Next Steps for the Founding CEO of Spiceworks with Scott Abel – Ep 96

John Mark Troyer – The Geek Whisperers

Audio on this one is pretty terrible, but it’s worth turning up the volume.

What is the next job move when you co-found a company that’s grown to be a huge success? You have the option to stay and the option to transition out. This happened to Scott Abel, CSO of Spiceworks, who we talked to this week on the Geek Whisperers. This interview was recorded live at SpiceWorld 2015 in Austin, TX.

We spoke to Scott last SpiceWorld about the cultural of Spiceworks. This year we hear more of Scott’s personal story.

Spiceworks was the third startup founded or co-founded by Scott, and this time they wanted to get it right. By making lists of the things they wanted to bring to the new company and the things they didn’t want to bring into this new company. Some of these lessons came from Scott’s time as VP of Professional Services at NeXT, and the lessons he learned (both things To Do and things Not To Do) from Steve Jobs.

More topics:

• Breakfast tacos – an Austin speciality
• When starting a company, how do you know what to do?
• Evaluating the risks of starting a company
• Do you grow up knowing you want to start companies?
• The method acting practice of founding a startup
• Figuring out what makes a company by building them
• Cheating your way into learning to be a Founder
• Taking the paycheck cut to start the startup
• A little bit of what it was like to work with Steve Jobs
• Building the culture you always wanted
• Launching a product for the first time and leaving room for people to make the right choices
• How to compete in a commodity market
• How life experiences shape your career path
• Transitioning from CEO to CSO

Thank you, yet again, to the Spiceworks team and Scott for this opportunity to talk. See all our past SpiceWorld episodes here!