Being at the right place at the right time: An important part of business success

In this week's interview we dive into the entrepreneurial journey of Josh Furstoss, and how his startup is changing the outdated processes within the financial industry. Learn about how he identifies growth channels, capitalizes on new opportunities, and manages his work schedule as someone with ADHD.

What is your company doing and what was the pivotal moment that led to the creation of your business?

Our wholistic goal is to fix the private markets, we’re starting with automating portfolio reporting, investor updates and a whole host of other functions by providing real time financial and performance data on the underlying portfolio assets.

Creating the business may have been a stroke of luck, being at the right place at the right time. I had made a career in big data, AI and had some experience running a small business.

I was asked to help a friend build out his venture capital firm while I was in an incubator working on another project. Between those two experiences I realized the processes that funds use to understand how their assets are preforming is insanely manual, almost as if it hadn’t changed since email was invented.

How do you identify and prioritize new growth channels?

I see our new channels as a series of blockers. We prioritize features based on the customer we currently serve then we do business development to look for expansion markets.

We’ve listed all possible expansion markets by what features would be needed to make our product valuable to that market. Then we look at the overlaps between those feature sets to understand where the lowest hanging fruit is.

Listening to how people perceive our product prior to telling them what it is was also very impactful as we were able to vastly expand our understanding of how much of the private market economy Incued can accelerate.

Which tech tools, software, apps, etc. do you use religiously in your business?

Figma and Notion may be the greatest applications ever made. Shoutout to Slack’s new canvas feature that is essentially Notion attached to your Slack channel. That’s been game changing.

For analytics on your app Posthog is quite good and we’ve found Help Scout’s integration into our Slack to be really powerful for the low cost compared to Intercom.

What is that one opportunity that had a significant impact on your company's growth or direction?

I have to give a shout out to Landon Campbell who now works at Drive Capital but previously was at Motorola Solutions where we worked together and I met him. He got me in on the Chicago Venture Summit where we pitched, won the competition, almost immediately closed a funding round and made tons of our potential customers aware of this solution all due to one 5 minute presentation.

Other than that, Alchemist Accelerate was the single biggest driver of professionalism and growth for Incued. Without them I believe our network would been much more limited and we wouldn’t have gotten access to the tribal knowledge necessary to get where we are today.

What are some of the challenges you’ve come face to face with on your entrepreneurial journey? How did you overcome them?

The loneliness was the hardest thing, you start something new, not everyone wants to see you succeed. You can lose a lot of friends pretty quickly and as you become obsessed with the business you take on a mindset that I believe may be alienating to the average person working a 9-5.

It’s not pleasant to put yourself out there the way that’s needed for a venture backed company, not initially at least, but you get used to it and eventually the pressure give you energy and motivation.

I overcame a lot of this by focusing on the relationships in my life that gave me energy instead.

How many hours per week do you work on average?

It depends. I have ADHD and I’ve found I work best in sprints. I will have 100+ hour weeks when I’m driving growth or raising money and I will have 20-30 hour weeks when I’m waiting on a feature to be done or research to come back.

The reality is I’m always working, but not always on something directly.

For example, talking to people on LinkedIn, going to networking events or hanging out with founders or investors at night. None of these feel like work, but I suppose if I count those I spend roughly 70% of my awake time working.

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Rapid fire questions

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Favorite morning ritual  ☕

‍Fresh grinding coffee.

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‍Favorite book/s 📕

‍A Long Way Gone.

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Your leadership style in one word 💼

Trusting.

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Cats or dogs?

Dog person who owns a cat.

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Mountains or beach?

Beach.

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Morning person or night owl?

Night 100% , nobody bothers you.

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