Lisa Falzone’s journey from elite athlete to successful entrepreneur showcases the discipline, adaptability, and resilience required to weather.
Lisa Falzone’s journey from elite athlete to successful entrepreneur showcases the discipline, adaptability, and resilience required to weather the emotional highs and lows of building and scaling companies, including experiencing burnout despite achieving a $500M valuation with Revel Systems.
Part of the fun of like growing a company is to grow as an individual and growing within yourself. The growth that you go through and then also just like pacing yourself like this is a marathon not a sprint. That is what's best for the long-term value of the business. [Music] All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show. So today we have an amazing guest joining us is a repeated founder, very successful. Uh and we're going to be talking about all the good stuff that that we like to hear, you know, the building, the scaling, the financing, the exiting as well. We're going to be talking about how being an athlete ended up, you know, coming in quite handy, you know, in the journey of uh being an entrepreneur as well as founder burnout. You know, we don't hear that too often. So I think it's going to be very important to touch on that. you know other topics like raising
money, scaling different things, you know, different points, you know, when it comes to scaling a company and the different life cycles of a business. But again, quite inspiring the conversation that we have in front of us. And without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Lisa Falsson. Welcome to the show. Awesome. So excited to be here. Thank you so much for the kind introduction. So Lisa, originally born and raised in Santa Barbara, give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you? Uh, life growing up was pretty awesome. Santa Barbara um was is sort of like the perfect weather. Um, it kind of spoiled me for the rest of my life. So, I really can't live anywhere that's not Mediterranean. Um, it it was pretty it, you know, grew up on the beach, Pacific Ocean. Um, and I also, you know, during that time got a passion of swimming and became a competitive swimmer.
And and why swimming? Out of all things, how do you get into swimming? How did I get into swimming? Um, it was sort of just like in my family, my dad was a swimmer, my mom was a synchronized swimmer, and just in Santa Barbara, you're kind of like used to always being in the water. So, it's right next to the beach. So, then walk us through how you get into Stanford. you know, quite the program for competitive. So, I I got recruited um from from being a competitive swimmer by the four-time Olympic coach Richard Quick at the time and um one of the best swim programs in the United States and yeah, so got got recruited to go swim at Stanford and you know, that was really my passion and my competitive outlook at the time. And you know one thing that is very interesting here I mean I remember watching for example the discipline and the commitment when Michael Phelps you know was training for
doing the Olympics and stuff like that but I think that you know that discipline and and way of doing things is really spread all across the board especially if you are attending a program like Stanford. So, what do you think you you learned about discipline or what do you think swimming gave you around discipline and then also around being competitive and and and having that ambition and and being able to endure pain too? Totally. I mean, those are the exact same exact things that it taught me. Also, I just really like to race and I like the competitive pressure of of that 2-minute race. So, in swimming, you train, you know, between 3 and 5 hours every day. You're getting up in the early in the morning to work out. So, you're putting in a lot of time, a lot of a lot of miles and it's all for just like a two-minute race. And and I just loved the adrenaline feeling of when you are getting
up, you've put in a season of really, really hard work and you're getting up on the blocks and you have no idea what's going to happen and you just have to put it all out there. Pressure is on. um adrenaline is running high and um and go for it. And so I really think a lot you know a lot of these you know the ability to perform in a high pressure situation um competition um and yeah just like competitive overall competitiveness translate really well into business. So then let's let's talk about to you know you experiencing a little bit of everything you know whether it was PR venture capital and how that led you to really deciding that in the end what you needed to do was to become an entrepreneur. Yeah. So I graduated from Stanford and I was a history major and I spent my a lot of time swimming and so I had I graduated and I had no idea what I wanted to do. And at the time I really
thought that that really I maybe I had just had a limited view, you know, at the time of what an entrepreneur was, but I really thought that being an entrepreneur, you could only be a computer scientist. Um, and so and so after I graduated, I went to go work in London and I realized that there was tons of entrepreneurs that, you know, weren't computer scientists, um, like Richard Branson and people that just didn't even go to college. um developing companies and so and so during that time I also um worked in venture capital. I worked in insurance and I worked in PR and marketing and you know tried a bunch of different different internships and jobs and really didn't like working for other people and I wanted to start my you know I really just wanted I knew it was just like something I had to do. Um but I it took me a long time to get like the confidence to start my own business but um
but you know eventually those different experiences led me to want to start my own business. So let's talk about that too because part of that involved doing your own blogging and yeah that actually opened up the way that you were able to meet people to interact with others to connect with others that maybe had a similar situation and open-minded. So, how do you think that helped you too? Yeah. So, I once I decided I once I decided to start my own company, I just tried a lot of different things. I, you know, I even looked at doing a swim distribution company for swimsuits. I worked I looked at doing, you know, a coffee shop. I looked at doing a toy company. And so, these these are like different baby businesses that I just tried and I just worked on it. and really more just from a learning standpoint like hey you know is this a good market is this something I wanted to do um kind of
realized during that time that the cheapest company to start because I didn't really have that much money was um was a software company cuz I could you know pay you know a developer and um for pretty inexpensive off you know maybe like a company like Upwork or something like that and um you know and and and start a software company but anyway During that time, I I wrote also wrote a blog because it took me a while to gain the courage to step out out on my own. Um, and so I did I did a blog of just like inspirational quotes for entrepreneurs and it was mostly just for myself, but I just like I just made it public and um, you know, I had two people comment on the blog and then one of one of them being my future co-founder of Rebel Systems and he commented on the blog and he said, you know, nice blog and I was so excited that someone commented because it wasn't like a very popular blog but
realized that he was kind of in a similar situation and he was um, a technical um architect. So, so we started working together um and we had just really compliment complimentary skill sets and just really worked well together and like moved really fast and um we started working together on an ordering app trying to integrate into point of sale systems and then doing that it led us into um Rebel Systems which was my first company. So then let's talk about that because eventually you know the way that you guys thought about it was really putting together software analytics and all around the iPad and and the point of sale system no around that. So so how did the pieces start coming together for for Rebel? Yeah. So like I was doing with the b with other baby businesses I mean we found our product market fit by just like going out and doing it. Um, and so we were going out and actually
selling this ordering app and talking to restaurant owners and it gave us a chance to talk to restaurant owners. And even though we weren't in love with the ordering app idea, it gave us, we just started working on it. And through doing the ordering app, people were like, "Cool, that's a cool idea, but what I really need is a point of sales system." And everyone kept complaining about their point of sale system. And so that was right when Steve Jobs had just announced the iPad. and and so we put two and two together and said let's create an iPad point of sales system um that's cloud-based and um and never you know never looked back. So then what ended up what ended up being the a business model of Rebel? How were you guys making money there? So, we made money. I mean, a lot of So, we're more of like the enterprise point of sale. Um, so point of sale for like chains and um large volume
businesses. Um, so we…