Hardest experiences - Entrepreneur Video Transcripts
Video 1 Transcript
Probably my hardest experience as a young entrepreneur was the day my dad died. It was my mother's birthday, September 15, 1985, and they had been on a cruise to Alaska and he died of a heart attack. But you know what? If you will take the time to think through those tough times in your life and turn those lemons into lemonade, as they say, you can be successful and have a happy life. After my father's death, I came to Utah to settle some things in my father's estate here in the state of Utah. And as I did so, I encountered a great company up here by the name of Novell. I walked into Novell, met the CEO, and they were looking for someone with my precise legal and business background to move their company ahead.
Video 2 Transcript
Some of the hardest experiences as an entrepreneur are when your vision doesn't come to fruition and you have to decide what that means. You have to lead the team and not show your disappointment as much as, hey this is our solution, this is how we're going to get through this, because you don't want to come in there and be like, I don't know how we're going to make it this year, I don't know if you're all going to be employed in three months. You can't say those things. So that's been difficult. COVID was hard. All of a sudden my employees were at home, we were trying to stay connected over Zoom, we were trying to move projects forward that didn't want to be moved forward, we didn't know how the income would go, and that was a really hard experience because I didn't want to share with them how worried I actually was. And so sometimes being a leader can be lonely because you can't talk to your co-workers about some of your biggest fears. That's why it's important to have other CEOs and other entrepreneurs that you're connected to.
Video 3 Transcript
Building a business, it not working, having to go get a job that you didn't like and pretty much push you to losing your mental and emotional sanity. Relocating to get a job just to pay the bills and then you had a baby coming in a few months was my situation in 2019 and it was bleak. It was incredibly humbling and it stung and it was hard because I really felt I was trying to do good things. I was trying to be a good person and I felt like all those things I was doing were not being honored and I was kind of left to hang in the dump. I had practically no money, barely enough money to pay for things, a child on the way and that's actually what started me and got me to the point that I'm at now. But crazy, it started at the very bottom.
Video 4 Transcript
My hardest experience at Jolt to date has been the unfortunate experience of having to do what's called a RIF, a reduction in force, which is essentially doing a layoff. It's unfortunate that sometimes you make bets and strategies that don't pan out. And where we were as a company, we put our bets on scaling what's called an SMB, so small, medium business strategy that in our industry with our product just didn't work out. And so we grew our headcount to very high numbers that we couldn't support. And so because of that, we had to then make a cut and doing something like that, affecting people's lives, kind of recognizing that you failed is extremely difficult. So hopefully that doesn't happen to you, but it is a reality of having a business. And so that's been one of the hardest experiences I've had to deal with.
Video 5 Transcript
One of the hardest experiences of being an entrepreneur is feeling the weight of all of your team members and all of their families, and being responsible to make sure they have their paycheck, make sure that their family is taken care of. That's absolutely one of the hardest things, is having the weight of all those people. And when I raised venture capital for a software business in 2014, the weight of having those other people's money in the business that I was responsible for was really difficult and hard. The other thing was, after two years of blood, sweat, and tears of that software company, it failed. And I had to go back with, and I had been keeping communication frequently with my investors, but I had to go back and tell them that the business didn't work like we thought it would, and that I had failed. And it was the hardest experience.
Video 6 Transcript
The hardest experience of being an entrepreneur is that you must be willing to focus solely on your business. You must forego social aspects, sometimes emotional aspects. Also, that way you can make sure that this is successful. So be prepared to sacrifice all to make sure this is a big success. Otherwise, it may be harder than you experience.
