 This month's founder spotlight is on John Street, the CEO and founder of Pax8, a Colorado-based unicorn and a FirstMile Fund I portfolio company. John shares his unique journey to entrepreneurship after many years of learning from others. John Street is the CEO and founder of Pax8, a FirstMile Fund I portfolio company. Pax8 was one of the first investments FirstMile Ventures made in Fund I, having built a relationship with John for several years prior to him starting the company. Throughout his career, Street has established a remarkable legacy of rejuvenating faltering companies and constructing innovative new startups, earning him a reputation as a visionary leader. As an award-winning entrepreneur and CEO, he is lauded for crafting disruptive technology that fuels business growth and prosperity with four startups in the state, including Telephone Express, USA.Net, MX Logic, and Pax8, all of which achieved Inc. 5000 status. As part of his servant leadership style, Street champions a human-centric approach to cultivating exceptional employee cultures, emphasizing a work environment where teams can continually learn, evolve, and enjoy their work.
When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? A dinosaur! Actually, that was my brother. He loved the idea of just having to stand around and eat all day. For me, it started in high school. My girlfriend's mother was a guidance counselor, and she planted in me the idea of the power of owning my own business. So, from there on, I focused on what skill sets I needed to build in order to run my own business. I got an undergraduate degree in Accounting and worked at Arthur Andersen. Then I struck out on my own, doing consulting work while I researched what type of company I wanted to start. This was during the S&L crisis. I wound up with a few buyout projects in the telecom industry. After the cleanup work was done on one project, a very persuasive mentor of mine after multiple conversations convinced me to actually run one of the businesses I’d turned around. From there, I’ve been starting and running businesses ever since. Was starting Pax8 an "aha moment" or a "gradual realization"? It was a culmination of lots of things - technology advancement, adoption trends, and business needs - that I saw converging over the years. I was introduced to the internet in the early 90s and was fascinated by its impact on IT. Then I witnessed the emergence of the cloud in the early 2000’s. I had spent a lot of time working in and studying the dynamics of the telecom industry. It was clear to me that the centralized nature of telecoms would not align well with the future of office and email communication. Over the next two decades, I started and ran several companies, from a subscription email provider to an email spam detector service that I sold to McAfee in 2009. After that it was clear the timing for cloud and related services was imminent, but the way IT was traditionally sold was not set up to sell cloud-related services at scale. You needed a marketplace. The IT supply chain needed a refresh if it was going to cost-effectively sell cloud products to SMBs across the country who would need these products. If you could go back in time and tell yourself something when you first started pax8, what would it be? I’d tell myself, “it’s going to be even more complicated than you think!” That's one of the reasons we picked the complex challenge that Pax8 is solving. It's also going to take more time and capital than you think. What is the best constructive feedback you have gotten, and how bad did hearing it hurt? My business mentor Walter told me early on that the minute you open your mouth, people know how ignorant, ill-informed, or unprepared you are. At the time he told me, I was a young guy. I did not take it to heart until years later because I had some early successes. This all really hit home in my early 40s when I had to recalibrate my management approach. What makes Colorado a great place to start a company? I am a native, so I am completely biased. We have a unique sort of gestalt in CO. We have a mix of Midwest conservatism in terms of work ethic. But we have a good dose of the West Coast cool vibe. We are a nice balance between the MidWest and the Coasts. Quick Hitters:
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