Commitment to Grit, Lessons Learned from 35+ Years of Success with Dean Guida

This week’s Misfit Entrepreneur is Dean Guida.  Dean has a storied history.  Dean launched his first company Infragistics in 1989.  Being a startup with just 10 people, he went head to head against Microsoft for a $300k deal with Philadelphia Conrail—and won. From there, he never looked back.  The company has grown to 250 employees across 6 countries, without ever accepting outside funding. Today, the company boasts a client roster that includes 100% of the S&P 500, including Intuit, Exxon and Morgan Stanley.

One of the things Dean saw as he built his own business and observed teams at hundreds of others is the struggle they have to bring the right tools together to drive decisions and effectively use data.  He started his latest company Slingshot to help solve this challenge.

Dean has a wealth of experience and knowledge, but one of the things I most want to speak with him about is how you can better use data in your business to grow and thrive.

www.Slingshotapp.io

When Dean was 15, he was saving up to buy a car, but bought an IBM PC instead.  He fell in love with computers and taught himself how to program.  He’d always been an entrepreneur at heart.  As he grew up, he brought these two passions together and 35 years ago, started Infragistics bootstrapping it while freelance consulting for IBM on Wall Street.  He would work during the day and code at night.  They worked out of their apartment building their first product.  After a year, they got a small office. 

He learned quickly that “Sales solves all problems” and taught himself to sell to drive the company forward.

You’ve been in business 35 years.  What do you credit as the biggest reasons for that?

• ·       You need to create a learning organization where people grow, solve problems, and take initiative.
• ·       Putting processes in place and a culture where people are excited to collaborate and ask for help, share ideas, etc.
• ·       Be careful not to higher everyone like you.  Get diversity of thinking. 
• ·       Use data to make decisions and collaborate around it.  It is more than growth hacking.  It is using the scientific method to drive real business outcomes.
• ·       You need to do experiments based on the data and hypothesis.  You will learn and get better and better with each iteration.

At the 12:30 mark, I asked Dean how he went head to head with Microsoft in a true David vs. Goliath scenario and won….

• ·       It was early in the company.
• ·       People were just starting to move from mainframes to PCs.
• ·       It was with a big railroad company. 
• ·       Dean had to compete against Microsoft Visual Basic with their tool that allowed coders to use C++ and make it visual.  That was their edge over Microsoft because C++ was better for coding, but harder, so Infragistics  made it easy like Microsoft VB. 
• ·       Being small and new, the client also needed to trust that the company would be around, so Dean spent a lot of time showing them how they would be and built the trust with a better product to win.

Talk to us about the entrepreneur mindset – what have you learned about the mental game of entrepreneurship?

• ·       The entrepreneur journey is similar in a lot of respects across entrepreneurs.
• ·       First, you must have the courage to