He didn’t know it at the time, but Leigh Drogen was an entrepreneur from the start. Growing up, he spent the summers with his family on Fire Island. At the age of eight, Leigh and his sister would sell painted shells out of a wagon on the sidewalk. When all the shells had been sold, they’d walk to the ferry and help passengers carry luggage back to their homes for a few bucks.
Their parents didn’t give them money to spend on luxury items, which at that age included candy, pizza, or slush puppies at night. But that didn’t mean they missed out on these indulgences. The Drogen siblings simply made the money themselves. However, Leigh says their painted-shell and ferry-bellhop startup wasn’t about the money — it was just something to do all day with their friends.
The avid hockey lover says his parents always stressed the importance of holding a job that could eventually translate into a career that would carry him through life. But during those summers, they ended up teaching him a very different lesson that led him to a life of entrepreneurship.
Here’s what founder and CEO of Estimize had to share for this edition of Member Spotlight:
At 16 years old, I was fired from being a boating counselor. I worked at the day camp for about two weeks where I read the newspaper on the dock with a danish in my mouth, while the kids sailed in the bay. My parents were furious. They were upset that I couldn’t hold down a job for more than two weeks. After that, I went and taught private tennis lessons for $50 an hour and made a killing doing what I loved. It wasn’t really about the money. I thoroughly enjoyed the exercise of building a client base, offering something of value that people enjoyed, but most of all, I loved the idea that there was a direct relationship between how hard I worked and how much money I made.
Both of the companies I’ve started were actually accidents. In 2009, I came across a financial technology startup named StockTwits that was at a young stage, and I couldn’t shake the desire to join them. I had the most amazing time learning how to build a company and a product. Then in 2011, I seriously tried to validate the idea for Estimize, which I had been thinking about since 2007. The timing was good because StockTwits ended up hiring senior people from other large financial companies, and there wasn’t anything left for me to do there.
I approached the founder of StockTwits, Howard Lindzon, whom I consider a mentor with the idea for Estimize. He thought it should be its own company. He fired me, accelerated all my stock options, and gave me six weeks severance. I was really disappointed at the time, but he forced me to start Estimize. He knew I wanted to do it, and I owe Howard a lot to this day for that.
Estimize provides a data set more accurate than Wall Street. Analysts at banks on Wall Street make estimates on how companies will perform fundamentally. This data, which includes profits and revenues, is extremely important because the market is a forward-looking mechanism. Because of corporate access and investment banking pressures, the analyst’s estimates can be skewed, leading to an overall data set that is neither as accurate as possible nor representative of what the market actually expects. And here’s the most important thing: Understanding what the overall expectation of the market is.
To solve this problem, we built a web platform that allows anyone to make estimates for these data points. Instead of getting estimates from only the banks, we get them from hedge funds, asset management, and independent research analysts, as well as industry experts, students, and average investors. We make all of the estimates completely free for everyone to see, and then we rank and rate all of the contributors. This produced a data set that is both more accurate than the Wall Street consensus about 75 percent of the time and far more representative of true expectations.
I’ve learned that execution is everything — ideas are basically worthless. Twitter is a perfect example of this. Ask anyone at the time, and they would have told you that Twitter was a dumb idea. But ideas don’t matter. What matters is execution. Twitter was able to build the network effect, and they believed in their idea. Don’t ever stop because someone says your idea is dumb. If you are the best one to execute that idea, go for it. Great companies don’t get built by average people. You need to be able to make people believe in you and your idea.
You can not build a great company without attracting amazingly talented people to help you. To attract talent and capital, you have to be just as much a salesman of yourself and your vision as an executor of the business. I always remember when Hockey Hall of Famer Mark Messier told the press before Game Six (down 3-2 in the series) of the 1994 Conference Finals against the New Jersey Devils that “We’ll win tonight.” He made one of the most gutsy calls in sports history. He made his team believe they could win against some real big odds, and then he went out and scored a hat trick. The Rangers won the Stanley Cup eventually that year. I believe entrepreneurs must engender that same belief amongst their team and the people they want to recruit.
Photographs by Lauren Kallen