All the secrets to being an entrepreneur

okay so if you want to be a future founder CEO or entrepreneur this is the video for you we've all heard of Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Spiegel and all of these young Founders becoming billionaires and massively successful Founders at such a young age and really they are the exception to the rule because usually being a Founder is about getting experience and trying things out and taking risks so I'm Vivian I studied computer science at Stanford also worked at Google as a software engineer at McKenzie which is a consulting firm and I founded my own company when I was 25 years old and one of the things that I realized really quickly was that I didn't know anything about starting a business until I started one what like it's hard so let me talk you through some of the things I wish that I knew when I was an early entrepreneur and then also some tactical things that you could do if you're thinking about starting your own company we'll also go over some fun business ideas that you could maybe start from your house or from your dorm all right let's jump in so the first thing that I would encourage for everybody is to get your hands dirty and don't be afraid of failure so I'll give you an example I worked at McKenzie which is a strategy consulting firm McKenzie is super famous for giving advice to fortune500 companies and really powerful CEOs and McKenzie was my first job coming out of college so as a young person at McKenzie you see a ton of different kinds of businesses and you also learn about different functions within a company and you also do a ton of training as part of your time at Mackenzie around revenues and costs and all these kinds of buzzwords that go around business but when I actually started my company it was like starting from zero it is so different to theorize about profits and costs and it's a totally different thing to try to actually sell people on your product yourself so as a consultant you would say something super generic like you should start doing marketing but that's totally different from actually going out there and getting your hands dirty and doing the marketing yourself so when I started I just went and pulled up canva and made a set of Flyers at the time we were teaching kids how to code and so I took those canva flyers to a Kinkos and printed them out and then drove down to my old middle school and started figuring out how to sell and actually the first day that I went I went at the wrong time I didn't realize that the best time to go would actually be before school got out and instead I showed up after and so all the parents were super stressed trying to get their kids into their cars during pickup and it was really chaotic so the next day when I went back I showed up maybe 30 minutes before actual school got out and that gave me more time to talk to parents who were hanging out in their cars waiting for their kids to come out of school and I was able to give them the sales pitch for juny now I will say a bunch of people thought that I was really weird they just wanted to be on their phones not talking to anybody but there was a group of people who were really interested in what I was talking about and I had to talk to maybe 10 20 people before I really got the pitch for what I was doing downright when I was in Consulting you might have said something like create a sales pitch but actually testing out different versions of that sales pitch is the only way that you'll actually learn for example it's really uncomfortable to ask somebody for their phone number or to ask them if they're interested in moving forward and how much money they would pay pay for your product and again a key part of this is being told no failing over and over again and that's not going to be very comfortable but that's the only way that you build grit and you start learning what works and what doesn't Okay so that's my first piece of advice my second is that you should find your unique Spike or what you're uniquely great at so I know that this one sounds a little more intimidating if you're in high school and you don't know what you're great at yet remember this is all about practice and getting the Reps in early like in sports you wouldn't immediately go play for the NBA or the NFL it might just something that you've thought a lot about in your spare time or a unique skill that you've actually been working on like coding so a really common thing that I see for young entrepreneurs is that they're really great at social media marketing and that's actually harder to do than you think and a more valuable skill than a lot of people realize so for example you could just start out by starting your own Tik Tok or Instagram account and you may not need to be in front of the camera but figure out interesting things and ways to reach the eyeballs of thousands of people and social media is sometimes undervalued because the most important thing for a company is usually growth and distribution which basically means how do they get in front of more customers and how do they sell more of their product through those different customers and social media is really important because it can support the growth of a company and how they distribute their products so your first company could just be a Tik Tok account or Instagram account that you've started and from there you can start learning how do I create content that resonates with people because that in turn turns into demand and so from there maybe you see that a lot of people are interested in handcrafted jewelry je and so from there you start producing your own jewelry maybe just from your home to start and so that's another thing that sometimes people Overlook is that you can start with really simple physical products that are really easy to demonstrate and show people how they work so I knew somebody in high school who would just go buy a box of chocolates from Costco and then take them to school and resell the bars for like a 2X markup and that totally makes sense because at school kids will always be interested in eating candy and a $2 chocolate bar doesn't seem that crazy but given that you bought for so cheap at Costco you can make a profit and from there you start learning about things like inventory how are you actually going to carry your box of chocolates around how many do you need to buy in a given week which ones are more popular than other ones all of these things add up and so again it doesn't really matter as much what you're starting with but instead that you're getting the practice in a lot of the times somebody's first company is not their most successful one okay so my second piece of advice is that done is better than perfect you'll notice that I talk a lot about starting small and just getting that practice in and that really applies here because again being a Founder is a momentum game as well so if you were starting with one of these social media accounts you could actually start more than a few at the same time and it's really important that you post consistently and that you get multiple variants out there to just test things out but usually really smart people overthink things a lot for example they might overthink what kind of camera they need to start filming Tik toks or what kind of setup they need in their house but really all you need is just an iPhone or a smartphone and you could just get started some sometimes they also want to create a really long 50-page business plan but that's not really what's needed you may be running down the wrong road you might actually be thinking of a product that nobody really wants and so I know some people will say well selling candy bars seems like such a lame way to start but remember you have to start somewhere and once you start learning what kinds of problems that customers have and things that you could solve for them you'll build better and better businesses and the great thing is because you're in high school or in college it's really low risk for you because your full-time job is being a student and so all of these things could really just be side hustles that you're doing for extra cash but you can learn while you're doing that which is a win-win so back to the business plan I've seen a ton of people create really long business plans that have crazy projections in them on how much revenue they're going to do how they're going to expand their product line but remember all of these things are usually thinking too far ahead yes down the line if you want to build a company at scale you probably will need to do a lot of these things but again you won't know directionally if you're headed the right way if you don't validate that people actually want what you're building so Y combinator is a really famous Silicon Valley accelerator I went through the program in 2018 when I was 26 years old and they will always say to make something people want and the worst way to do that is to build a business plan while you're at home sitting in front of your computer instead you actually need to be talking to users getting your stuff out there and getting their feedback on it you should read The Lean Startup method which will tell you a little bit about what a minimum viable product is and how to get something out there that people can actually test okay another piece of advice I have is to find your people so when you're first getting started out as an entrepreneur it can be really lonely one of the things that's really fun about being an entrepreneur is that you get to learn what you're really great at and then supplement your skills with other people around you and so a classic one here is are you more interested in the business side or the technical side of building a company some people are naturally more inclined to be the technical co-founder either they studied computer science or they worked as a software engineer and that makes a lot of sense for them they may also not be very interested in talking to investors thinking about marketing doing all these other things on the flip side if you're somebody who's a natural marketer you love being in the spotlight you love talking to other people you also have really unique ideas for viral campaigns then that totally makes sense for you to focus on that but you won't really know until you start trying out these different functions at a company you can think about it like a sports team everybody might have a different role on the team but you won't really know which role you're great at until you try them and sometimes there's a natural inclination for one function or another but sometimes it's just developed over time and it becomes your unique Spike and this also lets you learn how to work with people who are really different from you and who will compliment you so one final note that I have here is how does entrepreneurship relate to things like college admissions if you're still in high school so one of the dirty secrets about being an entrepreneur in high school is that a lot of people are thinking about it in the lens of college admissions and I'm not somebody who thinks that that's that's a way to game college admissions I think it's totally fine if you have the goal of starting a company and getting into a great college and so the main thing here is to tell an authentic story of why you got involved in entrepreneurship and why what you're doing is unique to you you also really want to demonstrate the challenges that you faced how you overcame them and how you became a better person because of it remember you don't need to cure cancer or build the next Facebook in order to get into a great College you also don't necessarily need to do a for-profit business you could do something like a nonprofit instead you know at the end of the day everything you're doing in high school obviously will impact your college admissions but it'll also impact the many decades after college and Entrepreneurship is really one of the best ways to get your hands dirty start learning at an early age and think independently and so remember your story about entrepreneurship is really about your growth how you're building something that's important for other people and how you're eventually going to help the world sometimes it can be very specific like you were doing marketing at your own startup in high school and that becomes the reason why your interested in marketing at Warden at upen I would also say that college is an amazing training ground for entrepreneurship there's a ton of schools that have amazing entrepreneurship programs or clubs at the schools and so I would really encourage you to start thinking about how you'll get involved when you're in college so those are just three of my pieces of advice for people interested in entrepreneurship in high school I have a lot of thoughts about this subject so if this video was interesting to you let me know and I'll make another similar one thanks so much I'm excited to see what kinds of companies you all build

Channel: Vivian Shen

Views: 241

Keywords: Everything I Wish I Knew Before Starting A Business, tips for starting a business, starting a business, how to start a business, if i started a business now this is what i’d do, tips for starting your own business, business ideas, business tactics, entrepreneur, entrepreneur advice, tips for entrepreneurs, entrepreneur motivation, tips for new entrepreneurs, startup entrepreneurs, tips for entrepreneurs in their 20's, productivity tips for entrepreneurs, lessons for entrepreneurs

Id: PvaEUXqyEtA

Length: 10min 29sec (629 seconds)

Published: Sat May 11 2024