Street Broad Scientific Volume 1 | 2011-2012
INTERVIEW
Feature Article: An Interview with Jud Bowman and Taylor Brockman
Left to Right: BSS Chief Editor Jenny Wang, 2014-2015 Essay Contest Winner Keilah Davis, Jud Bowman, BSS Chief Editor Justin Yang, BSS Faculty Sponsor Dr. Bennett, Taylor Brockman, Taylor Robless (Brockman Apprentice Foundation, Digital Marketing). Photo Credit: Brian Faircloth Jud Bowman (‘99) is the founder and former CEO of Appia. Taylor Brockman (‘99) is the CTO of Causam Energy. Together, they established the Bowman-Brockman Endowment for Entrepreneurship and Advanced Research at NCSSM. Davis: What really inspired you guys to decide to start your own company as high schoolers at NCSSM? Bowman: From my perspective, part of it was because of the timing. We were here ‘98 to ‘99, when there was a lot of euphoria in the tech market. We thought, there’s no reason we can’t do this! Brockman: There was something special happening with the open source movement in ‘95-’96. You were able to contribute at an expert level no matter who you were or where you were. So being a part of that made a lot of tools available to get this thing going without requiring a lot of heavy investment - the software was freely available. Bowman: One last thing I would say too - there is the beautiful thing of being 17 years old, which is that you don’t have a fear of failure. Davis: In the beginning, were there any hiccups or bumps in the road that may have been discouraging, but you pushed through? Bowman: The biggest thing to tackle - the first stumbling block - was that the dorms had no internet. And this dates us big time, but there was no campus wide wifi. Even our rooms didn’t have cable lines. The first thing we had to do was to get internet into the dorms. That was all Taylor. Brockman: Network accessibility to get internet access was key. That was where we did a lot of research. We launched our initial products on the internet, and that was still kind of a new thing at that time. We found some of our friends, three of our friends at the school, who were good with computers to join us over the summer. We convinced our parents to liquidate some of our college funds - our first $50,000 - so that we could buy some servers, hire some friends for the summer, and get an apartment we could work out of. They believed in us, and that was really important to us. I think an92 | 2014-2015 | Volume 4
Street Broad Scientific
INTERVIEW
Volume 1 | 2011-2012
other thing that was almost a stumbling block was that the college offer acceptance deadline was almost 2 weeks before our angel investor meeting. Jud and I both rolled the dice and deferred for a year, believing that we could get funded. Bowman: Yeah that was a tough decision, or it seemed like one at the time. Davis: So was there any academic or life lesson that you learned here at Science and Math that helped you along the way or was it just being at the school that gave you the confidence to do anything? Brockman: There was a very specific lesson I learned my first year here. I had come from a very western state school where the mathematics program just wasn’t as far along, and so I felt like I was placed in the wrong class here. So I had to convince my professor that I should be bumped up. And it was right along the time where the first graphing calculators were coming out. And so it was sort of applying what I had learned from the open source community to the mathematics problems in front of me, and demonstrating that was what allowed me to get moved up, sort of bypassing the standard procedure to get into the right class. Bowman: Coming to Science and Math instills the belief that you can do anything - and that sounds so cliche - but I guess we did not have a fear of failure. And another thing was that Science and Math brings kids together, I mean I never would have met Taylor if it weren’t for NCSSM putting us in the same Hunt Dorm. He’s from Shelby, NC and I’m from Greenville and went to Enloe High School in Raleigh. We would have never met probably if it hadn’t been for NCSSM. And to say this school changed our lives - it is so directly correlated. I never went to college - well only for a little bit - and dropped out to become an entrepreneur. I feel like I’ve never had a job in my life. We started a project senior year that became a company that took on a life of its own. I’ve now had the chance to start two companies. So yeah there is no question that this school changed our lives pretty directly. Davis: As you reflect back on your experience here, what was one of your favorite memories? Brockman: It was so much fun for me to be involved in starting a new club. It was something completely ridiculous: the Grillmaster Club, a club about the art of grilling hamburgers. I worked with the faculty to get it chartered and raised money to buy supplies. We got grills installed, brought our guitars and amplifiers out in front of the Hunt lawn, and had a big party with music and hamburgers. Bowman: One of the coolest things about Science & Math is that it allowed me to explore many career paths. I originally thought I wanted to be an architect. Through the Mentorship program, I interned one day a week with a local architect doing residential architecture, which was a lot of fun but proved to me that I wasn’t any good at it. Another thing I wanted to do was something related to Wall Street - trading stocks. I founded the investment club here and I was always daytrading stocks here on campus fairly successfully. One of the bio teachers - Dr. Naiman - had a relative who worked on the floor of the NY Stock Exchange as a market maker. I thought, that’s the coolest thing in the world. We had a term for special projects - SPW which... Bennett: ... evolved into Miniterm. Bowman: So for my senior year SPW/Miniterm I got to go to New York City with my girlfriend for an internship getting to follow this market maker around at the NYSE. That was a really cool experience. Wang: Since a large % of startups do fail, how do you know an idea will succeed or when to stop pursuing an idea? Brockman: We’ve done a lot of research in that: creating the minimum viable product, or failing fast. Building a product is not the issue. The idea is the most important - finding a market need for an idea to take off, getting an idea out there as early as possible, seeing who responds to it, and being able to change it cheaply. It’s like working in modeling clay before taking it to the kiln to be fired. Bowman: I agree with the failing fast strategy. I generally encourage entrepreneurs now to not even pursue funding and this is more for tech startups - unless you have massive initial traction. At least a million in revenue or a million in users. And those numbers are getting to the point where a million may not even be enough. And in terms of deciding whether to pursue an idea, I have a rule. I have to have a crush on an idea to the point where it’s all I can think about for a least 30 days, almost like an obsessive crush. And if I’m literally sleeping, thinking, dreaming about it all the time, then it may be an idea worth pursuing. But I still wouldn’t look for funding unless the idea had significant traction. Volume 4 | 2014-2015 | 93
Street Broad Scientific Volume 1 | 2011-2012
INTERVIEW
Brockman: And a lot do fail. 99 out of 100 do. Bowman: I think we started our company in our dorm when there was almost an unfair advantage - the funding environment was great. These funding environments are cyclical. Right now is actually a great time. This past year was the best in venture capital since 2001 so it’s not that different from when we started. These things come in waves, and in a lot of ways the best thing is that we started so young because we were not scared of those odds of failure. In my opinion, it would be crazy to consider being an entrepreneur as a career path - it’s just far too risky. Brockman: The costs, especially on the software side, have come way down now. The clouds, the mobile development kits, $99 now gets you a year of what you need. I like to play in areas where you can play cheap and fail fast. Bowman: On Wall Street there is a term called hedging and in so many respects Taylor and I were able to take enormous risk but we completely hedged out the downsides. If we failed, both of us could go back to college. All of the capital we later obtained was from venture capital funding, not from ourselves. Yang: What advice would you give to young aspiring scientific researchers/entrepreneurs? Brockman: Take it outside of the classroom. Follow your passion. If you find yourself waking up 30 minutes early every morning reading news about your topic area of interest, that’s a good sign. If you are tinkering, sketching, and prototyping on a Friday night with an idea, that’s a good sign. Balance your courseload, but also find something that is academically challenging to do outside of the classroom. Bowman: Surround yourself with the smartest people you can find and go to the best college you can get into regardless of the cost. Bennett: What are you guys working on now? Bowman: So the company that we started grew from the two of us in the dorm here to at its peak about 500 people. It went public on NASDAQ and we were both there for 9 years. We left around the same time - the summer of 08. We both have gone to different startups after that. The startup that I founded that summer now has about 60-65 people and is in the process of getting acquired. Brockman: The project that I joined was named Causam Energy, and we announced last fall that we were acquiring a firm called Power Analytics, so we’ve got offices in Raleigh, San Diego, and Charleston. I can’t really say how many people we have but we are a small, nimble company focused on next generation powergrid services. Just like what smartphones did to telephone systems, we imagine that these new communications systems will revolutionize the way we generate renewable energy to help us consume it in intelligent ways. Wang: Besides your own companies, what are some of your favorite companies to follow? Favorite innovators? Bowman: Besides the big ones? Google, Facebook, Tesla, SolarCity, Apple, Uber - I read about pretty much all of them at TechMeme. Right now my favorite entrepreneur to follow is Elon Musk, simply because he has such diverse interests. He may not be the wealthiest right now, and he has not yet achieved as much success as Gates or Zuckerberg, but he’s pretty much the only entrepreneur that has made multiple multibillion dollar companies across so many disparate industries - space, solar, batteries, PayPal - that’s four! Brockman: Small-scale companies are really fun to be involved with: the local community accelerators. There are really brilliant people that are taking those risks. They have a hot new idea and they want to talk about it. They want some advice. And watching the Series A and Series B funding rounds, especially in the southeast, is a lot of fun. In terms of innovation, I try to challenge everyone in my company to go to at least one conference every year. Recently, I went to a conference where the keynote speaker was Neil deGrasse Tyson. He was talking about all the new sensors used for asteroid discovery. His new telescope - the sheer data processing volume flowing from the telescope through the computational pipeline is amazing. At conferences they talk the innovation that is new today, not like the stuff you read in textbooks. So now one of the challenges for me is to dream bigger - what’s next? I want to do something to get out of my comfort zone. I’m incredibly excited about bioinformatics, especially the Bowman-Brockman projects we’ve been reading about. Just seeing the cutting edge research where technology and biology begin to blend is exciting. So there are greater challenges ahead. 94 | 2014-2015 | Volume 4