SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 112: He Quit Google Now Serial Entrepreneur
16 Nov 2015
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
Chapter 2: What motivated Ethan to leave Google and start his own ventures?
I'm now at $20,000 per top.
Five and six million.
He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, every Monday I give one of you 100 bucks to invest in your idea and get to the top. To enter for your chance to win 100 bucks, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes right now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it.
This week's winner was Matt Wolfe in Chicago at the DDB Agency. Coming up tomorrow morning, we're going to hear from Bill Hanks, who went from zero to six percent market share in three months with the former Microsoft Bing director.
Chapter 3: How did Red Beacon differentiate itself in the home services market?
OK, Top Tribe, good morning.
Chapter 4: What was the vision behind MyTime and its market positioning?
You know, you've started off your morning with a warm cup of coffee or maybe you're jogging. You just put your headphones in and buckle up. You're going to love our guest today. His name is Ethan Anderson, and he's the founder and CEO of MyTime, a startup that allows consumers to to find and book appointments from over 2.5 million nearby businesses.
He was also the co-founder and CEO of Red Beacon, which allowed consumers to request bids for home services.
Chapter 5: What challenges did Ethan face while building Red Beacon?
Red Beacon was venture-backed and acquired by Home Depot back in, I believe, 2010. Now, prior to Red Beacon, Ethan worked at Google as product manager for Image, Search, and Google Video. It's going to be a good one. Ethan, are you ready to take us to the top? I sure am, Nathan. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me.
So first off, I want to talk about first, you graduated from Harvard. You had a lot of success. Why did you want to go into Google in a product manager role?
Chapter 6: How does MyTime's business model work and how does it generate revenue?
I love product. I think I just gravitate to imagining something that doesn't exist today and thinking about all the different components that have to go into it, from design to engineering, customer acquisition, and spending a lot of time with the customers themselves to understand what they need us to build to make their lives easier.
And to me, that's the heart of innovation, and that's what startups are really about.
And so what, kind of walk me through, what was it like working at Google? Was there any, like a story, you know, that was, you know, surprised you about something that happened there? And then why'd you transition out of Google into, I assume, Red Beacon?
Sure. Oh, wow. So, okay, so two very big questions. Yes. I think the thing that surprised me the most about Google is on my very first day, I was, they gave me a choice of whether I wanted to do marketing or product management.
Chapter 7: What strategies does MyTime use to reduce no-show appointments?
So, of course, I chose product. I think that's unusual that Google is growing so fast. They needed people in every role. And my job was to internationalize. What was that?
Chapter 8: What is the current growth trajectory of MyTime?
What year was this? Oh, this is back in 2006, January. And so they said, you know, we need someone to internationalize this brand new product called Google Video. It's our competitor to YouTube. We want to, you know, own online video. And we just launched it in the U.S., the Consumer Electronics Show. Can you launch this outside the U.S. ? And I said, sure. And there was no mentorship.
There was very little management. I had a product management director who had 40 or 50 direct reports that I didn't even really meet for a few months. And no one said how to do it. So for like 20 minutes, I was just like frozen. Like, what do I do? I mean, is there like a list of countries? How old are you at this point? Who do I work with? But then you just get into it.
And it's actually great training for being a startup founder and CEO because of that early Google day, you had complete autonomy and you had to figure things out just like you have to in the real world. Ethan, how old were you when you were going through that?
I was 30. Yeah, I was exactly 30. Okay, so what happened? Obviously, YouTube won out. Were you part of the M&A process when Google acquired YouTube?
No, absolutely not. I think everybody in the Google Video team was as surprised as everybody else when it happened. I actually got the sense that it happened very, very quickly. It looked like YouTube had multiple suitors, and Google got in there thinking, we just cannot let this go to a competitor like Yahoo or Microsoft. and they just made a bid and it happened like lightning fast.
Did that piss you off? I mean, you've been working on putting your heart and soul into Google Video. I was devastated. It's one of the reasons why I didn't go to YouTube to work there and internationalize that product. Instead, I left and went to Google Image Search. One of my colleagues, Hunter Walk,
actually did extremely well by leaving the Google Video team and going to be a product management director at YouTube. But for me, emotionally, I couldn't walk away from a year of combating YouTube and just start working for them. I just wasn't ready to do that right away.
Interesting. So is that one of the reasons you left and ended up at Red Beacon or founding Red Beacon?
No, they were unrelated. I worked on image search for a while before starting Red Beacon. The story behind Red Beacon is I went to my Harvard Business School five-year reunion. I was super excited to see my classmates from five years ago. And I had amazing people in my class. Sal Khan had started Khan Academy.
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