0003 Jim Fowler - Founder and CEO of Owler.com 20161124

Bay Area Ventures

On this episode of Bay Area Ventures we speak with Jim Fowler, Founder and CEO of www.owler.com, a crowdsourcing service that helps you gain and maintain insights on your competitors or customer.
Jim is a serial entrepreneur, former naval officer, frequent guest speaker and historian. Jim’s career as an entrepreneur began with the acquisition of Lookout Pass, a ski resort in Idaho. Then, after a few roles as a Director or VP of sales at several tech companies, Jim founded Jigsaw.com in 2003, an early crowdsourcing site that helps business people find contact information for prospective customers. Jigsaw was acquired by Salesforce.com in 2010 for $175 million which, at the time, was Salesforce’s largest acquisition.
Owler is a site that I use daily to gain information about tech merger and acquisition activity and to track the competition of my portfolio companies, including Spreaker.
In this interview Jim tracks his path from being a military officer to a repeat CEO. He talks about the different trajectories and velocities that he’s experienced launching and growing both Jigsaw and Owler. He thinks that Owler will ultimately surpass the success of Jigsaw and how he is positioning the service to be a daily source for millions of business people all over the world. Owler is a disruptive technology that could displace services like Dunn and Bradstreet in a similar way to how Wikipedia disrupted the encyclopedia industry.
Not resting on his laurels, Jim’s drive is a passion to build a great company. He’s not taking a salary from Owler and pledges all of his gains to charity.
Learn about Jim’s philosophy for building a team, maintaining long term relationships with co-workers and why the best entrepreneurs need to understand the sales function above all others. Also get Jim’s take on the Bay Area Way of business.
This is your chance to learn from a truly great leader and entrepreneur.
Recorded November 24, 2016 on SiriusXM Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by the Wharton School. Bay Area Ventures airs live on Mondays at 4:00pm Pacific Time, 7:00pm Eastern Time.