5 Questions For Founders with Marko Gargenta

Resilience, Purpose, and Scaling

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To understand my current venture, you’ll need to understand my previous one. Back in the day, my brother and I started this software training company called Marakana. We would go to large tech companies like Qualcomm, Intel, Cisco and Motorola, and train their engineers on cutting edge, open-source technologies like Java, Hadoop, Scala, and Android — you name it.

Then in 2013, Twitter acquired us, and so we went in-house doing the same thing, but as opposed to training engineers at various companies, we were just focused on Twitter engineers. To do this, we actually had to come up with a different methodology, and we built a platform to automate that. That worked so well at Twitter, and then my insight was that this magical experience could also be created elsewhere — essentially, how could we take what worked at Twitter and replicate it?

And so, I dropped out of Twitter and spun out PlusPlus. That was the motivation, and you can kind of see the arc here across my multiple companies: I’ve always tried to help people get to the next level. The name PlusPlus also implies that, with it being the programmer’s term for incrementing by one. I’ve always wanted to help people scale and make a bigger impact, and doing that through a software learning platform made sense to me.

You know the whole “being-doing-having” model, right? Back in the day, I was doing that, but in reverse. I knew what I wanted to have, and I was doing what I needed to do to have that, but I wasn’t embracing the “being” of a founder. I had it all mentally backwards as I was so attached to the outcomes.

During my first startup or even in my previous company Marakana, I was always in survival mode — trying to make ends meet. I knew I wanted to have my own business because I wanted “freedom”, but I didn’t really design those businesses intentionally.

And so, before I started PlusPlus, I was like, okay, if this is going to be a decade-long journey, what do I want to get out of this? Why am I doing this, and how does this connect to my purpose? I spent a lot of time pondering questions like this. I knew I wanted to express myself by helping people get to the next level and to better themselves, and I knew I wanted to do this through software — I just needed to find that intersection. I was also trying to imagine what an ideal week in the life of me would look like, and then use that as a design for the company, because I wanted to make sure that I would enjoy the journey all along. This approach of mine in my recent startup was quite different — I wish I had this “mental-model” mindset back in my first business, but I didn’t.

When you wake up on a random Wednesday, what do you do?

Personally, I just didn’t know what else to do; I needed to do something that is a self expression of what I believe in and what I care about, so that I can manifest my own values and purpose. For me, that packages itself into a startup — I’m not the sort of person who is into just travelling the world or chilling all day long. I needed something, and building companies is my closest mechanism for self expression.

For me, it’s resilience. Being a founder is a long journey, and just finding a way to enjoy it, and to find beauty and fulfilment in it along the way is important. That’s why I believe if you survive long enough, things are going to work out.

Being open to challenge is also crucial. My motivation for starting my previous company was not having a boss; I wanted to work for myself and have that “freedom”. Back then, that meant financial freedom — not having to do what somebody tells me, but having a choice.

Now, I’m also realizing that there’s another side to freedom: I also need a little bit of a push to thrive. It’s nice getting a healthy dose of stress or something that motivates you. For our business, we initially bootstrapped as I didn’t want investors, but then I realised I wasn’t challenged. I realized that having somebody to challenge me was actually helping me grow and focus on creating better work. That’s how I decided to ultimately raise money and have investors — to bring people in that were going to challenge us. Being open to that is crucial for building and sustaining a company.

Rather than one resource, there’s been many. One is my forum group — a group of entrepreneurs that have all been in the same boat as me in building our respective businesses for a couple of decades. We’re pretty intimate, and we know each other well, and that’s one space where I can bring up and discuss any of my concerns.

More recently, having coaches, mentors and advisors has been wonderful, especially to have such people to more strategically talk through things. Being part of various communities, like the Stanford StartX program, has also been valuable.

But, most importantly, it’s almost meditative: going back to my core values and purpose, and kind of standing in that place and anchoring myself helps me truly reflect, navigate and deal with uncertainty.

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