Purdue Talk: The Opex Analytics Story
I recently had the opportunity to guest lecture at Purdue about AI and my experience co-founding Opex Analytics.
I haven’t talked about the experience of Opex in a long time. It was fun to put the material together. The Purdue students asked lots of questions—we could have gone for another hour. Randomly, I also recorded a podcast episode covering the same material. I’ll post that when it is released. (If there are any Northwestern readers, I would love to do this talk on campus).
I had the chance to set the stage with this picture, my corner office, on the glamour of starting a company.
Here are some of the points I covered:
Lessons learned from my time at LogicTools-ILOG-IBM: I came into Opex with experience seeing a start-up grow and hustling for sales. I also saw how ILOG and IBM operated.
Sales and Marketing: When I talk to new founders (especially technical founders), I stress the importance of sales. I also stress that no silver bullets exist to get the word out. We tried many things at Opex.
Culture: You have to work hard to maintain the culture you want and keep it fresh.
Risks: One example of risk was that to grow, we had to hire before we had the revenue to pay for the new hires. We were bootstrapped, and my house was the collateral backing up our meager line of credit. So when we hired early, my house was at risk. There were a few dinners when I got some raised eyebrows from my wife when I said, “We hired four people today.”
The lively Q&A brought up many other fun topics like did we do a market assessment before starting (not even close), isn’t it costly to build custom software solutions (yes, and we had to create a model to make it work), the importance of a complementary co-founder, and did things go wrong (for sure!).