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Marc Hemeon Show Notes Marc is an artist and designer living and painting on the North Shore of Oahu. Previously, Marc was the founder of Design Inc. Marc has co-founded a number of companies including North Technologies which, merged with Hodinkee.com in 2015. Marc was the co-founder of Fflick, which YouTube acquired in 2011. Following the acquisition, Marc was part of the team to redesign YouTube in 2011 and again in 2012, leading the site wide redesign. Previously, Marc led design teams at Oakley and Digg, and co-founded a number of companies, including TeeFury and Design by Humans. Most passionate about I’ve always been somebody who liked to make things, like applications, software, or art, and now I’m kind of “recovering entrepreneur”. Last year, I closed a startup that I had founded in California; I sold my house and took a break from tech. After 20 years in the Tech world I took a break, and a year ago we moved to the North Shore of Oahu, where my wife is from. Currently, I’m trying different hands on and I’m trying to do art and create things that would inspire people. And surprisingly, I found that it is more challenging than I thought. But it’s a break for my mind. Today I’m passionate about figuring out how to make a living from selling art. I’m trying to figure it out. And it’s not easy to start all over again. Marc’s Career I had what people call a success, I had a startup in 2010, I got acquired by Google and YouTube, I spent four years working for Google and YouTube and I loved it. I was able to pay back tons of debt from many years of being an entrepreneur, and my family was able to buy a home. I thought wrongly that I was a good entrepreneur. That I know how to succeed now. But we had a good team and we were just lucky. The fact we got acquired doesn’t make us better than any entrepreneur that straggling to build their company and look for a product–market fit. I left Google in 2014, and I started another company called North with a friend of mine, we raised five million dollars to build apps, to be an incubator. We said that we will build an app every four months and when one of them will take off, we will put most of the money raised on it to maximize the success. We hit kind of gold in the second app. We made an app called WatchVille about luxury watches, it was a fantastic journey that led to a merger with the leader in the luxury watches market. And it’s a very successful business. That happen really fast. So I felt I probably do know how to succeed with startups and decided to go and build my own startup. I raised 2.3 million dollars and I created a design company called Design Inc. and we made a platform to find designers. And it did pretty well, and we had revenues but not enough. So I closed the company, and I gave half of the money back to the investors. Marc’s Customers At Fflick, the company that was acquired by Google and YouTube, we were trying to sell our software to the big studios, NGM and DreamWorks, but we launched our service and became very popular very fast so we got acquired within a month of the launch. It was a different time. At the last company, Design Inc. we had 900 customers from very large companies to medium and small. Google used us, and Facebook used us. Many leading companies used us. Marc’s best advice about approaching the customers The point of making a startup and building a new thing is not about building a successful business fast and selling it for a lot of money or making an IPO. There are different meanings to success and each individual should decide what success means to them. Thousands of brilliant smart entrepreneurs don’t hit a financial success. So you have to really understand WHY, what do you want to get out of it? You want to make money? You want to be famous? You want people to tell you that you are important? You want to find a meaning. The pure entrepreneurs are the ones that find a problem that resonates in