Lessons Learned: Sphere's Tony Conrad says find a hard problem to solve

Build the right team; be frugal; find a big problem

Tony Conrad currently wears two hats. He's the CEO of Sphere, a blog search engine that helps sites and their readers find more information about topics they're already reading or writing about.

He's also a partner with the San Francisco venture capital firm True Ventures. In his investor role, he sits on the board of Automattic, which developed the open source blogging tool WordPress.

Conrad's primary piece of advice to entrepreneurs is to "work with people you really believe in," because they can keep you excited and keep you going when doubt creeps in.

He also thinks startups should try and find a hard problem to solve, even if that means trying a new approach to one that others have already tried and failed to solve. 

Lastly, Conrad tells Vator.tv's Bambi Francisco about being frugal. "We've got one billion pages indexed and only nine people -- we haven't overextended ourselves." 

Conrad, who was on the board of Oddpost, a news and email client provider that was acquired by Yahoo in 2004, says he's been inspired by people he's worked with in the past, including Toni Schneider, founder of Automattic.