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Heather Ferguson: I’m just about to interview Kyle Vucko of Indochino. If you like this
interview, share it and don’t forget to comment.
Heather Ferguson: I’m Heather Ferguson and you have found a Sonar Moment.
[intro music]
The Sonar Moment, a monthly interview with CEOS from the Pacific Northwest.
Heather Ferguson: We’re here at the beautiful Alix Goolden Hall in Victoria, Canada and
with me today is Kyle Vucko, CEO and founder of Indochino. Indochino is a company that
makes custom suits and sells them online over the internet. Kyle and his partner, Heikal
Gani, have shaken up the world of men’s fashion as you can see, not even 30 years
old. So welcome, Kyle.
Kyle Vucko: Hi.
Heather Ferguson: This is a beautiful simple idea, really. Tell me about it.
Kyle Vucko: Well, what can I tell you? It started from a simple concept actually. My
co-founder and I, both friends in college, needed a suit for a conference, never bought
one before and just found the process to be really tough. We did some research online.
The stuff that we loved was really expensive, hard to get in Victoria, and what we ended
finding was the stuff that we could afford just wasn’t a great experience. The retail
experience was dated, the sizing wasn’t great, the style wasn’t there so we felt
that there was an opportunity to make it way easier for guys to go through this process
of getting dressed. We just went out and built a process that we felt spoke to guys and that
was Indochino.
Heather Ferguson: Now I want to give people an idea of the scale of this. Just tell me
where you started in terms of sales the first year and now we’re—what are we? Six years
later?
Kyle Vucko: Five years online. Yeah, six years for me.
Heather Ferguson: Five years online. So where did you start and where are you now? What
was in your first year?
Kyle Vucko: In 2007, we sold a handful of garments. It was just my co-founder and I
so it was single garments a day. Heather Ferguson: Your dad bought one.
Kyle Vucko: Yeah. But he was the one that didn’t. He was very supportive me, doing
my own thing so no. But it was a lot of schlepping around, measuring people and trying to build
up a business and has evolved from the two of us to today, we have close to a hundred
staff between Vancouver and Shanghai. We have now close to 130,000 customers in 130 countries.
So yes, we have grown very meaningfully. We have also taken investments along the way
and become a sizeable business.
Heather Ferguson: Tell me about the mentors you’ve had along the way.
Kyle Vucko: It’s been a story for me since day one. I always looked for who was the smartest
person I could get access to and I’ve always just been an oral and kind of interactive
learner so I started with the mentor program at the University of Victoria. When I came
up with this idea, I was able to throw the idea off of a series of mentors here in Victoria.
I kind of connected in particular with a few of those who actually became my angel investors
and kind of continued to grow from there through a couple of rounds of funding, through our
chairman, who is also an advisor of mine. He was an early employee of Yahoo, rose to
be president there, and I found that you want to be successful and you can look to certain
people who have been successful and generally, the most successful people do things differently
from everybody else.
Heather Ferguson: So one of your early investors was Jeff Mallet.
Kyle Vucko: He was.
Heather Ferguson: Ad when you talk about somebody doing something uniquely, tell me what was
it that was so unique about Jeff. He’s had a very successful career but when you say
that successful people do things uniquely, what exactly do you mean and how was that
for him?
Kyle Vucko: For him specifically, and I’m speaking for Jeff so I don’t know if this
is exactly his story, he has amazing amount of energy and focus and really follows, I
think, his emotive center. He’s got a very clear passion of what he likes, what he wants
to accomplish in the world and it’s infectious. So he’s able to get a group together, to
sell a vision, to really motivate a group of people to do something in a way that I’ve
rarely seen anywhere else. I think that’s one of his really special strengths. Once
he fixes his eyes on something, he’s very determined and then you can see that throughout
his life. I mean he was an excellent sports player and across multiple sports, a sports
star, and like the top of his class. He’s always really pursuing kind of excellence.
Excellence, a lot of that is talent in the case of Jeff, naturally talented of course,
but what I see with a lot of very successful people is really ongoing hard work and determination.
I think Jeff just has a level of drive that I haven’t seen in many other people. And
I’ve seen that with Jeff and most of my other mentors, those are the people that I’ve
aligned with, but generally people I’ve seen who have been very successful just have
a consistent drive over a very long period of time and while it may not, for some it
shows up right away, but for everybody it shows up eventually but some people have to
kind of be a little more determined a little longer than others.
Heather Ferguson: You know there’s an article that’s been going around the internet recently,
around mentorship versus sponsorship, that mentors are fine but what you really want
is someone to sponsor you, to help you to move whatever your project is forward.
Kyle Vucko: Interesting.
Heather Ferguson: Yeah, and I did think it was kind of an interesting concept. Would
you say that you’ve been able to find sponsors, people that have really helped you to move
this project forward?
Kyle Vucko: Very much. I mean that’s, I think, a huge part of kind of our success
today and my personal growth, has been people who’ve been really invested in seeing the
company succeed and along with that, kind of natural by-product, myself. That’s been
in the form of my initial angel investors and then also my institutional investors.
I’ve got some really smart people out of the US, out of Canada, actually out of Germany
as well. It helps that they’re invested, like with real money.
Heather Ferguson: That’s nice.
Kyle Vucko: But no, I don’t think I would have been able to accomplish nearly as much
without them just because they’ve seen so much. They’ve seen my situation or very
similar situations and many other portfolio companies and in many cases, also just them
going through similar growth curves in their business.
Heather Ferguson: So what was it you think that they saw in you because it’s a two-way
street, right? They must have seen some kind of drive, determination, and focus from you.
Do you have a sense of that or?
Kyle Vucko: Yeah. You know I don’t necessarily like to focus on myself too much.
Heather Ferguson: Oh come on, just for a second.
Kyle Vucko: But yeah, I think generally when I look to my mentors and kind of what they
have exuded, I think similarly you mirror that and you also want to be those people.
So you’re trying to aspire to be them. Very much there’s an altruistic element in all
of this but I mean generally I think people will gravitate towards people who are very
driven, very responsive, are I guess similarly-minded in terms of kind of their vision of what success
looks like. Also, I think people generally gravitate towards big ideas and they think
Indochino was a very big idea around not just helping guys with suits but helping guys get
dressed. I mean it’s a problem every guy deals with. I think people love the idea of
solving really big problems because there aren’t a lot of companies solving huge problems.
Heather Ferguson: You told me that you felt lucky to be CEO.
Kyle Vucko: Yes.
Heather Ferguson: So tell me a little bit more about that and why.
Kyle Vucko: Well, it’s a very rare place to get into and a very hard and rare place
to hold onto for any amount of tenure. In my business, we’ve gone through so many
different phases of growth, from two people to a hundred very, very quickly, global. There’s
a lot of elements and what makes you successful in a million-dollar company is very different
from ten and above. Generally, those require different people and what I’ve been really
lucky to do is have been put in this position where I can see kind of what a CEO requires
the whole way through and also have patient and very involved sponsors, mentors, who can
help guide me through those steps of the process just because I think it’s rare to be put
into a CEO spot in any one of those positions, let alone kind of go through the whole curve.
So I’ve been very lucky for that and to have kind of the advisement and the support
to make sure that I stay successful there because the reality is I may not always be
successful in the CEO spot. I’m working very hard and getting a lot of support to
be successful but it isn’t always a given.
Heather Ferguson: Yeah, they may kick you out at some point like every other CEO on
the face of the earth.
Kyle Vucko: Or I self select out. I mean I’m an investor and the CEO of the company and
so I wear both hats. While I still very much believe today that I’m the right guy for
the job, I don’t know if that will always be true. I look outside to my advisors just
as much to guide me on how to be successful in my role and that can sometimes mean how
do I do a better job at my role versus maybe there’s a better role for me. I’m not
necessarily opposed to those things because when I put my investor hat on, I’m asking
what’s best for the company, which isn’t purely me.
Heather Ferguson: There is a fairly famous book called—immediately I know I’m getting
the title wrong, I can tell—Fables of a CEO. Have you read it?
Kyle Vucko: I’m familiar with it. It was The Five Temptations of the CEO.
Heather Ferguson: The Five Temptations of the CEO, that’s it. There were all these
little fables and one of them talked about the importance of putting the company first.
Kyle Vucko: Yeah, it’s a tough challenge, especially when you found something, especially
in my case, just because founding it, it becomes your identity. All you do is talk to people
about what you’re doing, how you’re doing it. Your public in the media is all about
that so it becomes very much you and the company become very intertwined. As we’ve gotten
bigger and we’ve gotten kind of beyond ten people to a hundred, you start realizing that
you have to decouple those to become a professional executive and a professional CEO. It’s very
different from being a founder. Heather Ferguson: And it’s interesting that
you have been to decouple those because you hear a lot of people talk about “founderitis”
and not being able to decouple those.
Kyle Vucko: Right.
Heather Ferguson: If the time comes, at any point in time, do you think you’ll be able
to walk the walk?
Kyle Vucko: Of?
Heather Ferguson: That you really will have decoupled?
Kyle Vucko: It’s hard for me to say that without bias, that I’ll ever be able to
truly decouple both because just the nature of the environment you’re in is people see
you as a founder so they treat your differently, they listen to your words differently so you
have to be very conscious of all of those things. But I believe that I am actively am
already and I’m trying very hard to because the reality is a very large company can’t
be run by a founder. Anything can be run by a CEO who is a founder but I don’t know
if they can be run purely by founder because they have very different skill sets. One is
a lot more personal than the other and so your point around, really doing what’s best
for the company. That’s stepping away from being a founder and a lot of times, that’s
ultimately the right thing to do.
Heather Ferguson: You’re going to be a mentor to somebody else at some point, maybe even
now. Are you mentoring anybody now?
Kyle Vucko: I’m always very hesitant to do so. I feel like I’ve got a lot to learn
still.
Heather Ferguson: You know you’ll probably feel that way all your life.
Kyle Vucko: Maybe.
Heather Ferguson: I tell you honestly, Kyle, I’m sitting here listening to you and I
think that I have a lot to learn. But what sort of advice would you give to somebody
in your position now?
Kyle Vucko: Somebody in my position like an executive position or somebody—?
Heather Ferguson: Maybe who’s founding a company, maybe going through the same things
that you went through.
Kyle Vucko: You know, it’s tough because everything’s very personal to the individual
and I think that’s actually probably the biggest thing. It’s figuring out what’s
right for you. I think founding a company is a ton of work and you really want to be
clear on the type of company you’re founding and what really drives you from a motivational
perspective. It’s all really basic stuff but finding answers to those individually
is very hard. But once you start a path with a company,
it’s very hard to get off it. Whether it’s raising money, bringing in a co-founder, bringing
in other advisors and investors, all of those things are going to set the tone for your
company for years to come and generally speaking, a company will not be successful for years.
So I think what I always caution people and what I really think is important is to be
as clear as you can be on those things before you kick it all off because you’re really
committing five to ten years of your life.
Heather Ferguson: Kyle, this is fantastic. I’m so glad you were able to come in.
Kyle Vucko: Thanks so much.
Heather Ferguson: Take care.