Sandi Lin is co-founder and CEO of Skilljar, the leading customer training platform. Prior to Skilljar, she was a senior manager at Amazon.com. Sandi has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering from MIT and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
- Sandi’s dad
- Tom Taylor
When business started difficulties overcame:
“So, the hardest part for me personally was becoming comfortable with the financial risk and to some extent the career reputation risk. So financially as an entrepreneur I had to make peace with zero salary for potentially a long period of time and as well as walking away from what is now millions of dollars’ worth of Amazon stock options. It’s nonsensical I think financially of course and I just had to become comfortable with that”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
- Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE Book by Phil Knight
- Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams Book by Matthew Walker
Favourite Quote:
“What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?” Vincent Van
Recommended Online Resources:
- Zapier – Connect the apps you use every day to automate your work and be more productive 1,500 apps and easy integrations get started in minutes
- Slack is where work flows. It’s where the people you need, the information you share, and the tools you use come together to get things done
- Survey Monkey – Use SurveyMonkey to drive your business forward by using our free online survey tool to capture the voices and opinions of the people who matter most to you.
- Salesforce – CRM software solutions and enterprise cloud computing from Salesforce, the leader in customer relationship management CRM and SaaS
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“take care of yourself, sleep, eat healthily, exercise and make sure that you are a whole person outside of your job”…[Listen for More]
More About Sandi Lin:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo Da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.” H. Jackson Brown Jr., American author
Other Quotes From the Chat with Sandi Lin:
- “I have found that I am incredibly motivated by fear of failure. And I said this once with a group of CEOs and I think almost everybody agreed that they are more motivated by fear of failure than sort of attraction to success. So, there does seem to be something in entrepreneurial spirit around trying to avoid failure”
- “I learn by doing”
- “one of our values is continuous learning”
- “being able to continuously look at a situation, figure out what needs to be done and problem solve and move on is incredibly important. And plans change and the market changes and in an entrepreneurial environment they change much faster than more established companies. So being able to continuously learn and adapt and grow organically I think is incredibly important, not to be too tired to what happened in the past”
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