- Teams that know each other incredibly well,
can move at a speed that is not 2x but 10x that
of a team that has been introduced to each other.
I'm amazed at how fast we went.
Okay, so today we are talking to my friend,
and co-founder of Ultra Mobile, this is Rizwan Kassim.
I'm amazed at how fast we went.
We'd sit and whiteboard and moved up to New York
so I was with the team that was there.
Whiteboard, alright here's the function.
We strapped on the entire building system
onto our existing calling card platform.
We're like, well we'll need to sort
customers, and addresses, and passwords,
and do they do credit cards, and-
so let's reuse all this infrastructure.
And we get together in a room
and we'd fight over what the functionality should be
and how it should be, and when we're done
we went off to our corners and did something.
Cause we had done so many projects before,
we knew what to expect from each other.
- So when you guys are fighting in those meetings,
I'm assuming you're debating over things.
Who gets to make the final call?
- I have in the history of this company,
I cannot recall a moment where someone said
this is my decision, you're gonna have to accept it.
Including our majority stakeholder and
including someone who has every financial
and respect to do so.
Never have I heard it.
- Especially for starting something
or even the early days of entrepreneurship
you start to raise your voice
and you start to yell at each other.
I've seen people come close to blows with each other before.
So, that doesn't really help that much so-
what I've found recently was the most powerful book
I've read this year is called Multipliers,
where you are basically you are debating,
you're teasing the answers out of people,
and you're having conversations,
and that's how you grow a business.
And you're not always gonna be the right one.
I think the Jeff Bezos' quote is
"You know sometimes he disagrees with people
but he's gonna disagree,
he's gonna commit at the end of the day."
Which is what I hear that's going on at Ultra.
- I cannot think of a time where a decision that
I disagreed with that other people convinced me of
was not pushed forward at full speed
once we made the decision.
We left the room, we're like 'We're gonna do it'.
There's a brotherhood amongst that right?
And again we've got a shared values,
we've got history together.
We've decided to do this. Let's go do it now.
I may disagree with it,
I don't know everything that may happen
nor does this person.
What I do find and it's hard to remember
cause we all come with the ideas that we think are right
and now we have to discuss them with someone.
Not a single idea has not gotten substantially better
by the process of that debate.
- You mentioned you had a full time job,
when did you know was the right time to make the jump,
pivot, let's go all the way on this.
- First, you can have so many irons in a fire.
But I think if you've got a full time job
and you have the energy,
finding dedicated time to do something else is key.
And it's not easy.
The gift that I've been given is insane curiosity.
So I wanted to know how to do this other thing.
Optionality is key.
Recognizing where potential comes,
and that requires a really sober analysis of
where opportunities-
if you think an idea is gonna be a billion dollar idea,
and you wanna dump everything into it,
more power to you but is it gonna derive revenue.
I'm very much a cash focused guy.
Is it gonna be able to pay the bills?
Is it gonna be able to sustain itself?
That's for me, that's the inflection point.
If the new idea can meet basic business stuff
and you've got an MVP,
this is why the beauty of MVP is so great.
That we've got this idea that
just get a product out there to see if people want.
Cause the second you've hit that, the rest is grinding.
It's less luck once you've got the point that
people are interested in your product.
- You guys are doing really well right now.
You have some accolades.
I'm actually gonna bring this out right now too.
Look at this Inc. magazine right here.
- We were the number one fastest growing company
in America in 2015.
- And so what does that mean exactly?
- So you submit to Inc. magazine your numbers
three years ago and current year, and they do a percentage.
If we were a tech company,
we'd have announcements, we'd do our series A,
we'd do our series B, we'd do this,
and if we're a public company we'd have
announcements we'd have to make quarterly.
We were very quiet, we still are very quiet.
For five years, we don't disclose how much revenue
(inaudible), or much how much profit we make.
We don't have to.
There's no reason for us to do so except for ego.
Doing this showed our employees, showed our partners,
showed the rest of the marketplace,
oh my goodness these guys are serious.
And it was a huge ego point
that allowed us to attain credibility.
And we also got pricing discounts from companies.
- Because of that?
- Because I could say
in a negotiation point I was able to say,
'Look we've got this press that we're getting from Inc.,
you should do a press release saying that
the nation's fastest growing company chooses X service'.
- Interesting.
- Yeah.
- So there is a leverage point with it.
- Yeah. And I knew-
And it's a list of five thousand and there were so many-
- And you were number one.
- And we were number one.
Yeah.
About a 100 grand to I think
a 114 million dollars of revenue in three years.
- 114 million dollars of revenue in three years. Impressive.
So there's a lot of purple around this company.
You're wearing purple right now.
I see a bunch of purple on the walls and things.
What does purple mean?
- There's two versions of this story.
I've loved purple since in my earliest twenties.
- So that was the debate that you won.
- That's how I'd like to think about it.
The exact shade of purple, I actually brought in a shirt
and showed it to my head of marketing at the time saying,
'I would love it if this was our shade',
and it turned out to be our shade.
- Nice.
- The real answer is that
we did a look at the wireless companies.
T-mobile's got magenta, Sprint has got yellow.
You look at the color spectrum,
you're like what isn't taken out by a nationwide brand,
and the purple, orange, blue combination we've got
is both very appealing,
felt good to some of us who really like purple,
and there's still a royalty aspect of it.
And we're a brand that goes after
first generation immigrants as well as people who are-
need to pay 19 or 29 dollars for cellphone service.
This is the (indistinct),
these are people who are paying cash every month.
Of solid brand that looks good
is a level of respect they don't usually get.
So they all kind of went in place.
And so we showed up with a very strong brand
that looked carrier quality, but was providing great value.
Versus other companies that were just like
'Eh, we'll throw it together,
we don't need to spend any money on marketing'.
- Got it.
So we're both in the same entrepreneur's group.
You've been in for a while.
When your in peer groups in general,
what has that done for you,
what has it done for your business?
- Having educational experiences,
being exposed to different forms of thinking make me better.
Talking to people-
you and I have spoken about online marketing
for hours and hours and hours over the last five years.
I bring those ideas coming back,
and help challenge the team-
I don't run marketing here- but I help challenge the team.
It gives me the sophistication to be able to talk to them
and have some additional input.
They take some of it, sometimes they don't.
But it allows refinement of ideas
and clearer the vision we have
the more optionality we have.
We're always pivoting in business.
No, our strategy is never-
every six months is a fundamental shift
to either our financial or product strategy
because we're in a very fast growing market.
You can't do that on your own.
No person can do that on their own.
- Key Takeaway: If you wanna go far,
if you wanna go big, then go with people.
Alright, final question.
- I have a piece of advice to share.
- Sure.
- Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese,
brought through a group of sixth graders
through the restaurant that we were building.
And he gave them our next twelve months strategy
of product build outs and I'm like...
And there was a reporter with them.
And I'm like why would you do that?
He's like the ideas are not the hard part,
the work is the hard part.
The detail of the idea is the hard part.
But telling them we're gonna launch three more restaurants
and we're gonna add these features,
we think of that as incredibly dear and it isn't.
And so I find being really open with business details-
and we're told NDAs and we should hold onto this.
There's two ideas a year that are so precious
that you need to hide them,
the rest of them it's the fact that you
want to do them that's special, it's not the idea.
- Totally. Good advice.
So I mean, on that note of advice,
is there anything that you'd like to add for
current entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs.
What would like to add to help them out?
- Always be learning.
It's very easy to get into a place
where you feel that you totally understand your business.
We've got an excellent business intelligence team,
it's asking questions.
It's asking questions of our data.
It's asking questions of what our customers want from us.
And when you have initial success it's very easy to think,
look what I built, I must be great at this.
Some of that's true. There's some luck.
There's some everything else.
But the difference between companies
that go to here and plateau
and the ones that continue, they continue to iterate.
The only way to do that is with more information.
And you get that by asking.
- There you go.
Rizwan, thanks so much for doing this.
- Thank you.