Ken Barton: Founder @ MinnoTank

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Alright everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Business Blast Podcast. I'm your host Tyler Wagner. Today I have Ken Barton with us. He's the founder at Minnow Tank. So welcome to the show, man.

Hey there, Tyler. Thanks for having me.

Of course, man. Grateful to have you here. We'll jump right into the first one, Ken. The first one I have for you is, what is the best story from your life that has an underlying valuable message?

All right, Tyler, so I'll try to keep it short because I tell the story quite often. It's a big part of my life. So I had the great opportunity when I was going to community college in Florida to be selected to represent our community college to visit China. We were in an accounting program and we were doing an exchange program for 8 of our students and 8 of theirs. 8 is a lucky number in China, in Chinese, if you didn't know. And so cut that story a little shorter. I arrive in China, I'm falling in love with it, I'm super interested, and the moment that it hit me, the valuable underlying message kind of hit me was I'm on a bus from Tianjin, which is a far northeast city, to Beijing, which is the capital of the country. It's about a 4-hour bus ride. And while all my classmates are playing Angry Birds and scoffing and complaining about the lack of cheeseburgers and French fries, I am glued to the window and I'm staring out this window and I'm trying to count the number of construction cranes that I see. And it was well over 1,000. And so here I am, a small town boy from Orlando, Florida. I might've seen 5 or 10 construction cranes in my entire life, looking at the future. Essentially I was seeing, I'm staring at the future in its face. That changed my life. Then I realized I need to go study Mandarin, and I need to have a kinship with this country and this language because I know it's going to be a huge impact forever. I can see the development. My underlying valuable message would be when you see these opportunities and you see these industries growing, and this is transmutable to many industries, if you see real estate opportunities, or maybe you see blockchain opportunities, Or you see that, you know, you look at stock market, you see the FANG, and you see the Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google are running the world, maybe you should probably work in technology. So just looking and seeing where the future is. When you see these glaring opportunities, make sure you go and grasp them.

Yes, man. The next one I have for you is, what is the most valuable piece of information we should know that's within your expertise or industry?

So a lot like one of your other podcasts, members, Kelly Lampkin, who actually connected me to you. I work in sales, so although I run my startup and I run Minnow Tank, I definitely am all about sales and making business happen because as a guy who's not great at the software development, I make money happen. So my piece of advice would be qualify the question no, qualify and question the word no. When someone tells you no, whether it's you're being hired or someone did not hire you or you're trying to make a deal or you can't pass this way, I like to qualify that with the question, why? Because oftentimes there really isn't much reason, or if there is a reason, if you know what the reason is, you can change, fix, move around it and surmount it. And then you can accomplish what you wanted to accomplish in the beginning. You can actually find a solution between you. But I think too many people take the response no and allow that to end. And I'm always challenging my team, and I challenge people around me to question when you hear the word no and say why, and see if there's a way for you to get around that.

And what is your best piece of overall business advice, so not necessarily industry-specific?

Yep, it's not industry-specific. I'd say my best piece of advice is be tenacious. So when I was playing roller hockey in high school, or I think it's actually middle school, my coach taught me this word. He said, I want all of you to be tenacious. I had no idea what the word was, and so I was really nervous, and I was I was like, okay, so uneducated, I gotta learn what this word is. And so I went home and I realized tenacity is basically grit. It's not giving up. And my favorite example is obviously I live in the tech community. So whether you're the Collison brothers who went into their customers' offices and installed their API, and the Collison brothers are the gentlemen who founded Stripe, one of the most successful tech startups in the West Coast and the world, or whether you run the runway, I just listened to one of the podcasts about the founder of Rent the Runway, and she cold emailed, cold called, and cold walked into the offices of some of the most powerful brands out there, Neiman Marcus, huge designer people, because she said she wouldn't accept the first no. She didn't accept the 10th no. She'll take 15, 20, 30, 50 nos until she gets an answer that she wants, which is being tenacious, so just keeping going.

And if you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would that be?

I would have— Tyler, I would have said to myself, study some computers. I just turned 28 earlier this month, and I wish I would have studied more computer science or had a better understanding of how computers work, because in reality, I don't care what you do, I would be very impressed if you could find any industry that does not interface with computers. I would or some kind of technology, I would say it's almost impossible in today's world. And so whatever you're doing, or even if you're an adult, even if you're in the workforce, I would say find a way to start, whether it's software, whether it's networking, just understanding how it works brings you to a higher echelon of understanding the things that are going on around you. Because I think that's a big problem for a lot of non-technical startup founders or even for business owners who just kind of see it as this wizardry, this witchcraft that just works sometimes and other times it doesn't. And I have to pay someone lots and lots of money when it doesn't work. But if you understood it a little better, maybe it wouldn't cost you so much. So my response is, this is coming from someone, by the way, who has 2 degrees in Mandarin Chinese. I suggest study computers as well.

100%. I thought that too. I'm 27 now, and I was like, dude, I should have been learning how to code or something back in the day.

Just like, not even like fully learning, but just like understanding it, you know, at least getting a good base knowledge, at least understanding how to communicate with your developers. That's one of the problems that I had. So I'm a non-technical founder of Minnow Tank, and one of the problems is for a very long time— I actually, actually just finished a coding boot camp, which I highly suggest. But, you know, I didn't understand front-end, back-end. I didn't understand what JavaScript, HTML, CSS were. Had no idea. And now that I do, I'm able to communicate the things that I want in their language. Which is so much better.

And so, kind of going a little bit down a different path here, the next one I have for you is, in your opinion, what is the key to happiness?

I thought about this question for a long time and I thought to myself, I wanted to say friendship, but I thought that sounded lame and banal. And so, I think the better response is community because especially as an entrepreneur, and I'm specifically a tech entrepreneur, so You have to remember, although you hear about some amazing Mark Zuckerbergs, 99% of us fail. So there's lots of us who are out here struggling together, and you can't expect your local friend group to be able to support you in everything. They can't always understand what you're going through, but you can build a community around you that has some people to support you emotionally, some people to support you business-wise, who to celebrate things with, and just building that community for yourself. Wherever you are, I think is really good for you as a person, not just as a business person, but as a person and a human. So my suggestion is like the key to happiness is build a community that helps you go through the world.

And what is the best book that you've read and what was the number one thing you learned from that?

Oh goodness. So this is kind of embarrassing. So I work in finance, economics, numbers, and investing all day long. So when I read, I love to escape. But although I do read business books, I read like everybody else. I really like fantasy books. So there's a book I'm actually finishing. It's not a trilogy. I don't know what you call it. It's a tome that has 17 books. I'm on number 7, but it's by Terry Goodkind. And at least the first book was The Wizard's First Rule. The whole theory around this book is talking about wizards. It's so funny. It's so lame. It's so weird. Anyway, it's fantasy and fiction. It talks about all these rules that wizards have built, which wizards are the smartest people in society. They built all these rules. The wizard's first rule is people will believe what they want to believe. I take that back to fake it till you make it kind of thing. If you're not there yet, sell it like you're there yet. Get there by delivery date and make it happen. I guess that's something I learned from the book. It's just I read a lot of dorky stuff.

I got to start getting into some fiction. I've never gotten into it, man, but I think there is obviously, like you just said, there are things to be learned even from the fictional land. But I just haven't given it a chance really. So the next one I have for you, man, is what is your favorite quote and why?

So my favorite quote, this one I really like, and I was using a lot while I created the Minnow Tank visual. So we did 36 episodes of different pitches, and I would always tell my startups before they started, I would say, "Brevity is the soul of wit." And do you know who that's by? Do you remember that one?

No, but I really like it and I agree with it.

So it's by Mr. William Shakespeare. Ah. Wherever he is, the soul of wit, it really makes you think to yourself, the more brief you can be, the more witty you are. And I like to use that when it comes to presenting or pitching yourself or your business, because what we do all day long at Minnow Tank is we connect tech startups and investors. So we're always trying to tell them, pitch shorter. Takes less amount of time. If you can't communicate your concept in under 60 seconds, you don't know what you're talking about. So think, think, think, be brief, and that's witty and intelligent, and then people respect and know what you're doing. So brevity is the soul of wit, William Shakespeare.

Yeah, man, I could not agree more. Thank you so much for coming on. The last one I have for you before we let you go is, where is the best place for people to find you online?

So the very best place to find me is on LinkedIn. You can look for Ken G. Barton. Also, you can go to minnowtank.com. There's no W, so it's M-I-N-N-O-T-A-N-K.com. And Tyler, you were an inspiration for me. So after getting the opportunity to come on your podcast, Minnow Tank recently launched a podcast as well. We've done some really cool interviews, so we're totally copying you. But like, what do they say about copying? It's like the highest form of respect. I know what you're saying. I do. I do.

I don't know the exact words, but I know what you're saying.

What I'm saying is I'm not stealing you. Like, I'm just, I'm just respecting you by doing the same thing you are. So yeah, you can find me online there and people can find my email if they try.

Awesome, man. Thanks again for jumping on.

Thank you, Tyler.

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