Above: Bay Elliott. Photo by Monica Hopkins
I recently spoke with Bay Elliott, a private angel investor who has been working in the Gables since '83 when he moved here from New York City.
Irina: Hi, Bay. Let's start with your personal background and how you came to this point in your life.
Bay: I started flying in college and I am a bit of a techno junkie. I love technology and I love creating solutions and love creating products that fit market needs.
While in college, mulling these core aptitudes and risks, I decided that I had to create a foil where I could enjoy my work, pay the bills and have the ability to work in the off hours on new products and if they hit, build companies out of them.
The plan that married many of my passions and the foil scenario was to become an airline pilot, get on international routes where I could work 3 on, 4 off so I could use the 4 off days a week to do the product development and business building.
After a stint in Europe and experiencing life in some of the former Soviet-bloc countries, I also wanted to serve our country and give something back. Being a military pilot was a key path to becoming an airline pilot and if I was going to go that route, I wanted to do something really exciting so I joined the Navy as a carrier based pilot.
I got on with the airlines, got transferred to Miami and picked up the international routes and the first company I built was a telecom interface and voice mail for PCs, the next company was airfoils for tractor trailer trucks, and the next company was a parts provision suppler for mega yachts and that brought me to Gulf War I.
In the early stages, I was based in Rome, flying troops into the desert near Kuwait on 24 hour missions. When back in Rome, on my 24 hour off, I had my duties with National Marine so I had a real need for a professional business services & unified messaging system (which didn’t exist at the time), so I drafted an outline for that system and when I came back to the States, I searched for a joint venture partner to build what became WorldLink.
After trading my joint venture position for stock and residual income about 15 years ago, I was invited to join the Farwell Group, [a Coral Gables-based executive search firm], where my primary focus is building high performance teams for our client companies. In my off hours, I started investing in a wide variety of early stage companies, many with a technical product aspect.
After investing on my own, in half a dozen early stage companies, I worked with Peter Hairston and a couple of others to create New World Angels to benefit from the knowledge of a group and to have a greater impact on the early stage companies in South Florida.
Although several years ago I resigned NWA, I have to say that it's a great group of professionals, most are serial and hardened entrepreneurs who are excited by the prospect of helping worthy early stage teams become very successful. While I was involved, we looked at a lot of deals, helped a lot of companies and I learned a lot. I continue to refer promising early stage companies to them and other Angel groups, and on occasion, I reach out to individual NWA members when I see something in which I think they might have a strong interest.
Since resigning from NWA, I have been primarily been focused on investing in cleantech. Most recently I have invested in a couple of cleantech companies.
Irina: Could you name any interesting tech entrepreneurs that are based in Coral Gables, if not in the Gables, then in Miami?
Bay: [In the Gables], one of my favorites is John Daly who built Americas Software and sold that to a British conglomerate [Experian in 2004] and he is now developing medical services and practice management software which are quite simply amazing.
In Miami, I have many favorites and some of them are Mike Kasbar, President and COO of World Fuel, he is one of the most driven and most successful entrepreneurs I have ever met. John Sicilian is a founding partner of 1848 Capital, brilliant business, finance and legal mind and a joy to work with. David Brillembourg is a driven serial entrepreneur who has moved from building tech companies to building a high end resort focused private equity firm. I can go on and on and on…
Irina: From your personal experience, what are some common mistakes that entrepreneurs tend to make?
Bay: The biggest mistake is not taking the acutely important task of picking the right team members for the monumental challenges ahead with enough: thought, planning, time, dedication, deliberation, seriousness.
A second mistake is not working strategic to tactical, macro to micro, always understanding where you are in a business cycle and how megatrends and competitive technologies trends etc. are going to affect your market, your products or services.
A third mistake is being more enamored with your product or service than what the market needs and/or wants.
A fourth mistake is underestimating your time lines and capital needs and the competitive space you are playing in.
A fifth mistake is not changing out your team members fast enough when you see that they don’t have the commitment, drive, brilliance, creativity, the endurance, the focus, the stamina that you need.
A sixth mistake is not bringing every ounce of your energy, talent, brilliance, enthusiasm, vision and drive to the table each day and infusing each and every member of the team with that vision and enthusiasm (and then giving them the recognition and rewards they deserve).
A seventh mistake is not driving down into the nth degree of the details, of making sure that you drive past everyone else in every aspect of your business and you make sure that your customers have wow experiences at every touch point. “The devil is in the details" (and big profits in the nickels and dimes left on the table).
An eighth mistake is trying to compete by being a commodity.
Irina: What do you think entrepreneurs could do to increase their chances of success?
Bay: See above. Don’t make those mistakes and eat, breathe, sleep your business 24/7 with every pore of your being so that there is no one on the planet who knows the wants and needs of your customer segment as well as you do, and care enough to blow them away with wow experiences in meeting those needs.
Irina: What do you think we, as a community, could do in South Florida to foster serious, scalable Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurship?
Bay: We need to support our public and private education system and make them and the students they produce, the best on the planet.
In addition to the technical skills, we need to teach our children to learn how to learn and teach them critical thinking skills, we need to broaden their horizons in every way possible. When we do this, it starts to raise the bar in every aspect of society.
We have the weather, we can build the education systems, we have the medical systems, we could have the financial systems, but we need a very well and broadly educated populace to make sure that we have the political systems and bright, well educated, ethical political and business leaders to support the educational and business infrastructure, incentives, grants, etc to attract and encourage developing businesses and give greater comfort to those individuals, organizations, financial institutions which will fund the startup and then growth needs of these companies.
In general, we have allowed the education of our children to degrade significantly over the past 30 years. We are long past the capabilities of the system designed for the industrial revolution and we are still in the nascent stages of the information age however we haven’t yet really assessed, understood and altered our support and educational paths for those needs, skills and knowledge ahead (in both the teachers and the students).
There are other areas of the country and perhaps much more importantly, other countries, which have been doing better than we have, for many reasons and they appear to be well poised to continue to outdistance us.
These are not quick solutions and they require a macro to micro view, a long distance vision that is understood by the greater community and enables the will of all to make the long term commitments to drive all the pieces to successful implementation. The funny thing is that it often doesn’t require great sacrifice but it sure requires understanding, vision and commitment (and the synergies of these drive the growth curves to be exponential).
A possible case in point: in the past 5 years, one of the only job growth sectors has been in cleantech and it is slated to be one of the top corporate and job growth sectors for the next 40 years. In prototype and in labs, we already have alternate energy and fuels that unsubsidized are already cheaper than our highly subsidized hydrocarbon (gas etc) energy sources and yet a good portion of our political leaders still don’t understand or support these cleantech areas (or more cynically, maybe they do but lobbying money has influenced the landscape). Because of this lack of real leadership, we have literally driven many of our companies to other areas (and other countries) and some of our technologies continue to languish or be eclipsed by those of others. The entire planet suffers as a result.
Irina: Thank you, Bay. Great insights!
This blog is a part of my volunteer efforts to build a strong entrepreneurial community in South Florida and worldwide.
About me: I am Irina Patterson, was a Medical Doctor and tech PR executive in the past, My current passion is entrepreneurship. I'm a volunteer for the Silicon Valley-based Global Initiative 1M1M that offers free online guidance to entrepreneurs worldwide. Feel fee to ask your quesitons below in the comments.
