An exited founder: getting to know Andrus Purde
Last week Outfunnel announced that it had been acquired by Pipedrive. The sales and marketing workflow platform was founded in 2018 by Andrus Purde, Markus Leming and Andris Reinman and during those eight years Outfunnel has gone through a few different iterations of itself.
Purde had written in Fomo a few months ago about feeling like a small business CEO. What was once a team of fifteen was a team of five, describing Outfunnel as “not a unicorn but an honest workhorse.” Well now that workhorse is joining the unicorn’s stable.
Given the news was out this week I took it as my opportunity to interview Purde. I’m a blow-in in these parts so my knowledge of Purde is mostly through other people, it's about time I found out myself.
Incidentally, the worst time to actually interview an exited founder is soon after the deal is done. As with any big life altering decision, it takes a whole lot of processing - what someone tells you now may well change in six months time. So I'll hold my hands up and say this is not my finest journalistic decision, but I’m not here for the tech talk, or to dissect the inner workings of the company - I’m here to find out who this guy is, in this moment.
Who is Andrus Purde?
He tells me that he’s a “consultant at Pipedrive right now”. But I can tell you he’s much more multi-faceted than that career update. He’s an exited founder, consultant, investor, father and comedy provider. His CV, previous to Outfunnel, is heavily in marketing and he spent time in London with Skype which is where the comedy factor comes in. Upon returning to Estonia he started to bring comedy acts from the UK to an Estonian audience to enrich the comedy scene here.
The new gig at Pipedrive is actually a return for him as prior to Outfunnel he was Head of Marketing at the CRM platform for SMEs. He joined the company in its early days as an advisor on a sweat equity basis before it turned into a job. That sweat equity graft worked out! His reason for leaving the firm was in the pursuit of entrepreneurship, which was either “delusion or idea,” he says.
“I mean, product-wise, it makes sense [with Outfunnel] to go back to Pipedrive because that's the missing piece that they don't have - it's logical, but it's also surreal because I am going back to a company I had worked at before, and then it's the company my brother co-founded, so there's all these nostalgic elements and memories which come back,” he shares.
The catalyst
At the time of leaving Pipedrive he hadn’t quite nailed down his idea but it did turn out to be Outfunnel. His co-founder Markus Leming shared their ‘meet-cute' on LinkedIn this week.
Before Outfunnel I was working for a company in the Netherlands and Pipedrive was one of the companies I was trying to sell to. My contact there was a guy called Andrus but the deal never happened (maybe I was just lousy at sales?).
When I moved back to Estonia, I walked into LIFT99, a coworking space and ended up sitting directly across the table from... Andrus. He'd just left Pipedrive and was itching to build something of his own. We're both tall so our feet kept touching each other under the table and neither of us would move so eventually we had to start talking. A few lunches later, we decided to build something together, he wrote.
The rest of the Outfunnel team join Pipedrive as full time employees but Purde admits that his consulting role is “more temporary in nature for both parties.” Maybe he’s not built for full-time in a large enterprise, although he thought that the last time he was in Pipedrive he ended up spending seven years, so all bets are off. Mind you, he is convinced his life works well in seven-year cycles.
Entrepreneurship
I’m curious to know if his pursuit of entrepreneurship in tech met with the expectations he had when he walked away from a full-time job. “No, I expected things to be much faster and easier,” he replies.
But then goes on to say that he is grateful for the experience the last eight or so years has given him. “I learned so much about entrepreneurship, and mostly about myself - how I operate and what I like and what I don't - I think in life you tend to regret the things you don't do rather than the things you do… I got offered some really sweet jobs in great Estonian and non-Estonian tech companies when I left Piperdrive,” he tells me, and those would have made “much more sense, I think, career-wise and financially, potentially.”
“But so glad I didn't take these [opportunities] because I got to do my thing and then learn about myself, as a person, doing my thing,” he adds.
At the time of the announcement I had asked him how he’d felt immediately after closing the deal and he said it was a ‘cocktail of emotions’, this time I ask him if Outfunnel took a toll on his his personal life and he said “It gave me experiences, connections, some different emotions that I wouldn't have gotten as a marketing guy.”
Then he talks about being that person who is responsible for the whole team, who is responsible for the money etc… “I think I needed that experience. I'm very, very glad I had it,” he says. I can feel he really means it because something in his face says it too, so I break eye contact and look out the window.
I want to go back to this notion of why he expected building a start up to be ‘faster and easier’ than it was. Where does that idea come from?
“I think you need to be delusional as an entrepreneur to start things because things are always harder and take longer - thinking “this is going to be easier” because that's the only way to get started. Otherwise, I would have just been afraid to start something in the first place …so I think I was appropriately delusional to start,” he says.
Stress management
Stress really is part and parcel of a founder's life and everyone has different ways of dealing with it. Outfunnel, and its twists and turns over the past eight years, did throw up some stressful periods so I ask Purde how he manages stress. He says, “keep up the habits of eating well, sleeping well and moving.”
Now he doesn’t mean packing your bags and moving your life to a new country to avoid it, he of course means exercise. He also thinks it important not to cut your social life during stressful periods either.
He starts to tell me about this “particularly rocky period where the revenue growth was stuck.” They didn’t have the money to hire more people and actually ended up having to let people go, “that was the toughest part,” he says.
He goes on to tell me about this coach he had by way of byFounders VC, one of Outfunnel’s investors, who gave him a ‘golden rule’. That being… if his daily tasks that he found ‘uninspiring’, or that he didn’t want to do, reached over 40% of his workload then that could have a long term impact on his mental health.
“She gave me permission to not work,” he says, explaining that meant to delay the task, and he found by working less, and stepping away from the tasks that were impinging on his enjoyment of work, he actually found himself wanting to tackle the tasks once he ‘got back on track’.
Comedy
We speak about his comedic endeavours and he says he hasn’t done anything in this vein over the last few months but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been funny during that time! Standing on stage and being funny was not something that was really his intention when he started to bring comedians to our shores.
“At some point, I realised that if I always invite both the comedian and the host or compare, then I always lose money. So I wanted to not lose money every time - I did the comparing myself… I was terrible at first, but then I fairly quickly became less terrible. I enjoyed making people laugh,” he says.
He has even married two of his passions together (comedy and investing) as one of the characters he’s invented is an investor who makes investment decisions whilst drunk.
I hope to meet this investor guy sometime, he sounds like a blast, but first I need to improve my Estonian as the character doesn’t sound bilingual! But for now the conversation I had with Purde has scratched my itch. Maybe next time we will dissect his learnings from Outfunnel, when I start doing my job properly!
Comments ()