John Richard Simplot made a fortune selling potatoes. His company, J.R. Simplot Co., supplies around 50% of the French fries Americans snarf down at McDonald’s each year. An Idaho farmer with an eighth-grade education, Simplot, who died in 2009, was also the man behind semiconductor powerhouse Micron.
Laura Behrens Wu didn’t know the first thing about ecommerce or logistics and had no technical background. Nevertheless, she guided the company she founded, Shippo, to become a leading online shipping platform for smaller merchants.
Brian Chesky was an industrial designer with no experience in hospitality before he founded Airbnb. Jamie Wong was a producer and writer when she started online marketplace Vayable.
And the list goes on. As Harvard Business School professor and Flybridge general partner Jeff Bussgang puts it, “Time and time again, I have seen outstanding founders who defy the theory of founder-market fit— founders who have little domain knowledge or even little operating experience at all are somehow able to navigate the journey of building a valuable company from scratch.”
Outside experience makes the difference
Bussgang identifies a few factors that can spell success for founder without domain experience: passion, the ability to lead, focus and determination, and that ineffable quality that inspires others. All true, but he missed an important one: an outside perspective. All of us are captive to our experiences, and that leads people to prejudge what will and will not work, what is or is not possible. Those with industry naiveite, however, can see past the obstacles and impossibilities that trip up insiders. They’re not harnessed to incremental changes to established patterns and can, instead, look at a problem in a wildly different way.
Now package that outsider vision with decades of business experience and proven leadership ability, and you’ve got a founder poised to disrupt an industry.
An organic road to this point
The founders of Xinsere began, as many entrepreneurs do, by being frustrated by an unsolved problem in our industry. We are marketers, and we saw more and more of the brands we strove to build suffer lasting brand damage due to consumer data breaches—a problem that would only get worse since brands were investing heavily in building up their databases of zero- and first-party data. Moreover, consumers were growing weary of being uncompensated for the data that others were using for profit.
In addressing that, we realized that we would create a massive cybersecurity problem for our own company. Our response? An elegant solution that secured mass quantities of consumer data much better than traditional cybersecurity techniques could.
You can predict what happened next: the classic pivot. We saw that our fix for the weakness in our original idea was, in fact, the biggest challenge of all. And so Xinsere was born, as so many companies are, of a keenly felt pain, a passion to solve it, and a some unexpected turns along the way.