Ryan Holmes

Businessman

1974-12-30

Quotes by Ryan Holmes

• Without grounding, it's easy to embrace the 'baller' lifestyle: dropping out of tech, throwing money at cars, boats and real estate, and slipping into a cycle of spending and indulgence.

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• Since social networks gained popularity extremely rapidly, there had been a debate as to whether social media was a fad. There are countless pieces of evidence now proving the contrary, among them the explosion in Twitter growth and Facebook's public listing.

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• By monitoring the activity taking place on social networks, retailers can amplify successful marketing and sales strategies and avoid weak tactics which can later be tied back to organizational objectives.

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• Anyone with an inbox knows what I'm talking about. A dozen emails to set up a meeting time. Documents attached and edited and reedited until no one knows which version is current. Urgent messages drowning in forwards and cc's and spam.

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• Landing a million-dollar investment for your startup is exhilarating. But as big as that number sounds, it doesn't go far. Many startups just getting off the ground won't have a CFO to monitor finances. It doesn't take much for spending to spiral out of control.

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• Anyone working at HootSuite will tell you that I don't sugarcoat my opinions. I heavily encourage feedback and suggestions - partly because I'm blunt about offering the same in return.

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• One thing I would like to see in Vancouver and Canada is something similar to the PayPal mafia. They were all early employees of PayPal. They all had monster exits with PayPal, and they were able to take their winnings and form a syndicate that co-invests.

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• When my company was first getting off the ground, we were completely lost in the shuffle, despite our best efforts. In 2012, however, we had a 28-foot-long, 15,000-pound secret weapon. To stand out amid the gala parties and blow-out bashes hosted by much bigger tech companies, HootSuite decided to take to the streets.

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• Tech companies don't exist in a bubble; they draw from and feed into a larger community. Ideally, the relationship is symbiotic.

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• Tech companies have a finite lifespan: For the successful ones, an IPO or exit is never more than a few years off. But by recruiting locally and developing homegrown talent, companies can build something that remains after they're gone. People, skills and a culture of innovation persist.

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• Entrepreneurs, by disposition, are built to think big. When a role no longer affords those opportunities, it might be best to leave it in capable hands and move on.

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• Understanding and respecting your roots is critical not only to winning the tech talent wars but leaving a legacy that transcends bottom lines.

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• For anyone who devours the web on a daily basis, the biggest problem is too much of a good thing. There's so much extraordinary content - from articles to images, videos and Tweets - that it's almost impossible to keep track of it.

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• Social media teams tend to be decentralized - a motley mix of in-house experts, off-site consultants and international partners. The result: Confusion, rogue tweets, and off-message posts are almost inevitable. The worst gaffes live on in social media infamy.

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• As an entrepreneur, one of the biggest challenges you will face will be building your brand. The ultimate goal is to set your company and your brand apart from the crowd. If you form a strategy without doing the research, your brand will barely float - and at the speed industries move at today, brands sink fast.

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• The basic idea of email has remained essentially unchanged since the first networked message was sent in 1971. And while email is great for one-on-one, formal correspondence, there are far better tools for collaboration.

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• The point is that instead of a monolithic brick of printed content - delivered more or less unchanged to all subscribers - social media offers news that is personalized and nimble.

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• While consumer social like Facebook and Twitter gets the headlines, perhaps the greatest untapped potential for social networking lies in business applications.

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• Working with lots of old media clients, I've had a front-row seat on the ascension of new social players and the decline of traditional news outlets. And it's clear to me that old media has an awful lot to learn from social media, in particular in five key areas: relevance, distribution, velocity, monetization, and user experience.

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• As a child, I did what any normal kid who grew up without any electricity would do - I spent countless hours working on a computer wired to my parents' car battery... and learned how to code. This natural passion for computers lead me into the Internet market during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

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