I’ve heard people caution fledgling entrepreneurs that building a business is a marathon, not a sprint.

There’s certainly some truth to that, but I believe it’s more aptly described as a relay race, an especially grueling relay race where the course itself changes dramatically with each hand off of the baton. Each leg brings new obstacles, and demands that the runners develop skills they didn’t even know existed.

It’s with that in mind that I sit down to write a farewell note to my friend, co-founder and eternal optimist Marcus Nelson as he leaves the UserVoice team to pursue his next dream.

How did we get here?

When we started in late 2007 it was just me & Lance Ivy doing the prototypical designer-developer tag team. A few months later we had a prototype, a little seed money and a concern. I’ve known the pain of building things in the dark and I’m fond of saying “2 people is a project, 3’s (a) company.” I knew we needed someone who could come in and spend his cycles spreading the gospel of UserVoice.

Through local tech events, like SuperHappyDevHouse, I came to meet Marcus and through a certain Craigslist post I found him yet again. He seemed to be the missing ingredient, but like all good engineer types Lance and I thought we needed a test. SXSW was right around the corner, just the test we were looking for. I don’t know what we expected, but it was certainly exceeded. I think I saw Marcus for all of 2 hours over 3 days and each time it was an exasperated Marcus saying “I just met so-and-so… oh and do you have any more cards.” Hurricane Marcus was bearing down on SXSW. He was a force of nature. In the end he gave out every one of his cards and half of mine.

That’s Marcus for you. Put him in a room of smart people and he’s like the Googlebot spidering his way from person to person, bringing back the raw social capital a fledgling startup needs to get noticed.

You might have met Marcus on Twitter

I remember when Marcus introduced me to “the Twitter.” Or at least I remember my reaction. “You’re talking to individual people… like one by one… that’ll never scale. What we need is to talk to bloggers!”. I had some past success with guerrilla blog marketing and naturally that was *the* way to get noticed. Not this stupid big-ass, confusing chat room called Twitter.

Marcus didn’t listen to me and I’m very thankful for that. You *can*… no you *have* to build awareness of your product one person at a time. And it does scale… well at least when you have a b2b model like ours. [psst, tools like UserVoice help scale that 1:1 feeling of connectedness ]. The *individual* relationships that were cultivated over Twitter led to cornerstone customers, future employees, positive press and even investment.

Back to the present

I’ve learned a lot from Marcus over the past 18 months. I’ll never work a room like he does, be quite as optimistic or crack as corny jokes (I’m probably okay with that bit) but I’ve certainly learned a lot about the value of relationships and positive thinking.

Marcus will certainly be missed. But like a runner in the relay, has has cleanly handed off the baton to a new team of great people that have come on board to run this leg. We’ve an exciting new sales team featuring Daniel Kan (you’ll see his bright smiling face on the sign-up page), I’ve turned the designery keys over to the excellent Joshua Rudd and I’ll be stepping into marketing & evangelism. There’s a lot of excitement on the team and on the horizon.

Marcus is off to to new opportunities and places that stretch him to the limit, yet again. As a co-worker and even more so as a friend I hope you’ll join me in wishing him the best.

You can reach Marcus on Twitter (@marcusnelson) and via email (marcusnelson@yahoo.com)