David Olk is the CEO and Co-Founder of Voray, helping people more authentically build meaningful business relationships. Prior to Voray, David co-founded ShopKeep, an SaaS Point-of-Sale technology company, which under David’s leadership, grew to one of NYC’s largest software companies with over 25,000 enterprise customers and raising over $100 million in capital. He is an active advisor and investor to multiple early-startups, a NYC TechStars Mentor, is a Board Director of ShopKeep, Vengo, Amper Music and Columbia University’s Lang, and was a board member of Kickstarter which he helped advise from the earliest stages. David began his career in the Mergers and Acquisitions group at PriceWaterhouseCooper’s (PWC), followed by working in M&A at Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp (IAC). He is a graduate of Tulane University and Columbia Business School. David lives in New York City with his wife and two sons. When he is not working at or advising startups, you can find David chasing two toddlers around in a city park near you.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
Perry Chen
When business started difficulties overcame:
“I kind of developed a bit of a chip so I had to overcome a lot of ego, the underlying insecurities of it and not really knowing what I was doing that created some feelings of being afraid of failure so for me a lot of my underlying difficulties was self inflicted and generated by having a massive ego and a lot of arrogance based on how I felt about the world”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less Book by Greg McKeownFavourite Quote:
“If you’re going through hell keep going” Winston Churchill
Recommended Online Resources:
- Inc – get advice, tools, and services that help your small business grow.
- Crunchbase – is the leading platform to discover innovative companies and the people behind them. Used by millions of entrepreneurs, investors, and analysts every month, the crunchbase Dataset is constantly expanding through contributions from its community.
- Tech Crunch – is a leading technology media property, dedicated to obsessively profiling startups, reviewing new Internet products, and breaking tech news.
- Venture Beat – is the leading source for news perspective on tech innovation We give context to help execs, entrepreneurs, tech enthusiasts make smart decisions.
- AVC – Musings of a VC in NYC
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“Do a lot of user discovery before you spend any money”…[Listen for More]
More About David Olk:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“Ask the right questions. The fastest way to change the answers you receive” Lee J. Colan
Other Quotes From the Chat with David Olk:
- “When you’re raising capital, you’re not pan handling and that goes back to the mentality that we thought about, you are selling a piece of your brain child and giving somebody else the opportunity to make a lot of money by investing in the opportunity you’re giving them so when you’re out raising capital for your company you really need to remember that you’re not pan handling”
- “The secret sauce is just focus”
- “If you feel like you’re in complete control, you’re probably not moving fast enough”
“You want to make a lot of decisions based on data but if it doesn’t feel good it probably isn’t the right decision”
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