From Pre-Med to Product Strategy: Eric Dodds’ Journey in Data and Startups

John Wessel  0:29  

Welcome back to The Data Stack Show. We have a very special guest today. He’s been on the show multiple times, so welcome Eric Dodds to the show, not as a CO or not as a co host today, it was a guest time. Yes, I’m right. Yeah. Thank you for having me. I know having you on your own show, of course, work this into the calendar, but I really appreciate it and am excited to be here. Yeah. So let’s jump right in. I think I’m sure listeners are really curious. I’d like to learn more about your background, so I’m really glad we’re doing this, but start us off at the beginning. Maybe not birth, but start us off at the beginning of your career, yeah, or education, wherever you want to start, sure, well,

Eric Dodds  1:09  

I think maybe a couple things that may be fun to talk about and maybe give listeners a little bit more insight into me. I actually wanted to be a doctor. Interestingly enough, I’m really glad that didn’t happen. One of my best friends is a doctor. We room together throughout college. I’m so glad he’s a doctor and I’m not. I think that, you know, working in product is really where I need to be, for sure. But I think one of the reasons I wanted to be a doctor was I always loved taking stuff apart, figuring out how it worked, you know, and putting it back together. So, you know, in high school, my dad and I took a car completely apart, I mean, de, like, literally everything apart, and then put it all back together and restored it. And, you know, which is a pretty formative experience. And sort of, you know, I really loved that, that whole experience, and it kind of was interested in precision and sort of surgery, and you know, you know, like operating on a human was okay, there’s a right way to do this. And you know, that was just very appealing to me. And, you know, helping people, that was pretty cool. So that was, you know, pretty formative in my experience. But I ended up taking a pretty different path in school. And interestingly enough, I had no plans on, you know, studying business or getting into data or anything like that. And it changed, literally in a moment at college orientation, in pre med orientation was a, you know, there’s this turning point, which is pretty wild, and I ended up switching from pre med to business, which is pretty crazy, yeah.

John Wessel  2:43  

So I’ve gotta, I’ve gotta ask you about the car. What kind of car was it? Yeah,

Eric Dodds  2:47  

It was a 1978 Jeep, CJ, seven. So, oh, cool. Not quite as old as, like, the army Jeep, but, you know the cool Jeeps of the round headlights, yeah.

John Wessel  2:59  

So, and after, you like, did this, like, you know, assembly, disassembly process, did you, like, drive it around? Was, oh yeah, oh yeah. Like, daily driver, yeah,

Eric Dodds  3:09  

totally cool. Yeah, yeah. It was, it was great. I mean, it was really cool. And we ended up, you know, we ended up selling it, you know, for a number of reasons. Once I went to school, you know, it’s not, it had a soft top. It wasn’t necessarily the most practical vehicle, yeah, you know, commuting to college. Initially, I went to College up in Pennsylvania, so I drove, you know, up the eastern seaboard. And so, you know, not the most, the most practical

John Wessel  3:34  

for those purposes, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so you’re in orientation, you’ve, like, assume like, like selected the school based on like, I want to be pre med orientation. And then I think you told me before that essentially, like, you start the day in pre med orientation, you end up the day and the business school orientation.

Eric Dodds  3:54  

Yes, yeah. And this is a I look back on this story, and it really is interesting how much hinged on this, on this one moment. But we’re sitting in pre med orientation, and I’m excited, oh, this is going to be great, you know, I’m looking around, okay, these are going to be my classmates and my teachers, etc. And my dad turns to me and he says, This isn’t right. And I’m thinking, Well, I mean, you know, have been preparing for this, for, you know, for a long time now, and what isn’t right? And he said, like, God is telling me you don’t need to be a doctor. And I was like, wow, okay. So I said, Well, what should we do? And he said, I think we need to go to the business

John Wessel  4:38  

school. And how is that like, character wise, for him, is this like something that happened a lot throughout your life, or is this like one time this happened? Type of No,

Eric Dodds  4:46  

no, actually. I mean, we grew up going to church, and you know, that was a big part of our, you know, a big part of our family life, but very much not, you know, sort. Of, I would say, like, charismatic. That was, it was pretty, you know, that was pretty, I wouldn’t say shocking, but that didn’t happen a whole lot, right, right? It was very in the moment. I knew that it was a very serious thing, you know. And, but I trust my dad, you know. And so I said, What should we do? And he said, I think we need to go to a business school orientation. And so we switched then. And you know, I sort of never looked back and again, looking at where I am now, working on products, especially in the world of data. I mean, there’s just no question that it was absolutely the right thing, but it was pretty you know, you’re 18, and you know, you have had dreams of being a doctor for years, and right in a moment that sort of all changes. Did.

John Wessel  5:51  

When was it immediate? Did you sit down in the business school orientation feel like, okay, like this is right now, or was it like, I don’t know, like I was kind of set on the other thing, and it took a while to to take it

Eric Dodds  6:04  

wasn’t necessarily, you know, this is just like, yes, you know, right? But it felt like a really significant course change in a very short amount of time. I mean, in 10 minutes, you know, we go from one building to another on this campus, you know, with a pretty significant change in direction of career path. But it felt natural, if that makes sense,

John Wessel  6:27  

yeah, yeah. That makes sense, yeah. And then throughout, throughout that, you know, progression was there? Were there points like in your education after that where you had professors or, like, classes or internships that really like, hey, I want to do entrepreneurial type things or tell me more about that component.

Eric Dodds  6:46  

Yeah, I think that the theme of figuring out how stuff works really carried through, and it sort of transitioned from mechanical more to mathematical and psychological okay? And so as I went through the business school, you know, you studied economics and finance and other things like that, which is, you know, those are pretty interesting, but I really enjoyed statistics and then anything related to psychology. So in the business school, that’s a lot of consumer behavior, but I ended up taking a lot of psychology courses outside of that, because it was, you know, it was really fascinating to me. And so I think that probably was the foundation of, you know, getting into data, or sort of the early seeds of getting into data, right? I mean, I just love statistics, because it was just, it felt like this, like, holy cow, there’s this tool set that you have that helps you describe things or answer questions that are really challenging to answer in any other way, right? And you can get a pretty high level of confidence doing that, and you kind of combine that with psychology and consumer behavior, and it’s just a really fascinating world. And so that, I think was, you know, those were the things I probably wouldn’t have said it at the time, but looking back, those are the things that I really, you know, I put a lot of time into it in college because I enjoyed it,

John Wessel  8:10  

yeah, sure, yeah. This is something I think we’ve identified before too. I was also pre-med. I should have figured that out. You know, what is nice to figure out in freshman orientation to switch, but it took me a year and a half and lots of painful chemistry and biology classes that I did not enjoy, for the most part, and a summer internship, I think I shared with you, too. I had a summer internship at the morgue, which, you know, I did a short rotation in surgery too, which was cool, but for whatever reason, I somehow spent it was supposed to be like a thing where you rotate various places, right? Somehow I ended up in the morgue. It feels like most of the time, right? And, yeah, that combo of like, I didn’t really enjoy the classes, like I didn’t want to be, you know, working with dead people is, is that I prefer to live with people.

Eric Dodds  9:00  

That kind of makes me thankful for this, you know, sort of sudden, you know, sudden direction change in my experience. Yeah,

John Wessel  9:07  

and then, and it’s funny, I ended up doing the business thing too. And the funny thing about me is I never loved the math part. And people always assume, like, Oh, you do technology and whatever, you must be good at math. Like, I mean, I can do a little bit of math, but, like it was, but I was always best at, like in school, like I did best in English, and it’s a language thing. I really enjoyed the language part of, like, SQL, Python, like that was actually the thing that I liked about it, which was a little bit different than what people said.

Eric Dodds  9:36  

If you are, if you enjoy language, I really, I enjoy writing and literature as well. And I think one thing that I’ve noticed is, if you enjoy language, you probably are, you know, predisposed to enjoying, or at least having a skill set and data, right? Because, you know, it’s about clarity. It’s about, you know. Uh, distilling ideas down, yeah, and

John Wessel  10:01  

it’s much lighter on the math than, I think, people outside of it, yes, right? Unless, yeah, there’s some exceptions, but the majority of the roles really are fairly light on math, and it’s heavier on communication and language, right, right? Yeah. So, okay, so take us in so you finish up school, and then you go get an analyst job, go get a data job. Like, what do you do, right?

Eric Dodds  10:24  

I graduated in 2008 so, yeah, you know, the job, whatever job you can find, was not exactly at that time, yeah. And I moved back in with my parents. Because, I mean, you know, it was kind of a wild time to graduate college, and I got an internship at a marketing agency, you know, basically, you know, sort of saying, I’ll do anything. And that’s essentially what I did, you know, I mean, I did, I worked on design projects, you know, had no idea what I was doing, had, you know, was learning Photoshop. I mean, all the crazy, you know, just really, anything and everything I could get my hands in tune. I was very hungry to learn, and, you know, scared about the economy and, right, yeah, trying to earn my spurs and turn it into a full time job, or at least get a bunch of stuff on my resume. And it was a great experience. I had a chance to work, you know, with some really big companies, actually, and looking back, it was a really fascinating time to be working with companies trying to figure out marketing because of the state of the economy. So that was a great experience. And got to work on a number of technical projects that I think were the I had always been interested in, you know, in technology, and then, you know, working on stuff growing up, but worked on a number of large technical websites, you know, app type projects, and loved the technical side. And I was thinking, actually, this past week, in a different life, maybe if I had another dramatic, you know, direction change, it would have been into computer science. And I’m probably a software engineer, you know, I probably would love to be a software engineer, you know, as a job as an I see, I think would be just so enjoyable to me, yeah? But I ended up doing a bunch of data driven marketing stuff, you know, and so that’s probably why I’m in product. Maybe that combination, yeah, that makes sense, yeah. So I worked on a number of technical projects there, and I think that grew my love of software, generally, but it was a word of mouth marketing agency who did a bunch of really cool stuff and a lot of brand heavy work, et cetera. And I just had this insatiable appetite for trying to use the statistics that I had learned in school to describe whether what we were doing was working or not right. And boy, was I naive on how difficult of a problem that is to solve, even in the best, even in the best of cases, you know. So there’s definitely a lot of hubris in that that I sort of, you know, I think I had a mindset of, there’s a way to figure this out, and I’m gonna go figure it out. Which is which I think, you know, is healthy. And you know, both my parents are entrepreneurs, Both my grandfathers are entrepreneurs. So maybe it runs in my blood, right? It’s like there’s a better way to do this. There’s a way to figure out if all these marketing campaigns that we’re doing are actually moving the needle. And so I knew I wasn’t going to be at the agency forever, just because I had to answer that question for myself, actually, you know. And so I started, you know, just started looking around once things, once the economy had stabilized a little bit, I started looking around for other stuff. Well,

John Wessel  13:50  

I mean, I don’t know if this is true. This isn’t true of everybody, but I see that, like coming out of a business degree that depends on a little bit on, like, what type of focus you did in your degree, but I see, at least for my business degree there, there was a really healthy, I think, theme through the degree of, you know, return on investment and, like, the expectations of a business, and then you jump into, like, a very brand heavy, You know, marketing agency, just purely from that like background, I could see you coming in, and then you mentioned, like, statistics, you know, another, you know, some courses you took just being very like, oh, like, you know, this is how you should think about this thing of, like, how do we know that our customers are getting a return on their investment? And that right kind of basic business logic?

Eric Dodds  14:38  

Yeah, I think I was wrong in both directions, far more than I even knew. So there’s far more possible with data than I imagined. I mean, which was, it took me a while to figure that out, but it’s incredible. And I had, you know, I’ve had the chance to do some truly, really neat like. Like attribution projects at a very large scale, which has been so cool and so definitely, my imagination about what was possible with data. A lot of those things were real, but I also think I sort of underestimated the power of brand, right, which is incredibly powerful, right and right. You know, word of mouth marketing is incredibly powerful. It is also very hard to, you know, hard to measure, but, right? Yeah, I think I was young, and I just didn’t know a lot about the world. But there’s a lot of cool stuff waiting for me,

John Wessel  15:35  

right? Okay, so you do that, you’ve got a little bit of a hunger for something more, data driven, more, you know, measurable maybe. So what do you do from there? Well,

Eric Dodds  15:46  

I told you that I had become really interested in software and technical stuff, and so I just started networking, you know, with friends of friends. And, you know, hey, I’m looking, I think, to get more into the technology side of things. I went to a local conference in the southeast, and at that point, you know, there was a group in Greenville, South Carolina, where I live, who were working as a remote design and front end team for a really high growth Silicon Valley startup inside of this conference. And people would come in from these huge companies on the West Coast, you know, these designers and developers and give these talks. It was really amazing. And I met a number of people there, you know, and started to, you know, I was, became more and more interested. Oh, wow. These people are really, you know, it’s the bleeding edge, right? What they’re doing in Silicon Valley, especially around that time, right? Because, if you think about, you know, the early 2010s I guess, is around that time period, there’s a lot happening in the world of consumer apps and design and user experience and AB testing and all you know, growth hacking and all of those things, which is pretty energizing. And through that networking, I ended up meeting an entrepreneur who was from Indianapolis but had moved to Greenville because he has a really large family. And just, I think, they were driving through Greenville one day, and his wife said, This is great. This is, this is the car. And a fascinating guy. I mean, he flew all around the country, you know, to Tech Stars, events, investing in different companies, and, you know, being a serial entrepreneur. And he was connected with a group called Startup America, and in partnership with Tech Stars, they were planting startup accelerator programs around the country. So this is an effort by the administration at that time to encourage entrepreneurship, encourage startups. You know, startup activity. And so one of the ways that they were doing that was essentially launching these incubators to encourage people to join, you know, and start these companies. And through a series of circumstances there, we ended up launching one of those in Greenville. I say we really it was this entrepreneur, but the timing worked out such that I was able to join him and help start that and help run a startup accelerator program, which, looking back, I am just It boggles my mind that he thought it was a good idea to bring me on because I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but it was, I mean, I guess it was fairly low risk, because he said, You know, I can pay you this much, which is nothing, and I can do that for what, you know, whatever it was eight or 12 months, and right, you know, we’ll see, you know, this is startup world, right, right? And so I jumped in. I mean, I was like, let’s do this. I want to learn about this world. And it was a, really, just an amazing opportunity, not only to learn from him, but to get immersed into the venture backed software startups,

John Wessel  19:09  

right? Yeah. Okay, so you jump in there. You’re going from brand agency stuff, working with big companies, like, completely flipped to like, okay, VC back startups, was that, was there an adjustment period for you there, or

Eric Dodds  19:26  

a little bit? But you know, it’s interesting to look back on my experience at the brand agency, because I’ll give you examples of two projects that I worked on. So one project was actually with double day publishing, and it was working on launching a John Grishom like it was marketing for a John Grisham novel. You know, whichever I don’t mean, he’s written so many books, right? That’s cool. And we take social media for granted now, but back then, it was, you know, people were still figuring stuff out, and so. So we ended up building a Facebook app, which, at the time, was pretty cool. We ended up building a Facebook app that was sort of like a gamified type competition, you know, because John Grisham has a huge following, you know, to create viral growth for this book launch. And then another project was working for Best Buy, and they were launching this concept of a musical instrument store within their, you know, within their existing real estate to compete head to head with Guitar Center. And I, you know, interestingly enough, both of those were very, you know, the double day publishing project was very much like, we’re going to try to use technology, we’re going to try to engage this community online and, you know, sort of leverage virality, you know. And the other one was very much a startup within a very large company. And so there was some adjustment period. But we had, you know, I had worked on some things that I think were, you know, were fairly exploratory or fairly like, I guess, early stage, you could say

John Wessel  21:08  

1. So Facebook apps bring me back. The only thing that comes to mind is Farmville. You can remember that well. I mean,

Eric Dodds  21:17  

It was pretty cool. I think that a lot of that, I mean, the developer experience stuff, and what people have built on Facebook has been really cool, but it was a, I mean, they had a very robust tool set for you. I’d film about it, yeah, to build these. I mean, you know, an application, like a custom application that ran inside of Facebook, and that was essentially software that you deliver to your audience through Facebook. Well, between

John Wessel  21:39  

those two projects and like, what I mean, the ones in apps you had some kind of, probably data, like number of people using it, at least, for sure. The Facebook app and for sure have something similar, like number of community members, some kind of engagement metrics on the Best Buy project. Like, what would the data look like?

Eric Dodds  21:55  

Yeah, I mean, a lot of it was community growth and engagement metrics for sure. So I was digging into a lot of that. And you know that that was, I was constantly in, you know, Excel for Mac, which, back then was, you know, oh man, yeah, a great experience. But, you know, you’re at an agency and everyone’s rough, yeah, right. So I remember going to the, you know, to the accelerator, and it’s like, well, just everything’s on Google. And I was like, what? And it’s like, Google, like, all of this. It was awesome. I remember so many things like that. I mean, we’re just using all of the latest software tools, right? So that was also a very cool experience, because I think in my day to day work, I also felt, you know, is okay, we get to experience that we’re using all these the latest tools, right? Because we invest in software startups, so we’re trying all these different things, and multiple times there’s a tool, it’s like, This is so great, and then the startup just dies, you know? I know, yeah,

John Wessel  22:52  

mortgage spot, right? Yeah,

Eric Dodds  22:56  

yeah, but yeah. So there was data, and I think that’s part of it just felt so hard to measure stuff right, because it wasn’t a core competency at the agency, you know. So I just spent days in spreadsheets trying to produce a number that I wasn’t super confident in. And yeah, right, you know, that was just always dissatisfying to me,

John Wessel  23:19  

for sure. Yeah, I had not the same experience, but a similar experience at times. So being an analyst, like early days in my career, being an analyst, where you’re like, you work so hard to get something as accurate as possible, and then you realize that, from your audience’s perspective, they have no idea. And they have such little idea that they couldn’t even question to tell you if you were wrong, yeah, within some level of certainty, which is kind of a sad reality.

Eric Dodds  23:50  

Yeah, yeah. I think also, you know, if I lived by myself, I would have, like, everything, meticulously organized, you know, and not because I’m, I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m obsessive compulsive, but I just, I have strong opinions about everything having its place, or, like, the way that things should be, which I see coming up in product a ton, you know. You know, thankfully, I have, like, a wonderful wife and three kids who temper that, you know, tendency, and so things you always have, like a workshop or something that can be like, I actually just this past weekend, I got a new tool chest, and I organized all my tools, and it’s like, you know what? That’s enough. I don’t even need to work on my practically therapeutic, right? It is, it totally is, totally is. And it’s like, it closes and locks, you know, so no one can but, but, yeah, I think that, you know, one of the things that I look back on some of those early things, and even at the accelerator program, I mean, your early stage startup companies have no data, right? And so, right? I don’t think I really understood the. The value of intuition and directional you know, make like just understanding directionally what’s happening. You know, I wanted to be very technically accurate, and I and there were times later on that was very helpful, that tendency was very helpful. But I also think that I was way over rotated on, you know, bringing the math problem to its final conclusion, right? Because that’s you have to do that in school, especially with statistics, right? It’s like you sort of have to run it out to its council. I mean, you know, whatever we can talk about education with some other but, yeah, I think that, you know, I learned a lot about the value of intuition and directional data later on. Yeah,

John Wessel  25:44  

yeah, when? And that was my same problem too, right? I would be like, Why don’t they care that it’s not, you know, accurate. And then I realized that, like, the fidelity they needed for the decision was not 100% right, and nor would it ever be, yeah, it was a good lesson. So, okay, so you’re doing the entrepreneur thing, part of this, part of this VC backed, you know, incubator, yep. And from there you got to see a bunch of different startups, bunch of different groups, yep,

Eric Dodds  26:15  

fundraising. I mean, yeah, fundraising, yeah, going out to the West Coast and Sand Hill Road and, like, doing, you know, pitch events and everything with a startup. So it was a true baptism. You know, it’s just actual Silicon Valley, even physically a lot,

John Wessel  26:28  

yeah. So how many, I don’t think I know this, how many actually ended up, like, being part of the incubator, like over the years that it was running?

Eric Dodds  26:38  

Let’s see. So, the cohorts that I was involved in, I think probably three or four cohorts, and then there was sort of another branch of the accelerator that started with a different group of investors that was focused on the medical space, but at that point we had spun another company out of the accelerator program. And in fact, I think that there, there’s still a handful of companies. One of them had a pretty large exit, actually, which was really cool. Actually, this is kind of wild. I went to a startup event at NC State, met these two sophomores who had a business idea. It was such a good idea that I convinced them to drop out of college. I can’t even believe I did this. I can’t believe you did this either. I convinced them to drop out of college and come to Greenville, South Carolina, to be part of this accelerator program. And it’s like the success story of the portfolio. I mean, really amazing, really amazing story for those guys.

John Wessel  27:39  

Yeah, that’s really neat. So, so you had several different cohorts, and if you jumped in with one of the companies that was in the cohort, or did you, or was it the thing you jumped in, like, adjacent to this? It

Eric Dodds  27:51  

was adjacent. One of the challenges, and still in many ways, is that, you know, with things being remote now it’s less of an issue, but in the southeast, there’s not a lot of liquidity in the market for technical talent, really. And I would say, if you think about it like a venture backed startup, I mean, there are a lot of roles that, you know, there’s just a higher concentration in the major tech hubs, you know, for, you know, software engineering, product design, etc.

John Wessel  28:21  

Well, in a specific stack too, right? Like startups are usually using a different stack than established companies. So I

Eric Dodds  28:27  

I think, you know, in the southeast, textile manufacturing is history, yeah, yeah. And so not high tech and the, I mean, not high tech from a software standpoint, right? But more manufacturing and so that was a problem. Because, you know, if we had a company who would go on and raise, you know, a Series A they would almost inevitably have to end up moving, you know, to another place so that they could hire talent very quickly, right? I need to hire five software engineers as soon as I possibly can. Okay, well, it’s actually hard to do that in the southeast, especially with a stack, right? Because, you know you’re talking about, you know, Rails, you know, right? Rails, JavaScript, you know, just sort of the more modern, you know, lingua franca of startups at the time, and and so

John Wessel  29:20  

that was, yeah, for those of you that needs translating rust, go, that’s what, yes,

Eric Dodds  29:25  

exactly, yeah. I mean, really, yeah, yeah. That is funny. I mean, gosh, what you can do now, just like with AI tools, outrageous, but yeah. So that was, you know, it’s fine. I mean, we want the companies to be successful, and it’s fun, right? And so if you need to go to another place, that’s fine. But we also have a vested interest in, you know, retaining companies here, in building an ecosystem here. And so the more we thought about how to solve that problem, we realized we need to, you know, we need to solve that problem from the root, which is actually creating talent, right? So, you know, because. They weren’t teaching those languages in the universities, and so there was a learning curve anyways. And so that was the goal, right? And so actually, as part of the accelerator program, we just started a school for software engineering, right? So you essentially would start with a cohort in the accelerator program. And so these startups are going through like, a three month, you know, incubation program, and we would have just a handful of students start, and they would learn JavaScript, or they would learn rails, or, you know, that’s what we were teaching at that point. We eventually expanded things, you know, and then they would graduate. And the idea was, okay, you sort of have this marriage, right? Like, all you know, you have these companies who, you know, graduate from the accelerator program, and the other people who graduate from the school are great, and they can hire each other. And what happened at the end of the first class or two was really interesting, because not everyone went to work for the startups, because, you know, you realize you have this marketable skill set and you can make a bunch of money, right? A couple of people went to work for the startup. So they’re like, do you want to, like, gamble, you know, do you essentially want to gamble on this early stage startup, you know, or do you want to go get this, you know, job at a big company and, you know, have great health insurance and stuff, which was awesome so and again. It wasn’t that stark, necessarily, but as people realized, wow, I can go, like, actually get a career. And then we realized, okay, maybe there’s something here beyond just, you know, having this internal program or creating talent for other people regionally. Other accelerators had heard about it and asked us to come look at doing something similar in their space, you know, in their region. And so we ended up actually spinning out a different entity, and I ended up running that, which became a code boot camp. We didn’t call it that at the time, but that’s kind of what they’re called now. And yeah, so that was the, that was the entrepreneurial venture that we spun out of the accelerator program. That’s

John Wessel  32:00  

1. So you, I don’t think I knew this part of the story. So after you spun out, part of the strategy was to continue to supply talent into startups. You just got wider, more geographically diverse,

Eric Dodds  32:13  

yep. So we sort of anchored it with, you know, incubators regionally, and then it took on a life of its own and became its own, you know, a business in its own right, because at that time, there was significant demand for that type of education. And, you know, rapid career transition, yeah, yeah.

John Wessel  32:32  

I mean, and it makes a ton of sense, because if you want a traditional schooling route, you got a computer science degree like, you’re not going to be learning Ruby at that time, for sure, exactly. And then you kind of already had this network that you guys had developed through the incubator of other incubators. And, like, Yep, yeah, this is actually a really cool, in my opinion, a really cool growth story, yeah, or like a really cool pivot and like something where you can use an existing network to really just drive really fast growth, which I love for you to speak to that. I mean, you guys took off pretty quickly. Yeah,

Eric Dodds  33:03  

yeah, it certainly was, yeah. Well, I’ll speak to the growth in just a second. But the short version is that we expanded very rapidly. So I think in the first, you know, in the first year we did, these numbers aren’t going to be right, but I’ll just, we’ll go with something directionally accurate. Yeah, there we go. Because that was kind of a blur. I could go back and look it up if I really wanted to nail it down. But, I mean, we did between five and 10 campuses the first, like, year and a half, you know. And these are physical campuses in person. So there’s a real estate component, there’s a legal component, you know, we’re going multi state, which is pretty wild, you know, and continues to grow pretty quickly. And then in let’s see, within like two to three years we ended up, yeah, three years, we started to get interest from some suitors in the education space who are really interested in our model. And, you know, sort of our ability to expand really rapidly. And we ended up selling the company to one of the largest education conglomerates in the world, and then the growth really accelerated from there, because we had all the resources. That was a big reason we sold the business was to actually get access to their resources, because that would help us expand the business. Because there are a number of things in education that are, you know, fairly difficult to figure out on your own quickly, and so they were a huge help in those things. And so the punch line is that we were the largest Code School in the world. So we had expanded internationally, had launched a campus in London, and, you know, sort of tons of them all across the United States we had gotten into, we had started to build software, and so we started to get into, you know, actually, like remote learning and online education, etc. And so, yeah, it was a wild growth period, and that’s really where I cut my teeth, in terms of, I. Data and the data stack, and using all of that to drive growth, you know, because I’d sort of dip my toe in the water in a number of different areas before, but now it was, wow. You have, like, massive attribution problems trying to understand marketing that’s happening in different regions, which is very different. The same campaigns didn’t work the same way. Tons of data flowing in very primitive tooling at that point, you know, relative to what we have now, it was just a totally different world. And so doing these analyzes were super hard and, you know, and then you add in, we started building software, and then you add in the product analytics element, you know, to that as well. And so that we wouldn’t call it this back then, but, you know, sort of launching product led growth, you know, through digital acquisition and a product. So yeah, it was a wild, you know, it was really a wild time, but it was also a lesson in market timing and distribution, right? Because it was, you know, we certainly made some good decisions, but we had really good market timing, and there was huge demand, and we already had a distribution network to your point. And so that was one of my biggest takeaways. Was, Wow, big market with good timing, and like a pre you can export a distribution network like you can do a lot of you can do

John Wessel  36:20  

everything else wrong, essentially, exactly, yeah, that’s awesome. So, so Okay, from there, so you stayed on for a while, and then after, you know, after that, what was next? What was next? After that? Yeah. So, very next, wild ride,

Eric Dodds  36:36  

yes, yeah. So that was like baptism as a founder, you know, an exit, you know, getting a taste of being part of, you know, an extremely large, you know, multi billion, billion dollar corporation, and realizing, okay, I’m definitely a start. Don’t like that. Accidentally started a consultancy. So me and my co founders, you know, wanted to stick together and do something else. And so we just started taking on projects, helping other companies, you know, essentially advising on some of the things that we’d, you know, done right and done wrong. And which was super cool. I mean, that was a really good experience. We worked with, you know, we worked at the time, which was, you know, that’s a crazy story. So we were, we sort of got to actually be there, you know, at the peak, and then we started to see the decline, kind of from the inside, which was wild. We did some work with BMW on some of their Mobile App Analytics stuff, you know, which is really neat. But I realized, okay, we’re running a services business, and I don’t love that, but, you know, just as a business model, it’s, you know, it’s not the most exciting thing, but we got to work on cool projects, and that’s actually how I found RudderStack. So we were, you know, things kind of, we tried a bunch of different things. We did some advising, we built some projects. We actually tried to start a startup, you know, through the agencies, a venture studio type model, yeah, ended up raising some money for it. COVID just completely wiped it out, you know, which was wild. But, I mean, we were piloting stuff for, like, Motley Fool, so it was, like a pretty exciting thing as a startup idea, and then just got completely wiped out by COVID, you know, basically overnight. But my focus in the projects that I really was pursuing were all related to the data stack, because from the time that I had been, you know, digging into data and trying to do attribution and building sort of a pretty primitive stack in the previous company. All this new tooling is coming out, and so we’re trying all of the new tooling, you know, super excited about it, because we’re like, oh my gosh, this is such a pain. Look, we can do this so much more easily now, you know. And I guess we call that the modern data stack, you know, whatever buzz word you want to use, but that was really where I focused, and was very excited, just because I saw so many ways to solve problems so much more easily than I had experienced in the past. And that’s how I found RudderStack. I remember that we were actually working with a number of companies who were trying to collect behavioral data at scale and do a bunch of different things with it, get it into a data warehouse, etc. And I remember finding RudderStack from their Hacker News post. I remember I walked over to, you know, my co-founder and CTO, and I was like, we, you know, or maybe he came to me either way. You know, he spun up a Kubernetes cluster, and we deployed this thing. And he was like, Dude, this is legit. And so, so, yeah, and that’s actually how we met John, because we were doing some consulting for your E-commerce company, and you needed to collect behavioral data. And so we deployed RudderStack, and it’s the longest running production instance of RudderStack still, still running today. Yeah, how many years is that

John Wessel  39:50  

five? Five plus five years? I think it’s over five. Well, I mean, I still remember talking on, I guess it would have been discord. I still remember talking to. To

Eric Dodds  40:00  

Yes, Discord beat. That’s before he switched to slack. Yeah, it was. Some of

John Wessel  40:04  

The founder is one of the founding team members on Discord at, you know, like, 10 o’clock at night, nine o’clock at night, trying to figure out the open source version of RudderStack. Yeah, back then it was, it was crazy, but yeah, I mean, it was such a again, it was such a good timing thing. Of, we’ve got all this modern data stuff, you know, we can, you know, it’s not like this wasn’t possible before, but, but it was just a such a different, cool spin on like now, we can collect all this behavioral data instead of having it trapped inside an ecosystem or a platform. You can be directly, you know, in your warehouse, and you can do all sorts of creative stuff with it, because you have more control and access to the data. So, yep, another really cool timing.

Eric Dodds  40:44  

Yeah, totally. So we got close to the RudderStack team because we were giving them feedback on the product. I mean, they were very early back then, and they ended up calling me and asking me to join their team and actually lead, you know, implementations for customers, because that’s what we had done several of those, you know, for the company you were at the time. And so that’s what I did in my first time at RudderStack, was actually implement the product, you know, for our customers. And so, you know, call it customer success, or technical account management or Solutions Engineering. I mean, it was a handful of people back then. So right? All of the above did

John Wessel  41:20  

all of those things. They weren’t actually separate roles, right, right, right, yeah.

Eric Dodds  41:25  

So, yeah, that’s actually how I ended up at RudderStack.

John Wessel  41:28  

Yeah. So, okay, so we gotta only have a few minutes left. Let’s talk about products a little bit. Yeah. So you did a bunch of roles, I mean, it’s customer success, and Mark various marketing roles, growth marketing, product marketing and all those things, you know, kind of came together and turned into a product role for you. What was that like? I mean, that it seems natural progression a lot, yes, to me, but

Eric Dodds  41:49  

I don’t know, yeah, I think it’s been very natural for a couple of reasons. So, you know, I was a user of the product before joining RudderStack, and then we use our own product so heavily internally. I mean, it’s, it is, we have a very sophisticated implementation, in part because I really wanted to push the limits on dog food in the product, and we still do that today. I mean, we just finished a project internally that’s, you know, it’s really cool using some new APIs that we have, you know, and sort of punching far above our weight class in terms of our ability to have a sophisticated stack, right? And so that was always, for me, the foundation of the, well, I mean, I had to, I was in, you know, in the trenches, day to day with customers for a while, and then in marketing, you know, the being rooted in the product was just natural, because I was, I mean, I literally used RudderStack Every single day, right? You know, I saw, I built all of these use cases, you know, attribution, modeling, analytics, you know, marketing automation, all that sort of stuff I built, you know, internally using all the data from RudderStack. So it was very, you know, sort of like the, you know, we say data team, right? It’s like we have a data team, but then we’re also the consumers. We’re the stakeholders with a use case, yeah. And so all of that was very natural, right? Because we were just using the product every day, and so ended up working with the built out several teams, and then ended up working with our CEO and a couple of strategic product things, so like doing a bunch of research and going out into the market and talking with hundreds of companies and trying to understand problems and and then eventually started working on some product operation stuff, and you sort of combine those two things, and ended up taking over the product team, which is what I do today. And it’s wonderful. I absolutely love it. Yeah, that’s

John Wessel  43:54  

awesome. So, yeah. So wrapping up here. I mean, what would you say? So say I’m sitting at home like, hi, you know, I’m kind of interested in data, maybe interested in product, and data and products are coming closer and closer together, right? Like, I think that’s a trend we sing. What would you tell somebody at home that’s like, hey, I really like this stuff. I like data. Maybe I like products and data together. What’s some advice you’d give somebody

Eric Dodds  44:19  

advice in terms of career or career, as far as what experiences

John Wessel  44:25  

were key to get to, you know where you are, and maybe just general advice, yeah,

Eric Dodds  44:31  

yeah. I think that you know, one of the things that’s pretty surprising to me is how you know even a lot of people who work in product or product marketing don’t know the product intimately. Yeah, right. I mean, like, I’ll give you just one example. Like, have you read it? All of the documentation. And I’m not talking about like I browse through, but I mean, you know, 1000s of pages of documentation. Have you read all of it? Wow, that’s a lot. It is a lot, right? But, you know, and I, you know, I’m not saying that was, I was, you know, was like, I’m gonna do this. I had to do it because I was on the ground with our customers. I was developing documentation. I was using the product, you know, and so that was very natural for me. But main thing I would say is, if you use the product to try to solve problems, you will position yourself to understand your customers pain points when they talk about it, and you’ll be very intimately familiar with that, not on a conceptual level, but on a visceral level, because you’ve used the product and you’ve tried to implement a use case, and so, I mean, that’s helpful in and of itself, but the true win is that you can empathize with your customer when They’re telling you what they’re trying to solve. And that, to me, is just, I mean, it’s the foundation of everything in product, is understanding your customer pain point, and then, if you’re doing that, the data that you need to do your job, I think, will become very apparent, you know, I don’t, I think that’s actually the easy part in some ways, right? There’s some technical aspects that can be hard, but if you get the first part right, you will know the data that you need for sure

John Wessel  46:29  

That, yeah, that is such good advice. And we’ve talked about this before. I’ve had I think I can say dozens of people reporting to me or reporting up through me at this point in my career, and I can think of one person who I’d like, hey, I need you to be an expert on this. One person who decided to actually read the docs cover to cover, and by far had the best success as far as, like, owning, you know, their area. And so that is such a simple, really, quite boring thing, yeah. But it’s really good advice. So awesome. Well, thanks for being on the show.

Eric Dodds  47:02  

Thank you for having me. Hopefully I got back. Yeah,

John Wessel  47:06  

you know what? Will invite you back, maybe even next week? Yeah, sounds great as a co host. So yeah, thanks everybody for listening, and we’ll catch you next time

Eric Dodds  47:18  

The Data Stack Show is brought to you by RudderStack, the warehouse native customer data platform. RudderStack is purpose built to help data teams turn customer data into competitive advantage. Learn more at rudderstack.com.