High School Dropout Turned Unicorn Founder | Adam Guild, CEO of Owner | Ep. 4

[upbeat music] All right, I'm super excited to be here with Adam, the CEO of Owner. Thanks for doing this, Adam. I'm really excited to have this conversation today.

Thanks, Jack. I'm stoked.

All right, so what I wanna start with is you as a young founder. You dropped out of, not college, but high school when you were not even eighteen. You started at Owner. You're twenty-five now, and that's, like, still pretty young, all things consider-- You know, like, I started Lattice when I was twenty-six, and I felt like I was, I was, like, a pretty young founder, and, you know, you're younger than I was when I started, and you've already got hundreds of employees and, you know, seven years of experience and tens of millions revenue and all this other stuff, so that's, like, amazing. I also know you've, like, you know, chewed a lot of glass and done a lot of hard stuff to get where you are and to make that happen, and there's, like, a ton of backstory to what you've been through. So I guess I wanted to open with just, you know, Silicon Valley talks a ton about young founders, and it's like this sort of both glamorized and sort of complicated topic, but I'm sitting with one. I'm sitting with a really good one, and I just wanna be inside your brain a little bit. Like, tell me about the experience of it.

Initially, being a young founder is a huge disadvantage, particularly the type of young founder that I was. Because I was a tenth grade high school dropout that had no credentials to my name, no professional network to draw on, no fancy college with a great computer science program to recruit classmates in order to build stuff, and the worst disadvantage of all was that I have a baby face. So when I was seventeen, starting Owner, I looked like I was twelve, and after grinding for weeks to get single demos, appointments scheduled, I would walk into the restaurant to demo their software after emailing and texting and calling incessantly to try and initially grab their attention, and then they would look at me as I was telling them about SEO, and I looked like I was twelve, and they wouldn't take anything that I said seriously. They'd ask me things like: "Where'd you go to college?" And then I'd have to explain, "I didn't go to college." "Uh, why not?" "Uh, 'cause I dropped out of high school halfway through tenth grade to build a Minecraft server." It led to all this friction where restaurant owners weren't willing to really even listen to what I had to say. Then this was, like, for context, four years before I got any credentials to my name. Four years later, I ended up getting the Thiel Fellowship, but for four years of building Owner, young founder, no network, high school dropout, and just grinding to, to make things work. So what's interesting is that these disadvantages ended up flipping into being massive advantages, both in the way that they changed our strategy and the way that they pushed me as a founder and CEO to grow myself. I got sick and tired of having to grind so hard for trying to distribute our product outbound and started asking myself: How do I get them to come to me after having benefited from something that I've put out there in a way that actually makes them excited to chat with me? And this is what led to, from the very earliest days, focusing entirely on inbound. I realized that anybody could be an expert on the internet as long as they created content that was good enough. So one of the things that I did in that first year was I started writing a blog on restaurant marketing that had these very comprehensive articles because I had looked up to this marketer, Neil Patel, who I had learned a lot of marketing stuff from, and so I told myself: If I could be the Neil Patel of the restaurant space, maybe people will benefit from the content and then want to use our product. Which, for the first few months, didn't work, 'cause content takes a while, but eventually, I ended up writing some of the most popular restaurant marketing articles of twenty eighteen and twenty nineteen, at which point restaurant owners started reaching out and saying, "I saw that article you posted. That was so helpful. I ended up doing the first strategy you mentioned in my restaurant and, and grew my sales. I'd love to chat with you about how your product might be able to help grow our sales even more." And then I would show up either for the Zoom call or for the in-person meeting, and they would see that I was eighteen years old at that point, or nineteen years old, and be blown away. And that's what ended up leading to us defying this trend in our space of selling via outbound, because we had to build via inbound on that necessity alone. I was the first sales rep in the company and the person that needed to do all the demos, and nobody was taking me seriously when I was going to them, but when they started coming to me, it flipped the dynamic entirely, and that ended up being a superpower as a young founder, both in driving our strategy as a company as well as in feeling extra energized by the fact that I had to work even harder.