Alex Bates is an angel investor and a Member of Peter Diamandis’s Abundance 360 Network. He’s experienced in anything from leading DARPA funded research in neural networks, to applying analytics for the world’s largest data warehouses at Teradata, to creating Mtell, a machine learning company acquired by Aspentech (NASDAQ: AZPN)
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
When business started difficulties overcame:
“as a first-time entrepreneur I made all the classic mistakes, I call it massive error correction learning. I think early on its hard to know what to prioritise and so I made a lot of mistakes about worrying too much about competition or just worrying too much in general about things you read in press releases. And over time you just get more confidence just to focus on what you are building, your connection with customers and making your customers extremely happy. And ultimately that value is going to make everything else fall into place… When I was an early entrepreneur I would just focus knows to the grindstone but over the years I have discovered it’s really important to seek out mentors and spend time with them because there is so much wisdom you can get that will cause you to help you avoid making those mistakes on the way”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail Book by Clayton M. ChristensenFavourite Quote:
“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” Peter Thiel
Recommended Online Resources:
- Blinkist – lets you read the key lessons from 3000 nonfiction books in 15 min or fewer
- Audible – Explore the world’s largest selection of audiobook titles by best-selling authors
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“one would be just to not give up on your vision to early. You hear a lot about fail fast, fail forward but one other perspective to keep in mind is that most start-ups go through low points, and if when you hit the first low point you fail fast, fail forward you are actually going to miss the success. Some of the really successful people like Steve jobs went through various low points and then came back and ultimately got to major outcomes. So one will be not to give up two quickly and to have that perseverance to push through”…[Listen for More]
More About Alex Bates:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
Stephen Covey “I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.”
Other Quotes From the Chat with Alex Bates:
- “immerse yourself, meet other entrepreneurs, go and watch them talk and absorb their energy”
- “surround yourself with people that are going to lift you up that you want to emulate”
- “secrets to success: one is definitely perseverance and tenacity and sometimes that overlaps passion in the sense that, in my case there was passion about the mind and the brain and that led me into this field of neural networks and artificial intelligence. And so because I had such a passion there was so much perseverance that if we went through 10 or a hundred low points it was a good to stop me or make me give up”
- “if you don’t love what you are doing your probably won’t have perseverance”
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