Growing a company in Rochester, NY

ASV’s Director of Strategy Pia Sawnhey interviews Jorsek CEO Patrick Bosek on conceiving and building a leading knowledge management software platform in his hometown. The two met at Fifth Frame, a coffee shop in downtown Rochester, NY, in November 2019.

Pia Sawhney: It’s great to be here in your town, Rochester, NY. And, of course, in some ways, this is a Kodak moment. Because you are sort of like the product of two people who worked at Kodak. Your parents were really rooted in this community and they lived in this community for most of their lives.

Patrick Bosek: Their entire lives. My father worked for Women’s Health in Kodak for most of his career. He was in middle, upper management, until the end of his career, in the sales division.

Almost everybody in Rochester has some legacy to Kodak, or to Xerox or something like that. Everybody who’s born here and raised here and lived here, in some way or another, they have someone in their family who has worked in one of those organizations.

And you know Kodak, and Xerox, and Bausch and Lomb, they were such big innovators. They laid a lot of the groundwork for what this community is. I think in a lot of ways, we are built on top of that foundation that came with Kodak and a lot of the universities and the education, and the culture and community that was created in those organizations.

The opinions around the town and what it means to live here, and how this compares to other places in the country have really shifted. So, when I was in high school there was a really negative general impression of the town, you didn’t walk around and think about there being a real culture of, you know, people who love Rochester who really wanted to stay here, who wanted to be a part of it, from a cultural perspective and build it into their lives. That’s not true anymore.

Especially in places like this, sitting in Fifth Frame here, I think the bartender has one of those tattoos I was telling you about, the Rochester flower symbol. Rochester used to be the flour city. And that kind of, eventually got into the symbol for the city. So, you look at the parking meter out there, see right there. So, that symbol, you will find that symbol all over the city, on anything that the city owns. I think you can even find it on manhole covers, and you also find it on a lot of people. A lot of people have that tattoo.

People love being here and love the change that’s happening here, and love the energy enough that there’s a large number of people that have put it on their bodies. I’d be willing to bet that any hip bar, one of the bartenders has it. I think the people who go to the extent of putting a physical mark on their arm or on their leg or something, they believe in some portion of that and they want to be a part of it.

PS: You seem really passionate about this place. Everyone is passionate about their hometown, right? Most people. But a lot of people leave their hometown. And so, you chose to stay. Not only did you choose to stay, but you built a business here. And so, what was the genesis of that idea?

PB: Well, the business was an evolution. There are people who really actively choose to start businesses, and there are people who go through a process and find themselves starting a business. And then at some point, they decide that that is what they are going to do. I probably fall more into that latter category. You can live here on a lot less, and that means that you have less pressure to be perfect all the time. I think it would be wrong to say we strategically picked Rochester to start this business. But I think that the fact that we did choose to stay here and start this business in Rochester is a major part of the reason we were able to do it.

I think especially in the type of economy we are looking at now, where there’s so much global competition. You look at our business. Our business is Software as a Service (SaaS). For all intents and purposes, it could be built here, or in Chicago or in London or in India or in China or anyplace with a viable connection to the internet. So, you’re not competing inside of your bubble anymore, you’re competing globally. And when you have to compete globally, doing that in a really high cost environment, your ability to make mistakes goes down. You have to be more perfect, and if we had to be more perfect than we in the process of starting this company, we would have failed.

PS: How do you view this question of timing when you’re building a business? It’s something of course we think a lot about as venture capitalists. We think about when is the right time to start a business, when is the right time to scale a business, what are the expectations one ought to have in that process? And when you’re operating in another market, in a new market, are there new considerations, are there different considerations?

PB: So, the Kodak example is an interesting one. If you really think what Kodak was at the turn of the century, they were more of a chemical company than they were an imaging company in a lot of ways. I’m sure there’s people who would argue with me on that. But if you apply the question that I think you’re asking which is, there was an obvious change, in hindsight, coming and they didn’t adapt to it fast enough. So, what can we take away from that? I think the biggest thing you want to try to take away from that is it’s hard to decide which swells are going to turn into waves, you know as they’re coming at you. But I think you have to be really open to it, and when you’re a market leader in a certain space, like Kodak was, and it’s really obvious it’s becoming a wave, you have to have the courage to abandon and maybe sometimes cannibalize a business that is very high margin for you, if that wave is going to continue in the long run.

Now, when I think of something that’s going to scale in our business, we are more agile than Kodak, obviously. We’re much smaller but we’re still not, we’re not 5 guys in a garage anymore. So, it does take longer to turn our trick than it used to, and I think that that’s a good thing too. Because if you chase everything you think is going to become a wave, you really end up doing nothing well. One of the things that has been really challenging for me over the course of my career. I am not saying I’m good at it yet but I’m getting better maybe, is deciding what in terms of value is going to be more timeless, and how to apply that to the innovations happening around you.

I think there is a process of being smart and strategic about which waves you’re going to try to ride and which ones you’re going to skip and, you know, you hope you don’t get it wrong.