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I don’t think we’re the best place from a capital perspective-our funding prospects for startups here is definitely not nearly as good as places like Toronto. What do you think of Vancouver’s tech scene in general? Where are we headed? The number of small businesses being formed right now is going faster than we can consume as customers. Now you can outsource that, and it’s so cheap. In the old days, you had to have manufacturing and all this stuff. Part of that is the fact that it’s so much cheaper to start companies now. We were looking at advance warnings out of Italy and Spain and saw massive rises in people signing up for our service, starting e-commerce stores or becoming influencers or independent consultants. It’s something we saw last year with COVID. I believe, for a lot of macroeconomic reasons, that small business is the future of our economy, and we’re only going to see more of them. Why such a big emphasis on small business? We don’t do that, and you’re not our focus you don’t have to use us.Ĥ. It’s kind of liberating when NBC will say, We need a custom contract, and we basically say, Sorry, no. But they pay us 20 bucks a month we don’t focus on them. It’s been tough over the years, and we have a lot of huge customers 61 of the top 100 businesses in the world use us-Google, Disney, NBC. We chose to go the opposite direction and focus in on one core customer segment, small business. But one thing they did that I think we learned from was that they tried to be a little bit of something for everyone. I don’t want to bad-mouth Hootsuite we all make mistakes. Speaking of learning from competitors, what have you taken away from the Hootsuite model? Everyone knows how the salary formula works.ģ. We don’t negotiate on hiring and never have we automatically give people raises and make it very transparent.
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We wanted a situation where if you were coming to work for our company and had the same experience, seniority and responsibility, you were getting paid the exact same as someone else. So we borrowed an idea from Buffer, one of our competitors, and instituted a salary formula. Two of our core values are around fairness and transparency. There’s an old saying: If you don’t define the culture, the culture defines itself. And one of the things I wanted to do differently was to be very thoughtful and proactive about the culture. Well, it’s the fifth company I’ve started-all the founders had experience working on other startups. What kind of culture have you instilled in the company? Then Later's revenue started to surpass our other startups’, and we decided to do it full-time in March 2015 that’s when we hired our first employee.Ģ. Before we launched to the public in the summer of 2014, we had 20,000 small businesses and people sign up. We all had other startups but realized there could be something here. We had a landing page and had two businesses sign up within 48 hours. We went to the hackathon, built the whole thing with a server, web interface and mobile app. And so Ian MacKinnon, Cindy Chen, Matt Smith and myself were sort of put together, and Ian had this idea for a scheduler for Instagram. But it’s a collegial/familial location where there was a cross-pollination of ideas and talent, people just working together and collaborating on things. Since then, we’ve helped over 500 companies.
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It's a nonprofit, physical space to allow tech entrepreneurs in Vancouver to come together, that we started in 2012. The concept that Ray Walia, Jesse Heaslip, and I had when starting Launch Academy quickly gained momentum in 2012 when we added cofounders Alex Chuang and Mike Edwards.
#Later social media scheduler serial#
Roger Patterson, CEO, Later For this serial entrepreneur, some things are non-negotiableġ.