Matt Blumberg has spent his entire career creating startups, scaling them, and sharing best practices of what works and what doesn’t work for other CEOs and team members in the entrepreneurial community. He is the author of Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business (Wiley, 2020), a highly influential book embraced by entrepreneurs, CEOs, founders, and board of directors in the entrepreneurial ecosystem that was an outgrowth of his blog, StartupCEO
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
Matt’s Dad
When business started difficulties overcame:
“There were two really. One was that I had never done it before, I had never been a CEO before and as much as I thought I knew about business from couple of jobs that I had had including being a general manager and sort of building a business inside of another company… Convincing people to join you when you’re a first-time entrepreneur and you are in your twenties is a little challenging”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
- The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business Book by Patrick M. Lencioni
- Whale Done!: The Power of Positive Relationships Book by Ken Blanchard and Thad Lacinak and Jim Ballard
Favourite Quote:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” Theodore Roosevelt
Recommended Online Resources:
- iTranslate – The Leading Translation and Dictionary App. iTranslate enables travelers, students, business professionals, employers and medical staff to read, write and speak in over 100 languages, anywhere in the world Translate text, websites and start voice conversations You can also look up words, their meanings, and conjugate verbs
Also mentioned:
- 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.
- Google LLC is an American multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related services and products, which include online advertising technologies, search engine, cloud computing, software, and hardware.
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“Work less… I think entrepreneurs who learn how to work less, exercise more, sleep more, take more personal time to sharpen the saw, as Stephen Covey would say, are entrepreneurs who get more done, who are happier people and who make everyone around them happier”…[Listen for More]
More About Matt Blumberg:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“We realize the importance of our voices only when we are silenced.” Malala Yousafzai
Other Quotes From the Chat with Matt Blumberg:
- “I didn’t know really anything about boards, I didn’t know how to build one, I did not how to run one. That was a sort of on-the-job learning that I wish I had learned more ahead of time”
- “The specifics of how to manage each function; how you manage an engineering team when you are not an engineer; or how to manage a sales team when you are not a salesperson, would have been helpful to learn ahead of time ”
- “I think the bigger challenge that I had a long that I had and lots of entrepreneurs have is more around self-management than managing a team or managing a board. and understanding that entrepreneurship is taxing, that it comes with some great emotional output at times, that it is something that you have to be very careful about how you manage yourself because everyone else in the organisation is constantly looking at you. The microphone is always on and you can’t let everyone in the organisation know every time something is worrying you or you are going to worry an entire organisation. So, I think that self-awareness and self-management was something that I probably didn’t think about until I was deep in it”
- “I think success as an entrepreneur is measured in a few different ways. There is an obvious success of oh I built a company, I sold the company, I built a big company et cetera. But I think there’s a lot of success that comes from learning. If you are an entrepreneur and you only measure success of exits you are not necessarily going to see a lot of success in your life, you might never see a lot of success. But creating things, having an impact on people, having an impact on an industry, learning and improving are all really important stepping stones to success that in and of themselves are good success metrics”
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