Todd Masonis Interview

By: Michael Dunlop     Topics: Blog

Todd Masonis is a co-founder and Vice President of Products for Plaxo. He is Plaxo?s lead user interface designer and Windows programmer. Plaxo is the third company Todd has founded. Previously, he co-founded netElement and Natient Technologies.

Thanks for agreeing to this interview Todd. I have been looking forward to completing this interview for some time. First off – can we have a little background information- Where you live? How old you are? What motivates you? Inspires you?

I’m 28 years old and live in San Jose, California. I grew up on the East Coast, in West Hartford, Connecticut. I came out to California to go to Stanford. I graduated in 2001 which a degree in Symbolic Systems. My concentration was Computational Linguistics – basically studying how computers and language fit together. Some friends of mine and I started Plaxo in 2001; for me it was my first real job out of college. Since then we’ve raised $28m of funding and built a service that has over 20m users. In terms of what motivates me, I really enjoy building products that people can use every day.

1) http://www.plaxo.com/about is a great introduction to what Plaxo is all about. I see as of September 2006 there was over 15 Million Users and over a Billion connections. This is quite amazing. Are you able to give any update on these figures?

I don’t think we’ve done an official announcement in a while, but the service continues to grow quite well. It’s all been organic — we haven’t spent any money on advertising or user acquisition, but people who use and like the product invite their friends to join. So we’re pretty proud of that growth, as well as some recent partnerships that have also expanded the reach of Plaxo.

2) I understand that Plaxo is the third company you have founded. Can I ask, what motivated you to get into business, to become an Entrepreneur and how old were you when you founded your first business?

I had always been interested in starting a company — and going to Stanford in the late nineties accelerated that idea. At that time (during the bubble), everyone was trying to start a company or dream up start-up ideas. So for my first company, some friends and I started it over one summer between Freshman and Sophomore year of college. I was about 18 years old then. We built a product, launched, it got users, got some press, and got some great experience. Eventually we decided to kill it and go back to school, but the experience was incredibly valuable for when we started Plaxo.

3) You are a Windows programmer and Plaxo’s lead user interface designer. What advice would you give someone who is a programmer, who wants to start their own company?

That’s a bit out of date – I don’t do as much of the programming any more, but I think being a programmer is a great way to start your company. It’s very hard to start something when you first need to convince other people to build it for you – if you can have an idea and just starting building it right away, it makes everything much easier.

One piece of advice I would give to programmers, though, is that as engineers it’s very easy to get stuck in details. However, users are very busy and do not think like engineers. So it’s very important to keep your product simple and continually get user feedback and see how user’s interact with your product. If you can tap into great user feedback you’ll build a better product faster than just doing it solely based on your own intuition.

4) If you could go back in a time machine to the time when you were just getting started. What business related advice would you give yourself?

I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is that things always take longer than you think. Starting a company and creating real value takes a lot of sustained, hard work. There’s no shortcut to success, but a lot of long nights and missed weekends. So don’t get discouraged and realize that you are in it for the long haul.

5) Do you think that entrepreneurialism is something that is in your blood? Or is it something that can be learned?

I think it would be very difficult to learn how to be an entrepreneur. It’s the sort of thing that if you are passionate about you should just do. The barrier to entry is incredibly low, so if you have an idea I think you should just go for it.

6) What is the best advice you have ever been given?

I think as an entrepreneur you will get advice from a lot of different people. Some of it is great, some of it is really terrible. And some of it is well meaning, but doesn’t really apply to your situation. I think it’s important to take every piece of advice and really think it through and only do things that make sense to you. Everyone’s situation is different, and if you are doing something new, you can’t also rely on what has been figured out before and have to make your own conclusions. There’s a quote I heard recently that sums it up well:

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” – Buddha

7) What advice would you give to a Young Entrepreneur setting up their first business?

I think the hardest part is just starting. There are a million reasons why an idea won’t work or insurmountable obstacles you could imagine. However, I think you just need to jump in and start. In the worst case, you will fail and learn from that and try again.  So if you have an idea or passion, you should just do it.

8) It looks like you have a lot of experience dealing with investment firms / venture capitalists. Is there any specific advice you could give a Young Entrepreneur raising investment for the first time?
I think it’s very easy to focus on trying to raise money. But in my experience, raising money is a big distraction and can cause more problems. It’s much easier to raise money when you don’t need it, so I would focus entirely on building a great product and getting users. If you can do that, VCs will come to you and you will work out a much better deal.

9) If the Internet had not existed – what do you think you would be doing?

That’s a tough question — I’ve always liked computers and building software. I’d probably be building some other type of software product. If it weren’t for computers, I probably would have ended up as a lawyer or an architect.

10) What do you like best about the Internet?

I like that the Internet increases the pace of innovation. We can come up with a new idea, build it, and put it out to millions of users in a few days. With Plaxo Pulse, for instance, we ship new features every week to our entire users base. I think with normal download software, hardware, or any other technology, this would be impossible — it takes so much time to build, test, and release something new. But this fast pace makes it much easier to try new things and experiment without having to worry as much about what happens if the experiment fails. This allows us to find the unintuitive answers quickly.

11) What do you like least about the Internet?

I think the Internet has not yet done a good job of connecting people to other people they already know. It’s great to find content and other people with shared interest, but it’s still difficult to keep in touch with your friends and family. That’s one of the things we’ve been trying to change with Plaxo Pulse and I think that once this challenge is solved the internet will be much more useful for everyone.

12) Have you any plans (personal or business) that you can share with us about your future plans / goals / lifetime goals?

I’d obviously like to keep growing Plaxo with even more users and revenue. I think we’ve accomplished a lot, but there’s still a huge amount to be done to get Plaxo to where we’d like.

Thank you Todd – great interview – and some wonderful lessons here for all of us.

We wish you and all at Plaxo even greater success.

Michael Dunlop

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