Managing Your Ego: Lessons from a Startup Journey

And we were very successful. Sequoia Capital was our first investor. Sequoia Capital is the, the, the VC. Of all VCs, they're the most successful VC in the world and they invested in us. And your ego gets a little bit ahead of you sometimes. I would say that managing your ego through the process is not something you would ever know until you've gone and gotten beaten up a little bit, lost some customers, maybe gotten thrown out as CEO, which I did. And then I came back again, which I did. Reminiscent of Steve Jobs. Company was going great. Somebody at Sequoia said, you know what, you board, you know what? This guy, you know, hasn't seen the movie yet. He's a little young, we're going to go ahead and swap him out. And at that time they could do that. And, and then the company crashed. And then I came back a couple years later and we had to revive the company, brought it back and then we had a successful exit on it. But that's a really, really hard thing to learn because what happens is as an entrepreneur, your company is a bit of your baby. You get very attached to it and everything that happens emotionally to that company, you win a customer, you, you feel elated, you lose a customer, you feel devastated, something doesn't work right, you're devastated. Again, you need to separate or what we call detaching from that so you can still have all that emotion that goes along with the passion that drives your business forward. But if you're, it's almost like an addiction. If you're so involved in the business, in every sway, which way you'll lose your center point. And you would not know that unless you actually live through that experience. And by becoming somewhat detached, I don't mean apathetic to the business, just emotionally detached. And then look at it a little bit from the outside. You don't have to go on the roller coaster ride of every up and every down, you'll be able to enjoy it a lot more and enjoy the journey a lot more. That's just one small piece of advice, but I've got a ton, a ton of examples there.

Our special guest today is Ken Burke. He's a serial entrepreneur, respected professor and lecturer at top business schools around the world, including Columbia Business School. He is also the founder of Microcasting, sort of his latest venture. And Ken and I first connected through Entrepreneur now and we've, we've formed partnerships with my online courses, his online courses with distribution. So he's been a pioneer in the online learning movement. Tell us about microcasting and what unique part of the market it's. It's trying to address.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And you know, I loved, I wanted to, after I sold my company and did some different things, I wanted to jump back in the software game. I absolutely love the software game. And microcasting is kind of that, you know, how can we, how can we bring really good quality, curated content to the world and let individual contributors really package value? Not just influencers, not just two or three minute videos on YouTube or Instagram, which, by the way, is great and wonderful. But how can you then derive value from doing this, number one, and number two, actually derive a revenue stream from it as well and do it in an effective way. And that's one of the things that is unique about our platform and our overall business. And our overall solution is bringing people in that have wonderful and amazing content and working with them to get it out of them, number one, right. And then number two, being able to create it in such a way from scratch, that is engaging, that hooks people into the process and having all the tools to actually create a business around it.