So I've been on Entrepreneur now for 25 years. This is my fourth company have started. The prior three were all venture back sass companies or service companies had three exits to successful, one painful and, uh, spent a long time just reading books about mindset and the question like, How do you bet your life? And those two books the business books were the startup playbook and knew the bank, which just came out this last year. I started working in as an entrepreneur in college. I got my start from a general and build Gillette the Idea Group in Rochester, New York I studied our i t and we began with working on building his company and I got the bug. I realized that I didn't wanna work for anybody else, and it had no interest regulated big company. And and so we started. Uh, you know, it was the dawn of the Internet in 1996 so it's a little bit of right place, right time, and we It was a transformative age, and so we built our first come and still that a couple of years later, and then continue to repeat that process in the last 20 years, learning how to get good at the job of being a founder. Some people have good fortune and extraordinary outcomes early, and we were We were similar to that. But you know, entrepreneurship is a career, it's a job, and it's as much about how you think is as you work. Um, there's a stain that says that Success is a bad educator and eso I've learned mawr in the failures that I ever have in the success. In fact, when you talk to entrepreneurs who have had any success, they always say that, you know, it was good, fortunate timing despite how hard they worked. It's usually something that is about an outside force, a supposed to, you know, just on your own power. So lots of things we could talk about today about the startup journey and what means to do this job. But I've been very fortunate, and, uh, and I've had its ups and downs and the ability to restart, and we found yourself. While the journey is a critical skill in doing this, doing this job well

So this company I started about seven years ago, it's called biotic and Biotic is a collective entrepreneurs who drive the mindsets and systems for growth transformation larger, larger organizations. It's the idea that big to bigger organizations are about efficiency and growth lives in discovery. In the same way MBA administrates for good reason. The big to bigger and large organizations growth was a discovery, which is largely a skill that venture capital entrepreneurship do as a form of management. And so my company is the pioneer and the idea. The venture capital and entrepreneurship are management, and we do this. For large enterprises around the world that leads to transformation. Companies like P and G and Nike and General Mills and Microsoft mothers have driven a mindset and a growth mindset and growth systems movement that Bionic has pioneered.well, primarily because they don't grow. So if you're a large organization and you don't grow, you are what we call a rich in pain customer. And one of my prior investors was a very famous BC from the Founders Fund. And he said, You always wanna focus on super customers who are rich in pain, and when you have large organizations that don't grow, they have tremendous accountability to their boards and Wall Street, and they need growth and our model, and our work solves that challenge.

well months I would edit to be years. Classic start ups typically take a least three years to figure out the exact customer problem and a revenue stream. So very often, you know, the first idea never survives. First collision with a customer, and secondly, very often the first revenue stream is not the right revenue streams. So the Internet for entire first three years is just about learning, discovering what is the problem? What is the need and how are we going to solve that? But there's actually a deeper question in the first year or two that you have to ask yourself and this this work comes through. Ah, book I wrote called the Startup Playbook. We interviewed about 40 entrepreneurs, some of the best in the world. Elon Musk, Sara Blakely, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, who wrote the foreword to the book to ask them, How do you bet your life and what they all said consistently across all 300 hours of those discussions. What There are five lenses, five criteria that get answered in the first three years that lead to disruptive growth and the first lens is proprietary gift. The question of why you What's your secret? What do you know? That no one in the world knows about solving this need? And that has to be true. The second lenses extreme focused. The more things you do, the less good you are, right. Optionality is the enemy, and that's a scary idea, because an entrepreneur you want every option to win. And it's counterintuitive, But the ability to invalidate options to get to the answer is what the job is in the first three years. Extreme focus. The third lenses. You gotta build painkillers and not vitamins. You want Richard and paying customers chronically lifelong that you're solving need for vitamins, air features they're not cos they're, you know, fingers crossed. Wishful thinking that the marketplace loves you when in fact it's just something to try and put down. So painkillers help you define who is the customer and what is the pain and how we're going to solve it. The last two lenses are about execution. The 10 next is the fourth lens, which is what aspect of the business is impossible to replicate. How can that 10 x factor become something that no one role that can do and you wanna asymmetrically invest in that which leads the fifth lens, which is You wanna build a monopoly where you can create permanent life, the customer to stay with them for long periods of time, typically one of three years. The job in the first two or three years. The company, not even months, is to frame the question of what is the need, the world. What is what's our proprietary gift in many cases, why now? And you use those five lenses to think about how and what to execute them.