and We finally moved over to the US. I studied an MBA at Stanford. And my dream at that time was to go and work at a Google or a Salesforce. And on my resume was, I was a lawyer, a former lawyer. I had done strategic consulting and I had an MBA from Stanford.
And it turns out tech companies didn't value any of those things. So all the things I had worked so hard to put on my resume were completely useless to folks In that world, I think somewhat unfairly, but that's how they saw people with my background.
People that knew how to code or had experience really in the trenches. I felt like I had built experience with companies, but in a much more low risk way. And that just really wasn't valued. So I became an accidental entrepreneur. I couldn't get a job at a technology company.
And I hung out with a friend of mine at a VCR firm and he introduced me to another entrepreneur who was doing something in the iPhone world. And I just thought it was so wonderful that someone really wanted to even hang out with me and hear my opinion about this thing. And so we started working together and a month in, we decided that we would partner up and really grow this business.
So I didn't start out being an entrepreneur. Of course, when I got into it, I started to realize what an incredible experience that would be and how it really matched my personality.
I remember rollerblading along El Camino Real in Palo Alto and just being blown away going by like the Yahoo office and the Google office that were all on El Camino Real back then.
Well, for me, I think you mentioned that I sort of, I've lived in different countries. I probably live now in six or seven different countries around the world. And a big part about that for me, every time I did that, it was a real enabler to show up a different way in that new country. I personally felt like a lot of what held me back, held my own development and growth back was that
I'll give a simple example. Let's say I'm a very serious person and I would like to be more lighthearted, tell more jokes. If all the people around me I've hung out with for 20 years, I suddenly show up one day and I start telling jokes. In my mind, I'm going to be thinking, these guys think I'm really weird. This is not me.
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