i3 Talk

Sarah Biller is the Executive Director of Vantage Ventures, an initiative of the John Chambers College of Business and Economics at West Virginia University that focuses on launching high impact, scalable businesses that tackle complex challenges.

Prior to Vantage Sarah was a very successful entrepreneur, and co-founded Capital Market Exchange, a predictive analytics platform for institutional bond investors. Sarah was most recently the Chief Operating Officer for Innovation at State Street Bank’s Global Exchange division.  She is recognized around the world for her expertise in financial technology, and many in West Virginia consider her one of the most important players in West Virginia’s developing entrepreneurship landscape.

Sarah grew up in Hurricane, WV, went to WVU, and took various consulting and management positions with technology firms in Washington , D.C. before moving to Boston, where she started and sold two of her own start-ups. She knows the value of collaboration and believes strongly that the solution to building a young entrepreneurial class in West Virginia cannot be found in a vacuum where one or two entities control the state’s entrepreneurial landscape. In her words, it’s about who is in the boat with you. With that, this is the story of Sarah Biller and Help.

Kevin Combs has a passion for small town entrepreneurs. As a native West Virginian who grew up in Fayette County, he’s another expat who left the state, made it big and now wants to give back. In addition to being the Chief Executive Officer of a new company called Molecular Biologicals, Combs is the founding member of the Country Roads Angel Network which, as the name indicates, focuses on bringing start-up funding to small businesses and entrepreneurs in rural Appalachia, especially West Virginia.

Combs’ early career took him to Charlottesville, Virginia where he still lives today. But his mind and work with the angel network brings him back to West Virginia and his family’s farm in Elkins every month. My conversation with Combs was a meeting of the minds of sorts.  He’s passionate, dedicated, and we share a vision for West Virginia’s future that builds on our culture and strengths.  There’s no such thing as a roadblock to Kevin Combs.  In his mind, grit and determination can conquer all. So in this episode of i3 Talk, we look at the one thing every entrepreneur needs to succeed.

Here’s Kevin Combs’ story of grit.

Matt Eversmann is a retired Army ranger whose 20-plus year career took him to some of the world’s hardest places. In 1993, Matt was serving with Task Force Ranger in Operation Gothic Serpent when his unit fought one of the bloodiest gun battles the U.S. Army had seen since Vietnam. By the time it was over, 18 U.S. soldiers were dead and another 80 wounded. For the record though, the Rangers gave more than they got. According to one source, the Somali militia whose leaders were the target of the raid sustained at least 315 dead and 812 wounded. It was a pivotal moment for the U.S. military that was later captured in the movie Black Hawk Down.

Matt deployed once again in 2006 as part of the surge of forces into Iraq and saw combat in a different form. Since retiring in 2008, he has dedicated his life to helping veterans and their employers understand the transition process that soldiers go through when leaving the service.

Whether it was taking care of soldiers in the heat of a gunfight, or managing his small business, Matt Eversmann knows more than most how important agility is to to leaders and entrepreneurs.  In episode three of i3Talk, I speak with him to learn more about his history, and how he has had to adjust to changing situations both in combat, and in the civilian world.

BONUS: Watch the Interview with Matt Eversmann

In today’s world, most people believe that they are facing an infinite number of dangers and risks. Whether it’s a global pandemic, civil unrest, terrorism, war, joblessness, or any of the other crises we’ve faced as a nation over the last nine months, it seems like life has become a never-ending series of risky decisions. How we deal with this environment varies. When given a choice between something safe or something risky, which do you choose? Do you shy away from risks, or do you seek them out? How often can you see an opportunity that can only be realized by assuming a great deal of short-term risk? These are just a few of the questions that new entrepreneurs must ask themselves every day.

The fact is that entrepreneurship and risk go hand in hand, and how we deal with it depends on who we are, our life experiences, and our ability to handle the stress that goes along with stepping onto a path that leads to an uncertain future. The truth is, becoming a successful entrepreneur requires the adoption of risk and that requires a certain amount of courage, but courage without the risk of loss is just a word. Few people know this better than the four successful entrepreneurs who are featured in today’s episode of i3 Talk. They all have a common experience that only 7.6% of U.S. citizens can put on the professional resumes, and they all attribute their success in business, at least in part, to this this one chapter in their personal stories. So what do they have in common? They are all veterans of elite units in the U.S. military. All four have experienced levels of risk that few of us can even imagine. After they left the military, they leveraged that experience and the mental toughness it created, to build incredible businesses outside of the military. They each have amazing stories.

Ideas are funny things. I’ve spent most of my life believing I was an idea guy.  A person who sees things that others don’t. As I’ve grown older, I’m not so sure that’s true.  It’s been said that in today’s world where billions of people are connected, the odds of one person having a truly unique idea are incredibly small.  You see, in theory, all information is equally available to everyone who has an internet connection and a smartphone.  So if two people are interested in the same subject and see the same information, it stands to reason that the likelihood of them both coming up with the same idea is pretty high.  But even if someone else across the planet, or across town is thinking about the same new idea, that doesn’t mean both will act on it. In fact, most won’t. The risk is often too high, and the reward is speculative at best.

But that doesn’t stop the people who want to change the world with ideas.  For these individuals, the pursuit of manifesting an original thought drives them forward. Most of the time, they fail usually because no one around them tells them that their brilliant idea is actually a really dumb idea. Sometimes though, new ideas succeed, and when they do in a big way, economies are reshaped, communities are transformed, and the world takes notice.

Many parts of Middle America are looking for ways to create idea economies that reproduce entrepreneurs like colleges and universities produce engineers, doctors, and lawyers on a large scale. But doing that assumes there’s a process for creating great ideas that can be packaged-up and repeated time and again. Identifying that process is the holy grail of entrepreneurship educators and business leaders alike. Especially in areas of the country that have lagged behind in the 21st century economy.  Capturing innovation and using it as a tool for economic development is seen as THE key to Middle America’s future.

So, where do great ideas come from? Can they be mass produced, and how can bad ideas be killed off before some wayward entrepreneur loses his life savings building a business making things no one wants? That’s the story of ideas.

Tyr Symank is the special projects manager for the phenomenally successful Black Rifle Coffee Company. BRCC is unique in several ways.  First, its management team is comprised almost exclusively of current or former members of the special operations community.  Second, since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, unlike other companies that have gone out of business, Black Rifle’s sales have increased 15%. Lastly, while experiencing triple-digit growth since 2014, it has given away literally tons of its product to members of the military deployed overseas, police and fire fighters here in the United States, and most recently, to health care workers on the front-lines of the pandemic.

After launching a FinTech company around 2012 that ended up not working out, BRCC’s founder, Evan Hafer picked himself up, took the only money he had left in the world (somewhere around $1800) and got into the subscription gourmet coffee business.  Over the last six years, that gamble has paid off in a huge way. While most of its revenue is, and will continue to be generated through online sales, Black Rifle Coffee Company just inked a multi-million dollar deal with Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s to sell coffee in their stores, and will soon be selling one specific product in Walmarts across the country.

It’s been an amazing success, and Tyr Symank has witnessed much of it. This is his story, and the story of Black Rifle Coffee Company.

 

 

StandWatch Academy’s Innovation Builders Zoom Conference featured eight of the area’s most dynamic young entrepreneurs as they presented their ideas to investors, peers, education leaders, and the larger business community.  As participants in StandWatch Academy’s i3 Entrepreneurship Program, most of the speakers come from areas that are often overlooked by investors and business leaders. Individually, these young men and women are amazing. Collectively, they represent a future where the state’s economy is transformed by a vibrant class of young entrepreneurs who see a brighter future for the Mountain State.

Times have certainly changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but one thing is certain: The heroic doctors, nurses, physicians assistants and the entire medical community will save America. But eventually, entrepreneurs – innovation builders – will have to rebuild America.

We have to start preparing innovation builders of small businesses like never before. The new world of successful entrepreneurs will not focus on creatively disrupting global markets. Post-pandemic entrepreneurs will disrupt the hopelessness, fear, and panic that COVID-19 will leave behind on main street. Restarting a bakery, restaurant, welding shop, or IT services company will be far more disruptive for most Americans than the person who builds the next Uber. The impact of entrepreneurship must shift from scaling-up to world markets to scaling-down to main street USA.

Entrepreneurship is now a trade skill. People who take risks in rebuilding America aren’t entrepreneurs any longer, they are builders. They are innovation builders.  And just like their great grandparents in the 1930’s WPA, they will reconstruct America, one business, one main street, and one town at a time.  Our task is to create as many of them as possible.

This special edition of 50 Pages is the audio taken directly from the Zoom video conference. The video is available on YouTube if you prefer to watch rather than listen.

 

Bob Schmied is the Operating Partner of Atomic Provisions, a small restaurant group located in and around Denver, Colorado. Fifteen years ago the chain’s founder, Drew Shader, launched, “the nicest seedy bar in the not so best part of Denver,” and grew it into a restaurant group that now features great dining venues such as the Denver Biscuit Company, Fat Sully’s Pizza, the Atomic Cowboy Bar, and their newest concept, Frozen Gold Ice Cream.  Both Bob and Drew have been great supporters of StandWatch Academy and were actually featured in Unwritten, the documentary about our entrepreneurship program that was aired on West Virginia Public Broadcasting in 2019.

Like every restaurant chain in America, Atomic Provisions hasn’t gone unaffected by the COVID-19 pandemic, but due to the company’s excellent management, they are weathering the storm better than most.  Their crisis management plan has allowed them to stay open, and even though they were forced to furlough all 240 of their part-time workers, Bob, Drew, or one of the other senior managers calls each employee every two weeks to make sure they’re okay or need anything.  I would say that’s uncommon.  So far, of the 240 furloughed workers, Bob expects all but four to be willing to return to work at Atomic once the restrictions are lifted. That says a lot about the positive culture that’s been a hallmark of Atomic Provisions’ management style.

Bob took some time to speak with our students about how great management can help small businesses work their way through major storms.

 

Neil Jorgensen grew up in Summersville, West Virginia.  After attending college in Germany and West Virginia University, he earned a PhD in Mathematics and went to work for Intuit as a Data Scientist at its headquarters in Mountain View, California. A couple years later, wanting a new challenge, Neil left the security of Intuit and went to work for one startup that failed, but eventually landed at another new company called Skupos. Along the way, he gained some incredible insights into what it’s like to both lose and land a job in one of the most intense job markets in the world.  This is his story.

 

Listen to the music from this episode:

Ryan is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of UV. Ryan’s commentary on where the puck is going in higher education regularly appears in the Gap Letter, Forbes, TechCrunch, Inside Higher Education, Fortune, HR Dive, and VentureBeat, among others. He is the author of A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College (Ben Bella, 2018), which describes the critical importance of last-mile training and the emergence of bootcamps, income share programs, staffing and apprenticeship models as preferred pathways to good first digital jobs, and was named in the Wall Street Journal as one the Books of the Year for 2018. He is also the author of College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), which profiles the coming shift toward competency-based education and hiring.