My guest today is Tom Seery, founder and current Executive Chairman of RealSelf, the leading review site and marketplace for cosmetic surgery. This is Part 1 of the interview where we explore Tom’s career and how he found himself founding RealSelf. Tomorrow we will explore how he grew the RealSelf business.
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Transcript
Edward: My guest today is Tom Seery. Today we cover Tom's path to founding RealSelf, Drexel, University of Washington, and Expedia. Tom is now Executive Chairman of RealSelf. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
Tom, you were only a Director at Expedia when you left to found RealSelf. How did that happen?
Tom: I really appreciate being on your show. I'm laughing because I think you're already disparaging me saying I was only a director. Being a director at Amazon is a big deal, but in Expedia, it is probably not as significant of a hurdle.
I left Expedia feeling like I had been there for a long enough time to be empowered to go do my own thing. I don't know where you went to college, but I was in college and there were always these individuals who never graduated. They were six-year students or five-year students. What's wrong with you? Why aren’t you graduating? They're actually the smart ones. Why would you want to leave this little cocoon of wonderfulness, at least at my school?
I kind of started feeling that way after six years at Expedia. I think I've got the learnings I need and the vision to go start my own thing. Filled with that and a lot of naivetés, I decided to forge my own startup and go down that path.
Edward: How do you get other people to trust you with limited experience? You obviously raised a lot of money for RealSelf. How do you do that when you don't have a lot of experience? I guess you had more than a lot of those kids doing it straight out of college?
Tom: The power of storytelling, my friend—vision, power of persuasion. Part of a startup is you're always selling. You're selling a vision, you're selling an idea that's bigger than yourself. You're trying to convince people to leave perfectly great jobs at companies that are in this region to do something crazy, join a startup, and get paid less than the market rate.
Edward: What skills that you already have to go into that job as CEO? You did spend a lot of time at Expedia. What were the important skills you developed along the way that you had going into that job?
Tom: When I'm asked this question of what was the enabling force that really got you to a place where you did this? I think it's this level of confidence that I had built in myself. I do say there's a little naiveté, as I say to that, which is maybe some blind ambition and mixed in.
You do have to have a very confident perspective and feel really good about your ability to take something from nothing, to do something bigger than yourself. That confidence mixed with the ability to help people distill down specific things that need to be done and work through ambiguity is a soft set of skills, I guess.
While there's a lot of amazingly intelligent people I've worked with and individuals who are much more talented than me in specific areas, I think having that range and that capacity to lead through uncertainty is perhaps one of my strengths that I've been able to tap into.
Edward: What were the most important skills you were missing when you took that job that you had to develop quickly?
Tom: Well, I could list all sorts of things I didn't have. I would center the most around how—it’s sort of an order of operations in seeing things and never having seen these things before. I didn't know what to do, what order, and a lot of guesswork.
Part of that was also, who do you hire at what stage? What is the skillset? The tendency of a startup is we should be selling something. Okay, Mary, over there. Why don't you pick up the phone and start selling? You just take somebody who's got maybe a little bit of extra time and say, why don't you go do this thing? Not recognizing their skills. There's talent, there's the discipline that's associated with driving sales.
I think there's that lack of understanding of how to match the activities to the right people with the right talent and then doing things in the right order. I think there was a little bit of unnecessary chaos in the early period of trying to do a lot of things in a swirl as opposed to in a methodical way. Then, not raising enough money. That also accompanies all of that.
Edward: Now, let's go back to the path that got you there. I'm a big believer that the experiences we have when we're 12-14 affect our entire lives. What were you passionate about at that age?
Tom: My next-door neighbor, Heather, was one of my passions. She wasn't very interested in me, but I was very interested in her. In fact, I taught myself how to disco dance—that's how old I am—just so I could maybe catch her eye. It didn't work so much.
My passions as a kid were across your typical youth of beyond the sports and all that kind of stuff, I was fascinated by commerce. My teacher was a coin collector and one day brought in part of his coin collection. I just became obsessed with coins. I would go to the bank and exchange $10 for a roll of quarters so I could look through every quarter to try to find one that was more valuable than $0.25.
The bank teller got to know me because I would do this cycling of coins and building my collection. To this day, my little kids just found my coin collection the other night, actually. They're like, what's this? I'm like, it was some obsession I had, but it's pretty cool. It's all laid out there. There's a lot of stuff. It's still not very valuable, by the way.
That desire to find a little bit of an edge or an unrealized value was something that must have been something that was more innate or inherent in my mind in the way I was built and designed by my family, my parents, or my DNA.
Edward: What about relationships with people? How is that happening when you're at that age and how did that affect you?
Tom: It's interesting. For me, there has been a lot of reflection on why I am who I am today, and what are those shaping factors? I'm reflecting on that because as a parent, as you realize how you are creating the world that your child sees in many ways and how they approach it, at least. I'm consciously trying to make sure my children approach life in a very kind and open-minded way.
As a kid, I had very supportive parents, but they were busy. I was a latchkey kid, as they said in the 1970s. My mother worked, and I clearly needed more attention than I was getting at home. My old neighbor once told me that what was unique about me as a kid was I was always in somebody else's living room. I was constantly in somebody else’s house. They said they believe that I was doing that because I was looking for additional nurturing. I went out, got it, and found it.
I think this idea of connecting to people was just something—in an unknown way to me at the time—I did for sustenance and survival, if not development. Relationship building is something I actually love doing. It's been very important to my business at RealSelf, which is focused on doctors, and they’re very relationship-driven, like in many industries. It's one of my superpowers.
Edward: Let's jump ahead. You graduated college and how did you start your career?
Tom: Well, my actual first thing out of college was to work for a congressman in D.C. where I drove him around to fundraisers. I learned that politics is really just more about raising money than anything else. It made me less interested in the world of politics. Plus, it was funny. Back then it was very polarized. There would be parties for the Democrats and parties for the Republicans. You didn't want to mix the two. It just turned me off.
I ran across an individual from a company that was a computer company in Philadelphia called Unisys. That's still around. They were doing some weird stuff around environmental remediation of old manufacturing plants. Unisys was UNIVAC, Sperry, Sperry Rand.
If you have seen a typewriter—for your audience members who know what that is—it's the Remington typewriters, as an example. This company goes way back to the 1800s. They had lots of facilities that were closed, shuttered, Superfund sites, and they needed help on assessing the risk associated with those but also managing them. That was my first job working for Unisys as an environmental administrator, consultant, project manager.
Edward: What did you learn there? What did you pick up doing environmental science that you took later into your career?
Tom: While I was there, I decided I needed to get more analytical rigor to the approach and that's something that probably, hopefully, has sat with me through business as well. You need frameworks and models for approaching complex problems like what to do with a massively contaminated facility. I learned—both by going to school at night and getting my master's in environmental science, but also in the role—how to use a science-based approach. And then use that science and data to persuade organizations like the EPA that we were doing the right things and that our approach was right.
There's a lot of negotiations, working with lawyers through litigation with multiple parties. Also, just owning my own portfolio of problems that I got to manage pretty large budgets around what's pretty fulfilling as a pretty young professional.
Edward: What about the soft side, Tom? Things like the corporate hierarchy, corporate vision, and mission statements. Did you take anything away from your time there? I heard you had a fancy office when you first started.
Tom: Yeah. Unfortunately, this might say negative things about my personality type. I hope not. One of the things that my colleagues would tease me about was I just didn't like the idea of working in a cubicle. I noticed that the most powerful people in the company had offices, and I wanted one too, even though I didn't deserve one.
I found an empty closet that was the janitor's closet—literally mop buckets, mops, brooms, and stuff like that. Somehow I got a desk and moved in there. My buddy helped me lift it. I ran a phone cord through the ceiling, so I had a phone, and I just set up shop. No one said anything. I even put my name on the door.
I would say I'm the kind of employee you don't want to hire. I didn't follow the way things are supposed to be. I guess that was an early sign I needed to be an entrepreneur, write my own ruleset, and set up things so that I'm successful.
As the company I was at was a huge corporation with something like 110,000 employees when I began. When I left, it was about 45,000. I went through this incredible amount of bloodletting of employee layoffs and depressing environmental situations. Meanwhile, you'd walk down the hallway. There'd be these signs and slogans saying, our company values and what we stand for. I got a jaundiced view of how those really meant.
I'm really excited for our team today at RealSelf abiding by leadership principles that are similar to those you see in Amazon where they actually help individuals recognize these are what behaviors we encourage, evaluate, and reinforce in our day-to-day. That seems to be much more materially helpful and less check the box, we got it done for the required values, and so forth. That's been my approach.
Edward: Tom, what made you move to Seattle? What was the driving factor that got you off the East Coast and came out here?
Tom: The janitor took back his office. I'm sure the janitor was like, what the hell is going on around here? It's funny.
Edward: Maybe he took a cubicle.
Tom: Yeah. He's like, okay, these cubicles are way nicer than this little windowless room. In college, one of my friends grew up in Seattle. I was amazed by how he wanted to go back to Seattle after he graduated. For me, I grew up in a small town where everybody leaves and doesn't go back. I was just like, what's up with this Seattle thing? I had visited as well.
What really triggered my desire to make a move west was I was reading The Wall Street Journal in the lunchroom wearing a tie, of course. You wear a tie to a computer company job. The article talked about admins or secretaries—as I recall in the past—at Microsoft who were retiring at age 30, 31, 34, and buying second homes at the San Juan Islands. I was just amazed. How is that possible?
They talked about how they had stock options. I didn't know what that was, so I had to look that up. Once I read what a stock option was and what it meant in terms of a company really valuing you as an owner, not just a dispensable employee, I realized I was a sucker. I was in the wrong space. I was in the wrong industry, the wrong size company, stage, and region.
I literally told my girlfriend—who is my wife now—I'm moving to Seattle, you want to come? We jumped in my Honda Civic, drove cross-country, and got here. I have been here for over 20 years.
Edward: Tom, what were the biggest failure points in your career? Where did things not go as expected?
Tom: The biggest failure—the one I can't get over—is when I worked for Expedia, I recognized an opportunity that exists in the market to create a private label business. I pitched my boss on this idea of creating a way to power, say Alaska Airlines could have Alaska Hotels that we power behind the scenes, powered by Expedia.
I created the concept, I named it, and I worked with the team to get it launched. Then, our divisional heads said, well, would you like to lead it? I said, gosh, no. I'm just the idea guy. I'm just here to enable others and just to help things grow. I don't want to be the leader of that.
I would say that was huge. He actually said to me later that it was a big mistake too that I didn't step up. I reflected on that, why didn't I seize on that? It goes back to that sort of janitor's office that I had where I really didn't play the game well. I didn't really understand how things worked inside corporations and how you move ahead (so to speak).
I just didn't do well in that environment, as I probably could have if I really learned how to seize those opportunities, career growth, and so forth. I look at that as a big miss, but I'm not harboring any more than it's just learning in life.
Edward: What did you learn from that? Did you learn basically that, hey, maybe I should work for a big company, I should go start my own thing? Or is there something you take away from that that helps you run a company better?
Tom: Actually, I learned that I am an entrepreneur. I do have the ability to see things that others don't. I do have a way to galvanize individuals to go and create something from nothing. What I needed to prove was that I could actually then drive. That was what led me to start my own company.
It was, okay, now I can take it to the next step, which is to do things and also not be encumbered by having to report to somebody, have to get a PowerPoint presentation done, and just actually have degrees of freedom to express things in my way. I learned over time the team's way, but initially, it's a pretty selfish endeavor to start up a company.
Edward: Tom, what are your productivity tricks? What do you do to be productive that most people don't do?
Tom: I should never write a book on that. When you read that productivity, I don't read the books but the blog post that you can see about, here's all the things you should and shouldn't do. I kind of do them the wrong way.
I'm actually my most productive self when I'm under the gun when I have one minute left, and I need to get something in. Our CFO can attest to this, I'm not a very good longitudinally long-term planner. I respond well to pressure. An example of that which would drive, by the way, team members crazy, I would be doing a presentation at a major medical conference. Right before I was to go on, I would pull up my slides and change them as I was preparing to plug in my laptop and display.
As of 15 seconds before I was to present in front of several hundred doctors, making adjustments on the fly. I loved it. It led to better outcomes.
Edward: The number of conferences I speak at that I asked for the slides four or five days in advance, I just don't know how people do that. I do the same thing. It's very hard to not want to change them at the last second.
Tom: I always say you don't know me then if you think I'm going to get slides done four or five days in advance. It's just not going to happen.
Edward: Tom, this has been fantastic. We're going to pick this up with talk about RealSelf.
Interview: Tom Seery, Founder/Chairman RealSelf, Part 1