Listen to the most recent episode of Smart People Should Build Things: The Venture for America Podcast, a play.it original in collaboration with CBS!
This week, our host Jeremy Shinewald has a lot of ground to cover with serial entrepreneur David Kidder. David is an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur—he’s founded a handful of companies, acts as an angel investor through two investment funds, and has even written a book—The Startup Playbook—about the actions and attitudes that tie the best entrepreneurs together.
Currently—after selling a few companies and authoring his first book—David spends his days as the co-founder and CEO of Bionic, an enterprise social innovation platform. So, how did David get to where he is today? As he tells it, luck and good timing got him 80% of the way. But this isn’t the whole story. There were plenty of bumps and missteps along the way, leading David to take the following lesson to heart: it’s better to be a rational optimist—someone who operates firmly in reality—than what he calls a “pathological optimist”—someone who doesn’t know what’s impossible until it’s too late. “Wishful thinking is an enemy,” he tells Jeremy—and to succeed as an entrepreneur, “the core assumptions you’re building a business on must be actually true.”
Download this week’s episode to hear David talk treating your professional life like a VC fund, the necessity of discovering your proprietary gift, and why it matters to understand that you’re more than just your company.