ESSAY BY TEJ DHAWAN
I’ll quit and go into business for myself when the revenue from my company is 1 1/2 times my salary. This unrealistic goal was the first life metric that led me to quit a stable job obtained at the height of a recession. I’d largely reached my set metric in 28 months of employment. On Jan. 1, 1995, I provided a notice of resignation and walked to the secretary of state’s office with a knot in my stomach.
As an 8-year-old growing up in India, I rented my large collection of comic books in my neighborhood, and in high school sold ads for the newly introduced Yellow Pages. The desire to be in control of my earnings arose from watching my blind grandfather build a business making rattan chairs and wax candles. The entrepreneurial gene inherited from him provided a constant itch as a salaried employee and I started working late into the evening building computers for sale and programming for area companies.
My wife and I sacrificed the symbols of post-college “wealth” to build a business. Eschewing rent for a new home with a 15-year mortgage (instead of 30), we pushed all extra funds to pay it down quicker. We chose to delay our honeymoon, kids, entertainment, restaurants and customary expenses until we were independent or hit age 30. The single car and city buses got us places. Guests to our new home found the main floor devoid of any furniture except the two stools for eating at the kitchen counter. We sought “Financial Independence, Retire Early” (FIRE), before it was an acronym or practice.
Finally independent, I became the first “tech” employee for Robert Half International and was contracted out to the city’s premier real estate company. In the latter, as I fulfilled my work pulling network cable through offices, I overheard a frustration expressed over a software purchase that wasn’t living up to its promise. They’d licensed software to show pictures of homes for sale, the images rotatable for a 360-degree view. A seemingly simple task today just didn’t seem to work.
They’d acquired many desktop computers of varying speeds from national and local brands, but success eluded them. As a gamer, I felt I knew the problem, but rather than simply tell the solution I offered them a deal — to build and show them a computer to successfully run their software if they would give me the order.
They agreed. I built a computer with off-the-shelf parts and a gamer ready video card, a novelty in the early 1990s. It worked. A minimum viable product (MVP) was in our hands.
I didn’t know, nor had I learned in computer science classes, a key principle taught to students in business school: The most valuable problems worth solving are those that remove a customer’s headache (and saves their face with their boss or stakeholders). Nor did I know the idea of an MVP — a low-cost test product that solves a problem without the accouterments of a finished commercial product.
They didn’t simply give the deal for 400-plus computers to a cable jockey, but they insisted that I find a way to sell the computers via someone who could service them (prescient — you’ll see). In that, a second lesson emerged — of symbiotic partnerships. By this time, I had been in discussions with a friend to merge my consulting business with his, and his network connected me to the city’s premier computer store, and we inked a mutually beneficial deal.
As gamers know all too well today, game cards consume electricity and produce heat. Our computers were no different and began showing symptoms of heat-induced problems. With computers spread out wide across the region, I needed to figure out a way to solve and repair — where the store’s service and support team came to the rescue. We found the right cooling solution, found the way to successfully retrofit, obtained customer approval, and with the team of skilled engineers beside us, fixed the computers.
Both the customer and I moved on from that sale and relationship and didn’t really do anything together again, but the lessons from the experience continued to guide successful and unsuccessful projects in the intervening decades. The lessons I took away were:
Solving a customer’s problem requires listening to it in their words.
Unique solutions to problems often benefit from adjacencies. (Who would’ve imagined gaming know-how to solve a real estate problem?)
You can’t do it all yourself — complementary partners are invaluable.
While I was in the right place at the right time, it was listening to the problem that led not only to a solution but also an opportunity. A pattern that would repeat at least a dozen more times in as many years.
The MVP isn’t the final product. It must be used in the way, and in the environment, the customer intends.
Tej Dhawan is a proud member of the Central Iowa technology community. As the managing partner for Plains Angels’ angel investor network and partner in 2946 Ventures Fund, he is engaged in early-stage investments in startups across various industries. He has started several technology ventures in his three decades in Iowa, and has exited several successfully and a few where success remained elusive. He serves on the board of directors of EMC Insurance, is the chair of the board of trustees of Central College, and is a member of the YMCA, Iowa Venture Capital Association, and Bravo boards of directors.