This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube video titled "Jay Kaplan: Addressing Early Customer Doubts" from January 19, 2017, where Jay Kaplan shares his entrepreneurial insights, emphasizing the importance of building a lasting company, surrounding oneself with the right people, maintaining conviction, and executing effectively.
Chapters
My key entrepreneurial learnings. Tina asked me to throw together some things that maybe you can learn from. A lot of this I kind of already talked about, but I think starting off, don't just ride a trend. Build a lasting company. It's one thing to say I'm going to do cybersecurity in a crowd sourced way. It's another to actually build a company that addresses all the problems associated with selling to businesses, selling to conservative enterprises in cybersecurity and crowdsourcing at the same time. So that was definitely something that we learned was really important. Surround yourself with the right people. We talked about that. Hiring really top notch talent, bringing on great investors, advisors, mentors, super crucial. They have really propelled our business forward and got us to where we are today. Conviction. You got to stay the course. Even if people call you crazy, they will call you crazy. If they're not calling you crazy, your idea probably is just boring. So do something that's exciting. People should call you crazy and then you should figure out how to prove them wrong. Be passionate but patient about the grand vision. Right? It takes time. Takes time to build a business. I'd say the last year, I've been at this for about three and a half years. The last year or so we've really hit our stride with respect to bringing on new customers at large contract values. I mean, our federal customers are new. We've been going after them for some time. Enterprise sales takes a really long time. You have to not only convince customers, but you have to get through their procurement process. That's really hard. They're very conservative with dealing with smaller companies, but they're starting to embrace it more and more. And then execution. It's one thing to start a company, it's another to actually execute. And sorry this is so small by the way. I see some of you squinting, but really at the end of the day, it's all about execution and executing on that early idea that you had to make it a reality.
