Sean Whiteley (LinkedIn | Twitter) knows his stuff. He’s a veteran entrepreneur and has started more than three successful companies. He’s now the founder of Qualified, a conversational marketing application that alerts your sales team in real-time when qualified leads are on your website and gives you the full stack of meeting tools (chat, phone, screen share) to engage and convert them to pipeline and revenue.
Sean has been through the wringer. He’s failed, he’s got back up, and he’s forged meaningful, lasting relationships along the way. If you want a roadmap to the top, you’d want someone like Sean drawing it out – and he was kind enough to stop by The Mission Daily to give us some insights.
Lean on the wisdom of those who have been in the game longer. Sean can look back on his journey and see some of his biggest blind spots. One of those was that he says he didn’t appreciate what his bosses were doing when he was new to the landscape. “I worked at Salesforce for seven years after they acquired our first company, and I was a stupid kid at that point. I didn’t appreciate a lot of the things that company does at scale, operationally, in terms of the leadership and the culture that Mark [Benioff] drives down into the company. Parker Harris, everyone knows Parker, but I didn’t appreciate the things that he was doing at the time. I was a young entrepreneur, I wanted to move fast, I wanted to ship code, I wanted to do things. Now, as I’ve scaled the business, and I’ve gotten into growth stage, and gotten beyond just building product, there’s a lot of things that company does at scale that it makes sense to me when I see them on Jim Cramer and he’s like, ‘Again, Salesforce again.’ I get it. It’s I think a testament to just the machine that they’ve built over time and the values. We’ve taken a lot of lessons later that we didn’t actually get the first time with those guys.”
Be in it for the long haul. It’s easy to want to jump in and see results immediately, but Sean’s bosses, mentors and colleagues have showed him that it’s all about patience. Sean’s very clear – it is all about the long game. You might put something out into the world and not see dividends for years, and he’s learned that you have to be okay with that. “Mark’s always been a visionary guy. He’s always said it’s our job to paint the future and then our customers will meet us there. Jeff Bezos says the same thing. He talks about his management style where he tells people the executive team is not working on problems that we have right now. That’s not where we should be spending our time, that’s your job. We’re going to be working on the next thing. That’s where we should be and that’s where the existing team should be.”
Build a dynamic, diverse team. Over the years, Sean has worked with people who all come from different backgrounds, and he’s learned to appreciate all of them and what they bring to the table. “Parker used to always say, ‘If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.’ Prioritization is so important that when you got a guy like Mark he’s like, ‘We’re going to do this,’ and Mark’s an entrepreneur. When you’re an entrepreneur you want to go, you want to do it, you want to take risks. Parker was the rational guy that had to operationalize it. He had resources that were finite. When we were there he always wanted to talk about, ‘We’re going to do a debt release,’ which is reasonable. But at the time I’m thinking, ‘That’s not going to happen.’ It was always interesting to see that dynamic, especially given the success of the company. They’re still down in it, which is amazing to me.”
Build lasting relationships. Sean has an iron-clad, storm-tested relationship with his partner and co-founder. This allows them to not only push each other to the next levels, but also allows for a feeling of stability and safety. “Kraig Swensrud and I have been working together for twenty-two years. We’ve been at six different companies, three of our own. We met at a company called Web Methods where we did integration infrastructure and he was an SE in the west and I was in SE in the east. We met and we ended up on a proof of concept together. We ended up just really liking each other. After a while, we started our own company together. Then when we got bought by Salesforce, the first engineer we found is a guy named Bing Yang, and he’s still on our team today. The second engineer we found is a guy named Gopal Patel, still on our team today. We’ve been working together for a really long time. The advantages you have there, there’s no uncertainties. Bing and Gopal have a special dynamic. They work together so well. Their chemistry is so strong that they’re a lot more powerful than having two good computer scientists. Kraig and I have been working together so long that we already know when something is a better fit for one person versus the other, we already know. It just makes you more efficient. At the end of the day, we actually really enjoy each other’s company personally. If you’re going to spend so much time together, it’s great.”
Sean’s got a lot more wisdom to impart. To check it out, listen to the rest of the podcast here.
