The Blade

While writing The Hockey Stick Principles, I interviewed dozens of founders. This blog is part of a series, “The Most Important Lesson I Learned from…” Look out in the coming weeks for others like this one. 

Lisa Falzone, age 31, is cofounder and CEO of hugely successful retail point-of-sale system Revel Systems. She is quick-minded, candid, and matter-of-fact in conversation. Lisa, a Stanford grad, spent much of her twenties unhappily working for corporations. A former collegiate swimmer, Lisa notes, “My passion in life was to race. When I stopped swimming, I was pretty lost. I knew I had to find that passion with work somehow.”

Discovering a good idea

When Lisa decided to become an entrepreneur, she started with the same question many founders face: What idea should I pursue? Her approach to that question was not only fresh and innovative; it was smart and effective. Each year, I meet dozens of people who say: “I’d really like to start my own cool, innovative company, but I don’t have any good ideas.” One word for them: LAME! If they truly wanted to start a business, they’d make it happen. Lisa did make it happen. She became an entrepreneur without an idea in hand. (Another founder I interviewed, Joe Colopy who started Bronto Software, which was recently sold for $200 million, did the same thing.)

Lisa’s “baby businesses”

For nearly one year, Lisa gave several business ideas a whirl—investing a few weeks or months into each. She explored importing swimsuits from Brazil, building a toy company, selling soaps online, and “bullsifter,” a website designed to sift out the bull**** from people’s corporate lingo. She calls these business explorations “baby businesses” and says what she was really doing was finding her passion again. “You just have to try,” Lisa points out. “You have to actually do it to figure it out. For the swimsuit business, I created a PowerPoint presentation and went out and cold-called random store owners. It was that experience of putting yourself out there, not knowing what’s going to happen. I think a lot of people want to start a company and are waiting for this great idea to come by, and they think they’re going to find this idea if they’re just thinking about it, but for me, it was helpful to just act on stuff.”

Revel Systems is born

One idea Lisa and her cofounder, Chris Ciabarra, had was an app that enables people to quickly and easily select restaurants and place to-go orders. Before they had programmed it, they cold-called restaurants to see how it would fly. “We always sell it before we create it,”[i] Lisa says. In a meeting with restaurant owner Michael Lambert, he suggested they build him a point of sale (POS) system that would work on an iPad. During that first meeting, Michael outlined basically what he was looking for, so right there on the spot, Lisa responded, “We’ll build it for you.” Lisa and Chris soon contracted to deliver Michael the product, which became Revel Systems. The rest is history.

So what’s the lesson? If you really want to become entrepreneur, get off your ass and do it! The idea will take off itself. Remember, it’s not the idea that creates success; it’s the development of the idea.

[i] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgXAlk1JH5w at 13:38