Episode # 535 - Talking about Entrepreneurship to College Grad Students with Colin McIntosh

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

I'm here with Colin McIntosh and Collins from Denver, Colorado. Transplanted Floridian and. Sounds like you're permanently planted in Denver.

I am. I've been here seven years now and I just got engaged two months ago, so. Thank you. Got engaged on Moab. Totally beautiful, stunning place out there in Utah. Have you been? Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Spectacular special place. We're thinking about doing the wedding out there, actually.

Really?

Yeah. So I'm officially, I'm a Colorado and I'm not going anywhere. And I bought my, my first house last year, year and a half ago where I'm, you know, I'm sitting in now. And it's, it's wonderful to have roots in a place, you know, I, I grew up in Florida. I went to school in Atlanta. I worked at Bridgewater Associates in Connecticut. Right out of school I became a, I flew out to Seattle, I worked at a startup in Seattle. And you know, so it's really nice to feel connected to a, to a place when you.

How long have you been going and sharing ideas of the entrepreneur on entrepreneurship back at Emory?

Since 2014, I think was the first time I went, wow, so you're pro at this now? You know what, actually, I think it was 2015. I think it was when I started, when I went through techstars the first time with the last company I was at, they reached out and they asked me, hey, would you come talk about accelerators and your experience with techstars? Because Emory doesn't really have that robust of an. At least it didn't used to have a very robust entrepreneurship program. In fact, when I was in college, I wanted to start a business and the school had a policy that said you were not allowed to start businesses on campus because of legal liability. And I got into a big fight with the dean and he said, look, we're not going to, we're not going to let you start this business because, you know, we don't, we just have a policy of students aren't allowed to start businesses on campus. And it was like 2010 or 2011. And I, and I told them, I said, hey man, you call yourself the Harvard of the South? You what, you think Harvard doesn't let their students start businesses on campus? Like, like. And I, and I said, so look, you know, I said, I'll Give you two options. I'll never forget this conversation. I said two options. One is you let me start my business and I will be, you know, in the future, I'll be a big donator to Emory and I'll, and I'll remember that you guys really, you know, helped me out at my journey. Or two, you don't let me start my business, and I'll never donate a cent to Emory in my entire life. And he goes, he just goes, two. And I was like, great. And I walk. And I walked out the door and I was like. And I literally, every time they call me, I go, let me tell you a story about a conversation I had with the Dean 10 years ago, 15, 12 years ago. And. But, you know, I give back, I go back and I teach and I, you know, I like to lecture and that sort of thing. And. But yeah, I don't give any money to that school.

What do you think of the most important things, if you kind of come around to realizing are the most important things for kids coming up who are interested in entrepreneurship, which would probably be the same things that they need to know questions they have probably the same things for people who are not in grad school and are starting a business or wanting to start a business. So what, what do you impress upon them as insights?

So on a, on a macro level, I would tell them, I tell all the kids this at Emory. I say what. I say, what do you want to do? Oh, I want to be an accountant. I want to do. Do this, I want to do that. And I was like, all right, well, let me, let me tell you what that looks like. I'm like, it looks like working for somebody else, having their stresses, be your stresses. You will never make as much money as you want to make. It will always be tied to the business's performance, your, Your competitive landscape for who they can rehire in your field. And I'm like, And I said, you guys are smart kids with good educations, and you will always, always be able to go down that path. Always. Whereas if you start a business, the worst thing that can possibly happen to you is in six months, the company doesn't do well. And you'll figure that out pretty quickly. In fact, you can do it a lot faster than six months if you have some barriers set up to see if you're actually doing what you need to be doing. And I said, and the best case outcome is that you can change the course of your life. And the cost benefit analysis for people who are privileged enough to have good educations and have the fallback option of a good career. It is so skewed in favor of starting a business that it is mind boggling to me that every single one of my friends in Denver who is a professional has not yet started their own business. It blows my mind. And so I always try to let them know that the risk is so much lower than the reward for starting your own business.

Now, is that an eye opener for them? It seems like they would be have.

Thought about this, I think by the.

Questions you get or the response you get.

I mean, if you're a kid, you're 22 and you get a six figure offer at a school, at a bank or something like that, it's hard to say no to. It's hard. And, and I think there is value in working for someone else for a while and learning, you know, at that company. But, you know, so I'm not encouraging people to drop out and start their business or, or give up on, on a career path. But I think that after a few years, three, four, five, six, seven years, you know, maybe you're in your 30s, you have a little bit more money saved up. Like I think, I think the real trouble is people get into this life path where they're, you know, they're 31, they're 32, they're getting married, they, they have a really nice income with their job, they're going to have a kid and the risks start to pile up in their mind. But even so, even so, you can, you can start a business on the side. You can start, you can figure out in three months if it's going to work or not. And usually the worst case scenario is you cost yourself a few thousand dollars and three months of earning potential.

Right. And I think you understand it. Exactly. It's like going right out of school.

Probably, probably the, the difficulty is way higher because you don't, you don't have a Rolodex, you don't have probably, yeah.

You probably need more life experiences, contacts, right. And you know, you need to probably emotionally grow up, you know, and. Yeah, yeah, and the ones that I've talked to on this podcast that seem to have had somehow they got it in their mind like right from the beginning. See where I think you're doing them a favor, Even the people that might argue with you, you know, I'm going to get it, you know, I want security or whatever. The thing is that they need to hear it, right, when things happen to them, you know, like if you work for a corporation, you're gonna get screwed. And it might be, it might be two years, 20 years, you know, and the sooner the better because now you got the bigger home, you got the bigger obligations, the kids are going to college. And you know, when they toss you out, like right now, Jamie Dimon, who I've been in business with before, you know, Jamie running JP Morgan, they're getting ready to, they're doing, putting the squeeze on employees to show up in offices because they've got a lot of retail space and they want to break that cycle of people working at home, you know, and so he's getting ready to move. He's got a lot of reasons to want to make people force people to show up. But here's the thing, here's the figure that came out of there. They, they're getting a brand new huge building in New York City and they're going to have 15,000 employees go in there. Now let me ask you, you want a 15,000? You better swim upstream very quickly because you know, when they do layout, you know, it's the thing a corporation that you need to know is that corporations are like glaciers. They look like monoliths. They never change big piece of concrete, but they're always changing. They're always melting. Cracks are always in, involved somewhere in there and they're calving and big sections are falling off here and there and they're morphing. You know, corporations are more. And if they decide to lay off a division or this, that the other, or you know, whatever, you know, move something to another country or another state, you're, you're gone. And not you personally?

No, the, the, the thing I tell people is like you're, I don't know, some people want to work for other people. I, I, I got fired from my first job and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Like, like, you know, and, and I think that like a lot of people need to have that wake up call before they're actually ready to go out on a limb and start their own business. You've got to get your healthcare ripped away from you. Suddenly. You've got to get your salary ripped away from you. Suddenly you've got to get screwed. You've got to get mean, you got to get angry. Like there's got to be something that happens because most people, the inertia is so powerful that if they're, if they're, if they, they have a comfortable life and they like their life and they're moving on with it, they won't risk that even Though I think that they just overblow the risk in their minds. I think that that's the thing is they think it's like this really scary prospect. And I think the other thing is this fear of failure that people have. Like, you know, if Sheets and Giggles goes out of business, like, which is always a possibility for a young company, like in a high growth company, if it does that, I will feel bad, but I won't feel like a failure in the sense of I will regret decisions I made, I will regret things that I could have done better. But at the same time, it's just a corporation, it's just an idea. It's nebulous for me. Like, I feel really good in saying that. Like I'm, I'm not defined by my company. I say that as I'm wearing a Sheetzinger Go shirt and a Sheets and Giggles office. But that's, that's actually one of the reasons what we talked about earlier with social media is that's one of the reasons why my Persona is not completely tied to my company, is because I don't, I don't want to be the company I want to be Colin. You know, and I think that people fear failure so much because they tie themselves and their Personas and their value to their ink, you know, and they shouldn't.

Absolutely. And the sooner you start thinking getting out of college and working for other people, other companies, right off the bat is right from the beginning they went in with the idea. I'm going to get as many skills as I can. I'm going to ask as many questions, I'm going to volunteer for every project I possibly can. I'm going to meet as many people as I can, and I'm going to suck all of the education and experiences out of that company that I can while I either locate my next step or I find my own company, you know. You know, and if I don't, if it doesn't crystallize, you know, in a couple of years. And I talked to a high level, not high level, but like mid, mid management she called it on the podcast. A lady who, who did that all the time. And she said, you know, when people make 80 to 100, 120,000, she said they turn over there is every two and a half years. And so if you know that, if, if you know that that's what happens for whatever reason, you're going to really want to make your time count wherever you are. That's the best thing you can do to stay employed and move up you know, swim upstream and become more valuable where the company knows who you are and they're going to keep you no matter what because you're unique, you know, you're, you're, you're making the money, basically.

My second job, so my, my first job was at Bridgewater. I got fired in six months. Feelings. And then my second job was as a recruiter and I, and I became a recruiter for banks, for hedge funds, for startups. That's how I got into startups.

There you go.

And, and I, that job, I was like a sponge. Like, I, I learned everything I could about software development. I learned everything I could about, you know, the roles that I was recruiting for the. Why is this role valuable? Why is this role valuable? Scoping out the roles of my clients, like, understanding their business needs and why they needed to hire this person for their business needs. And it was such an incredible education with so much context switching and, you know, and I, and I was up working till two in the morning every night, like, you know, messaging people on LinkedIn and trying to find the right candidate. And my, my colleagues used to call me a recruiting vampire. But you know, even then you could see kind of like the differences between the way that I would approach that job versus somebody who's treating it as a 9 to 5. Right. I was 20, I was 23 and I was like, I just got fired from my first job. I gotta learn some shit, some valuable transferable shit. And yeah, and I ended up, funny enough, I ended up hiring myself, but one of my clients in Seattle for a biz dev role. So then I moved to a biz dev role and then things kind of went from there for me. So. But I, but yeah, a hundred percent. You gotta, you gotta, really? I used to make the coffee and take out the trash and do everything in between, you know, like, and I will say I think that, I think that that attitude is shifting a little bit. But then I, then I'm just, you know, I start to think I'm the old guy being like kids these days, you know, like, you know, shaking my fist at a cloud and I'm 32, you know, so it's not. Yeah.

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