Stay ConnectedThe Mentors follows twin brothers Vadim and Sergei Revzin as they seek to uncover how successful people build their businesses and careers from day one. Twice weekly, the brothers bring inspiring stories from entrepreneurs, artists, business leaders, and entertainers they meet in NYC, to tell never before heard stories of how people get started, even when they have nothing.
Music by: www.purple-planet.com
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When a founder decides to build an impact driven organization, at some point they have to make an important decision on whether to structure it as a for profit entity or a non-profit. While a for-profit can maximize financial upside to the founding team and shareholders, a non-profit by definition can focus more of its effort on the impact it wants to have in the world.
In this week's episode bring back Darrell Silver, the founder and former CEO of Thinkful, a for-profit education venture, to talk about why the model of the non-profit freeCodeCamp is so innovative in its funding and impact model, and why he is now a major donor and supporter of the organization that was founded with a similar mission to his.
In this rare interview, we got to dive into some of the nuances of how nonprofits are managed and how freeCodeCamp has been able to deliver 1.1 billion minutes of instruction with just a 12 person team by making their education model open source. We also discussed how people who want to improve their career prospects and pick up a technical skill can best decide whether to learn online for free or pay tuition for an instructor guided education experience if they can afford it.
Tune in to hear our interview with Darrell Silver about the story and future of freeCodeCamp.
If you want to support their work, you can donate as little as $5 here which will directly contribute to 250 hours of free education!
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Kevin Urrutia decided to teach himself to code while in college so that he could turn all the different business ideas he had into reality. Little did he know that after years of building apps and websites and trying idea after idea, he would need to completely change his mindset about how to get ideas off the ground to have his first entrepreneurial success.
Kevin left his home in New York to go to Silicon Valley and work as a software engineer for Mint.com and later a little known startup called Zaarly where he would learn the power of SEO and marketing.
After reading every marketing and sales book he could find, he moved back to start an online maid service called Maid Sailors. In this episode he talks about how his new found love for marketing helped him scale Maid Sailors to millions of dollars in revenue, and truly kicked off his entrepreneurial career helping him launch several more startups, including his digital marketing agency Voy Media.
This show is brought to you by School16, a tech career accelerator for professionals interested in roles in Product, Marketing, Sales and Operations at top tech firms and startups.
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In today's episode we're sharing an update on what's been happening with our own entrepreneurial venture, School16, and how our publishing schedule for The Mentors will change going forward.
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This week we got the chance to interview a former SpaceX Engineer and founder of biohacking startup Levels as part of a special podcast recording hosted by School16 in front of a live audience.
In this episode, Josh Clemente told us about how he pushed his way into getting an opportunity to work at Tesla and then SpaceX, where he ended up leading the Life Support Systems team. He credits his time at SpaceX for teaching him how to think big and go after nearly impossible goals, and his time running his own general contracting business in college for giving him the confidence to start building a business that was going after a massive opportunity.
Listen to find out how Josh came up with the idea for a continuous glucose monitoring technology that is being made available to anyone to help people avoid some of the most common and dangerous diseases. We also discuss how he built the right team to help him get his first customers, find investors, and start bringing it to the masses all in less than 2 years since he conceived it.
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This is one of the most common questions we get from aspiring entrepreneurs. The answer, however, is less about what you should learn and more about how you should do it.
Entrepreneurs come from almost every background imaginable, but one of the biggest contributors to founder success is previous experience with working on highly talented teams.
Let's take the most famous example - the "PayPal Mafia." Companies like SpaceX, Yelp, Yammer, LinkedIn, and Square all came from individuals that were employees at PayPal. Some of them came from engineering, while others lead operations or sales teams, but the factor that separated them from other people starting companies at the same time was their experience working with and learning from other incredibly talented individuals.
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This is a follow up to our recent episode titled The Story of A Homeless Neuroscientist and how one small act eventually resulted in a job offer. We often come up with reasons not to do something or to delay acting on an idea because of fear of failure or simply because we feel like we have other more important things to do.
Entrepreneur Naval Ravikant once wisely said "inspiration is perishable - act on it immediately." Famous motivational speaker Tony Robbins uses the same technique to stay on top of the various business interests that he has. Whenever he's in a meeting he makes sure to act on at least one thing that's discussed immediately to insure that it gets done. This is because he knows from experience that if something is put off there's a big chance it'll never become a priority.
In this episode we discuss how you can apply the same ideas to seemingly small actions this week that can have very impactful outcomes.
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This rebroadcast episode was inspired by the growing opportunity to connect with sought after individuals that are more accessible than ever before as more people are working remotely in 2020.
Finding a good mentor is hard but the real work is in keeping them. In today’s episode we talk about how you can impress important people in your life, be they a mentor, advisor, investor, or simply someone that’s further along than you.
We give two specific examples of how our mentees have accomplished this by following up, following through, being solution oriented, and finding opportunities to add value instead of always asking for help.
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Our sense of self worth is constantly in flux, but it's important to learn how to control it to stay productive. This is in part because failure is a big part of the process and if you tie your worth to success or failure it's bound to become debilitating. Instead of worrying about outcomes that are outside of our control we should focus on actions that we can control.
In this episode we discuss the following four techniques, tying each of them to a personal story:
1) Getting outside encouragement
2) Setting achievable goals
3) Shifting your focus
4) Finding ways to be helpful to others
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When faced with a challenge remember that you don't have to endure it alone. In this week's 5 Minute Pick Me Up we wanted to share a story of Brianna Austin, a homeless neuroscientist that we learned about on LinkedIn and why we were compelled to reach out to our network in an effort to help.
In this episode you will learn:
As a resource we encourage you to join our free weekly seminars to learn from people that have overcome similar challenges to land incredible opportunities at firms like Twitter, Uber, Google, and more. You will have the chance network with other attendees and connect with our expert instructors to develop your network.
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This is a rebroadcast episode that was inspired by a recent class in our Sales Module at School16.
We decided to give you an inside look into a recent phone call we recorded where we ask a high school principal for a speaking budget.
For many people, asking someone what they might be willing to pay is the most uncomfortable part of any sales or business development conversation - aka, going for the close. But with practice, you can learn how to do this quickly and effectively, creating new opportunities that may have been left on the table before.
You'll hear how to use active listening to rephrase your line of questioning when asking for something like budget or a commitment to finally get the answer that you want.
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Online education has been around since the 1990s but when Andrew Clark decided to start a fully remote accredited college, students weren't yet used to the idea of going to a school without a campus. His solution? Raise money to buy a small liberal arts school with a central campus that students could choose to visit any time, with the option to complete their education completely online.
In this episode we talk about Zovio's origin story (formerly Bridgepoint Education) and how Andrew was able to convince a private equity investor to give him $20 Million to build his vision after knocking on doors to raise capital for over a year. Andrew proved his credibility with his decade long management experience at University of Phoenix and his profoundly forward thinking approach to education.
We discuss how his team created a highly sought after program by standardizing their curriculum and allowing students to enroll any week of the year, and talk about his outlook on the future of remote learning given the rapidly changing global environment that's forcing all higher education institutions to move online.
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Great business leaders come from all sorts of backgrounds but the one skill that all of them prioritize developing over time is learning how to write effectively. The reason for this is clear - as a creator you're communicating through the written word all of the time - by writing speeches, landing page copy, job descriptions, thought-leadership content, business proposals, social media posts, etc. But how do you develop this skills if it hasn't been a priority for you?
The best writers (and entrepreneurs) are voracious readers, so before you develop your own style you need to get into a habit of consuming the work of other writers, but the best way to get better at it yourself is to start writing every opportunity that you get.
In this episode we discuss four main tactics for becoming a better writer:
1) Write about what you know or care about
2) Get critical feedback on your writing early on
3) Pick a medium or format for your writing (like long form essays) to create constraints around the type of writing that you do
4) Make your writing public
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Almost all sources of conflict stem from someone feeling like they're not being heard. Sometimes this is knowingly perpetuated by two sides that are proactively unwilling to make concessions but other times we unknowingly ignore warning signs that a conflict is escalating.
In this episode we discuss two cases - a prisoner of war negotiation highlighted in Chris Voss' book Never Split The Difference and a story of a founder dealing with a partner that wasn't pulling his weight.
In both cases resolution was only achieved once the source of the problem was actively acknowledged, validating the concerns of the other side, and achieving the coveted "that's right" response.
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Many entrepreneurs prioritize building a great product that people want but fewer prioritize building a great team that allows your business to grow. In this episode we talk about the importance of developing a business that's designed to work even when you're not working on it. The only way to achieve this is to move away from being an individual contributor and becoming a manager and leader that learns to effectively delegate.
This comes down to two fundamental principles.
1) Having the right people in place
2) Investing the time upfront before you delegate
Tune in to learn about the character traits you should look for in the talent you recruit and the preparation required to set them up for success.
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Most of us assume that taking a step back in our career can be a fatal move but in reality it can actually help you skip several steps quickly.
This week we decided to feature a story that was shared by sales influencer Kevin Dorsey (KD) during a live class at School16 about how taking a pay cut and a demotion in title ended up catapulting his career in technology sales, leading him to become a VP of Sales just a few years after he started working in tech.
KD explains how he was able to take on responsibilities that weren't part of his job description to quickly get promoted to management and leadership roles and why having the confidence to take on a more junior role ended up paying off in the long run.
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One of the greatest misconceptions about career progression is that the consequences of our choices should always be predictable and linear. It’s this thinking that creates risk averse decision making for fear of irreversible outcomes, potentially closing you off to opportunities that could lead to something you can not yet foresee. Over the last few weeks we’ve had several people come to us expressing trepidation in making the right choice in the next step of their career. To help anyone else that might be going through this, we reshaped this question to three simple prompts:
1) What are the soft and hard skills you can learn to fill your own skills gap?
2) Where do you need to grow your network, whether it’s industry or expertise based?
3) Is this next step helping you level up in a measurable and significant way?
What should also help inform your decision is the understanding that most careers today are not linear and that the old way of deciding the next step in your career does not fit the model of the new economy.
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This week we decided to address two important yet seemingly unrelated events that went on over the weekend in the United States. The mass protests that spread across most major cities in America, and the first manned launch into space between a government institution (NASA) and a private company called SpaceX. We discuss the idea that major changes often come after periods of sustained failure, and that societal progress, much like personal development, can only come with deliberate action.
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When you're just starting out it's easy to get caught up in what your competition is doing because naturally they're further along than you. But once you learn that your competition isn't perfect and that there's likely a lot about their business that could be improved upon, start focusing on the opportunity instead of fixating on your relative position in the market.
In this episode we discuss the true benefit of being a nimble startup and why young companies constantly beat out incumbent competitors. When you don't have to worry about a public track record, existing investors, or a large set of existing customers that require your attention you can move in any direction you want on a dime. So, don't make the mistake of worrying about the competition at the expense of action. Your ability to act fast is what will pull you ahead of them in the long run.
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An indisputable character trait of every successful person is their willingness to stay persistent even when it feels uncomfortable. In this episode we discuss the growing importance of persistence in today's increasingly uncertain economic climate and how we should all get more comfortable with asking for help.
A good way to remove negative self think when something triggers you to feel that you're asking too much of others is to remember stories of other ambitious people accomplishing great things because of their willingness to ask others for help directly.
We discuss Barbara Corcoran's story of landing a spot on ABC's Shark Tank by following up with Mark Cuban after being rejected for the opportunity. We also talk about how Sergei got a job working for Andrew Yang's last nonprofit, Venture For America, after being rejected for a job there and following up directly with the COO almost two years later.
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Entrepreneurship is hard, but one of the basic tenets of being a creator is knowing that you can build something completely on your own terms. For Michael Fenchel, a young physics major out of Wisconsin who loved being a creator, that meant starting companies - three of them at once, to be exact.
All three of those ventures ended up being successful, eventually leading him to start his newest company Paradox Ventures(prdx.co), a program providing personal development for entrepreneurs and leaders. But before that Michael stumbled with various failed projects, until he figured out something important - focus on adding value first, and making money second.
In this episode Michael talks about how he was able to build one of the largest co-working spaces in Madison, WI (100State), while starting a software company that supported live music events (Prism.fm) and running product at BlueTree Network. In each example he was able to get the business off the ground and identify talent in his network that would then take over leadership responsibilities in the businesses.
He also talks about how his experience launching and growing an education company called Breathe For Change inspired him to create a founder and leadership development business called Paradox that provides a true community for likeminded entrepreneurs that recognize the need to balance personal development with audacious professional goals.
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From a young age we're asked - "what do you want to be when you grow up?" - implying that we have to be just one thing. Our natural curiosity may take us in unexpected directions but all it takes is an expression of doubt from someone else to stop us in our tracks. In this episode we discuss the importance of questioning self-imposed limitations and removing labels that others may ascribe to us. We discuss two main limiting beliefs that we had to overcome - the idea that we're bad at writing and the belief that we're not good marketers.
We talk about the importance of taking the initial step to act on your internal desires, eventually removing your self-imposed labels through sustained effort that leads to the external validation you need to completely redefine yourself.
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All ambitious people, even the ones that have already experienced measurable success, feel self doubt at certain times. Knowing how to move past those feelings is critical in getting to the next stage of your journey.
In this episode we discuss:
1) The importance of positive outcomes (wins) and other external validators
2) The value of working on what you care about and what you're good at
3) Why you should ask yourself if you're working on the right things
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All entrepreneurs have been forced to rethink their entire strategy over the last 30 days, and many are uncertain about their ability to secure funding during an unstable economic environment. In this episode we discuss what changes we're seeing in the market and how founders should approach the fundraising process now that investors are more careful about how they deploy their capital.
In this episode you will learn:
1) How to setup a more targeted fundraising approach
2) What types of investors are more likely to write you a check
3) How you should adjust your story and business plan to stay attractive to investors
4) What traction to focus on to raise your valuation
For more episode on startup fundraising check out our Fundraising 101 series.
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Creating a successful career is very similar to building a successful company - your outcomes are directly correlated with your execution. This week we reflect back on a story shared by Daisy dePaulis, Head of Sales at Google Cloud, who was recently featured in a free online class at School16. Daisy worked at a restaurant after going to community college for two years when she decided that her time was more valuable than the hourly work she was doing.
In this episode we talk about how she landed a job at a tech company as an office manager, eventually moving to marketing, then sales, and how she developed her leadership skills in each role to rise to VP level early on in her career.
We also discuss how leaders are actually discovered within companies by being willing to take on new responsibilities, coming to others with solutions and not just problems, mentoring those that need help, and learning skills on their own time.
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Being an entrepreneur means that you get to decide what you want to be an expert in each time you start a new venture. One famous example is Richard Branson, who started off running a student magazine, then a record company, followed by a successful airline and a spaceflight company. Darrell Silver made a similar move with his second company, Thinkful.
In part two of our interview we discuss why he decided to move away from enterprise tech where he successfully sold his first business into a sector that was completely unknown to him, direct to consumer education. As before he did what he knew best - created a valuable product as quickly as possible, then figured out an effective business model for it.
Darrell explains how him and his co-founder Daniel Friedman saw an opportunity to educate people interested in technology jobs soon after the 2008 financial collapse, and the impressive marketing experiments the team ran to create a revenue generating program in a few short months. Over 8 years they grew Thinkful to a recognized brand, eventually selling to Chegg for $100 Million to reach their next milestone - making tech based education accessible to more people.
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"Keep busy at something. A busy person never has time to be unhappy" -Robert Louis Stevenson. Today's episode is inspired by a message from Naval Ravikant, prolific entrepreneur and investor. His observation states that the physical spaces that we, typically, navigate to and from every day - be it the office, school, church, etc. - are primarily there to keep us busy. When going through a difficult period an effective way to keep negativity at bay is to create an environment where there's no time for it.
This week we share a story from an entrepreneur that was able to create purpose for himself during this crisis by raising funding to support a network of seamstresses that create masks and other PPE for medical staff in his area. During this time what you do decide to do is not as important as committing to doing something. That alone can drastically help ease the burden of the uncertainty we're all feeling.
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Most successful founders will tell you that you can’t build a company for the purpose of selling it, yet some entrepreneurs are able to successfully find acquirers for their ventures time and time again throughout their careers. After all, that’s one of the most common exit scenarios for founders and shareholders.
In this two part series we had the pleasure of sitting down with the founder of Thinkful, Darrell Silver, who sold his education company last year for $100 Million to Chegg, his second acquisition and second company that he founded in the last decade.
In Part I Darrell talks about what skills and circumstances he thinks attributed to him being able to start his first venture, Perpetually, and how years of networking with others in his industry led to a successful acquisition of that business at a time when it seemed like it was destined to fail.
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The simple act of setting a big goal can change your outcomes because it defines the tasks that you prioritize in the immediate future. This week we talk about how we experienced this phenomenon first hand when we decided to launch our new education program School16. We discuss what motivated us to set a highly optimistic goal and how this led to getting over 600 signups in just a few short weeks.
A simple framework that can be used to replicate this process is called SMART goal setting. Goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
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Ever wonder why someone isn’t responding to your email? Maybe you made a great connection with someone you met in person, but when you follow up with them you never hear back. Every day others are vying for our attention, but we only truly engage with those that succeed in piquing our interest.
This is especially true if you’re trying to reach someone important or busy.
We’ve been able to get the attention of some of the most incredible people in the world after refining the outreach process over many years. This has lead to incredible opportunities, like appearances on live shows, writing opportunities with major publications, mentor and investor relationships, high value customers, and much more.
Since then, we’ve taught our methods to hundreds of entrepreneurs that have gone on to build meaningful relationships themselves. Important people are just like you and I – they value positive human interaction, and get excited by new opportunities. They also appreciate working with others that they see as equals (or potential equals) and with people that truly value their time.
In this episode we walk you through several communication principles that can be applied immediately. We also walk you through specific examples of the outreach that we’ve done so that you can replicate our process and see the results for yourself. Whether you’re writing a book, working on a new business, trying to find partners, recruit new employees, or simply want to build new relationships – this episode will help you get closer to your goals.
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In difficult times it helps to remind yourself that every day there are good things happening in the world. This week we highlight how some entrepreneurs are taking the opportunity to rapidly innovate and address the problems caused by this crisis head on. We also talk about the importance of being grateful for the positive things that happen throughout your day while trying to avoid the negativity of the daily news cycle. We end the episode by highlighting some of the happy moments we experienced this week which will hopefully help you remember your own.
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When Vu Van was struggling to learn how to pronounce words in English correctly as a grad student at Stamford, she couldn't have known that a passion for this problem would drive her to build a language learning app with millions of users just a few years later.
In this episode Vu breaks down exactly how she managed the process of proving demand for her language app ELSA by getting 1000 users in just one week. She also walks us through how she tested with hundreds of early users in Vietnam to build a functional initial prototype that she used to attract one of the best minds in voice technology to join her as a CTO.
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Entrepreneurs are not defined by their product but rather their ability to come up with an idea and bring people together to make it a reality.
Given recent events this week we decided to launch a new initiative to help people land jobs in more resilient and flexible industries, starting with tech. Starting in two weeks (April 1st, 2020) we will be launching a series of free live online classes to help people 1) understand the opportunities available to them in tech 2) learn how to develop soft and hard skills specific to the discipline they're interested in 3) understand how to leverage their past experience to identify the industry they're best suited for 4) learn how to rapidly build up their credibility to land interviews 5) begin to establish a network in their field of interest.
In this episode we discuss exactly how we're executing the launch of this program, what we're doing to grow awareness, and how other entrepreneurs can start to adapt to the changing environment we're living through. If you're interested in joining our classes or know someone else that would like to learn directly from leaders in tech, you can sign up here to get all future announcements https://school16.co
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Starting one successful business doesn’t necessarily make it easier to start another one. However, experienced entrepreneurs are more likely to be successful the second time around simply because they know how to push forward until they start to reach their goals, even if it takes longer than anticipated. In part two of our interview with Claudia Chan we discuss what gave her the idea of starting a women’s empowerment company and why this business was more challenging to build from the ground up than the business she started in her mid twenties.
We learn the importance of having a right hand man or woman from the onset and how Claudia was able to recruit this type of talent in the very early days of her company to make sure that she was executing on her goals.
As the business grew SHE Summit started to attract people from over 100 organizations and to date it has had over 600 speakers while reaching tens of thousands of people through the conference and hundreds of thousands of people remotely. Claudia also talks about how this created an even bigger opportunity to build a leadership program for organizations that are interested in prioritizing diversity and inclusion and why it’s so important to show others how leadership opportunities can be accessible to anyone that actively pursues them.
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We're in a unique time in history right now where the whole world is going through an experience together. While it's clear that there's a lot we don't know about the spread of a pandemic and it's eventual ramifications, if nothing else our very humanity is evident now more than ever. This is creating a heightened sense of camaraderie and a realtime shift in how we interact with each other.
In this 5 Minute Pick Me Up we talk about how Scott Heiferman identified an opportunity for a business that helped build communities and connect people face to face right after the tragic events of 9/11. That company, Meetup.com, grew rapidly in part because of the timing in the market and people's inclination to embrace this new technology.
We also talk about why more people are now looking for opportunities to connect with others as they shift to working from home and how this should open up more doors for you to become a creator. During the episode we reference Paul Graham's essay titled Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy which can be found here: http://www.paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html
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Before Claudia Chan was even 30 years old, she was already running a 7-Figure women’s entertainment business in New York City. How did this first time entrepreneur accomplish so much, so quickly?
It was through that own-your-own-destiny mentality that Claudia’s parents ingrained in her from a young age that she was able to have the confidence to think of herself as a born entrepreneur even as a teenager.
Always keeping her eyes open for opportunities, Claudia spotted her first business idea while working for a dot com startup in the early 2000’s, when companies were spending thousands on event and party sponsorships.
In part one of our conversation with Claudia Chan we talked about how she got to revenue with that business before even quitting her job, why she decided to partner with someone else who had an existing party business in NYC and how that led to millions in revenue in a few short years. We also discuss how she used the lessons learned from that first business to start S.H.E Globl, which puts on one of the biggest women’s empowerment summits in the world.
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We were all set to hold our conference with more than 500 confirmed attendees, but at 8:00AM on the morning of the event we got an email from the venue saying that due to the coronavirus threat, they can no longer host our event.
With 4.5 hours left, it seemed that the only option was to email all speakers and attendees apologizing for this unexpected turn of events and cancel the whole thing. But it took just one person to ask, is there any way to keep the event on?
This is exactly what happened to us just a few days ago and in this episode we talk about how this proactive mentality helped us figure out how to save this event, and why sometimes having your back against the wall is exactly what you need to achieve things you would otherwise think are impossible. We also discuss the importance of having a resilient team that can handle uncertainty gracefully.
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If someone tells you “that’s just the way things have always been done,” then there’s likely a business opportunity there that no one has been brave enough to tackle yet. When Mona Bijoor was working in the fashion industry connecting apparel brands to retailers, she heard that phrase often. But she knew that offline handshake deals and orders placed via fax were going to be replaced by technology, it was only a matter of time.
The difference between her and most of her industry colleagues is that she set out to be the one to change this behemoth of an industry by launching JOOR in 2010, and ultimately growing it to billions of dollars in transaction volume.
But how does someone who has no experience building technology, let alone creating a marketplace from scratch, even know where to start?
In this episode, we got to hear exactly how Mona was able to convince brands to digitize their inventory exclusively on her platform, and eventually built it into a company with over 100 employees. We also dug into some of the stories that Mona shares in her new book, Startups and Downs: The Secrets of Resilient Entrepreneurs, of her struggles as a first time founder, and how she, along with the dozens of founders that she interviewed for the book, overcame them.
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Why would a billionaire agree to be interviewed by someone who just started her own podcast? For most of us, celebrities and ultra-successful people seem completely out of reach, but Heneka Watkis-Porter has proven again and again that if you really believe that you can create value to people, then you can get anyone to support you. As long as you’re willing to keep asking them.
In this 5 Minute Pick Me Up, Vadim spoke to Heneka to find out how she gets influential people to support her work and the philosophy she uses to get over her own fears.
Find out more about Heneka here, and support her podcast, The Entrepreneurial You, by subscribing!
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Quitting a job can feel exhilarating and intimidating at the same time. In a perfect world, you’re leaving on good terms and have a supportive boss that offers you future opportunities for mentorship and references.
Unfortunately, these circumstances are usually far from perfect. Many people leave their jobs because they’re unhappy, and the source of this unhappiness typically comes from the people that they work for.
There’s many misconceptions about what to expect from this process, and how to handle the conversation with your employer when the time finally comes. We start this episode with a role play, giving you a real life example of how to handle a boss that reacts horribly to the news of you leaving. A situation like this can often be fraught with emotions on both sides, so it’s important to be fully prepared going into the conversation.
We breakdown how you can anticipate questions and objections from your boss, and what to do to prepare ahead of time. Whether you’re quitting your job to work on a new business, or leaving for a better opportunity it’s important to know your rights as an employee. These tips will help you stay calm and at ease throughout the process, and remember – it’s only one conversation. Soon you’ll be on your way to a happier you.
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The best opportunities are often in the long tail where no-one is looking. This is one of the reasons why startups have an advantage over established businesses - unique strategies can be quickly tested at any time when there's no oversight or rigid processes.
This week we talk about three stories of entrepreneurs that were able to create a seemingly unfair advantage resulting in accelerated growth. We reference a student that leveraged texting to reach parents, recap how Teespring (Episode 62) acquired their early customers, and tell you the story of how Tinder grew from 20,000 users to half a million users in one month.
The three main takeaways for this week's 5 Minute Pick Me Up are:
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It's hard to say no to a six figure check but sometimes your best option is to reject it. In this episode we explore three commons reasons for walking away from an investor that's ready to put money into your startup. Here are some red flags to watch out for:
For each scenario we point to stories from real founders that we've worked with and why their decision to walk away ultimately helped save their respective companies. While there are always exceptions to the rule we bring up these cautionary tails to help first time fundraisers make the best possible decision for their company. The allure of money can be deceiving and as with any contractual obligation the decision to accept money in exchange for equity should be considered carefully.
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This week we tell a story of a Venezuelan med school student who opened up a burger restaurant in Spain called Goiko Grill that grew to over 40 locations and sold for €130 Million only 4 years after the first restaurant opened.
We talk about why partnering with the right people can mean the difference between hyper growth and stagnation, and what uniquely positioned this particular entrepreneur to succeed.
When you make constraints for yourself it becomes easier to be creative. For a similar reason scarcity creates resourcefulness. You learn how to solve problems in unique ways when you have fewer options available to you.
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Sometimes the questions that we bury deep inside of us are the ones that should be asked first. This is part two of a segment where we try to answer questions that we get from founders in private. Things that often only come up once we've been talking to someone for quite some time.
In this week's episode we answer the following three questions that came up in our recent conversations:
1) How do we decide who's the CEO?
2) What if I feel like I want to give up?
3) How honest should I be with my team?
We discuss how to be honest with yourself about the best choice of leader for your team, what to do first before you make the drastic decision to shut down your business, and why there's a difference between transparency with your co-founders vs. the people you employ.
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One of the greatest misconceptions about career progression is that the consequences of our choices should always be predictable and linear. It's this thinking that creates risk averse decision making for fear of irreversible outcomes, potentially closing you off to opportunities that could lead to something you can not yet foresee. Over the last few weeks we've had several people come to us expressing trepidation in making the right choice in the next step of their career. To help anyone else that might be going through this, we reshaped this question to three simple prompts:
1) What are the soft and hard skills you can learn to fill your own skills gap?
2) Where do you need to grow your network, whether it's industry or expertise based?
3) Is this next step helping you level up in a measurable and significant way?
What should also help inform your decision is the understanding that most careers today are not linear and that the old way of deciding the next step in your career does not fit the model of the new economy.
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Every entrepreneurial success story has a strong visionary that’s able to recruit countless others to help them along the way. Being willing to ask for help isn’t only critical in the early days of building something. It can help you avoid mistakes at every level, filling any gaps in your knowledge, your network, your experience, and much more. Still, for many asking for help is not natural. It’s easy to feel like you’re inconveniencing someone while adding no value to them. Fortunately, this is mostly a false line of thinking.
We start this episode by discussing how to get over this initial feeling of self-doubt by first understanding that every successful person has gotten help from someone else to get to where they are, and by using negative visualization to realize that the worst that can happen if you ask for help is, well, absolutely nothing.
Next, we break down the most effective way to get others to help you, especially if you’re approaching important people. Start by using whatever you can to your advantage (your friends, classmates, colleagues, your expertise, etc.) and prove to others that you’re serious about what you’re trying to accomplish. Lastly, we suggest offering value whenever you can, giving examples from our past, and being as specific as possible when asking others to help you.
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What can a hostage negotiator teach us about customer relationships? That the best way to disarm someone is to directly confront their grievances. This week we discuss how to handle a situation where you've made a mistake. We talk about what's known as empathy statements and why Sergei's old boss spent 48 hours calling each of his customers after a major server outage.
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If you need to do something hard start by committing to it for just 30 minutes. You can do almost anything for 30 minutes no matter how difficult it is. This is the advice that Natalie Gray got from her college professor, pushing her to finish a 3 year graduate degree in just 1 year. She later applied that advice to teaching herself how to be a designer, marketer, sales expert, and product leader. She's now the Co-founder and Head of Product at Cover, a startup that recently raised $27 million to change the way people get insurance.
While Cover has grown very rapidly in its first four years - getting accepted into YCombinator on a prototype, getting rapid early customer traction, attracting investors, and tripling in size to 124 employees in just the last year - Natalie's story to getting to this point was anything but a straight line.
In this episode we talk about the various career shifts that led her to teaming up with her current co-founders on a completely different business and how working on that business for two years, and then together at Shopify after being acquired, ultimately lead them to recognize a massive opportunity in insurance while on a weekend hack session at a cabin with the team.
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Everyone's timeline is different but if you're lucky enough to identify what you're uniquely good at, it's imperative that you pursue it. This week we got to watch world renowned violinist Karen Gomyo perform at the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra and after seeing our dads old documentary the next day we noticed a parallel in their very different paths.
They're passions started as internal feelings that couldn't be explained, but their calling was formed over time by external validation and unwavering pursuit despite overwhelming difficulty. This week's 5 Minute Pick Me Up explores the idea of passions and how to know if your passion is actually a calling.
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Everyone wants to get press for their startup, but most founders go about it the wrong way. In this episode, we explore why some founders are so good at constantly getting written about and others struggle for years to get anyone to notice them.
Through hundreds of conversations with successful founders, and a few insights we've received from PR professionals over the years, we discovered a few basic principals that any company can follow to be more attractive to the media.
The first is to realize that "the media" or journalists, have jobs to get done, and if you can help them make their job easier, you have a much higher chance of getting their attention. And that number one job is to tell a story.
We break down some specific examples of how you can create a noteworthy pitch or story that journalists will want to tell, how to find exactly the types of journalists and publications that have a high likelihood of writing about you, and how to develop relationships with them over time. We also share some resources like Help A Reporter and PRNewswire, for founders who are just getting started and want to tell their story, but have not had time to develop relationships with journalists yet.
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The problem with getting good at something is the temptation to perpetually avoid the unknown for fear of discomfort. This week we talk about an issue that's real for many mid-career professionals - the "Golden Handcuffs" - ie: the allure of staying in a financially comfortable arrangement at the expense of personal growth. We talk about how this paradox applies to us and why it's important to acknowledge when you've been comfortable for too long.
We draw a parallel to the career of famed author Steven Pressfield (of The Legend of Bagger Vance and The War of Art) and why he didn't become the prolific author he is today until late in his life.
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When Ishveen Anand started getting athletes like Dwyane Wade and Tiger Woods on her platform, brands started coming in droves. But according to Ishveen, simply driving transactions to happen on her platform would not be enough to create a sustainable business.
In this episode we discuss why Customer Success became a core competency of OpenSponsorship’s business, and how optimizing for outcomes like ROI and brand awareness made it possible for the business to retain customers in the long run.
Ishveen also talks about how her role as a founder fundamentally changed as the platform scaled, and how she learned how to balance execution with delegation to her team over the 4 years since founding the company.
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Motivation isn't always a reliable way to spur action but discipline is. For this week's episode we spoke to Terry Choi about how the skills learned in the Special Forces of the South Korean military helped him become a junior partner at a venture capital firm not long after graduating college.
Terry speaks about his experience working directly for commander generals, becoming a squad leader and later a platoon leader, and why learning to be "fluid like water" helped him in situations of uncertainty.
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How does a first time founder get 1,000 athletes on her platform from teams like the Dallas Mavericks, get on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, and get accepted into one of the top accelerator programs in the country, all in her first year in business?
If you ask Ishveen Anand of OpenSponsorship it’s all about showing external validation, and ever since she graduated from Oxford and got her first job out of college she has created opportunities for herself by doing just that.
In part one of our two part conversation with Ishveen, we talked about why she believes getting work experience instead of jumping into entrepreneurship straight out of school gives people a big advantage, how she identified a big opportunity in the sports sponsorship market that she couldn’t ignore, and how she built up an impressive client list by not being afraid to reach out cold.
Starting a two-sided marketplace is a notoriously difficult thing to do, and in this episode you’ll learn how Ishveen was able to do so successfully by removing as much friction as possible from getting one side of the market to sign up, while simultaneously building up the other side.
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Some projects are so grandiose that it's difficult to fathom how any one person could conceive of them. This week we visited La Sagrada Familia, a massive basilica in Barcelona that has been in construction for almost 100 years.
We were incredibly inspired by the story of its creator, Antoni Gaudi, and set out to understand how he was able to dedicate over 40 years of his life to pursuing this project.
In this episode you will learn:
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Failure has long been embraced by entrepreneurial minds, and some of the most successful inventors, businessmen, and creators credit their ultimate triumphs with their ability to endure repeated failure. As startup founders, musicians, podcast hosts, and self proclaimed “jacks of all trades” we’re no strangers to failure.
In this episode, we take a stroll back to our very first attempts at venture creation, starting with our college days of trying to launch an affiliate marketing platform called AdLobby. We discuss the massive mistakes we made as first time entrepreneurs, including selling our car to pay for engineers that we couldn’t even speak to. We also talk about the next two business we tried to start, and how we almost got into the top accelerator in the world after recruiting an MIT technical co-founder.
With each of our failures, however, we were able to leverage the experience to not only avoid making the same mistakes again, but even turned them into lucrative job opportunities with other tech startups in both Boston and New York City. Tune in to learn how you can start looking at failure differently, and what you can do to position it as a positive experience to others.
We leave you with this quote:
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” -Thomas Edison
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There is no one size fits all solution that makes everyone productive. To accomplish your goals, you have to find what works for you, and create your own set of daily routines and rituals. The key is consistency.
This episode was inspired by the book “Daily Rituals” by Mason Currey, and an article by Pia Silva entitled “9-5 Is Out. Try The 1-6 Instead.”
In this episode you will hear:
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This is the final part of our series about our father, Samuel Revzin, who built one of the most successful schools in Soviet Belarus, only to have to start all over in a new career at the age of 54. Listen to Part I, and Part II if you’d like to hear the whole story, but this episode can be listened to standalone.
In this episode we tell the story of how our mother and father made the difficult decision to pack their bags and move halfway around the world to make a better life for their children here in the United States. With few employment prospects for recent immigrants, they had to do menial work for years to support the family.
Listen to find out how our father was able to use the same entrepreneurial instincts he developed in Belarus to start a business in a shopping mall that he grew to three locations and multiple employees. This small business was effectively our real world MBA, where at the age of 12 we were thrust into the day to day of the business to learn what it takes to run a company.
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Why do so many people constantly fail at changing their behaviors?
With the decade coming to a close, in today’s 5 Minute Pick Me Up, we wanted to look at some reasons why people fall short of achieving their goals, even when they have intentions to make major changes in their lives.
We reflect on the methods we have used when looking to make substantial changes, and the importance that balance and rewards have played a role in making those changes a reality.
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When you’re a founder, everyone around you expects you to be an expert in everything that has to do with your business. Quite often this means that you're in a constant state of "the unknown" where you have to learn something new. To many this is a very uncomfortable feeling but this is the very state where most of your learning and skill acquisition happens.
This episode was motivated by a story from Emilia Clarke about the gruelingly difficult process that she had to go through to learn and deliver scenes on Game of Thrones in a completely made up language - Dothraki.
In this episode we discuss similarly painful moments in our careers when learning to put together a venture fund and learning how to sell software.
We also break down the four stages of learning - Unconscious Incompetence, Conscious Incompetence, Conscious Competence, and Unconscious Competence - and why you should be aware of these stages when facing a new challenge that you must overcome.
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Sometimes even the most seemingly concrete rejection can be reversed if you can effectively make a case for it. In this episode we talk about how we got rejected to speak at a conference happening in two months and why the organizer of the event changed his mind.
We discuss the importance of developing relationships, establishing credibility and communicating value, and when it's appropriate to push a little harder to create opportunities for yourself. We also share another story about how a friend of ours turned a seemingly impossible no into a yes.
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Fundraising is like selling - it only counts when you close the deal. A successful investor pitch is only a small part of the process. The real work is in getting the investors to agree to the investment terms (the negotiation) and wire you the money (the close).
In the last part of this four part series we discuss the most common way to put together a round of investment from multiple funders. You'll learn why it's important to have a lead investor in the mix and how to incrementally get financial commitments from investors to get other investors to commit as well, a process called soft circle.
We also talk through the due diligence process the investor will go through if they're interested in giving you money and the most common pitfalls for first time fundraisers around the actual terms of the investment. We close the conversation by highlighting some ways that you can create urgency to close the deal faster.
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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says that empathy played a critical role in his development and success, but he didn't always know how to prioritize empathy.
In this 5 Minute Pick Me Up we talk about how empathy can drastically improve your career (better relationships with colleagues, more opportunities for promotion, etc.) or business (better partner relationships, more customers, faster decision making) and why it's a skill that can be actively practiced and improved.
We also talk about what it means to be too empathetic and the importance of balancing empathy with confidence.
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If you're ever meeting with a professional investor you must remember one thing - you gotta know your stuff. In part three of our Fundraising 101 series we explain what an entrepreneur can expect to happen in a meeting with an investor and how to make sure you're best prepared to increase your chances of getting funding.
We talk about what's non-negotiable to cover in a pitch meeting, including your vision, market, and traction, and why the CEO should always lead the pitch. We also share some tactical advice about selective sharing, NDAs, and the typical response you can expect after a pitch meeting.
In part four of the series we're going to get into the nitty gritty of how to structure the fundraising process and negotiate the terms of your deal!
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It's okay to act without having a clear goal or outcome in mind especially when it comes to creative pursuits. This week we talk about what we learned from Jerry Seinfeld's first book, SeinLanguage and how Sergei's former boss, Andrew Yang, applied the same mentality to running Venture for America and now his campaign for the Presidency.
Previous episode(s) mentioned: Episode 12: Launching Best Sellers, Going Viral, and Avoiding Burnout with Charlie Hoehn
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Investors often require a warm introductions to take a meeting, so how do you meet one if you don't have a big network? When we moved to New York City we knew few entrepreneurs and no investors, yet when building our sales software company we were able to secure dozens of meetings with professional investors.
In part two of our Fundraising 101 series we breakdown our strategy for getting your foot in the door to pitch your startup by meeting other founders. We also share why it's possible to secure meetings through cold emails and how to do it the right way.
Getting investor meetings is similar to getting sales meetings so if you haven't listened yet check out our other episode on a similar topic called Sales For Founders 101: Getting Meetings to get more ideas.
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What can you learn from the person that brought The Office to America? Last week we had drinks with a friend of ours in LA and he told us a story of when he worked for Benjamin Noah Silverman not long before he became co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studios.
One night at a movie premier after party Benjamin shared some words of wisdom with our friend about achieving success.
In this week's 5 Minute Pick Me Up we talk about what he meant by the simple phrase he shared with our friend and what you can learn from his advice to identify opportunities that can quickly advance your career.
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Most founders will never raise a single dime from investors. This has nothing to do with your capabilities as an entrepreneur. It’s simply the reality of venture economics and the fact that most businesses don’t fit the requirements of a professional investor. The good news is that 95% of business are able to find capital through other means.
In this episode we describe how most entrepreneurs raise capital through four main channels – credit card loans, bank loans, money from friends and family, and good old fashion side hustles (aka contract work). Yes, in 2017 alone VC firms invested $61 Billion in capital, but everything is relative. This money was deployed across 5,948 deals – virtually nothing (1%) compared to the 500,000+ businesses that were started that year.
To help clarify the reality of fundraising, and to provide some data from those that are bullish on raising venture money, we also dive into the true motivations behind angel and venture investors, and what actually makes an entrepreneur fundable – a track record (previous exits), domain expertise, defensibility, a large market opportunity, and tangible go to market execution.
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Humans today manage more relationships than at any other time in history. Our digital networks alone can include thousands of people, so it's inevitable that some of those connections might fall by the wayside through nobody's fault. If you've ever missed an email or forgotten to respond to someone that reached out to you, you might feel guilty and assume that the other person was hurt and doesn't want to hear from you again.
In practice, the opposite is true. In this 5 Minute Pick Me Up we discuss why it's always better late than never to reach back out to a lost contact or to follow up with someone that's dropped off your radar. Even a quick check in is an opportunity to make someone feel appreciated and the chance to reignite a relationship that might lead to incredible personal and/or professional outcomes.
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While most entrepreneurs never raise money from professional investors, many first time founders want to understand how the process works. Having met with a lot of people eager to learn how they can raise money for their startup idea we decided to record a new series called Fundraising 101 to dispel some myths around the process and provide a template for those that think this is the right step for their business.
Part one of our series focuses on what you need to accomplish at minimum before you're ready to approach investors. We discuss the three areas of traction to focus on - Team, Product, and Customers, and why investors invest in lines not dots (ie: consistent output and growth, not individual indicators of success).
We also discuss our experience with fundraising for our tech startup and what we could have done differently. In part two we'll explain how you can quickly setup meetings with professional investors through both cold and warm outreach.
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There's a lot of reasons a producer may want to bring someone on a show, but how do they pick their guests and how does it actually happen?
We talk about going to watch a studio taping of Dr. Oz this week and why our friend Andrew Maksymowicz, founder of Poopers Guide in NYC, ended up on the show.
In this episode you will learn:
1) The importance of doing something unique and niche thus becoming a leader in your category
2) The role of PR in showing credibility
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Emotional health isn't just an abstract idea we should strive towards. It's a skill that can be learned just like anything else through practice. This thesis is the basis on which Nataly Kogan built her company, Happier, and people are starting to catch on.
Before developing her program, which is now part of the corporate training curriculum at massive organizations like SAP Concur, Nataly spent years research, testing, and developing daily practices that would create major shifts in her mindset and life. Through her popular talks she caught the attention of corporate leaders, and Happier @ Work was born.
In part two of our interview with Nataly she talks about the initial hurdles she faced as she attempted to reinvent her business and how she landed on a concept that's changing the way executives and leaders approach professional development.
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Inspiration is perishable, but if you capitalize on it when it strikes you can set big things in motion. This week we're giving you a simple yet important reminder to pay attention to when you feel inspired and to act on that inspiration right when it comes.
This is the one thing that you can't leave until later because it may never manifest itself in quite the same way again. We discuss two events this week, one in which we succeeded in acting on a moment of inspiration and one where we failed. We talk through the repercussions of a missed opportunity to act on inspiration and talk about how Phil Knight created Nike from a similar moment.
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What are the moments in your life when you felt that you were doing something natural, exciting, and powerful at the same time? When you felt truly present with no desire to change what was happening to you. Our guest Nataly Kogan, the founder of Happier.com, believes that these moments are signals that you should pay attention to. Signals that act as a window into what you really desire and where your passions might lie.
Nataly didn't realize her real calling until she was 40, even though she had already attained incredible professional success. In our interview she talks about a dark period in her life that helped her reinvent herself and created a path where she can teach others how to do the same thing while avoiding hitting the proverbial rock bottom.
We discuss how to remove the 'should' thinking that's present in most of us to focus on the things we want to do instead. We also talk about what correlates to true meaning in one's life and the importance of manifesting meaning in the work we do.
In part two of our interview we'll discuss how her company Happier evolved over the last three years to reach millions of people, and why emotional intelligence and even happiness is a skill that can be learned by anyone.
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If you're looking for a starting point for how to think about marketing for your business this episode talks through the same advice we give founders at NYU and beyond.
The idea for the Bullseye Framework originated from a book that was recommended by a startup CEO friend of ours called Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares.
We break down this simple tool designed to help you pick your top three customer acquisition channels and the 80/20 rule of marketing. We also explain a simple way that you can come up with over 40 different marketing ideas in just 30 minutes.
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If you're not a marketer the discipline can feel like a black, box but learning the fundamentals will immediately increase your value as an entrepreneur. More specifically, digital marketing is now part of every business strategy, so to help our listeners understanding how to apply it to their business we invited Matt Wolfe and Joe Fier of Evergreen Profits to break things down for us.
The two friends have been experimenting with online marketing for over a decade, from working for agencies with massive budgets to running their own, they've become experts at figuring out how to turn $1 into $10. In our interview we discuss how they generated $40,000 in monthly revenue from an affiliate partnership with their first client and the systems they put in place to repeat this with others.
If you're new to SEO and SEM this is the perfect introductory episode for you, and we promise to have the duo back on the show to dive even deeper into some of these topics.
Make sure you listen to the very end of the episode where Matt and Joe discuss the tools and technologies that help them execute these campaigns successfully with a lean team.
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Finding a good mentor is hard but the real work is in keeping them. In today's episode we talk about how you can impress important people in your life, be they a mentor, advisor, investor, or simply someone that's further along than you.
We give two specific examples of how our mentees have accomplished this by following up, following through, being solution oriented, and finding opportunities to add value instead of always asking for help.
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Winning a negotiation is simpler than most people think. While becoming a master negotiator takes a lot of practice, being good at negotiating comes down to understanding a few very basic principals.
In this episode we walk through three common negotiation scenarios, starting with a salary negotiation, to illustrate how you can be better positioned to win when entering a similar discussion.
A successful negotiation begins before the meeting ever takes place. Your goal is to be as prepared as possible, so that you can be armed with credible information that can be used as needed throughout the discussion. Once you’re at the table, your only job should be to learn as much as possible about the other side. Our assumptions about other people’s wants and needs are often incorrect. By learning the other party’s priorities you can anticipate what they might be willing to agree to.
The last piece to consider is your walk away point, which relates to your ultimate leverage in the conversation. A negotiation is simply an agreement between two parties to enter into a discussion that can lead to an outcome that both sides are satisfied with. If you have other options when entering into a negotiation, those alternatives give you more leverage since you’re more likely to walk away from the discussion if a favorable outcome isn’t reached.
If you’re interested in learning more about the art of negotiating, Getting To Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury is an excellent place to start.
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Many successful founders of our time started their businesses as side projects while they were still in college. This is something that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg all have in common, among many others. But sending a rocket into space? That’s something that most college students can only dream to do.
In this edition of the 5 Minute Pick Me Up we tell a story of a group of enterprising college students from Princeton, NYU and Duke, who not only figured out how to design, and build a rocket with a completely remote team using tools like Slack, but were able to get the necessary partnerships and government approvals to legally launch a rocket in just one year.
That project has now led to a business opportunity that caused these students to take a leave of absence from school, much like the famed entrepreneurs before them. Listen to hear more about their incredible story.
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Winning people over is an art but like much of what we talk about on this show it's a skill that can be learned by almost anyone. Yes, it can be useful in your friends and family relationships but the ability to turn an enemy into an ally is especially important in business.
In this episode we wanted to highlight the reality that some relationships aren't frictionless and that in certain cases they can escalate to avoidance and disdain. Especially if this happens at work it can be detrimental to our other relationships, our productivity, and even our careers. Luckily there are a lot of things you can do to help mend things and turn your enemy into an ally for life.
We uncover four main methods in our conversation:
If you focus on moving your soured relationships forward you'll find that you experience less stress in your life and more importantly that you and the other person are better off for it. In many cases you can actually even develop lifelong friendships with the very people that stood in your way before.
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In his first book Unlimited Power, Tony Robbins discusses the value of role models and heroes and what can be valuable to emulate from their behaviors. Everyone's story is completely unique so you can't expect an exact blueprint for life but you don't have to reinvent the wheel for everything.
Sometimes, however, the people we think are our heroes do something that we wouldn't. Something that's not aligned with our principles or values. How do we know whose example to follow?
In this 5 Minute Pick Me Up we talk about how to identify people in your life to admire that can help guide you in the decisions you make as you work towards achieving your goals
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Always be closing. There's a reason why this became a cult-like mantra in the sales world. It's the hardest and most important part of the process. It's also both the scariest and most rewarding part of being an entrepreneur and something that you can become addicted to once you get desensitized to facing rejection.
In the third and final part of our Sales For Founders 101 series we talk through the entire process of running a successful sales meeting, from how to structure the conversation to how to go for the close.
We discuss sales best practices like building rapport, conducting a needs analysis, identifying the pain, objection handling, and confirming the decision maker while also describing detailed tactical advice that can drastically increase your chances of closing a deal.
As always we give examples from our own sales experience while trying to provide you with scripted suggestions wherever possible to help you get started with closing your first deal this week.
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When you're going through a difficult time it's very hard to picture yourself out of that situation, but after some time passes you inevitably always find a way out. As we celebrate our 25 year anniversary of coming to the U.S. we remember our family's immigration story and how our parents were able to pull themselves out of a very challenging time within a few short years.
Most circumstances are temporary states which is why it's so important to have the patience to work through difficult moments. By becoming aware of this you greatly reduce the amount of time you spend in the undesired state.
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There's literally hundreds of ways to get customers interested in your product/service, but there's a few methods that can get you results almost immediately and at no cost as long as you're willing to do the work and persist.
In our second installment of the Sales For Founders 101 series we focus on three things you can start doing this week to get started with your sales process and generate meeting with prospective customers that are interested in what you have to offer.
We will cover three main topics that we've discussed in great detail in previous episode of The Mentors. We encourage you to listen to those episodes (links below) if you want to dive deeper into each specific topic:
If this is your first time doing any or all of these activities, it will feel unnatural to start. But, putting yourself outside of your comfort zone will develop your skills in ways you've never expected. It will help you learn to be okay with failure especially once you understand that a failed cold call or an email that doesn't get a meeting gets you one step closer to one that does.
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Most of us are consumed by our thoughts, anticipating the future or recalling the mistakes of the past. This week, based on a recommendation from a venture capitalist we follow on Twitter, we started reading Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now. Actually, we started listening to the audio book version and we think it's a great way to consume this particular piece of writing.
This book impacted both of us right from the start, and we're already feeling more in touch with the present moment in our day to day lives. While we hope to continue diving deeper into this level of awareness, we wanted to share with you some ideas on how you can start being more in the moment, and why being aware of the present can help you get closer to accomplishing the goals that you want to reach in the future.
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If you're starting a business you have to learn how to sell. You might not be the best sales person in your company, but you have to be the first sales person. The good news is, you're not alone. Even professional sales people have to figure out the most effective way to sell a particular product or service every time they change roles.
Similarly, every time you work on a new business you'll have to do the same thing and only after you've tested the process and identified your initial target customer can you start hiring others to do it for you at a larger scale.
In the first episode of our Sales For Founders 101 series we dive into the topic of direct sales and identify the most common ways that businesses sell to customers - self-service or freemium, inside sales, and outside sales. We break down the differences and overlaps amongst these distinctions, clarifying why it's important to consider the type of sales you engage in depending on the product you're offering and it's value (price).
We also describe the importance in understanding your unit economics when identifying the sales process you choose and how it can impact the type of business you end up building. The rest of this series will focus on the actual process of selling, from generating initial interest, to closing the deal.
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Entrepreneurship means different things to different people, which is why it's important to evaluate your personal entrepreneurial goals and motivations. It can help you understand what kind of business you want to create given the type of life you'd like to lead.
In our episode we talk about why creating a lifestyle business can be just as good as building a venture fundable business, with a story about how a successful business owner that we know recently came to the same realization.
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Approaching and talking to strangers is not natural for everyone. But some people seem to always make new friends and connections everywhere they go. What are they doing and saying that makes them stand out?
In this episode we learn from some of the same techniques and principles in psychology that pickup artists use to meet people anywhere, and apply them to a business setting.
The biggest similarities between dating and professional networking are in the critical first moments where people often times end up getting in their own way. The outcomes of these moments depend on whether you condition your mind to frame a new relationship as doomed before it even begins, or instead as an opportunity that can change your life in ways you could never predict.
Hear our stories of how ordinary people have used some of these approaches to get life changing jobs and opportunities for their own businesses.
Listen to this episode to learn how to:
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Our brains are good at finding reasons not to do something, but what if going against your instinct completely changed the trajectory of your career?
In this week's 5 Minute Pick Me Up we talk about the importance of squashing your own doubts to think more rationally about the potential impact of a new opportunity towards your future. We draw parallels between Vadim's career transition to becoming a University Professor at NYU only two years after delivering his first ever lecture at State University of New York and Kal Penn's decision to take a questionable role on a movie that ended up catapulting his career.
Sometimes great opportunities come disguised as smaller ones and even then they might not come too often. This is why getting into the habit of saying yes even when you're full of doubt is important. You never know just how things could play out from that single decision.
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When LISNR closed a major enterprise deal with NBC, the organization fundamentally changed forever. First, they were able to raise $10 million as they gained interest from 70 more enterprise level customers that wanted access to their innovative solution. Second, they got their first major lawsuit. These early growing pains would eventually lead them to identify a billion dollar opportunity, but how did the startup persist while avoiding failure?
In part two of our interview with Rodney Williams we discuss how the company managed to survive through multiple points of potential failure by focusing on gaining customer traction and building product value. Rodney tells us how the team was able to quickly create large sales pipelines that take years for some companies, through a meticulously thought out brand strategy.
We also dive into the specific tactics behind his aggressive B2B lead generation strategy to understand how they were able to build up demand so quickly every time they pivoted.
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Today the chase for success leaves many people feeling so overwhelmed that even doing simple things like scheduling a doctor's appointment can feel daunting. With an always on culture where everyone's personal lives are on display it's easy to get to a point where you're not defining your own success and instead are letting outside factors and outside parties define it.
This week we were on an episode of the Redefining Wealth Podcast and the host, Patrice Washington, ended her show with a great question - what does success mean to you?
Over the last few years we've realized that to us success is being able to have varied experiences and have a feeling of contentment and through this lens we're able to make decisions about what we spend our time on and the goals we set.
In this 5 Minute Pick Me Up we talk about how we got to this realization, and what you can start doing this week to get one step closer towards defining your own success.
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Rodney was still working full time for Procter & Gamble when he got a term sheet from investors for his new business, a technology that transmits mobile data over audio signals. After raising $850,000 in capital he was finally ready to quit his day job. He grew up with entrepreneurial parents that ran small businesses and from an early age he knew he wanted to build a big company one day that would impact millions. Today, LISNR counts NBC, Sony Music, Ticketmaster, and many other recognizable brands as clients with new partnerships that is getting their technology in the hands of millions of people.
In part one of our interview with Rodney Williams we uncover how he navigated his career early on to position himself to become an innovator. He accumulated four degrees specifically designed to give him the knowledge, skill set, and awareness to be able to see a big opportunity when it came along. We find out how he ended up at a highly visible and cross-functional role at P&G and how after getting into a startup competition called Startup Bus he was able to bring on a major music record label as a client and raise close to one million dollars within six months.
Next week in part two of our conversation we learn how the business pivoted into various verticals and markets closing massive enterprise deals in the process, and how the team eventually landed partnerships with some of the biggest companies in the world to change the way we pay with our phones forever.
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Sometimes an innovator is born when someone decides to dig deeper in pursuit of a conviction or idea that others dismiss. This week we talk about a pattern that we noticed from watching Mindhunter and All The President's Men on Netflix. The characters in both stories go from being relative unknowns to changing history by being entrepreneurial and pushing further than anyone else was willing to go.
We also talk about why your previous behavior doesn't have to define your future output and performance, and why anyone can chose to make a change at any moment that can reshape their trajectory going forward.
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Every creator and business founder reaches a point where they need to lean on the advice of a legal professional. But how do you know when the time is right? At what point in the evolution of your venture do you need to consult a lawyer, and how do you make sure that you're being as resourceful and pragmatic as possible? We thought the best person to talk to about this was someone that truly cares about entrepreneurs, someone that left a massive law firm to join forces with a legal partner whose mission was aligned with his - to help inspire innovation by working with brilliant founders from inception to help them navigate complicated legal issues.
In our interview with David Postolski of Gearhart Law we dive into many of the same questions that first time entrepreneurs have when starting a business. The first half of the interview focuses on what to consider when thinking about Intellectual Property for your business, detailing what you need to do in the first year of your business and the costs you can expect around patents.
We then cover more common questions, like when you should incorporate, how to avoid personal liability, when to create founder agreements with your partners, and why you should never pay for an initial consultation with a startup lawyer. David speaks with us from the perspective of an entrepreneur to make sure that you limit your costs early on while avoiding major problems in the future.
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The average age for a first time entrepreneur is 40 years old. Why? Because by then you've already developed skills and knowledge that can give you a massive competitive advantage over other people that are just starting off.
We spent most of this week at the Podcast Movement Conference in Orlando and wanted to share stories from a few of the speakers that we met that leveraged deep experience in one industry to create quickly growing businesses and brands in a different one.
The first story is about Hernan Lopez who built a career in TV at Fox over a 15 year period, to start a podcast network called Wondery that used the same approach to international expansions via partnerships to become one of the fastest growing podcast networks in the world.
Next we talk about Erica Mandy and how her start as a local news anchor and eventually a reporter at CBS gave her the confidence to start her own daily news show called The NewsWorthy quickly landing a partnership with PRX's RadioLab.
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Sometimes passion and opportunity meet at the perfect time. Antonio was at a restaurant with his friends when he noticed how much plastic waste was being created by the trash from just a few customers. He knew that this wasn't sustainable and he decided to do something about it. Turns out the market was ready for a change.
In this live podcast interview with the founding team of SeaStraws we talk about how they quickly grew their sustainable straw business, receiving their first major order after just a months of operation. Having already helped another coffee brand grow the founder knew that branding and sales were the most crucial things to get right from the start, so he recruited his friends Echo and Sophie to start the business with him.
In this episode we dive into exactly how Antonio convinced his team to join him, and how they found incredible mentors and advisors to help fill the gaps in their team. We also learn how they closed their initial distribution deals, and why relationships are so critical in the early days. Lastly, we discuss what it means to run a public benefit company, and how the team's focus on sustainability drives the decisions they make every day.
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It seems that one of the most consistent entrepreneurial mantras is that you should never give up. But the reality is that entrepreneurs abandon ideas in favor of new ones all of the time!
In today’s 5 Minute Pick Me Up, we wanted to discuss the often ignored topic of when it’s okay to give up on an idea, and why trying something new doesn’t always mean you’re chasing a shiny object.
Some questions to ask yourself when considering giving up on an idea are:
Have you really given your original idea a real chance by iterating on it?
Are you still excited about the value your idea brings, or the people it serves?
Do you enjoy any of the day to day of working on this idea or business?
Are you in the mindset of identifying a new idea that’s worth pursuing instead?
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Deciding to change the entire direction of your business is inherently hard. Are you giving up too early? Will you lose the value you've already built? What if the new idea doesn't work out?
In part two of our interview with Nigel Eccles he explains why his team made the decision to pivot their product and start in a completely new market - fantasy sports betting. It started with an ideation session with his team, and a realization that they still had a lot of potential with the part of their original idea that had been working - prediction software.
Nigel discusses how they built their first MVP with no coding, and how lengthy early discussions with customers helped them identify a huge opportunity to create FanDuel. Once there were signs of success, Nigel went on to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in Venture Capital, investing deeply into marketing and growing the company into a billion dollar business.
We also learn why Nigel decided to go through the process of building a company from scratch all over again with his new business, Flick, and how he continues to validates his products to know when to correct course. If you have any questions or comments after hearing this episode, message us on the Flick app to chat.
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The best part about getting older is realizing that everything you've ever been taught about how things are "supposed" to be is fiction. The truth is, there are no rules. Instead, there's an equal playing field for every single person that decides to create their own version of how things "should" be.
Still, it's not always easy to have the confidence to create the rules yourself. To stop waiting for permission from someone else.
In this 5 Minute Pick Me Up we discuss how to throw yourself into situations where you have authority so that you can start getting comfortable with making decisions and creating rules even when you might not feel completely ready to do so. We talk about our own experience with this as educators, and why mentoring and teaching has empowered us to understand that no one else is innately better at deciding on how things should be.
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When Nigel Eccles met his technical co-founders at a networking event in Scotland, he didn't know they'd be running a $400 million business together a few years later. The team started building a political prediction app in 2007, but eventually pivoted into a fantasy sports betting business when they saw a much bigger opportunity in the space after attending SXSW and getting some inspiration from their early customers. Now Nigel and his team are disrupting another industry - podcasting.
In part one of our interview with Nigel we talk about the early days of his career as a management consultant and how he landed a product management gig at a tech startup that inspired him to become an entrepreneur. Nigel discusses how he was able to quickly put together a founding team for his first startup idea after helping two engineers work on their business concept for six months.
We also talk about some of the mistakes that Nigel made with his first startup, Hubdub, and why he decided that the business needed a drastic change if it was going to survive.
In next week's episode Nigel describes how focusing on the team's strength and learning to listen to the market helped them pivot into a billion dollar opportunity with FanDuel, and the new opportunity he's identified in building communities of podcast listeners with his company Flick. If you're a listener and you want to join The Mentors community on Flick, click here.
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It's never too late to try something new, and for us this week that's improv. The first lesson that you learn in improv is that saying "yes, and..." is crucial for developing interesting ideas.
The concept seems simple. You agree with anything that's happening in the scene and any idea that's introduced by someone else even if you thought it was going in a different direction. In practice, it takes a little while getting used to because in every day dialogue we tend to prioritize our ideas over others.
In this episode we discuss why saying yes is an effective tool in any creative exercise, especially when brainstorming ideas for something. We give specific examples of how this technique can be used to generate new ideas, and how we used it this week to put together a presentation for a talk we're giving on Wednesday.
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When Dan Porter started his second company he had every intention of building a massive business and getting rich. In 2013, after creating one of the most viral mobile games on the planet he achieved his goal and sold his business to Zynga for $183 million. And now he plans to go even bigger with his new company Overtime.
We got a chance to hear him speak last week to a small group of entrepreneurs that Sergei works with at the eLab at NYU, and we were inspired to share some of the insights and wisdom that Dan bestowed on us during his 60 minute conversation with the group.
In this episode you will learn:
1) How to compete with massive established companies and win
2) How to make products designed for a niche group, mainstream
3) The importance of relationships and how to cultivate them
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The founders of Facebook, Slack, and Twitter all started off building something completely different. How is it that they stumbled into creating some of the fastest growing and most impactful products of our generation?
In this week's 5 Minute Pick Me Up we discuss why you should simply focus on getting started on creating something instead of waiting for some big idea to strike, and how opportunities eventually start presenting themselves once you're in motion.
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A lot of people want to start something, but most never actually do. Why? They simply don’t want it or need it enough, and find happiness in other ways.
But, some of us never get started for a handful of simple reasons.
Fortunately, all of these obstacles can be overcome. In this episode, we discuss how to reframe your thinking to finally start acting towards your goals and dreams. We share our exact framework for getting out of the “funk” when you get to a point in your life when you’re constantly feeling unfulfilled.
We also give you specific examples of how we identified and improved on our respective strengths to gain the confidence to create.
Hear Sergei talk about how he got into acting, eventually landing a paid speaking role at an ABC pilot, and how Vadim became a lecturer at a University having never before taught in an academic setting.
The feeling of being stuck in your life can have a major impact on your overall happiness – follow these steps to quickly get out of that state of mind to continue to progress.
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Books can have the best mentorship moments. This week we have a story about Boris Berezovsky from The Oligarchs by David E. Hoffman. We recorded this episode on our drive from Boston to New York City this Sunday, so lucky for you Sergei's Nissan 300ZX makes a guest appearance.
In this episode we discuss how it was possible for a career academic to become a billionaire, and how the same thing can be done today to create opportunities.
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When you're inventing something completely new you don't have the benefit of following someone else's blueprint. So how do you know if you're on the right track? Patience, and good old fashioned trial and error. Within a few short years of coming up with his innovation for gluten free freshly baked bread, Tristaun LeClaire and his brother grew their business to half a million dollars in revenue and distribution in major stores like Whole Foods, but the business almost failed before they got their first major distributor.
In our second interview recorded live at the FounderMade Discovery Show we chat with the founder of Simple Kneads about how he came up with the idea for his company, and the immediate demand he saw from the gluten intolerant community. We also talk about what happened when the company moved to North Carolina and hit a major obstacle when trying to scale production.
Tristaun details how he got through that difficult moment, where they found their initial capital, and what the brothers did to get on the shelves of large distributors that quickly started generating cash flow for the business.
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People don't think their way into acting differently, they act their way into thinking differently. We recently heard that advice on the Armchair Expert podcast, and it reminded us of a story about our late dad.
In this episode we talk about how after being diagnosed with cancer at the age of 72 and not working for over a year our dad ended up creating a job opportunity for himself when he decided to go back to work.
We all come up with excuses that prevent us from acting, but how can we break out of that cycle? In this episode you will learn how to:
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How do you take an idea for a new hardware innovation and attract funding for it? You have to start with the prototype. In part two of our interview with Kevin Yoo we find out how the founder of WearWorks became so inspired to work on the R&D for his product for several years, getting accepted into BMW's URBAN-X accelerator and attracting half a million dollars in grants and investment in the process.
We discuss the importance of branding, especially for a physical product where the experience of the consumer begins when they first interact with the brand, heavily influencing how they feel when they first handle the product. Kevin also tells us why he would be happy to work on this business for the rest of his life, and the vision he sees for the future of navigation and his company.
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This week we were invited to attend the FounderMade Discovery Show in NYC where hundreds of founders of consumer brands in food, beauty, nutrition and more showcased their products to consumers and store buyers in a huge exhibition downtown.
In this edition of the 5 Minute Pick Me Up, we let you listen in on some takeaways from Christine Saleh, the founder of Skinvolve, who started her beauty brand with her sisters in Miami, and told us exactly how she grew the company to ultimately get on the shelves of Anthropologie. She also shared a unique distribution channel that she found to get the product in front of millions of potential customers.
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While most of us don't have everything figured out, there are others that seem to navigate life with the help of an invisible compass. This week we met with one such person, Kevin Yoo, the founder of WearWorks, which is creating the future of navigation using haptic feedback - ie, leveraging feel and touch, not sight. In college he already became an award winning industrial designer which quickly lead to opportunities to work on projects with large corporations like GE. It was during that time that he started to realize what his purpose was and what truly motivated him to act.
In part one of our interview with Kevin we learn about his origin story and what prepared him to build a product designed for the blind and vision impaired, ultimately landing his team into NYTimes,The Discovery Channel, TechCrunch, and a TED Talk earlier this year. We discuss how he recruited an all star team and why he realized early on that his goal in life would be to bring people together to build things that matter.
In part two Kevin talks about how he iterated on the original concept to turn it into a business, how his team was able to secure half a million dollars in funding, and the various applications of the technology they're building today that makes his new product revolutionary. If you're interested in supporting WearWorks consider contributing to their Kickstarter and get early access to their first product, Wayband.
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What's the easiest way to notice lucrative opportunities? By keeping your eyes open in the industry that you're already an expert in.
This week Vadim comes back from his trip to Italy and talks about a truck driver and chef turned entrepreneur that he met while at a friend's wedding in Tuscany. In this episode you will learn:
1) How to find a niche in the industry you're working in
2) Why there is a massive competitive advantage to starting a business where you're a domain expert
3) What you can start doing today to understand where the opportunities are
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This is a new segment where we answer questions that we get from founders in private - the things that they're too afraid to ask just anyone.
In this week's episode we tackle three questions that have come up in our recent conversations with founders. We discuss:
1) How do I know if I'm building the right thing?
2) What can I do if my cofounder is not pulling their weight?
3) When is it okay to pay myself?
To answer these questions, we pull from our own experience and tell you the exact advice we've given to entrepreneurs in the accelerator programs we work with so you can apply it to your own business.
We discuss what you can do to know if you're on the right track with your business, how to have difficult conversations with your co-founder about the work that's being done and being honest with yourself about the work you're doing, and the right way to think about compensation in the early days.
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This week, we had a chance to hear from the founder of the popular app Foursquare, Dennis Crowley, when he came to speak to a group of entrepreneurs at NYU.
In this edition of the 5 Minute Pick Me Up, you’ll get the inside story of how Dennis came up with the original idea of a location-based check-in app back in 1999 when smart phones didn’t even exist, how he ended up selling that concept that he called Dodgeball to Google in 2005, and how he was able to start the concept all over again under the name of Foursquare in 2009 to grow it to tens of millions of users.
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James was 26 years old when he was promoted to managing director at a 900 person public relations agency. He spent the 4 years after college learning everything he could about the business, adding value wherever he could eventually becoming invaluable to clients that wanted to spend more money with his agency because of the work that he was doing.
In the third episode of our Scaling Mentorship series where we hold live interviews with corporate leaders, we get an inside look into how a leader is made in a business that is heavily relationship based. When James decided he needed a new challenge, he moved to Australia to help turn around a small PR company that was operating at a loss. Within 7 years he grew it from 15 people to over 100 with operations all across Asia Pacific. His experience traveling the world was instrumental in helping him create new business units across new geographies and cultures where the clients and their needs had to be relearned.
In our interview we also learn how the PR business has changed and what companies should be looking for when partnering with agencies today. James Wright speaks to the future of PR, where he sees massive opportunities, and what people should do if they want to break into the industry.
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Sure, David Letterman had his own hugely popular TV show that ran for 33 years. Yes, being one of the most recognizable personalities on the planet helped him quickly land a Netflix show shortly thereafter. But, David had his own issues, struggles, and obstacles. Even though he had one of the most popular shows on TV there were other entertainers out there that he was jealous of.
In this week's 5 Minute Pick Me Up we think back to when we got the opportunity to sit in David Letterman's old screening room earlier this year, and the feeling of excitement that we felt even getting to walk through the same halls as David, Stephen Colbert, and so many others. But, while acknowledging another person's achievements or even being envious of them is natural, it's not productive to dwell on it. In our episode we talk about how we all should focus on our own super powers, and why it's important to remember that you'll always have someone else to compare yourself to. Regardless of how successful you become there will always be someone else on a different level. Try to be grateful for your own accomplishments, and simply stay focused on yourself.
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Back in September we had an idea. Could we give a compelling talk to an auditorium full of thirteen year olds? Our motivation ran a bit deeper. Our nephew was about to head to high school, and this might be the last chance for us to give a talk to him and his classmates before sports, girls, and schoolwork completely took over his life.
In this episode we discuss how the whole thing came together, from our brother's introduction to the school principal, to pitching him on the idea and trying to secure a budget for the speaking engagement. We also talk through exactly how we came up with the idea for the talk, and what we did in the final weeks to create one of the most engaging hour long talks we've done in a while.
If you're interested in learning about how to convince someone to give you a platform to speak, what goes into putting on an event like this, how to plan and structure a long talk, and what it takes to create additional value for yourself (like video assets, potential press, and other speaking opportunities) tune into this episode and share with a friend that mind find it valuable. Throughout this episode we let you listen in on some of the calls we had to make this happen, and include excerpts from the actual talk we delivered last week.
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On April 26th, 1986 and the days that followed the Chernobyl Disaster, very few people actually learned about what had happened. This week we got a first person account from our mom, who was then taking care of infant 5 month old twins (us) when the media finally announced what had happened.
We discuss the aftermath of the disaster from the perspective of normal citizens living in an oppressed regime that held control over large parts of Eastern Europe and Asia at the time.
We also draw parallels to the relative omnipresent freedom that we have here in the United States, and why we should all take advantage of our ability to question the status quo and create change where it's necessary.
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By the time Callie and Kelly were selected to pitch at Shark Tank, Slumberkins had surpassed one million dollars in revenue, all with no outside investment. What started off as a weekend side hustle for these two new moms turned into a retail and content business with 10 employees and a potential TV deal that's in the making.
Listeners of The Mentors can get 20% off of their first order of Slumberkins by using the code 'mentors' at checkout. Visit https://slumberkins.com/.
In this episode the founders break down exactly how they got their start, from sewing stuffed animals by hand every night and selling them at craft fairs to creating an online presence with a loyal following. Callie Christensen and Kelly Oriard describe exactly how they leveraged social media (namely Instagram) to grow their sales from day one, and how they divide responsibilities as Co-CEOs. They tell us what they would say to popular influencers to get them to promote their products and how they convinced a giant manufacturer to give them a chance.
Before starting their business, Callie and Kelly had been friends for 20 years, and while their experience as teachers and therapists gave them the idea for their business, they had to slowly figure out how to become entrepreneurs and create a sustainable businesses. Their story is a testament to the fact that you don't have to have years of experience or deep business knowledge before you start building something. You do, however, have to start.
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In this edition of the 5 Minute Pick Me Up, we wanted to share a story of our family military history, and talk about why some of the biggest entrepreneurial success stories of the last century came from people who served in the armed forces.
We start off the episode with a Soviet military hymn and end with a few reasons why holidays like Memorial Day should inspire all of us to be our best selves.
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One of the biggest issues permeating the business and political landscape in America today is that of student debt. More than 44 million Americans collectively have over $1.5 trillion in student debt, $521 billion more than total credit card debt. We recently wrote about this issue on Harvard Business Review, and today we had a chance to talk to David Chang, the CEO of Gradifi, one of the companies that's actively working to reduce that massive number.
David has an impressive background. He's been a leader at Goldman Sachs, Paypal, TripAdvisor, and several other enterprises. He's also invested in over 40 companies, and has worked with student entrepreneurs at some of the top business programs in the world - Harvard Business School and Babson College. This work lead him to realize that students and recent graduates today are at an unfair disadvantage, and when the opportunity to lead Gradifi (a First Republic company) came he decided to stop all of his other projects to focus on the opportunity help remove this unfair disadvantage.
In our episode we talk through David's dynamic career and what he's learned from being part of 5 acquisitions. We also dig into what affects someone's decision to start a company, and what angel investors look for in startup founders before deciding to give them money. Finally, we attempt to breakdown how the problem of rising student debt can be curbed, and what options are currently available for those that need debt relief.
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This week we caught up with Kyle Bergman of Swoveralls (from episode 44) to learn about what's been happening with his business after his episode on Shark Tank aired a few weeks ago.
You'll hear an update on how much revenue he's generated since then, the new challenges he's tackling as he grows, and who he needs to hire in the next few months to continue to build his clothing empire.
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After just one month at her new sales job at Costco, the CEO promoted Becky to Head of Global, running the business across 10 countries. In part 2 of our new live event series - Scaling Mentorship - Becky Frankiewicz, President of ManpowerGroup North America, talks about how she was able to accelerate her career time and time again as she rose the ranks to become an executive leader.
Two main themes come up through out the episode. The importance of finding mentors and people that you can learn from to help you make the right decisions, and the value of being willing to take on challenges that other people avoid and jobs that other people have failed in.
We get into specific stories about how Becky navigated difficult moments in her career and what she did to be able to change jobs multiple times, with directly actionable advice for anyone that's looking to make a change in their lives and do something they really want.
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Talking to important people can feel intimidating, so in this edition of the 5 Minute Pick Me Up, we decided to talk about why it's actually easier than most people think.
Sergei tells a story of how he navigated a conversation with a billionaire, and we dive into some of the things we learned in our recent conversations with leaders of major companies in our Scaling Mentorship series, to hear their thoughts on approaching seemingly unapproachable people.
Part of it has to do with understanding real vs. perceived risk, a topic we talked about in more detail this Friday on the Jordan Harbinger Show.
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Andrew used to be the kind of person that didn't speak unless spoken to, never seeking to be the center of attention. That all changed in High School when he decided to run for class secretary and won, which opened up other opportunities like getting to meet President Jimmy Carter when he visited the school. From that moment, he was a people person.
This is the first of a series of live interviews we're recording with corporate leaders called Scaling Mentorship where we dive into how leaders of large and successful organizations choose to run their companies, and the steps they took in their careers to get to where they are.
Our interview with Andrew starts with his formative years of working for his father's sandwich shop, and how this was his first experience with leadership. We then dive into how he climbed the ladder at Nixon Peabody as it grew from 100 people to 1,500, and $530 Million in revenue. We get actionable advice on how a network can turn into business opportunities, and why the key to building trust with someone is repeat interactions over a long period of time.
Andrew is unlike most lawyers, and his propensity to go against the grain is what helped him create a different type of organization - one that focuses on developing people based on their unique abilities.
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This week I got to attend a screening of "Of Mics and Men", a new docuseries on Showtime. After a show like this gets made, the director and talent will go on the road to promote it, and in this case present it to professionals in the entertainment industry for Emmy consideration.
After the screening I got a chance to meet and talk to RZA, one of the founders and leaders of the group. In this week's 5 Minute Pick Me Up we talk about what we learned from the story of the Wu-Tang Clan's rise to prominence in the early 90s from the streets of Brooklyn and Staten Island, and why RZA, despite his busy schedule, stayed and networked with professionals and fans on Monday late into the night.
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How do you grow to half a million users in 6 months? In Part 2 of our interview with Wayne Mackey of Statespace he details how he set out to build a different type of technology company, and why he thinks that's contributed to his fast growth.
After joining the Expa accelerator Wayne and his team quickly focused on building their product and releasing it to real users as quickly as possible to get feedback. Their main distribution channel was Steam, but unlike other gaming products they were pushing live product updates 3 times a week, something that the engineers he recruited were not accustomed too.
In our conversation Wayne discusses the other methods he used to grow his users early on, his obsession with communicating with every user that reaches out, and how he was able to raise a million dollars in the course of a few weeks.
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Entrepreneurship is hard, and sometimes we need to show our loved ones why we we’re working on something that to them might seem like crazy. On this week’s episode, we talk about the importance of having a close support network and how to show the people in your life the value you’re creating through action and results.
As an example of how having positive support and reinforcement can help you get to move forward, we talk about how a meeting with a close friend this week (also an entrepreneur) sparked a new business idea and why we were compelled to act on it quickly.
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When Wayne got fired from Applebees for a new hand tattoo, he didn’t know that less than a decade later he’d be naming a new part of the brain. In Part I of our two part series with the founder of Statespace we hear about why being obsessed with video games and training as an MMA fighter prepared him to start a video game analytics company as a young Neuroscience postdoc at NYU.
Wayne’s story starts in high school where he taught himself how to code for fun, but the rest of his path to being a tech founder is anything but usual. Growing up in a small town in Ohio he originally didn’t set his eyes on college, instead working various jobs in sales, customer service, and management. By the time he went back to school towards his 30s, starting with ITT Tech and a community college, he realized he could capitalize on his computer science knowledge.
This episode details how he went from that small community college to getting a PhD in neuroscience at NYU, and how he came up with the idea for his startup, a product that uses neuroscience to help people get better at video games. In Part II, we’ll discuss how he raised capital and grew his business to hundreds of thousands of users in his first year.
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Creatives are 2x-7x more likely to come up with something radically different. In his book Originals, Adam Grant explains that in a study of thousands of Americans - entrepreneurs, scientists, and inventors typically had one thing in common - they all had other creative interests like playing an instrument, writing short stories, painting, acting, etc.
In this episode we discuss how indulging in pursuits outside of your regular vocation or area of expertise actually opens up your mind to think in different and new ways, and to seeing new opportunities.
We discuss why Galileo was the first to realize that the moon had mountains, what Conan O’Brien does to keep his comedic brain sharp, and the characteristic that makes Nobel Prize winners different. We also talk about how making parody videos helps us in other areas of our lives and in business.
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Part II of our interview with Gillian Morris starts with a cautionary tale about taking people for their word, and why a potential investment is never real until you have the money in the bank.
As with every obstacle in her entrepreneurial path, Gillian quickly learned the complicated and sometimes cryptic landscape of dealing with investors to raise more than half a million dollars in her first round.
In the second part of our interview Gillian talks about how she dealt with a co-founder leaving, and how her team ended up monetizing Hitlist to turn it into a profitable company. We also dig into how her job changed when the company had to adjust its focus on sales, and why she made the decision early on to have a distributed team with no central office.
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In business, as in life, we find ourselves in many unexpected situations where the natural instinct is to freeze up.
In today’s 5 Minute Pick Me Up (that admittedly is closer to 11 minutes), we talk about the meaning of the phrase “the show must go on,” and how anyone can become better at dealing with difficult situations, just by learning how to move on, and keep going.
We discuss a few moments in our lives, on the stage, in a debate club, and in a high-stakes business meeting, where an ability to move the show along really came in handy.
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Lots of people love to travel, but how do you turn a hobby into a real business? Gillian Morris had a full time job in Istanbul and she figured out that she could get her friends to visit her there if she found cheap flights for them for specific dates. Soon, she was getting weekly requests from dozens of people to send them cheap flight deals, taking up nearly all of her free time.
In part one of our two part interview with Gillian we learn how she was able to turn her idea into a real business after deciding to attend a conference in Europe that would lead to a press release that grew her user base to 25,000. Gillian talks about how as a first time founder she had to learn everything, from how to build a product and understand user data, to marketing and learning how to talk to investors.
In part two you will hear how she ended up getting her first investor, what she did to monetize the app, and why she decided to build a distributed team at Hitlist.
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This week has been full of events for us, culminating in a weekend charity brunch that was executed so well that we decided to do an episode about it.
You will learn:
Events do require significant effort to be successful, but it’s incredibly rewarding to get a bunch of people together in one place to create new relationships. If you've been thinking about organizing something (anything) we urge you to try it. Only good things can come of it.
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Darius was on stage with NYTimes columnist David Brooks in front of 2,000 people, and he couldn't be more in his element. Just a week before that, he found out from a Tweet that he was going to be in the opening Keynote of a major conference. I had a chance to catch up with him after his panel to hear his story and find out how he ended up on that stage.
At 25 years old, him and his co-founders (all friends from Georgetown University) have been able to build an impactful non-profit, GOODProjects, that's already transforming communities in Washington D.C., aimed at reducing gun violence and ending poverty in the area.
In this episode, Darius walks us through how the idea for his organization came about, from running their very first over-subscribed summer camp to growing to 25 team members, attracting major donors and even launching an investment fund in the process.
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If you really want something, don't wait for all of the stars to align to get started.
That's the moral of the story for today's 5 Minute Pick Me Up about an entrepreneur we met from Ghana that's trying to build the Netflix of Africa.
When he got the idea for this tech platform, everyone told him that he won't get anywhere without a technical co-founder. He could have let that slow him down, but instead he focused on what he can accomplish right now.
In this episode you will learn how he:
1) Outsourced the development of his technology until he found the right partner
2) Convinced local producers to provide him with content
3) Got a major distribution deal by focusing on what motivates a major corporate partner
We also discuss why sometimes finding the right market fit for your business simply means looking somewhere new, like a new geography or customer segment.
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For our 100th show we decided to go through some of our most popular episodes and pick out the best parts. If you’re a first time listener, this is a great way to get a feel for our classy style, and if you’re a veteran, we love you and hope you enjoy this trip down memory lane.
Here’s the breakdown of the clips featured in this episode:
Episode 7: Becoming Unstuck – How To Finally Get Started, on Sergei getting a role in a feature film.
Episode 8: Building a 90 Million Dollar Business After 50, with Larry Petretti, on what Larry did when he first started building his business
Episode 11: How to Network Like a Pickup Artist, on the three second rule of not giving a… hoot.
Episode 30: How To Make It In America (aka How To Do What You Love In A Communist Country Part III), on how our parents left their careers and took menial jobs to build a life for us in America
Episode 32: The Secret to Finding Big Opportunities, with Carey Smith of Big Ass Fans, on what to look for when starting a business from an entrepreneur that sold his company for $500 million.
Episode 24: How Julie Smolyansky of Lifeway Became CEO of a Public Company at 27, on how Julie took over Lifeway when her father died.
Thank you for listening, and see you next week. Love, The Mentors.
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For our 99th episode, we've got 99 problems on our mind, and we wanted to discuss some of the ways Vadim and I have tackled seemingly insurmountable problems in the last few years.
In today's 5 Minute Pick Me Up (okay we know it's 10 minutes but shush) we describe the three quick ways to remove the burden of having big problems weighing on you.
First thing you can do is to Act Fast. Here we talk about the accounting problem that almost cost our business, and how we acted fast to solve it with our lawyers.
Second is to Cross Things Off by starting with the quickest and most fundamental next step in front of you, and here Sergei talks about how he was able to plan and execute an entire accelerator program just 2 months before it launched.
Third is to Be Solution Oriented. Especially in the workplace, no one wants to work with someone who just focuses on the problems. Here Vadim discusses how he was able to add value immediately at a startup he worked at by being the person who was willing to solve the CTO's major problems.
Intro Lyrics to 99 (Business) Problems
If you got work problems I feel bad for you son
I got 99 problems, but my business ain't one
I got the tax patrol on the cash patrol
Foes that want ta make sure my biz gets closed
Music Credit: Youtube: MakerOfAllMusic1DS
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Some people have an uncanny ability to pitch themselves or their ideas so eloquently, it makes you feel like it’s an unattainable skill that they’re born with. While it may come more naturally to some, anyone can make significant improvements in this area by following a few simple principles.
We start this episode by talking about what you should avoid doing in an elevator pitch. This isn’t your time to tell your entire story, or to talk about everything that you or your product can do. The idea is to simplify things as much as possible by only focusing on the most important and impressive aspects of what you do while making it relatable to the specific audience you’re addressing.
We also discuss how to actually figure out what your target audience cares about and provide a simple framework for composing your elevator pitch. Throughout the episode we give specific stories of how we’ve helped entrepreneurs refine their elevator pitch which should help you apply it to your own story.
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Just because your idea or big vision isn't quite working out the way you thought it would, doesn't mean that it's not possible to make small adjustments to turn it into something that works.
In this edition of the 5 Minute Pick Me Up, we talk about a founder with a big vision in the computer science education space who was able to turn her business around by listening to the market, and we share some quick tips on how to get better at knowing when to adjust course in with you venture.
We talk about how even Steve Jobs couldn't sell his initial vision of a personal computer in every home, and who he sold to at first while he waited for the technology, and the market to mature.
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Reading Rainbow ran on PBS for 23 years and as the host of the show our guest LeVar Burton developed an immense appreciation for the importance of access to literature for young children. While his initial entrepreneurial skills were developed as a working actor, leading him to land roles in shows like Star Trek and Roots, after Reading Rainbow went off the air in 2006 he decided to buy its rights and made it his mission to leave an impact on future generations through reading.
We sat down with LeVar and Alicia Levi, the CEO of Reading Is Fundamental (RIF), a non-profit founded in 1966 that has 400,000 volunteers nationwide working to bring books and literacy resources to millions of people. We start by discussing how they think about risk taking and failure, and the best frame of mind to move past obstacles that paralyze you. LeVar tells us how Skybrary, the company he started in 2012, ultimately took off when the Kickstarter they launched raised their goal of $1 million in 11 hours instead of the planned 35 days.
We also learn how their massive new partnership came about, starting from a chance PSA that LeVar did for the non-profit in Los Angeles, and why investing into building your relationships can have life changing consequences.
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This week we got to interview LeVar Burton of Reading Rainbow and Star Trek fame. That episode is being released on Wednesday, but we thought you might want to know exactly how we got him on our show.
In this episode we discuss the importance of building strong relationships and delivering on your promises to help you get the types of opportunities you're looking for.
We also talk about why taking risks and being willing to face rejection becomes an invaluable skill in this whole process
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Ever wonder what it takes to plan and run an 8,000 person conference? While attending SXSW EDU this week, Vadim got a chance to speak with the founder of the conference, Ron Reed.
This episode covers the origin story of the education conference and how Ron saw a big opportunity to build a community for people interested in improving education. In our conversation Ron explains why the original event was double the expected size, and talks about how the conversation has changed over the years around education. We also dive into what it takes to plan and run a conference of this magnitude, which grew to about 8,000 attendees in 2019.
Vadim also had a chance to watch the keynote address from renown author and New York Times columnist David Brooks, and found out how Ron was able to get David to speak at this year’s event.
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This weekend we set an audacious goal for ourselves of writing, recording, and filming an entire parody music video for all of you by the time this episode was published. The only problem is that when we met to work on it, we started hitting roadblocks pretty much right away.
In this edition of The 5 Minute Pick Me Up, we discuss how we were able to use reframing to figure out why we weren't making any progress on our work, and to change our perspective in a way that led to the most productive 12 hours we've had in a long time.
Please enjoy the product of our work session, our second parody titled "Friends Now", a story about why networking is important, sang to the tune of "These Days" by Rudimental.
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This week we have a returning guest, Olga Nesterova owner of DANCECLASS, who was one of the first guests on this show. If you want to hear her origin story, check out Episode 6: World Champion Dancer Olga Nesterova, from the UN to the NBA Playoffs Halftime Show.
Listeners of this show can get 50% off of Olga's most popular 2 For 1 Deal Group Class by going to www.danceclass.today/deals and using the code THEMENTORS.
In this episode we discuss a major change that she made in her business this past summer after running it for almost 4 years. Olga talks about how she identified a more lucrative opportunity, selling dance classes to other corporations, and how she learned how to sell to big companies in New York City. In less than 6 months, this part of her business is already generating half of her revenues.
She also talks about why companies find these classes so valuable, helping her provide a differentiated offering. Many corporations care about the wellness of their employees, providing activities like yoga classes, but learning how to dance at work is still a novel idea. Turns out it's not only fun for employees, but acts as a great social activity that helps employees get to know each other better, and makes them more productive at their jobs.
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If you only feel satisfied when you think you're working on something big enough, you're likely missing lucrative opportunities. It's okay to dream big, but being preoccupied with whether or not you're solving a big enough problem means you're not actually executing.
In this episode we talk about Sergei's old boss, Andrew Yang, and how he was able to become a millionaire after he stopped chasing big ideas that couldn't be turned into sustainable businesses. This initial success later helped him work on even more audacious pursuits, like creating a national non-profit with Venture for America, and now running for President of The United States in the 2020 election.
If you want to hear us dive deeper into these topics, listen to Episode 68: How To Think Big While Starting Small With Praful Mathur and Episode 7: Becoming Unstuck – How To Finally Get Started.
https://mnt.rs/thinkbig
https://mnt.rs/unstuck
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What would happen if you learned to push just a little more to get your way? Most of us give up the minute someone tells us that something is non-negotiable, but in our experience very few things actually are.
To illustrate this point, we decided to tell you three different stories. The first two are about scenarios where we were able to negotiate something even when it seemed impossible to do so, including a medical bill and a software license fee that was set in stone. The third is about Sergei's old boss, and how he was able to negotiate a bonus payout for all of his employees, virtually pulling money out of thin air.
Through these examples and more we've learned that almost anything can be negotiated as long as you take the time to ask the right questions and continue to dig, establish leverage, and focus on retaining the relationship with the person you're speaking with. For every rule, you can find an exception.
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You don't have to have a revolutionary business idea to be a successful entrepreneur. It's more important to find a way to provide value for a specific group of people in a differentiated way, and figure out how to reach those people consistently.
This week's 5 Minute Pick Me Up is about a 17 year old entrepreneur who built a significant revenue generating business while still in high school
Sergei met this founder, who's now a Freshman at NYU, and discussed how he built his local chore service business from a one man operation, to a multi city service with an army of contractors.
We discuss how he went from a small idea to identifying a bigger opportunity that he's working to scale into a big business.
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Bullying affects 20% of high school students and 25% of middle school students (stats from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). It's a serious problem, especially with the advent of cyberbullying, and like many immigrants, when we came to the United States we fell victim to a lot of it. Please see resources below if this is something that affects you or your family.
In this week's episode, however, we wanted to highlight how getting bullied made us stronger in business. Most of us face some kind of adversity, and our ability to learn to overcome difficult situations, events, and people help us navigate life's unpredictable nature. In business, these skills and strengths can pay huge dividends.
In this episode we discuss five main lessons that we learned from being bullied at a young age. Learning to trust others, but verifying their intentions, developing a thick skin, developing an ability to push for what you want, working with difficult personalities, and learning how do diffuse situations. We also try to provide specific stories wherever we can.
Here are some resources for those affected by bullying.
https://www.stopbullying.gov/get-help-now/index.html
https://antibullyingsoftware.com/anti-bullying-hotlines-in-the-us-and-canada/
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Most people are in a constant search for a formula for success, eager to find out how someone else was able to gain wealth or fame to see if they can do the same. But successful individuals have one thing in common. Instead of spending all of their time searching for a formula, they create their own path, focusing on what makes them unique.
In this episode we discuss the importance of being your unique and authentic self in becoming successful, and why your effort is better spent staying true to yourself rather than following someone else's path. We tell the story of Howie Mandel and how his unique personality made him one of the most famous comedians of the 80s.
We also decided to follow our own advice this week, by doing something that we love - writing music. Listen to our parody of Maroon 5's "Girls Like You" where we sing about Episode 15 - How to Get the Attention of Important People in a song called [Important] Folks Like You.
"Folks Like You" Lyrics:
Spent 24 hours
I've got more outreach to do
I spent the weekend
Writing emails, to you.
We spent the late night
To get that subject line right, click it?
But now it's all good baby
That open rate grows steady,
Will you respond?
Cuz folks like you
Will only respond if you
Have got a good reason to
The value is clear to you, yeah yeah
Folks like you
Don't beat around the bush
That's why i'm direct with you
Need a contact like you, yeah yeah
Yeah yeah yeah
Yeah yeah yeah
Need a contact like you, yeah yeah
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Hardware is inherently harder to build than software, but advances in technology are making it much easier for engineering minds that are interested in bringing physical products to life.
When Christine Schindler and Dutch Waanders got the idea for PathSpot, a hand scanner that instantly detects invisible signs of bacteria and viruses, they wanted to figure out how to iterate on their product as quickly as possible. After getting accepted to the Venture for America Accelerator, Sergei helped them get access to a 3D printer there and pretty soon they were going door to door to restaurants to pitch their new idea - a revolutionary technology designed to prevent foodborne illness.
In this episode, Christine tells us how she secured meetings with restaurant owners with a simple 3D Printed Prototype, and how her team continuously improved the product over the coming months to eventually secure their first order. Over the course of just a year, the team went on to complete the TechStars accelerator program, raising millions of dollars from investors, and streamlining the manufacturing/supply chain process to handle contracts with restaurant chains that are placing orders for thousands of units.
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This week, we decided to give you an inside look into a recent phone call we recorded where we ask a high school principal for a speaking budget.
For many people, asking someone what they might be willing to pay is the most uncomfortable part of any sales or business development conversation - aka, going for the close. But with practice, you can learn how to do this quickly and effectively, creating new opportunities that may have been left on the table before.
You'll hear how to use active listening to rephrase your line of questioning when asking for something like budget or a commitment to finally get the answer that you want.
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Anxiety has risen as much as 30 percent in the last 4 years, affecting as much as a fifth of the population. While its causes are obviously varied, in this episode we decided to tackle work related stress and anxiety.
The episode is split up into three sections, with examples throughout:
Finding Focus and Prioritizing, where we discuss how to take control of your schedule by focusing on one thing at a time, and one main goal per day. We also talk about checking things off of your to-do list, and how doing the things you're least comfortable with first can have a huge impact on reducing stress and improving your productivity.
Removing Sources of Anxiety, where we touch on the importance of taking the time to walk away from all sources of inputs and simply reflecting. We also talk about how restructuring the use of social media an email can help reduce a lot of latent stress.
And lastly:
Getting help, possibly the most important step. You're never alone in your struggles, and simply speaking with significant others, friends, therapists, and even strangers can make you feel better. We also suggest a buddy system for those of us that do a lot of solo work to help you get out of your own head.
Happy Listening.
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"Destiny does not do home visits. You have to go for it." Today's 5 Minute Pick Me Up was inspired by this quote from a great fiction novel we read, The Shadow of The Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.
In this episode, Sergei talks about 2 sets of entrepreneurs that he advises in the fashion ecommerce space, and how "going for it" made the difference for one of the companies when raising money from investors.
You will learn:
1) The type of work that actually matters in the early days
2) Why you might want to hold off on raising money
3) What you can do this week to create your own destiny
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This is a continuation of Monday's episode where we interview two more startup teams that just completed a two week program at NYU where their goal was to talk to as many people as possible to validate their business idea.
We asked the founders to leave their drinks a the bar, and join us outside in 30 degree weather to tell us what they learned in the program, and what they plan to do differently now that they're more informed.
The first founders are Mir Hwang and Ryan Kim of GigFinesse. Mir discusses how his early execution helped him recruit Rich as a technical co-founder, who just quit his engineering job at Google to join the project as CTO. Even though they entered the program with hundreds of gigs booked, they approached every customer conversation with an open mind, and this ability to challenge their own assumptions is changing the way they plan to build their software.
Up next was Syreeta Gates and Airis Johnson of Yo Stay Hungry. They've been working on their event company for four years without making any money, and decided to use this two week sprint at NYU as a way to see if they can figure out a revenue model for their already popular event series.
They discuss how they were able to schedule over 35 interviews with advertising agencies over one weekend, and the large revenue opportunity they've identified through sponsors hungry to get in front of the hundreds of people that attend each of their events.
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This week we decided to interview 3 sets of entrepreneurs that Sergei works with, right at the end of a two week program where they had to speak with as many prospective customers as possible to try to validate their business idea.
We spoke with a student named Kanishk who had some really creative ideas for how to meet as many doctors and other healthcare professionals as possible in less than 2 weeks. He discusses what worked, what didn't, and how this process was instrumental in helping them figure out what kind of business they can build for healthcare professionals. The founders also told us how they were able to use this process to secure their first pilot customer.
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In their first two years of business, the founders of Nardo's Natural bootstrapped their business to $30,000 in sales. Even though the four brothers had to figure out how to make this money last to fund all of the operations of their business, they were confident that there was a massive opportunity in their coconut oil skin care line. Their customers loved their products, and they had to make it work.
In this episode Danny Mastronardo, one of the brothers and owners, tells us exactly how the team got their first distribution deal at a 5 Diamond Rated Resort Hotel, and how they quickly became the highest selling product in the whole resort. The team was able to use their family focused brand to close their initial deal, and started building relationships with more and more hotels in the area. Two years later, one of the brothers came across a then new show called Shark Tank and they decided to send an email to the producers on a whim.
Danny tells the hilarious story of how the brothers broke all the rules to get selected to pitch on the show, and why they were ultimately successful in closing a deal with Barbara Corcoran. The advisor and mentor relationship with Barbara continues to this day, and has helped them land multiple appearances on Good Morning America, ultimately growing their brand to millions of dollars. Today, the brothers have diversified their revenue streams to include private label and contract manufacturing, launching over 250 brands in the last year alone.
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The art of persuasion comes down to understanding human behavior and what people want. In business and in life it's a very powerful tool, and while everyone has a different approach to persuading others, aggressively trying to force your way is usually not effective in the long run.
In this week's 5 Minute Pick Me Up, Vadim talks about how he was able to convince two YMCA employees to give him a free hat this week, and how we've used the same approach in sales to get past gatekeepers and reach important people.
You will learn:
1) How being nice to people is likely to make them want to help you
2) The importance of respecting authority and existing processes
3) Why building a human connection is more important than being right
4) How to come up with creative solutions to empower others
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The path to doing what you love is not always straight forward, and sometimes the hardest part of becoming an entrepreneur is figuring out what you don't know and trying to fill those gaps in knowledge as quickly as possible. Before he became an accomplished author, successful entrepreneur, and popular podcast host, Steve Glaveski, author of Employee to Entrepreneur, was there himself, which is why he decided to write a book that provides a blueprint for people that want to be freed from the corporate world and learn how to become creators and entrepreneurs.
In this interview Steve describes how he went from being a corporate employee that didn't feel purpose in his life to starting multiple successful businesses and building a life where he can create impact for the world. He provides highly tactical and actionable advice describing exactly how he built his businesses, from how he scheduled hundreds of meetings with prospective customers and leveraged press to raise money, to the actual tools that he uses to automate tasks and accomplish all of his goals.
We also discuss what Steve did to grow his team at his current company, Collective Campus, a corporate innovation and startup accelerator, and why he thinks it's so important to outsource certain parts of your job as quickly as possible to focus on high value activities like business development and strategy to accelerate your business growth.
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How often have you thought to yourself "wow - I haven't talked to her in forever?" We work very hard to meet new people and grow our personal and professional network, but it's easy to forget to stay in touch with the people that we meet. Friendships, partnerships, and opportunities can only happen if you actually work to build meaningful relationships.
In this episode we discuss how we recently made it a point to reconnect with some of our old colleagues, friends, and acquaintances, and the immediate unintended benefits that can come from simply asking how someone is doing.
In this episode you will learn:
1) The importance of doing things and not expecting anything in return
2) Why you shouldn't overthink things, and start reaching out to people that you've met
3) How to start acting towards reconnecting with people right away
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Why are New Year's Resolutions so popular? Because we always have hope that things can get better. It's how we survive. The start of a new year can feel a lot like moving to a different city and starting over. Opportunities seem endless, and you can develop yourself into someone completely different. Unfortunately, most resolutions tend to fail unless they're properly managed. It's important to first understand that changing your life and acquiring new habits is more of a cyclical process - a constant back and forth. In our experience, we've found that there's a few critical things you can do set yourself up to achieve your resolution goals.
In this episode we discuss our 2018 resolution - what we called "The Year of Content" at the beginning of the year, and break things down into four main takeaways:
We tie these concepts into the creation of The Mentors Podcast this year, and why we think we were able to make big progress towards our "year of content" goal this year. We also make parallels to other popular resolutions, like weight loss, and talk about how successful entrepreneurs like Scott Belsky of Behance (acquired by Adobe) get past potential points of failure/giving up when things seem very uncertain.
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Highlights from 5 of our most popular episodes of the 75 released this year. On this New Year's Eve we've decided to review the top 5 episodes since The Mentors podcast was launched at the beginning of 2018. You will hear some of the main lessons learned from our most popular interviews and stories that really resonated with our listeners throughout the year.
In this episode you will hear about:
Episode 32: The Secret to Finding Big Opportunities, with Carey Smith of Big Ass Fans
Episode 8: Building a 90 Million Dollar Business After 50, with Larry Petretti
Episode 13: How to Start a Successful Coffee Shop in One of The Biggest Cities in The World
Episodes: 22, 28, 30: How To Do What You Love In A Communist Country, a three part series about our father, Samuel Revzin
Episode 7: Becoming Unstuck - How To Finally Get Started
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Entrepreneurship is almost never a straight line. Much of the experience is unpredictable, and while you can usually weave together a cohesive story of how a successful business was able to get there, in the moment it's anything but cohesive. This is why Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, is famous for saying that "an entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down."
In Part 2 of our interview with Micah Brown, he details how he went from having incredible momentum in his business, to nearing the brink of failure on more than one occasion. In each example, persistence and continued execution is what kept him afloat, allowing him to survive until a lifeline seemingly came out of nowhere to keep his business moving forward.
We also discuss the work that Micah is doing to develop highly technical talent, focusing on building out their communication skills to teach them how to turn complicated ideas into massive, fundable opportunities.
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Is it risky to start a business based on a trend? Maybe, but if you want to start a business and you see an opportunity to meet customer demand that's currently not being addressed, it's riskier to keep waiting for another idea to find you.
In this episode we talk through three businesses that are following currently popular trends, and why they have the opportunity to become big. We also discuss why it's more important to first focus on the hard part of building a business (getting a product to market and finding customers) and why it's okay to worry about how you will turn it into a big business later.
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You don't have to wait until you're struck with a brilliant business idea to start scratching your entrepreneurial itch. There are plenty of opportunities to create efficiencies and solve impactful problems that aren't being addressed when you're working for someone else. This not only makes you a more effective entrepreneur in the future, but it can help you earn more money and skip several steps in your career.
Micah Brown grew up in South London, and started coding for fun at just 14 years old. But when he graduated college at 20 years old as a Royal Honoree in the UK, finding software engineering jobs wasn't easy. He decided to exercise his entrepreneurial instincts at his first job out of school working as an admin assistant at Aon. His ingenuity would go on to save the company $56 million.
In this episode, the first of two parts, we discuss how Micah Brown used his expertise as a database engineer to run product at massive brands like NBC Universal and Viacom, and how this led to him starting two companies in his mid 20s, both of which were eventually acquired. In next week's episode, he talks through how he negotiated the sale of his businesses and what lead him to launch a $5 million Deep Tech and Neuroscience fund this year.
You can find Micah on Instagram @micahbrownofficial and twitter @micahapbrown
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Today we reflect on the sad news of Colin Kroll's passing, founder of Vine and creator of HQ Trivia, and discuss the reality of being an entrepreneur and the importance of finding productive ways of dealing with the various difficulties that might come along the way.
You will learn:
1) Tony Robbin's technique for neutralizing emotions during especially trying times, from his first book Unlimited Power
2) The power of practicing daily gratitude
3) The importance of speaking with others to work through your issues, and some of the options available today for connecting with experts, like MyWellBeing and TalkSpace (used by celebrities like Michael Phelps)
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Failure has long been embraced by entrepreneurial minds, and some of the most successful inventors, businessmen, and creators credit their ultimate triumphs with their ability to endure repeated failure. As startup founders, musicians, podcast hosts, and self proclaimed "jacks of all trades" we're no strangers to failure.
In this episode, we take a stroll back to our very first attempts at venture creation, starting with our college days of trying to launch an affiliate marketing platform called AdLobby. We discuss the massive mistakes we made as first time entrepreneurs, including selling our car to pay for engineers that we couldn't even speak to. We also talk about the next two business we tried to start, and how we almost got into the top accelerator in the world after recruiting an MIT technical co-founder.
With each of our failures, however, we were able to leverage the experience to not only avoid making the same mistakes again, but even turned them into lucrative job opportunities with other tech startups in both Boston and New York City. Tune in to learn how you can start looking at failure differently, and what you can do to position it as a positive experience to others.
We leave you with this quote:
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." -Thomas Edison
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Going to a Russian bathhouses is a very unique experience, but we didn't expect to get a lesson on sales and customer relationships after our trip there this weekend. In this week's 5 Minute Pick Me Up, we explain why we think everyone should try the banya, and the valuable business lessons that we learned.
In this episode you will learn:
1) The importance of finding ways to engage with customers over and over again and seeing up-sell opportunities
2) How being flexible can help you generate more revenue
3) How high pricing can create perceived value
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Not everyone is born thinking that they can change the world, but most of us have dreamed about it. Entrepreneurs are first and foremost dreamers, but some think so big that they end up having a lasting impact on the world. Steve Jobs saw what Steve Wozniak couldn't, changing the world of computing and music forever. Elon Musk dared to create a car company despite major competition and a high chance of failure from incumbent organizations, not only dominating the electric car industry but paving the way for self-driving cars.In this week's episode we interview serial entrepreneur Praful Mathur to understand how entrepreneurs can learn to think big, and what makes a true visionary. At just 19 years old as an engineering student at Northeastern University, Praful convinced hundreds of taxi owners to partner with him on an unproven software/hardware advertising solution, beating out Verifone, a multi-billion dollar company. Since then he has gone through some of the top accelerators in the word, including Techstars and YCombinator, raising millions of dollars for multiple ventures. Praful talks about how he went from being a nervous engineer to learning how to sell, and how this new skill and knowledge is helping him execute on his next big ideas. His parting advice? Surround yourself with the types of people you want to be like and think like, and focus on working hard to solve the small problems first to eventually get to your big dream.
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If you listen to this show, you know that we got our startup chops by working in sales for several years. In one of Sergei's last sales jobs, he was tasked with making 100 calls a day. Most of the time, when you call Fortune 500 CEOs, they don't pick up the phone, but this time, the CEO of Sprint did. Listen to this latest edition of the 5 Minute Pick Me Up to find out exactly how the conversation went.
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We think so. But how? As coaches and university lecturers, we deeply believe that entrepreneurship can be learned, or more accurately - relearned. We're all born with entrepreneurial capacity, which starts with curiosity and the desire to experiment. Unfortunately for most of us, as we grow older we're conditioned to stop thinking in this way, both because the way that we're educated and because of what we constantly hear from seemingly more experienced people. Some of us are given opportunities to exercise our entrepreneurial muscles from a young age, while others are not. We start the episode by discussing the three main skills and aptitudes that make a successful entrepreneur - persistence, ability to evaluate risk, and adaptability - providing stories and examples of how entrepreneurs that we know have been able to learn and apply these skills themselves. This is what we've observed from interviewing and working with hundreds of entrepreneurs, both successful and not. We close the show with suggestions of what you can start doing to learn these entrepreneurial skills right now, and what's worked for us in our journey.
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Turns out running a drug cartel is a lot like running any major business enterprise. In this week's 5 Minute Pick Me Up, Vadim shares what he learned from watching Narcos Mexico over Thanksgiving break. We learn: 1) How a Mexican drug leader was able to motivate every other drug boss to work with him2) The importance truly understanding what drives the people you work with3) How you can apply this to your business to inspire others to work with you
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Every entrepreneurial success story has a strong visionary that's able to recruit countless others to help them along the way. Being willing to ask for help isn't only critical in the early days of building something. It can help you avoid mistakes at every level, filling any gaps in your knowledge, your network, your experience, and much more. Still, for many asking for help is not natural. It's easy to feel like you're inconveniencing someone while adding no value to them. Fortunately, this is mostly a false line of thinking.We start this episode by discussing how to get over this initial feeling of self-doubt by first understanding that every successful person has gotten help from someone else to get to where they are, and by using negative visualization to realize that the worst that can happen if you ask for help is, well, absolutely nothing. Next, we break down the most effective way to get others to help you, especially if you're approaching important people. Start by using whatever you can to your advantage (your friends, classmates, colleagues, your expertise, etc.) and prove to others that you're serious about what you're trying to accomplish. Lastly, we suggest offering value whenever you can, giving examples from our past, and being as specific as possible when asking others to help you. In the spirit of Thanksgiving we wanted to close this episode by thanking a few of the people that helped us in impactful ways this year, including Jordan Harbinger of The Jordan Harbinger Show, Sarah Green Carmichael of HBR, Georgie Mihaila of Goalcast, and Tanya Klitch of Forbes.com.
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Instacart recently announced a $271 Million funding round, and Sergei is reminded about a very similar concept he wanted to start around the same time that Apoorva Mehta started Instacart in 2012.The only difference was that Apoorva had a way to execute immediately, and Sergei did not. That's why the idea didn't matter, in that case, as much as the immediate ability to put something into market, and see if it's viable. And that's exactly what Apoorva did.Listen to this edition of the 5 Minute Pick Me Up on The Mentors Podcast to hear the whole story.
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How do you know if it's the right move to give up on a business you've been working on for over half a year? When Evan Stites-Clayton was approached by his co-founder Walker to give up on their business, a job site for college students, to work on a completely new product, a t-shirt company, he had to make this difficult decision. While throwing away months of hard work was painful, the new project was difficult to ignore. It had generated thousands of dollars after just one weekend of work, while the original business idea had no clear demand or differentiation after six months.Soon, the pair was working on the new business idea exclusively - a way for businesses to raise money from their online audience (crowd-funding) by selling merchandise - specifically T-Shirts. Teespring was born. In this episode, Evan outlines exactly how this idea was conceived, and what the team did in the early days to find customers. We also uncover how they stumbled upon a new marketing channel that would go on to grow their business from $250,000 dollars a month in sales, to over a million dollars a day. Evan and his co-founder Walker's meteoric growth helped them raise over $65 million from some of the top investors in the world, like Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures, but as the company scrambled to keep up with investor's demands to maintain their hyper growth, the company started experiencing issues. In our interview, Evan opens up about some of the pitfalls of growing too quickly, and how other founders should carefully think about the choices that they make especially when they're raising money from major institutional investors at high valuations. He has incredible insight into the trials of scaling a company, and provided us with a sincere reflection of how others should manage growth while understanding their own true wishes and intentions with the company they are building.
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The company I had been advising was just served a cease and desist order from a major brand to change their name, and it was about to put at risk their chance of having the Shark Tank episode air that would likely make the difference between success and failure for their fledgeling startup. It was the Friday night before the Monday deadline by which the startup had to have this issue resolved, that in a last ditch effort I decided to cold email an executive in the brand that held the startup's entire future in their hands without even knowing it.
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Performing alongside Jim Gaffigan and Dennis Leary at The Boston Garden would be a massive accomplishment for any comedian. For Jared Freid, it felt like a bar mitzvah. It was clearly a new milestone in his life, but it was also just one night - a fleeting moment that would mean nothing without continued focus and dedication to his craft. Since leaving his job in insurance to pursue comedy full time Jared has treated his career like a business, constantly putting out new content while building relationships and forging partnerships that would lead to new opportunities like his iTunes Top 100 JTrain Podcast, a show about modern dating called U Up, a SnapChat show called How Low Will You Go that lets him travel the country attending college football games, massive sold out live performances and more. In our live recording event we breakdown the process that has lead to Jared being featured on NBC’s The Today Show, MTV, his live recordings at the Comedy Cellar and more. We also discuss how Jared first started his career as a comic writing weekly columns for major online publications, and how he continues to stay motivated by focusing on small realistic goals. You can find Jared on Instagram at @JaredFreid, and on Twitter @JTrain56. He releases new episodes of the JTrain podcast every Tuesday and Friday and his tour dates can be found on https://jaredfreid.com/
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The upcoming election on Tuesday inspired us to talk about our first ever entrepreneurial pursuit in High School that ended up teaching us many lessons that we still use when starting businesses. As sophomores, we found out about a political debate club, Junior Statesmen of America, that taught kids how to debate real issues in congress style debates, and decided to bring it to our school. The only problem was that our principal decided not to sanction the club. That meant that we had to learn how to raise money, how to promote the club and do everything in between all by ourselves. Little did we know that by being forced to figure out how to bring this club to our school without any support from the administration, we were doing something very entrepreneurial that would teach us how to build businesses later on. With this episode, we hope that you decide to become a more active member in your own community, even if it's just volunteering, because it's guaranteed to pay off in ways that you can't even imagine in the future.
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As a first time entrepreneur it's easy to doubt yourself, or come up with excuses for why something will not work. Maybe you don't know the industry well enough, or you can't find a technical co-founder, or you've never done sales. When starting Minibar, Lindsey Andrews and Lara Crystal didn't have experience in any of these areas, but they saw a massive opportunity and simply focused on execution instead of letting doubt consume them. Four years later they're in 40 states, servicing 90% of the U.S. population. Listeners of The Mentors can get $10 off of their first order on Minibar by using the code THEMENTORS at checkout. Download the app at: https://minibardelivery.comIn this episode we talk through how the cofounders decided to quit their jobs to focus on making their liquor delivery service a reality. Within six months of coming up with their idea they got initial funding from an investor and launched their app, generating revenue on day one. We discuss how they ended up closing a $1.8 million seed round for their business, and what they would do differently if they were fundraising today. We also cover their customer acquisition strategy in detail, and how they strategically focused on on-boarding liquor stores in different areas of each city, one city at a time. The team has been featured on NY Times, CNBC, Forbes, Fast Company, and more.
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Busy leaders have to make dozens of important decisions on a daily basis. While everyone’s process is slightly different, there are some common practices that almost every successful CEO and leader follows.In this episode we talk about:1) Removing unimportant decisions from your day2) Practicing being uncomfortable3) Why meditation can help you avoid acting on impulse…including stories from successful comedian Bill Hader and former President Obama.
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It's not often that a book can change the way you approach your day to day life or impact some of the most important decisions you make. Once in a while you come across something so timely that it feels like it was written just for you - just for this exact moment in your life. In this episode we discuss three incredible books that shaped our outlook on life and the way we approach our businesses and careers. We start with Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends and Influence People, which taught us how to interact with people in a way that helps build stronger relationships. We then discuss how Richard Branson's story in Losing My Virginity taught us to take risks and be open to opportunities we would normally say no to. We conclude the show with a review of Victor Frankl's brilliant story of survival and finding purpose in Man's Search For Meaning and how this book shifted our perspective of the importance of having meaning behind everything you work towards.
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This week we met an entrepreneur who told us about a side project he did that ended up making him and his partner $30,000 in just 2 months. The story is about how one young entrepreneur started an exotic car meet up in his home town that ended up growing to a sizable community, and how he eventually found a business opportunity in shooting high quality car videos for businesses.
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How do you become a venture capitalist with no previous VC experience? Our guest this week, Diego Berrio, was able to create a venture career for himself with no previous track record as an investor. When he realized he wanted to leave the world of traditional finance to become an investor after years of running finance at an education software company, he did what any savvy entrepreneur would do and created the opportunity for himself.In this episode we dive into Diego's early career, and how his decision to get a second Masters degree in his early 30s lead him on a path to creating a completely new career for himself as an investor. While he was no stranger to the world of finance, he knew that the barriers to raising a Venture Capital fund were high. VC investors convince massive institutions and wealthy individuals to trust them with millions of dollars of their money, and that type of trust typically requires a track record of success as an investor and/or entrepreneur. As any good entrepreneur, he didn't let these barriers stop him. Instead he focused on what would give him an advantage, like creating a differentiated offering and building out a deep trusted network that helped him attract other investors and highly sought after investment opportunities. Throughout this episode we also uncover his exact strategy for breaking into this field with syndicates, and the work he's now doing to raise a $20-$30 million fund in 2019 with his firm BrightSky Ventures.
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Jackie Chan is well known for breaking every single bone in his body throughout his successful career as a martial arts actor, but in this episode we talk about the little known story of the rigorous upbringing that turned him into the most daring stuntmen in the business. If you're facing difficulties in your life, your ability to be disciplined enough to push through is what will ultimately bring success your way. Jackie's entire career was fraught with ups and downs but he always kept pushing, eventually becoming as famous as his idol, Bruce Lee.
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Getting Sting and the CEO of Goldman Sachs to trust your business with their dogs is a pretty positive indicator. When the Great Recession hit in 2008, Mike Lavora and Adam Light were working on Wall Street. Within 12 months after being forced to leave their jobs, they were doing six figures in revenue with their new dog walking business. What started as a simple services company has now grown to 45 employees, and 7 locations across New York City. Turns out the market for pet care services in a place like New York is massive. There's an estimated 1 pet for every 4 households, and the team at Throw Me A Bone is just getting started even though they now service 200 pets a day. In this episode we discuss how Mike and Adam came up with their idea after Mike visited a pet care facility in the West Village, and was placed on a three month waiting list for his dog. We also discuss how they decided to approach the market to drastically reduce the capital they needed to create their business. Within a week of operation they had their first customer, and the momentum never stopped. Soon the pair knew they would never have to go back to their finance jobs. We also uncover how the two started to scale their business, seizing every major opportunity and partnership they came across along the way. After a decade, what was originally a lifestyle business is now becoming a quickly growing operation that has the opportunity for massive scale.Music source:ZitronSound - Lonely CowboyWild West by ZitronSound http://bit.ly/2nXGy9WCreative Commons — CC BY-ND 3.0 https://goo.gl/QHshNa
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This episode is a follow up to Episode 39 - Starting a Revenue Generating Training Business in 3 Weeks. Here we read you the exact email we used to get 10 meetings with coding bootcamps, to ultimately close our first contract just weeks later.
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Most founders will never raise a single dime from investors. This has nothing to do with your capabilities as an entrepreneur. It's simply the reality of venture economics and the fact that most businesses don't fit the requirements of a professional investor. The good news is that 95% of business are able to find capital through other means. In this episode we describe how most entrepreneurs raise capital through four main channels - credit card loans, bank loans, money from friends and family, and good old fashion side hustles (aka contract work). Yes, in 2017 alone VC firms invested $61 Billion in capital, but everything is relative. This money was deployed across 5,948 deals - virtually nothing (1%) compared to the 500,000+ businesses that were started that year. To help clarify the reality of fundraising, and to provide some data from those that are bullish on raising venture money, we also dive into the true motivations behind angel and venture investors, and what actually makes an entrepreneur fundable - a track record (previous exits), domain expertise, defensibility, a large market opportunity, and tangible go to market execution.
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There is no one size fits all solution that makes everyone productive. To accomplish your goals, you have to find what works for you, and create your own set of daily routines and rituals. The key is consistency. This episode was inspired by the book "Daily Rituals" by Mason Currey, and an article by Pia Silva entitled "9-5 Is Out. Try The 1-6 Instead."In this episode you will hear:1. How George Orwell changed his life at 31 to be able to work on his writing and support himself.2. What Albert Einstein's daily schedule was like as a University Professor. 3. The environment Maya Angelou needed to create for herself in order to write, and how we apply this in our own work
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Woody Allen famously said that eighty percent of success is showing up. Often times the most effective way to consistently get yourself to show up is to simply say “fu*k it”. This means putting insecurities and doubts aside. It means ignoring the voice inside your head that incessantly tells you why something might not work out. It means removing all expectations and letting things simply play out. In this episode we talk about how we were able to get fast and incredibly impactful results for our business by acting without fear. From following up with famed podcaster Jordan Harbinger after briefly running into him at a conference and getting him to feature us on his podcast which gets millions of monthly listens, to building relationships with Goalcast and Forbes to become contributing authors, helping us grow our audience. We also talk about how we were able to close the first deal for our software startup by changing our approach and saying “fu*k it - why not try something new.”If you have your own story of when you said “fu*k it” and got results, send us an email at vadim@thementors.co or sergei@thementors.co and we’ll feature it in a 5 Minute Pick Me Up episode.
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This is an update to episode 41, the recent episode about a new idea that we decided to test.
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Is it possible to build a successful business with your best friend? Stephen and Jeffrey of the Frost Gelato Shoppe franchise seem to think so. They’ve been friends since second grade and credit the deep trust that they’ve built up over their entire lives to helping them survive over 13 years of being in business together. But how do you go from never starting a business, to opening a Gelato shop in an underdeveloped part of Tucson Arizona and franchising the business within just three years?In this episode we learn about the early days of building their first location, and the set of correct decisions that lead the friends to enjoy consistently rapid year over year growth. The two founders explain how their ongoing success comes down to the advice they take from their family of entrepreneurs - their ultimate mentors. From learning about real-estate and location scouting from Stephen’s mom, to understanding where they had the most opportunity to be competitive from Jeffrey’s dad, these early lessons allowed them to focus on the other part of the business that was paramount to their success - obsession with the quality of their product.We hear about how they were able to get daily inquiries to franchise their business, and how they quickly learned about franchising to take advantage of the growing opportunity. To date, not a single franchise location has failed, and the Frost Gelato brand is now being enjoyed internationally. We got to try their gelato during the recording of this episode, given to us directly by their master gelato chef, Nazario, who was in the studio with us. Molto delizioso - and that’s not just the sweet tooth talkin’.
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Often, as a founder, you have to be willing to do things that others aren't.In this 5 Minute Pick me Up episode we talk about why seemingly antiquated techniques like selling door to door, are a great way to get business in the early days. We also tell the story of 2 founders that we worked with who came up with an idea for a product that would be great for restaurants, and validated that it had a huge potential market by talking to 80 restaurant owners in 3 weeks.
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Most apparel startups don’t generate 6 figures in gross profit within 1 year of launching. But then, most apparel companies aren’t run by a solo entrepreneur who until recently was balancing working on his business with a full time job at Birchbox, pursuing his MBA at NYU, working part-time as a physical trainer at Orange Theory, and playing for the Israeli National LaCrosse team. If that wasn’t enough, he’s also a photographer and videographer on the side and occasionally works with major brands to supplement his income, allowing him to reinvest most of his earnings back into growing his business.This is the incredible story of Kyle Bergman of The Great Fantastic, who has had multiple successful careers before the age of 30, and how he was able to leverage his experience as a buyer for Bloomingdales and Birchbox to launch a quickly growing brand of sweatpant overalls called Swoveralls. Listeners of this show can get a 15% off when they order on thegreatfantastic.co using the code SWOVIE15.Kyle attributes his ability to juggle so many projects at once to two main factors. His inability to sit still from the time he was a kid, and the three calendars that he uses to organize his whole life, including his daily walks around East Village to clear his mind. In this episode we walk through how the idea for Swoveralls was born, and the steps that Kyle took to validate the initial demand in the market. We also talk about how he was able to get some early traction through major press exposure with Fatherly, Thrillist, Business Insider, and the SEO traffic that followed.With each new opportunity Kyle has continued to find incredibly creative ways to grow his brand, attracting celebrities to help market his product and even producing a viral video in the process. This episode has tons of takeaways for anyone interested in launching an online retail product, or even people that are simply interested in learning how to balance multiple careers at once.
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In this edition of the 5 Minute Pick Me Up, Sergei tells the story of how getting rid of his fear of approaching new people helped him meet Daymond John.You will hear about how Sergei started meeting more people by getting comfortable starting conversations with anyone. You'll learn how to overcome a fear that's limiting you by reframing what the potential outcomes could be. And you'll hear a few suggestions of what to say to people when you first meet them.
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Winning a negotiation is simpler than most people think. While becoming a master negotiator takes a lot of practice, being good at negotiating comes down to understanding a few very basic principals.In this episode we walk through three common negotiation scenarios, starting with a salary negotiation, to illustrate how you can be better positioned to win when entering a similar discussion.A successful negotiation begins before the meeting ever takes place. Your goal is to be as prepared as possible, so that you can be armed with credible information that can be used as needed throughout the discussion. Once you’re at the table, your only job should be to learn as much as possible about the other side. Our assumptions about other people’s wants and needs are often incorrect. By learning the other party’s priorities you can anticipate what they might be willing to agree to.The last piece to consider is your walk away point, which relates to your ultimate leverage in the conversation. A negotiation is simply an agreement between two parties to enter into a discussion that can lead to an outcome that both sides are satisfied with. If you have other options when entering into a negotiation, those alternatives give you more leverage since you’re more likely to walk away from the discussion if a favorable outcome isn’t reached.If you’re interested in learning more about the art of negotiating, Getting To Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury is an excellent place to start.
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This week we decided to try a new concept and take you along on a journey to see how it works out. With this episode, we’re hoping to motivate you to try that new idea that you’ve been thinking about for a long time, but not acting on. The idea is a virtual competition that we’re calling a “Validation Challenge.” This will be a competition with prize money where anyone can apply to try and validate a business idea during nights and weekends over a period of just two weeks.Here are our goals with this idea that we’ll be reporting back on to you over the next few weeks as we try it out:1) Reach out to 70 college and university entrepreneurship centers to get them to promote this competition to their entrepreneurial students2) Secure $1,000 - $2,000 in prizes for winners of this competition3) Secure any additional amount on top of this as sponsorship money if we’re able to attract enough participants. (This goal is vague on purpose because we’ll be happy with any amount in sponsorship that’s above the prize dollar amount we’re able to raise)4) Start to build relationships with more universities that can ultimately result in speaking gigs or other mutually beneficial initiativesThis week we’re starting by launching an application and reaching out to universities. Stay tuned for part 2 of this series to see how this experiment goes!
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80% of women report issues related to their period, from irregularities and inconsistencies, to debilitating pain that doesn’t seem to subside. The Founders of Food Period (discount code THEMENTORS20) are on a mission to help women everywhere through a completely natural process called seed syncing. They’ve simplified the complicated seed consumption protocol by creating delicious energy bites that get sent to your door every month. Within just a few months, for less than the cost of a protein bar, customers have reported major improvements in their periods - all without taking any medication.This episode starts from the very beginning, when founders Britt Martin and Jenn Kim met in boarding school. They quickly developed a friendship that would last through college, where they would have long phone calls brainstorming different business ideas with the dream of starting their own company one day. That day came years later, after Britt started attending NYU to study business journalism after working in finance for years, and Jen was living in Seoul doing branding work for major clients like Facebook. The idea came from a personal problem. Britt had been diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma, and after undergoing chemo her period stopped completely. In an effort to avoid putting more chemicals in her body, she sought healthy alternatives and discovered seed syncing, the process of taking a specific set of seeds at specific times every single day.Soon after her period came back, her and Jenn realized that this is something many women could benefit from. After surveying hundreds of women, they realized that a majority had some issues related to their period, validating that there could be a lot of demand for their solution. Within 2 weeks, Jenn moved from South Korea to run the business with Britt. In this episode we dive into deep detail to uncover how this business was built, from how Food Period has been able to grow completely organically with zero advertising to how the two best friends deal with conflict when making critical decisions.We also learn about their process for building out the supply chain for the business, and even dissect how they think about pricing. If you think this product can help you, you can get $20 off of your first box of Food Period by using the code THEMENTORS20 at checkout.
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In this episode you’ll hear a story about how Vadim and I had to shut down a failing business and start another one within a matter of weeks.We’ll walk through the steps we took to test and start a training services business from scratch with no prior client list, and no training curriculum. In this episode you will learn how we:1) Narrowed down a list of potential skills we have that we could teach2) Narrowed down a list of potential clients we could target for this new program3) Tested different client segments to figure out which one to focus on4) Closed our first $4,000 deal within 3 weeks of conceptualizing this service offering
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At 16 years old Justin secured a full time internship on Capitol Hill. By 19, he was running a quickly growing student organization designed to bring financial literacy programs to students on campus. This informal program would soon land him support from Bernie Marcus, one of the founder's of Home Depot, and a quarter of a million dollar commitment to help launch a non-profit called GenFKD (Generation Financial Knowledge and Development, one of the meanings of that acronym). In this episode we dive into Justin's background, and what positioned him to launch this type of non-profit early in his college career. We learn how he was able to build and nurture a highly impactful support system to help him realize his vision of bridging the gap between a college education and the skills that are necessary to succeed in the real world. "Just because you don’t know how to do something, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. People can help you. You can’t do anything substantive alone." Justin attributes his growth from one school to a network of 34 major universities to the deep relationships he's been able to cultivate with the people, communities, and organizations that believed in his vision. Today, GenFKD runs financial, soft and technical skills development programs all over the country, including for profit college courses in Entrepreneurship. They have raised $7 million to date, and have $4 million more committed.
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The biggest mistake you can make as an entrepreneur is to spend all of your time and resources building a product without doing the proper validation - ie: figuring out who your customer is, and confirming that this customer is willing to pay for your product. This 5 Minute Pick Me Up is a story about a founder that we mentored who made this classic mistake. Fortunately, the story has a happy ending. His team had spent over a year building a product with hundreds of features, with the idea that it could help almost any small business with customer retention. After hearing this, our advice was simple. Stop building, and start selling. They needed to raise money to continue operations, and the only way to do that was to prove that there was real demand in the market. We gave them advice on their pitch, and suggestions for how they could start selling quickly. Within a few months, they had several paying customers.In 5 minutes you will:-Learn how to quickly get in front customers to test and sell your solution before fully building it out-Understand how early customers can help you simplify your product, saving you time and money down the line-Learn why trying to build and sell to everyone is a recipe for disaster, and how you can be successful by solving a big enough problem for a very specific type of customer
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1.5 Million children die each year due to diarrhea. Proper handwashing with soap can prevent over two-thirds of those deaths. Amanat Anand didn't know that she wanted to be an entrepreneur, but when she came across this statistic she instantly knew what she wanted to do. She entered a business plan competition with a simple idea. Children need access to soap and a reason to wash their hands consistently. By making their products affordable and fun to use for kids, SoaPen can accomplished both goals. In this episode we learn how Amanat and her co-founder Shubham, both voted Forbes 30 Under 30, focused on being relentlessly resourceful in their first year of operation to secure funding, develop their chemical formula, and refine the supply chain process for their soap concept. We cover how they were able to quickly sell over 100 units of their product, leading them to their first major production run of 10,000 units. We also discuss how the first time entrepreneurs think about team dynamics, from dividing responsibilities and roles, to refining their decision making process to stay on track. If you're interested in physical product businesses with a social good component, this interview is the ideal case study for how to approach the first few years of building this type of company, from ideation to execution.
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This week's 5 Minute Pick Me Up was inspired by my Uber ride from the airport this morning when I was picked up by an ordinary gentleman that was secretly building an extraordinary business. The reason he was driving an Uber today? Market research. I knew something was different about him when he started telling me that he never flies from LaGuardia airport. It turns out that he used to fly a lot for his job, which of course lead me to dig deeper. I learned that he not only ran his own IT consulting business, but that he was starting a new driving service after hearing complaints from many of the Uber drivers he met. In 5 minutes you will: -Learn how he came up with the idea for his business-Find out the first steps he took to research the market, and identify value before investing his own money-Understand how he's been able to attract customers, and his plans for growing in the future-Vadim RevzinCo-Host of The Mentors
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Quitting a job can feel exhilarating and intimidating at the same time. In a perfect world, you're leaving on good terms and have a supportive boss that offers you future opportunities for mentorship and references. Unfortunately, these circumstances are usually far from perfect. Many people leave their jobs because they're unhappy, and the source of this unhappiness typically comes from the people that they work for. There's many misconceptions about what to expect from this process, and how to handle the conversation with your employer when the time finally comes. We start this episode with a role play, giving you a real life example of how to handle a boss that reacts horribly to the news of you leaving. A situation like this can often be fraught with emotions on both sides, so it's important to be fully prepared going into the conversation. We breakdown how you can anticipate questions and objections from your boss, and what to do to prepare ahead of time. Whether you're quitting your job to work on a new business, or leaving for a better opportunity it's important to know your rights as an employee. These tips will help you stay calm and at ease throughout the process, and remember - it's only one conversation. Soon you'll be on your way to a happier you.
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Here at The Mentors, we're all about explaining how people just like us can go from having no experience, to running a successful company. Today we’re launching a new series called 5 Minute Pick Me Up.One of the recurring themes on this show, shared by everyone from Max Altchuler, who just sold his company Sales Hacker to Outreach.io, to the Hey Lady shoes twins Emily and Jessica, and even to our story about our father, is that most people don't get started with a fully baked brilliant idea for a business. I want to share with you a story about a true entrepreneur, Mack of Superior Auto Steam, who I met this weekend who is motivating me this week with his lesson.I found him when I was searching for car wash options in NYC for my classic 300zx, and he was the only hand wash service with a Yelp account.Listen to hear why I will gladly refer anyone to him, and what I learned from him about running a business like this. In 5 minutes you will: Discover the NOTABLE SERVICE he provided, Understand the NOTABLE CHANNEL he found to acquire customersHear the MAIN TAKEAWAY from this interview.-Sergei Revzin Co-Host of The Mentors
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How do you mint 15 new millionaires over night? Carey Smith of Big Ass Fans knows how. He committed to growing his industrial fan company for as long as it took, until he was certain that his most hardworking employees could also become rich from the sale of his company. That meant waiting until he could sell it for $500 million, giving away 10% of that to his team. Carey doesn't like to call himself an entrepreneur. He's been creating businesses since he was a teenager, and it's simply part of who he is - it was never going to be any other way. Still, when you listen to his story you start to understand how his background shaped his thinking, and how someone with no experience managing a team was able to successfully lead a company of over 1,000 employees. In this episode we discuss how he came up with his business idea, uncovering a massive opportunity that would lead to owning more than 75% of the entire market he worked in. We also dig into the day to day of his work as CEO, and his relentless attention to detail when it came to his tribe of employees and his customers. Carey has done many interviews over the years, including a feature on PBS, but the stories you'll hear on this show will not be found anywhere else.
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We get stopped on the streets quite a lot. Not because we were secretly star child actors, or because people recognize us from the Open Mics we do around the city. It's because we're twins. Okay - once on an uptown bus we sat in front of two elderly women who kept starring at us, later getting up the nerve to ask us what TV show they saw us in (still wonder who they were mistaking us for) - but that's about it.Yesterday, as we were walking down the street to grab some lunch in Philly, we got recognized not once, but on three separate occasions. We're here for a conference called Podcast Movement, and in this episode we detail the steps we took to get an opportunity to speak in front of over 250 people at the beginning of the conference, and how we ended up standing out from all of the other speakers to make sure that people remember us. This week at the conference we also got to meet some incredible people like JLD of the Entrepreneur On Fire Podcast, Lewis Howes of School of Greatness, and Aaron Mahnke of Lore. We'll tell you what we learned about attaining success and growth from each of those conversations so you can apply it to your own career and life.
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How To Make It In AmericaThis is the third and final part of our series about our father, Samuel Revzin, who built one of the most successful schools in Soviet Belarus, only to have to start all over in a new career at the age of 54. In this episode we tell the story of how our mother and father made the difficult decision to pack their bags and move halfway around the world to make a better life for their children here in the United States. With few employment prospects for recent immigrants, they had to do menial work for years to support the family.Listen to find out how our father was able to use the same entrepreneurial instincts he developed in Belarus to start a business in a shopping mall that he grew to three locations and multiple employees. This small business was effectively our real world MBA, where at the age of 12 we were thrust into the day to day of the business to learn what it takes to run a company.
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Most startups seem to have advisors listed in their pitch decks, but it's not always clear what they actually do.Not every company needs a formal advisory board, but there's a reason why it's common practice for many startups to have one. Even the most experienced CEOs can't possibly be experts in every single aspect of their business and industry, and advisors are the people they often turn to to answer difficult questions, or help make critical industry introductions. This is especially true for early stage companies that can't always afford to hire experts until they have enough revenue. In this episode we discuss what advisors do, what the difference is between formal and informal advisors, how to compensate your advisors and more.We tell a few stories about how we were able to find very experienced and sought after advisors for our own startup, and how we negotiated with them. We include real information about equity percentages that we offered, and give you some tips about how you can decide how much equity to give.Listen here to make sure that you have all the information you need to put together your advisory board, and leverage them in the most effective way.
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This is a continuation of How To Do What You Love In a Communist Country Part I - a story of our father, a man who didn't finish high school until he was 29 years old, and ended up building an education empire in one of the most oppressive areas of the world, only to have to start his career all over again in the United States in his early 50s.We walk you through his rise in Soviet Belarus, from the workaholic nature that compelled him to take on triple the work load of any other educator, to the opportunities he was given as a notorious community organizer. By the time he was 42 years old, he had established deep ties in the Department of Education, and was presented with a rare opportunity (especially for a jew) - build a new school in one of the worst areas of the city. He quickly developed a massive vision - he wasn't simply going to build a school. He was going to create an organization that brought resources, aide and opportunities for the whole community. We discuss how he negotiated additional funding to completely change the way an academic institution operated, attracting families from from the entire city, and what lead him to become a prominent innovator in education across the entire Soviet Union. Music by: www.purple-planet.com
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One in five children in the United States goes hungry every day. That statistic might be surprising to most, but to Michael Levine, it became a calling - a reason to build an organization whose guiding mission is to reduce that number drastically. 500 food products and seven brands later, Global Food Solutions is continuing their work by partnering with government institutions, all without raising a single dollar of outside capital. Entrepreneurship is a marathon, not a sprint. Over the course of a decade, Michael focused on building a business on his terms. In this episode, we uncover how this promising executive chef decided to start a food business after suffering a major injury, preventing him from ever working in the kitchen again. The early opportunity was initially driven by changing government regulations that forced public schools to look for healthier food providers. Coupled with his dedication to create an impact on kid's lives, Michael and his team created a proprietary way to make food that was both cost-effective and nutritious. In this episode, we discuss how he landed his first major client with the New York City public school system, and the two main factors that contributed to his ongoing success - placing incredible importance on building face to face relationships and managing financials with relentless focus.
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Adam was starting to photograph celebrities for major magazines, when he decided to quit his job and move back home to Pennsylvania to start a cold brew coffee business with his brother. It wasn't hard for him to figure out where to start. Over the years as a photographer he got to know almost every small retailer in his home town. Instead of sending out emails to see if any business owners were interested in the new cold brew coffee he was developing, he quickly put together some samples with his brother and hit the road. That day he visited 30 stores. Out of those, 26 agreed to put his product on their shelves. Stories like this are typical of many entrepreneurs that operate under one simple principle - failure is not an option. That's not to say that failure isn't possible, or that the path to growth isn't fraught with obstacles, challenges, rejections, and mistakes. It simply means that once you set your eyes on a goal, you'll do nearly anything to try to attain it. In this episode Adam shares how he discovered and developed a passion for what he once hated - coffee, and the steps he took in the early days to land major distributors like Whole Foods. We also learn how him and his brother started attracting major seed investors to source and launch a new product called Cascara Tea, breaking down exactly how the team is investing the money to grow this new product line. If you're interested in following Drink Peloton's journey, Adam shares his daily entrepreneurial stories live on Instagram @drinkpeloton
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The cold brew coffee market has exploded over the last few years, with sales reaching $738 million dollars in 2017 alone, popularized by major chains like Starbucks.When Matt Bachmann and Ben Gordon met at Columbia Business School a few years before the cold brew craze, they knew that they wanted to start a business, but had no idea what to build. As their friendship grew over the next 6 months, they realized they both shared an interesting passion - really more of an obsession. Making their own cold brew coffee at home. Over the next year and a half, while still in school, they developed what would become Wandering Bear Cold Brew Coffee, launching a first of its kind boxed coffee in the process (think Franzia for coffee). In this episode we breakdown how they came up with their minimum viable product (first consistently good tasting batch of coffee), and what they did to test various go to market strategies for their business. We uncover how they identified an opportunity to rapidly generate revenue for their business, and the steps that they took to end up in over 1,000 stores across the United States, landing major partnerships like Fresh Direct, Whole Foods, Target, and more.
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At 27 years old, Julie Smolyansky found herself leading a 12 million dollar public company. Her father had died suddenly of a heart attack, and just 24 hours later she was addressing all of her employees as their new CEO. Over the next decade, Julie would go on to grow the company to one of the most recognizable food brands in the world, earning a spot on Fortune Magazine's '40 Under 40'. Since then she has launched a non-profit, produced several documentaries, and authored The Kefir Cookbook, sharing her entrepreneurial story and over 100 globally-inspired sweet and savory recipes using Kefir.Many doubted Julie's ability to run a public company at such a young age, but her confidence came from having incredible role models in both of her parents. After emigrating to America, her mother opened a small Russian Deli to support the family. This eventually grew into a larger food distribution business working with Russian stores all over the United States, securing exclusive contracts like the right to distribute a then little known brand called Nutella in America. Her parents got the idea to bring Kefir to America after visiting a trade show in Germany to source food for their delis. The Russian population in Chicago was growing, and they knew that their would be growing demand for this staple Russian drink. In our conversation with Julie, we uncover how her parents created their own recipe for the drink, and the steps that they took to turn Lifeway Foods into a public company within only 2 years of inception. We also discuss the importance of having the right mentors in your life, and why a strong network of support contributes more to success than experience.
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Entrepreneurs can spend years working on the wrong thing because they failed to test their assumptions along the way. We look for positive indicators when entering a new relationship, or evaluating a new job opportunity, so why do many of us skip this step when starting a new business? Because starting a business is a lot like having a baby, and when you're so attached to something it can be difficult to admit when it isn't working.Lean startup, design thinking, and agile development are just a few principles that have been developed to address this very issue, and to underscore the importance of validating a business concept before investing resources into developing it. In this episode we walk you through how we were able to test completely different types of business ideas before spending any time developing the actual product. We also highlight stories from the early days of Airbnb and Uber, proving how any smart entrepreneur can use very little resources to validate or invalidate an idea, even if that idea requires a lot of capital to be fully developed. We also tell stories from the founders of Netflix and Kayak, and how they were focused on constant communication with their customers, even after gaining success, to continue to iterate on their business model, building sustainable innovative enterprises along the way.
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The Soviet Union was not a very supportive place for entrepreneurs - especially in the 1960s, on the heels of Stalin's dictatorial regime. In fact in the decades leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union, many were jailed for circumventing the law by starting their own businesses. Free thinkers, creators, and innovators had to find other ways to apply their minds. Our father, Samuel Zakharovich Revzin, was one such thinker that was simply born in the wrong era and in an inconvenient part of the world. Despite all of this, he was able to rise to prominence and create one of the most innovative education institutions of his time. Decades later, his work can still be found in the Russian State Library in Moscow, and his legacy lives on in the students whose lives he touched. This is the first episode in a series that will chronicle our father's life, and the stories he began to document in his unfinished autobiography before his death. His entrepreneurial drive and instinct had a profound impact on our lives, and the stories throughout provide incredible lessons for any creator that must overcome obstacles on their journey. The story starts with two major themes - how to create experiences for yourself to find your passion, and the importance of having relentless focus on building value versus an obscure goal. You'll hear stories of how our father was able to create opportunities for himself to do what he loved at a very young age in a communist country where many were forced to follow a predetermined path. These lessons will help you rethink your own path, and hopefully provide some guidance on how to find purpose in everything you do.
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We're taught to associate failure with getting fired, when often times it is the very catalyst that allows us to experience incredible progress. In this episode you will learn techniques to fills gaps in your resume, how to build skills to help you change your career, and use getting fired as an opportunity to create new and exciting experiences for yourself. While losing a job is inherently a stressful experience, it's critical to start seeing it as a life changing event - for the better.We discuss how to rewire your brain to embrace the loss of a job, and create opportunities for yourself that will help you grow and skip multiple rungs on the ladder of your career in a short period of time. You'll hear stories about some of the most profoundly successful people on earth, like Oprah Winfrey, J.K. Rowling, and Bill Belichick, and how getting fired directly helped the growth of their careers. We also tell you our personal stories of getting fired, and how we leveraged the free time that we had to transition careers and massively increase our incomes. Getting fired can help you become unstuck, and take on completely new experiences. For Sergei, it was getting a chance to act in an ABC pilot. For me, it was having the opportunity to speak in front of over 1,000 people. Both would never happen if we weren't forced to act and move forward. At every step of the way, you control your own story. In this podcast we also discuss how to create a narrative about your experience that fits the roles you're looking for, and how to effectively bridge any gap created in your resume. A career is not always linear, and humans are born to have varying interests. Getting fired can give you the push you need to explore a completely different lifestyle for yourself, or to learn entirely new skills. Arnold Schwarzenegger made his millions as a body builder, brick layer, and real estate investor before he ever got into acting and eventually politics. We're all allowed to rewrite our own path, and getting fired can be the best way to start.
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When Murtuza started consulting on the side with his co-founder Hari to fund the startup they were building, he didn't think of it as a business - simply a way to be able to pay his bills. Soon he had so many clients that he had to hire help, and he realized that he actually enjoyed working on different projects day to day. Within a few years, he closed his first 6 figure contract. Now he runs F22 Labs, a 22 employee full-stack mobile and web development company in India that's able to charge the same prices as American dev shops. In this episode we discuss how he was able to start landing clients so quickly and consistently, his approach to building relationships, and the iterative work that he did on his business in the early days to stand out from the thousands of engineering shops in India. If you've ever considered building an app and outsourcing the engineering work, this episode is a must listen. Murtuza gives us a blueprint for building software products from scratch. He also breaks down exactly how business, engineering, and product teams should work together to ensure that they build a successful product, providing incredible insight into how business and technical teams should operate together. The products his team has built have been featured in New York Times, Mashable, TechCrunch, Business Insider, and more.
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What's the easiest way to find a co-founder? Have a twin sister. This week on The Mentors we have our first ever 'twinesode' where you'll hear identical twins brother entrepreneurs (yours truly) interview identical twin sister entrepreneurs. Aside from being one of the funniest episodes yet, this discussion covers the story of Hey Lady shoes, and how two sisters with no background in fashion design started a ladies shoe company that has grown to over a million dollars in sales, almost entirely through word of mouth. Within 3 years of starting, the business was growing incredibly fast, when Jessica was diagnosed with stage 4 terminal cancer, leaving the weight of the news and running the business on Emily. Hear Jessica's miraculous story of beating the odds, surviving the disease, and rejoining the business only to help reinvent it and grow it to completely new heights. People often invent elaborate stories for why someone else is successful - connections, money, luck. On countless occasions Emily and Jessica's story proves that each of us must be in control of our own destiny - when you're dealt a bad card in life, it's up to you to figure out how to play the hand.
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When Sufia Hossain started experimenting with hot sauce recipes in her kitchen, she was already working full time on building a jewelry business. But, whenever she had some free time she would start tinkering with different ingredients again. Within one year, her now sought after Silly Chilly Hot Sauce is being sold in one of the busiest shopping markets in the world - Chelsea Market.In this episode we uncover what it takes to start a food business, Sufia's relentless approach to getting her hot sauce on the shelves of stores all over New York City, and the steps she took to get distribution through one of the largest distributors in the world, W.B. Mason. As usual, we break things down to specifics, from understanding initial investment numbers to learning about how ingredients are identified for a product like this. One thing is very clear - it takes incredible passion and persistence to succeed with any business, but especially a food business in one of the most competitive locations in the world. Sufia's story is a perfect example of how to rally support from experts around you and find mentors that can help catapult you to success.
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Max Altschuler is redefining what it means to build a successful career. When most people were busy trying to land internships in college, Max got his school to agree to pilot one of the earliest bike sharing programs. When that business failed to raise the necessary capital to get off the ground and Max found himself without a job as he graduated into one of the worst economies of the century, he started a social media consultancy that generated revenue within its first 30 days. In this episode we break down how these experiences led Max to become a self made millionaire by the age of 30, forever changing how he thinks people should approach their careers. In his new book "Career Hacking for Millennials: How I Built A Career My Way, And How You Can Too" Max tells his own inspirational story and gives highly specific actionable advice for anyone that needs direction with where to take their career. We also talk about how he was able to overcome some incredibly difficult moments in his entrepreneurial journey, and how he's designed his life to be able to run three businesses at once - Sales Hacker, Career Hacking, and Sip Sutra.
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When Bobby Thakkar started Grupacity Consulting in his senior year of High School, he was able to attract customers like Uber, Redbull, Chanel, and Spotify within the first three months of business - all with zero marketing. How does an 18 year old jack of all trades accomplish what many seasoned specialized professionals struggle to attain? By spending years meticulously building a network and a following. It all started when a sports injury forced him to stop playing tennis 8 hours a day. Instead of retreating to his friends, or spending his free time playing video games, he decided to focus on growing professionally. In this episode we uncover how he created a massive community of 25,000 people in his sophomore and junior year of high school, and the steps that he took to quickly create a profitable business before he even got accepted into college.
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Ever wonder why someone isn't responding to your email? Maybe you made a great connection with someone you met in person, but when you follow up with them you never hear back. Every day others are vying for our attention, but we only truly engage with those that succeed in piquing our interest.This is especially true if you're trying to reach someone important or busy. We've been able to get the attention of some of the most incredible people in the world after refining the outreach process over many years. This has lead to incredible opportunities, like appearances on live shows, writing opportunities with major publications, mentor and investor relationships, high value customers, and much more. Since then, we've taught our methods to hundreds of entrepreneurs that have gone on to build meaningful relationships themselves. Important people are just like you and I - they value positive human interaction, and get excited by new opportunities. They also appreciate working with others that they see as equals (or potential equals) and with people that truly value their time. In this episode we walk you through several communication principles that can be applied immediately. We also walk you through specific examples of the outreach that we've done so that you can replicate our process and see the results for yourself. Whether you're writing a book, working on a new business, trying to find partners, recruit new employees, or simply want to build new relationships - this episode will help you get closer to your goals.
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Some of the best public speakers in the world started off as shy and reserved presenters that had trouble captivating an audience. Contrary to popular belief, effective oration is a skill that can be learned and mastered by any personality. There are countless examples of leaders, like Mahatma Gandhi, Warren Buffett, and Abraham Lincoln, that deeply feared public speaking until they refined their skills through many failed talks, ultimately learning how to command the attention of any audience.In this episode we walk you through our personal story of how we became effective public speakers and dig into specific steps that you can take to ensure that your next speech leaves a lasting impression. We discuss techniques like storytelling and theme discovery to help demystify the anatomy of some of the best talks in history. We also share stories from billionaire entrepreneurs, world leaders, and professional actors to show exactly how they apply these rules in their own lives.
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Coffee Project New York has been voted the best coffee shop in New York City by Time Out Magazine, gaining world wide attention within just a few years of opening - but it wasn't an overnight success.Chi-Sum Ngai and her partner Kaleena Teoh had no entrepreneurial experience when they decided to start a coffee shop, so when they first opened their doors in September 2015 they had no customers except for a few neighborhood regulars. However, the decisions the couple made in the early days, even before brewing a single cup of coffee, were instrumental in their eventual success. Hear how they got their start by deciding to go to a coffee conference in Seattle on a whim, building a massive network of coffee experts and influencers that pushed them to open their own shop. We also uncover how they created a differentiated business in a city with thousands of coffee shops, and even dive into the financial details of building a business like this.
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Finding a world class mentor even once in your career can change the direction of your life forever. Charlie Hoehn has been able to do this many times over. From interning with Seth Godin, to landing a job with Tim Ferriss right out of college and working with talented entrepreneurs like Ramit Sethi and Tucker Max, Charlie has figured out how to leverage his unique expertise as a marketer and video editor to attract some of the most successful and talented people in the world.Since then Charlie Hoehn has published three books, countless articles on the topic of overcoming anxiety, launched his own successful podcast, and has been asked to speak to massive audiences all around the world at TEDx and more.In this episode you'll find out what he's learned from some of the greatest minds in the world, from building a viral marketing engine with Tim Ferriss and launching a best selling book to tips on creating highly unique content that can spread virally. We also discuss how Charlie overcame anxiety and burnout, and what he's done to help millions of people around the world lead happier lives.
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Approaching and talking to strangers is not natural for everyone. But some people seem to always make new friends and connections everywhere they go. What are they doing and saying that makes them stand out?In this episode we learn from some of the same techniques and principles in psychology that pickup artists use to meet people anywhere, and apply them to a business setting. The biggest similarities between dating and professional networking are in the critical first moments where people often times end up getting in their own way. The outcomes of these moments depend on whether you condition your mind to frame a new relationship as doomed before it even begins, or instead as an opportunity that can change your life in ways you could never predict.Hear our stories of how ordinary people have used some of these approaches to get life changing jobs and opportunities for their own businesses.Listen to this episode to learn how to-overcome the initial fear of approaching someone new-strike up an organic conversation with anyone-talk about yourself in a way that gets people interested
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In just a little over a year, Mera McGrew has gone from making soap in her apartment to getting published in the New York Times, acquiring a number of celebrities as customers and landing on the shelves of major retailers like West Elm. She was able to accomplish all of this by starting with a simple and clear mission - "get soap in the hands that need it."In this episode we discuss exactly how she came up with this idea while working in Africa, how she enlisted the help of the United Nations and World Health Organization to do initial market research, and how she quickly started growing through word of mouth after landing her first customers. We also break down her process for building out retail relationships, and why her brand has been able to garner so much organic support.
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Every creator and entrepreneur dreams of one day quitting their job to commit full time to their true passion, but when is the right time to do this?It's easy to trick yourself into thinking that if you could just spend 40 hours a week working on your business idea, then you would be successful. But what if you're not? What kind of risk can you expose yourself to?In this episode we uncover when it's the right time to finally go full time with your business. There's a lot you can do while still having other commitments (like a job). From spending your free time on becoming a domain expert to validating your idea with real customers, your job is to remove as much risk as possible before taking the "plunge." Many entrepreneurs and creators only transition to full time when they have too much demand to work on their ideas part time. Everyone's financial and personal situation may vary, but your willingness to do the hard work up front can be a good indicator of your willingness to work through the difficult times of running your own venture. We talk through our personal stories, and give you examples of other successful entrepreneurs that took the time to validate their ideas before quitting their jobs. We also give you a framework for how to go about quitting your job when the time finally comes.
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Is it possible to spend your whole career working for someone else, only to start your first business at 55 years old? Immediately after high school, Larry Petretti began a career as a carpenter eventually moving out of the field and into the business side, working his way to the top of a massive construction enterprise. At each level he took the time to meticulously learn his craft to know what it takes to run every part of a construction business, from sales to management and operations. The soft skills he acquired in his 20s brought him tremendous opportunities in his 30s and a job offer for a COO job that allowed him to travel all over the world. By the time he decided to start his own business, he was certain of his success. Learn how you can apply some of the same principles to massively reduce the risk of entrepreneurship by starting when the time is right for you.You'll also hear how Larry's decision not to go to college was ultimately better for his career and business, and how he found the time to continuously educate himself to surpass his peers.
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A lot of people want to start something, but most never actually do. Why? They simply don't want it or need it enough, and find happiness in other ways. But, some of us never get started for a handful of simple reasons. 1) We don't know what we want to do. 2) We don't know our own strengths.3) We doubt ourselves.4) We worry about what others think. Fortunately, all of these obstacles can be overcome. In this episode, we discuss how to reframe your thinking to finally start acting towards your goals and dreams. We share our exact framework for getting out of the "funk" when you get to a point in your life when you're constantly feeling unfulfilled. We also give you specific examples of how we identified and improved on our respective strengths to gain the confidence to create. Hear Sergei talk about how he got into acting, eventually landing a paid speaking role at an ABC pilot, and how Vadim became a lecturer at a University having never before taught in an academic setting. The feeling of being stuck in your life can have a major impact on your overall happiness - follow these steps to quickly get out of that state of mind to continue to progress.
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At just 13 years old Olga was selected to join the German national dance team as one of only 6 pairs nationwide, but by her early 20s after becoming a World Champion she quit dance to work for the UN Security Council. Olga Nesterova walks us through her journey of leaving dance at the top of her game, to eventually starting and quickly growing her own dance company. Since then she has expanded to multiple cities, performing at NBA and WBNA half-time shows along with her students all over the U.S. This episode dives deep into every hurdle along the way, and the methods Olga used to work through the every day issues of running a business. You'll see examples of how to show value right when you're starting off to immediately differentiate your business and acquire customers organically through the process. Whether you're a dancer, business owner, or just someone that wants to capitalize on their own talent, this story will provide major takeaways.
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Blockchain technologies and the cryptocurrencies created on top of them are quickly becoming the fastest growing opportunity of the 21st century. The complex nature of this new paradigm and relative scarcity of expert knowledge makes it difficult to decipher accurate information from irrelevant noise. In this episode, Boris Revsin, Boston based Founder of blockchain advisory Game Theory Group, breaks down how to accelerate your knowledge in this nascent space, and see through the noise of misinformation. Having invested in several Initial Coin Offerings personally and through a syndicate, he walks us through how he evaluates the credibility of a new blockchain company to make the smartest investment decision possible. This podcast should not be considered as financial investment advice, but instead as the most effective way to become literate and knowledgeable in a space that will only continue to permeate our every day lives. The Mentors also dive into the similarities between conventional tech startups and blockchain startups, and the fundraising process surrounding both. By Boris' estimates, 98% of today's new blockchain companies will become irrelevant in 2018. This is the year that the industry optimizes, and this is the time to grow your awareness in the space.
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Sadiq Samani has figured out how to run a lifestyle business as CTO (Chief Technology Officer) of Autoagent while pursuing his true passion, comedy, full time. He now works 40 hours a month on his business, and performs all around the world. In this episode we walk through his whole journey, and breakdown the daily routines and habits that turned him from a 17 year old kid that hated school and spent all his time watching TV, to a successful businessman, activist, and comedian that has performed at hundreds of venues like The Improv, Laugh Factory, and Gotham Comedy Club.
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Most first time entrepreneurs get this wrong. In this episode we cover exactly how and when an equity split discussion needs to happen, and how to make sure you get a fair share of the company you're building. We also talk about how to act if one of your founders decides to quit, and how to protect yourself if that should happen. There's a brief discussion on incorporating your startup, but we'll be diving deeper into business formation in a separate episode.
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It's hard to start a business completely alone. Sometimes, success depends entirely on your ability to recruit the right partners for your business. We provide a realistic scenario of how a business founder would go about finding a technical co-founder for his/her tech startup, but the logic is the same for any type of team you need to assemble.
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In this episode we look at how successful creators (comedians, entrepreneurs, etc.) work to get better at coming up with good ideas, and how you can apply this to you own life. We also give actionable suggestions on how you can immediately start coming up with your own business ideas.
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This is a quick introduction to our podcast, the Mentors, where brothers Sergei and Vadim Revzin give advice to anyone interested in building a business.
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