Eric Migicovsky believes successful entrepreneurship derives from a suspension of disbelief.

The Canadian-born founder of Beeper, an open-source chat app that consolidates multiple messaging services, has witnessed the benefits of this principle in the arena of Silicon Valley.

“One of the things I love about the Valley, and it’s one of those difficult things that isn’t really felt anywhere else so far, is this idea that anything could happen, that anything is possible,” Migicovsky said in an interview with BNN Bloomberg on Tuesday. 

“There’s almost an experience here in the Valley where you talk to someone at a cafe or you meet someone on a train, and they tell you this wild idea for a start-up, my first inclination is to disregard that, and think of all the reasons why this is not possible, why it will fail. And, inevitably, most start-ups do fail. But there’s something here in the valley where people just forget that.”

This temporary amnesia facilitates great change, he says. 

In a multi-million-dollar deal, the 37-year-old entrepreneur recently sold Beeper to Automattic Inc., an open-source software company most notable for WordPress.com. 

Beeper is the second company Migicovsky started -- the first being Pebble Technology, the smartwatch which was acquired by Fitbit in 2016, after selling US$250 million worth of smartwatches and placing Migicovsky’s name in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2014. 

“During that first exposure to an idea, instead of immediately thinking of all the negative possibilities, they think about the positive case, they think about: ‘What if this person sitting across from me is actually right? What if the vision they’re painting for the future is actually going to happen? What if?’ I think that that kind of suspension of disbelief really helps fuel these early-stage companies because too often it’s easy to get into your own head,” he said.

 

‘Brick wall after brick wall’

Migicovsky said he started Beeper because of a “personal problem.” 

“I look down at my phone and I see a folder full of chat apps,” he recalled. “And each app did the exact same thing, except I had a few contacts on each app. I wanted one single app that I could use to chat with anyone that I knew.”

This proved to be much more difficult than he expected. 

“It turns out there’s a reason why the big tech companies really don’t want this type of app to exist,” he told BNN Bloomberg. “It breaks down some of the barriers they erected to keep you on their platform and to keep you either buying the same hardware that you’ve been buying or using the same kind of social networking software.”

Migicovsky said his previous entrepreneurship experience with Pebble enabled him to “run into brick wall after brick wall.” 

“This is the type of product that didn’t work the first time,” he explained. “We’ve been working on it for just over three years now and it’s gone through a bunch of iterative steps before we could get it actually working. We just launched last week.”

 

‘Work with friends’

Migicovsky noted that one of his favourite driving forces for entrepreneurs is “building something that you want yourself.”

“It’s much easier to build a product if you are the first user of that product,” he said.

Another factor in his success, he says, is learning how to work with friends. 

“During the early days of Pebble and Beeper, the first people that I turned to to help build the product and the company were people that I knew very well,” he explained. 

“They were friends that I knew for years at university. There’s definitely opportunities to start companies with people you just met, but I found that the greatest success comes from working with someone you have a trusted relationship with already, because in those early days of doing a company, you don’t really know what’s going to happen next. Most of this is new territory, and having a strong relationship that you can fall back on, that you can trust, is a great place to start.”

In the case of Beeper, Migicovsky says he started the company with a friend from the University of Waterloo, whom he had worked with for nine years at Pebble. 

“He was the first person that I phoned when I was starting up Beeper and I said: ‘You got to join me on this.’”

 

Automattic acquisition

Migicovsky says he’s excited about the new potential brought to Beeper after being acquired by Automattic Inc.

“They’ve built tons and tons of open-source software. Beeper is an open-source software company. So we’re excited to learn from the experts and really help have the power of their organization as we bring Beeper out to millions and millions of users.”

To watch Migicovsky’s full interview with BNN Bloomberg, watch the video above.