This week, I had a profound conversation with Derek Andersen, Founder and CEO of Startup Grind and Bevy. Entrepreneurs are visionaries but it takes more than bright ideas for a business to thrive and be firmly grounded. We must make sure we are creating a space where our creativity meets our target audience. I had a lot of insights as Derek and I unbox a lot of good stuff around bootstrapping and profitable hiring. Derek points out where entrepreneurs should direct their resources to ensure they’re not killing their own vision. On top of that, he also gives us some direct and rational tips on getting over failures, creating the future we want, hiring efficiently, and so much more! Evidently, those who we choose to work with have the ability to dictate our results.
“The goal as an entrepreneur shouldn’t be to just continue to work on random ideas in perpetuity. The goal is to find something and to spend all waking energy on that thing.” –Derek Andersen
Episode Highlights:
02:56 Start-Up Grind- From Local to Global
08:55 The Goal Entrepreneurs Should Aim For
16:15 Who’s The Real Visionary
20:22 The Pain of Failure and Its Cure
25:55 How To Have The Future You Want
29:36 Customer Validation: A Sure Way To Seal the Deal
36:00 Save More, Gain More With Exceptional People
40:44 Be Careful Who You Hire!
Level up from local to global! Tune in as @JayRooke and @DerekjAndersen discuss two things that powerful enterprises utilize for success: customer validation and efficient hiring. Listen at https://jayrooke.com/105-Derek-Anderson/ #podcast… Click To Tweet
Resources:
Connect with Derek:
Derek Andersen has spent the past 10 years building communities. He is the co-founder/CEO of Bevy, a SaaS product that helps companies like Salesforce, Atlassian, Asana, and Duolingo build virtual and in-person communities. Derek co-founded Startup Grind, a community of 600 Chapters in 125 countries designed to educate, inspire, and connect startup people. Since 2012 Startup Grind has hosted 10,000 events for more than 250,000 people. In 2010 he co-founded Commonred which was acquired by Income.com. Derek also previously worked at Electronic Arts on games like Burnout and The Sims 3. He currently lives in Palo Alto CA with his wife and four children.
Inspirational Quotes:
- 09:45 “The goal as an entrepreneur shouldn’t be to just continue to work on random ideas in perpetuity. The goal is to find something and to spend all waking energy on that thing.” –Derek Andersen
- 16:57 “Do not build things that aren’t cool anymore.” -Derek Andersen
- 24:08 “As long as you keep it within certain reasonable bounds, people aren’t going to be talking about your failures, they’ll be talking about your success. And you got to fight through the failures to get there.” -Derek Andersen
- 27:42 “Use different things to get you in the stream of consciousness and then take a bet on the best opportunity that you can find and give it a shot.” -Derek Andersen
- 32:31 “If someone won’t pay for it, then it’s still vaporware.” -Derek Andersen
- 37:02 “Exceptional people have such an outdated impact on the business… because they will create so much value for you and the company that they’re worth anything.” -Derek Andersen
- 37:43 “Truly exceptional people… could return it a hundredfold. The difficulty is convincing those people to jump on but once you start to get one or two of them, it becomes exponentially easier to get more.” -Derek Andersen
- 43:37 “The way that somebody can have a positive impact is the exact opposite of having a negative impact. The person with negative impact can sink your ship.” -Derek Andersen
- 43:57 “Hiring great people is the number one indicator of success.” -Derek Andersen
- 45:07 “No pain is so great in a company that it’s worth hiring a wrong people to solve.” -Derek Andersen