Earlier this week I attended the first fall Learn from the Best (LFTB) speaker event hosted by the Graduate Entrepreneurs Association (GEA). Thanks to Tim Falls and Jay Wilson for pulling it together - great event, great speaker guests (more in a moment) and great student participation. Standing room only and Tim and Jay finally had to ring the bell to bring the event to a close.
Thanks to Ari Newman, founder and president of FiltrBox, and Eric Marcoullier, co-founder and CEO of Gnip. After brief background and introductory comments from Ari and Eric the floor was opened to students and the questions were non-stop. Ari and Eric were great and very open and transparent about sharing their personal experiences, details of challenges they'd faced, decisions and hurdles they'd had to meet specific to their current and past businesses.
Here were some of my key takeaways. I want to give attribution to Ari and Eric for some great insights - but the attempt to encapsulate them reflects my own words.
Throughout their comments they both stressed the critical importance of listening to customers. When asked about his most valuable resource in building his businesses, Ari stated that it has for years been his network of personal trusted advisers. Eric agreed and offered another perspective - talking about the need for both passion and clarity - that without passion a new business doesn't have a chance, but without clarity (aka reality checks) passion can also get a business into irretrievable trouble.
At the Deming Center we stress that domain expertise is critical; that many great new business ideas don't come from the blinding disruptive insight but rather from new ways of solving old problems. Eric summed that up roughly as "The best way to solve a pain (fill a need) is to have deeply experienced that pain yourself. In other words - become very competent in your domain."
I look forward to the next LFTB session!
Thanks to Ari Newman, founder and president of FiltrBox, and Eric Marcoullier, co-founder and CEO of Gnip. After brief background and introductory comments from Ari and Eric the floor was opened to students and the questions were non-stop. Ari and Eric were great and very open and transparent about sharing their personal experiences, details of challenges they'd faced, decisions and hurdles they'd had to meet specific to their current and past businesses.
Here were some of my key takeaways. I want to give attribution to Ari and Eric for some great insights - but the attempt to encapsulate them reflects my own words.
Throughout their comments they both stressed the critical importance of listening to customers. When asked about his most valuable resource in building his businesses, Ari stated that it has for years been his network of personal trusted advisers. Eric agreed and offered another perspective - talking about the need for both passion and clarity - that without passion a new business doesn't have a chance, but without clarity (aka reality checks) passion can also get a business into irretrievable trouble.
At the Deming Center we stress that domain expertise is critical; that many great new business ideas don't come from the blinding disruptive insight but rather from new ways of solving old problems. Eric summed that up roughly as "The best way to solve a pain (fill a need) is to have deeply experienced that pain yourself. In other words - become very competent in your domain."
I look forward to the next LFTB session!
