Magellan - My Bet on Myself (and on the Future of Work)

Magellan - My Bet on Myself (and the Future of Work)

From my sales mentors at Namely, I learned to take a chance on an early-stage company, help it grow, and grow my career alongside it. So I joined Graphite, a seed stage company, as an Account Executive and became their highest revenue-generating rep in record time. I was on track to 2.37x my annual quota. My paycheck at the end of the year would be larger than any other in my career, including my time as a lawyer, but instead, I left. Why??

Catching Lightning in a Bottle??

A few months earlier I began mentoring a buddy from law school. He wanted to change residential leasing in NYC. We met a couple of times, and then I received a text asking to meet ASAP. Since our previous meetings were scheduled weeks in advance, I had a sneaking suspicion he had raised money for his company, Doorkee.

We met the next day and before he even sat down I asked, “Did you get funding?”

“Yes, $2.65 million! Do you want to build my sales team?!?”

“Absolutely!”

The following weeks after the meeting I spoke to everyone who could advise me, but the pivotal conversation came with Michael Manne. I spoke to Michael about my success at Graphite and the opportunity at Doorkee. Michael said two things that changed my life. First, he said, “you caught lightning in a bottle” since I liked the founder,? liked the idea, and wanted to take the risk. Second, he said he would guide me through the process of building a sales team. Michael was right and he has been mentoring me ever since. For that, I am forever grateful.??

Betting on Doorkee & Myself

When I joined Doorkee, we didn’t have a finished product or revenue. I bet on the Doorkee team and on myself. A big opportunity came when my pitch won us an introduction to A&E Residential–a little-known company that is one of NYC’s largest residential landlords.?

After meeting with A&E’s Head of Operations and Leasing, I discovered their leasing process was perfect for Doorkee’s platform. A&E heavily relied on brokers, at the time, and regularly paid a one-month’s broker fee, which Doorkee would cut by 60%. But just because we were a perfect fit didn’t mean one of NYC’s largest landlords was about to trust a startup (if only it were that easy).?

I persuaded, entertained, and created FOMO for seven months calling, emailing, and meeting with A&E’s team. That’s when I finally caught the whale and Doorkee closed A&E, one of our best clients.?

Meeting Madness

During my time at Doorkee, I experienced the pain of bad meetings, both as a participant and as a discussion leader.

In the early days of Doorkee, as a participant, I joined meetings with vague titles and no agendas. Meetings with no structure where our executive team would meander and regularly go long. Later on, I felt the pain of bad meetings as a discussion leader. As Doorkee’s VP of Growth managing six sales reps, meetings would overwhelm my original plan if I didn’t keep our goal and agenda top of mind for me and my team. So I searched for a solution to help me. I needed software to provide me with a repeatable framework to ensure I could easily have a great meeting every time.

But no such tool existed …

This seemed crazy to me. Not only are meetings an integral part of corporate America, but they’re growing in number and importance as companies move to a hybrid work model. Most companies historically only provide their employees with the equivalent of a digital notepad and a digital conference room and make them figure meetings out on their own. There had to be a better way.?

Necessity, the Mother of All Invention

I researched meetings to see if this was a wider problem outside of Doorkee. I learned that every year US companies spend $1.4 trillion dollars of employee time in meetings and $399 billion of that time is wasted.?

Before writing a line of code I acted as a human version of Magellan’s meeting software for early beta clients to identify what initial features improved meetings most and therefore should be prioritized. I learned the first step toward fixing bad meetings was requiring a time-boxed agenda where teams explicitly state their meeting goal.

Hence, the birth of Magellan’s agenda builder. We enable teams to share a meeting goal, discussion topics, and allotted times to empower everyone on the team to facilitate the discussion. Any team member can point to Magellan’s current time spent or left to keep a discussion on track. By making our software the bad guy, Magellan–rather than any particular member– becomes the squeaky wheel. Therefore, Magellan’s SaaS agenda builder facilitates meetings by keeping teams on time and on task.

We’ve seen clients cut stand-up meetings that regularly lasted 30+ minutes down to an average of 16 minutes! Magellan’s structure focuses everyone on the team, from participants to discussion leaders, to stay on task until they achieve their goals. And when they achieve their goals early, they end their meetings early, i.e., they achieve meeting Nirvana.

Betting on Magellan & Myself

In hindsight, I don’t recommend anyone quit their job to build a software company without a technical co-founder. But that’s exactly what I did. I realize now that I needed to start my software company without a technical co-founder to find an excellent one. However, I am getting ahead of myself.?

Having bet on myself at Graphite and Doorkee and seeing both bets pay off, I decided to place the ultimate bet on myself and start my own company. On January 2, 2022, I started working full-time on Magellan. Two months in – with no product and no technical co-founder – my development team and I were quickly burning through my savings. We needed more time.?

To extend Magellan’s life, I gave up mine in NYC. I stopped paying NYC rent and subleased my apartment (at a profit!). Next, I found work as a sales consultant making an additional couple of grand a month. Finally, I moved abroad and bounced around the spare bedrooms of family members to save money. It wasn’t always glamorous, but the hard work paid off and I extended four months of runway into ten!

Seven months into building Magellan, I would never have predicted the exact path I took. Now I have a functioning MVP, a technical co-founder, two paying customers (seven clients total), a development team of three engineers, and a phenomenal opportunity to raise $1 million in funding. This new reality was a distant dream in January.

So what’s my lesson learned from this experience? It’s too soon to tell. We’re just getting started. But I do know that I’m excited about the journey, and I hope you are too. I hope you’ll follow and support me and the Magellan team throughout it.