Meet The Disruptors: Grant Singleton and Dan Orkin Of PangoBooks On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
“Don’t carry failures, climb them” — myself. Failures can be a burden or a platform depending on how you position them. I used to carry the burden of failure in a crippling way. Now I look at failure as an opportunity to grow and actually go into the next round better because of them.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Grant Singleton and Dan Orkin.
Grant Singleton is the founder and CEO of PangoBooks, a marketplace app for people to buy and sell used books. After serving overseas in the U.S. Navy, he completed his undergraduate degree in computer engineering at Texas A&M University, where he discovered his passion for building consumer technology that gives power to the individual. He identified a lack of innovation in the physical book industry and decided to build a disruptive platform for everyone who loves to learn and read. PangoBooks is a peer-to-peer marketplace for books, with an emphasis on the individual readers that make up the platform. He lives in Nashville with his wife and four young children.
Dan Orkin is CMO at PangoBooks. Prior to that, Dan was part of the founding team at Reverb, a successful marketplace in the music gear industry. As part of the Pango team, Dan focuses on creating the most welcoming, streamlined and fun way for people to buy and sell books imaginable.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Grant Singleton: Before starting Pango, I worked as a Software Engineer at Raytheon, earned my engineering degree from Texas A&M, and spent four years overseas for the US Navy. PangoBooks was born out of the pandemic. Like many others, I developed a pandemic hobby. Mine was reading, and I fell back in love with books. I wanted to combine my passion for building tech with reading; with that, PangoBooks was born. Our goal is to connect the world through reading.
Dan Orkin: Before getting into tech and startups, I studied history and journalism in college. When I joined the team at Reverb, I was able to combine my love of storytelling with my passion for music gear. With PangoBooks, we are endeavoring to do much the same with the amazing world of books.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
Dan Orkin: The vision with PangoBooks is to make the easiest possible way for folks to sell their books and in turn, provide book buyers with an amazing selection of used books at fantastic prices. While there are certainly other venues for folks to buy and sell used books, our emphasis on empowering individuals to sell — and the personal connections that come with that — really sets us apart. For example, our buyers are always talking about getting thoughtful thank-you notes in their book packages. That’s not something you typically encounter when buying from larger entities.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Grant Singleton: There are so many. The one that comes to mind is a small adjustment I made to our DNS setting that took the website offline. A startup is a unique environment where speed is necessary. But that same speed can cause mistakes. Balancing speed while minimizing the downside is a good skill to learn.
Dan Orkin: When PangoBooks first launched, our expectation was that it would be used mostly for school books,textbooks and the like. We quickly learned that the easy selling process we designed was actually super inviting for folks who love fiction, especially fantasy, romance and related genres. It’s not funny exactly, but just goes to show that your intended audience may not actually be where your product finds its best fit.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
Grant Singleton: My best mentor in business has been David Kalt. His experience of starting a tech company and raising money in the dot com crash has been huge for navigating the current economic conditions. He’s run successful companies through every type of economy and condition imaginable.
Dan Orkin: PangoBooks is very lucky to count David Kalt as one of our investors and key advisors. David was the founder of Reverb and prior to that, OptionsXpress, a successful FinTech platform. David is always prepared to make bold bets centered on an obsession with delighting our customers. That spirit of doing things with customer obsession in the foreground has guided much of our decision-making with Pango.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
Dan Orkin: At its best, disruption works when every stakeholder benefits from new technology or new ways of approaching a problem. We like to think that our marketplace empowers everyone interested in those arenas to buy and sell more efficiently than older models in a widely beneficial way. The converse of this is when disruptive technologies or platforms simply consolidate an industry in ways that are not beneficial to everyone involved.
Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
Grant Singleton: “Don’t carry failures, climb them” — myself. Failures can be a burden or a platform depending on how you position them. I used to carry the burden of failure in a crippling way. Now I look at failure as an opportunity to grow and actually go into the next round better because of them.
Dan Orkin: An early manager of mine explained to me the idea of important vs urgent, and how tasks we encounter can be important but not very urgent and therefore never get done (as compared to things that seem urgent but aren’t actually very important). This idea has really resonated with me. In a startup environment, there is always more to do than there is time or resources to accomplish, so it’s crucial to step back and really question if the tasks you are taking on are actually going to make a difference.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
Dan Orkin: At PangoBooks we have big plans to make our app even more fun and engaging with a suite of new features for book discovery and sharing. The experience is already very social in how it’s designed, but we think these tools are really going to enhance the social experience for our users.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
Dan Orkin: At PangoBooks, we’re big fans of “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. The idea of being mindful of how your brain makes decisions can be really impactful, and stopping to think about how you’re thinking is a useful practice for everyone to engage in.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Dan Orkin: There’s a very simple quote from one of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut: “you gotta be kind.”
It’s not a super elaborate thought, but I try to seek people in my life and work who care about others’ well-being and who practice kindness.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Dan Orkin: As an extension of PangoBooks, thinking about how items can be reused and recycled more readily in support of lessening our global environmental impact could be hugely important.
How can our readers follow you online?
You can find us at @pangobooks on social media and download our app via Google Play or the App Store!
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Meet The Disruptors: Grant Singleton and Dan Orkin Of PangoBooks On The Five Things You Need To… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
