My guest was Jacob Rothman, co-founder of Platform88, which offers services from China.
Jacob has over fifteen years of experience working in China. He has founded several companies including Smart Products, Velong Enterprises, and his latest venture, Platform88. With Platform88 his goal is to help hardware entrepreneurs with their manufacturing, retail needs.
This is a first episode where a company which is based in China is featured. Since the world’s manufacturing base, especially for hardware, consumer products is in China, I find his topic extremely relevant for this podcast. We’ll discuss such topics as how much retail and manufacturing has changed in the world and in particular in China in recent years; how Jacob arrived to China and how he got to start his recent company. You’ll learn what differentiates them from accelerators, what products they specialize in, what kind of innovations they like very much. We also discussed what market trends he can see that can be significant opportunities for startups. We brought up also an example of a hardware startup called Stojo which they worked with.
Learn more about this episode via the highlights as seen below.
Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com
I’ve interviewed Joshua Spodek, a professor at NYU and an entrepreneur. This has been an eye-opener interview for me on leadership, how to master it and also on his teaching methods, his entrepreneurial journey.
Joshua is a best-selling author of the book called “Leadership Step by Step”, which has recently come out. In this interview we talked about his leadership principles which he describes also in his book. He’s a professor and a coach, teaching about leadership and entrepreneurship. In addition he writes regularly for Inc magazine, holds five Ivy-League degrees, including a PhD in Astrophysics and an MBA, both from Columbia University. Following his academic career he co-founded a company called Submedia, commercializing his hardware invention for in-tunnel motion-pictures. We talked also about this and what problems they ran into. Beyond his professional achievements, he completed six marathons, swam across the Hudson River, did over 90,000 burpees, wrote over 2500 blog posts, took over 250 cold showers. This means you’ll also get to hear about some of his habits.
Enjoy this episode, which I did very much.
One more thing: if you want to have access to a material that Joshua made available for you as my podcast listener click here.
Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com
Show highlights can be seen below:
I had a duo-feature interview with Kickstart Accelerator from Switzerland, Patricia Schlenter, responsible for Program Lead and David Emmert, head of one of the verticals of the program.
In a previous episode, we had Brinc on the show, an IoT accelerator. This time we feature another accelerator, which has a wider range of disciplines they’re handling, but still, also hardware topic comes up in their portfolio of companies.
Now a little bit about my guests. As for Patricia, she received her Bachelor’s from Bocconi University, Milan, Italy and her Master’s in Energy, Trade of Finance from Cass Business School, London, UK. She subsequently worked in the shipping industry in London, then started her own fashion accessory company. Shortly afterwards she became a co-founder for a Venture Capitalist’s startup in Berlin, Germany.
David on the other hand has a background in biology and economics and likes to create and work with people with lots of energy. When he is not busy with Kickstart, he's working on his own startup "Imagine Cargo" in the area of sustainable logistics.
In this episode we’ll discuss what they do, all the verticals they have, what their differentiating factors are from other accelerators, the corporate partners they partner with, the steps a startup would go through when working them. They explain their business model, what disruption means for David and many more.
Please have a look at the detailed highlights below and enjoy listening. Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com
I had as guest Benjamin Ertl, Director of Business Development at Retailbound. He works in retail, helping entrepreneurs on how to get their product to customers in a lean and agile way.
He gives you an intro to retail field, and to his company. Due to their uniqueness in essence they enable companies to operate lean and agile especially during the risky phase when a business model has not been validated yet, so taking on more staff would be a risky move. Since when working with them one doesn’t have to take on more personnel, this means one can operate leaner, and agile as they’re flexible based on the needs.
Benjamin finds himself lucky that he was mentored and educated for the last two and a half years on the complexities of retail personally by his company’s President - Yohan Jacob. Swimming competitively in college for four years and having an older brother has made him very competitive - which translates well for retail.
Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com
Please have a look at the highlights below and enjoy listening.