Josh James, CEO and Co-Founder of Omniture

This interview originally appeared on Silicon Slopes

Q: How did you get involved with Omniture and what does the company do?

I started Omniture when I was 22. Omniture is the largest web analytics company. We tell companies where there traffic is coming from. We have about 900 high end business customers. This is about our 4th business model and we have finally figured it out. $60 million company. Recurring revenue business, so it takes a while to get the ball rolling, but if you have good retention, it makes it a really nice business.

Q: What is an entrepreneur? Do you have be a founder to be an entrepreneur? Could you be some senior manager and still be an entrepreneur?

I am a purist, so I like a more narrow definition of the word. There has to be a word that embodies the risk and pain of two guys in a garage. I don't like it being diluted.

Q: How come you are not a mid-level manager at WalMart?

We kind of fell into what we are doing. I wouldn't do well where I felt I was stiffled. I started this in my information services at school and we stumbled into a business.

Q: What new cool tool are you using to run your business?

We have a lot of freeware. We raised $70 million in funding and it was mostly spent on servers. Personally I love X1, allowing me to find old emails and searching all my old attachments.

Q: How did you become an entrepreneur?

We were not afraid of risk. The great thing about technology. Young or old, you can become the expert in that area of the technology because it is so new and just spend a few months at it and you know as much as anyone else in that field.

Q: How do you deal with the "law of crappy people" which is you start a team and you hire a few people and you get some A players and then some B guys and then the B guys hire C guys and then you wind up seeing your company full of "crappy people"? How do you fight this problem?

We have a no "A**H***" policy". We try to force our managers to spend a lot of time with a potential recruit. A recruit will see at least 7 different managers, we bring them in at least 5 times before we hire them. We spend a lot of time with people in different settings.

Q: Start ups often hire lots of friends who become the CFO or the COO. Later when the company grows up, the friends are not qualified to be in their positions and it is hard to let those people go.

It is healthy to fire people every now and then. You lose so much credibility with the good people if you don't fire the bad ones.

Q: Comment on replacing the Founder or keeping the CEO there.

I always wanted to stay as the CEO. You will not get more passion than from someone who owns half the company. I always said, I don't think you will find anyone that will do a better job than I am doing. If you do, I am the first to say that they should run the company. For most of my team, they have all done it before, so the VCs don't have to bet on them, they are just betting on me.

Q: How did you approach venture capitalists being so young?

I don't think any VCs are really that interested in seeing a business plan. They want to see something real, with revenues and then they want to then 10x it. I have been turned down a lot. We self funded for the first two years with student loans and credit cards. We got a lot of business advisors and they got a lot of great advice. We built a lot of credibility with this guy and he was our first Angel. The next 20 people were all introduced to us by this guy.

Q: How do you attract the best people?

When you are a million company, you can't attract someone that has worked at a $100 million company. You need to find someone who has worked at a $6 million company.

Q: In the case of multiple founders, where some put in more energy and some put in more capital, how do you manage that?

Alignment of integrity is critical to me to be a partner. How hard is everyone working? If both are equally working hard, it is much easier to figure out parity.