To Watch Clips of Interview, visit: Watch Dan Olsen

After receiving an MBA at Stanford, Dan worked for various companies in the high tech industry and in naval engineering for 18 years. In 2004, Dan worked at Friendster and then went off to start a lustrous consulting firm, Olsen Solutions LLC. Olsen Solutions consulted numerous Internet startups companies such as Box.net, YouSendIt, and Moodlogic. In 2007, Dan took a bold leap by creating his own startup, which was operated out of his very own house. The passion and dedication of Dan and his team led to YourVersion’s thrilling launch and success at the recent TechCrunch50 conference. Dan discusses the unspoken nature of the first years at a startup and advises that it is better to accomplish something than achieve nothing.

STATS

Number of Companies Founded: 2
1. Olsen Solutions, LLC
2. YourVersion

Funding: As of Oct 2009 – Fully Bootstrapped
Number of Employees: 5
Awards: 2009 TC50 People’s Choice Award

PERSONAL INFORMATION

Hometown: Rota, Spain
Currently Resides: Palo Alto, CA
Bachelor of Science: Electrical Engineering, Northwestern University – 1991
Master of Engineering Administration: Industrial Engineering, Virginia Tech University – 1995
Master of Business Administration: Stanford Graduate School of Business – 1998

Hobbies/Interests: Sailing, playing poker, and wine tasting
Biggest Fear: Not having enough time
Favorite Quote: “Responsibility is a unique concept: it can only reside and inhere in a single individual. You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you. You may disclaim it, but you cannot divest yourself of it. Even if you do not recognize it or admit its presence, you cannot escape it. If the responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance, or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point the finger at the person who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”

- Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, USN

Role Models: Admiral Hyman Rickover and Albert Einstein

Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/danolsen98
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/SVdan
YourVersion Profile: http://www.yourversion.com/profile/dan

THE INTERVIEW

Kim Ngo: Hi Dan, nice office … and home. Thank you for meeting with IntimateMath today. Can you start by telling us about YourVersion in the simplest and hottest way possible?

Dan Olsen: YourVersion is a “real-time discovery engine” — real time is very hot now. YourVersion goes out and finds content that’s tailored for your specific interests . It finds what is new and relevant on a continual basis. It’s a great way to stay updated on the latest news and topics you’re interested in: poker, sailing, HTML, calculus, etc.

Kim Ngo: So it’s ranked in terms of most current?

Dan Olsen: The term we use for that is “recency.” That’s what real time is about. In contrast, Google sorts information by relevance. The best way to sort is with a combination of these two. We do both. We do recency, so results are presented in an updated order, but we make sure that they are relevant to the specific interest that you typed in.

Kim Ngo: Why would YourVersion be useful for me?

Dan Olsen: It would be useful for you if you had hobbies or interests, and you wanted to see cool new information on the Internet without doing any work. YourVersion goes out to the web, fetches all the recent and relevant information and brings it to you, and then makes it easy for you to scan and select. You can see which articles you would be interested in and which ones you would not.

Kim Ngo: How are you planning to get traffic?

Dan Olsen: The most important thing is to have a great product, because at the end of the day, if people love the site, they’re going to tell other people about it. I’m a big believer in the old school “word of mouth” method.

For example, when we wanted to go from private beta to public beta, we decided to launch it at TechCrunch50– a large event, where if you win, you get a lot of PR out of it. That’s what happened to us; we won the TechCrunch50 People’s Choice Award.

Once a good product has users, it becomes viral. For example, our engine makes it really easy for users to share information with friends.

Kim Ngo: After TechCrunch50, did YourVersion’s traffic spike?

Dan Olsen: Yes, by a lot. It was funny to see because I knew it was going to spike so our team worked really hard on getting ready for that massive traffic by moving to EC2 to get more servers. Everything held up great. There was definitely a spike but then I wondered where it would end up.

Kim Ngo: Where did it end up?

Dan Olsen: It ended up higher than where it was before. To this day, YourVersion site traffic continues to have a positive slope. And throughout the month we have follow up events to continue to get the word out.

Kim Ngo: How did you win everyone over that day at TC50? Outside of the presentation, what did you do differently?

Dan Olsen: I think our team accomplished this. We all had our company t-shirts on, and acted like a team. Everyone felt like this was the event where we finally got to unveil our baby that we had been working on for two years. We were so excited to show off the results of all our hard work to people.

My advice to other entrepreneurs who come to events like these is to make sure that you bring a couple of extroverted people on your team. You need people on your team that are going to walk around and approach people asking them if they have seen your product. People can become infected by that energy and excitement.

I didn’t even realize where we stood in the People’s Choice Award until this other entrepreneur said, “Hey, your booth has a lot of chips compared to the other booths.”

Kim Ngo: I know you’re planning to rely on advertisements, but are there any other potential revenue streams?

Dan Olsen: Yes, definitely. In addition to listing ads to target specific interests, we will also experiment with selling sponsored results.

I have also worked on several “freemium products” in the past. I consulted for YouSendIt and Box.net. These sites have service levels where they charge users $5/month or $10/month, but they also have basic service offerings that are free for some users. I’m fine with applying this type of pricing for YourVersion. If we get into it, what we end up doing is an analysis, and we might notice that ten percent of our users are power users. With that information, we then would find ways to set limits on free usage because these people are using the site the most.

Many people don’t mind paying a little money to suppress ads. If your users are very passionate about your product, they’ll pay that $5/month. So freemium is a potential business model.

Another good business model for sites that have many users is to create a database with all the information that can be mined, for example, for a given topic, what sites people are clicking on the most. This database can be monetized with advertisers seeking to improve ad relevance. This is a bigger, longer-term strategy that YourVersion can adopt.

Kim Ngo: How did you get started?

Dan Olsen: I worked at Intuit for five years after business school. In 1998, I graduated from Stanford Business School. A lot of my classmates were going to startups, but I just wanted to go to the best place to learn how to develop consumer software. And everyone said Intuit was the best place to go so I began working there. I learned a lot. After that, I felt that I had enough experience and wanted to join a startup to learn what startups were like.

My first startup experience was at a bootstrapped startup in Madrid. We worked out of the living room of my friend’s apartment. Then I joined Friendster. After Friendster, I felt like I had the skills and experience to create my own startup, but I just didn’t have an idea I was excited about.

I’m not one of these people who can say, “Well! Wireless networking is hot. Let me get involved with that.” I have to do something that I feel internally–I’m referring to being passionate about what I do and what I create. If you knew the amount of hours I’ve put into YourVersion, there’s no way I could do this much work for something I am not really excited and passionate about.

I came up with the idea for YourVersion two and a half years ago. I realized that there were all these sites that provided a good solution to a user problem but didn’t take advantage of the user data they generated as a result. If some sites actually paid attention to the data from their users and used the information to make personalized recommendations, they could provide even more value to their customers. For example, OpenTable does a great job of making it easy to make restaurant reservations. However, if they analyzed my reservations, they could make personalized recommendations about new restaurants. So I asked myself, why don’t we apply personalized recommendations to the problem of connecting people with relevant information? The Internet is exploding with information and there’s not a good way for people to stay on top of their interests on a recurring basis.

That’s how the idea for YourVersion started. I did a little proof of concept for a few months. Then I basically tried to juggle consulting half-time with working on my startup. My startup was not receiving enough attention , so I decided to stop my consulting business to focus solely on YourVersion.

Kim Ngo: What made you say, ”I’m going to leave a paying job and go straight into creating my own startup?”

Dan Olsen: I think it goes back to what I was saying earlier: having an idea that I was so excited and passionate about. And an idea that has long legs.

Kim Ngo: What’s makes you nervous?

Dan Olsen: I don’t get nervous. Though, on nights where I can’t go to sleep, I’m thinking about the critical things my company needs to complete, and how to make sure we have enough time to get them done. One thing that has allowed us to do so much at this small startup is our team which is ruthless about prioritization. We have to be realistic; there are only five of us. We can’t do everything, so we strategize to get the most done.

Kim Ngo: Are you afraid of failure?

Dan Olsen: I’m a big believer in not worrying about things that are out of your control. It doesn’t do any good. When you have a small team, you can only work on what you have control over. Although there may be twenty things you want to do, there’s not enough time to do those things.

I use the concept of “continuous forward progress”. If you keep chipping away at something and keep making continuous progress, you will get closer and closer to your goal. At the end of the day, all you can do is prioritize and work on the top things that you think are the most important at that point in time. And if you’ve done that and worked hard all day, how can somebody criticize you? When you’re in a startup, there’s definitely low lows and high highs. Hopefully, there are more highs than lows. Like at TechCrunch50: when we launched, we were flying on cloud nine. All our hard work paid off.

Kim Ngo: What would you say was your toughest experience so far?

Dan Olsen: When you’re building a website from scratch, there’s a lot of slogging you have to do to get the basics built. Before you even get to the sexy part of the product, it’s just grunt work. At first, it was just me coding. Then I recruited several friends who would help once in a while.

In February 2008, after a lot of hard work, YourVersion reached a rough private beta. After reaching that milestone, my friends moved on to other projects and it was me coding again. That was the low point for me: realizing that the progress was too slow. At the time, I told myself I needed to recruit two full time developers to help me out, and I probably had to pay them salaries. So I incorporated and was getting ready to look for a seed round. But at the last minute, I decided to test the assumption that I had to pay people cash. I gave myself two weeks to try to recruit people for equity. So I started emailing people and posting job listings. Six people responded to me within a week but two were willing to work for equity. My reaction was, “Cool, let’s delay the fundraising and let’s start cracking.”

Kim Ngo: How do you get your teammates to commit without a paycheck?

Dan Olsen: Basically, it’s a fit for my teammates to be a part of YourVersion. The product and company resonate with them. Everyone here is hardworking. I think what they like is the ability to learn. And every engineer loves it when their work launches. They are plenty of places where they don’t launch stuff, or they don’t launch it frequently.

Kim Ngo: Why do you think that is?

Dan Olsen: There are lots of reasons. The vision may keep changing, or they might never feel ready, or their work may not be a

high priority.

You need to say, “Innovation is important to our culture, and we have to launch every day or every couple days.” Iteration happens because you get feedback on the new feature you just launched which informs the next release. So if you have a long time between your launch cycles, you aren’t getting the feedback to make your product better. And you always HAVE to make your product better!

Kim Ngo: If you could tell future entrepreneurs one thing, what would that be?

Dan Olsen: I would say surround yourself with a good team of people. No one person, no matter how great or smart or talented, can do what it takes to run a startup. You can get the ball rolling and be the leader, but you really need a team of people to surround yourself with because you do get synergies where when there’s one other person, it is more than double the output and when it’s triple, it’s more than triple the output. I would tell future entrepreneurs to find the right people, but this can be tough. Luckily, there are a lot of free networking events in the Valley; you can get out there and meet people that share your vision and dreams and who you also get along with. And complement your skills. That would be my one piece of advice.