RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser speaking at the University of Washington as part of Seattle Startup Week.
RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser speaking at the University of Washington as part of Seattle Startup Week.

Rob Glaser loves technology startups, but the RealNetworks founder also loves baseball.

Rob Glaser Seattle Startup Week (15)
Rob Glaser interviewed by GeekWire’s John Cook. Photos: Kevin Lisota

A small percentage owner in the Seattle Mariners, Glaser’s Twitter stream is usually packed full of baseball minutiae. He even had the Mariner Moose dump a bucket of ice water on his head earlier this year as part of the ALS challenge, and it’s no coincidence that Real’s new offices are within spitting distance of Safeco Field in Seattle. I didn’t get the honor of dumping water on Glaser’s head Thursday night, though I was able to pepper the tech exec with a few hard-ball and soft-ball questions during the Seattle Startup Week festivities. Glaser covered a lot of topics during our hour-long interview, touching on everything from lessons from his entrepreneurial father (always accommodate your customers) to why he returned to the helm of RealNetworks. (More on that below).

But it was a baseball question where Glaser shared some important lessons about building companies, noting the similarities between the team aspect of the sport and startups.

“You can be the best pitcher in the world, but if the catcher is not catching the ball, you are going to have nothing but passed balls. You can be the best pitcher in the world, but if the guys behind you are not fielding the ball, or aren’t getting any hits, a team that never scores, never wins,” he said. “So, it is a team game, even if you think you are playing the most important position on the field. If you don’t have a great team, you fail.”

Secondly, Glaser noted some of the principles of Moneyball, saying that Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane’s unconventional tactics are absolutely applicable to startups.

The key, Glaser said, is finding stuff that other teams undervalue.

“That is a classic example of avoid conventional wisdom, and the crowd, and find patterns of things you think can break through,” said Glaser.

Rob Glaser Seattle Startup Week (12)Asked earlier about advice he’d give to young entrepreneurs just starting out, Glaser echoed the importance of straying from the herd.

“Most of the biggest ideas and the biggest opportunities come from everybody else going left, and you going right,” he said. “That’s just true. When we started doing streaming, the conventional wisdom was that it was going to be this 500 channel top-down cable universe. And we were among the people saying ‘no’ let’s see how much quality media we can squeeze out of these 14.4 dial-up modems.”

Other key advice: Follow your passion, and pick a few collaborators that you believe in who offer complementary skills.

“Find a group of people who have different skills than you, but you catalyze each other in terms of driving your passion, driving your creativity, reinforcing each other in a positive way when things are going great, and when somebody is down gets you back on your feet,” said Glaser. “No entrepreneur is an island.”

In the case of RealNetworks, Glaser touched on the influence of Phil Barrett who built the company’s product team.

Glaser also touched on his decision to return to RealNetworks as the full-time CEO, a decision that was made in July.

“It’s like that scene in The Godfather,” Glaser said to laughs when asked about why he came back. But in all seriousness, Glaser said that RealNetworks was heading “backwards” and he just couldn’t stand to see the company he founded on that path.

“Part of it is personal. When you put your heart and soul into building a company and you achieve a level of impact and success … and you see that atrophying and being impacted, you have a point of pride where you want to see what you can do to fix that,” said Glaser.

Glaser also said that he came to the conclusion that he could balance his family life with his work life, noting that he’s now giving a “52-year-old’s version of 100 percent into making the company successful.”

“That 52-year-old version is not the same as the 32-year-old, but I hope it is equivalent. It is not quite as many hours, it’s very close. And it has a bunch of experiences applying to it that hopefully are helpful, and perhaps a little more perspective on some of the intense moments where I engage in a way that is more effectively channeling my intensity, than perhaps when I was younger and intemperate. And now two years in, it has really been fun.”

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