Sean Ammirati co-founded mSpoke, which was the first acquisition of LinkedIn. His next startup was Peak Strategy, which was acquired by Morgan Stanley. Today, he focuses on being a partner at Birchmere Ventures, where they invest into seed-stage SaaS and marketplace startups. Since their start in 1996, they’ve invested in 135 companies with 51 exits. Sean also teaches entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
When business started difficulties overcame:
“the biggest challenge for me was actually getting the conviction to get started… I think it wasn’t a head knowledge thing, I understood logically all the reasons it made sense to be an entrepreneur. But I think for me one of the challenges became did I really believe the things I believed enough to actually take that step and take that jump. Because I had a fairly defined path in front of me. And instead of pursuing that path I went down this very different”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
The book of Nehemiah in the BibleFavourite Quote:
“if we are going to do the Tour de France we might as well win it” Lance Armstrong
Recommended Online Resources:
- Steve Blank Entrepreneurship and Innovation
- Eric Ries The Lean Startup – The Movement That Is Transforming How New Products Are Built And Launched. The official website of all things Lean Startup presented by Eric Ries
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“the easy advice is just do it. But we want to be more thoughtful than that. So, the way to unpack that a little bit… I think that entrepreneurs before they start the journey, they tend to think too much about the downside. And so, I would encourage you to have a rational conversation with yourself about what really are the different outcomes here. And then once you’ve done that… Once you’ve kind of thought through that and you’ve taken the leap and jumped into it you can never overemphasise spending time with your customers. The more time you spend with the customers and listening to them and understanding the problems they have the better off you will be”…[Listen for More]
More About Sean Ammirati:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“There is a huge difference between failing and failure. Failing is trying something that you learn doesn’t work. Failure is throwing in the towel and giving up. True success comes from failing repeatedly and as quickly as possible, before your cash or your willpower runs out.” Jay Samit
Other Quotes From the Chat with Sean Ammirati:
- “some of the things I think I didn’t fully appreciate were I didn’t fully appreciate the customer development model. So how do you really weave customer feedback into your product vision when I first started out and it’s something, I try to help other entrepreneurs to do better than I did when I was an entrepreneur”
- “I think also early in my journey I didn’t really truly deeply appreciate agile and how to manage product in an agile way. It’s kind of ironic because my research in graduate school was on the agile manifesto and how to build software projects in an agile way. Until I’d actually done it myself… It’s a good example of reading versus doing. Until I had actually been part of managing products in that way myself, I didn’t fully deeply grasp it. I do think over the last decade plus tools like the scrum methodology have made it much easier to translate these concepts into action”
- “I do think everybody needs to find their own journey”
- “I will tell you for me the thing I think I’ve done a pretty good job of is making sure that the swings I’m taking are meaningful enough that if successful it can cover up for a lot of the things that didn’t work out”
- “there is the saying that Babe Ruth struck out a lot but he hit a lot of home runs as well. And so, people tend to focus on the home run piece of that. I do think I try to pick activities and projects where if the project works out it works out in such a significant way that it covers up a lot of other projects that would be categorised as failures”
- “I think readers are leaders so I encourage people to read lots and lots of content”
- “your work compounds and the excellence that you apply to your work does compound. And I have found often it’s that extra 10 or 20 percent effort that is the difference between making it and crushing it. So, I would encourage people to look at the things you are going to do and if you are going to do that you might as well win it doing it”
- “this concept of really pushing hard makes a ton of sense for the things you commit to doing”
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