21st Century Entrepreneurship

Joe Downs is a self-storage investor, developer, educator, and former residential real-estate investor, and we spoke about why he moved into a market where more than 70% of facilities are still owned by mom-and-pop operators. His turning point came when he discovered that the industry was far less institutional than he had assumed: “80% of the industry is mom and pop” at the time he entered around 2016. For Joe, that fragmentation meant opportunity—especially for investors frustrated by the rising costs, regulation, tenant problems, and maintenance involved in residential property.

His approach is to put guardrails around the entire acquisition process: sourcing, evaluating, underwriting, negotiating, transitioning, closing, and managing a facility. He describes it as “bowling with bumper rails”—including being willing to talk someone out of a first deal that does not survive proper underwriting. The education behind that process is broken into 11 modules and 82 short videos, generally five to seven minutes each, with additional audio, quizzes, flashcards, and AI-supported learning. Joe also explains how mastering conventional self-storage opens adjacent niches including boat and RV storage, pro storage, industrial outdoor storage, truck parking, and small-bay flex.

The economics are where his argument becomes especially concrete. On his example of two $1 million acquisitions, multifamily could require roughly $250,000 down plus $200,000 of renovations and $50,000 of closing costs—about $500,000 before operations begin. A comparable self-storage purchase might require $150,000 down, $25,000–$50,000 of improvements, and similar closing costs. Operationally, a vacated apartment may need thousands of dollars in turnover work; with storage, as Joe puts it, “We sweep it out. It’s a broom.” Underneath the numbers is the same goal his students often had when they first entered real estate: more income, tax-efficient wealth building, and ultimately more control over their time and lives.

For listeners evaluating real estate beyond residential property, Joe provides a practical framework for comparing capital requirements, operational complexity, deal selection, and overlooked storage niches.

Key takeaways

• Target fragmented markets where small owners still dominate supply.
• Underwrite first deals rigorously; walking away can protect your capital.
• Learn sourcing, evaluation, negotiation, closing, transition, and management as one process.
• Compare total startup capital, not just the property purchase price.
• Explore adjacent niches after mastering conventional self-storage fundamentals.
• Lower tenant-turnover costs can materially simplify ongoing operations.

Alexandre Mongeon is a CEO and co-founder of Vision Marine Technologies. Alex has been building electric boats since 2013, and we spoke about what it takes to turn a technology people doubt into something they can actually trust and use. Electric boats spent generations associated with slow trolling speeds, but Alexandre says his team reached 116 mph in 2023, while cutting maintenance by about 90%. On operating cost, his comparison is even sharper: roughly $5 of electricity for a full day versus about $350 of diesel or gas. “The power is there, the technology is there,” he says. 

The harder problem has been adoption. Alexandre describes himself as “an educator” because customers still worry about range, safety, service, and charging. His answer is hands-on proof: integrate electric systems into manufacturers’ boats, test sound, power and range on the water, train dealers, and let families experience the difference themselves. That approach has included 25 manufacturer integrations and a California rental operation that grew from five boats to as many as 30, giving the company years of real-world operating data.  

For Alexandre, adoption is deliberately gradual: “it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.” The lesson for listeners is concrete: when customers distrust a new category, reduce the argument and increase the experience—prove economics, performance, and usability where people can see and feel them. 

Key takeaways

• Prove new technology through hands-on use, not explanations alone.
• Compare operating economics with concrete numbers customers immediately understand.
• Test sound, power, range, and usability against existing alternatives.
• Use rental fleets as both laboratories and customer acquisition channels.
• Train manufacturers and dealers before expecting customers to trust the category.
• Expect category adoption to take years, not months.

Latané Conant is a four-time CMO, author, community builder, and Chief Market Officer at Parloa, and we spoke about why companies spend heavily trying to understand customers while often making it harder for those same customers to talk to them. After having “spent millions of dollars… trying to understand customers,” she realized nine months ago that another part of many businesses was effectively doing the opposite.

Her approach to AI-driven customer experience starts with a simple principle: “observe first, then build.” Instead of launching AI agents because the technology is available, companies can analyze customer conversations to uncover friction, identify the right use cases, and measure customer effort and satisfaction more accurately. Her research found that customers will wait about three minutes and repeat themselves twice before leaving, while only one in four companies surfaces customer insights and acts on them.

For Latané, the goal ultimately comes back to customer lifetime value—and to making complicated technology useful. “What motivates me is learning and teaching others what I've learned,” she says, describing her process of breaking complex AI concepts into practical actions leaders can actually use.

Listeners get a practical framework for turning customer conversations into better AI decisions, lower friction, and stronger customer value.

Key takeaways

• Listen to customer conversations before deciding which AI agents to build.
• Track customer effort and CSAT from conversations, not only surveys.
• Fix friction before customers wait three minutes and repeat themselves twice.
• Turn service conversations into product, sales, and retention insights.
• Observe deployed AI agents for hallucination, drift, and performance issues.
• Tie customer-experience improvements back to customer lifetime value.

Matt Edelman is the CEO and president of Super League Enterprise and we spoke about how the gamified consumer mindset is reshaping marketing—and how his own path from Marvel and film production unexpectedly prepared him to run a public company. He describes producing a film as surprisingly close to running a business: “a film is like a mini company,” with budgets, contracts, marketing, distribution, and production all moving at once.

When the pandemic eliminated the live-event foundation of the company’s esports model, Matt first led a commercial pivot and later, as CEO, a much harder corporate turnaround under severe time pressure. His operating principle became simple: “you actually have choice. You have agency.” In negotiations, he recommends focusing on the other party’s motivations rather than your own emotions. The same thinking shapes his approach to marketing: understand a player mindset built around progress, status and rewards, then create participation with real value. One campaign linked digital mini-games to 30,000 free-popcorn coupons, all claimed on the first day—evidence, he says, that consumers “expect participatory rewards.”

For entrepreneurs and marketers, the practical value is a framework for handling pressure, designing stronger engagement, and treating gaming as a serious customer-acquisition channel across ages and business models.

Key takeaways

• Build engagement around progress, status, rewards, and repeated participation.
• When pressure spikes, make one daily decision that improves the situation.
• In negotiations, focus first on the other party’s needs and motivations.
• Use participatory rewards connecting digital actions to real-world value.
• Treat gaming as a channel for B2C and B2B customer acquisition.
• Don’t let emotion drive decisions when the business is cornered.

Dean Drako is a serial entrepreneur who has founded somewhere between five and fifteen companies, raised venture capital around 20 times in Silicon Valley, and experienced both successful exits and failures—and we spoke about the operating lessons that came from building repeatedly. His starting principle is simple: find a pain point you understand deeply, make sure many other people share it, and build what he calls “painkillers, not vitamins.” 

Dean also breaks company growth into three distinct organizational phases. From roughly one to 25 people, almost everyone knows everything; as the company grows, specialization and communication systems become necessary; and around 500 employees, the CEO must increasingly delegate and trust major leaders rather than rely on founder-level visibility. Timing can be just as decisive: one of his businesses spent roughly five years “pushing a rock uphill” because the market was not yet ready, reinforcing his view that success depends on product, timing, and some luck. 

That long-term perspective also explains why Dean says, “I don’t believe in an exit.” Instead of optimizing a company for sale, he argues founders should build durable products, customer relationships, revenue, service, and leadership—while staying adaptable enough to move quickly when customers and markets change. For Dean, the larger purpose is practical as well: his current work is organized around making physical spaces safer. 

For listeners, the value is a concrete framework for choosing problems, scaling leadership, surviving bad timing, and building for endurance rather than an exit.

Key takeaways

•  Solve painful problems you personally understand and many customers actually share. 
•  Expect leadership needs to change dramatically as headcount grows. 
•  Around 500 employees, delegate major functions to trusted leaders. 
•  Being years early can be as dangerous as having the wrong product. 
•  Treat product, timing, and luck as separate ingredients of success. 
•  Build enduring customer value instead of optimizing for an exit. 

Sam Demma is an author and keynote speaker who has delivered close to 850 talks across four continents, and we spoke about how losing a Division I soccer scholarship after three major knee injuries redirected his life toward service, storytelling, and speaking. A teacher challenged him to take small, consistent action, which led to five and a half years of community cleanups—and eventually to schools inviting him back as a paid speaker.

Sam also explains the practical principles behind his latest work: “assume positive intent” when customers, colleagues, or family frustrate you, and “self-evaluate first” before blaming someone else when things go wrong. He describes great speaking as combining useful ideas with humor and stories, while his broader philosophy is that “when you give expecting nothing in return, beautiful things unfold.”

That philosophy is operational inside his company: 10% of annual profits after tax and expenses goes toward giving—half through books donated in January and half through cash donations in July, when charities may receive less support. For Sam, the purpose is less about what comes back financially and more about fulfillment, relationships, and knowing the work genuinely helps people.

Listeners leave with practical ways to manage reactions, take ownership, communicate memorable ideas, and make generosity part of how they operate.

Key takeaways

• Assume positive intent before reacting to an angry customer or difficult email.
• Self-evaluate your contribution before blaming someone when something goes wrong.
• Turn personal experiences into stories that help people change their behavior.
• Wrap useful information in humor and storytelling so people remember it.
• Build generosity into business intentionally instead of treating it as an afterthought.
• Small, consistent acts of service can open completely unexpected career paths.

Learn more about Return on Goodwill and Sam’s live events at https://samdemma.com/rog-live/

Amy Perez, CEO at myDream & Mindful Software, Inc. - is a former government technology leader, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, and responsible AI consultant, and we spoke about using dreams as another source of information for decisions, self-awareness, and major life changes. After years managing high-stakes programs - including a digital system that distributed more than $10 billion in pandemic aid - Amy was outwardly successful but exhausted: “I was slowly dying on the inside.” A violent dream centered on her work phone became the turning point. She quit, immediately felt “20 pounds lighter,” and she and her husband left their careers to travel the world for a year. 

That experience led Amy into systematic dream interpretation and eventually to building an AI-assisted approach that combines emotions, common symbolism, personal meanings, recurring patterns, and input from experts with more than 180 years of combined clinical experience. What previously took Amy more than an hour can now be explored in seconds, but she stresses that interpretations should offer possibilities rather than dictate decisions. Her philosophy is equally clear about AI: “Technology should serve the person, not turn the person into the product.” Privacy, anonymization, expert review, and keeping human judgment in the loop are therefore central to the approach.

For listeners, the practical starting point is simple: set an intention before sleep, record whatever you remember - even one word - and begin looking for recurring emotional and symbolic patterns over time. Amy created myDream to make that process easier: the app lets users capture dreams quickly, add their own personal meanings to symbols, explore expert-informed interpretations, and identify recurring trends that may connect to waking life. Her larger argument is especially relevant to entrepreneurs: “you will never have all of the data you need to make a decision,” so dreams and intuition can become an additional source of information- not a replacement for judgment, but another signal worth learning how to hear.

Set an intention before sleep to strengthen dream recall.

•  Record dreams immediately, even if you remember only one word. 
•  Track recurring symbols alongside your personal emotional context. 
•  Treat dream interpretations as possibilities, not instructions. 
•  Use subconscious insights as additional data for difficult decisions. 
•  Design personal AI around privacy, reflection, and human judgment.

Learn more about Amy’s work and explore myDream: https://www.mydream.io/

Saurabh Gupta is CEO of The Modern Data Company, and we spoke about why so many AI initiatives struggle to scale despite massive investment in the technology. His perspective comes from nearly 30 years in data: designing the World Bank’s open data platform, spending 12 years leading statistical data at the IMF, serving as Chief Data Officer for Washington, DC, and later working across more than 20 major enterprise data initiatives at Thoughtworks. Across those environments, he kept seeing the same pattern: “people are not focusing on outcomes, people are focusing on technologies.”

Saurabh explains why “bad data leads to bad AI,” and why adding more compute cannot fix a weak data foundation. His approach starts with right-to-left thinking: “bring only the minimum data that you need to solve a problem,” then expand as new problems emerge. He describes one manufacturer planning seven to eight quarters of foundational work before his team delivered the first use case and supporting platform in less than one quarter. Instead of stitching together 10–12 specialized tools, the method combines ingestion, quality, governance, orchestration, transformation and cataloging while keeping context attached to the data itself. Complex customer problems, he says, can often move from months to roughly four or five weeks.

For listeners building with AI, the practical lesson is simple: start with the outcome, minimize the data and infrastructure required, prove value quickly, and only then expand.

Key takeaways

• Start with the business outcome before choosing technologies or infrastructure.
• Bring only minimum necessary data, then expand as adjacent problems emerge.
• Replace 10–12 disconnected tools with a unified ingestion-to-cataloging layer.
• Package context, governance, lineage, and transformations with each data product.
• Track unused pipelines and shut them down to stop wasted compute.
• Aim to prove complex use cases in four to five weeks, not months.

Digna Deleon-Morris is an entrepreneur and insurance agency CEO, and we spoke about her path from arriving in the United States at 17 and earning $5.25 an hour to building an agency doing almost $4 million a month. Before entrepreneurship, she earned two college degrees, supervised 30 locations and managed $82 million in operations while working seven days a week — but, as a mother of four, realized, “I was building somebody else's business.” 

The turning point was painful: after making millions in their first business, Digna and her husband lost everything in 2016 because, she says, they lacked financial education. They began learning through books, seminars and mentors, then applied those lessons to their own family before building a business around them. In 2023, Digna shifted her focus toward the Hispanic community and says she “literally 10x the business” by serving entrepreneurs in Spanish as well as English. Her broader method is equally clear: build people, create repeatable systems, delegate to leaders and give newcomers a structure they can “plug in and play.” 

She also shares a practical 90-day planning framework covering seven areas: spirituality, health and energy, relationships, career, personal development, finances and contribution. Rather than waiting five years, she recommends defining what each area should look like in 90 days, writing it down and taking daily action — while using books, mentors, seminars and other successful people as blueprints. Her motivation comes back to family and freedom: she remembers being a mother who was rarely home and now wants other parents to build income without making the same sacrifice. 

The practical value is a concrete model for turning personal growth, mentorship and repeatable systems into a business that can scale beyond you.

Key takeaways

•  Set specific goals across seven life areas for the next 90 days. 
•  Work harder on yourself, not simply longer inside the business. 
•  Use mentors, books and proven examples instead of starting from zero. 
•  Build repeatable systems newcomers can use without prior experience. 
•  Delegate authority and develop leaders if you want a scalable business. 
•  Serve an underserved community in the language and context it understands.

Robert Misheloff, Smarter Equipment Finance co-owner, is an equipment-financing entrepreneur, and we spoke about how small business owners can finance essential equipment without falling into costly traps. After running direct marketing campaigns for financing companies, Robert saw firms brag about how they “pulled the wool over the eyes of their customers.” That experience pushed him to build a business around transparency and helping owners make informed financing decisions. 

Robert breaks the market into three practical options: start with dealer financing, then try a bank, and only then look to private equipment financing when those routes do not work. Dealer programs can sometimes offer 0% rates—“You can't do any better than free financing”—while brokers become more useful for startups, used equipment, or challenged credit. He also explains how fake approvals can turn a seemingly standard deposit into a $2,000–$3,000 loss, and why reading negative reviews for patterns of deceptive behavior matters before signing anything.   

For Robert, the larger purpose is helping very small businesses—often just one to four employees—turn equipment into economic opportunity. He walks through a dump-truck example where someone earning $50,000–$60,000 annually could potentially build toward roughly $10,000 monthly after modeled expenses, then add trucks and drivers over time. In industries like trucking and construction, “the equipment literally is the business,” making the quality of a financing decision consequential not just for the company, but for the owner and their family.  

Listeners leave with a concrete framework for comparing financing options, spotting scams, and deciding when debt can genuinely help a small business grow.

Key takeaways

•  Check dealer financing first; 0% offers can beat every alternative. 
•  Try your bank before entering the private equipment-financing market. 
•  Brokers are strongest for startups, used equipment, or challenged credit. 
•  Read negative reviews specifically for patterns suggesting fake approvals or deposit scams. 
•  Never assume an approval deposit is refundable without reading the contract. 
•  Model revenue, expenses, payments, and repair reserves before financing equipment.