Towards the end of my sophomore year at Penn State, I attended the IST Startup Week which featured Weebly as one of the featured startups. Weebly enables anyone to create a high-quality site with no HTML experience. Today, 175 million people a month visit one of the 20 million sites created on Weebly, and 60 percent of people starting a site on Weebly are entrepreneurs (Penn State News, 2014). David Rusenko is the CEO and co-founder of Weebly. Rusenko is a 2007 graduate of Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology and the youngest recipient of the Penn State Alumni Achievement Award (Penn State News, 2014). Upon hearing from a few friends that this idea had originally began as an IST group project, I was fascinated to learn more about their story and thankful Penn State provided students with the opportunity.
I quickly ran over to the IST building after one of my classes and sat down in the Cybertorium (pictured above). To be honest, I sort of expected to hear a ‘feel-good story’ from the Weebly team. I expected the founders to talk about their positive experiences at Penn State, and how that led them to success quickly when they chose to drop out and pursue their dream in Silicon Valley. I was under the impression that they were immediately able to live the dream of riding Segways around the office, playing countless hours of ping pong between projects, and take large amounts of vacation time — you know just what happens immediately with ALL tech startups, right?
Wrong. Like, REALLY wrong. As David Rusenko began talking about the early stages of Weebly, I sat there and could not fathom how he and his fellow co-founders had the willpower to stay with it. To provide some background, he first described to us that after leaving school, they moved to San Francisco to a tiny apartment (which was broken into the first week of living there, might I add), where they literally jammed three desks together and worked day and night tirelessly on improving Weebly with barely enough money to pay the bills. Then he shared this wake-up call piece of information with us:
“When we were getting started, we’d work all day and night until the light came up and we’d crash until we’d had as much sleep as we’d needed and then we’d wake up and just start working again. Our only rule was we weren’t allowed to work on Saturdays. That day we’d bask in the glory of wasting time, but then we’d get back to work on Sunday. For about two years that was our working schedule. It wasn’t until about 35 months in that we became profitable, and not until around 48 months that we were really off to the races.” -David Rusenko (Penn State News, 2014)
I’m sorry, I’m not sure I heard you correctly…did you just say that
you guys worked for 35 months before becoming profitable?!
Indeed that was the case. And fortunately, someone snapped a picture of me in the audience at the time of this truly enlightening yet shocking moment (pictured below).
Rusenko then stated:
“You can’t succeed if you quit. It might sound stupid to say, but Y Combinator has done research, and while they originally thought raw intelligence was the No. 1 predictor of a founder’s success, it turns out it’s actually sheer determination. A lot of people working on a startup now, they find early on that it’s not working out and start questioning things. There will always be obstacles in the way, and the only way you’ll be successful is through sheer determination — you just don’t quit. I think for us, we were young and dumb, and just kept going. We didn’t know what success could look like, but through sheer determination, we just kept going. And now, I’m incredibly proud of how we’re able to help people take their dreams, their vision, and make it a reality through our website. But there’s still a lot of work we want to do … the story isn’t finished; the ending hasn’t been written.” (Penn State News, 2014)
Rusenko and his team are the epitome of authentic leaders. While authentic leadership is a difficult construct to define, the developmental approach supports the notion that leadership is something that can be nurtured in a leader, rather than a fixed trait (Northouse, 2013). George’s (2003) authentic leadership approach states that there are five dimensions to developmental authentic leadership: purpose, values, relationships, self-discipline, and heart. Purpose is tied with passion; values are tied with behavior; Self-discipline is tied with consistency; and heart is tied with compassion (George, 2003). Rusenko and his team had the purpose and were passionate enough about the possibility of Weebly, that they dropped out of school. They all valued a strong work ethic, and this guided their behavior during the 35 months they were not profitable. For those 35 months, they only allowed themselves one day off per week which supports that they had a high level of self-discipline. Perhaps most important was the heart they displayed. George (2003) found that authentic leaders have a genuine desire to serve others. David Rusenko and his fellow co-founders set displayed authentic leadership because they were relentless in creating a tech company that served “non-tech” individuals with the opportunity to participate in the internet. They are strongly committed to providing millions of people with the tools to build a beautiful, and functional, HTML website without needing to have any coding experience.
From a theoretical perspective, developmental authentic leadership argues that there are also some positive psychological capacities that are necessary for authentic leadership to start as a developmental process (Pennsylvania State University, 2014). Those positive psychological capacities are confidence, hope, optimism, and resilience, and moral reasoning (Pennsylvania State University, 2014). The fact that Rusenko and his team were so committed to Weebly despite not being profitable for 35 months, evidences their confidence in their abilities, hope for their startup, optimism towards the future, and most importantly their resilience when creating something that there was no road map for. The theoretical approach to authentic leadership argues that those factors determine how an individual reacts to a critical life event (Pennsylvania State University, 2014). David Rusenko’s talk helped illustrate the misunderstanding that many people have in just how much determination and willpower goes into launching a successful startup. There is no external resource which will provide the answers they need to make Weebly work. The team is their own best resource in building it. Their responses as authentic leaders to dropping out of school, moving across the country, and living on very little money in an unfamiliar place working on an extremely difficult problem served as critical life events in the Weebly founders’ lives. Weebly’s success is not the byproduct of solely raw intelligence, as Rusenko stated, but of sheer determination as they fought through many hurdles during the early years of Weebly.
David Rusenko and his fellow co-founders authentic leadership has truly changed the lives of millions of people who would not be able to participate in the internet. His lectures have opened the eyes of thousands of individuals (including myself) as to how important determination and persistence is to be successful when tackling a meaningful problem, whether it is in the tech industry or any other new venture. I am extremely grateful for having the chance to listen David Rusenko, and will remember his lessons forever.
Watch the entire David Rusenko talk below (given at Stanford’s Y Combinator):
References:
George, B. (2003). Authentic leadership: Rediscovering the secrets to creating lasting value. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Northouse, P.G. (2013). Leadership: Theory and Practice. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.
Penn State News. (2014). Heard on Campus: David Rusenko, co-founder of Weebly. [Online Article]. Retrived from Penn State News: http://news.psu.edu/story/311673/2014/04/11/heard-campus-david-rusenko-co-founder-weebly
*The quotes from David Rusenko where retrieved from this transcript. I listened to his Weebly talk in 2012, and the quotes in this blog post are from his 2014 presentation. However, they were essentially the same as what I remember the lecture to have been in 2012.
Pennsylvania State University. (2014). Leadership in Work Settings: Lesson 12: Authentic Leadership. [Lesson Commentary]. Retrieved from Penn State World Campus: https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/su14/psych485/001/content/12_lesson/printlesson.html