Jude Gomila’s Got Business on the Brain (+VIDEO)
While the nine-year-olds of the world were sitting in their bedrooms playing video games all day, Jude Gomila was in his room taking them apart, putting them back together, then moving on to tinker with his next project. A businessman on the playground, Jude hasn’t stopped bustling around since he has learned to tie his shoes. Fascinated by the way things work, Jude’s passion for innovation has stayed with him over the years, pushing him to constantly strive to build the next big thing. Whether it’s packaging eggs, selling Wii consoles, or designing digital picture frames, Jude has always been eager to jump headfirst into a new venture and put everything he has behind it.
After a colorful collection of “mini startups,” Jude is finally prepared for his biggest yet: HeyZap, a new site that simplifies the connection between flash games and websites. After several blurry months of hard work and nonstop coding, Jude’s newest project has got him more excited than ever. HeyZap is on his mind during every waking moment, not because he is burdened by the thought or worried about whether or not it will succeed, but because he is genuinely thrilled to have built it and excited to see where he can make it go. Jude says that more than anything, the key to success is truly believing in a product and putting everything into it, because if you can’t live and breathe it, then it’s not worth your time. Click here to read more about HeyZap: Finally Plug-in-Playable: HeyZap Makes Flash Gaming Even Easier
A Short Clip of My Conversation with Jude Gomila
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PROFILE
STATS
Jude Gomila of HeyZap
Companies Founded:
1. HEYZAP – First Proper Valley, VC-Funded Startup – Sept 2008
Fundraised: $650,000
Investors:
Union Square Ventures
Highest Numbers Number of Employees: 8
PERSONAL INFORMATION
Hometown: Harrow, London
Currently Resides: San Francisco, CA
Age: 25
Education: Cambridge University, Engineering
Quality Most Remembered For: Great hair
In 10 Years, I See Myself…: Having one, or two, or even, three startups under my belt
I’m Happiest when…: I’m meeting people, networking, and seeing products launch
I’m Motivated by…: Innovation
Biggest Fear: My Girlfriend (Laughing)
Role Models: Mathematicians, famous physicists, famous engineers, business guys, and any extreme performer in their field.
Jude’s: Linkedin | Twitter | Facebook | Blog
THE INTERVIEW – (Full Interview Transcription)
Jude Gomila
Kim Ngo: How crazy are you?
Jude Gomila: How crazy am I? More than you can ever imagine.
Kim Ngo: Explain. Do you think I’m crazy?
Jude Gomila: Slightly. I think a bit of craziness is good, especially in startups because if you make a boring company, you’re probably going to do something that no one cares about. Whereas if you take a slightly unusual route and don’t do what everyone else is doing, people are attracted to that. Things that are different excite people.
Kim Ngo: What is Heyzap? Tell me in the coolest way possible.
Jude Gomila: Heyzap provides tools for connecting the best flash games from the web to the best web sites and allows players to be more social. So, we take a game from Facebook and we put it in the right place on the web.
Kim Ngo: Would you say this market is fairly new?
Jude Gomila: It’s very new. Asia is leading the market, it’s ahead of the US in ways; but the US is also skyrocketing. The market has been getting insane.
Kim Ngo: So how many companies have you founded?
Jude Gomila: Heyzap is my third startup, but it’s my first proper venture capital-funded startup and also my first Silicon Valley-located startup.
I’ve gone through many smaller projects. When you try to create a website, make a product, or experiment with your friends and make things, those are all mini startups in a way. I’ve been making things in my bedroom, experimenting, and messing with websites since I was around nine years old. Each of these experiences helped prepare me for a big startup.
Kim Ngo: At nine years old?
At the HeyZap Office
Jude Gomila: I started messing around with the web when I was about fourteen when the Internet became available to me. My friends and I were messing around, playing with games, and trying to figure different things out. Essentially, we wanted to be creative and find new uses for the web, which weren’t really available at the time.
Kim Ngo: Can you tell us the story? How did it get started?
Jude Gomila: I’ve been making things in my bedroom, working on random hardware and electronic projects. I was really interested in constructing things, engineering and messing around with stuff. I used to take apart electronics just to look at what was inside.
For example, there’s a company in the UK that’s a bit like Costco, I used to go through the catalog and look at all the different products and their pricing, not necessarily because I wanted to buy anything, but because I was interested in how they worked.
I was also into making cash on the playground from buying and selling things. I remember buying some chewing gum in bulk that was super cheap, and then selling each stick for roughly 75 cents. I made about 50 times of the price I bought the gum for. It was small money, but I was like, “Okay, now I can buy things like hardware and whatever I want!”
Another thing I did in primary school was I used a magic 8-ball reader to go around the playground and ask people, “Do you want your future read? It’s 10 cents a go.” It was great because it was a virtual present, like the ones you see in the virtual world today. I could keep doing it over and over again.
Jude Gomila AGAIN.
Kim Ngo: Which university did you go to?
Jude Gomila: I went to Cambridge University and majored in engineering.
I was among pretty good people. I got interested in business during college. Though, I was always interested in making money before university, but the “traditional business process” wasn’t part of my mindset.
In my second year, I participated in a business competition, and we redesigned a process for kidney dialysis. My team was a finalist, and we took fourth place, which was pretty good since most of the people there had PhDs. I think we were the youngest finalists ever. It was encouraging. It was a big competition where the winner took home $75,000.
But I started to see this disconnect between participating in college competitions and just being creative. The competitions weren’t like the real world of business. Even though it was impressive and I started to make contacts, I started to think about funding and the practical aspects of entrepreneurship.
Learning about business is very different in the UK than the in US.
Kim Ngo: How so?
Jude Gomila: Well, there weren’t role models to look at around our community. There was really just one guy, Michael Smith, who created Moshi Monsters. He did firebox.com, which is a big UK gift site, and he was quite a bit older than us. He was one of the few guys that made it seem possible that you could be very successful as an entrepreneur in the UK.
Kim Ngo: Why do you think it’s different in the UK?
Jude with Max Ventilla of Aardvark
Jude Gomila: There are several reasons. Obviously, there are more funding opportunities because there are so many venture capital firms here. Other companies like Facebook, Yahoo and Google are here, so you can make deals quickly. And the skills to make it all happen are here: you’ve got people with the right mindset and training. The right people, funding, companies, and deals are all here.
Even the pure logistics of having a meeting are so much simpler in Silicon Valley. There are many different startups close to our office. We can just jump across the street for a meeting. In London, it’s a 30 to 45 minute commute for a meeting.
Kim Ngo: Who’s your favorite VC?
Jude Gomila:Union Square Ventures has been really good to us. They’ve been giving us a lot of great advice. Albert Wenger is an amazing guy. He’s one of the few investors with a computer science degree. Albert brings a lot of context – not just on business side, but also on the technical side as well.
Kim Ngo: I hear the relationship with a VC is really important.
Jude Gomila: Yes! They can make you or break you. You have to report back to your VC every day or every week, and they have the ability to get involved with what you’re buying, who you’re recruiting, and the direction of the company. If a VC tries to restrict you in too many ways, you end up being non-entrepreneurial.
It’s much better for VCs to provide contacts to you when you need them and steer you towards the right market. Often, they will solve specific problems if you need help, but the most important thing is that they are there when you need them and that they keep track of you and make sure that you’re going in the right direction.
Kim Ngo: It sounds like entrepreneurs don’t look for micro managers; they look for investors who support them when they need it. Let’s get back to your story. What happened after college?
Jude Doing His Thing!
Jude Gomila: After I graduated, I set up a business with two other guys from Cambridge.
We tried a few different things, like a strategic consulting company because we had a lot of specialists in that. That paid the bills, but it wasn’t scalable.
Another thing we tried, which is quite funny, is an egg packaging company. And everyone takes the piss out of me for this one, but it was still an experiment in entrepreneurship. The profit margin was very slim, and I learned that you have to go into a business that has a decent margin. There were some hard lessons learned that you couldn’t learn from a textbook. Selling to farmers was the hardest thing in the world. But I learned not to get into a stagnant market. To make a profit, it is essential to get into a market which will innovate quickly, because that speed will allow your business to move fast as well.
Kim Ngo: What did you after that?
Jude Gomila: I tried to develop an electronics brand for electronic photo frames marketed to premium stores. We led the spec and captured the best part of the market. We came in at the highest priced point and were making good margins. But, I realized that it’s difficult to compete with the large manufacturers, like Philips and Kodak, without a lot of funding. We literally started out with one of two frames, sold it on eBay, then doubled and re-doubled our money, which went back into making more frames.
The cool thing was that we had real products which got into the Hi-Fi Expo. Our product was in Harrods and Selfridges – the most prestigious stores in Europe and the rest of the world – and our brand was getting out there. That was back in 2007, right after graduating from the university. I did about a million dollars turnover over the projects.
Kim Ngo: How old were you?
Jude Gomila: I think I was 22. Then I spotted an opportunity to sell Nintendo Wiis from Europe to the UK. During Christmas time, the UK completely ran out of stock. I had seen this coming and bought stock from Europe and retrofitted the machines.
Kim Ngo: So you were one of those guys selling the Wii game for 3 times the price. Why did you decide to come to the US?
Jude Gomila: Well, I was searching for my next project, and I was interested in virtual goods because it was a hot market— it still is. I learned all the fundamentals about products from my previous experiences with hardware. I decided to come over to the US and work for ClickPass to help them strategize. Soon after, the company sold. At that point, Immad Akhund, one of the cofounders exited; he was a long-term friend of 10 years.
In the summer 2008, Immad Akhund and I started thinking about ideas. We settled upon the idea of Heyzap around September. Then we coded like crazy to get the whole thing ready to launch in January 2009.
Kim Ngo: So just you and him coded?
Jude with Chris Bader and Paul Graham
Jude Gomila: He did back end and I did front end. We got in the Y-Combinator program from January to March. It was good being in a group of mutual hackers, coders, and business people. The network and lessons we learned, like how to launch a startup, were really interesting.
We coded so much that we actually missed meals.
Kim Ngo: Sounds too familiar. Did you lose weight?
Jude Gomila: I don’t remember. It’s a bit of a blur. I lost track of time and can’t really remember. We launched in January and were in the batch as the first guys to launch, I think.
Kim Ngo: What do you mean “in the batch.” Were there competitors?
Jude Gomila: There weren’t competitors. There were 15 companies that are in the program’s batch, twice a year. Everyone creates their own startup and pitches it in on demo day in March. On demo day, all the investors come in to look at all the company proposals and ideas. It’s a great way to find the right investors and get funding.
We knew that demo day was coming up and wanted to be prepared for the funding round. We got some traction from launching, and lots of people installed our widget. Then we started doing our funding round. We got oversubscribed for the round and talked to Union Square Ventures. There were other great angel investors as well. After that, we recruited CTO James Smith and started building our own team. HeyZap has 10 employees now as of March 2010.
Jude Gomila (Right)
Kim Ngo: Were you really passionate about packaging?
Jude Gomila: Yeah, is that sad?
Kim Ngo: No, I’m just wondering, “How?”
Jude Gomila: Once you see the unique selling points of the product, you can get passionate about the product and the market. You have to be passionate about what you are doing! When you employ people, as well, if you aren’t passionate, you don’t show any form of leadership or help your company culture. If you start to let things go, your company will start drifting.
Kim Ngo: Do you think building a company has hurt you from going out and living your life? Do you have a girlfriend? How does she feel about your busy work schedule?
Jude Gomila: Yes, building a company has been a lot of work. Yes I have a girlfriend. What I learned is that you need to be efficient with your time. You are trying to spend 100 hours a week on your company, but you also need to spend time with your girlfriend. You got to be super efficient and drop everything that is a waste of time. It’s smart to have a personal assistant.
You got to cut down all the time that is wasted on the little things. In the beginning of my startup career, I used to reply to and get involved in everything. Now I can’t do that. There’s a point you reach when you have to let the little things go.
Kim Ngo: Good answer. Are you afraid of anything?
Jude Gomila: I think you can’t be afraid of failure. If you try your best and it doesn’t work out, you have to try again. You need to know when to pull out, and you need to know when to keep going. If you discover that you went into a bad market, you got to switch markets. If you have the wrong team, then you got to switch teams.
It’s like the Vegas slot machines. There are 40 fruit symbols, and you are trying to hit the right ones for big payouts. You test all these different dials and variables. From your mistakes and experience, you know that these dials should be on certain settings, but you haven’t tested out all the other settings. If you line all them up correctly, you will be successful, but you won’t know until you make those mistakes and are experienced enough to know what variables lead to success.
Kim Ngo: What would you say was your toughest experience in all of this?
Jude (RT) = Best Energy Ever! No Doubt!!!! - Kim Ngo
Jude Gomila: Getting a visa was a lot of work. It was very distracting as well, because I was trying to build a company while messing around with legal work.
Getting funding is hard too. We were on the road, speaking to different investors. All the time spent pitching is time divested from building the company. Pitching doesn’t automatically lead to getting money, users, and traffic growth. As for funding, we’ve raised during the hardest time during the recession. It was hard, because no one was investing and some investors didn’t even have money.
Kim Ngo: What do you think are the three top qualities that an entrepreneur needs to be successful?
Jude Gomila: The most important quality would be persistence. It is the most important variable. Intelligence is actually at the bottom of the list. You need to take calculated risks by knowing the difference between the risks that come from important things where there is or isn’t any gain. Being frugal and not wasting money is also very important. Intelligence helps, but it can slow you down as well. Sometimes you just need to take action and know when you have to strategically move out and try the next thing.
Kim Ngo: What do you think is more likely going to happen to Heyzap? Do you think you will have an exit plan or do you think you’ll be able to build a profitable business?
Jude Gomila: You should always have an exit plan. You need to have an exit plan, and you need to know which companies can buy you. You need to know how far you want to go; we want to go as far as possible with Heyzap.
Kim Ngo: If you could give one piece of advice for future entrepreneurs, what would it be?
Jude Gomila: For consumer products: GO LIVE. Launch it. Be aggressive from day one, even if you don’t have a name. This is a common problem that often leads to failure, so many people come to me with an app that they built but haven’t launched.
Get out there quickly. You just have to get out there and test things like what the market wants. Listen to your customers, but you have to get it out there first.
Kim Ngo: Just do it. Thanks Jude. I enjoyed our conversation. Good luck with all your future endeavors!
