Q&A: Entrepreneur Wil Schroter

Wil Schroter started his first business, Blue Diesel, in his dorm room in 1994. Within five years, he had grown the interactive marketing agency to more than $60 million in capitalized billings, serving clients like Best Buy, BMW and Eli Lilly. He later sold the company to inChord Communications, but joined that firm's board of directors, helping to bolster annual billings to more than $600 million. Meanwhile, he embarked on a career of business formation that includes Kelltech Internet Services, Swapalease.com, Go BIG Network, GotCast.com, Virtucon Ventures, AffordIt.com and BizPlan.com. We asked Schroter, who divides his time between Columbus and Santa Monica, Calif., about his entrepreneurial career and how he views Ohio as a place to do business.

What led to formation of Blue Diesel?

It's kind of weird to think about now, but at the time around 1994 the Internet was not something people were building businesses around. I started the company because I was simply enamored with the web, since I had been building bulletin board systems on my Commodore 64 computer in 1986. The web was a natural extension and I wanted to be part of the community building it. I had no idea what it would turn into -- no one did.

Were you able to finish up after Blue Diesel began to take off?

If you mean school, I definitely never finished school. I didn't even realize I had stopped going to school until one day I realized the semester was over and I didn't even realize it. I was so busy I just forgot about school altogether.

Since then, you've been involved in forming a number of enterprises. Which ones are you most proud of and why?

Companies are like children -- you love all of them equally although they all please and disappoint you differently. Blue Diesel was special because it was my first company. Swapalease.com was my first Web-only company and really opened my eyes to the way things were going to be in the next version of Web companies. GotCast was my first venture-funded company and gave me a sense for what it meant to manage other people's money for the first time. Affordit was the first company I started in Santa Monica. They all have a different story because they all brought very different experiences. The actual outcomes, strangely, have had very little to do with my view of them.

You've had lots of successes -- have you had any ideas that misfired, and, if so, what did you learn from those?

I've never made a single mistake. I've performed flawlessly on all of my endeavors without so much as a bad day. Oh wait, that never happened. Seriously, they all misfired. Blue Diesel almost made me bankrupt personally. Go BIG Network was supposed to be a classified ad site before it become a partner in finding funding. The list goes on. The only constant in all of these companies was that we were wrong 100 percent of the time on what we thought the business would be. At this point we don't even bother trying to plan on getting it right, we just point in a general direction and figure it out as we go.

What characteristics do entrepreneurs need to have in order to be successful?

For every example of one type of entrepreneur I've seen an equally successful characteristic of another. You'll hear words like passion, determination, and drive. But that also makes people good soccer players. I'm not sure there are a definitive set of criteria -- I think everyone's experience is different and their outcomes are unique.

What are the most common mistakes that new entrepreneurs tend to make?

They honestly believe there is a right answer. There isn't. There is your gut and there is someone else's guess. That's it. If you think there is going to be a market for people who want blue grass on their lawns, go and do it. There have been far more successes around people who went with their gut than failures from people who missed all the right answers.

You wrote on one of your blog posts that communities shouldn't all be trying to become another Silicon Valley but should instead leverage their own strengths. What are the strengths of central Ohio, or Ohio in general?

Ohio is cheap and reliable. I like that a lot. Silicon Valley is wildly expensive and terribly fickle. They succeed because they can afford to be both of these things whereas we cannot. We will never be Silicon Valley and we should never strive to be. We should strive to be amazing at what Ohio wants to be known for, although I'm pretty sure we don't know what that is yet. Most cities are facing the same issue and I've yet to find one that has the right answer yet.

Is there anything that Ohio should be doing differently to increase the chances that new startups will succeed?

We just need more starts. We need more shots on goal. It's so cheap to start a company here that there is no excuse not to start one. You can live in a decent apartment for $700 per month here and get by. Try that in Silicon Valley -- you won't find a spare bedroom easily -- and yet they are starting 100 companies a day to every one of ours. Anyone complaining that they can't afford to start a Web company in Ohio is just wrong.

You also wrote that startups often place too much emphasis on raising capital early on. Could you elaborate?

The first few months or years of starting a company are wildly frustrating. You simply need everything, and you have nothing. So raising capital seems like an obvious solution. But in most cases what raising capital provides you is a compressed timeline to getting started. It buys you time, usually not much else. In the absence of capital, people build businesses all the time. There are dozens of incubators around the company that are launching very useful companies for less than $20,000 each.

What, or who are the companies or business leaders you admire most and why?

This is so obvious that it's ridiculous, but Bill Gates. Here's a guy who could have kicked back and said "I started one of the most successful companies in history and became one of the richest men -- I'm out." Instead he actually figured out how to tackle an even bigger challenge -- fundamentally changing the world by redistributing wealth. I admire him more for what he is doing now than what he has done in the past.

Entrepreneur programs increasingly seem to be placing some emphasis on mentor opportunities. Are there some things, though, that can't be taught?

I don't know that a mentor can teach you as much as they can guide you. Most things you need to learn for yourself. However it's awful helpful from time to time to tell Wile E. Coyote that he's about to run off of a cliff. I wish I had my own Ben Kenobi showing me the ways of the force back in the day. My life would have been much easier.