Greetings, Hard Knocks Community!💰

We're popping into your inbox with a brand new School of Hard Knocks newsletter. Today, we're featuring Glen Boyd, founder of the analytics company Webtrends. During the dot-com boom, Glen was able to scale his company with no outside funding to millions of dollars of revenue. He sold his company during the dot-com era for over $1 Billion!

Today’s Schedule

• Perfect Timing: How Glen Boyd scaled Webtrends and sold it for over $1B.

• From the Hard Knocks Library: The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness

• In Case You Missed It: We interviewed luxury shoppers all across Dallas, Texas.

Let’s jump in!🔥

Perfect Timing

Glen Boyd started his tech career young and he taught himself how to program. In his early 20s, he started EG Software, one of the earliest dot-com companies.

Glen’s original product was a security program that acted as a surveillance system for internal networks. At this time, the internet hadn't fully taken off, but there were a lot of local area networks.

Many banks and financial institutions were under pressure to put in more audit control as more things became computerized and Glen saw an opportunity.

He wrote a product for logging and analyzing all the traffic and access inside a local area network and things started to grow fast. Eventually, Glen had almost every major bank in the U.S. as a customer, even the Federal Reserve.

Glen ran the company along with his partner, his wife, and his brother-in-law. The team of four soon started making a million dollars a year out of a tiny office.

Once the internet went mainstream, Glen saw both Yahoo and Netscape go public and knew it was a world-changing moment. 

Glen decided to shift his focus from local area networks to the internet to capitalize on the boom. He spent an entire summer trying to figure out a new product to offer, knowing it was a huge risk to abandon what was already a successful business.

Glen and his team developed a product that could analyze anonymous traffic that came into the web. However, this time, he approached things from a marketing perspective over security. Instead of identifying fraud, he found a way to identify potential customers through internet traffic.

Then, Webtrends was born. One of their earliest clients was Sports Illustrated Magazine. They had a website, but they had no idea who was visiting or how many people. Glen's new product could analyze massive amounts of this kind of data very quickly, which was a huge win.

At first, Glen didn't know if the product would be successful. However, within the first month, they did $50,000 in business without any advertising. Within 11 months, the new venture made almost as much as the security company.

Within four years, the company was doing $120 million in sales.

Glen took EG Software public in 1999. Luckily, Glen got out before the dot-com crash and ended up selling it for over a billion dollars.

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He sold his company for over $1 Billion. 🤯 we spent a day in the life with a tech multi-millionaire. The full video is out now on YT! 📺🔥 #... See more

In our interview with Glen, he shared his inspirational story along with several real-world tips for entrepreneurs. Check out these top takeaways:

If You Build It

Many people have great ideas, but struggle to get the funding for them. Glen recommends having something demonstrable to show, not just an idea. If you can build a sample or something tangible to show funders, it goes a long way.

You should also aim to get some kind of early adoption for your idea or product to prove it's worthy of an investor's money. When you can prove people are actually using it and gravitating towards it, you're much more likely to generate buy-in.

Risking It All

The biggest risk Glen ever took was when he got down to his last $1,000, quit his job, and started developing his first product. The little he had got him through a couple of months then his partner came in and they went on to become very successful.

Glen put it all on the line at the time and even had a baby on the way. However, he took the risk because he knew that if he failed, he could always just go get a job to make ends meet. It was more important that he tried because otherwise, he'd spend all of his time wondering why he didn't.

Go With Your Gut

The worst financial decision of Glen's life resulted from getting involved in something he really didn't want to be in. He got talked into doing a construction loan with a friend of his and he lost around $3 million on it.

Glen learned the lesson of not getting involved in something unless it was a 100% yes. His gut instinct on the opportunity from day one told him not to, and ignoring that instinct literally cost him millions.

Time Machine

If Glen could go back and give his 18 year old self some advice, he would tell him to enjoy life a little bit more. He started working so young that he didn't feel like he had a childhood, which was something he had to process as he got older. Glen says he wishes he would be a little less ambitious back then and cultivate deeper, more meaningful relationships.

He also wishes he'd taken better care of his health. Glen says health is the first and easiest thing to let go as an entrepreneur as you put in long hours. He also advises getting good financial advice once you start making real money.

Watch our full interview with Glen here:

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Words of Wisdom

From the Hard Knocks Library

In Case You Missed It

Earlier this year, we interviewed luxury shoppers all across Dallas, Texas. We asked people about the most amount of money they have made in a year as well as their best career and life advice. Entrepreneurs that talked to us worked in private equity, supply chain, Entrepreneurship, and restaurants. We even interviewed a professional football player!

Let Us Hear From You

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