#13 Patrick Spain, Serial Entrepreneur | Making It Real Podcast with Jan Brinckmann

Spain is a serial entrepreneur who has founded or co-founded four
Web-enabled companies that transformed their industries.
Presently he is the CEO of First Stop Health an online and
on-call telemedicine and advocacy service used by employers and
their employees.





Co-founder and long-time chairman and CEO of Hoover’s, Inc.,
Spain led the company from a small book publisher in 1992 to a
profitable, publicly traded online business information services
company with $31 million in revenue in 2001 with a sale to
D&B in 2003 for $119 million.





Spain was also the founder, chairman and CEO of HighBeam
Research, which he started in 2002 and sold to Cengage Learning
in December, 2008. He also co-founded and is CEO of Newser, a
news curation and summarization service with an audience of seven
million readers each month.





Spain serves as a board member of Owler a Silicon Valley-based
company information service that is using crowd sourcing to
revolutionize data collection, quality and delivery. He is also
on the Board of a Chicago-based Occasion, an event scheduling
platform for smaller merchants. Spain also serves on the Board of
Community Health, the largest free clinic in the U.S. Chicago. He
is also a member of the Board of Governors of Opportunity
International, the largest and best capitalized micro-lender in
the world. Spain serves on the advisory boards of several
technology startup companies.





Past board positions include service at Televerde a rapidly
growing, socially responsible marketing services company,
SmartAnalyst, a research company that serves the pharma industry
and GuideStar, the largest and most trusted database of
information on the not-for-profit sector.





Spain has worked in the technology industry since 1979 and has a
bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago and a law degree
from Boston University. He splits his time between the Chicago
and Austin, TX areas. 





Patrick Spain, Serial Entrepreneur | Making It Real Podcast with
Jan Brinckmann | Episode #13





00:00 When did you decide to co-found a company?


02:04 How did you approach starting your first business?


02:58 Leaving behind a nice salary for your startup


05:14 Democratizing information as a business model


07:40 How could you get into volume distribution?


09:34 How important was market timing for Hoovers.com?


10:38 What would have been your plan B if Hoovers.com didn't work
out?


12:25 Is there a common scheme you're looking for when founding a
company?


15:19 Intuition vs validation before making large purchases for
your business


16:22 After selling two companies, how did you decide on your new
venture?


19:10 Core lessons learned in a declining market


21:02 Would you advise founders to only go into high-growth
markets?


24:04 How do get started when trying to fix fundamental market
issues


26:58 How important is it to have at least one co-founder with
deep domain knowledge?


28:28 Starting First Stop Health


30:18 Putting components together instead of building everything
from scratch


32:18 Building a sales team as a company who made it to the INC
500 list twice in a row


36:10 Is there a guiding concept to decide things as an
entrepreneur?


38:51 Being a very active business angel, what are the common
mistakes you're seeing?


42:40 First Stop Health is your fourth venture - what keeps you
going?