Lessons - The Importance of Experience | David Fink - Co-Founder & CEO of Postie

In terms of being successful, you look for a couple things. One thing you didn't mention was experience and I and I thought that was interesting. So talk to me about how important experience in a category is to success. Oh, that's a double of sword. And depending on probably the moment of the day, I could take both positions in that debate. So explain why you can take both positions. Explain both lenses. So I do some investing and also provide some guidance to friends who do tech investing and yesterday the day before friends sent me over a pitch tag. It's a category that I wasn't super familiar with but reviewed the data and the deck and the storyline and you wanted my feedback on it. And immediately the first page in the deck that I gravitated towards when trying to synthesize my recommendation to someone I care about when they should invest their harder money into this business was the team. And it starts with is the team capable of pulling this off. And that's a wide range. It's the right business leaders of the right technicians, the right marketers, the right operations, people, etc. And this team was extraordinary military backgrounds, just really impressive, like special ops people. But then they also had a number of years and a very clean trajectory from from their armed service days through developing category expertise and vertical domain expertise. And and that made me really comfortable and feel comfortable, right? Like here the these people that they they understand the industry that they're going off after building a solution to you could see how that could lead to demand generation. They knew where to go to source initial deal flow and new customer acquisition. But I also think that on the flip side when you look and you take someone who has deep domain expertise and has been playing in a system for a long time, they've been trained to think in terms of let's operate efficiently the way that things have always been operated. And so when those type of people oftentimes come in and they and they have some idea of how they're going to disrupt the industry that they've spent 15 years in. And you start kind of going deep and talking through kind of their process and and you know and how they were going to attack the problem. And you you you realize that that they're they're thinking incrementally different. differently than they were at the incumbent that they work for whereas oftentimes disrupt something you need a complete fresh perspective like you can't be, you know, saddled down with all the reasons why this couldn't work or things have to be done the way that they've always been done. And and so there are times where when you take an entrepreneur who doesn't have direct domain expertise has applicable expertise. And and that person is more likely to be successful because they're just coming in a little bit naively looking and saying like with complete fresh eyes like this is this isn't make any sense. You build an entire industry this way. You know there's a better framework for how how this industry should be run. And so that's you know I do it's so interesting that you ask that question because I do spend a lot of time thinking about that. You know when making investment decisions you know like when does it make sense to invest with someone who does have deep domain expertise. And you have that confidence that the that they understand what they're going after and when when does that not make sense and when would you rather bet on someone who's coming in completely, you know, bright item bushy tell. You know ready to run through you know brick walls and it's bringing completely fresh ideas to a legacy industry. Could you I guess optimal situation would be like both personalities. I think so right or what the industry expertise I was just thinking like just like as a as a entrepreneur going in maybe the person without the expertise would almost like default to and just feel comfortable with like somebody coming from the industry then maybe that might actually dilute their own thought process and bringing disruptive innovative ideas to a company. I think there's probably roles for the right roles for both in our company we have both right so Jonathan my co-founder and I you know we we have deep domain expertise in and consumer internet and building and scaling direct consumer brands and building marketing technology platforms in kind of digital. But we did not have a background in direct mail very specific you know sector within you know advertising in general. And and I think because of that it's allowed us to completely rethink the way that direct mail should be executed. And this is an interest this year the latest numbers are over 50 billion dollars will be spent here in the US in this channel. It's an established 100 year old vertical with some really big players. And so I'm the entrepreneurial front the kind of vision behind you know what we think you know this industry could look like in the future and how I can support advertisers and and brands. I think it's very different than the way that that senior execs coming out of the direct mail industry you would think. And that works out for our roles. But then you know a lot of what we do is around complex operations and logistics. You know the heads of those departments you know we've recruited away from from you know big incoming companies because you know they need to have expertise in how to play within the system. How the US policy service works how great forwarding and logistics providers move pallets of mail around the country. How you know manufacturers producing you know hundreds of millions of pieces of mail month for us you know behave and operate how to source paper in a pandemic. But all these things that if you don't have that that don't make deep domain expertise you have no innovation in the world is going to you know is going to make you successful. And so in our company at the executive level we have a blend of I think creative thinkers like disruptive thinkers and you know those individuals who have deep domain expertise. And so I think that was kind of your maybe your suggestion. Well as I just wasn't I've never seen I've always sort of seen one of the other that's why because I've never been exposed to an organization where you have both but actually the company that I'm at right now that's what that's how we're trying to build out the leadership team. So it's just interesting to get your perspective on it because I was I would hope it would work that's like that like the just to theorize like what would be the best possible way to disrupt existing category or industry. Like how do you you bring somebody obviously you have great product but you bring somebody in who's from that industry and you combine somebody who is just a creative entrepreneurial thinker and then like those two in tandem can work together to do like incredible stuff but I'm like living through this right now so that's why I was just curious. Yeah look I we could certainly take this yeah offline as well but I'm seeing it firsthand that it can work you also there has to be a lot of other components that that work collaboratively within you know those kind of different personality types or experience types but yeah I think it's probably a pretty good recipe to have a little bit of both.