Stu Wall - Co-founder and CEO of Setpoint

A Fastball Down the Middle

I’m really excited to share our first podcast episode with my friend Stuart Wall. Stu was previously the founder and CEO of Signpost, a VC backed SMB focused SaaS company that raised multiple rounds of VC funding and grew to $25M+ in ARR before it was acquired by a PE firm. Stu left Signpost and is now a co-founder of Setpoint, a software company that supports the capital markets function of fintech companies, starting in the real estate vertical. Setpoint recently announced a $43M series A led by Andreeesen Horowitz. Full disclosure, NextView invested in the seed and series A rounds.

I’d call Stu’s story sort of a fastball down the middle. He’s a successful repeat founder who had a methodical, logical framework for finding and building his next business. Setpoint tackles a pretty esoteric market (more on that later) and sprinted out of the gate with very rapid revenue growth, big customers, and a warm reception from the VC market (even in a very tough growth environment).

I want to call out two highlights from Stu’s story in this post. You can listen to the rest in the full episode.

The first highlight I want to share is the first filter in Stu’s framework. In the interview, he describes 4 questions he asked himself when evaluating companies to start, but I found the first to be the most interesting. He started with the question: “Is this esoteric”. His heuristic for this is “how hard is this to explain during a cocktail party?”.

He then goes on to juxtapose two companies started by fellow classmates in his Business School class. One is actually a very well known brand that is a concept that is very easy to explain (although I’d argue that it was a pretty bold and non-intuitive idea). The other company is not very well known and is decidedly not something you’d bring up at a cocktail party (unless you party with a bunch of CTOs and CIOs :). The latter has a $15B+ market cap, and the former does not. His goal was to find a company that was pursuing a somewhat hidden, esoteric opportunity that would allow him to avoid competition and build a business largely outside of the public eye.

The second highlight I wanted to mention is a word of advice that Stu received from a member of his CEO peer group. FWIW, I strongly encourage founders to find a serious peer group to be a part of as that is something that consistently comes up as one of the most valuable things that successful founders are involved with. In any event, in a moment when Stu was sharing his frustrations about struggling to find his next company and the fear of not being able to find something that was the right fit for him, this CEO encouraged Stu by simply saying: “Are there not markets?”

This was clearly something that stuck with Stu. The idea here is that there are problems out there to solve. Some founders can get stuck feeling like they must find that one thing that they absolutely must do. But I’ve spoken to multiple repeat founders that came to the similar conclusion that there are actually many companies out there worth building. The scarce resource in this world is not ideas, but great founders. If you believe in yourself as an entrepreneur, then believe that you are the scarce resource. Be patient and don’t be anxious. Yes, there are markets.

Thanks for reading. Please give the full episode a listen and consider subscribing! Trust me, the next episodes will be totally different, which is the point of this podcast.