It’s kind of a cliche, Vlad A. Ionescu, founder and CEO of Earthly, says, but his first attempts to build something really awesome focused on amazing technology. With hindsight, he doesn’t think it’s so surprising that those efforts weren’t successful. It’s not that passion doesn’t matter, but rather that he had to learn to build things that inspired passion from both the market and the builders. We also talked about:

• Leaving a job, blowing through his savings, going back to a job before finding entrepreneurial success
• Realizing that if he wanted to have the kind of impact on the world that he wanted to, he had to figure out a way to make it as an entrepreneur, because the alternative was climbing the corporate ladder and that didn’t sound like fun
• Why it’s important to be brutally honest with yourself and what you suck at
• How Vlad finally found success at Shift Left (now Quiet.ai)

I also really liked his ideas about cutting corners — that startups will always have to cut some corners, it’s just up to you to decide which ones to cut. 

Highlights:

• Vlad recounts lessons learned from early entrepreneurial failures. (2:31)
• Taking failure personally to overcome weaknesses (5:19)
• Vlad explains what led to his first success with Shift Left (7:40)
• Vlad shares his journey from Shift Left to Earthly (13:40)
• Why open source? (17:03)
• How Vlad and his team built Earthly based on what he learned from building Shift Left (25:07)
• Breaking a product down to its components to find more value (31:38)
• The Startup Hierarchy of Needs (34:02)

Links:

Vlad

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Earthly
• Qwiet.ai
• Personal Site