Vettery

At rock bottom, build a punch list and take it one day at a time

Adcock spent about 15 years constantly running out of money, including broke, unpaid years at Vettery from 2012 to 2017 before its $110M sale. His method for the lows is to make a punch list and focus only on getting through today, not the week and not Friday.

“The inner monologue is like, this really sucks. Super painful. I think at that point you just gotta go like day for day. You just gotta make it like day. You gotta make, when things get really bad like that, you gotta build a punch list and you just gotta get through it. Like there's only way out is through. So you need to build a punch list. And you need to get to day to day. You gotta go day to day. You can't go week to week, 2 days, can't look at Friday.”

Steal thisWhen things are falling apart, write a punch list and plan only to get through today.

48 of 50 startups in Vettery's NYU incubator class went to zero

Adcock says founders sign up for a game where about 95% fail: of roughly 50 companies in Vettery's NYU incubator cohort, only two returned more than $0 five years later. He then went all-in again, funding Figure with falling Archer stock and a second mortgage on his house.

“I remember what Vettery, we started at the NYU incubator. I was so excited. We got in one of the semesters and there was, I think it was like 50 companies that were there. We started in SoHo. It was great. We had a great time. I think if you look back, I think like 5 years later, me and one other guy are the only 2 people that made greater than $0 on our team. 48 companies went to zero. Wow. And I was just like, holy shit, if you're around this game for long enough, everybody dies.”

Vettery built Outreach internally a year before it became a $1B company

Pushing back on Sam's point that a $10M/year business is a home run, Adcock recalls his seven years at Vettery. His team built an internal marketing automation tool that turned out to be essentially Outreach, which later became a billion-dollar company. His lesson is that choosing what to spend your time on is critical.

“Vettery is my bridge. I sat inside of Vettery for like 7 years. Like, we literally built like a marketing automation tool for us internally. And then like a year later I was like, oh man, look at this, it's outreach.io. And it was like a billion-dollar company. We built that internally a year or two prior.”