Ryan Allis
Founder and CEO, SaasRise · 1 appearance on the record.
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Ryan Allis co-founded email marketing software provider iContact in 2003, serving as CEO until its $169 million acquisition by Vocus in 2012. He currently serves as the founder and CEO of SaasRise and authored the book Zero to One Million.
18statements → 3claims → 3claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 3.94/5average certainty → 1.89/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
3 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted how the 3 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
3 assertions · 13 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 3 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Ryan argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Allis: iContact Reached $47M+ Annual Revenue and 70k Customers
“We started the business in 2003, and you're right, we did everything we could to keep expenses low, sleeping on futons, eating lots of rum and noodles as we built up eye contact over the years to 70,000 customers, a little over forty seven million in annual re…”
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Ryan Allis on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Ryan Allis said on Mixergy that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Allis: Founders should take secondary liquidity to think long term
“I think the value as an entrepreneur of having a million dollars in your bank account, for example, is that it does allow you to think longer term. And to think bigger. And so I do encourage other entrepreneurs if they have the opportunity to take some chips o…”
Allis: Hitting over 75% of goals means targets were not ambitious enough
“The secret with goals is if you're hitting 75% of your goals aren't ambitious enough, and most people feel bad when they don't hit a goal. I feel bad when I'm hitting too many of them, as ironic as that sounds. And so, you want your goals to be sufficiently am…”
Allis: Annual goals must remain locked and never adjusted mid-year
“You never adjust your goals. Your goals are locked for the entire year. Okay. You have to judge yourself against your original projection.”
Allis: The role of an entrepreneur is to minimize risk
“I think the role of the entrepreneur is to constantly minimize risk. As ironically as that sounds, your goal is to arrange land, labor, capital, entrepreneurial ability to create a value of outputs that's greater than the sum of the inputs and to hopefully cre…”
Allis: CEOs of 100+ Person Companies Must Focus 3 to 12 Months Ahead
“My rule of thumb for a CEO of a company larger than a hundred employees is you should be, you should rarely be working on anything that's gonna affect the current month. If you're working on something that's gonna affect the current month, you're working on th…”
Allis: Gaining deep mentor collaboration requires aligning economic incentives
“In order to get the level of a collaboration, you often need to align economic interests in some way by allowing them to invest in your firm or by potentially paying them on a monthly basis for their advice.”
Allis: Scheduling meetings at abnormal times prevents people from showing up late
“Well, there's a, you want it to be an abnormal time so people aren't late. If it's an, if it's a normal time, people are four minutes late. If it's an abnormal time, then people are right on time.”
Allis: Large preferred venture rounds increase liquidation risk for common shareholders
“When we raised forty million dollars in, in series B preferred security, which is how you do venture capital, that forty million dollars is now senior in the capitalization structure, which means above all of the common shareholders, which is me, my co-founder…”
Allis: Driving organizational change multiplies in difficulty past 150 employees
“And so, I think when you get beyond, I think the magic number is a 150 employees, things become, ah, a multiple, ah, things become challenging at a multiple of the degree of difficulty that they were previously in order to drive change within an organization.”
Allis: Startups require formal processes and metrics around 50 employees
“It generally tends to be that when you get to a scale of about 50 employees, you need these wonderful things called processes and you need these other wonderful things called metrics.”
Allis: Startups with 10 to 15 people must codify their values
“When you get to 10 or 15 people, you need to find, ah, the adjectives that describe your culture, and you need to take the time to write down the values.”
Allis: Startups Should Hire a COO Around 30 Employees
“One is hire a chief operating officer. When you get to about 30 employees,”
Allis: iContact Reached $47M+ Annual Revenue and 70k Customers
“We started the business in 2003, and you're right, we did everything we could to keep expenses low, sleeping on futons, eating lots of rum and noodles as we built up eye contact over the years to 70,000 customers, a little over forty seven million in annual re…”
Allis: iContact raised a total of $53M over five years
“Not only provided, you know, 500,005, which you raised a total of fifty three million dollars over the last five years at eye contact not only provided money, but actually provided, you know, strategic advice”
Allis: iContact rejected a previous buyout offer following EO forum advice
“We had a company coming to us That had made an offer to buy our company a couple years ago by eye contact, and I took it to the forum, and I said, is this something I should do? Is this not something I should do? And I ended up getting some very valuable advic…”
Allis: CEOs must run skip-level meetings to overcome executive isolation
“Certainly there is this executive amplitude or leaders amplitude where people are afraid to come to you and tell you things. And so you just have to proactively reach out and be extremely friendly and do skip level meetings and things like that.”
Allis plans 25 years of venture investing across sub-Saharan Africa
“What I plan to do with the next 25 years at least is to become a great venture capitalist and a great private equity investor in companies and countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Zambia, South Africa. And really sub-Sahara…”
Allis grew iContact to $1M in sales shortly after turning 21
“I remember we chatted last time about a goal I set when I was 16 to build a company to a million dollars in sales by the time I turned 21. And I told you I missed that goal by 18 days. But you know what? I was 21 years old in 18 days, and eye contact got to on…”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| #710 iContact Founder Returns To Mixergy After $169M Sale – with Ryan Allis | Apr 9, 2012 | 35m |