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Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Executive Conversations
CEO to CEO: Digital Lumens' Pincince interviews SCVNGR's Priebatsch
MHT's Galen Moore: Mass. companies building to be sold
UMass President Jack Wilson on Entrepreneurship
When Tom Pincince, president and CEO of LED lighting company Digital Lumens Inc., was invited to participate in Mass High Tech’s continuing series of features called Executive Conversation, in which entrepreneurs from startups meet with experienced CEOs, Pincince turned the table. He wanted to learn from one of the Boston area’s hot young entrepreneurs, Seth Priebatsch, chief ninja of location-based smartphone game organizer SCVNGR Inc.
“Interviewing an old guy about how to build and run a company would be kind of boring,” said Pincince. So he interviewed Priebatsch, who dropped out of Princeton University at age 19 to found SCVNGR in 2008. They met at Priebatsch’s Cambridge office.
Tom Pincince: What does a day in the life of Seth look like?
Seth Priebatsch: I get up early in the morning. I try to get an hour of work in, depending on how the previous night at the office was. I go running every morning. That keeps me at a low enough energy level that I can interact with other people. I don’t drink coffee, and I’m already pretty hyper. I finish running at around 8:30. I come into the office and work here with the team from 8:30 or 9 in the morning until 10, 11, 12 midnight. And I generally crash here at the office. Then wash and do it again.
TP: You and I talked about how game theory can be used throughout the world. How do you use game theory here inside the company?
SP: Internally everything we do is a game. We judge our sales team and motivate them not necessarily on the dollars that they bring in or on quota but on points. We will have a holiday on Wednesday called superbowl Wednesday. It starts in the morning, and it is a game and runs all day – everyone gets together and states what they are going to do that day. “I’m going to bring in four sales,” or “I’m going to get National Geographic to launch a new game with us,” or “I’m going to bring in 10,000 new users.” We all get excited. It’s high energy; a gong ringing every time somebody makes a sale. It’s just insanely noisy.
We get together at the end and everyone gets to vote, and somebody wins. Who did the best that day? Prizes might be an iPhone or someone gets to drive a Ferrari. We turn everything we do — whether it is selling, whether it is building a better product, whether it is just interacting with people — into some form of a game. So we’re always having fun, and we’re always thinking about what we have to do, which is to build a better game for the world.
TP: How do you build the company philosophy organically? Do you have a mentor or a model?
SP: Joe Caruso of Bantam Group is a great guy, Peter Bell from Highland Capital, Rich Miner from Google Ventures (Ed. all investors in SCVNGR).
Most other things have been a lot of trial, and I think we haven’t made too many mistakes. After we took the first round from Highland Capital, we were told, ‘You have 20 people you have to form a corporation.’ I don’t like the word corporation. You have to have quarterly reviews and hierarchy and all those things. Well, we’re at 60 people now and we don’t.
We hire incredibly bright and self-motivated people. We work with a point system based not just on the dollars you bring in but for every dollar that client brings in you get a point, and every user that plays with that client, you get a point.
TP: Have you been asked to mentor other companies? It seems that as a leader of an emerging company people would want to be near you and learn from you.
SP: Generally, I say no because the free time that I have in my day is non-existent.
TP: At the (recent MassTLC) unConference there was a conversation about visionaries and leaders. Which one are you? A visionary talks about where the company should go, a leader tends to be much more formal, organized.
SP: I think it depends on the role that I play at any time. In general it’s a mix of the two. In my position it takes a high level of visionary ability when working with engineering in terms of where we want to be at, and at the same time when working with sales or biz dev or operations you have to know that there’s someone who is better at it than you are.
TP: You mentioned that a lot of the genius here is in the success in hiring people. How have you done that?
SP: We have insane hiring policies. It’s not just the categorization of great people with great ideas. It’s not about me walking around barefoot and acting insane. It’s great people acting insane and building an actual company and making it happen. Nobody gets hired at SCVNGR with fewer than five in-person interviews. Generally speaking, those are pretty aggressive depending on the position. For sales people we will sit them down in a room and have three people walk in who are acting, and we’ll just start screaming at each other. Everything is just raw… Some people just leave. Some people crack, they really don’t like it; they can’t handle the stress. We interview 100 to 120 people for every person we hire. On the engineering side we actually hire people before we hire them. We say we’re going to pay you for 72 hours to build something, but we are going to rip through your code and force you to defend every piece of code that you write. Every person that we hire at SCVNGR is the best at what they do, and every one else here knows that they are the best. So there is incredible respect.
TP: What do you think about the work/life balance?
SP: I reserve the right to sleep right here on the couch. I made that choice. I don’t have a social life here in Boston. Everyone else is dedicated and working incredibly long hours. It’s almost as busy here on Saturday as it is on Tuesday. They know that if we have 1,000 enterprise customers we will get to 100,000, and we will be a billion dollar company. But most people should maintain a good work/life balance.
TP: How long can the organization exist in this format?
SP: I hope it works forever. I think part of what has enabled it to be successful is that it is so incredibly exciting and so fast moving. If we’re not agile, we’re dead… I think that probably the biggest hurdle for us next — and we may have to implement more controls — is when we go international.
TP: The Boston community has been very proud of your success and the progress you have made, but there is a topic of conversation in the community about how we can keep young technology professionals here in Boston.
SP: I picked Boston because of the universities. I believe there is the greatest profusion of incredibly bright people in Boston. It’s easier to hire the best and the brightest in Boston.
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