From accidental entrepreneur to a $2.5M raise, with Cycle Labs’ Josh Owen

Josh Owen never looked at himself as an entrepreneur. He formed his first company Tryon Solutions to do some consulting work, and before he knew it, the company had grown to the point where it had about 100 employees. For Josh, it was time to try another idea, which required funding.  Even after a $2.5M raise to start his new company Cycle Labs, he still doesn’t think of himself as an entrepreneur – he’s simply someone who likes to solve problems.

Transcript

Josh Owen: For me, it’s never been about like financial success or anything like that. It’s like, like solving these problems and I need people to help me do it. When they do that though, they’re trusting in me a lot. Right, right. They’re trusting in me in this vision, they’re trusting in me that we’re making the right decisions for the organization. And so I feel like that is my responsibility to everybody who’s ever been a part of one of my organizations.  yeah. You’ve trusted the vision that I have. You’ve trusted me to make the decision. So I am gonna do everything I can to take care of you and your family. That’s sort of the tradeoff. 

Trevor Schmidt: Today’s guest is Josh Owen, co-founder and CEO of Cycle Labs, a provider of a continuous test automation platform, in software that tests other software. With any business, whether it’s a startup or a Fortune 500 company, the day to day processes often get done on software built by other vendors.  Some of it is new, while other systems have been in place for years.  These systems have to be tested to ensure that mission critical functions perform as expected.  Cycle Labs provides an automated way to make sure those systems are working. 

You may be thinking, as I did, how does something like this scale – what happens when a piece of software is just so old or something they’ve never seen before

Every client thinks that they’re unique. You know, at the end of the day, they’re putting stuff in boxes and shipping it. Sure. So there’s, there’s a lot of commonality. Probably the challenges are really with the legacy systems, right, when you find somebody who hasn’t changed in 30 years, , there’s probably something there that maybe we haven’t found before. Generally speaking, we’re be transparent about that. And, we’ll say. We’ll give it a shot and see if we can make it successful. There’s definitely been things where we weren’t sure if we were gonna get there or not, but so far we’ve been able to move ahead.

Trevor: Josh attributes that to a great engineering team. How this engineering team came together is part of Cycle Labs’ story, but Josh’s journey to this point was not a foregone conclusion.  Some of our guests describe wanting to start businesses from young age and seem to be born entrepreneurs, but others, like Josh never really thought this would be their path.

You know, I, I’ve never really looked at myself as an entrepreneur. I still don’t necessarily in the traditional sense. I think people think of that as like, you know, these people who are out there launching businesses to grow businesses and provide value to the shareholders and things like that. But it’s like, I just like solving problems, you know, it just so happens that the ones that I found myself in the position to solve require, you know, investment and it requires building something that’s complex.

Full Episode Transcript

Hosted by Trevor Schmidt, Founder Shares is brought to you by Hutchison PLLC and is edited and produced by Earfluence.

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