🚀✉️ The done column
Eli Hooten is today's Five Minute Mentor.
Happy Friday letter getters,
I want to offer some background on this week's email. I'm really excited to share a little about the story of GameWisp, a company I used to write about, and later worked for. Although this interview is focused on new ventures, GameWisp holds a special place in my personal entrepreneurial journey, but I also have had the opportunity to work with incredible people from there. GameWisp's former CEO is most recently the founder of Steadfast Media Company, our sponsors. The subject of today's LaunchLetter is GameWisp's former CTO. I hope you enjoy reading!
In 2014, Eli Hooten, along with three cofounders, were accepted into a competitive tech accelerator with a business called GameWisp. The company was a bit of a stand out for a few reasons: it was in gaming, the founders had higher academic degrees, they were early on understanding the entertainment value of personalities on live streaming sites like YouTube and Twitch. After Gamewisp sold its technology in 2018, Eli took on his second CTO role at Codecov, a company that makes developer tools that specifically help engineering teams improve their software by improving and tracking their code coverage. They currently support an enormous and diverse number of projects across the software spectrum, from marquee open source repositories to some of the largest and most innovative companies in the world. Eli is one of just a handful of founders who have the experience of building a business, creating revenue streams, growing and leading a team that created an exit opportunity. He additionally chose to continue the startup journey with his current company. Meet your five minute mentor, Eli Hooten.
I'm incredibly pumped for AI and what it means for customer support and customer success. There's so much human work that's incredibly hard to scale without just throwing more bodies and more documentation at the problem. I'd love to see some sort of AI/ML driven approach that could do a really great job of distilling user questions and issues into a pattern matchable set of inputs by extracting meaningful data from their support queries. Said differently, there are as many different ways to describe a bug as there are humans in the world. So an AI doing the work of determining ''oh, this user is actually talking about known problem X, to which I can supply known answer Y" before a customer support rep has to spend time figuring it out for themselves would be game changing in my opinion.
Here's one I learned the hard way...
Self-deception is prevalent, powerful, and should be avoided at all costs. Humans are notorious for lying to themselves to explain away inconvenient truths. This is no different in business. When facing an incredibly tough problem or hard decision, be sure to step back and attack it analytically from first principles to remove any hint of self-deception. My first question is always, "What would my gut reaction to this problem be if my best friend was telling me about it?" It's a helpful framing device to make sure I'm not lying to myself or practicing willful ignorance in an attempt to sidestep an unavoidably messy situation.
Get things out of your brain as quickly as physically possible. My memory is absolute garbage, so I have to get tasks, plans, and ideas out of my brain and into some method of long term storage as quickly as possible. I've used a million different methods to get this done, and my current favorite is just a personal Trello. Make four columns: Done, To Do, Later, and Watch. Stack up your todo's in the Later column, and move a subset over each day to form your work for that day. Throw simmering/back burner stuff in Watch. The Done column lets you have that little dopamine hit that comes from getting something done. You'd be surprised how much of your professional and personal life you can effectively manage by just using these four columns.
99% of current and yet to be conceived software ideas don't need outside investment anywhere near as much as they just need a good product to solve a real problem. Stop trying to convince yourself that up front cash will make the difference between success and failure and just go build a product that stands on its own two feet from day 1. It's a grueling and difficult slog, but there's nothing better than controlling your own destiny.
Individual success is based mostly on luck. Hard work applied correctly can greatly increase your potential for encountering lucky outcomes. Work hard -- with passion, honesty, and people you enjoy -- and luck will usually take care of the rest.
Eli Hooten is the CTO at CodeCov. You can find him on Twitter @hootener and on LinkedIn (Clicking this link will take you to his profile).
Recent Achievements:
The company I co-founded and served as CTO of, GameWisp, recently had its technology acquired by another company in the space. I feel incredibly proud to have led and contributed to the technical team that made such an acquisition possible.
We partnered with Otterbase to bring you high demand/quality jobs in Nashville. This job is for $80,000-$95,000.
Think you are great for this role? Send Hunter from Otterbase an email at hmitchem@otterbase.com.
iOS Developer for a Nashville startup
Responsibilities and Duties
Design and build applications for the iOS platform
Ensure the performance, quality, and responsiveness of applications
Collaborate with a team to define, design, and ship new features
Identify and correct bottlenecks and fix bugs
Help maintain code quality
Successfully perform any coding tests or challenges as required
Suggest new features and expansions of existing apps to improve performance and usability
Deliver on time as discussed and clearly communicate any changes in deadlines as soon as possible.
For more information, see the full post here: https://southernalpha.com/may-ios-developer-for-nashville-startup/
Nashville Software School's story from the Tennessean this week highlights the need for tech-talent shortage of a few years ago that John Wark help solve.
Postmates is planning a Nashville expansion, and potentially adding 500 jobs.
The Nashville Post recorded a Podcast with tech leaders about the topic of IT workforce development on a panel Thursday night.
Jumpstart Foundry added 15 new companies to its portfolio. The Nashville-based healthcare focused seed-stage innovation added companies in the ambulatory, hospital, devices, payer and consumer spaces.
Ceterus, a company that combines technology and accounting, adds its first Chief Revenue Officer.
Steve Case, Rise of the Rest and AOL Founder had some great things to say about startups in the Miami area after finishing another tour focused on startups outside of Silicon Valley.
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Steadfast Media: Empowering Innovators to Achieve their Goals
Steadfast Media’s team has spent the past ten years as growth partners to both tech-enabled businesses and startups. We love helping all kinds of digital pioneers accelerate the pace at which they are reaching customers and audiences. Our unique experience has led us to offer supporting services for all types of businesses looking to grow their technology offerings, as well as leverage our unique experience as startup founders to accelerate your business in general.
LaunchLetter is a weekday newsletter from Southern/alpha, a website that features collections of stories and resources for underestimated startup communities.
LaunchLetter is for founders getting started on an idea or business. Our goal is to share the perspective, habits and positive messages of more experienced founders and CEOs. We hope you find it relatable and delightful as you get focused for the day on your own goals. Enjoy the ride.
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