Just who am I? To answer that question, like most Americans, I need to start the answer with an explanation of what I do for a living. As of two years ago, I spend my time helping entrepreneurs with their ideas and startups. That is all I do.
When you look at it through the lens of a job, for example on my LinkedIn profile, it appears not as a single entry, but a half dozen. From my daily work, however, it’s all one job, just split amongst a variety of different businesses, projects, and channels. In order of time spent, they are first and foremost Fledge and Kick, then my volunteer work at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute and Social Venture Partners Seattle’s Fast Pitch, Realize Impact, teaching, writing, and now blogging. Toss in a few advisory roles and I appear to be doing more than most people seem reasonable or sometimes believable.
But really, all I do day after day is provide advice to entrepreneurs, connections to others who can help them, and introductions to investors who can fund them. It’s a great job, one that suits me perfectly, as I spent the twenty years before that building five other startups, learning the trade (so to speak) the hard way.
Given my focus of “servant leadership”, mentorship, and connections, I have noticed a shift away from “I” to “you”. In other words, most of my time is spent on other people’s plans and other people’s work. I do have my own companies to run, but they too all exist to serve this purpose, and at the same time to serve the needs of my investors.
With all that, I’m finding the plentitude of “I’s” in these first two blog posts, not to mention the smiling face on the favicon and logo of the web site to be quite out of place. But as this is a personal blog, I see no reason nor simple way to leave out the “I’s”, as these are my opinions and bits of advice to share with the world.
So who am I? I’m an experienced entrepreneur turned teacher and mentor. I’m here to help. How can I help you?
Love this! 🙂