Hiten Shah: Founder egos
The entrepreneur and advisor reflects on decades of building, breaking, and beginning again.
Hiten Shah is one of the most visible SaaS founders in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s known for being an extremely helpful person, routinely shares lessons learned through his founder journey ups and downs, and cares about mentoring. The best way to learn more about him is to check out his blog, particularly the following:
Ritika: Every entrepreneur’s path looks different.
How would you describe the beginning stages of your journey?
What were the influences in your life that inspired you to start a business?
Hiten: My journey started when I was maybe 4 or 5, right after my family moved to New York from Zambia, where I was born.
My father, an anesthesiologist, told me that I would be an entrepreneur because it was one of the few professionals that would allow me to be creative and use my brain for the rest of my life.
He believed that his profession was one that he could do from memory—he didn’t feel challenged, and he didn’t want me to feel that way.
In the 80s, this way of thinking was unusual.
Most of my friends’ parents wanted their kids to be just like them—doctors, lawyers, and engineers. But my parents pushed me to be independent.
The way I would deal with my boredom was open every electronic device in my house and try to put it back together. I did that to my radio, phone—everything. I never got in trouble. I saw the inside of every electronic device in my apartment, growing up.
Every day, my dad would come home from work, and we would eat dinner together. After, he’d go back to work and take me with him to the hospital. My dad would leave me in the computer room. I’d take them apart and put them back together. I learned how to program in QBasic.
In high school, I continued on with my passion for learning how things work. I started fixing up my car. Then I started selling car parts so that I could pay for my car’s modifications.
Ritika: It seems like entrepreneurship, for you, was a perpetual state of motion.
At what point did you establish your first real company?
Hiten: It was when I graduated from college.
My brother-in-law, who was four years younger than I am, had a client paying him $3,500 a month for marketing consulting. My now-wife, his sister, suggested that we start a business together.
So we started a marketing agency together, and that’s what guided me towards the world of online software companies.
From there, we ended up launching a dozen company ideas within 2 years. This was from 2003 to 2005.
We started making money from these platforms pretty quickly and began pouring those funds into new ventures. That’s just how we were—we loved experimenting and having fun.
Neither of us were technical at the time, but we picked up concepts pretty quickly. We started hiring people and building up teams with all kinds of skills like design and engineering. We had a web hosting company, that we spent $1M of our own money on, that we never launched.
Eventually, in 2005 or 2006, we landed on an idea called CrazyEgg. That company is almost 15 years old—it’s still around.
This company struck a nerve with people because it solved an important website usability problem in helping people see heatmaps of clicking and scrolling behaviors. We built the company using our consulting business’s revenue.
Our second technical company was KISSmetrics, which we received venture funding to co-found in 2008.
I ended up leaving in 2015.
Ritika: How did you end up choosing your focus and concentration area in your business?
Hiten: I’ve always valued human relationships, whether they are one-to-one or in a group setting.
In society, we’re inundated with messages from our family members, partners, colleagues, teachers, etc.
Communication is everywhere and something that I always want to improve upon. It drives adoption and engagement in terms of people gravitating towards what you’re doing. There are so many platforms available to get your message out there.
But really, the value of communication runs much deeper. Think about the stories we learn even before we learn to speak from mannerisms, gestures, facial expressions, and all of the ways we learn when we are young. Think about our online lives. Everything that we put out on social media is about building affinity with other people.
Ritika: In addition to running businesses, you also spend a lot of time blogging, sharing knowledge on social media, and speaking at conferences. Why?
Hiten: I like helping people. I want to be authentic and genuine. This passion is very personal to me.
I want to help people take action immediately and be able to implement what I’m saying. I love when I feel like I’ve empowered someone.
I used to say stuff to people, and they would contact me 6 months later to tell me that I was right. After a while, I realized that this wasn’t my goal. If someone reaches out to me 6 months later, it means that I’m doing a poor job explaining to them what they can do, right now.
Being right isn’t important. Offering value is.
Ritika: One of your most helpful blog posts that you’ve written has been about the failure of KISSmetrics as a business.
Can you tell me more about that experience?
Hiten: It was called “My Billion Dollar Mistake.” The story begins with the success we found after navigating two failures. After a series of business pivots, we finally hit the right points in the market.
But after that, I really screwed it up. This is something that I’m willing to admit objectively and without emotion.
I kept dropping new ideas on our team, which made it difficult for people to focus and execute. Everyone at the company started calling them Hitenbombs behind my back. They were frustrated. Nothing could get done. It became a company-wide joke.
At the time, I thought I was being a great communicator in sharing my vision and balancing opposing forces. Instead, I tanked my company by refusing to let go of my own perspective and trusting my team. My Hitenbombs ruined our once-strong position in the market. We were always changing and never steady.
As leaders, we can do better—so much better. We need to be self-aware that we’re balancing a lot of forces. We’re human ourselves. What we need are systems and processes to translate our innermost thoughts into relatable ideas. Leadership isn’t innate. We need to manage ourselves.
Ritika: What’s your process now?
Hiten: I write down my ideas. I don’t share them with anyone until I’ve fully crystalized and synthesized them. I share my notes with my team to gather feedback, so that they have the same information that I do. I don’t tell them what to do. I don’t drop Hitenbombs. I’ve stopped sharing what’s on my mind.
I focus more on sharing things factually and keeping my opinions separate. If I’m navigating opinions, I write them down first to work through them. I make sure that there is a pattern to the things I’m learning before sharing them.
Ritika: How did the dots connect for you?
Hiten: For a few years, I wouldn’t talk to that many people. I realized that I needed to spend time alone, to focus on myself. My departure from KISSmetrics took a lot out of me. As you can imagine, I navigated a lot of negativity. I needed to find my footing.
I came out of my shell in a better, 2.0 type of way.
I needed to change.
Nobody wanted to see me puke out my crap.
I learned that lesson the hard way. Hitenbombs were me just puking what was in my head. There are venues and settings for that — outings with friends, therapy, decompression sessions — where there are rules and we can all just puke.
But if you’re doing this at your company and making people deal with your vomit, that’s not okay. When you start puking, other people start puking.
It’s my job to make sure that nobody has to deal with this, from me. If someone’s looking to do work, and the things I’m sharing are distracting them, then that’s inappropriate. Nobody has time to clean up my messes. That’s my own job.
We’re building a business. Nobody has time to clean up each others’ messes. My rules are simple:
Be clear
Be factual
Label opinions as opinions
Give people the space to open up with their own opinions
Ritika: Do you still have fun?
Hiten: We just spent the last 10 minutes of this conversation sharing profound life lessons through puke analogies.
Did we just have fun?
I mean, we’re laughing right now.
Clear communication doesn’t need to be sterile. When you talk to me one-on-one, there’s a lot of color. I get really passionate about certain topics, especially in business.
You can still have fun and be clear.
Ritika: You are constantly communicating, writing, and thinking.
How do you balance it all?
Some people struggle to write just one email.
Hiten: I have a strong set of relationships with people who help me level-up.
For instance, for a few years, someone had been teaching me and my co-founder Maria how to write better.
This person is our editor and has done an incredible job streamlining our work. It’s because this person knows how to write a certain way, has leveled up, and has worked with the best people around writing, email marketing, and communication. I have energy to improve my writing.
I have infinite energy for creating as well. That’s why I like building businesses — and more than one at a time — because I have infinite energy for learning.
If I had to give anyone advice it would be to figure out what you have infinite energy to do. You’ll naturally want to focus on these things. People think about time too much. Energy is what matters.
If you are passionate enough about something, you can do it — and do a great job — even when you’re tired. That’s when you stop focusing on time.
Portrait illustration by Kat Cao