EB interviewed Ted Serbinski of Detroit Venture Partners and the interview is now up! Aside from working on the start-up renaissance in Detroit, Ted has been an entrepreneur for many years and spent 8 years as a lead open source developer for Drupal.
As always, my favorite snippets –
“Things that keep me on track when I look at coding and hacking and those kinds of things are to always be enthusiastic and passionate about what I’m doing and there’s a great saying online of David Seta’s. It’s “build, ship, mentor and share.” The concept is that there are these four steps to every process.”
“The first thing is the team behind the start-up. The second thing is how they’re actually executing. Notice that I’m not saying anything about their idea and I’ll show the reason for that in this example. When someone says, “I have the best idea and it’s going to change the world,” I say, “Let me tell you about my idea.”
When I’m investing in start-up, the biggest question is how do you judge start-up one from start-up two? What’s the real difference? There are two fundamentally different things. My idea is that I’m going to rent out a big space. It’s going to be on a busy street corner and it’s going to have about 10,000 square feet of space. I’m going to put down tables and chairs and have a menu of food. It’s a restaurant. There are millions of restaurants in the world, but they’re all completely different from the décor to the type of food, the type of service, the cost. But they’re all fundamentally exactly the same idea, so when an entrepreneur comes to me and says they have a great idea I tell them, “I don’t care so much about your idea as how you are going to execute. What is going to be your cost? What is going to be the way you’re different? How good is your food or your product going to be? What kind of icon, what kind of colors? Those are the things that will really differentiate you.”
The full transcript is up on RealLeaders.tv.
A Learning a Day 