

Advice from CEO of Blackboard - matthewer

I had a chance to meet with the CEO of Blackboard Michael Chasen last week and thought I would share some of advice/thoughts he gave me. (paraphrased)<p>--<p>When he was a graduate in an MBA program he invented a program that would allow students to upload papers over the Internet to their teachers.  He showed it to some schools and VCs and they wondered why anyone would need that.  However, a teacher thought it was a great idea, and Blackboard was born.<p>He tried to raise money from several VCs, but they turned him down.  “I went to 50 meetings with 50 different VCs and I can assure you VCs do not invest in companies that are looking for money to develop their product.”<p>They found an investor that was a friend of a friend’s brother’s sisters’ wife’s husband…  they heard he might invest in the space, and kept harassing him until he said yes.<p>Early on they found another company doing the same thing (a bunch of graduate students as well) and they merged together doubling the size of the company.<p>For him it was all about sales.  To get started they gave away the product to 2 schools.  Then sold it super cheap to 2 schools.  From there they sold it to ten at full price, and so on.<p>If you can sell it once, you can sell it ten times, if you can sell it ten times, you can sell it 100 times.<p>A lot of teachers approach him and say “I really want to come work for you.  The online education space is the future.”  He asks two questions: can you program?  Can you sell?  If you can’t do either then you don’t bring any value to the company.<p>The product is never finished.  When BB started to grow, they had competitors with better products.  It didn’t matter.  They outsold the competition (and eventually bought them out.)<p>FB, Twitter, Google they won the lottery.  Companies can win the lottery too.  He had a friend that was a plumber and won 10 million in the lottery.  If he was going to do something that was advertising based, he would rather quit, become a plumber, and try to win the lottery.<p>The most important thing: sell, sell, sell.
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mahmud
No doubt he can sell well, but how in touch is he with the customer-support
side of the company? is he aware that his products are lousy and inspire anger
among its users, and there are bright minds working hard to deliver a better
product, and would have much sooner, if he didn't smack them down with
patents?

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tiffani_
Yeahh, I have to agree with this reply. He may be an impressive salesman, but
that only seems to make up for the lack of anything remotely interesting about
what he is doing for the product _now_. Sure, it was an innovative concept
when it first came out, but after four years of using Blackboard during
college, it feels like he missed the boat on improving a product. I wonder if
Blackboard is so popular now because of a bandwagon-effect instead of because
of being a great product. There's so many things they could be doing to
solidify themselves as a truly awesome (and modern) product that they're not.
They still feel like software we were using back in 2002. Salesmanship is
great, but I wonder how hard you would have to press if you were offering
something _awesome_. Who knows...

