Interview: T.A. McCann, founder of Gist
Ok gang, here’s our next daily Curious CEO Interview! This time it’s T.A. McCann, founder of Gist which is all about collecting and organizing key information about your contacts. A lot of people have ideas. When you meet T.A. the first thing you might notice about him is that he is all about pragmatic execution. He’s able to get teams together, get product shipped and get it marketed. For this reason, he’s a popular advisory candidate for many start-ups.
You’ve been around this business awhile. Tell us about T.A. and where you’re from?
I moved to Seattle from San Diego in 1995 after finishing my second America’s Cup and 5-7 years as a professional sailor. I came to Seattle as it was the best blend of lifestyle and software culture as I was starting my first company, a web-consulting agency. I am a mechanical engineer from Purdue, grew up outside Chicago, and built specialized robots as my first career before moving on to sailing. I still spend lots of time outside running and riding with my wife, Teresa and daughter Ray.
You could have settled on any number of business ideas. What got you going about email?
I love talking, just ask anyone who knows me. I also love communications solutions more broadly. My first startup, HelpShare, focused on community driven questions and answers (like Yahoo Answers). So solutions that connect people around content and communications get me excited. When HelpShare ran out of money in 2000 (we all need a good failure), I ended up at Microsoft on the Exchange team, where I was fortunate enough to get real insight of the power and problems around email.
The ideas for Gist came during some brainstorming sessions with Paul Allen and Steve Hall at Vulcan, which were actually centered more around “Googling everything a person cared about all the time…” and the email inbox was an easy data source to determine a list of the people and companies (a subset of “everything I care about”) which we could then “Google”. Once we connected to the inbox and saw the value, which could be created by mapping messages, links, attachments, meetings…to people and companies, the real combined value of Gist, where “your inbox meets the web” really started taking shape.
When you’ve got to describe Gist to in a crowded, noisy bar, how do you boil it down?
“Gist is like having a great personal assistant working for your around the clock, collecting and organizing key information about your contacts, your next meeting, next actions and helping you make the most of your professional relationships”
…buy the person another beer…
“Gist can help you unlock all that value trapped in your inbox and make it more useful and make your more productive. We can connect it to the web so you have a constant feed of who is most important, what is going on with them and what actions you could take to further your business success, all done automatically”
… ask them if I can buy their friends a beer and tell the story again…repeat 1000’s of times with small modifications until people start buying me beer…
Who is your target customer? Heavy IT knowledge worker? Average guy?
We are focused on people who place high value of relationships and tend to use information to strengthen them. This tends to be people with a sales focus but does extend to most business professionals (execs, PR, legal, journalists, business development, real estate…).
What do you think you’re really good at? And, what do you wish you did better?
I am very good at developing and executing a focused plan. I am good at recruiting and managing a team. I am a good product manager with a focus on the core customer scenarios. I wish I were better at the finance and operations sides of the business and I think I sometimes focus too much of the small stuff.
I’ve got lots of IT experience, $5 million bucks but this is my first start-up. What one bit of advice would you give me?
Read this: http://tamccann.blogspot.com/2008/11/nwen-presentation-0-25mph-for-startups.html
Pitch your business using Powerpoint, but focus on running it with Excel. Get the key milestones on a timeline and understand the dependencies. Everything will take 50% more time to close than you think, so plan accordingly. Trade your personal equity to attract great people. Focus on customers long before you focusing on product. The CEO must do all the initial selling. Did you say one?
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Thank you for this fabulous interview. It gives so much insight why GISP has been developed and the ideas that were realized.