The Mentors

Everyone wants to get press for their startup, but most founders go about it the wrong way. In this episode, we explore why some founders are so good at constantly getting written about and others struggle for years to get anyone to notice them. 

Through hundreds of conversations with successful founders, and a few insights we've received from PR professionals over the years, we discovered a few basic principals that any company can follow to be more attractive to the media. 

The first is to realize that "the media" or journalists, have jobs to get done, and if you can help them make their job easier, you have a much higher chance of getting their attention. And that number one job is to tell a story. 

We break down some specific examples of how you can create a noteworthy pitch or story that journalists will want to tell, how to find exactly the types of journalists and publications that have a high likelihood of writing about you, and how to develop relationships with them over time. We also share some resources like Help A Reporter and PRNewswire, for founders who are just getting started and want to tell their story, but have not had time to develop relationships with journalists yet.

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The problem with getting good at something is the temptation to perpetually avoid the unknown for fear of discomfort. This week we talk about an issue that's real for many mid-career professionals - the "Golden Handcuffs" - ie: the allure of staying in a financially comfortable arrangement at the expense of personal growth. We talk about how this paradox applies to us and why it's important to acknowledge when you've been comfortable for too long. 

We draw a parallel to the career of famed author Steven Pressfield (of The Legend of Bagger Vance and The War of Art) and why he didn't become the prolific author he is today until late in his life. 

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When Ishveen Anand started getting athletes like Dwyane Wade and Tiger Woods on her platform, brands started coming in droves. But according to Ishveen, simply driving transactions to happen on her platform would not be enough to create a sustainable business. 

In this episode we discuss why Customer Success became a core competency of OpenSponsorship’s business, and how optimizing for outcomes like ROI and brand awareness made it possible for the business to retain customers in the long run. 

Ishveen also talks about how her role as a founder fundamentally changed as the platform scaled, and how she learned how to balance execution with delegation to her team over the 4 years since founding the company.

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Motivation isn't always a reliable way to spur action but discipline is. For this week's episode we spoke to Terry Choi about how the skills learned in the Special Forces of the South Korean military helped him become a junior partner at a venture capital firm not long after graduating college. 

Terry speaks about his experience working directly for commander generals, becoming a squad leader and later a platoon leader, and why learning to be "fluid like water" helped him in situations of uncertainty. 

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How does a first time founder get 1,000 athletes on her platform from teams like the Dallas Mavericks, get on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, and get accepted into one of the top accelerator programs in the country, all in her first year in business? 

If you ask Ishveen Anand of OpenSponsorship it’s all about showing external validation, and ever since she graduated from Oxford and got her first job out of college she has created opportunities for herself by doing just that. 

In part one of our two part conversation with Ishveen, we talked about why she believes getting work experience instead of jumping into entrepreneurship straight out of school gives people a big advantage, how she identified a big opportunity in the sports sponsorship market that she couldn’t ignore, and how she built up an impressive client list by not being afraid to reach out cold. 

Starting a two-sided marketplace is a notoriously difficult thing to do, and in this episode you’ll learn how Ishveen was able to do so successfully by removing as much friction as possible from getting one side of the market to sign up, while simultaneously building up the other side.

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Some projects are so grandiose that it's difficult to fathom how any one person could conceive of them. This week we visited La Sagrada Familia, a massive basilica in Barcelona that has been in construction for almost 100 years. 

We were incredibly inspired by the story of its creator, Antoni Gaudi, and set out to understand how he was able to dedicate over 40 years of his life to pursuing this project. 

In this episode you will learn:

1. The key element to sustaining output toward a grand vision 
2. The importance of collaboration when working on something bigger than yourself

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Failure has long been embraced by entrepreneurial minds, and some of the most successful inventors, businessmen, and creators credit their ultimate triumphs with their ability to endure repeated failure. As startup founders, musicians, podcast hosts, and self proclaimed “jacks of all trades” we’re no strangers to failure.

In this episode, we take a stroll back to our very first attempts at venture creation, starting with our college days of trying to launch an affiliate marketing platform called AdLobby. We discuss the massive mistakes we made as first time entrepreneurs, including selling our car to pay for engineers that we couldn’t even speak to. We also talk about the next two business we tried to start, and how we almost got into the top accelerator in the world after recruiting an MIT technical co-founder.

With each of our failures, however, we were able to leverage the experience to not only avoid making the same mistakes again, but even turned them into lucrative job opportunities with other tech startups in both Boston and New York City. Tune in to learn how you can start looking at failure differently, and what you can do to position it as a positive experience to others.

We leave you with this quote:

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There is no one size fits all solution that makes everyone productive. To accomplish your goals, you have to find what works for you, and create your own set of daily routines and rituals. The key is consistency.

This episode was inspired by the book “Daily Rituals” by Mason Currey, and an article by Pia Silva entitled “9-5 Is Out. Try The 1-6 Instead.”

In this episode you will hear:

• How George Orwell changed his life at 31 to be able to work on his writing and support himself.
• What Albert Einstein’s daily schedule was like as a University Professor.
• The environment Maya Angelou needed to create for herself in order to write, and how we apply this in our own work.

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This is the final part of our series about our father, Samuel Revzin, who built one of the most successful schools in Soviet Belarus, only to have to start all over in a new career at the age of 54. Listen to Part I, and Part II if you’d like to hear the whole story, but this episode can be listened to standalone.

In this episode we tell the story of how our mother and father made the difficult decision to pack their bags and move halfway around the world to make a better life for their children here in the United States. With few employment prospects for recent immigrants, they had to do menial work for years to support the family.

Listen to find out how our father was able to use the same entrepreneurial instincts he developed in Belarus to start a business in a shopping mall that he grew to three locations and multiple employees. This small business was effectively our real world MBA, where at the age of 12 we were thrust into the day to day of the business to learn what it takes to run a company.

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Why do so many people constantly fail at changing their behaviors?

With the decade coming to a close, in today’s 5 Minute Pick Me Up, we wanted to look at some reasons why people fall short of achieving their goals, even when they have intentions to make major changes in their lives.

We reflect on the methods we have used when looking to make substantial changes, and the importance that balance and rewards have played a role in making those changes a reality. 

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