Dan Martell - December 29, 2014


3 Things That ALL Great Entrepreneurs Have


Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

180.25673

Word count

997

Sentence count

55

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about the three traits that I've seen in all great entrepreneurs. These are the three things that I have seen in entrepreneurs and why they are the key to building an amazing company. I hope this episode resonates with you in your day to day life.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
00:00:00.720 These are the three things that all great entrepreneurs have.
00:00:05.240 You know, I've been in and around business now for 15 years, starting companies, investing
00:00:10.400 in companies.
00:00:11.400 I've invested now in 33 companies and counting.
00:00:14.760 And there's this reoccurring thing, this characteristics that I've seen in all these
00:00:19.000 amazing entrepreneurs that I've met throughout the years that I've now figured out.
00:00:23.000 There's kind of like these three key areas.
00:00:25.080 And the number one is passion.
00:00:26.560 Now, a lot of people talk about passion.
00:00:28.640 You have to be passionate about your idea.
00:00:29.760 I mean, growing up, my dad always said, you know, if you could only find something that wasn't going to get you in trouble that you're passionate about, you do wonders in the world.
00:00:37.280 And he was right.
00:00:38.020 When I discovered technology and writing code, my life changed.
00:00:42.180 But the key for building a business with passion, the best story or answer I've ever seen on why it's important was from Steve Jobs at a conference.
00:00:50.860 You know, when he was explaining this, he said, you know, the one thing that every entrepreneur needs is passion.
00:00:55.300 Not because it's important or, you know, if you don't love what you do, etc., etc.
00:01:01.900 It's passion because when everything else gets super hard,
00:01:06.480 when the rest of the world is pushing back on you not to want to change,
00:01:11.720 when it just feels like it's impossible to move forward,
00:01:15.340 it's because you are passionate about your company that you're going to push through.
00:01:20.400 And by pushing through is the reason why the company eventually goes on and is successful.
00:01:26.100 He says, without passion, any sane person would have given up.
00:01:30.420 And I love the way he frames that because it's such a requirement to build an amazing company.
00:01:35.840 And that's what I've seen in all great entrepreneurs.
00:01:38.360 On top of passion, the thing I've seen is they all use their own product.
00:01:43.220 Now, this might sound trivial.
00:01:44.620 You might be like, what are you talking about?
00:01:45.960 Use your own product.
00:01:47.300 Trust me when I say this.
00:01:48.700 When I meet an entrepreneur and things aren't going well, the first question I ask them
00:01:53.520 is, are you still using your product?
00:01:55.860 If you are building a product and you aren't a user, you've moved away from, because most
00:02:01.920 companies are started because the entrepreneur had a problem and he wanted to solve it.
00:02:06.620 If you've moved away, if you started off building a product for your own problem and you've
00:02:12.880 evolved and evolved and all of a sudden now you find yourself no longer using your product,
00:02:18.700 that's a big red flag think about it like you I see this happen all the time
00:02:25.540 where entrepreneurs pivot out of their passion for the product they end up not
00:02:30.580 being a user they don't get feedback anymore I mean if you started a healthy 0.96
00:02:36.140 chain of restaurants and all of a sudden you catch yourself eating crap like
00:02:39.940 McDonald's and Burger King and all this fatty crap you have no context to who 0.97
00:02:46.320 your customer is if you're trying to do this like super healthy organic thing right so try to 0.94
00:02:51.840 reconnect with that but that is one of the traits that i've seen all great entrepreneurs have is
00:02:56.400 they're they're they're like ridiculously passionate and maniacal about product and their
00:03:02.480 own product and then the third thing that i've seen in all great entrepreneurs is they're all
00:03:08.400 working on really hard problems and i don't mean to scare you if you're not one of those people
00:03:14.400 that you don't feel like you're trying to change the world or you're not trying to solve some crazy, you know, medical challenge or technological challenge.
00:03:24.400 But again, I'm talking about great entrepreneurs, not mediocre, not good, not okay.
00:03:29.880 I'm talking about world class, game changing, change the world, leave a dent in the universe kind of entrepreneurs is the problems they're solving are really freaking hard.
00:03:42.280 Think about this, Elon Musk, SpaceX, rocket ships, sending rocket ships into Earth.
00:03:48.980 Tesla, the first profitable electric car company, started with electric car.
00:03:55.780 One of the first new car companies to launch in the United States in over 50 years.
00:04:01.720 Not an easy problem to solve.
00:04:03.700 And third, SolarCity, trying to build a new way of energizing the planet and the world we live in.
00:04:11.380 And these are all ridiculously hard problems to solve and why I think pound for pound Elon
00:04:16.300 Musk is probably one of the best entrepreneurs of the century.
00:04:19.640 But that's true for all the entrepreneurs out there from Steve Jobs to, I'm going to
00:04:24.180 put Aaron Levy from Box.net to, you know, Brian and Joe at Airbnb.
00:04:30.640 All these companies, maybe as a consumer, when you use them, you go, wow, the product
00:04:34.360 experience is so great.
00:04:35.360 It's so easy.
00:04:36.360 Trust me, you do not understand the amount of hours that get put into every single decision
00:04:42.440 to create this fluid and elegant experience.
00:04:47.120 And those are the three things.
00:04:48.640 Passionate about their company, they use their own product,
00:04:52.140 and they're solving ridiculously hard problems.
00:04:55.080 And now if that's not you, that's okay.
00:04:56.680 You don't have to start on all three.
00:04:58.760 You don't have to have them all.
00:04:59.620 You can actually edit your way into making it a three for three.
00:05:04.040 But again, I'm saying this is for great entrepreneurs.
00:05:06.600 You may not have aspirations.
00:05:08.120 Maybe you just want to create enough revenue or income to kind of pay your bills and create
00:05:12.460 some kind of freedom in your life.
00:05:13.640 And that's totally cool.
00:05:15.320 But if you have aspirations to become a great entrepreneur, think about those three things.
00:05:19.780 Those are the three things I've found.
00:05:21.320 Hopefully you found that useful.
00:05:22.600 And I want to challenge you to really stack up your business success and kind of go for
00:05:26.920 growth.
00:05:27.760 And with that, I want to thank you for watching this video.
00:05:30.180 And I hope you have an amazing day.