20VC: Buffer's Joel Gascoigne on The Moment The Founder Is No Longer The Boss, The Questions Founders Must Ask Their VCs and Why We Need A Spectrum of Different Financing Mechanisms Other Than VC

**Harry Stebbings** (0:00)
You are listening to The Twenty Minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings at hstebbings1996 with two Bs on Instagram. I really would love to see you there. But my word am I excited for today's episode. Not only am I welcoming a fellow Brit on the show, but a really different founder and company to the heavily backed venture companies we usually feature. With that, I'm thrilled to welcome Joel Gascoigne, co-founder and CEO at Buffer, the social media management tool that makes it easy for businesses and marketing teams to schedule posts, analyze performance and manage all their accounts in one place. And they had raised both seed and Series A rounds, but last summer, they spent $3.3 million to buy out the majority of their Series A investors, making them much more independent. Today, Joel runs Buffer as a profitable business with $2 million in profit in 2017 and $3 million in profit in 2018 And before co-founding Buffer, Joel co-founded OnePage and StartupMill and was a web developer in the UK. As for the intro, I have to say, it was me cold emailing Joel on this one. I'm such an admirer of Joel's and Buffer's, so I will give myself the credit for the hustle on this one. But before we dive into the show state, a lot of what we do on The Twenty Minute VC is talk to experts, pick the brains of founders and investors who tell us which trends to watch out for, offer tips on fundraising and teach us how to excel at any company stage. There's no playbook for building a great business, but we can certainly learn from people who've done it before. Beyond listening to this podcast and talking to mentors and advisors in your own network, it's important to have resources you can turn to when you're tackling a new challenge. Stripe has built those resources for you. Whether you'd like to learn how to run a pricing experiment or build a knockout landing page, Stripe gives you the information you need to start, run and scale a technology company. Their guides are often written by or feature people like Eli Gill, whom we've actually had on this very podcast. And you can read one of my favorite guides on scaling engineering organizations and many more on stripe.com forward slash 20VC, that's T-W-E-N-T-Y-V-C. And speaking of incredible products, Intercom was founded in 2011 by four startup veterans who were simply frustrated by the lack of visibility they had into their customers at their previous ventures. They set out to build a suite of messaging first products that would help make internet business personal. Fast forward to today, and Intercom has built a platform and suite of messaging first products that help internet businesses accelerate growth across the customer life cycle from acquisition to engagement and support. And you can convert more website visitors onboard new signups to become active customers and then support your customers in a really personal way. What's more, you can do this all at scale with their powerful automation technology. And over the past eight years, they've totally reimagined what a business messenger can be, which is way more than simply live chat. And more than 30,000 businesses, including New Relic, Atlassian and Shopify use Intercom to connect with a billion people worldwide. And finally, I've always been a big history man. And so I want to talk about Cooley, the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley's formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world. With 50 plus years working with VCs, they help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad of issues that arise through a fund's lifetime. So to learn more about the number one most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public, simply head over to cooley.com and also go to cooleygo.com. But that's quite enough of me, so now I'm so excited to hand over to Joel Gascoigne, co-founder and CEO at Buffer.
You have now arrived at your destination.
Joel, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show today. I've been a big admirer of your writing for a long time. So thank you so much for joining me, Stajole.

**Joel Gascoigne** (3:29)
Yeah, thanks so much, Harry. It's a real pleasure to be on the podcast. You've been doing this such a long time now. I've been really impressed, and you've had such a wide range of different guests on here. So it's always really interesting for me.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:40)
That's so kind of you. And yeah, four years has gone very, very fast. But I do want to talk about you, Joel. So I want to start with, how did you make your way into the world of startups and come to found Buffer with that kind of initial aha moment?