Work as Art: Performance Q & A with Will Bunker

Will Bunker is a co-founder of the VC firm GrowthX Capital and GrowthX Academy. In the 1990’s he built the Internet’s largest dating site with two partners. They sold it in 1999 for $47.7mm. 

For me, his story goes deeper than “guy gets lucky in the Internet boom.”

Will grew up on a farm. He got a degree in industrial engineering. He ran series of international businesses for a legendary oil family. Then, he and his co-founders started looking for ways to tap into the changes of the Internet boom. As they experimented and learned, they found themselves competing directly against AOL, Yahoo, and the rest of the “established players.”

They won that race with a laser focus on learning, results, and creating value for others. They built the third largest affiliate network on the Internet to do it.

After methodically building up revenues, their scrappy startup was purchased and rebranded in a deal that created today's Match.com. 

From there, Will began helping other entrepreneurs scale to their first exits.

Will reminds me of the great athletes and performers I’ve known. Every day, no matter what is going on, he makes time for his art: learning. Two hours a day is invested, usually in drilling flashcards.

Every day.

Programming languages, foreign languages, vocabulary -- nothing is considered taboo. And that’s only one part of his learning equation. I’ve yet to see anyone learn to apply new skills faster.

I asked Will to share his perspectives with the ResultMaps community. Read on for a few of his insights on entrepreneurship, learning, performance, creative flow, and how to find balance as a team.

ON HAVING VISION 

Will Bunker: Being an entrepreneur requires balancing two opposing things. First, you have to be optimistic enough to see a compelling future. Second, you have to be realistic enough to accept the feedback about whatever you're doing wrong that will keep you from getting there. You have to be realistic about what the universe is telling you, yet optimistic that you can change it in a way that gets you your outcome. It's very difficult and that's why people struggle with it.

When I've made the very best decisions in my life, it's usually because of a strategic insight. I don't always have them. When I do get them they lead to massive success. What got me through the OneAndOnly.com stuff [the company that ultimately became Match.com] was knowing that even if my startup failed, I was still correct in seeing the potential of the Internet and believing that this changes everything.

When you run into something that changes everything, then that provides massive opportunities that, if you can go through the pain of figuring it out, can give you fantastic results.

ON PRIORITIZING

Will Bunker: I won't pick up the phone if talking to that person isn't on my critical path for the day. Or I won't check my email but so many times during the day because I don't want to be interrupted. It takes a lot of flow to crank through anything like learning or programming or whatever, so you have to truly block off time and give it to yourself. 

Scott Levy: How do you prioritize your time? Do you have a method you use or a thought process you can share?

Will Bunker: You know, it's harder in the current business because I have to deal with a lot of “inbound” (calls, emails). But when I'm working on an independent project, it's generally trying to pick out what has to happen each day for it to be a success and making sure I block time off for that part. Right now I'm trying to create another Udemy course, so I know I'm going to do X amount of that every day and that happens no matter what. Same with my studying.

Scott Levy: Do you block specific times for this? I know from working time together that you tend to work through some of the studying in downtime.

Will Bunker: It's looser, so the Udemy stuff I do religiously when I get home. I blocked off that I will do X amount of videos in that slot.

Scott Levy: That's regardless of how you feel? Because I know talking with people all day, managing people all day can have a heavy energy requirement.

Will Bunker: Yeah, but if you've got that urgent priority - like right now I'm working on a project with cryptocurrency that involves learning a bunch of stuff on Amazon - I've just got to block off the time or I'm not going to do it.

Scott Levy: Now is this your personal learning or for a Udemy course you are building?

Will Bunker: This is a separate project on top of that. If I want to do it, I need to learn a certain amount of things to be able to code it. Now the reason I'm interested is I know it's something I want to teach on Udemy as well. It's hard to learn something if there's no reason why, so I think finding a motivating why is a huge part of being able to plow through the amount of material that I do.

ON OPPORTUNITY COST AND THE POWER OF LEARNING

Scott Levy: Let's talk about your learning habit: you make time every single day?

Will Bunker: I don't know when I got so obsessed with it. I think it was the feedback of being able to teach myself how to build OneAndOnly.com, then seeing that translate into money.

That has created this link in my mind: the more prepared I am to meet opportunities, the more I can actually execute on those opportunities. So I generally have a map in my head of the next four to five things I want to learn that I think are going to be useful to me in my career or making money over the next year to two years. 

Scott Levy: Something we've discussed before is that you were motivated in high school to create a life that wasn't tied to the farm. How did that motivate you early on?

Will Bunker: It's knowing what the alternative is. I learned this in my industrial engineering class:“what is the ‘opportunity cost?’" It's hard to know if a decision's good or not unless you know what the other things are you could be doing with your time or money. In this case, knowing driving that tractor was a viable alternative motivated me to create other opportunities. Because I knew that's what I was going to be doing if I didn't change things.

Scott Levy: You also said in college they used to call you "the machine" for your dedication to using flashcards to learn.

Will Bunker: [laughs] Well, again, it was knowing that my grades were going to determine what opportunities I had that were outside the farm.

I was fanatical about getting good grades. A chemistry teacher of mine said: "if you want to learn all these formulas you need to put them on flashcards and start organizing them and drilling on them."

That's was the "aha" - that I could break things down into very small pieces. Because you don't meet anyone that couldn't learn one flashcard, right? Then you go "well, if I can learn one, I could probably learn 10.

If I could learn 10 a day...there's nothing I couldn't master within a pretty reasonable amount of time."

Then I had an experience that reinforced it. For some reason, I decided to take 24 hours in one semester. Everyone told me not to do it, including my advisor.

I made all A's that semester by being fanatical about breaking down every piece of information that I was supposed to learn, and putting it on flashcards, and drilling it.

Scott Levy: How much time do you spend these days each day on average studying?

Will Bunker: Probably two hours a day.

Scott Levy: No exceptions?

Will Bunker: None. I review the material every day because if I don't then it's twice as much the next day, and it's usually so many items that I can't let it slide a day. It's too much.

Scott Levy: Have you ever inventoried the number of different subjects you've learned?

Will Bunker:  It’s close to 100. I have over 46,000 flashcards in my system.

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF MEANING

Will Bunker: A lot of the motivation to do something is convincing yourself it's meaningful.

I think the big mistake many people make is that they confuse the fact that they don't understand something with it being useless.

If you don't know how to do algebra, then yes, it's completely useless to you. It's easy to assume that algebra is useless, simply because it's useless to you.

Scott Levy: When you say "meaning" in this case, you're referring specifically to applying a skill to get some result?

Will Bunker: Yes. Because if I can visualize what I'm going to accomplish with learning something, then I'll take the time to learn it well enough to be able to get that outcome.

SETTING PACE, SCOPE, AND LEARNING

Scott Levy: Breaking things down into small chunks is a recurring theme for getting anything done when we've worked together. One of the things that focused me was a point in time where you checked in each morning to see what we were working on, what was done. Then, sometimes you'd check in again at noon, and then for sure at the end of the day. It's become a cornerstone of how I manage. Do you recall when and how that style evolved for you?

Will Bunker: A big part of when we were building OneAndOnly.com was noticing that the longer someone “went dark”, the more likely it was that something wasn't going to work when they resurfaced and tried to plug their work back into the system.

Now they call it continuous deployment - in an ideal world you would write one block of functionality with testing around it, check it in, and have it go through the whole build process.

Again it's back to this idea that you should break big projects down into very small parts. Make sure something visible is happening and getting done in a regular cadence; Don't go off and think for three weeks and then believe that magically the whole cloth will appear.

It's interesting, the current book on tape I'm listening to is Black Box Thinking, and it's very much around that iterative process and feedback that you get from doing something that's visible, and getting feedback from other team members or from users or customers, and how that paradoxically makes faster progress than trying to do things in bigger chunks, bigger leaps.

ON CREATING VALUE

Scott Levy: How much are your mental models for business shaped by software engineering concepts? Or do you even frame it that way? 

Will Bunker: I don't think of it. My whole orientation is around business in general, so every skill I'm learning is generally in the context of "is there something about this that will allow me to deliver enough value to make money?" Which is why I got into Udemy. I heard the growth person for Udemy say the number one teacher on Udemy made 3 million dollars last year. I just went, wow! It's hard not to react to that statement and do something with it.

Scott Levy: I remember many conversations with you that began with you asking the question "how cool would it be if we/I did that" followed by an outline of the future.

Will Bunker: Yes - I'm hopefully going to put together a pretty good workflow for doing Udemy courses, but the only reason to learn all that and master it is I think it will deliver value, and that value in return will come back to me in dollars. If there is software stuff that I've picked up, it's always in the context of does it make it more likely that a business will succeed if they use this or not. I'm not a purist in terms of software - it doesn't serve its own purpose, it should only serve the purpose of delivering value to customers.

ON EXPERIMENTS AND INNOVATION

Scott Levy: We’ve talked before about things that can limit learning and innovation on teams that are within in larger organizations. What are your thoughts there?

Will Bunker: The biggest issue is the inability to make mistakes without receiving blame.

If you're pioneering - working on something new - by definition, nobody knows how to do it, therefore, the odds of any instantiation being correct is almost zero.

So if working through those mistakes is viewed screwing up instead of learning, you'll have no innovation, because innovation takes tremendous amounts of iterations.

An example they gave in Black Box Thinking was Dyson, the guy who invented the new kind of vacuum cleaner with the cyclone inside or it, the vortex inside of it. He had to make 1,600 versions of it before he found something that worked. He did it at night and on the weekends, in a low-cost lab, but if they had been doing that at a big company and every prototype cost half a million dollars, they would have given up.

So it's: “can you create an environment where you know you're going to have to try a lot of different things and create a cost structure where that's okay?”

Edison hinted at it: "I haven't failed. I've found 10,000 things that didn't work."

Then it's whether you can you set up a structure where A) the cost of failure is acceptable so that you are not betting the company on each iteration. and B) you're learning with every iteration, there's a feedback loop.

ON FREEING TEAMS TO PERFORM WELL

Scott Levy: So you've managed teams, worked on and in them, you've mentored, advised and invested; what shared traits have you noticed on the teams that perform well?

Will Bunker: The biggest thing is a high level of trust, and the ability to work around each other's flaws. I think it's a mistake to assume there are human beings that don't have flaws. They call them the "A Team," right?

You hear it, "Only hire the "A Team" or "A players." Most of the time you won't be able to attract the A team because you don't deserve them because you're not an "A Team" player.

When we were at our best or when I've seen teams at their best, it's because everyone's figured out what each other's good at and you play to your strengths and cover your weaknesses. Those are the best teams.

Scott Levy: Do you have specific examples you can share with us?

Will Bunker: Our current team right now at GrowthX. Sean Sheppard is extremely optimistic and engaging with people. He always sees the upside, the possibilities. Then you've got Andrew, who is trained to look for the downside in his legal background. Then you've got me, with high empathy and ability to try to grease the wheels and get everyone onto the same page.

None of us are perfect, but we complement each other’s strengths and cover for each other where there might not be a strength.

That’s the key.