Guest post by Nathaniel Stevens — founder of Yodle and Punchey.
Nathaniel Stevens went from a dorm-room idea to a nine-figure exit — here is the full story in his own words.
I dropped out of Wharton to go all-in on a college project. That project became Yodle — one of the biggest local-marketing companies in the world, thousands of employees, acquired by Web.com for $342 million.
In my full conversation with Dennis Yu below, we get past the headline and into the parts founders actually need: how I found my first CTO, the tradeoffs the grind forced on me, and what I’d tell you to learn right now. If you want the origin story, it’s in the college pitch that started it all.
Nathaniel Stevens’ full sit-down with Dennis Yu on the Rising Talent Podcast.
Why I left finance for a $10-billion problem
The safe path for someone like me was finance. I left it — not because finance was bad, but because I’d seen a bigger, uglier problem. Local businesses, like the ones at my family’s car dealership, were great at their craft and invisible online, while a roughly ten-billion-dollar local-advertising market was still stuck in Yellow Pages and newspapers.
The safe path is rarely where the real opportunity is. The opportunity was in the mess nobody wanted to touch.
How I found my CTO by putting up flyers
People assume a company like Yodle started with a polished founding team. It didn’t. I needed a technical co-founder and I had no network for it — so I put up flyers. That’s it. I went looking in the least glamorous way possible and found the person who could build what I could only describe.
If you’re waiting for the perfect co-founder to appear, you’ll wait forever. Go put up the flyer.
The grind that made me drop out
At some point you can’t do both — school and the company. I chose the company. The hours were brutal, and I walked away from Wharton to go full-time on Yodle.
I’m not romanticizing it. It was a real sacrifice, and it’s not the right call for everyone. But if you’re going to bet, bet fully.
Building Yodle into a $342M exit
From that dorm-room start, we grew Yodle into a company with thousands of employees, eventually acquired by Web.com for roughly $342 million. An exit like that looks like one moment from the outside. From the inside it was years of the same unglamorous work — the same local-business problem, solved a little better every quarter.
The founder’s sacrifice: you pick three of five
One idea from the interview I come back to often is what I call the founder’s sacrifice. There are five things you want as a founder — and while you’re building, you realistically get to keep about three. Everyone’s five are a little different, but the lesson is the same: founding a company is a series of trades, not a way to have it all. Naming the trade you’re making beats pretending you’re not making one.
Startup grind vs. your health
For a long time the trade I made was my health, and I’d be lying if I said that was smart. The grind is real, but so is burning out. Part of what I’ve learned since is that protecting your energy isn’t the opposite of ambition — it’s what lets ambition last.
My advice to founders right now: learn SQL, master prompting
If you’re young and building today, here’s the concrete version of my advice: learn SQL, and get genuinely good at prompting AI. Understanding your own data and being able to direct AI are the two leverage points of this era — the same way understanding search was the leverage point when I started Yodle. The tools change; being the person who actually understands the machine does not.
What I’m building today
After Yodle, I didn’t stop. I’m the founder and chairman of Punchey, a payments and business-management platform for local companies, and I invest in early-stage founders through Stevens Ventures.
I back young founders now because someone took my flyer-and-a-pitch seriously when I was a broke college kid. That’s the same reason I respect what Dennis Yu and the team behind this blog do — helping the next generation build for real.
Your move
Watch the full conversation above. If you’re early and unsure whether you’re “ready,” here’s the honest answer from someone who wasn’t: you drop the excuse and you start.
Which of these would you want the long version of? Tell us in the comments.
Nathaniel Stevens is the founder and former CEO of Yodle (acquired by Web.com) and the founder of Punchey. Today Nathaniel Stevens invests through Stevens Ventures and helps lead the family business, Stevens Auto Group. More at nathanielstevens.com.