Wei Deng is the founder and CEO of Clipboard Health, an app-based marketplace that matches healthcare facilities with nurses nearby, and operates in dozens of U.S. cities. It is backed by Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator. Wei was previously with Sendwave, and started her career as a lawyer.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
- Friends
- Jeff Bezos
- Elon Musk
When business started difficulties overcame:
“When I started my business first of all figuring out what I was going to spend my days doing – that was difficult. Recruiting people to join me – that was definitely a difficult journey because I was not some famous entrepreneur, my company was not well-known. So trying to convince people to work on and spend their time…which is arguably the most precious thing that they have on something you have decided is important…that’s hard – so that was very difficult ”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz
- Conquering the Electron The Geniuses Visionaries Egomaniacs by Derek Cheung and Eric Brach
Favourite Quote:
” If I had one hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem & 5 minutes thinking of the solutions” Albert Einstein
Recommended Online Resources:
Paul Graham Essays – is an English born computer scientist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, author, and essayist. He is best known for his work on Lisp, his former startup Viaweb (later renamed “Yahoo! Store”), co-founding the influential startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, his blog, and Hacker News.
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“my best advice is to talk to customers and put one foot in front of the other. It’s like exercise. If you want to lose 50 pounds tomorrow don’t try to lose it all tomorrow. Like I mentioned progress is non-linear. I think if you lose the first couple of pounds you will see that compounding effect of wow I can do this and I just need to do more of this and it seems suddenly very doable. I think that unblocking your own psychology there is probably the most powerful thing you can do as an entrepreneur ”…[Listen for More]
More About Wei Deng:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“The secret of change is to focus all your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” Socrates
Other Quotes From the Chat with Wei Deng:
- “Just have more fun… In the early days I did have some fun but also, I had so much anxiety about getting to a certain milestone, getting to certain progress. And I think that impedes your ability to truly learn the way a student with no obligations would want to learn. So, I think just relaxing…”
- “I think the main secret is just that I don’t think that this is necessarily a secret but it is what I said before which is it is really about putting one foot in front of the other. If you are viewing yourself from the vantage point of like wow this person like Elon Musk, he is so far away from me, he is like a superhuman, I could never be him… Then that is a self-fulfilling prophecy and you are never going to try but if you think about the next smallest set of steps you can do for the next milestone however small and you do them it will give you immense power to continue on…. And a continuation that compounds. So, I think the secret is the compounding effects of learning and building that people underestimate quite a bit because they only see things in a linear way…”
- “What are the things that will seem obvious in five years that are not obvious today. How do I teach myself to recognise those patterns early on so that I not a sitting duck by the time it is five years from now and I could have foreseen this future“
- “When you are building a product, you are essentially building solutions but most of the solutions may not solve the problem because you don’t even understand the problem… Really digging deep enough that you are like okay the fundamental problem here is something that is probably very different from what you had understood at a surface level initially. And therefore, your solutions are probably going to be way more powerful because they actually get at the root cause”
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