The Entrepreneur's Ethic

Jim Fay is an innovator who’s been a part of development of multiple billion-dollar products. Jim defines his work as that of an ‘Entrepreneurial Product Engineer.’ He shares four product development principles, with a contrarian view of the idea of a minimum viable product. He also shares seven principles for success.

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Zeitgeist is a word that comes straight from German — zeit means "time" and geist means spirit, and the "spirit of the time" is what's going on culturally or intellectually during a certain period.

In the last podcast of 2023, I take a shot at interpreting the spirit of the time for change-makers, what I’ll call the entrepreneurial zeitgeist. What’s potentially interesting or notable for innovators and entrepreneurs in late 2023?

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This week’s podcast is with Dr. BJ Johnson, CEO and co-founder at ClearFlame Engine Technologies. We talk about his design of a sustainable diesel engine with the capability to reach net-zero emissions and even reverse greenhouse gases to yield a negative balance in carbon emissions while reducing the costs of long-haul trucking for fleets large and small.

This week’s podcast is an interview with Dr. Josh Storrs Hall is an independent scientist and author. One of this books is, Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past.

Dr. Hall was the founding Chief Scientist of Nanorex, Inc, which is developing a CAD system for nanomechanical engineering. He remains a member of Nanorex' Scientific Advisory Board, and well as a Research Fellow of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing. His research interests include molecular nanotechnology and the design of useful macroscopic machines using the capabilities of molecular manufacturing. His background is in computer science, particularly parallel processor architectures, artificial intelligence, particularly agoric and genetic algorithms as used in design, and reversible computing.

Editor's note: this interview was conducted virtually. We apologize for a handful of internet connectivity hiccups throughout, and have done our best to maintain what Dr. Storrs Hall was conveying.

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This week’s podcast is an interview with Joel Harris, co-founder and CEO of GenVax and my compatriot with agtech investment fund Ag Startup Engine. Joel co-founded another business more than fifteen years ago, Harris Vaccines, that pioneered development and commercialization of mRNA vaccines in the livestock industry. The GenVax team is working on the next generation of livestock vaccines for diseases that would be devastating for agriculture and food security like African Swine Fever and Foot and Mouth Disease.

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One of the Entrepreneurs featured in my upcoming book, The Entrepreneur’s Ethic, is Henry Ford. There are seven parts of The Entrepreneur’s Ethic. Ford’s work exemplifies Ethic 2: Solve Hard Problems. This is the priority setting-orientation of entrepreneurship. It tackles the profound question of “what should I work on?”

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In this week’s podcast, I interview Brent Blum, Executive Director of the We Will Collective at Iowa State University, an organization that supports student-athletes through NIL deals and helps them to contribute to the community.

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In this podcast, I try a new format, a solo riff on mentoring. Last week’s podcast on talent; how to attract it and how to keep it, resonated. So, I’ll do a deeper dive into mentoring through the lens of three decisions I’ve made, one practical, one principled, and one whimsical or weird.

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Matt Pozel is an Associate at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri, which provides access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity. He is deeply knowledgeable about Ewing Kauffman’s story and legacy, and I enjoyed insight that Kauffman offers us on attracting and developing talent and translating business success into community and philanthropic impact.

One of the Entrepreneurs featured in my upcoming book, The Entrepreneur’s Ethic, is Ewing Kauffman. Kauffman founded Marion Laboratories, a pharmaceutical business, in Kansas City in 1950. By the 1980s, Marion was a billion-dollar business. But a non-pharmaceutical piece of Kauffman’s legacy is in professional baseball, and this case study will dive into one of the most interesting experiments in professional baseball talent development in history, the Kansas City Royals Baseball Academy.