Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Interview with T.A. McCann, Gist
Today's interview is with T.A. McCann, CEO and founder of Seattle-based Gist (www.gist.com). Gist is a startup which is connecting email with information about the people sending those emails, and is funded by Vulcan Capital. McCann spoke with us about what the firm is about, how the firm came about, and what it is hoping to do.
Can you describe what Gist is, and how it works?
T.A. McCann: Gist is where your inbox meets the web. What we're trying to do, is combine the best of personal information and the best of the web, in order to develop relationships with your core customers. The key scenario is--and we've all done it--is that prior to making a phone call or having a meeting with a person, you Google them. You may choose to find their LinkedIn profile, or their Facebook profile, or link to their company or other stuff. Essentially--you're building an online profile or sales lead. In Gist, we do that automatically for all of your contacts. We assign, and discover information by connecting to your inbox. We automatically figure out if you are someone or something you care about. It's stacked--ranging from the most important information to the least--and provides the most focused news and information that you might need, including what's going on with a company and personal correspondence we've already had.
Where'd the idea come from?
T.A. McCann: The idea came from a conversation with Steve Hall of Vulcan Capital, Paul Allen, and myself. We were brainstorming about different things. I thought it would be cool to automatically Google everything I cared about. We thought it would be kind of cool, but sort of impossible, so we started to narrow down to what are some of the things that we Google or look up information about--which are people or companies. We narrowed it further to business people, who are trying to stay on top of different connections they have. That's how the idea came about. It was really just a brainstorming session with Steve Hall, Paul Allen, and myself.
We then made a couple of prototypes connected to Outlook, and figured out that we could understand, through reading message headers, things like this person is named T.A. McCann, who worked for a company called Gist. That information can be automatically extracted, and created without work on my behalf. The next evolution was how to prioritize things. In my inbox, I have 8,000 contacts to prioritize, and we developed a cool algorithm to determine who are the most important people who we have on our list. Along the way, we connect to this other valuable data, such as how can I find attachments that you have sent me, which is hard to do in Outlook, and understand when you and I have exchanged links. It's the uber-connection between your inbox data, all organized around people and data from the web, which we automatically query on your behalf.
Talk about your relationship with Vulcan Capital -- how did you end up brainstorming businesses with Steve and Paul?
T.A. McCann: I was introduced to them. I was previously an EIR at Polaris Venture Partners, and we had worked on different ideas together, and started a company called MessageGate together. Ultimately, I got to a place where the ideas I wanted to work on were not the ideas they wanted to fund. Steve Hall and Steve Arnold (Editor's note: of Polaris Ventures) got to know each other on the board of MessageGate. Steve Arnold introduced me to Vulcan Capital, where I worked on a number of different ideas, two of which are now companies. Gist is obviously one of them, the other one is Evri.com, another Vulcan funded capital in the early days. I was essentially hired to be a product guy, to turn ideas into companies. The two of them were successful, although we had others we started but didn't get out. Paul is very involved in what we're doing, and also very involved with Evri, and also sits on our board. There is the capital, but much more than capital is the connections, knowledge, and experience with working with someone like Vulcan.
It looks like you also have some experience at Microsoft?
T.A McCann: I did. I worked for Microsoft for 3 1/2 years on the Exchange Team. that happens to be very relevant. I was hired in 2001 as the lone business development guy on Exchange. Basically, we said we had big business corporate email, and we have lots more places to take it and to figure it all out. I was the first person to do that, an ultimately owned all product planning, business development, and new markets for Exchange. That included Hosted Exchange, geographic expansion, and small business and consumer efforts. I thought about how people were using email, and the challenges, and how different solutions can be implemented on Exchange. So while I wasn't thinking about Gist at the time, I was looking at the information overload problem, which is the more important problem, and starting to build solutions into the product--although it was nowhere nearly as sophisticated as what we've done with Gist. I had an entrepreneurial background before that, with two companies before Microsoft, and at Microsoft I was fortunate to be quite entrepreneurial. At the tail end at Microsoft I was actually starting MessageGate, where I ultimately met Polaris. Polaris funded MessageGate.
Microsoft is a huge employer here, but it seems that employees at Microsoft are fairly comfortable, which sometimes discourages startups and entrepeneurs. Do you think that's true, and how did it work for you?
T.A. McCann: I would say each person is different in their own experience. I wasn't at Microsoft that long, only three and a half years, and I don't feel that I really acclimated to Microsoft culture. That was one of the things that made me leave. If you've got an idea inside which might produce $10M in revenue, they're not interested. If I said it $80M, they're not interested. If it it's $100M, they're probably still not interested. Unless it's a billion dollar idea -- not just as an exit, but in revenues, at a finite period of time -- they're not interested. The ability to start small things in Microsoft and let them mature is very difficult, to the extent that the ideas that do get momentum very quickly get some VP who tried to align that to their particular meeting. That therefore makes it difficult for startups to happen within Microsoft's culture in a way that we think of startups outside. You see very few businesses start from scratch and run for awhile, to become their own real businesses. They're subsumed by larger products, or not making revenue fast enough, or are too small of a business and are killed. For me, I never fell into the whole Microsoft culture, whereas other people who have been there for a long time might think that unless an idea has $100M in revenue in three years, it's not a good business. There are very very few--almost no--startups that end up with that run rate in such a short period of time. That said, there are lots of people running big and successful companies, startup guys here, who came from Microsoft--RealNetworks and Zillow are good examples--big companies that are being run by ex-Microsoft folks.
Finally, back to Gist--where are you in launch, and where do you go next?
T.A. McCann: We formally started in June, and launched into private beta a week ago, Friday the 5th. So far, it's going really well. We did a little bit of local press to get the message out there, and are taking it slow in terms of making sure the product really hits the core customer and delivers value. the good news is we have a good situation from the funding, and are hiring aggressively. The team at this moment is six, and we're hiring aggressively against that. A lot of the work for us is making sure the product we thought we'd build is what people want. We are keeping our user base relatively small, and making sure we know what is working, not working, and what they need more of.