Very Short Interview No. 1

So today I had the great pleasure of interviewing an entrepreneur - who also happens to be a friend of mine - CEO and founder of Gainesville startup, Keep It Simple Technologies, Benjamin King. Over the last 10 years, Ben has started four different companies. The spark that set him on the path to founding his last company came from hearing how hard it was for his brother, a Car Salesman, to keep track of all the people he had talked to and needed to followup with during the day. Sensing an unmet need, Ben developed a useful and simple-to-learn app (hence the name of the company) that allows sales people to catalog who they speak to as well as provides reminders to followup with them. Ben is a really cool guy with a lot of insight into entrepreneurship, but i'll let you see that for yourself in the following video:

For the record, here are the questions I asked Ben:

Question 1: As an entrepreneur, if someone were to ask you for your input in creating a course plan, what would you want to teach to students in an introductory entrepreneurship class? Or what would be the most important things that you think need to be taught in an intro course?

Question 2: What does it mean to you to be an entrepreneur? And, to continue, have you heard or do you think that other entrepreneurs would describe themselves differently? And why?

Question 3: What do you wish you had learned, or what experience do you wish you had, when you you were in school and hadn't yet set out on the path to become an entrepreneur?

Reflect:

Ben's answers to my questions were really insightful. I could tell that their was a difference between actually living the life of entrepreneur and what we're taught in class. School, as it stands today, can't possibly prepared you for all the realities of running your own company. Having to fire someone and having to accept and grow from failure seem very difficult to teach. Maybe someone could teach failure by designing an impossible assignment that's designed to freak out students. Or that could get a professor fired... Firing someone doesn't sound teachable. Maybe watching the Apprentice would be the best option for that. And even then, I don't that Trump really feels anything when he fires Steve Buscemi or any other celebrities.