Lasting To The End: Persistence Personified with Harrison

The Jake Dunlap Show

This episode of The Jake Dunlap Show features Harrison Tang, Founder and CEO of Spokeo. Moving to the US from Taiwan as a teen was the biggest shift in Harrison's life. Not only did he need to learn an entirely new language, but he had to adjust to the people and culture all while gunning for the best education he could get.

Harrison would eventually make it to Stanford, a validation of he and his family's efforts, where he would graduate with a double major in Economics and Electrical Engineering. He continued down the path with his masters and, deciding against working for behemoths like Google and Facebook, started his own company in his parent's basement.

The trials began during the first years, during the product market fit years, when Harrison and his partners almost went bankrupt and needed another round of funding from their parents. These years instilled perseverance in Harrison to last until the end and to outlast all competition.

Through the obstacles, Spokeo entered its crazy growth phase. It was also during this time when Harrison started to dig deeper to ask questions of why they are being successful. For him, not knowing why you are successful makes the success very hard to replicate.

This was when Spokeo and Harrison entered the dig back into the why years. Not only did they start to get their data gathering correct, they also started to look deeper into their company fabric. Harrison learned the big difference between trust and blind trust with the defining factor being transparency.

As Harrison and his company grow, he has put a premium on providing transparency. This translates into the major changes the company has gone through, and the mission, vision, and strategy they now employ to provide their users with epistemic transparency. With tools rooted in transparency, they provide users the ability to determine what information is true and what is not.

QUOTES:

19:10 "Success is actually not about whether you gone to Stanford or Ivy League or how smart you are. It's actually whether you can last till the end, whether you can last longer than your competition."

21:14 "So I think when things are going well, I think the key thing is you have to ask why. So that's the difference between growth and blind growth and and the same thing with trust and blind trust."

25:26 "If running a business is so easy, why do you need humans? Robots can't do it. Data, at the end of the day, represents the voice of the people. Data, at some point, comes from a person or device or some kind of entity... You really have to dig deep into what people are saying."

31:02 "I think blind trust is one that you just say but you don't do. If you don't really care about somebody, you spend time working with them to help align the objectives between you and that person. Blind trust is the case where you don't care enough to do that."

35:53 "One little lesson I've learned is the importance of recognizing other people's work. Whether you agree with it or not, the importance of listening and acknowledgement, because that's the very first step of getting everyone on the same page."

More about Harrison

Harrison is originally from Taiwan and he moved to the US when he was 13 years old. He experienced a culture shock but this did not dissuade him from learning the language and pursuing the best education possible.

He graduated from Stanford University with a double major in Economics and Electrical Engineering. Harrison then got his MS also from Stanford for Electrical Engineering specializing in optical systems and optoelectronics.

He has helped pioneer communications technologies and has been featured in PC Magazine for a Skype mouse concept. He, together with his roommates in Stanford, started their company Spokeo in Harrison’s parent’s basement.

The company went off to a rocky start and their first round of funding would get depleted, threatening them with bankruptcy. However, with some more help from their parents, they were able to refine their product market fit and keep developing their business.

From trying to create a social network aggregator, they had evolved their product into a search engine where users can look up people’s contact information such as phone numbers, email addresses, and social media platforms.

From a four person company, the company has grown significantly and now serves 18 million visitors per month. Spokeo won the 2015 Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in the Consumer Services category and posted 159 percent growth over the past three years, with $78 million in revenue for 2015

Find out more about Harrison and connect with him in the following links:

• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/theceodad/
• Website (Spokeo) - https://www.spokeo.com/
• Twitter - https://twitter.com/theceodad
• Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/TheCEODad/

Learn more about Jake Dunlap and Skaled by visiting the links below:

Jake Dunlap:

• Personal Site - http://jakedunlap.com/
• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakedunlap/
• Twitter - https://twitter.com/JakeTDunlap
• Instagram - http://instagram.com/jake_dunlap_
• Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/JakeTDunlap/

Skaled:

• Website - https://skaled.com/
• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/skaled
• YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsw_03rSlbGQkeLGMGiDf4Q