00:02:26 · Jim Rose
[00:02:26] S5: Most startups are going to fail. Very, very few of them succeed. The chances that you're going to succeed aren't very high. What you want to do, depending on how much money you have, is you want to give yourself as many chances to find product market fit as possible. When you find product market fit, you will feel it. You won't know why it happened, but you'll feel the market pull. The only way you can find that out is to. My name is Jim Rose. I'm the CEO of CircleCI. CircleCI is a continuous integration and continuous delivery platform. Think of it, we're the manufacturing system for software. So when developers make a change to an application, you want to be able to build, test, and validate that that change is good before you put it into the hands of your downstream consumers. We're at a pretty decent scale, so we're more than 100,000,000 in revenue. We're about 300 plus folks distributed globally. We work with organizations of all sizes, including folks like Hugging Face and Weights and Biases, including the US government. Well, it's been an interesting market over the last ten years. I think the first thing is you always want to recognize that the market is cyclical. There's going to be ups, there's going to be downs. As an entrepreneur and as a startup, your job is to not get too high, at the same token, not getting too low. You want to make sure that you're charting a path and staying stable and making sure that you're doing the best thing you can. But if you're building a good business and you're building something that's valuable and that your customers enjoy, you're going to be fine. There are very, very, very few overnight successes. But usually if you look at most great companies, they've been at it and working hard and growing over the course of five, seven, ten, fifteen years. What I have found is that you need two things to be successful as an entrepreneur. One is you need to be inherently very curious. You have to always be kind of trying to figure out what makes things tick. What's curious? What's interesting right now? What kind of problems are you running into? And then I think the other part of it is you have to be able to step back and see problems, not just at a small microscopic level. You have to be able to step back a little bit and look for patterns.
00:04:40 · Jim Rose
Because I think great opportunities and great businesses oftentimes, while they start with a very unique point solution or point insight, it's usually the companies that you see succeed over a long period of time have that ability to zoom out a little bit and say, Oh, that one point is actually related to these 15 other things. What if we could solve seven of them? What do you have to avoid as an entrepreneur? You have to avoid getting too swayed by the flavor of the day or the trend of the moment. Trends are trends. One of the things I see happening so much right now is the half life of trends right now is getting shorter and shorter and shorter. And our attention span is getting shorter and shorter and shorter. You have to figure out how to be aware of it, but then ultimately be in a place where you can ride out and understand the value that you're adding for a customer and not get distracted. If you're focused on an area where there's a lot of users or a lot of money spent, it just gives you a lot of ability and affordance to be wrong. If you're going after a market and there's only $10,000,000 spent there and only $10,000,000 the potential, you're gonna have to figure out a way to get all 10 of it. Whereas if you're going after a market that's $100,000,000,000 there's lots of different ways to get to $10,000,000 in revenue. And so focusing on very large opportunities in large pools gives you a lot of flexibility to try new things and a lot of different ways to choose your own adventure to get to size and to get to something that's meaningful. Oftentimes, the thing that you build that's gonna be meaningful is going to be seen as a toy by everyone else. That's the way that you can kind of establish a way to generate something that's meaningful to 10 users or a 100 users. Once you can
00:06:27 · S0, S1
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00:06:52 · S1, S3
Ad[00:06:52] S1: Who said you can't have things your way? Spin your way on DraftKings Casino, the exclusive iGaming provider of Foxwoods. Flex spins let you pick the slots exclusively on DraftKings. New casino players play $5 and get 1,000 total flex spins, including 100 lightning link spins. Unlock 50 spins a day at varying values for your first twenty days, then use your spins your way across more than a 100 top slots. Download the DraftKings Casino app now. Sign up with promo code floor and spin your way. The crown is yours. In partnership with DraftKings Casino. Help is available for problem gambling. Call (888) 789-7777 or visit ccpg.org. Must be 21 or older. Physically present in Connecticut. Eligibility restrictions apply. Nonwithdrawable spins issued as 50 spins per day for twenty days valid for select games only and expire each day after twenty four hours. Spins values vary. See terms at casino.draftkings.com/promos. Ends 11/22/2026 at 11:59PM eastern time. Ad[00:07:52] S3: This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.
00:07:52 · S3, S4, Jim Rose, S6
Ad[00:07:52] S3: This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Ad[00:08:22] S4: The secret society of semi homemade? Listen up. Sam's Club has premade dishes for a Thanksgiving feast that's ready in two hours, all while tasting suspiciously homemade. Ad[00:08:33] S5: Come join us. Sam's Club. [00:08:35] S6: Individual oven times may vary. [00:08:37] S5: Find that thing that that attaches that that becomes meaningful to your customer. That's the the the spark. So you wanna target markets that are big, but you wanna target opportunities that you can get to quickly so that you can better understand, Am I on the right track? Am I solving a real problem? The customers enjoy the thing that we're building and delivering to them so that you can continue to invest and reinvest and grow.
00:08:37 · Jim Rose, Rob Zuber
[00:08:37] S5: Find that thing that that attaches that that becomes meaningful to your customer. That's the the the spark. So you wanna target markets that are big, but you wanna target opportunities that you can get to quickly so that you can better understand, Am I on the right track? Am I solving a real problem? The customers enjoy the thing that we're building and delivering to them so that you can continue to invest and reinvest and grow. [00:09:05] S7: I'm Rob Zuber, CTO of CircleCI. A co founder relationship is a very long relationship, and it's very difficult to exit. I met Jim through our third co founder at Copious. And so Jim and I went for coffee, and he sort of gave me a bunch of insights into the business as someone who had never even worked on it that were really interesting and compelling to me, like very insightful. And I thought this is someone who really understands product, really understands like the kinds of things that you face in a startup. And so I think it would be really interesting to work together. And I will say many early stage investors spend all of their time trying to understand the dynamics of the team and the relationships between the people, because that is the biggest challenge. If I was considering starting a company with someone, I would be extremely honest about who I am, what motivates me, how I work, what frustrates me, and would want to hear the same from that potential co founder to know that we're going to work together because otherwise we're going to invest years of our lives in something that's going