Ep. 203 - Sean Sheppard, GrowthX Founder on Adapting in a Changing Environment

Sean Sheppard is the founder of GrowthX. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, and Sean discuss the impact of COVID on the startup and investment environment, Silicon Valley, and elsewhere, trends we're seeing in the world of no code, and ways that startups can generate revenue and adapt in this challenging environment. 

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Sean Sheppard. He is the founder of GrowthX. And for long time listeners, you may have heard and met Sean before. He was actually on Episode 14, I believe, back in 2016 so welcome back, Sean. 

Sean Sheppard: Hey, thanks Brian. I had no idea. I was so early. 

Brian Ardinger: We're recording this in April, and this is our birthday week for inside Outside, and we're five years into this podcasting scene, so it's been kind of crazy, but it's been fun to do all these shows.

Sean Sheppard: Thanks. I can't believe it's been five years since I came there to do that talk and sat in your studio. Right? 

Brian Ardinger: That's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you back on. Probably a lot has changed with GrowthX and we want to talk about that. Also want to talk about now that we're in the Corona virus disruption, I wanted to get your insights into what's going on in the Valley, what's going on in startups and get some feedback there. Maybe we start by telling the audience more about what GrowthX is and where you are in the scene. 

Sean Sheppard: We started about seven years ago as a group of serial entrepreneurs turned investors, turned frustrated investors, because our companies weren't succeeding, not because they couldn't build products, but because they didn't know how to build markets. And we set about trying to solve that problem for ourselves, and we built a proprietary framework for helping our companies find product market fit. It was exclusive only to the companies that we invested in, but it became quite successful and very popular. And so we started to share it with the rest of the world.

And now we licensed that, and I spend most of my time when I'm not in quarantine, traveling the world, working with governments and companies and countries and incubators and accelerators, on how to incorporate product market fit thinking and programming and execution into their support systems for their startup communities.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about how the world has changed in the last four, five, six weeks, specifically around what you're seeing in the startup scene. Even what you're seeing from corporate innovators that you work with. What's the general consensus of what's happening? Where the holes that we need to be plugging, that kind of stuff.

Sean Sheppard: Obviously, it's an unprecedented and interesting time for anybody who's in our generation and certainly in our lives. I've been through many economic crashes. I go back to 87'. I remember that one. I remember the dot com boom and bust, 9/11 certainly, and then the 2008 crash. This one feels much more like the 9/11 experience.

And by that, I mean it certainly does feel much more like war time, you know, we do have this enemy that we're, we're dealing with. Obviously, it's not one we can see, but it's there and I think it's going to change behaviors on a global scale. The degree to which those behaviors will change and the permanence of that change and when that change starts to normalize is yet to be determined.

You can watch the news all day long. Watch people predict the future. But like a smart man once told me, if you want to know the relevance of the news, just watch seven-day old news, and you'll find out just how unimportant it is. But the point is that we don't know, but we don't know yet about that. I do believe that there is going to be some measure of behavioral change.

Like the way we have security measures post 9/11 that aren't going away, and over time have been relaxed, but they're there to stay. I think we're going to have similar security measures, for our health, that will be here to stay, and then there will be certain things and behaviors that we will all change, whether it's less people shaking hands and hugging, which to me is very sad because I think the need to connect basic human need that we all want, need, and desire. I think just for our own physical and mental and spiritual health. But other things like working from home. The digital transformation that everybody has been talking about that's been coming for years and years and years. I think it's going to be dramatically accelerated. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, I think you're right. It's not that it wasn't seen or a lot of it wasn't seen disrupting education, disrupting healthcare, disrupting all these industries that we've talked about, but a lot of us, what we talked about in the past, it's focused on like the technology being that core driver. And I think the virus just expediated that conversation and forced a lot of those folks to change faster than they even were going to have to, given the circumstances going around. So, I'm not sure that necessarily we would have been facing these things in the future, just this virus has accelerated the impact. 

Sean Sheppard: Yeah. So, a big part of GrowthX family of companies is our corporate business, which works on helping corporations commercialize new innovations, bring great startup technology into their environments, invest in the startup community, things like that. And when I'm having conversations with our corporate community, and partners, they're all number one in triage mode right now. Period.  End of story. They're just trying to deal with the current situation.

That's number one and number two is those that are starting to actually see some stabilization around that are starting to recognize that there is more productivity than they thought, in their distributed workforce, than they thought would be there. In fact, two of the world's largest banks. I have very good friends and partners in the community that are at the C suite. Have gone through this triage mode, are trying to manage the mindset and mental wellbeing of their workforce, while creating this distributed work from home environment. And they're seeing that productivity isn't waining. So now they're rethinking their whole footprint. Like, why do I need some super expensive tower in Manhattan or San Francisco or Chicago or London when most of the people that I'm talking to are out meeting with customers half the time. They're 50% travel anyway.

Do I need all this space? What does that future look like for them? We're already seeing security concerns with Zoom. But they're having those conversations about, all right, now that we've sort of standardized at least sketch a patch...