Gabriel Safar is CEO and co-founder of LeasePilot, the only company creating a scalable, digital future for commercial real estate leasing. LeasePilot accelerates the timeframe to close leases by pairing innovative technology with rigorous legal industry standards. Gabriel received a BA in Economics from Tufts University and a JD from Boston College Law School.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
Hamdi Ulukaya founder of Chobani
When business started difficulties overcame:
“One of the big difficulties is as a founder I had an established career before building Lease Pilot and it was a successful career where ideas well and I built the expense structure associated with being an attorney who was doing well. And so to move from that environment, having a comfortable career where you earn a good income and I could have just stayed on autopilot, and then shifting to an environment with a high degree of uncertainty, a high degree of both execution uncertainty in the business financial uncertainty, that was a real challenge”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change) Book by Clayton M. ChristensenFavourite Quote:
“It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So” Mark Twain
Recommended Online Resources:
LinkedIn – LinkedIn is a business and employment-oriented service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Founded on December 28, 2002, and launched on May 5, 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking, including employers posting jobs and job seekers posting their CVs.
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“always be willing to bet on yourself. I found there are lots of circumstances where people give you advice, lots of it makes sense, a lot of it doesn’t make sense, but at the end of the day you need to be able to figure out what are risks that are not in your control and what are risks that relate to your ability to perform for your ability to achieve results. And if you bet on yourself and then effectively make whatever it is happen that you want to have happen other people will be willing to follow and will be willing to bet on you as well”…[Listen for More]
More About Gabriel Safar:
“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” Walt Disney
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
Other Quotes From the Chat with Gabriel Safar:
- “sometimes you need to think by doing”
- “sometimes you just can’t think about things you just have to do. And action is what creates opportunities. So just go for it and do it”
- “any type of business plan until you have some meat on the bones is going to be irrelevant. Plans only become meaningful once you have been engaging with the world and have some understanding of the overall environment and what you want to accomplish”
- “I think it is very important to have the ability to say there is an idea and to go out and get the resources you need to be able to actually make that idea a reality. And that might mean hiring a UX group if you don’t have those skills to be able to go and put ideas and have the methodology to go from ideation to a blueprint that can become software. And doing that requires sort of money. Or it requires some potentially external resources if you don’t have someone with those skills”
- “I would have spent more time out there doing things and less time initially analysing things”
- “I think confidence and betting on yourself is a big secret to success”
- “the other element of success is being really smart about risk. Being an entrepreneur is about taking risk but you are taking on so much risk you need to be able to identify where you can reduce risk. And we spend a lot of time thinking about risk reduction. That doesn’t mean we are risk averse it just means that we are smart saying that we have so much risk in our business. What’s the risks that are responsible for us to take where we are betting on ourselves and where are their external risks that aren’t sort of a factor that aren’t things that we can control, and how do we mitigate that. And I think smart entrepreneurs that is a real key to them doing well because the things that you can’t control can sink you so if you spend some time planning around that it goes a long way”
- “You need to always be testing your assumptions. And the most dangerous thing is when you are sure of something, you are dead certain of it and it is 100% wrong”
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