An epic fail early in his career taught HomeAway co-founder Brian Sharples that it's a good idea to hire folks who have a healthy familiarity with failure.
You think you've had bad days?
HomeAway co-founder Brian Sharples once lost seven figures worth of funding in three hours.
Today, he's a successful CEO who made a boatload of cash in 2011 when his vacation rental marketplace HomeAway went public. But back at the start of his career, Sharples was a relatively inexperienced entrepreneur with a business plan to produce weekend car shows where those selling and buying used vehicles could meet up. He raised $1 million from well known VCs, and bet a hefty chunk of it on the company's first event in San Francisco's Candlestick Park.
The only trouble was, that weekend a freak storm blew in with 70-mile-per-hour winds. "It ended up being quite a disaster. Big tents were blowing down and giant poles were crashing down on cars. It became very quickly more of a task of trying to make sure nobody got killed than running the event," Sharples told Inc.
He managed to salvage something from the business, but the VC money was gone and the failure was seared into his brain. It's affected how he looks at risk ever since.
"As I've grown up and done a bunch of other things you learn that as an entrepreneur you still want to take great risks, but there are fantastic ways to manage downside and be paranoid about downside," Sharples says.
Hiring for (Healthy) Paranoia
But paranoia and healthy fear of failure isn't just a quality he's learned to love in himself. It's also a character trait he looks for in his team.
"With HomeAway we had a lot of people on the founding team who had been through the first dotcom bust," Sharples says. "I loved that because it made those people highly educated, highly paranoid, highly worried about ever getting in a situation again where they were working for a company that was burning too much cash or investing too much in the long-term and not really being disciplined."
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