Latest / The Bold Lounge / Lori Rosenkopf: The Bold Entrepreneur- Creating Value Your Own Way

Transcript

Lori Rosenkopf: The Bold Entrepreneur- Creating Value Your Own Way · The Bold Lounge

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bold Lounge podcast.
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: My name is Leigh Burgess and I will be your host.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: If you're anything like me, you love hearing inspiring stories of people who have gone on bold journeys and made a positive impact in the world.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: This podcast is all about those kinds of stories.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Every week, we'll hear from someone who has taken a leap or embarked on an extraordinary journey.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: In addition to hearing their stories, we'll also learn about their bold growth mindset that they use to make things happen.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: Whether they face challenges or doubts along the way, they persisted and ultimately achieved their goals.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: These impactful stories will leave you feeling motivated and inspired to pursue your own bold journey.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: I believe everyone has a bold story waiting to be freed.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Tune in and get ready to be inspired.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bold Lounge.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: Today I have Lori Rosenkopf.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: She's the Simon and Midge Pally Professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: As the have Lori Rosenkopf, she's the Simon and Midge Pally Professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: As the Vice Dean for Entrepreneurship, she serves as Wharton's Faculty Director for Venture Lab, penn's home for student entrepreneurs and also their San Francisco campus.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: In a prior role, as Vice Dean of Wharton's Undergraduate Division, she introduced a new curriculum and developed experiential classwork in the tech sector.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: For over 30 years, rosenkopf has taught entrepreneurship and management of technology to more than 20,000 high schoolers, undergrads, mbas and executives, connecting these learners to many of the most entrepreneurial alumni at Wharton and Penn through treks, panels and classes.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: She's also the author of Unstoppable Entrepreneurs Seven Paths for Unleashing Successful Startups and Creating Value Through Innovation.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: So I am excited to hear your definition of bold.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: What's bold look like in your world?
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: In?
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: my world.
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: Bold means taking action despite that nagging voice in the back of your head.
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: We all see so many opportunities where we can do something valuable and I'm not just talking about financial value, I'm talking about social value or emotional value and we see these opportunities, but then there's the voice in our head that says what if you fail?
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: Or what if people don't like you?
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: There's all kinds of little nagging voices like that.
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: I'm not saying to ignore them completely, because we should look to minimize any risks, but once we can figure out a strategy to get past those risks and then take that action, that's what's bold Creating that value, doing that wonderful opportunity without letting that nagging voice hold you back.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: I love this definition because it's active Of all the definitions that we've had with the word bold.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: It's a choice, right, so it's a choice to take action.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: It's a choice not to take action, like sometimes being bold is not doing something too right, in that sense it may be pressure, or it may be something that feels reactive, or it may not be something you've thought through, because actually, I think being bold is very thoughtful and so I love that.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: You also said listen to the voices, make sure you don't ignore them, but don't let them stop you from taking that action, right?
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: So that's a really unique definition that we've heard, in the sense of that combining the listen as well, as you know, pause as go right.
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: It's like listen, pause, go.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: So, as you think about your own life, when was a time in your life that you lived aligned to that definition?
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: I was thinking back to the first time that I was bold, and so I had to take you back to the 1970s.
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: I'm a middle schooler growing up in suburban New Jersey, going to public school.
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: Actually, at the time we called it junior high school.
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: It was second through ninth grades and we were responsible for choosing an elective in life skills, and so in seventh grade you could choose between sewing and auto shop, and then we had cooking and metal shop and we had manners.
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: Oh, my gosh I did not have manners, oh thank goodness.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: Well, by the time we got to ninth grade, the final one was steno or drafting, and so steno for your younger listeners.
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: Stenography was a way that secretaries would take shorthands and abbreviate what their bosses would dictate to them, so that then they could type it up later.
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: And I really did not want to be a secretary.
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: I really did not want to learn steno and drafting had all of this appeal to me right the mechanical pencils, the 2D representations of all of these physical objects, the beautiful little white Staedtler erasers that work so perfectly.
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: I really wanted to do it, but that nagging little voice in my head said it's not what girls do.
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: I was already a little socially awkward, I was kind of a nerdy kid and I said you might, people might make fun of you.
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: You're going to lose friends.
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: And I had to weigh it out against the thrill of doing the drafting which seems so exciting to me.
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: And I did decide to do it and it was glorious.
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: It was gloriously, I loved it and it of course created the seeds for math and science and engineering that I studied, which then led me to my career pursuits today.
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: So I think that was the first time I was bold.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you never know, like it isn't something calculated usually either.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: Right, you weren't taking that because I'm going to be an engineer, I'm going to lead to that.
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: Now some bold moves may be connected, but sometimes our bold moves lead us places that we never had even planned right, it's in your heart, it's intuitive, but again there's, there's all the naysayers and all the naysaying behind you, yeah yeah, we have this voice in our head and sometimes people name it and they talk back to it and kind of tell it you know, I hear you, but I'm not going to listen to it today.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: Or, oh, I hear you, I think I'll pause.
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: But I think the other thing you said is sometimes we're not always understood right when we make bold choices or we do something that isn't expected or in the right order of what someone else thinks is the right order.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: You know, even choosing to be an entrepreneur is not understood quite a bit in that sense, do you agree with?
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: that.
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: Well, yeah, the entrepreneurs in my book are people who they're seeing something that others aren't seeing yet, and that's why they ultimately can become successful, because their set of experiences allow them to see an opportunity and perceive it as somehow less risky than others who are looking without that same knowledge might see it.
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: And so many people say entrepreneurs are big risk takers, but actually I believe that entrepreneurs minimize risk.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I do too.
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: Obviously I'm biased, I'm an entrepreneur, but I never even thought about being an entrepreneur until I was 48 and burnt out.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: So I had was kind of like almost forced into it.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: But then, once I was there, I was like, oh wow, what is this land Like?
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: Because I was brought up to, you go to school, you get a degree, you get your master's, you get your PhD and you stay somewhere till you're 65 and then retire, like you know, a stable place to work, all of those things that our parents teach us based on how they were brought up.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: So I think I actually stayed too long and probably where my head friction inside the corporate environment was actually my entrepreneurial pieces coming out, you know, in this sense of just kind of having friction with how slow things go or not being able to iterate and ideate as fast as we could.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: And I was in the best place ever for me to be.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: I was in clinical research, so I was in the space at least that could go as fast as it could.
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: But I think, you know, I didn't even think it was a possibility because people that I grew up with, and also my own parents, didn't really say that was something you could do, or it was stable, or was something that was an option.
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: So, yeah, that's changed quite a bit.
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: Role models really, really matter and that's part of why I wrote the book to set out some new role models instead of the celebrity entrepreneur stereotype that's all over the media.
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: And I don't think it's really the healthiest inspiration for most people who want to do something that creates some value of one sort or another.
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: But one of the themes in the book that I saw as I interviewed many entrepreneurs was that about half of them come at it with some burning passion that you know.
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: Caitlin was a young girl saying I want to do things for female empowerment, and she's built out a whole network for young women to explore career options and she's become an ed tech at this point.
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: Or Jared, who's African-American and he says I'm seeing minority entrepreneurs not get enough at the table and, I think, a lot of alphas being left on the table.
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: I want to found a venture capital firm that's going to support these entrepreneurs.
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: So, like some of the entrepreneurs really come at it with a deep passion for a long time.
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: But then the other half, they call themselves accidental entrepreneurs.
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: One of mine, joan, is a neuroscientist working at a big pharma firm, worrying about whether the pills should come in two packs or four packs, and she wanted to keep the value that she was creating and wound up going to startups in biotechs and investing, and now she's the CEO of a company that's searching for a cure for cystic fibrosis right.
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: So that's life-changing.
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: She calls herself an accidental entrepreneur.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess that's what it would be, because I didn't set out to be that, and I think what I'm hoping now, with your book and the experiences that you share, is that more people see it as an option sooner, because I think sometimes, especially now that I look back, my daughter is 28.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: And even you know the generation behind her they're looking at schooling or looking at how they work very, very differently than how we did, and I think that's very refreshing, honestly, because I think potentially it'll be healthier.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: I hope in that sense.
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: Well, and one of the things that I do in the book is give a different definition of entrepreneurship.
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: I think people hear that word and they think about you're a founder or the big stereotype is the college dropout right.
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: But the reality is that with my definition, it's simple value creation through innovation.
• 10:20
  Speaker 2: And once you say entrepreneurs are people who are creating value, they're doing something.
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: And different.
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: It might be a new product or service, it might just be a new way of doing things.
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: You know a process or a business model.
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: But once you say that, that opens up so many different pathways to it.
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: Not just that disruptor that's always featured in the media, but the social entrepreneur who's solving a social problem.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: They they're making a nice living.
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: They may not be building a unicorn, or they may be.
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: Or someone who acquires businesses and puts them together to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts.
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: Someone who's an intrapreneur, who's working in an established organization and builds a new business using their employer's resources.
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: So that's just a sampling of the seven paths, but there are so many ways that we can be creating value at any stage of our life, whatever we're doing.
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: That it isn't that you have to be an entrepreneur or not an entrepreneur, you can be entrepreneurial all the time.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you can have that spirit within you and, like I do believe that's what I had at Duke in the sense of kind of where I was working the same thing at.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: Dartmouth like being able to innovate and ideate.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: I think it was speed and the agility and that's more an industry specific challenge.
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: Most likely, I'm sure lots of industries may not move as fast as some would hope, but I think for me that's probably where the wear down for burnout came from was just knowing what we needed do, having the buy-in and all that, but not being able to go as fast as we could.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, I think it's within us that spirit of being an innovator, potentially and it's super interesting for me to hear you talk about your experience in the academic environment.
• 11:57
  Speaker 2: I've been at Wharton for a long time now 32 years and for the first 20, I was just a researcher and teacher you know, doing the professor career track, and for the first 20, I was just a researcher and teacher, you know, doing the professor career track.
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: And about a dozen years ago I became an administrator and surprisingly, that to me is a very entrepreneurial role.
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: How do you build a new curriculum?
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: when you have so many competing forces that want to keep things the way that they are, how do you fundraise to build programs that can inspire new entrepreneurs?
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: So for me, that's the way that I've activated my entrepreneurial side within a university bureaucracy.
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's not easy.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: Also, I think you learn a lot of how to compromise, where to push where to you know.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: Pause, I think as I got older, I got better at that when I was younger not so good, you know, in the sense of that, but I think overall, I think you're hitting the nail on the head of you know, I think we've had this one dimensional definition of what an entrepreneur is, and it's 2025, it's time to really broaden it, and I think you have so many great examples in the book.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: Now you told us why you wrote the book and you've defined it for us and it helps us also broaden the sense of what that is.
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: How did you choose the entrepreneurs in your book to be interviewed?
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: In my 12 years as an administrator, so I used to be the vice dean for our undergraduate program and now for the last four years I've been the vice dean of our entrepreneurial programs.
• 13:25
  Speaker 2: I've gotten to meet many, many amazing alumni who are out there doing entrepreneurial things along all of these pathways, so that was a real joy.
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: That wasn't happening when I was just a professor, and so I have been hearing these stories repeatedly and been bringing them to our students.
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: I don't know how much you know about Wharton graduates, but many of them historically went into finance or consulting sorts of jobs, but they were expressing, a dozen years ago, a lot of interest in tech, and so I took it as my personal challenge to introduce them to all of our amazing alumni in the tech sector so they could see these opportunities and not just follow that cookie cutter path like you were talking about earlier.
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: So I got to know so many of these different folks and then I chose them because I did know them and already know their stories.
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: So to go back to them and interview them around the specific features that I was starting to understand were part of an entrepreneurial mindset was great fun, because I wasn't starting from scratch with them and they also just represent a great, great cross section demographically Because, again, that celebrity media stereotype is much more a singular demographic and the students I serve at Penn represent interests in every industry, many different schools, many different disciplines, you know, across all sorts of demographic backgrounds.
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: Everybody wants a role model and that's part of how they were chosen as well.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a community, would you say.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: I think that's one of the things that I do is I try to build community in my work and working with women and women leaders in particular areas, but across industries, and I think a lot of it.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: Sometimes it is nice to know you're not alone.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: I mean, one of the myths of being bold is that you go it alone, you're always solo, and I don't think that's true.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: It's not true.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: So I think, as an entrepreneur, I think there is this sense too that you're always going in alone.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: But just, you just actually gave a great example of how there's a community and there's a flow and a funnel of people who are in different phases of it as well.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: So there's someone like you out there who's doing, you know, in the same thing, in the same zone of a startup, or you know bootstrapping or looking for vc funds, or you know you're already, you know you started or you're a ceo of a company.
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: So I think you know, from that perspective, there's also, I think, a lot of value in the community that you're creating through your class, through the book and those types of things in your experience.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: Maybe is it in our genome that we're like coming out as entrepreneurs, or what are our skill sets or what are things that we could identify.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: That, yeah, maybe that's my entrepreneurial spirit that's eking out there.
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: I have six R's in the book which are features of the entrepreneurial mindset, but I don't want to lose your point about community, so let's come back to that, because I do want to talk about the ways we built community at Penn.
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: At Venture Lab, which is our home for student entrepreneurs I'm Wharton's faculty director for that at Penn we build an overall community where we just have dinners and pitch nights and it's just a fun building to be in and the students want to hang out there.
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: But then, as you said, everyone needs to find their tribe in some ways and so we build affinity groups in lots of ways.
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: Obviously, there are students who want to congregate, you know, by gender or by race or ethnic background, so there's some groups that are like that.
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: But then there are other groups that are really industry focused, right, the students who are interested in health care.
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: They want to talk about things that are more specific to health care and students who are interested in social entrepreneurship.
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: And students can identify as members of more than one of these communities.
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: They're not mutually exclusive from each other, but creating those opportunities for these subgroups to congregate is incredibly important and it actually really helps us to connect our students with alumni who share those particular interests.
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: So we're not just willy-nilly having people coming in.
• 17:28
  Speaker 2: We're saying, all right, let's go to our alumni in the healthcare space because we're going to do a series of healthcare workshops that our healthcare groups are going to be really interested in.
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: So that kind of community is incredibly important and you see it well beyond what we do at the university with for women groups like All Raise that are so focused on helping women find their way to venture capital funding.
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's intentional community building, right.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: So you want to make sure there's enough offerings that someone can connect in and see themselves within it.
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: And I think the other thing around community is that it doesn't have to be perfect.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: It can be messy, it can be.
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: I'm just beginning.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: It could be like I failed and I'm starting over.
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: You know, and that does happen in the entrepreneur world on a regular basis.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: So I think one of the things that you said which is really important is you know you actually play a role in creating that intentionality and the thoughtfulness behind the community build, and I really do enjoy how you bring alumni back in, which a lot of colleges do, but it's in a thoughtful way, in a way that exposes them and helps them understand what's possible, as well as they're able to interact and have conversations and create relationships, because it is not just a connection on LinkedIn that's going to make a difference, right, you know.
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: So I really applaud you for that intentionality of that community build.
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks, thanks.
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: It's our job to build a structure where these people can find each other.
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: We can't operate at scale.
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: We have 4,000 student members.
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: We can't for everyone find them a perfect match, but if we can create places where people are going to intersect and collide, then they're going to start to build those relationships.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly so.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: You've had a lot of roles at Penn.
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: So in your administrative roles at Penn first at undergrad, vice dean, which you mentioned, and now vice dean of entrepreneurship what trends have you witnessed and what would you like to see more of or less of what trends?
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: have you witnessed and what would you like to see more of or less of?
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: Well, there's been a profound shift in the aims of students from when I first got there 30 some years ago to now.
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: I think at that time in the 90s, when I first got to Penn, students were just very focused on their personal career and their personal outcomes were going into the standard professional jobs and finance and consulting and the like.
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: And slowly but surely over this time, we've seen more and more emphasis by students on the big, pressing social problems in the world.
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: You know they're worried about climate change, they're worried about fairness and equity, they're worried about what will be the workplace as AI is coming in, and they're trying to come up with some solutions to tackle these problems.
• 20:11
  Speaker 2: When you ask our students do you call yourself social entrepreneurs?
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: About one in seven of our student members will say yeah, I'm doing social entrepreneurship.
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: But then, if you ask them a very different question, say well, you have a venture idea.
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: Do you have impact goals as well as your profitability goals?
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: 70% of them will then raise their hands.
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: So there's, I think, a little bit of stigma about the label that they feel like if they say they're social entrepreneurs, because you know it's important.
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: We're very interested in high growth entrepreneurship.
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: Perhaps it implies an emphasis that takes away from profitability, but what we're seeing with our students is that they're very focused on creating sustainable businesses from a financial perspective, but are also using them to really try to affect the sorts of change that they believe is important in the world, which is just fabulous.
• 21:05
  Speaker 2: You know, and more than one has said to me, lori, your generation is sort of messed things up.
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: Somebody's got to fix it.
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I've heard that more than once.
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: So, let's get to the six R's.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: Tell us about the mindset of an entrepreneur and what you have discovered through all your research and the examples that you've given.
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: Okay, let me maybe focus on a couple of them that I think are really important and valuable, and the first one would be resilience.
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: Right, the title of my book is Unstoppable Entrepreneurs.
• 21:33
  Speaker 2: It's not Resilient Entrepreneurs.
• 21:35
  Speaker 2: Unstoppable sounds a lot sexier, right, but every single person that I interview will tell stories of the moments that were hard.
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: These are not the moments that you hear when someone gets to tell their story of success in the media.
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: Right, they might say, okay, we made a pivot, but they don't tell you about the mental crises that they experienced.
• 21:59
  Speaker 2: Right, when a deal is falling through or your best customer walks away or COVID happens.
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: So I've done many, many panels with many entrepreneurs, and it's always when we get into those stories.
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: That's when the audience sits up at attention to hear you know, how did you deal with these sorts of situations?
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: Situations, and I think there is definitely a growth mindset where people say this is feedback and feedback is a gift, and that it's not all going to be positive feedback, but it's giving me instructions of what I have to do and adjust to keep solving this problem that I've identified.
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: So resilience is incredibly important the recognition that there are so many different ways to solve problems and being able to adjust and pivot as you get feedback.
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: Another one that I really love is what I call recombination, and what I mean by that is that most innovation comes from people mixing and matching different pieces together Like it's not like a brand new idea that has no relationship to anything.
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: But this is like, say, you grow up in India and you grow up using a neti pot I've been having sinus problems, so this one's been on my mind lately and then you immigrate to the US with your family and you say Then you immigrate to the US with your family and you say why don't?
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: they use it.
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: Why are?
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: they using that crazy chemical nasal spray and you take something that already exists but you transplant it into a new context.
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: So that's what I mean by recombination, mixing and matching, and almost all of the stories I hear the insights that lead entrepreneurs to their successful businesses are a mix and match of their past experiences.
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: Jackie is my intrapreneur and she was a banker for many years and then she started.
• 23:54
  Speaker 2: She wanted to go into tech and she started working for Square.
• 23:56
  Speaker 2: You know the little white square terminals where you put your credit card in to buy a coffee.
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: And because she was a banker and this is the important part of recombination because she was a banker, she realized that Square, every time someone was swiping a credit card, they're telling Square about their income stream and Square could make loans to these people because Square knew tons about whether they'd be able to pay them back and it's hard for these small businesses to get loans from other outlets.
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: In many cases, jackie winds up building out an entire subsidiary within Square where they ultimately get a banking charter.
• 24:32
  Speaker 2: But that was because she was a banker originally.
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: Nobody else would have seen that.
• 24:37
  Speaker 2: Anybody else has that idea.
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: You think they're crazy.
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: Back to the nagging voice.
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: But Jackie knows that this is exactly the data she needs to be able to make a great loan business.
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: And Square was incredibly influential during the pandemic with the PPP loans because she had built that and creating a new service line, a new offering for their customers, as well as a way for the company to make money as well, you know, through the loan process.
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: So that's the recombination, and we all have so many different work experiences, where we've lived culturally, where we've gone to school, what we've studied, and so I always encourage anyone who's saying what could I do?
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: What opportunity should I take advantage of To take a little stock of what's the thing for you that isn't cookie cutter when you mix it with the other pieces, because that may be the root of it.
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: Or for the young students I work with to say what can you do to not be cookie cutter?
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: What cool class could you take?
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: Or why don't you spend a summer living abroad instead of just doing another internship could you take?
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: Or why did you?
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: spend a summer living abroad instead of just doing another internship.
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: What do you think it is about?
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: As we get older, we think that our opportunities are much more limited.
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: So, if I take myself as an example of 48, not thinking that I could start my own consulting firm and then do all the things I've done in the last five years, which none of them were planned or even on my radar, including this podcast so I think, in that sense, is there something that's happened to us that we just don't see?
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: We have blinders on of what's possible, or even more so, like even with some of the women I work with are looking for certainty or the guarantee or the lowest amount of risk, and who isn't looking for the lowest amount of risk?
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: But I'm not sure if you can innovate or be creative without some risk involved, and so for me, if I had to choose, I will choose risk, because that's how we learn, grow, innovate and create.
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: Do you think it's generational, the openness to being an entrepreneur or not being an entrepreneur?
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: well, first of all there is research.
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: One of my my colleagues, danny Kim, he's a professor in the management department.
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: Along with me at Wharton he's been a part of some research where they looked at the very top venture capital backed firms like less than 1%, 0.01% to the very cream of the crop venture backed firms, and they found that the average age of founders was late thirties, early forties.
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: So very counter to this image of the college dropout Like those are really the rarities.
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: You know the Snapchat guy, for example.
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: Or Zuckerberg or those kind of folks those are the anomalies space in order to see the opportunity.
• 27:27
  Speaker 2: So again, it doesn't look quite as risky to them.
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: So that's the fact.
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: I think you're also going to see more entrepreneurial activity.
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: Just given what's going on in society right now.
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: There may be usually safety nets help people want to go into entrepreneurship.
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: I think there may be fewer safety nets, so that's a counterbalance.
• 27:42
  Speaker 2: But there's a lot of jobless dislocation right now.
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: There are a lot of people who've suddenly lost their jobs who are saying what can I do with my skillset?
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: And they may or may not build a gigantic business, but they very well may be selling their services as a sole proprietor, right?
• 27:58
  Speaker 2: So I think that will be very common.
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: So I think you're going to see more of that.
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: We do recommend to our students and every alum who comes and speaks to my young students always says do it while you're in your 20s.
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: Before you have a family, before you have to worry about having health care for everyone or you're worried about losing your salary, you're not used to living in a nice house, blah, blah, blah.
• 28:17
  Speaker 2: I think that is true.
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: But also it's like that trade off in sports you can have a young body, or you can have a wise body right.
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: Why can't they be together?
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: Can you make that happen?
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: No, that's the irony of life, but people are more bound to these financial challenges and concerns.
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: But they've also developed the wisdom that allows them to start recognizing more effective opportunities.
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, for me, my experience has been that there's a lot of self-belief work that goes into that, or it's already in you to be able to you know, know that if you fail, you'll figure it out, you'll find a solution.
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: And for me, I think, as an entrepreneur, I feel like I know who's the boss and so in that sense too, like if I need to take action, I can move as fast as I need to.
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: Doesn't mean I always do it right or, you know, like it's perfect, but I think in that sense, like I know, I can take action, and to me that's really really important and I think in my corporate career I had a great corporate career, but I don't think I had that sense of agency that I have now, which is really really important piece.
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: And so it's also alignment with your values, too, and deciding what are the things about your job you want to feel, what does it look like and is it aligned with what you value?
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that.
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: I was trained as an engineer.
• 29:40
  Speaker 2: My bachelor's and master's were in systems engineering and I worked for companies after each of those degrees.
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: I worked for Kodak and I worked for Bell Laboratories two companies that don't impress my current students but used to be very impressive to have on your resume.
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: But when I worked in each of those places it just did not fill my heart with joy.
• 29:59
  Speaker 2: There was nothing wrong with?
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: the work, but feeling like I was doing this work to benefit one company.
• 30:06
  Speaker 2: It just didn't do it for me and I just always liked the collegiate environment and I knew I wanted to study a PhD but had to figure out what that would be.
• 30:15
  Speaker 2: But also being in the academic environment, this is what makes my heart sing, because I feel like I'm meeting thousands and thousands of students and people and if I can just move the needle on them the teeniest little bit, multiply that by thousands and thousands of people and like that's the impact, that feels really great for me.
• 30:34
  Speaker 2: And so again, I feel like I'm entrepreneurial in my role, but I have not founded a business.
• 30:40
  Speaker 2: You know, writing a book is my act of entrepreneurship in some ways, but everybody is a little bit different in that way and I think you have to see what's true to your heart.
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: But by the same token, there are lots of ways to be innovative in whatever you're doing and to create that value in whatever you're doing.
• 30:57
  Speaker 2: And I think the more that people take those steps, the more that they build that muscle and that confidence to then take it a little bit further in the next iteration.
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I always say each bold steps leads to higher confidence, which leads to higher agency.
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: And then, once that train starts rolling, yep.
• 31:13
  Speaker 2: This is like a flywheel.
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: It is really hard to stop it.
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think if you don't think about it or you haven't written it down and you're just doing the someday, and if I can and when I can, fill in the blank, it probably won't happen.
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: And if that's okay for you, that's okay.
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: But if you really want it to happen like you know, pen to paper, getting into some of the weeds hanging out with some people, getting some mentors, you know going, you know, like you said, getting some base that you really feel like I can lever off of this it may not be where you land forever, but it's how you get to the next place that you want to go, right.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: So I think I always tell people this might not be here forever, but it's your what's next.
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: That's exactly right.
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: Step on that platform and learn it, and then you're going to find your path Now in your book you said there's seven paths for unleashing successful startups.
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: What have you learned about the seven paths and how did you even come to defining just seven?
• 32:06
  Speaker 2: Well, I was the practical answer is I published this through Wharton School Press and we're all about publishing books that you can take on an airplane and read in two hours.
• 32:15
  Speaker 2: So I had a limited manuscript size because the eighth path with which I was thinking about including but I'll have to save that for Unstoppable.
• 32:24
  Speaker 2: Entrepreneurs the sequel yeah yeah is the content creator right, because there are so many people who are making careers in this space of having expertise and building communities around it and and continually growing those communities and monetizing them.
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: So that was one that wasn't included.
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: But I start with the disruptor, because that is like the tech bro image that's out there.
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: But the person I feature is decidedly not a tech bro, though she has built a unicorn in the hair color industry.
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: I have a bootstrapper, which is somebody who does not take venture capital funding or any kind of equity or debt funding, but who pulls themselves up by their bootstraps and builds out their business without taking funding.
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: Those are actually statistically much more successful than most of the other approaches.
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: I've mentioned social entrepreneurs.
• 33:17
  Speaker 2: I've mentioned the technology commercializer, joan, who was doing cystic fibrosis.
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: I mentioned the funder.
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: I spoke a little bit about acquiring other businesses and then the entrepreneurs.
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: I just felt like that was giving a pretty full spectrum from the people who were actually founding businesses with different models of what would motivate them and what would fund them, but then also people who were acquiring or doing that activity from a vehicle that they didn't found.
• 33:45
  Speaker 2: So you know, it gives sort of a rounded approach.
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: Nice.
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: In your opinion, is there anything like going through the process of writing the book that you learned about being an entrepreneur, or that was like oh, I didn't realize that, even though I've taught and you know, these are some of the nuggets that come out of when we're writing a book we go deeper into some of the topics.
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: Was there anything like that that came up for you?
• 34:07
  Speaker 2: I think that the one thing that is really a great takeaway was the fact that about half of my subjects were people who said I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
• 34:17
  Speaker 2: I was the kid who got in trouble in middle school for bringing my Halloween candy in and reselling it in the classroom.
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: You know they were always finding a different sort of business.
• 34:25
  Speaker 2: They knew they wanted to be an entrepreneur, but they didn't know what kind of entrepreneur.
• 34:29
  Speaker 2: So they were just looking for where's the place where I can have this agency and make a career for myself.
• 34:36
  Speaker 2: But then the other half, as I mentioned earlier, really had this driving passion that led them to say I have to solve this problem and that's where I'm going to make my space, because, like those are two completely disparate beginning places but they both wind up in this space of successful business.
• 34:53
  Speaker 2: So I, like I felt like that was something that should be.
• 34:56
  Speaker 2: You know, a stab, a bomb for anybody who's saying I don't know if I can do this.
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: It's like you can do this, it's like you can do this.
• 35:03
  Speaker 2: Start small, but identify a pain point and start experimenting.
• 35:08
  Speaker 2: Test the market, activate your networks and you can make progress.
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: You can get on that flywheel.
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I always say, like, what problem are you solving differently than someone else?
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: Right, because there's a sea of problems and we need lots of problem solvers.
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: And so I think sometimes people think, oh, that is just so congested, there's so many people there and they're probably right, but then you need to differentiate or think about, like you said, how to mix and match, how to do something different, like your example that you gave of taking something in banking and then applying it to something.
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: That's really a technological advancement of how we pay for things.
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: So it's definitely adjacent, right, so it doesn't have to be this hard build either.
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: So I think sometimes, at least in my experience, and you'll have to tell me in yours I think others may overcomplicate what it takes, because I think the more simple we can be in this, the better.
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: Like, I don't have to like one up everybody.
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: I have to be original and differentiate.
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: Would you agree with that?
• 36:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you do want to be somewhat.
• 36:05
  Speaker 2: You can be too original and then nobody can connect with it.
• 36:09
  Speaker 2: But you want some spark of novelty.
• 36:12
  Speaker 2: You want something that differentiates you.
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: You have to be able to get the word out about it right.
• 36:17
  Speaker 2: Everyone's drowning in a sea of information, so how do you activate your networks in order to do that?
• 36:24
  Speaker 2: But I think that a lot of us fall into the trap.
• 36:27
  Speaker 2: Well, let me make an analogy to when I was studying for my PhD.
• 36:32
  Speaker 2: When I'm trying to figure out what is my dissertation topic going to be and I look at the journals and I'd look at the articles by the scholars a generation ahead of me.
• 36:41
  Speaker 2: So you know young professors who had recently gotten their PhDs and I'd look at the journals and I'd look at the articles by the scholars a generation ahead of me.
• 36:45
  Speaker 2: So you know young professors who had recently gotten their PhDs and I'd read these articles and say how can I ever write an article like this?
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: These are so perfect.
• 36:49
  Speaker 2: But those people didn't start that way.
• 36:52
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 36:52
  Speaker 2: Like this is the fallacy.
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: We're looking at successful entrepreneurs and saying how can I do all that?
• 36:57
  Speaker 2: Where, really, if you use any sort of design thinking principles, you're saying, all right, that's where I want to be in 10 years.
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: What's the step I can take today or this month or this year that would give me new skills or new capabilities or start moving me in that direction.
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: And taking those small steps really does accumulate over time.
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: Right, it's a long game, I mean you do have some people that seem to do it from you know, quicker than others.
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: For sure I'm sure there's ingredients that go into that, but I think it is a long game and I think sometimes people see some of the things on social media and they think it's overnight.
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: I, you know, the 10 year overnight success is what I always say.
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: You know so, and you don't always see some of that in social media or in the communications, but I think it is important just for people to realize that it is not overnight.
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: Would you agree with that?
• 37:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely, Definitely.
• 37:50
  Speaker 2: I mean even the big venture-backed operations that are looking to exit in a big way, and this is how venture capital makes their returns.
• 38:00
  Speaker 2: With these small number of outliers, they're usually doing that on a 10-year plan.
• 38:09
  Speaker 2: That's the image that will take place.
• 38:10
  Speaker 2: And look, god willing, careers are long.
• 38:11
  Speaker 2: We've had a lot of decades in our careers, and so that's a lot of opportunity to build and reinvent if we're lucky enough to have that long and healthy life.
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: Has your idea about how we research or how we teach changed based on your book writing?
• 38:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, this was, this was an incredible learning journey for me, because I had spent most of my career writing for a very academic audience right.
• 38:37
  Speaker 2: A tenure at a top university, you have to publish in the journals extremely rigorous scientific research, and that's a certain vocabulary and a certain way of proving something without a statistical doubt, which may or may not generalize to any other situation in the universe, and writing a book like this.
• 39:01
  Speaker 2: This is actually my first book and this is one that really is written for a general audience.
• 39:06
  Speaker 2: It's not a compendium of the research that I was doing in my strict academic days, but rather it's the compendium of stories of all of these people who I've gotten to interact with.
• 39:17
  Speaker 2: And seeing how these stories activate so many people in a much more emotional way than just pummeling someone with statistics has been just amazing to me.
• 39:29
  Speaker 2: And so, starting with stories and anecdotes and then weaving together a persuasive argument, it's just a fundamentally different way of thinking and operating for me, and I think it's really opened me up to say you know what comes next on this front now that I'm out talking to regular folks and hopefully inspiring them as well as my students.
• 39:49
  Speaker 2: That's a lot of needles, I can move a little bit, so it's super exciting, very energizing at this stage.
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think it's interesting just what academic writing looks like and what when you're writing a book for people to be able to engage with, see themselves in, understand how to use it as a tool for their next move.
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: In my first book because I'm writing my dissertation right now and I was writing my first book my editor kept telling me it's too academic, you're writing too academically.
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: I'm like I don't know how to write any different.
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: Then I would loosen it up and then my dissertation committee would be this isn't academic enough.
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: So I could relate to some of the things you were saying for sure.
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: As we end out the podcast, do you have any advice for an inspiring or early stage entrepreneur?
• 40:34
  Speaker 2: that's not in the book I've been saying to people just get out there and try something.
• 40:42
  Speaker 2: What's the worst that can happen?
• 40:51
  Speaker 2: Look for ways to identify a pain point and look for ways to get feedback quickly Before you invest years of your life or lots of money or someone else's money.
• 40:55
  Speaker 2: There are lots of ways to do simple tests to start to get a feeling for if this is a problem that you have to do simple tests to start to get a feeling for, if this is a problem that you have, that you think others have but they don't, or this is really a broader need, it's easy to put up a webpage which says a click to learn more and track how many people are actually clicking it and get that sort of fast feedback.
• 41:15
  Speaker 2: It's easy to put up an idea on a Kickstarter page and see how many people are willing to give you $25 or $250 for some promise of what they will get in the future.
• 41:24
  Speaker 2: And the worst that can happen if you try to fail fast is that you do fail and it is fast, but you get some information.
• 41:32
  Speaker 2: That's the seed for what can I try next.
• 41:34
  Speaker 2: And so getting out there, so being bold, right, facing that fear and just saying I can move past, that is what can start to get you onto this pathway, wherever you are.
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: Right and then, as you're talking I'm thinking of Amy Edmondson right, Kind of wrong, Like read that book, read this book and then go at it.
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: You know, in that sense of understanding, that failure is part of learning in the process right, absolutely yeah.
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much for being on the Bold Lounge.
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: All the information about your book is in the episode notes, as well as how to reach you and learn more about what you do at Penn.
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
• 42:10
  Speaker 2: Oh, it was great to be here with you.
• 42:11
  Speaker 2: I really enjoyed the conversation, Lee.
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to the Bold Lounge podcast.
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: Through the continuum of bold stories vulnerability to taking a leap you will meet more extraordinary people making a positive impact for others through their unique and important story.
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: By highlighting these stories, we hope to inspire others and share the journey of those with a bold mindset.
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: We hope you've enjoyed this podcast and look forward to sharing the next bold journey with you.