- So my name is John Eckhardt, and welcome to the 2017, Wisconsin Entrepreneurship Showcase. Tonight we have an opportunity to learn, from some amazing entrepreneurs for Wisconsin's finest. Every single one of them, at some point in their life, had to stop and make a bet on themselves, and a very scary moment. And what they made a bet to do, is not only bet on themselves, to create a company that maybe nobody else would, believe in them. But they also at the same time, were making a bet that they could come up with a new product or service, that could help improve the society that we live in. Tonight the four people that we're gonna hear from, are as follows, Zack Halmstad, who's student startup at U.W. Eau-Claire, has grown to be something absolutely, phenomenally large and amazing. Al Kubicek, Alex Kubicek, who is building, a weather measurement company here in Madison, which is absolutely incredible. Kristen Berman who's using behavioral science, to work on her start up and her endeavors. And Brian Wiegand, who's been here in Madison, Wisconsin, quietly building and selling startup companies, over the last 20 years, including selling one to Microsoft. I've asked each of the speakers to come on stage, and boil down their careers into only 14 minutes each. That's all they got. They're gonna tell us their story and share, with us some insights from their careers. Please join me in welcoming our first speaker,  Zach Halmstad to the stage. (applause)  - Thank you, thank you John.  Good evening everyone, and thank you for being here tonight. As John said, my name's Zach Halmstad. I'm actually a music major from, University of Wisconsin Eau-Claire. I founded a company named Jamf while I was in school there. I founded it at, like my fifth senior year. Today we employ over seven hundred people around the world. So, I'm gonna take a little bit of time tonight, to kinda tell you guys my story, all the different things that I went through, as an entrepreneur, and also try and answer, some of the questions that I most frequently get asked. My path actually started my sophomore year of college, when the Blimpie's that I worked at shut down. And I needed to find a job. I went around the city of Eau-Claire, and I put in my resume which had nothing on it, other than my name and phone number at that point. I brought it to every computer place in town. So if they were doing web design or computer repair, I dropped my resume off, and after about a month of that, I didn't get a single call back. Walking through the campus at UWEC, I actually stumbled across a job posting, for the I.T. department, it was called CNS. And it was doing Mac management, for faculty computers on campus. Got the interview, was able to answer, the one technical question for the job correctly, and got the job. And had an incredible experience as a student employee, on that campus. I can't stress how much I was able to learn working in that. It was like I was working in the real world, but as a student I had all these responsibilities that, I don't think someone my age would've gotten, outside of the university. It was such a great environment for me to learn in. And, two years later when my boss moved on, to another job inside our organization, I actually got his job. And so I spent the next four years, working full time on campus. And my job was to make sure that all of the faculty computers, all the faculty Mac's on campus were, up and running as best as possible. And my boss in that job, was absolutely incredible, in helping me understand the power of technology, when it relates to helping humans. And so our job was to get the technology, out of the way of humans. So the less the technology was actually, interfering with people's learning or teaching, the better job that we were doing. In addition to my music major, I had a computer science minor. And I was able to use that a lot in my job. So, managing Mac's back in 2002, there weren't a lot of tools for it. And my coworkers on the Windows side, had all these incredible tools, that made their job really easy. They like never had to leave their desk, and I had to walk to every part of campus, anytime something went wrong. And, using my computer science minor, which was fairly minimal skill sets that I had for that, I was actually able to start building some tools, to help make my job easier. About two years into my job, I decided, all right I don't want to build these tools, just for the university anymore, 'cause I think they're really useful for a lot of people. I know that there's a lot of people that have, the same job as me and are struggling, with these same problems. And went and talked to my boss, said all right I want to start a company. I still want to work here 'cause, I'm completely broke, and don't have any money to start a company. But I want to actually go outside and, start developing software on my own. So, in 2002 we founded Jamf. I was still going to school full-time. I was working full time on campus. And, basically nights I spent in, coffee shops and bars working. And the weekends, I would spend the entire weekend, working on writing software for Jamf. We actually started that with 1800 dollars. That's how much money we spent in the first year. We bought a computer. We paid for some web hosting. We bought a piece of software to help us develop. And we filed for our LLC in the state of Wisconsin. 1800 bucks was our startup cost, in that first year. During that time, we got a, handful of customers to come on. And by 2004 when I finally graduated, after eight years  So about two and a half years after leaving the university, it was 2007, January, we had about 125 customers, around the world that were paying us. And that's when we decided, that we're actually gonna start hiring employees. People ask me a lot as an entrepreneur, what's the scariest thing you've ever done. And for me it was really this time, when we started hiring people, and almost everyone that we hired our first two years, were friends and family, they were people that we knew. They were really close friends that were quitting, great jobs that they have to come work for us. They were really good friends that were graduating, from the university that had a great job lined up, with international banks and turned those jobs, down to come join us. Their parents made sure that I heard about that, at their wedding. (audience laughing) But this was really scary. Not because, they weren't awesome people, and they weren't coming to do great things but, we had to pay them. They had mortgages that they were having for the first time. They were starting families. These people were having their, first kids, and their first houses. We tried to protect them from what the bank account looked like, but on the first of every month it didn't look very good. We made payroll every month. We had a line of credit, that we'd dip into every once and a while. But this was a really scary time for me. I lost a lot of sleep. And this is where our board was really really helpful, to help us create what we called a balance scorecard. That meant that we tried to be profitable. Not because we wanted to get rich off it, because we wanted to have money in the bank, to pay people if we had a bad month. If we had a bad quarter, our first response wasn't to start laying people off, but actually we were able to group together, as a team and do that. That's one of the hardest times that I went through at Jamf, was really this how do you actually make sure, that everyone's getting paid, when they're really close friends, that are leaving in a startup. So one of the things that's maybe unique, for a lot of companies these days is, we were a bootstrap company. That means that we didn't take any money from outside. We didn't go and find a bunch of investors, to get millions and millions of dollars in the bank, before we started doing stuff. We were, at this point, five years in, of creating product, finding customers, and we still had no outside money. So every penny that we wanted to spend on people and travel, we had to actually earn, to be able to pay those bills. A lot of people you'll probably have, talk of angel investors or venture capitalist, or private equity firms. There's always different spots that those that come in and are very useful in starting a company. We didn't have a great experience in the only one venture capitalist that we ever talked to. We walked in and they looked at what we were doing. And when we founded our company in 2002, that was Apple's worst fiscal year, since 1982. It was the absolute wrong time in everyone's eyes to be, creating a company that was focused on nothing but Apple. And it was very smart of them to say, that's not really a good idea. And they offered us one million dollars, for 90% of our company. And we turned that down. Said, "Alright we think we can do this on our own." So we were heads down for a few more years. And through that time, we just continued to grow. We had this kind of 30-40% growth every year. We were finding that many more customers. Our products were providing that much more value. And we continued to hire people at that same rate. By 2011, we actually started, branching out of Eau-Claire, Minneapolis for our offices. We opened an office in New York. We opened an office in Cupertino, which is where Apple is located out in Silicon Valley. And those offices were good for us for a lot of reasons. They're still very small offices today. But we bring a lot of customers into them. We've got huge pockets of customers, both on the east coast and the west coast. And for them to be able to come and   Last thing I'll talk about with Jamf was one of the hardest things that we've ever done. It was actually hire an external CEO. So my friend Chip and I were co-CEO for a very long time. And we were in over our heads. The company was still doing fine. We were growing. We were profitable. But we knew that we were one day ahead of the organization, and we were learning every single day to stay that one day ahead. We went out and we found an amazing hire that came in. His name is Dean. He's been our CEO for about two and a half years now. Has really helped grow our organization, over the last few years. One of the other things that people ask me a lot is, what's a piece of advice you have for people who want to be entrepreneurs. And kind of the cliché answer to that, is find something that you're passionate about. And people say that for all realms of life, like you're going into work, when you're going to school whatever that is. But it's really actually very important to take that seriously. If you want to be an entrepreneur, one of the big things that you can't do is get burned out. You're literally going to spend tens of thousands of hours building and refining whatever your ideas are, to get them to market. In my 13 years before we hired Dean, I'm guessing I spent 70-80-hour work weeks, every single week for 13 years. If I got burnt out, that would have been a really really bad thing. And without that passion, it's really hard to succeed when you're trying to build something new. With that, I think I'm just about out of time. That sound right. Thank you all very much. (applause)  Hey everybody. I'm Alex Kubicek, the co-founder and CEO of Understory. And just because I really love puns, I'm gonna tell you the Understory story, the best kind of pun that I can come up with for, whatever. But first, a couple things about me. I have an undergraduate degree in physics from UW-Whitewater, undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Madison, and a masters in atmospheric science from Madison as well. And none of that's actually relevant to my story at all. So, I have a confession to make, I did not come up with my idea. But I did start it. So in 2011, I was in this course about venture creation. And I was in the graduate level, the 734 course. But one of the assignments was you are going to pitch to go into Y Combinator. Tell us how you're gonna do it. And I didn't have a company idea or whatever, so I wrote about weather. Weather is the thing that I knew the most. There's incredible amount of gaps in our weather understanding, and I wanted to find a way to solve it. And so I decided, hey I'm gonna create a company called weather and instruments, Winstruments, great name. Very clever I think. But the idea was we were gonna take Wi-Fi-enabled weather stations, sell them to people, to put in their backyards and that would allow them to feed data into a social network and sell their data to researches, government groups and so on. I thought this would be a good idea, so I started taking it through the venture creation course, but I was greener than green. This was my first business class that I've ever taken. And they were talking about company culture one day, so I had to raise my hand and say, "Hey, what is that?" 'Cause I had no idea if that was actually really important to starting a company. But anyways, so I went in head first and we built this weather station, Wi-Fi-enabled, really neat, could go into people's backyard. And as a scientist, I thought okay if I build this really neat thing, I would essentially be able to sell a ton of them. People will just flock to these weather stations. And so we thought, okay let's try our hat at a few business plan competitions. You know, a lot of people would be interested in this, and we can probably win them easily. The feedback was brutal. "This will never work, your use cases don't make any sense. Why would I ever need data better than the Weather Channel?" And that was tough. This really smart person, with incredible experience, telling me that my idea was dumb, and it wo