OrderUp CEO Chris Jeffery and Millennial Media cofounder Chris Brandenburg doled out advice to startup founders gathered at The CO-OP for a discussion organized by Kinglet as part of Baltimore Innovation Week. Brandenburg, who left Millennial in 2013, was an investor in OrderUp, adding another layer to the conversation.
Brandenburg and Jeffery reflected on challenges at each stage of the company’s life that shaped the recently-acquired companies — OrderUp by Groupon and Millennial Media by AOL.
On building a startup
With early-stage founders in the room, talk inevitably turned to building a startup. Here are a few lessons they offered on the early work:
- Be open, be compassionate, be inspirational. Those are three managerial areas Jeffery tries to excel in everyday. Having understanding for people’s personal lives and knowing about them as people is important, he said. Part of being inspirational is celebrating wins, he said. When building a startup, there could be “10 things going wrong every single day,” he said. “Find out that one win that happened and get that win to the surface.”
