I'm starting a new series called #Advice4Entrepreneurs. I ask the same two questions to close out the interview: 1. What advice can you offer budding entrepreneurs? 2. What skills that you use now do you wish you would have paid more more attention to back in college or the early part of your career? This series are those last two questions.
Podcast Hosts
Jeff Roster
Twitter https://twitter.com/JeffPR
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-roster-bb51b8/
Website https://thisweekininnovation.com
Brian Sathianathan
Twitter https://twitter.com/BrianVision
Website https://www.iterate.ai
Podcast Website
https://www.podbean.com/pu/pbblog-f8asf-af2782
https://thisweekininnovation.com
[00:13:16] What advice would you offer for young entrepreneurs? What would you say to young people getting
[00:13:20] Joey Rubinstein: started first and foremost?
[00:13:23] The best way to learn is by actually doing things and by listening to people that have done things you can always re you can always iterate, right? You can always come up with and improve ideas, but unless you're actually out there and testing them out in the marketplace, so you're not going to really know what ideas are good, and what ideas are bad.
[00:13:41] And this follows basically this line of philosophy from this book. That's very, well-known in the entrepreneurship world, which is like the lean startup by Eric Ries. Fantastic book. And basically what it talks about is, you, as an entrepreneur, what you really want to do is you want to get the quickest product that you possibly can out into the marketplace.
[00:13:59] [00:14:00] That's viable the minimum viable product MVP. And then you want to basically see how that's, reacted to in certain circumstances. It means that you need to cut things out of the product and in certain circumstances. You need to add things to the product, but just by having, having the exposure and actually seeing things on the ground.
[00:14:14] That's really important. And then the second thing is I think that people really discount their own agency, going into a philosophical perspective. I think that people have a lot more control over their lives than many people would like to admit. And agency's really critical.
[00:14:27] Like at the end of the day, each one of us could say, I have this idea. I want to go make it a reality. And just because people say it's not a good idea, maybe they don't understand. And sometimes a lot of people can say a certain message and it turns out to be completely not correct. And that actually is something that, you, I think pretty much every early stage startup probably experiences a lot.
[00:14:47] We're all speaking to, hundreds of different, investors and venture people, and they're all giving you all the doubt in the world. But then you'll see the people that manage to get through that because even the most successful with a few exceptions, even the most successful [00:15:00] ones, they all have the exact same sort of trajectory, which is to say there's a lot of doubt at the beginning, then things start moving forward and you keep plotting along.
[00:15:07] So then all of a sudden that doubt turns into, huh, this is interesting. And really it's just about, proving yourself and not really listening to I would say negative feedback, as long as you've done your homework.
[00:15:19] Jeff Roster: Awesome. And last question, what skills that you use now, do you wish you would have paid more attention to back in college or the early part of your career?
[00:15:26] Joey Rubinstein: In college, I would say number one finance and accounting are important skills. But that being said, I think that, also more of a, like kind of a philosophical view of things. I think that kind of taking an outside perspective and figuring out what you're good at and what you really want to focus on and figuring that out as soon as possible.
[00:15:47] That's a good thing because indecision really doesn't get you very far and it makes sense, people want to check out their different options. But I think that if you have a clear idea of what you want to do and then just work really hard to get to that idea as soon as possible.
[00:15:59] So what you're [00:16:00] doing is, life essentially is cumulative. As you build in a particular direction, you're going to be more and more. So I would say, I would have paid more attention to the things that would have really pushed me in the direction that I'm going right now.
[00:16:09] I would have paid a little bit more attention to the supply chain aspect of what I'm doing. Once I discovered that I really liked supply chain, which was pretty early on relative to marketing, I wish I'd focused a little bit more on that.