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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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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