Shawn Khorrami has made a career of identifying and artfully handling the issues most business owners don’t even look at or lose sleep over. He has been a serial entrepreneur since the age of 16, having started and managed more than a dozen businesses involving products and services across a wide range of verticals.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
- Shawn Father
- Elon Musk
When business started difficulties overcame:
“Lots of them. And those difficulties have continued… After college when I really got serious about starting my own business, I had all kinds of issues come up. How do you fund that business? And I a big fan of bootstrapping although I have raised money for my businesses as well. I went through times Neil when I had no electricity at my house, I couldn’t afford to pay it. I would literally walk around with a lantern around my house”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
- The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything Book by Guy Kawasaki
- A Civil Action Book by Jonathan Harr
- All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror Book by Stephen Kinzer
Favourite Quote:
- “the product is not your business” Shawn Khorrami
- “the biggest failure in life is the failure to participate”
- “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”
- “strive for perfection but don’t let it hold you back from actually taking steps forward”
Recommended Online Resources:
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:
“Take the steps forward… Don’t be so hard-headed about the product, have flexibility… You have to have that flexibility to keep on developing to bring what you envision as product you are bringing to the world and the problem you are solving…to understand that the world may have different ideas of what that problem is and you may not fully understand it and that may mean changing. So that is a very important thing that I do not see a lot of times”…[Listen for More]
More About Shawn Khorrami:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“Action is the foundational key to all success.” Pablo Picasso
Other Quotes From the Chat with Shawn Khorrami:
- “There is a certain bit of luck involved to. There is not that much of a difference between the person that becomes a celebrity entrepreneur… versus the person who is just as successful but you don’t really hear about. So, I draw inspiration from different people ”
- “I have a tendency to never accept a loss. Whatever it is I can find a solution, whatever it is I can make it past this ”
- “Everything is a gift and a curse. You have to realise when it becomes a curse. When that desire to succeed, that desire to solve problems, that desire to push past the difficult times is actually working against you… And not only recognise it but understand what you have to do at that point. That is something that I didn’t recognise early on and I would push a business past its breaking point a lot of times or I would make a decision not to cut jobs when it was appropriate to do so because I felt like I could make it through this tough time without having people lose their jobs which is always a horrible thing in my mind. I hate having to lay people off and make them lose their livelihoods ”
- “Understanding that your product is not your business but your business is your product”
- “Things aren’t always what they seem. There are things you don’t know you don’t know , there are unintended consequences to things that can be really serious… There is a tendency to make a decision because it seems intuitively right but not consider a lot of different ways it could go wrong”
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