Aaron Batalion
Cofounder/1st CTO, LivingSocial
Discussion
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Aaron Batalion
@abatalion · Cofounder/1st CTO, LivingSocial
Hi! I'm Aaron Batalion, now a Partner at LightSpeed, focused on early stage consumer companies. Previously, I was Cofounder and 1st CTO at LivingSocial, where I built the team from 4 to 4000 people across 25 countries and to billions in sales. I'm also a huge fan of ProductHunt. Ask me anything!
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Ryan Hoover
@rrhoover · Founder, Product Hunt
Welcome, Aaron! LivingSocial exploded from 4 to 4k as you mention. That must have been wild. What's your biggest learning and what might you have done differently during that hyper growth?
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Aaron Batalion
@abatalion · Cofounder/1st CTO, LivingSocial
@rrhoover My biggest learning from growing LivingSocial from 4 friends to 4 thousand people across 30 countries is the people and the culture matter more than the product you build. If you look at the history of LivingSocial, there were a dozen or so "companies" we built with the same team, each one succeeding or failing in their own ways. The original name of the company is HungryMachine, which I coined to represent what we actually built: the team/culture/experience to execute on new ideas.
I've always believed that a successful startup is first a gathering of incredible humans... who happen to work well together to build to a product. When we forgot that, we stumbled.
Corley
@corleyh · COO @ Product Hunt
Konnichiwa. I understand you spent time in Japan. How do you think your time in Japan has shaped your perspective? And what is your favorite hidden gem in Japan (a place, a park, a restaurant)?
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Aaron Batalion
@abatalion · Cofounder/1st CTO, LivingSocial
@corleyh In high school, I played sports but my after school job was building a trading platform for a local commodities broker (www.eggs.org). I received a full scholarship to college and knew I'd study Computer Science, but thought creatively how else to spend the university's money. To do that, I lived in Japan for over a year to complete my second degree in Asian Studies with a focus on Eastern Religion and Japanese. I spent time in a monastery while living there and it shaped my view of humanity, happiness and personal responsibility.
One of my favorite gems if you love the outdoors is Yakushima, a small barely-inhabited island off the southern coast of Japan. The island is mostly a national forest, home to the Yaku-sugi cedar trees, which grow to 500m tall and are incredible. I loved hiking through those forests. It's one of the most beautiful places in the world. If you dont believe me, do a google image search.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ya...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ya...
Emily Hodgins
@ems_hodge · Community and Marketing, Product Hunt
@abatalion what is your favourite moment from working at LivingSocial in the early days? Do you miss anything about the craziness of being in such a high growth state-up during that early period?
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Aaron Batalion
@abatalion · Cofounder/1st CTO, LivingSocial
@ems_hodge My favorite early memories are what I fondly remember at "battles". For example, before the local commerce business, we built viral Facebook applications, back when that was cool to do. One of those apps was called PickYour5. It grew from 0 to 40M users in 3 weeks. We had a team of 5 or 6 people on the tech team, and we worked in shifts around the clock. This was before AWS magically scaled everything for you btw. :)
One day, our traffic flatlined and we pulled our hair out trying to figure out why. We checked every layer of the stack, dozens of times. Turns out we maxed out connections on a firewall in our datacenter. We quickly replaced it with one 4 times as big, and the next day we maxed that one out too.
Those crazy/stressful/exciting/wtf moments are what I remember most fondly. Its the bonds built amongst my team that I will always remember.
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Aaron Batalion
@abatalion · Cofounder/1st CTO, LivingSocial
@iamcuan I have many favorite books, but as a child, my favorite was: The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren. I must have read it a dozen times as a child and the same copy is still on a bookshelf behind me as I write this.
Cuan-Chai Megghross
@iamcuan · Angel Investor, Brainyloft
@abatalion How will recreational marijuana in places like Colorado, Washington and Oregon impact the way Living Social does business there?
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Aaron Batalion
@abatalion · Cofounder/1st CTO, LivingSocial
@iamcuan I cant comment on LivingSocial today as I haven't been involved in many years.
That said, the legalization of medicinal and recreational marijuana across the US will generate many opportunities for startups as well as tax revenue which states are spending on improving education. I'm a fan of both outcomes.
Wahyu Kristianto
@kristories · @kristories
Hi @abatalion, 4k people from different countries and cultures is a difficult thing. LivingSocial hire smart people. How do you manage people who have more experience or more knowledge? How do you coach them if you don’t have the same level of expertise?
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Aaron Batalion
@abatalion · Cofounder/1st CTO, LivingSocial
@kristories When the company starts, the founders do everything. As you scale, you repeatedly replace some aspect of your responsibility with someone more capable than you. If you're doing it right, everyone is the room is better than you at something.
As a CTO, I often weighed in on technical direction... but most conversations were about focus, priorities, culture, and the vision driving us forward, all unrelated to a person's level of expertise.
Andrew Ettinger
@andrewett · Product Marketing, Twitter (ex-PH)
Which product(s) in LSVP's portfolio do you wish every PH user knew about?
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Aaron Batalion
@abatalion · Cofounder/1st CTO, LivingSocial
@andrewmettinger There are many incredible companies in our portfolio: http://lsvp.com/portfolio/ That said, many of my favorites are recent deals in stealth. I'd rather our companies stay quiet & focus on execution.
Erik Torenberg
@eriktorenberg · Former Product Hunt
Most underrated skill? Overrated skill?
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Aaron Batalion
@abatalion · Cofounder/1st CTO, LivingSocial
@eriktorenberg Of people I meet, an underrated skill is authenticity, to yourself and to others. It's what I highly value in all personal/professional relationships.
Emily Hodgins
@ems_hodge · Community and Marketing, Product Hunt
@abatalion what do you look for in an early stage founder / company when making a decision about investing?
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Aaron Batalion
@abatalion · Cofounder/1st CTO, LivingSocial
@ems_hodge What I look for in founders is: authenticity. creativity. and incredibly high IQ, EQ, and GSDQ, aka get-shit-done-Q.