#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?