Benjy Boxer

Josh Pigford on February 11, 2019

Table of Contents

 

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This week I talk with Benjy Boxer, Founder of Parsec, a game streaming company! In this episode we talk about gaining startup experience working at other companies, managing risk, maintaining personal momentum, the importance of celebrating small wins, building a consumer-facing technology company and more!

Show Notes:

  • 1:30- Building a company and not getting distracted by the product itself
  • 2:05- Childhood with entrepreneurial parents
  • 3:30- Growing up surrounded by the medical industry
  • 5:12- Gaming as a kid
  • 8:00- Going to business school rather than medical or law school
  • 9:22- Post-business school; Working at the World Bank
  • 10:30- Working at AOL
  • 11:16- The acquisition side of business
  • 12:12- Investor relations software
  • 14:20- Helping venture capitalists manage their portfolios
  • 14:52- Lesson learned with failing: “Believe and be driven to consistently work on something”
  • 16:20- Hard conversations with co-founders
  • 17:38- Joining Newscred and the opportunity to learn from a startup and a founder with a great reputation
  • 19:40- Getting experience with “no risk”
  • 20:05- Assumption that entrepreneurs are big into taking risks
  • 21:18- Newscred project- Building a million dollar business in a year
  • 24:22- Transition from building content management and licensing stuff to building Parsec gaming
  • 26:09- The right time to start a company
  • 28:14- Time shift data- You always want to work where time shift is going
  • 28:45- Transitioning out of Newscred to Parsec full-time
  • 29:35- First day kickoff feeling
  • 30:27- Realizing the idea might actually work
  • 33:55- Releasing a broken thing as your first version
  • 35:03- Paying Parsec
  • 36:37- Looking different than most New York tech companies
  • 37:00- Keeping momentum up
  • 38:06- Getting the next thing done while maintaining a stable thought process on your business
  • 39:01- Being practical people and celebrating the wins
  • 42:15- Seeing risks on the table for your company
  • 42:55- Parsec as a consumer facing gaming company versus working with larger companies
  • 48:00- “I enjoy owning lots of my company”
  • 49:10- Using media as a way of entertaining and communicating with people
  • 51:05- Looking ahead: The next year for Parsec
  • 53:30- Go big or go home

How to reach Benjy: TwitterParsec Gaming, Email- benjy@parsecgaming.com

 

Josh Pigford

Josh is most famous as the founder of Baremetrics. However, long before Baremetrics and until today, Josh has been a maker, builder, and entrepreneur. His career set off in 2003 building a pair of link directories, ReallyDumbStuff and ReallyFunArcade. Before he sold those for profits, he had already started his next set of projects. As a design major, he began consulting on web design projects. That company eventually morphed into Sabotage Media, which has been the shell company for many of his projects since. Some of his biggest projects before Baremetrics were TrackThePack, Deck Foundry, PopSurvey, and Temper. The pain points he experienced as PopSurvey and Temper took off were the reason he created Baremetrics. Currently, he's dedicated to Maybe, the OS for your personal finances.