Editor’s note: WRALTechWire publishes today the latest in a new series: In-depth interviews with Triangle entrepreneurs, each of which will include multiple parts. Our package today focuses on Joe Colopy, CEO of fast-growing Bronto Software. WRALTechWire Insider columnist and entrepreneur Joe Procopio will be having candid conversations over a beer with our profile subjects throughout 2014. Also included with each package will be a Q&A that goes beyond standard business and video interviews with WRALTechWire Editor Rick Smith. The Q&A and video interviews are now available online.
DURHAM, N.C. - Here’s the concept. I sit down with a startup founder and we drink one beer. During that beer, we have a normal non-journalism, non-marketing, authentic conversation. That’s all it is. When the beer is gone, we’re done.
- Site: Tyler’s, Durham NC
- Colopy ordered: Vodka Tonic
- Procopio ordered: Harpoon IPA
Joe Procopio: So wait… Why’d you give up beer?
Joe Colopy: Every year I give up things as part of my New Year’s resolutions — and I’m better at giving up things than starting things. Right now I’m undecided on whether to give up beer or soda, since it’s all about liquid calories. I’m debating coffee, but I don’t want to go crazy. Giving up things is a good way to change your habits. Did you give up anything?
Procopio: No, and I’ll tell you why. I’m not a big fan of New Year’s. It’s always so depressing —
Colopy: Because of the resolutions or the January weather?
Procopio: (laughs) It’s a little bit of both. There’s all this buildup and then it never lives up to the hype. So I decided in December to start doing all the new-year type stuff early. I set a goal to run 100 miles a month, and I didn’t give up stuff so much as cut back on stuff — like bad food, coffee. And when January 1 came around it wasn’t as daunting.
Colopy: December’s when you need to do it. Most people like me make great progress during the year and then it all falls apart. Eleven months progress destroyed in one month!
The toughest part of finding time exercise is having kids – and you have three kids?
Procopio: I do.
Colopy: Back in the day you could just watch TV and eat Cheetos. Now I have to make a choice to get in better shape. But I can choose not to drink soda.
Procopio: So this article will start off easy, in a roundabout way, because I’ve known you for, like, ten years, but I haven’t seen you in a while, and we haven’t had an extended conversation in about a year. So… you know… what have you been up to?
Colopy: Yeah, I know. There’s like the work front and home front and they’re both really busy. At Bronto we’re 175 people with a number of people starting on Monday. We have 12 people in London now and two people in Australia,. There everyone is still figuring out where they’re going to sit. It’s exciting, but really busy.
On the home front, I’ve got four kids so it doesn’t take much to be busy.
Procopio: Your youngest is how old now? Two?
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Colopy: Three and a half.
Procopio: Wow. It has been a while.
Colopy: She’s a cutie pie. My oldest is 11. She started 6th grade in one of Durham’s public middle schools. Her school starts at 7:30 in the morning. Since I drive her in the mornings, it has dramatically changed my daily schedule. All the other kids’ school starts at 9:00, which is much more manageable. How old are your kids?
Procopio: Nine, nine and six.
Colopy: Not quite middle school?
Procopio: Almost. The cool thing is – we never had a plan for my wife to stay at home, but when we found out it was twins the decision was made for us, kind of. And I was just starting something new, but, you know, that’s startup, and it probably made we work that much harder, knowing I had zero safety net. Anyway, she started back to work two years ago and got a job at the kids’ school, which is great. She takes them in, she’s in the building all day, and she takes them home.
By the way, you’re sending one my friends to London.
Colopy: Who?
Procopio: Jamie Tharp. We used to play soccer together.
Colopy: We’re sending three folks from to London from here – Jamie and two others, and we’re sending another guy to Australia. We have a new Australian GM, who was once one of our customers. Also, we have a guy in sales who started with us back in May and we sent him off to Australia in July. How’s that? Welcome aboard, we’re sending you to Australia.
Procopio: That’s got to be a cool assignment though.
Colopy: I’ve never been there. It’s a long haul. It’s great that a relatively small company can have this global footprint. We’re a great size where we really can give people some amazing experiences overseas without having them to change everything in their lives. We talk about Bronto Corps, like the Peace Corps, where it’s not completely unrealistic that you do a tour in London or Sydney.
Procopio: Don’t tell my wife that you do that.
Colopy: (laughs) Where would she want to go?
Procopio: Either. We honeymooned in London and fell in love. After a while, we just stopped doing tourist stuff, with the pubs and clubs and all, there’s so much to do.
Colopy: We toured there for a month this summer, rented an apartment, took the kids to see different sites around town. There’s so much in London itself. It was July and the weather was amazing. It was awesome. The kids hadn’t spent time in any big cities, let alone London, so it was great for them. We didn’t have a car. It was fascinating. It’s was really neat for us as a family to have that experience.
Procopio: Are they gonna get to go to Sydney?
Colopy: I go to London a few times a year. I don’t think I’ll do Australia that often, maybe once a year, in the summer. There are conferences there in July/August, so that might be a good anchor. That’s my current plan. It’s a long haul though.
We did our honeymoon in Peru. In Machu Picchu.
Procopio: Is this before or after Peace Corps?
Colopy: After. I was in Peace Corps for two years while my wife was in grad school. She finished and we moved to Ecuador. We were there for a little over six months. There was a big embezzlement at the school. Gunmen came into the school, tried to shake it down. What could have been a great experience turned into a bad experience. So we left.
We’d been out of the country for a while. We pulled out a map, this is mid-96, and we moved to North Carolina. I took her dad’s old minivan and we drove down here from New Jersey. We found an apartment the first day and settled in. No connections, no work, no friends. It was a bit random.
Before Ecuador, we had traveled through Africa for three months with backpacks, one backpack actually, it was great. From the Seychelles Islands, where I did Peace Corps, we had a one-way ticket to Tanzania — we didn’t even have a visa, which you need to get in, so we landed without the proper documentation.
We had a 10-year-old travel guide to east Africa, and as we looked for places everything was closed. We traveled through Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe to South Africa.
We got to South Africa and we said it’s time to go home. We were running out of money and travelling up the west side of Africa was becoming increasingly unrealistic. That part of Africa can get pretty rough. So in Capetown we chose the cheapest way to get to the United States and took a two-week layover in Cairo on our way to New York. Toured around Eygpt for a while.
Procopio: Now I know why you’re an entrepreneur.
Colopy: It’s the adventure. If we didn’t do it then, we wouldn’t be able to do it. Now we have kids and a mortgage. Plus, when you’re in the Peace Corps you get all jacked up with vaccinations, you feel indestructible, so it was a good time to try those things.
In my 20s I lived in 11 different places. In my thirties I lived in one. I still live in the same house that Bronto was founded in.
Procopio: Yeah, for me it was Manhattan. I was the fourth person at this startup consulting firm and they put me in charge of American Express. I lived out of the Marriott Marquis for almost a year because it was cheaper to stay than to fly back home. Plus what was I coming back for? It was really weird, like being rich, but only in the hotel, where everything was taken care of for me. Once I left the hotel, I was a broke twenty-something Except I was killing the per diem, buying a hot dog on the street for lunch and using the rest to go out.
I mean, it’s no east coast of Africa, but I dug it.
Colopy: (laughs) If you’re in your early twenties and you’re not conscious of the opportunity you have to take some adventures, then you are missing something. It’s such a unique time in your life — when you have maximum capability and minimal responsibility. When you’re 40-something you can’t do that.
Procopio: Do you feel like… where Bronto is now you can still express some of that?
Colopy: I think so. In my thirties, it was all about kids and Bronto – take something and make it much bigger. I’ve worked with Chaz (Felix, co-founder) from the beginning and lots of other great people. But I missed my more international days and — it’s not the driver, but opening up London and Sydney allows that to come back into my life. Now it’s the best of both worlds.
Procopio: Something I’ve never asked you about. Probably one of the cleverest marketing moves is that inflatable brontosaurus you guys hand out at trade shows and what not. Quick – estimate how many of those has the company given out?
Colopy: We buy them by the box-load directly from China. It all started back in 2002 when I bought six –
Procopio: Six? Period?
Colopy: Literally six. And one really big one. It was like a hundred bucks and we were like – screw it, let’s do it. Now we’re connected directly to the factory and we buy thousands upon thousands.
We distribute them at trade shows, we have them throughout the office. People in the UK love them. The verdict is still out in Australia. We are single-handedly distributing them across the globe.
This is tied to my travelling through Africa. At one point, we were traveling with this Danish guy who had this stuffed bear. He’d take a picture of it in interesting places and send it back to some elementary school classroom. He bungee jumped over the Zambezi River in Zimbabwe with it. I remember thinking — that’s the neatest idea. And then I heard about Flat Stanley and remember the movie Amelie having something like that. I remembered those times, when we started with the traveling Brontos.
Procopio: I remember the traveling Bronto.
Colopy: And it worked! But people would just keep them instead of passing them to other people, so we had to keep buying more. It was a neat viral thing to build the brand that had this loose connection to my early traveling days. Still works great for us today.
Editor’s note: Joe Procopio is a serial entrepreneur, writer, and speaker. He is VP of Product at Automated Insights and the founder of startup network and news resource ExitEvent.
