Positioning a Generative AI Startup: Erik Severinghaus, Founder and CEO of Bloomfilter (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It’s much more than that. We come up with this issue all the time. I recently published a series called The Startup Velocity Question, and the thesis of it is, ‘why do venture funded startups not achieve velocity?’, which equates to failure basically, because we see that trying to go from zero to a $100M in five to seven years. If you don’t hit velocity, you’re considered a failure. Why? So you may find this series interesting.

Erik Severinghaus: Yes, I’m going to check it out.

Sramana Mitra: Anyway, coming back to your situation. Did you have to go work for this acquire?

Erik Severinghaus: I worked there for a little bit less than a year and then I was laid off. The company that acquired us was having some of their own challenges and decided that they weren’t going to pay my payroll anymore. I was laid off after a little bit less than a year, which was a very frustrating end to a generally frustrating journey.

Sramana Mitra: So that was 2012.

Erik Severinghaus: No, it was after that. It was about 2013-12014.

Sramana Mitra: And what did you do?

Erik Severinghaus: I disappeared off to the mountains.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a good way to refresh.

Erik Severinghaus: I was nearing a nervous breakdown. To be honest with you, I was in a very depressed state. Unfortunately, I was having suicidal fantasies and I was in a very, very difficult and a very dark place personally. So, the long and short of it is that I ran away.

Sramana Mitra: Did you have a family by this time?

Erik Severinghaus: I didn’t have a family. I was dating a girl who was very supportive and I had people around me that loved me and cared about me. I had a lot of friends, but I wasn’t willing to share with them what was going on in my life. I was carrying this burden all by myself and I wasn’t willing to ask for help. I don’t even think I realized the depth of the problems that I had. At the time, I was a little bit delusional.

So on the one hand, I knew I wasn’t in a great place. On the other hand, I wasn’t willing to talk to people about it. I wasn’t willing to ask for help. I wasn’t brave enough to do the things that I needed to do to get better.

Sramana Mitra: One question, Erik. Is this the first pushback from life that you got?

Erik Severinghaus: It was by far the worst failure I’d ever had.

Sramana Mitra: My question is not about worst failures. The first pushback from life. It seems like you had a smooth childhood and then you went to school, you were studying, were starting companies, the companies were kind of doing well, then you went to IBM, presumably you made good money at IBM. And then you started another company, you were able to raise financing, etc. So it sounds like this was the first time you encountered pushback from life.

Erik Severinghaus: I’ve never exactly heard that term, but I think that’s a fair way to describe it..

Sramana Mitra: So that’s interesting because, you know, bright people, and clearly you’re a bright person, often have a lot of difficulty with that first pushback from life because they’re used to not getting pushback from life.

So, okay. I understand. All right. So, what did you, how did you deal with it? How did you bounce back?

Erik Severinghaus: So I disappeared. I went skiing and, basically just ran away for a while.

Then I started writing. So I started to do a lot of writing to try and get it out of my head and onto a piece of paper that ended up becoming the manuscript for a book called ‘Scale Your Everest’.

I needed something to go focus on, so I started to get very excited about the idea of climbing again. I’ve always been big in the outdoors and I wanted to go climb Mount Everest. And so I started getting into climbing again and starting to really sort of focus on that.

After about three months or so of that, I had a friend who kind of reached out and brought me back from the edge. He convinced me to take an operating role with him. He was getting ready to take over as CEO of a company called SpringCM.

I went in with him as his Chief Strategy Officer to help build and transform that business. So I basically took a few months off, refreshed and then got back into operating. So that was about 2014 or maybe 2015 when I took that role, but it wasn’t until almost six or seven years later that I ended up back as an entrepreneur again.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Positioning a Generative AI Startup: Erik Severinghaus, Founder and CEO of Bloomfilter
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