>> DAN BELFRY: My name is Dan
Belfry, and I'm an entrepreneur.
I live out in San Francisco.
I was from Penn State, here, and my Cofounders
and I started what became
wiwi.com here in a class project.
And WiWi is a service that lets people or
small businesses build their own websites.
And we've been at it for
about five years, like I said,
and have grown our user base to
about 11 million users today.
We power about 2% of the websites on
the internet, and roughly about 10%
of the United States' business,
we create a website every month.
Actually, pretty popular among education,
teachers use us to have a classroom blog
and share the syllabus and the homework
assignments, and the news of the class.
But, of course, we're also pretty popular
among small businesses, like restaurants
or just different shops around town that
need a web presence, or online businesses,
people selling things, artists, videographers,
like just a wide range of different use cases.
So my day-to-day responsibilities have
evolved in a sense before it was -
in the early days it was really focused around
everything business related and customer support
and a lot of aspects, but now I really focus in
how the product works and kind of the liaison,
if you will, between the designers and the
engineers, and I provide a lot of feedback
and actual wireframe mockups of how features
work, which is what I'm passionate about.
So I think our success and user growth is
really attributed to a passion for the product
and making things very intuitive and
easy and approachable, friendly in a way.
And a good product just spreads itself because
people, you know, they use it, they like it,
and they tell their friends, and it's pretty
much that generator is the way that we've grown
to date, it's all word of mouth and friends
and just satisfaction with the product.
The most exciting aspect of what I'm
doing is the fact that I can wake-up
and have impact at the end of the day.
The effort I put in and the ideas that I
have are the results at the end of the day,
and I love the control that
that gives me, right?
So if you're part of a bigger company you can
only have so much impact and there's a lot
of bureaucracy you have to
fight to get stuff done.
But I love most kind of the real impact that
you can have as an individual in a company
of a small size and a company that you control.
I mean I get a lot of satisfaction from
meeting real users who are passionate,
you know, I mean that's the best, right?
Like I met a girl the other day, she comes
over and she's like you founded WiWi?
Wow, like she was like literally like almost
kind of shaking, and she's like I want
to give you a hug, like I love WiWi.
So that's the best, right?
When you get like a real user with
real passion about your products.
I mean and that's kind of - it took
us kind of awhile to get there,
it was a long time before I actually met what I
would call like a WiWi user in the wild, right,
like a random, unconnected real WiWi user,
but now it's happening more
regularly and it's very cool.
I think my advice would just be to do it,
I mean do it, like because like you should
at least pursue your passion, right?
Just pursue it to the extent
that you can pursue it, right?
So if you're really passionate about
starting a company, you know, make it happen.
I know it's a big jump and it's hard to take
that leap, but if you're really passionate
about that path and you have, you know, a
good set of cofounders and you guys together
like think you can do it, I would
encourage you to actually do it.
You don't need to have that
backup plan necessarily
because the worst case scenario is a great
experience and you learn a lot from that,
and no employer is going to
look at the fact that, you know,
you started a company as a negative.
So this isn't - it's like not really
books written about this in the right way
to understand it, so it's kind of just
a learning experience the entire way.
The fear of the unknown might stop someone,
but if you have the - a different mindset
of you're going to attack the problems
as you go, that is the way to solve them,
and that's the way to get
much, much further, right?
You don't need to have all the answers, just
one step at a time and the dots will connect.
And I think if a budding entrepreneur is
not in Silicon Valley, in San Francisco,
but is truly passionate about starting a
technology related company you might want
to consider relocating there because that is the
Mecca of startups in technology because there's
that network, like I said, there's talented
engineers, and there's just so much opportunity
to partner and all that, it just makes it
so much easier if you're actually there.
I left a semester early to
start WiWi with my Cofounders.
We were seniors, first semester, after
the first semester we went to California
to start this thing, and it spurred out
of a class project and the direction
that the professor gave the class was you
guys need to create a web application in PHP.
And so Dave with meeting with the
group and they were throwing out ideas,
and the idea of having an e-portfolio [assumed
spelling] creator was kind of thrown-out there
and Dave kind of jumped on
that idea and really like it.
He reached out to me and he said, listen,
I'll build it for class and you can focus
on selling it to schools, and
we can charge $5 per student,
and we'll get all these universities.
And I was like, you know, that
sounds great, I'm onboard.
And, yes, so we kind of joined
up and evolved the idea into more
of a general website creation service, and this
is definitely something I was passionate about
and I wanted to see this through, and
I really wanted to go out and do this,
but at the same time I did have a fulltime
job offer from GE and that was an option
for me if things were not work out.
My Cofounder, Dave, we were looking for a
short name, dot com had to be available,
and wanted it to be pronounceable and brandable.
So he created kind of a dot com name generator,
if you will, that would output just a long list
of things and most of it was
gibberish, but we narrowed it
down to a couple choices
and WiWi was one of those.
And we looked at it and we thought, okay, this
could work, it's kind of friendly sounding,
approachable, and it's short, it's pretty
brandable, and so we went with that
and made our slogan web creation made easy.
Definitely ambition, drive, you know,
because times get tough at times, you know,
so there's ups and there's downs,
you have to see through the downs.
People that give-up are the people
that fail, it's not the people
that necessarily had a bad idea
because you can pivot, you know?
I would say that drive is critical and it
helps to have a balanced attitude and kind
of an optimistic personality because,
like I said, there's ups and downs
and the lows can get low, but if you
can really see the light then it's not
that bad and you come out ahead, yes.