Tips from Cofounder of Omniture and Observepoint, John Pestana

John Pestana is a familiar name in Utah, he cofounded Omniture which sold for over 1.8 billion dollars. And he more recently cofounded observe point 6 or 7 years ago, he is the cofounder and chairman of the board. He plays more of a business development and product role.  He helps with long term vision of the product by creating connections and networking. 

They help a company have quality data, data that they can trust.  The platform looks at their data implementations, all of their marketing techniques, and make sure that they are all functioning properly. Whether its on their website, video or mobile platform they just make sure their data is being collected properly.  It is a business to business market.

What is a big difficulty you have faced in this business,  and how did you overcome this difficulty?

“One of the hardest things is finding the qualified people into the company and finding skilled developers.  Building a good product has come pretty natural to us because we are already very familiar to the market that we are in.”

How did you find the top developers or team members?    

“Basically reaching out to my network and the people that I already knew.  Although none of these people I had actually personally met before.  Many of them were references that I received from people that I knew.  I always tried to reach out to my network and look for leads.”

What tip would you give an entrepreneur? 

“Just start, I think everyone waits for the perfect scenario.  And I think if you want to be an entre you just need to start and the opportunities will come. You will start seeing clearer and know what you need to do, and what you shouldn’t do.  Like with Omniture we just started making websites for people and then we tired X, Y, and Z and created different products and then actually a friend of mine came and said Hey have you guys thought about making this tracking app.  And that’s how we started into it.  But if we hadn’t gotten out that and started making those basic websites none of that would have happened.”

If there is anything that you would have changed in your entrepreneurial journey what would that be?

“I haven’t second guessed that many things.. Nothing ever goes perfect right?  I don’t know even the bad decisions guide you into better decisions. And if you were to take away those experiences I don’t know if I would have learned as fast.  There’s no real big thing that sticks out in my mind that I wish I wouldn’t have done.  There were a lot of tough times but I think we were able to make good decisions in the moment.”