#nexusinterviews with Gary Tauss

It was afternoon! The sun was slowly going down and the weather was getting a bit cooler!

We were sitting in the balcony and we were bootstrapping our Interviews Series with the amazing board of Nexus Energy Center!

Gary, the first one to interview, was there with us! At least virtually he was! Reading through the lines, his ideals, his personality and his virtues were becoming more apparent.

So if you wonder who is really Gary, when we asked the same question he said:

I am a serial entrepreneur with both an IPO and failures in my past.  I now sit on multiple boards, both for profit and non-profit.  I also work with committed entrepreneurs trying to scale their businesses.  I moved to Huntsville 6 years ago after spending most of my career in Silicon Valley.

Having spent a lot of time in the business world we wanted him to share a bit more of his experience. So we asked him what was his favorite motto and whether he could explain it to us! He boldly said:

YOU ARE NOT THE CUSTOMER!  The most common mistake startups make is assuming they know what the customer wants.  If you haven’t talked personally with 50 prospects of which 35 have said they would find room in their budget to buy or use what you think you should build, you are not on the right path.

All this knowledge and experience obviously does not come easy! Failure is always a part of it. Thus, we were wondering what was the lesson that derived from his bigger failure. And he shared this story with us:

I tried to convince a company I worked for in the 1980s that the Internet was going to be a big thing.  At the time, we could have purchased Cisco for about $20 million dollars.  We didn’t and the company is no longer in existence.  I learned that being right was nice, but convincing people to follow your lead was more important.

 Coming back to Huntsville and the reasons why he moved here, we wanted to know his favorite place in the town. 

The White Bus on Governors Drive.  The only authentic Mexican food in town.  But Nexus would have to be next.  Smart, passionate people working on big important problems and making real measureable progress.

And of course the following question could not be other than his aspirations and dreams about Alabama. 

Innovation requires risk takers.  People who take risk and try to change the world are considered weird by everyone else.  I want Alabama to embrace the weird so that we can become leaders rather than followers.

Thank you Gary! We are very proud to have you on our board. And we are very happy to learn from you and grow together.