Squirrels co-founder Andrew Gould is moving beyond bootstrapping and finding the next stage of growth for his business at Volaris Group
Few people can say they helped create one of the first 50 apps ever available on the Apple iPhone.
Andrew Gould is one of them. As the co-founder and General Manager of Squirrels, growing a startup has defined the early part of his career. After having co-founded his first company at the age of 22 in 2008, he grew it to a more established business and sold it to Volaris in October 2023.
The company that he sold to Volaris was Squirrels – a developer of cutting-edge screen mirroring and digital signage software used in millions of homes, schools, and businesses in 180 countries.
Acquired Knowledge magazine sat down with Andrew to learn more about the benefits his company’s products offer to customers and his experience with Volaris so far.
To start, can you tell me about your business, Squirrels?
Our products enable people to share content easily from a device to a shared screen when they’re in a conference room, a classroom, or a lecture hall.
We’re trying to remove any barriers to getting content onto that screen, whether that’s trying to find the right input on a TV, having to use multiple adapters for various devices, or having an adapter go missing from the room.
Using an HDMI cable might seem like a cost-effective solution, but it comes at the cost of ease of use and having to educate people on how to get their content on the screen.
What was it like initially when you co-founded the company?
We started the precursor to Squirrels, called Napkin Studio, in 2008, right as Apple allowed companies to start making apps for the iPhone. We had one of the first 50 apps in the App Store. We were doing contract app development, when you could charge a premium for that early on.
We created a piece of software and we called it Reflector. It was a tool we created for our own use originally, so we could easily review with customers the progress of the apps we were building for them without having to hold a phone up to the computer screen.
We created a second company that was sort of a holding company, and we thought it’d be funny to call it Squirrels and started selling it under that.
Little did we know that iPads were about to be in classrooms. Teachers were desperate for something better than plugging an iPad into a dongle into an HDMI cable and standing in front of the classroom.
A product that we did not design for the market ended up completely resonating with a particular market. It took off, so we rolled Napkin Studio into Squirrels and that became our brand. It was fortunate that Squirrels actually plays pretty nicely in education, since it’s fun and playful and whimsical. We were able to build a really good brand around that.
What was the business like in some of its earlier growth stages?
We had a couple of products that were one-time licensed products, and we released updates to them. Then around 2015 or so, we started to see demand for a simpler way to screen share that didn’t require licensing. If you were in a conference room and you had visitors coming in, you wanted to make sure that they didn’t have to install our app and uninstall it for the licensing.
So, that was sort of the genesis of the idea for Ditto.
Around that same time, we started getting inquiries from OEM hardware manufacturers saying they wanted to run our Reflector app on their hardware. Instead, we built this library of functionality that would let them embed it into their software, so it looked like it was the hardware manufacturer magically doing it all. But under the hood, it was the Squirrels technology doing it.
Since about 2015, we’ve been focused on those two more recurring models, and growing those ever since.
Why did you decide to sell the business, and what was that process like?
At that point, it had been 15 years since we’d started the company and 12 years since we’d created Squirrels. We weren’t interested in leaving, but we started to wonder what we could do with additional resources.
We were looking for somebody that had expertise in scaling. So, we retained a broker who was shopping us around, and it just wasn’t fitting. We talked to private equity and we talked to venture capital.
We didn’t see the private equity option as a good fit for us, since it was too much about the bottom line.
The venture capital option for a company that was 12 years old was a weird fit. Usually, they’re trying to get in early. The SaaS part of our business was attractive to venture capital, but the licensing of our technology piece didn’t really fit that formula.
That was when someone from Volaris reached out.
What made the team decide to sell to Volaris over the other routes?
Culture is a big thing for our company. We try to take care of our employees, and we try to be fair owners. We expect a lot out of them, but we also give a lot to our employees in return.
Everything that we did to grow Squirrels was always bootstrapped. We made an app on our own dime and released it, and it made a lot of money. And we took that money and reinvested it into new things and scaled the team and made more money and reinvested it. We never took a dollar of investment – not even seed money – to start the company.
The Volaris value proposition resonated a lot with us. Volaris is known for its expertise with guiding successful companies that have established their niche, and making them even more successful by helping hone the focus and scaling sales and marketing.
We didn’t need somebody to come in and take over the day-to-day operations. We just needed somebody to say, “Have you thought about this? Have you tried that?” Or “This worked for this group, maybe you could talk with them, and they could provide some insight.”
As well, sometimes I felt like I needed a mentor as the person running the business. As a small business, we were sometimes in a groupthink scenario, where we only knew what we knew and we were bouncing ideas off of each other. We didn’t have that contrarian view. I was attracted to the idea of having the influence of a parent company that wasn’t micromanaging, but who I could lean on when needed to help steer me straight.
For people who may be on the fence about joining Volaris, I would encourage them to think about it. It’s a corporate company, but it has a very fresh, almost startup kind of approach to things. It’s always willing to change, always willing to modify and adjust.
What has the journey been like for you and your team since being acquired?
All of the Volaris best practices have made a lot of sense. We haven’t had to learn everything from zero. I felt like we were 70% of the way there already.
We had a list of things we knew needed to change in the company, but when you’re on your own, you’re always very cautious about rocking the boat too much. If you lose one big customer, that might be the difference between whether you make payroll or not in a given period.
With the backing of Volaris, and some of the metrics to reinforce those decisions, we’ve been very quick in making a lot of changes to align the company to where we think it needs to be in order to be really successful.
The experience has been freeing. I realized that maybe I didn’t actually enjoy my job as much when we were on our own, because I was always dealing with the stress of what-ifs. It was a breath of fresh air to come into Volaris and have some experts around me saying, “That seems like a pretty good idea – let’s try it out. If you fail, we’ll double back, and we’ll try something else.”
We hadn’t been able to move like that as an independent company for a few years.
What advice have you gotten from the Volaris network?
Being able to see that other companies have been in a similar position and have done certain things that have worked has also provided the validation we needed to make changes.
For example, when we needed to overhaul our customer support, we had a really good conversation with Mindy Benzler, General Manager of Go Solutions, because she had gone through something very similar with her business. After we made some moves, they were already starting to show fruit not even 60 days later, and that was thanks to those conversations with Mindy.
What trends are you observing in your industry right now?
Because Squirrels is all software, we’re flexible and adaptable, and can go where the trends take us.
Along with the education customers that we have, we’ve also seen an increased demand for our products in the flexible workspace market, where many different people with different devices are coming and going.
Our products offer a great solution for these spaces, since they don’t require any software or special equipment. Most of our competitors make hardware solutions that have some sort of subscription on top of the solution, and we’re seeing those solutions struggling to gain traction. I think things are moving away from expensive boxes that you have to put behind a television that have to be maintained, deployed and updated.
