Cool and Creative Serial Entrepreneurship: 99Designs and DeveloperAuction Co-Founder Matt Mickiewicz (Part 5)

Sramana: In three years you gained huge traction. How dramatically has your adoption curve changed?

Matt Mickiewicz: We have been pushing international expansion heavily. We are seeing which markets work for us. The growth curve has continued very strongly. Our CEO has done a very good job.

Sramana: Have you changed CEOs or have you changed CEOs?

Matt Mickiewicz: We have only had one CEO aside from my co-founder. I don’t remember the exact date, but we recruited him while we were in our bootstrapped phase. We moved him from Melbourne to San Francisco to grow our San Francisco operation. My business partner is Australian and had kids there so he was unable to move to the US. We knew we needed to have a strong U.S. leadership and management team in order to grow the business.

Sramana: How did you find him?

Matt Mickiewicz: Patrick Llewellyn came as a referral from one of our board members. He was previously an investment banker who had worked in buying and selling tech companies.

Sramana: What process did you follow to determine that the individual who had been recommended would indeed be the right CEO for the company?

Matt Mickiewicz: That is a tough question. Hiring is less of a science. We had him work in our office in Melbourne side by side with our co-founder on a trial run. When we knew that he was doing well, then we felt confident about his move to San Francisco. He built the team there and raised the funding needed. We took a deliberate process. We were able to acclimate him to the business and made sure that it was a fit both ways before giving him the job and sending him off to San Francisco.

Sramana: Are you still involved fully with the business?

Matt Mickiewicz: I left a year after we raised money. I wanted to pursue a bigger marketplace opportunity that I saw which was in a different area. I wanted the adrenaline rush of building something from scratch. My co-founder left the day-to-day business before we even raised the financing.

Sramana: How much control do you have over the company now?

Matt Mickiewicz: Not much.

Sramana: Did the founders cash out when the VC money was raised?

Matt Mickiewicz: A portion was for shareholder liquidity, so yes.

Sramana: You essentially sold your shares in the $35 million round and did not wait for the full upside?

Matt Mickiewicz: We did not sell all of our shares. We both maintained equity in the business. My business partner is on the board of directors for the company.

Sramana: What did you do after you left 99Designs?

Matt Mickiewicz: The new business is called DeveloperAuction.com which is basically a two-sided marketplace for software engineers in Silicon Valley, Boston, New York and other hot tech markets. I started working on that business the day after I left 99designs. We raised $2.7 million in our seed round. We built a team of 13 people and have generated millions of dollars of revenue in just four months. We have major clients now such as Groupon, OpenTable and Twitter.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Cool and Creative Serial Entrepreneurship: 99Designs and DeveloperAuction Co-Founder Matt Mickiewicz
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