The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Entrepreneur’s Odyssey by Andrew Ackerman

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

The Entrepreneur's Odyssey by Andrew Ackerman Andrewbackerman.com https://www.amazon.com/Entrepreneurs-Odyssey-Andrew-Ackerman/dp/1032883545 The Entrepreneur’s Odyssey is an authentic window into... what it really takes to turn an idea into a viable startup. It is both an essential how-to guide for would-be startup founders as well as an entertaining novel for the startup curious. This textbook-as-novel has fictional first-time entrepreneur Marcus Williams recount his journey from would-be founder with a half-formed idea to a funded startup. His mentor, Jason Murath, a seasoned angel investor, guides Marcus step by step through customer discovery, validating and refining the product, market sizing, and more, all the way through closing his first round of financing. There has never been a more fun – and effective! – way to learn how to build a startup.About the author Serial entrepreneur turned early stage investor, innovation expert, professor and, oh yeah, author. Invested in 70+ startups and mentored hundreds more. Tl;dr It's hard Built my first startup into the top provider of web services to summer camps. Lots of mistakes. Luckily, none killed the company. Managed a family office. Incubated new ventures while managing hedge & private equity funds. Meh. Recruited to found an app for parents to organize digital memories. Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want. Awesome experience. Why start one business when you can launch dozens? Joined an accelerator and ended up creating a new, later stage, platform for them. These days I run REACH Labs for Second Century Ventures, consult for corporate venture funds, accelerators, etc. Teach entrepreneurship in my (ha!) spare time to test my book with real students. Spoiler: It works really well. Over 60 published articles but this is my first novel. Hope you enjoy it!

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Starting point is 00:01:09 YouTube.com, Forteous Christmast, Christfoss. Those are crazy places that we have on the internet. Do you have an amazing young man on the show of us today. We're going to be talking with Andrew Ackerman. He is the author of the latest book that came out in, I believe, May of 2025, called The Entrepreneurs Odyssey. We're going to find out about what else like to be a serial entrepreneur. You're probably sick of hearing about it from me. So we'll tell somebody else's stories for a change.
Starting point is 00:01:33 16 years. Yeah, he's always talking about stupid businesses. Anyway, guys, Andrew Ackerman is here, and he has some amazing businesses. He's invested in, in startups, and we'll get into that. He is a serial entrepreneur turned early stage investor, innovation expert, professor, and author. He invested in 70-plus startups and mentored hundreds more. He built his first startup as the top provider of web services. to summer camps. Lots of mistakes. Luckily, none killed the company. Those are always good to survive.
Starting point is 00:02:06 He managed a family office, incubated new ventures while managing hedge and private equity funds. He recruited to find an app for parents to organize digital memories. Can you leave the teenagers out of those? Oh, I'm just kidding. Parent jokes. Experience is what you get when you get what you don't want. All right, I'll leave that. This is very interesting. You got like men. here and TLDR, you're a fun little commentary we got. So we're going to get into it. Welcome the show. Andrew, how are you? I am awesome. You called me a young man. You've already made my day. Yeah, I learned it from Carson. Always always, always gas up your guess. So, you know, I mean, you're at least, you can't be a day over 35. I mean, not one day.
Starting point is 00:02:51 Two. All right, well, Andrew, give us your dot coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs? Yeah. If you're curious about me in general, it's Andrew, the letter B is in below. Ackerman.com. So, Andrew, give us a 30,000 overview of what's aside your new book. Oh, okay. You may have heard of The Entrepreneur's Odyssey. So long, long, long story short, I've been told that I should describe it as the lean startup meets the alchemist, meaning that it's everything you need to know to make a startup from
Starting point is 00:03:21 like I got an idea. I'm pitching it at this kind of law firm in an evening event all the way through to, hey, I just closed my first round of financing, but it's actually told like a story rather than a how-to guide is a fictional startup, fictional founder, kind of a pastiche of all the founders I've worked with, and it takes you through everything in memorable real-life scenarios. Sometimes parables or stories that are examples of like a novel, and as you put it, textbook to novel, sometimes those play better with people. like they they by by seeing someone else kind of from that third party thing instead of reading this you know i've read tons of tom peters i'm sure you have to the truckers you know all the great books but sometimes it's a little hard when somebody just going hey you do this and you're just like i don't understand how this really works like you know so you want a confession sure i hate reading business books i hate them like even the really good ones they're they're like dull they're dry i feel like all hired the same ghostwriter in the midwest
Starting point is 00:04:24 estimate, anecdote, anecdote, anecdote, name drop, name drop, name drop. And then there's like a half-page summary at the end and like the box or with the bullets. And you know what? If you just ripped out those end of chapters and stapled them together, you'd have a great 20-page PowerPoint. So it's tough. Even the really good ones. There are very, very few business books that are both good content-wise and good as books. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:04:46 You know, I mean, I've loved a lot of great books. Tom Peters was somebody I read a lot of and I used a lot of his stuff. what's interesting is sometimes the reverse engineering that people go through in books and business books to explain the lightning that happened in the bottle like how was Steve Jobs you know hit so many home runs some of was fucking luck well some of it was just good people around him you've hit all my nerves today right no so it's like you know it's history by anecdote right as I was not put his left foot in his pants first so that must make a great entrepreneur we'll do to half the country does that, right? You're supposed to do the left side first? I don't know. I made that up.
Starting point is 00:05:26 Yeah, it explains one. But I'll give you, like, you know, I'll give you a great example, which illustrates, I guess maybe the thing I haven't come with Steve Jobs, like tons of mistakes, but none of them killed the company. You know that story they have about Gorilla Glass, you know, the whole story like... You want to tell it to us? Oh, so he, you know, he comes in one day and he's like, we can't ship. He's like, why not?
Starting point is 00:05:46 He takes his phone out and there's like scratches all over the, all over the glass. You know, I put in my pocket with my key. it's all scratched. I can't ship this phone like this. So they went out and they changed the glass they were going to use. They developed where they found this, you know, gorilla glass they have now. They like set the production schedule way back.
Starting point is 00:06:03 It cost them unto millions, tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars. But everyone holds this up as like, man, you got to be maniacable about, maniacal about your product. My feeling is that was dead wrong. Ask a question. Your phone right now, is there a chip in it?
Starting point is 00:06:20 Not this one. have phones of chips in them though i have a bunch of fun how how often or how many times have we had a phone with a big crack in it and you've walked around like that for over a month because you can't be parted from it for the hour and a half it takes them to fix the glass mm-hmm yeah uh and by the way if you put your phone in your pocket with a sharp metal object and it got scratched you call that steve jobs fault or you being a dumbass me being dumbass but i'm kind of weird that way i'm not like everyone like anyone oh man i put i put sharp metal against glass and scratch. Who would have thought, right? Okay. So here you have a product that is so sticky that even
Starting point is 00:06:58 with big cracks in it, people will not take it out of their cold dead hands. They can't be parted with it long enough to fix the screen. So that shows me that like a little bit of scratches on the screen wasn't the thing he should have optimized for. He could have shipped it. Version two would have been new glass, new and improved. And no one would have been, nobody would have said boo. no one would have said boo uh you know it's it's interesting that way i mean he was meticulous at you know i mean what's that famous story about the color yellow and the original iphone he was oh yeah he was like obsessed with the shade of yellow and he'd like
Starting point is 00:07:38 i think he called his team and went this is the wrong yellow you're like okay i did whatever i think i think that's the story if i recall correct yeah no there's there's tons of stories like that um you ever hear of a guy called seemingly enough, Guy Kawasaki. Yeah. So I like his approach a little better. And before I use all his quotes, like, what is this PG-P-G-13 or say what you want? I say what you want.
Starting point is 00:08:03 Okay. So one of his favorite quotes, he's got really good, one of my favorite quotes of his, and he's got a lot of good ones. He's like, you know, principle number one, fuck it, chip it. He's like, and number two, similar related to it, it's like, if you don't look back at version 1.0 of your product and cringe at how disgusting. and how primitive it looked, and how ugly it looked, you waited too long to ship. But if you've developed something that's really solving a painful problem, I mean, really,
Starting point is 00:08:33 the kind of thing people really care about, they will take the half-finished product out of their hands. They can't wait to get their hands on it. Yeah. Right? So ship it as soon as possible. Get it in front of customers as soon as possible. Like, it's easier to iterate on software than hardware, obviously. but you do the best you can
Starting point is 00:08:50 and just get out there faster. Yeah. And sometimes, I don't know, it's kind of interesting. Sometimes you need that feedback or testing from people to tell you what's wrong. Like, it's amazing to me
Starting point is 00:09:03 how many people ship products and they can't see the fallacies of that product. And sometimes you need that feedback. They have this big vision. And they're like, oh, I got to build this. And I'm like, they don't realize
Starting point is 00:09:16 that like half the things that just built, no one cares of it. about. And if you get a team where they're strong about certain things, you kind of retreat to the things that you're good at, even if that's not the most important thing for the company. Hey, I got a joke if you want. This is one of my few PG jokes. Okay. But it's on point. Yeah, I don't have a lot of PG jokes. Most of my jokes are not safe. So this old guys in the middle of the street in the middle of the night, looking down,
Starting point is 00:09:44 just like looking down. And his friend is, is a, hey, Chris, man, what's wrong? What do doing the middle of the street at night. And he says, I, you know, I lost 20 bucks. So his friend says, okay, Chris, let me, let me help you look for it. So down, after about 10 seconds, it's the middle of the street. Like, there's not a lot of places for 20 bucks to be. I said, gee, Chris, I don't, I don't see. Where exactly did you lose it? So the old guy says, you know, down that alley. And he's, Chris, like, if you lost the money in the alley, what are we doing in the middle of the street? You know, well, the light's better. But that's exactly what founders do. Honestly, let's say you've got a technical team, right?
Starting point is 00:10:21 They're really good at shipping product. And something that's not working. They're just going to keep on putting out new features. Like, off, I just fix the user experience where I just fit new features, and it'll all click. But really, guys, like, you have a problem here. You're not selling it right, maybe. So you've got to go out there and you've got to do the market. You've got to talk to the customers, but they're not good at that.
Starting point is 00:10:41 So they retreat into what they're comfortable with. Or you have the other one where you've got guys that can sell ice to Eskimos, and, you know, it's not work. And then, you know, he's like, well, I'll just, I'll just try a different channel. I'll just try different ways to sell it. Well, hey, you had to go back to basics. Maybe your products aren't what they want. So we're all guilty of retreating into our comfort zones, or as I could put it, where the lights better for us personally. Yeah. You know, I remember that with, I can cite that on a lot of different things, but I remember the Path app was that way. When the Path app came out, it had a Facebook UI killer, and it had a beautiful UI. They'd done
Starting point is 00:11:16 just an amazing job with it. But there was one caveat that I knew it would fail, and I could have bet a million dollars that it would fail. And I wrote to, I don't know, whatever the dude was. And the failure point was it focused on this naive sort of experience that you only can really, you know, we've had hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter and Facebook, LinkedIn, you know, all that shit. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:11:45 And YouTube. And there's a certain scale you need to have a successful community. You know, you may not be talking to $5,000 or $6,000 or whatever the hell it is on my Facebook. But the scale of the filter down, you know, that funnel like a sales funnel of numbers of people that follow you and numbers of people who interact or occasionally see yourself and convert, you know, what converts and what you interact on a daily basis with, you need to have that. and so by them running at 50 max followers that you could have, that's what Path app did is they locked it in, where on Facebook in other places you can have LinkedIn 60,000, 5,000 on Facebook. But by locking it at 50, that means you, if you run the scale of numbers,
Starting point is 00:12:32 you know, you're maybe going to find people you're going to talk to every day. Yeah. And, and so I wrote them and I go, this is the dumbest limit you do. This will kill the app. You have built this beautiful eye that is a, a Facebook killer, but you're cutting off your nose about your face on this one fucking thing.
Starting point is 00:12:50 And I can't remember if I ended up talking to him or not, because we had similar friends with Robert Scoble and stuff. I think he was having lunch with him at the time. And I was like, this is the dumbest thing. You have to change this one fucking thing. You built something that could beat
Starting point is 00:13:06 Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah. So first all, I remember Path really, really well. That was David Morin. Yeah. It was 2013 plus or minus. I know it really well because bunk one, my first startup, one of the biggest features within this, like, internet service for summer camp startup was the photo gallery and was parents going back to see pictures of their kids at camp. Yeah. Right. One of the parents said that was like crack for summer camp parents.
Starting point is 00:13:30 Refresh, refresh, refresh. You know, refresh is not going to change the photographer having not taken more photos yet. But they were all over it. But it gave you great, what's the thing people love with apps like that? Great user. mistakenness, engagement, yeah, depending on, but, you know, for those two months of the year. And then it was like, you know, crickets for the other men, but that's a different story. But yeah, the theory behind it was if you had 50, you know, theories, like, you don't really have 50 close friends.
Starting point is 00:13:57 And like, if, but you're right, my 50 close friends, they all have lives. So they're not going to be online all the freaking time, which means that if I'm on and they're not, even if not exactly on, like, how much, you're just hearing crickets. You know, that was, and I think towards the end, after they raised a bunch of money, they realized and they raised the limit, but that moment had passed. Yeah, they'd miss the, they missed the hit. That's what your story. 200 at the end. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:14:27 And even 200 was like too small. I mean, you know, I recently sat down with, the Facebook came to me and said, I think they just, they did this with a bunch of people just recently. And they said, hey, man, you've got, you know, eight, it looks like I've got 8.3,000 followers. on Facebook and you need to either convert to a fan page if you want to keep those followers or you can just keep your 5,000 friends. And recently I sat down and looked at my 5,000 friends and you would be surprised. I mean, many of these people have been with me since I got on the Internet in 2008, 2009,
Starting point is 00:15:02 and created the Chris Foss brand. And I, well, I don't know them intimately or we're having lunch together. I know a lot about their lives over the 16, 17 years I've been on. I mean, I went through a whole mess of them and I was looking for people I could delete. I was like, I have like 17 relationships with this. And some of these people, it's pretty loose, but I know their faces. I know some of their posts. I know some of their stories over 17 years.
Starting point is 00:15:30 And so you could say, well, you know, you only hang out with maybe 10 people or something. It's not really true. And sometimes like my birthday, they all come out. I come out for their birthdays, you know, and some of these people, I kind of know their stories. In fact, it was kind of interesting to me to see how many people had passed away or disappeared during COVID, which I can only imagine what happened. But, yeah. So if you want, let's curve back to the book, because I kind of took us off on the hating path tangent. It was so beautiful.
Starting point is 00:16:03 I mean, it was he had. It was very well designed. He had it. It was there. He had all the shit that was missing. He had shit that made it intimate and just that one fatal flaw that was guaranteed. I could have, you could have given me any amount of money. I want to bet a billion dollars that that fucking thing was going to fail on that one issue.
Starting point is 00:16:21 Anyway, so the entrepreneur's Odyssey. Tell us about who's the character in it. Is there a character? Tell us about him and how he goes through this story. Yeah. So let me, I'm working on answering the questions first before going into the whole buildup. So the main character, Marcus, is an entrepreneur. He has an idea for something he's been working on for a while.
Starting point is 00:16:45 And then he ultimately runs into an angel investor named Jason at a pitch event. Jason's like, yeah, you're all wrong, but there's something good here. And Jason ends up like him taking him under his wing and mentoring him through the process. You know, customer discovery, you know, they pivot to use the P word. It happens, right? They pivot into something that's same but different. then ultimately, you know, through finding the right co-founder and through everything that you need to do to make a successful startup right into and including the fundraising process
Starting point is 00:17:18 and closing the round. Now, the thing I was going to segue into, but I kind of pulled myself back. I got to answer the question first is all the characters in the book, almost all of them, are actually based on real people. And I did it because I'm not that good a writer. I did it because, you know, I write a lot. I read a lot articles, like 70, 80 articles for the trade press and the startup press. But those are all like 500 to 800 words, and they're all my voice. And nothing's kind of, one of the things that's really annoying about books is when all the characters kind of sound the same. So I wanted them all to sound very particularly different.
Starting point is 00:17:58 So the angel investor, Jason, is actually named partially based off of a guy John Aeson, who was when, of the OGs of the New York startup angel investing scene, who I knew pretty well. We actually did a trip to South Korea together, but that's a different story. He passed a couple of years ago. But, you know, that character is kind of an amalgam of him and me. And Marcus is actually based on one particular founder who had like a way of talking and a way of thinking about things. And anytime I wanted to put words on paper that were Marcus's words, I just kind of visualize this other entrepreneur. we're saying it. I'm like, okay, that's how Marcus has to sound.
Starting point is 00:18:39 Mm-hmm. And so you tell the story. Now, what kind of, what kind of entrepreneur is this? This is an entrepreneur that's going to identify with a lot of, if I'm out there listening and I'm a, you know, I'm not a Silicon Valley guy. I'm not like, you know, Mr. Startup guy. Let's say I'm a first-time entrepreneur. I want to make things work. Is this going to be at my level of? Absolutely. Absolutely. This is a guy who's, you know, the archetypical working in a, you know, a large company for a couple of years, you know, 10 years in plus or minus. He's like, you know, man, I've been doing this. I've been doing that. But, like, I got this idea that's going to be huge. It's got to be huge. It will be huge. I'm, you know, I finally
Starting point is 00:19:19 got my, you know, my courage up to go out there and jump out and do it on my own. So that's the kind of guy. It's not, you know, to write for like Bill Gates to get better. sorry, not Bill Gates. Steve Jobs or, you know, four-time founders to get better isn't really a big audience. This is for everybody who's building a startup or thinking about building startup. And I mean, I think a lot more people are going to be into entrepreneurship with AI. What's happening with AI? You know, there's going to be a lot more layoffs.
Starting point is 00:19:52 They, I think Amazon or I'm not sure I got that right, somebody announced today there's, well, there's a rumor flying around. There's going to be 30,000 layoffs. But usually it's from a good source. evidently, and I believe it is, yes, Amazon targets as many 30,000 corporate job cuts. You know, we've heard Mark Benioff kind of bragging about how much he loves laying off people with AI. I'm kind of insinuating his words a little bit, but that's kind of how I came off the cuff. And so I think that's going to create more of an entrepreneurial sort of society, maybe.
Starting point is 00:20:25 I don't know. What do you think is, what do you think it's going to come out of the AI layoffs? is, are we going to maybe find more people that sell, coach? What do you see the vision of that? A couple different ways to take this. Number one, like entrepreneurship and startups can mean a lot of different things. You know, the kind of startups I do with my invest in are like the archetypical tech startups, right?
Starting point is 00:20:49 You know, big data kind of SaaS software or, you know, direct-to-consumer apps, that kind of thing. you know but they're also like hey i've always wanted to start a photography studio i just got laid off i got nothing to lose let's do it right or let's become a consultant to become a you know a career coach those are also entrepreneurs those are also startups they're a different kind of startup in fact in some ways they're a special case with tech startup with tech startup you're like we don't know anything about it we don't know if they'll pay this kind of money we don't know very we don't even know if the tech will work the way we want it to work in a small business startup like yeah we know how a gas station works we know how a dry cleaner works the only
Starting point is 00:21:33 thing we don't know is that top line like how much money can we bring in in revenue at the top but it's all entrepreneurship at its base and even if you're working inside a large company I would argue that you need to have the same kind of entrepreneurial mentality to be the one that's not laid off yeah to be like oh my god this AI stuff is cool I want to play with it, not like I'm worried about it, not like, oh, I got 10 years left. Can I coast out without having to learn anything new? You got to be like, oh, my God, this is great. I never want to retire. It's just getting more and more fun. Now, in the long run, this is the, to answer the other question, like resources don't go unused, right? If there are people available, we'll use
Starting point is 00:22:14 them for something. Short run is very disruptive. But in the long run, like, we will use people for it, and AI isn't going to replace people so much as replace what people do. So take vibe coding, right? So the idea that we can use AI to actually program, which is very cool. You know, there's certain things it can do really easy and there's certain things it can't do. And there's certain things that are only possible using AI. So the theory I've heard that I most believe here is that a lot of vibe coding is going to be used for the stuff that was too small to get anyone from IT to do for you.
Starting point is 00:22:51 Yeah, that's not a big deal. It doesn't move the needle for the company. Well, now everyone can vibe code. I can solve my problem for myself. And it's also going to be used a lot for the stuff that, like, hey, I could never build anything like this without AI. It's that middle area that, you know, it's that middle area that's going to be changed the most.
Starting point is 00:23:10 The kind of stuff where I've got programmers working on it right now, I would build it for the company, but AI can do a pretty damn good job on its own. So those kind of roles are going to be, you know, need less, fewer and fewer them. Then you're going to use them more in other capacities. Maybe auditors for AI, because, I mean, there's what AI hallucinates? It's pretty, create some interesting stuff. I thought you're going to say, like, you know, you can replace a lot of accounting roles. You can replace a lot of compliance roles. You know, you can do that, you know, again, the hallucination thing gives everybody pause. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how it all comes
Starting point is 00:23:46 out. But, I mean, imagine, I imagine the future we're just going to be more people. that are selling what we know and our time, than maybe anything. I don't know. It'll be interesting to see where all that ends up and goes. What do you hope people come away with when they read your book? So a couple things, right? So if you're sitting in your, you know, your corporate office, your corporate cubicle thinking, like, I got this. But, you know, what's it really mean to be an entrepreneur?
Starting point is 00:24:11 I want you to get two things out of it. One, this is what I got to do, right? These are the kind of the steps. It is a step-by-step guide. but equally important I want you to get the sense of what it feels like to be an entrepreneur but you can't get that from a how to book
Starting point is 00:24:27 you got to understand like these are the risks like you're looking at your bank account go down every month and hoping that it starts to go up again before you run out like the analogy is like we jumped off a clip maybe we can build like a parachute before we hit the ground we're better get more than I like that analogy
Starting point is 00:24:43 you can build a parachute before you hit the ground something every business era started yeah well that's it like it's a fundamentally stupid thing to do in a lot of ways you know i know people who are like if you're asking me should i do a startup the answer is no you got to do a startup only because you can't possibly live without ever doing it now that said i will say they're better and worse times to do it yeah like in you know you can be sitting in that office and you're thinking about it hey if you're married and your spouse has good job with health care and you got a little bit of savings and you don't
Starting point is 00:25:17 have kids your kids are really young so like you're not a lot of costs against them yet like that's not bad time right you're presumably far enough in your career that you got the good relationships you know what a real pain point in your industry is you know you're not your spend is fairly low that may be the best time to do it like when your kids are in college and maybe you're going to get into college and you're in peak savings mode and you know maybe your wife's not working or your husband's not working or they're an independent contractor that have health care that's maybe not the best time to do it but like that's the that's the sense of like this is what it really feels like to be an entrepreneur that you know you can only get from store you can't get that from a help to guide
Starting point is 00:26:01 and then obviously for the people who are doing a startup like right now oh my god like take two days off just read the book it'll save you a lot of mistakes like learn from someone else's mistakes don't learn from your own if you can avoid it yeah definitely learn from other people's mistakes because the ones you do your own are kind of painful inexpensive sometimes really when it comes down to it so uh yeah it's it's something more people need inspiration from i like how you put together as a novel and uh help people walk through stuff and how to build a startup do you teach people in the book how to scale or do you maybe have other books maybe you're going to add to this Yeah, one book at a time, right?
Starting point is 00:26:44 So, you know, let's get this one out first. So this book is really all about building it, getting it to those, like that initial, like, we'll call it the seed round, right? And it also includes, like, finding the right person to be your, you know, goes to market with you. But I don't talk about, I don't focus that much on the sales process. I focus on, you know, customer discovery because you need to know what you build. But, you know, the whole enterprise sales cycle is maybe. for a different book. Oh, every mile counts, as they like to say.
Starting point is 00:27:17 So there you go. So let's see. As we go out, anything we want is missed, anything you want to plug or anything like that before we go? Yeah. I mean, you talk about a couple other things. So this is, you know, this is part of what I do, right? So first of all, if you're doing a startup, go ahead, grab the book. It will save you a lot of pain and suffering.
Starting point is 00:27:35 And there's a lot of funny puns in it, right? So, like, you know, it's a novel guide to startup success. And if you look down at the cover, like, you'll see a guy in front of this maze. The guy's got a chainsoy's like hacking his way through. So that's kind of my sense of humor. I think it's a funny book. People have told me that. But, you know, who knows?
Starting point is 00:27:52 No one tells you you're not funny to your face other than, you know, your teenage daughters. We'll tell you that over and over again. People on YouTube on Twitter. But, you know, just this is kind of a part of what I'd do. So I also deal with the other side of the fence, which is like large corporations who have set up innovation teams or corporate veterans. venture funds or accelerator or venture studio and you know they're just not working and they don't know why so like you know behind the scenes i have a much kind of more buttoned down approach
Starting point is 00:28:22 much more button down set of uh clients where i talk about those kinds of things oh well it's fun to have you on the show and talk about entrepreneurism my favorite subject uh been entrepreneurs since i was 18 so i i uh i have all the scars to prove it i i can show you but they're pretty gross. Anyway, but any other advice you want to give to entrepreneurs as we go out, Andrew? Yeah. This one I heard early in my career, so I'm going to share it with your audience. The number one skill you can have is an entrepreneur's empathy. Empathy, not just sympathy, I feel bad for you, but empathy, oh, I feel how you feel. I know exactly how you feel. I was there before. The reason for that is if you can put yourself that completely in someone else's shoes,
Starting point is 00:29:10 You're going to be able to tell what moves your customer. You're going to be able to tell why they feel the pains that they do and how do you solve them. You're going to be able to understand what motivates your investor and how to speak their language and get them to want to invest. It's going to help you across the board. So cultivate that ability to see things from other people's perspective to feel it the way they feel it and it will pay dividends across the board. I love that. What a great concept. I mean, that's the big thing about being an entrepreneur.
Starting point is 00:29:39 you're solving people's problems or their pain points and making it so that they can get what they want done. It's good to have, good to have. So thank you very much for coming to the show. We really appreciate Andrew. Thank you. Thank you for having me. This was fun.
Starting point is 00:29:55 Thank you. And thanks for us for tuning in. Order up the book, wherever fine books are sold. The Entrepreneur's Odyssey by Andrew Ackerman. You can find it out May 2025. And you can learn more about how to be an entrepreneur. You know, you don't know what's coming in the future, man. And the great thing about being an entrepreneur is being able to control your future.
Starting point is 00:30:13 I mean, you know, there's all sorts of things and stories you've heard over the Chris Foss show over the years and, you know, different things that happen in the world. And sometimes work for yourself is better. I think some people, some people can get it. So thank you very much, Andrew for coming the show. Thanks, Ron, us for tuning in. Go to Goodrease.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, dot com, Fortress, Chris Foss, 1 on the TikTok and he all those crazy places in it. Be good to each other. stay safe we'll see you guys next time
Starting point is 00:30:39 and that should have us on Andrew great show

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