From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Michael Morris, CEO of Torc (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I have a slightly different kind of question. You are a developer who turned into a successful entrepreneur. You have a real insight into how a developer becomes an entrepreneur. Torc is working on the basis of equipping developers to be freelancers and blossom their careers. Given what’s going on in the world today, there is this tremendous desire for developers to be entrepreneurs. Is that something that you’re thinking about? Is that something that you want to facilitate?

Michael Morris: In our original business plan, we wanted to have a track in Torc that allows that path of going from a developer to an entrepreneur. I also want to be realistic. I think that for 9 out of 10 developers that want to go down that path, it’s not a great idea. Maybe they’re part of an entrepreneurial team. Everybody wants to be a CEO or a visionary.

I’ll give you an example. Once I realized that I wasn’t a great software developer is when my career took off. After I realized that, I then started to focus on other things. My strength just happens to be building a team. Understanding your strengths is super important. If you do want to be an entrepreneur as a developer, understand where you excel and where you’re going to provide the most value in a team, and accept that if it’s not the lead role, that’s okay.

Sramana Mitra: My feedback to you on that topic is, a developer doesn’t really know how to become an entrepreneur until they go through a specific learning on the issues that come up. I’ll give you examples. There’s this myth that you have to quit your job and go full-time at a startup before anything. Otherwise, you’re not a serious entrepreneur.

The path of bootstrapping with a paycheck is how a lot of companies get founded and do very well. Solo entrepreneurs are looked upon as inferior. You know what, Fred Luddy, the founder of ServiceNow, was a solo entrepreneur. There’s a lot of crap like that confuses developers. They need to learn how to be an entrepreneur.

We have become very good at turning developers into entrepreneurs, which is why I was asking you this question. If you did do that, what is your commercial model to support that?

Michael Morris: I don’t need a commercial model right now. The loyalty to Torc is what I want at the end of the day. A developer comes to us and creates a great profile and does our learning assessments all for free, and gets a job with somebody else. I’m okay with that. They’re going to come back to us. It’s my job to make sure that we’re providing enough of a service to make sure they’re loyal. It doesn’t have to be every single time. I would most likely look at something the same way.

I’ll give you an example. I had a company in Canada that is a small company. They needed a CTO. I had the right guy. I had the perfect person through the Torc community. There was a clause for a hiring fee inside of that. It would have been expensive given his level of experience. I said, “I’m going to completely waive that because it’s good for you. I don’t want to prevent that.” What ended up happening is he built his entire development team using the Torc platform.

Sramana Mitra: You answered my question. If a developer becomes an entrepreneur, they will build their entire team using Torc.

Michael Morris: Right.

Sramana Mitra: What’s happening in online learning today is very interesting especially when there’s a solo entrepreneur or two developers tinkering. It’s a very lonely journey. We meet every week. We have a free roundtable and we have programming around that. Then we also have our private roundtable for premium members only where we do the more intense mentoring work.

To be able to come to a community that is swimming in entrepreneurship issues that will help you stay on course is very valuable. We’ve been doing it on a global scale since 2010.

It was great meeting you. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Michael Morris, CEO of Torc
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