SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 95: Topless lady tanks billionare and $250k contract
28 Oct 2015
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of Garrett Dunham's entrepreneurial journey?
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. 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. Coming up tomorrow, you guys hear me absolutely grill Chris Sanfilippo. He makes 100K per month from something called revenge porn. Okay, Top Tribe, good morning. It is almost Halloween, but before you throw your costumes on, listen closely. You're going to love my guest today. His name is Garrett Dunham.
He is a Silicon Valley born and raised serial entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and startup advisor. His companies have been featured on the New York Times, NBC, Fast Company, TechCrunch, and many, many others. Garrett, are you ready to take us to the top? I am ready. All right, let's do it. So first things first, you are all over the place. You're advising, you're in the valley, you've seen it all.
What are you focused on right now?
Right now I'm focused on two things. I'm helping launch the startup accelerator for Singularity University. So we've got seven startups that we just gave $100,000 a piece to. And they're doing some pretty crazy stuff. One's putting a satellite into space that through imagery can track pollution. Another one is doing biosensors for water detection remotely.
helping around the fracking industry who now currently throws people on a helicopter to do any actual testing. So lots of things there. And then after my own personal burnout with my last startup accelerator at the put together a framework that helped pull me out of it and had a bunch of my fellow entrepreneur friends ask for help there. So I created a site called Ignite the Drive.
I do some posting on just things to help with the mental fortitude around entrepreneurism.
Very cool. And so, Walk, I want to hear, you said you had a failed accelerator earlier this year. What was that accelerator and why did it fail? Oh, boy. That is a story that I'm going to have to be careful on. That's fine. Your lawyers, trust me, they're not cool enough to be listening to the show. Just give it to me. What was the accelerator? Why did it fail?
So it was called pre-backed, and it was really almost a counter accelerator. I was not focused on any of the things that you would think of in an accelerator. I would work specifically with multi-billion dollar corporations like Blue Shield of California, Covidian, Amgen. These are multi, multi-billion dollar healthcare companies. And I would help startups...
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Chapter 2: How does Garrett Dunham help startups at Singularity University?
HR catches wind. They fire the CTO. They fire the guy who is financially backing my proposal. They give both of their jobs to the guy who was... He was going to support the proposal. And then everybody started suing each other and the whole thing collapsed. And so eight months of work just died because of a celebrity who couldn't keep her shirt on.
Oh, my Lord. That's the pits. Holy mackerel. And was this I know you're not going to name it. Was it a public or private company?
Oh, very public.
This is $10, $20 billion corporation. Well, it's been fun. I'm sure you're studying this as well. One of the guys I've been studying right now is David Ackman and the moves he's making in the pharmaceutical space with Valorgen and some of these other guys. How did you get into the pharmaceutical industry just to even start or bioscience, whatever you want to call it?
Well, so I was really focused on healthcare in general, but a gentleman named Jeff Clapp, who helped launch Rock Health, is a very good friend of mine. I told him my idea for a hackathon for venture capitalists to pitch problems that they'd like to fund. And he just... He just fell in love with it. This guy had already built a company over 12 years. He was the CTO, sold it to Bosch Healthcare.
You know, he's Mr. Health. He's keynoting and all this stuff. And I said, how would you need this? I thought this would be for, you know, college students. It turned out our market was actually with serial, like second time, third time entrepreneurs looking for their next big thing. And they wanted kind of a proven market already attached to it.
And so he was in health care and I said, well, you know, health, you can make a lot of money and more importantly, you can do a lot of good. So, yeah, what the hell? Let's give it a shot. So how did you make in that business? How did you make money? I was charging our corporate partners a, what to them was a small fee, you know, 50, I think it was 50,000 for the first couple.
And, you know, the next proposal was for about a quarter million. To them, this is, you know, rounding errors. To me, it's substantial, right? It's a pretty substantial round of funding. Yeah. And then I was also getting a- Sorry, I don't understand that.
What do you mean? I'm making this up. AmJet would say, here's 50K for you, Garrett. And in exchange, I want you to bring me 10 proposals from startups that might fit this need. Is that how it worked?
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Chapter 3: What led to the failure of Garrett's previous accelerator?
Don't you just move on to the next deal?
Normally, yes. I had a lot of the problems that every early entrepreneur had. I chose a business partner who turned out to be less than scrupulous and stole some customers, left us back on a nine-month sales cycle with running on fumes. And then at that point, I mean, after three years, I was personally pretty burnt out.
And at that point, I said, look, I could go and try to source a bunch of these deals. But enterprise is such a horrible beast that you spend all of your time on just a little bit. There are just one or two of them. And I just said, you know what? Screw it. I'm going to, these guys are the most likely to close. Everybody else is dragging their feet. If they close, then we're in, we're good.
And this will launch it. If they don't, I'm burnt out.
I see. So then after that, you launched ignite the drive.com again, top tribal link to all of this in the show notes at Nathan, like a.com forward slash the top nine, five again, forward slash the top nine, five. So Garrett ignite the drive. I mean, are you making meaningful revenue from this? How's it working?
I would say I would love to answer in the affirmative, but right now I'm mostly, I'm almost mostly using it for my own, for myself in a way. Hey, here's some of the best tips and tips, tricks, and things that I've been learning and blogging. I have made a little bit of revenue from it, but I will say that it is more of a labor of love. Well, it's a little bit. in the hundreds of dollars. Got it.
Got it. Got it. Cool.
Yeah. Okay. So it's a labor love. So your main thing right now then is Singularity University. That is correct. Which by the way, people love, you know, we've had people on that have been related to the program before. Bold is constantly being mentioned as one of the favorite books of entrepreneurs. So it sounds like it has a lot of momentum. What's your role there?
Yeah, it has a huge amount of momentum. So I am helping Pascal Finette, who's another amazing... Well, I shouldn't say another amazing. That assumes that I'm saying me. He's an incredible entrepreneur and started a couple of startup accelerators. So I'm actually helping him and his team to launch this one. It just happened that his...
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Chapter 4: What innovative projects are startups receiving funding for?
I mean, what's the model? How do you make money?
I can't really speak a whole lot to that. Technically, I'm consulting, and that's mostly because I've been wanting to dabble in my own things as well. But yeah, Singularity, the accelerator, does take a pretty normal accelerator cut. We give the $100,000 to the startups, get equity.
What, 6% equity?
Yeah.
Roughly, yeah. They can find it on singularity.com slash labs, I believe it is. Sorry, singularityu.org. Okay, but it's about 6% or 7%.
Yeah. Okay, interesting. Very cool. Very cool. Okay, well, this is great. One of the reasons I wanted to get you on and have you share your story was because of the involvement you had with Singularity. We've had so many people talk about it. Those of you that don't know about it again, we'll link to that in the show notes at Nathan, like a.com forward slash the top nine, five.
And Garrett, that is your main focus right now is the consulting role with singularity with Pascal, correct? Yeah, that's correct. Okay. Top tribe. I want to give you more brain juice this month. Totally free. If you're loving this episode, text the word Nathan. N-A-T-H-A-N to 33444 for your chance to win a prize on an upcoming show.
The next prize is a pack of 14 business books valued at 250 bucks if you bought them on Amazon. And these books are the ones that Mark Zuckerberg thinks every entrepreneur must read. All right, guys. Well, there you have it. Now, Garrett, we're about to get into my favorite part of the show. Do you know what's next? I do not. I'm looking forward to it. All right, mine.
It is time for the famous five. Are you ready? Sure. Number one, favorite business book.
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Chapter 5: How did a celebrity incident impact Garrett's business deals?
I'm going to be writing an interview that I just did with him yesterday up here in about two or three weeks.
Oh, good. Well, that's good. One of the early investors at Hayo was actually Dave McClure and Paul Singett at 500 Startups. So that model is near and dear to my heart. I'll have to go check him out for sure. Sounds good. Number three, Garrett, as you're building these tools online and you're building Singularity University, is there any particular online tool that you use and really love?
Oh, I fell in love with Zapier recently. I did an integration... What was it? So I've hated doing online content sourcing and keeping my tweet stream regularly going.
Ended up syndicating a number of really amazing blogs, putting that through Snipply, another good mention that gives a little ad at the bottom of someone else's content, and throwing that RSS feed through Zapier into Buffer to start posting online. So if you've got an engineer's brain, Zapier is fantastic for automating all kinds of just horrible tasks.
Very good. Okay. Number four, Garrett, out of curiosity, are you married, single? Do you have kids? I am single. Single. Okay. And how old are you? I am 30. Okay. 30 and single. So as you're working on Singularity University and you were hustling in your company or accelerator that went under earlier this year, I want to know if you were doing all this in a balanced way. Yes or no?
Do you get eight hours of sleep every night?
Oh, I get seven, sometimes eight.
So close, close. All right, good enough. Last question here, number five. Take us back 10 years. If you wish your 20-year-old self knew one thing, what would it be? Oh, boy.
You know, the one thing that has been by far the biggest driver of any sort of success for me is constantly putting myself in situations where good things can happen. So some call it planned serendipity. But about five years ago, I started just hanging out at the Hacker Dojo because I wanted to be an entrepreneur and I didn't even know what that meant.
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