Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Utah: Ben Dilts, Founder and CTO of Lucid Software (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Where was Karl based?

Ben Dilts: He’s based here in Utah. As I mentioned, he moved here with his family. He was living here. He had left Google at that time and was looking around and seeing what he wanted to get involved with locally. He had spent most of his time at Mountain View.

Sramana Mitra: He had relationships with Google and the Silicon Valley ecosystem. He had worked before joining Google doing startups as a lawyer working on startup rounds and M&A. That was a great bootstrap to get us started there.

Ben Dilts: Yes

Sramana Mitra: When does this all come together timeline-wise?

Ben Dilts: I believe that we raised that first round, which we just called our seed round, in the beginning of 2011. At that point, we were five or six. We did our first company retreat that summer in 2011. Our VP Engineering had a condo in Moab, so we all went down there and stayed at a three-bedroom condo. We’ve been doing a summer retreat with the company every summer since.

I look at that as a benchmark for our growth. That year, it was six or seven of us. The following year, it was 15. Then the next year, it was 33. The next year, we went white water rafting in Idaho. It was around 60 of us. This year, it  was more like 170. That became a tradition for us to go and do adventure-style company retreat. That has been part of our culture and part of what makes us Lucid.

Sramana Mitra: Super. Karl came on board. Then it takes a little bit of time before all the investment comes on board. In the meantime, you have a product out in the market. You are selling, yes?

Ben Dilts: Yes. In the fall of 2010, we peeled the beta label off. At that point, we were very much burning money. We were all taking very small salaries. At that very early stage, I was working for barely enough to rent my basement apartment. Karl wasn’t drawing any salary at all. We had just a few employees. We were stretching it out in the way that we could.

As I mentioned, we had couple of hundred thousand dollars. That was enough until we closed that round of investment the following spring. At that point, another key player had come on. Dave Grow joined very early on and took on an operational role. As I look back at the history of the company, the way that I think about is that without me, there would be no product. Without Karl, there would be no company – just all of the parts of operating an actual company. Without Dave, there would be no business.

Dave worked incredibly hard to get us off the ground. He did everything from answering support tickets to taking sales calls, writing content for the website, and doing SEO. Dave really managed, at one point or another, all of it. He was a tremendous member of the team who we brought on very early. He came from Bain Consulting. He is still with us today. Karl, Dave, and I still form the core of the management team here. It’s been a wild ride for a long time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Utah: Ben Dilts, Founder and CTO of Lucid Software
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