S5E27 – 5 reasons why a spinout is better than a startup With Andre Laplume

• (00:35) – Show intro and background history
• (01:28) – Deeper into his career journey
• (04:39) – Understanding the spin-out venture definition
• (07:26) – Deeper into his business model
• (08:40) – Why spin-outs can be more successful than new startups
• (11:46) – Commercial break (TYKR mobile app)
• (12:28) – What an entrepreneur need to know to run that type of business
• (15:56) – How spin-out founders can work together with other companies
• (19:42) – Where spin-outs can find funding
• (22:42) – What are the benefits for the parent companies
• (26:11) – Guest hot tips
• (28:45) – One more key takeaway from the guest
• (34:15) – Guest contacts

Transcription

[00:00:00.000] – Show Intro

Introducing Payback Time, the podcast for entrepreneurs looking to build and scale their startups, gain access to actionable tips, proven strategies, and valuable data that can help you avoid mistakes, skyrocket sales, and optimize profits. Your business breakthrough may just be an episode away.

 

[00:00:17.310] – Guest Intro

We can all agree that creating a startup is a lot of work, but there is an easier way to become an entrepreneur, the much higher probability of success. In this episode, my guest breaks down five reasons why a spin-out is much better than a startup. Please welcome Andre Laplume.

 

[00:00:36.170] – Sean

Andre, welcome to the show.

 

[00:00:37.540] – Andre

Thank you. Glad, happy to be here.

 

[00:00:39.610] – Sean

Well, thanks for joining me. Before we dive in, can you tell us something about yourself that most people don’t know?

 

[00:00:45.410] – Andre

Yeah, I see you’ve got a guitar hanging on the wall there. And one thing that I managed to do in my 40s was to learn how to play the guitar. So I now know how to play the acoustic guitar. It took me a few years, but I started in my 40s, and I wanted to prove to myself that I could still learn I did something in my 40s. So I guess I did that.

 

[00:01:02.090] – Sean

Good for you. I assume YouTube tutorials or an online class of some sort?

 

[00:01:08.340] – Andre

I did take a class. Actually, it was physical in person just before COVID. And then during COVID, I switched to an app that I learned from, Cordify, and it helped a lot.

 

[00:01:20.890] – Sean

I’ve heard of it. Yeah, how fast you can learn things, especially a new instrument on the internet these days. Nice. All right, well, let’s dive in. If If you could take a few minutes here and tell us about your career background.

 

[00:01:33.690] – Andre

Sure. I have a background in computer science, actually. That was my bachelor’s degree. After that, I worked in consulting, helping companies to become more efficient, replace people with technology, those sorts of things. But I also did a master, an MBA, actually, during that time when I was consulting because I always wanted to learn more about doing the project management or doing the account management and those things. And so after the MBA, I went back to consulting for a little while and did more management consulting type roles. But I always felt like it wasn’t quite enough. I always had so many burning questions. I always felt like I was being brought in on the implementation side after all the big important decisions had already been made, and I wanted to better understand how to make those decisions and influence those decisions. That’s what ultimately led me to do a PhD in management. During that PhD, I focused primarily on innovation, how companies do exploration and exploitation of opportunities. I completed my PhD and I went to go work at Michigan Tech. That’s in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Actually, it’s not too far away from where you guys are.

 

[00:02:37.180] – Andre

I used to actually take drives with the family down from Horton all the way to Milwaukee. I worked there for a while, mostly providing MBAs for engineers. That’s what Michigan Tech is really good at, is producing lots of engineers. While I was there, actually, was involved in a startup of my own called Launch Score, which was a A big data analytics company that provided recommendations for entrepreneurs, so especially for small business entrepreneurs. So they could select the city and we could tell them what business is that city needs based on a big data profile. So it was actually a really early machine learning play, too. And maybe we were a bit too early. Now everything’s taken off in that space. But when we were doing it, it was still pretty obscure, and there wasn’t a lot of investment going in that direction. Nonetheless, As you can probably tell, that venture didn’t succeed as much as I wanted it to. But I’ve been involved in the entrepreneurship space at Michigan Tech, and now at my school in Toronto, at the Toronto Metropolitan University. There’s lots of startup activity there. There’s DMZ, which is one of the largest incubators of startups and accelerators of startups.

 

[00:03:48.960] – Andre

What I do there, I teach entrepreneurship and management, but I also do research. I’ve been doing research on spinouts for some time. I want to get to that topic a little bit. When you do research in entrepreneurship, you get exposed to all the different theories that are out there. We actually have this website, actually, entrepreneurshiptheories. Com, which has 100 theories of entrepreneurship that we’ve reviewed and summarized. As we dug deeper and deeper, we saw that actually a lot of the entrepreneurship wisdom that’s shared online and with the public and in books and things like that doesn’t really match the reality of the data. I guess we’ll get more into that. But that’s really my day job is to do research to collect data, to do interviews, and to write manuscripts and publish them in academic journals and try to push forward our knowledge about entrepreneurship.

 

[00:04:39.060] – Sean

Awesome. Well, we have a lot of listeners that either want to jump away from corporate America or corporate wherever they’re at or whatever part of the world and create their own business, or they want to take their business to the next level. Now, you’ve got a lot of perspective on a topic we have not discussed, which is spin-out ventures. Could you take a second Can you really define what that means? And then we’re going to deep dive this?

 

[00:05:03.080] – Andre

Yeah, for sure. I mean, spinouts, we didn’t coin the term. The term has been around actually for quite a while in academia, and it was used especially to differentiate different types of startups. In academia, we like to have categories and say, Okay, well, there’s a lot of different types of startups. A spinout is one type of startup. Sometimes it’s called an employee spinout. We’re calling it spinout ventures for the book. But the core idea of a spinout is that rather than doing a de novo or brand new startup from scratch and a totally new idea, why not take something that was already developed to some extent within an existing organization and take it out and form a startup with it? And that startup is called a spin-out venture. Got it. Yeah, so that’s a really quick definition for you.

 

[00:05:46.730] – Sean

Thank you. And if you could, can you give us a few examples of companies that were spin-outs?

 

[00:05:52.630] – Andre

Yeah, the classic example that’s been used for a long, long time is Chevrolet. Because actually, the founder of Chevrolet, he’s working on Buick automobiles, and they kept getting bigger and heavier, and he wanted to work on small cars. So they had this strategic disagreement that led him to leave and actually found Chevrolet. Durant founded Chevrolet as a separate company. So that’s the prototypical spin-up. But you see them actually all the time. Many companies that you’re quite familiar with are actually spin-outs. Like Apple is a spin-out, Zoom is a spin-out. Zoom is a great example. We’re on it right now. Eric Juan, when he left the Webex division of Cisco, he managed to attract 40 Cisco engineers to come with him to work on Zoom. So you can see it’s a big difference between trying to create something really from scratch and being able to take an idea that’s already somewhat developed within an existing company, take it out or replicate it, and also attract some of the resources, some of the people who worked on it. Sometimes they attract some of the customers that are already interested in the product. And so there’s really an advantage in doing that.

 

[00:07:00.760] – Andre

We see them all over the place. We use a lot of big name examples in the book. But actually, when you look at data sets of entrepreneurs, the majority of entrepreneurs actually are spin-out founders. They might not think of themselves that way or talk about themselves that way, or often they don’t necessarily want to give credit to their previous employer for the great idea that they’re pursuing in their venture. But it’s very often the case, and in most industries, it’s the norm and not just the exception.

 

[00:07:26.420] – Sean

Right. I’ve talked to a lot of people that work for a company, for example, and you identify a problem, yet at the same time get to know a segment of the market really well. And it’s like, Well, our current company is in solving this problem, so we’re going to create this other product, this other feature nature or entirely new business, in some case, to really serve the demand. So I see that a lot. The entrepreneurs start somewhere and then branch off. In some cases, the company will help. They’ll create us a business under the umbrella of the entire corporation so they stay with the company, or the Zoom situation is an entirely new company altogether.

 

[00:08:10.490] – Andre

Right. Yeah, there’s definitely different options, right? Sometimes the employee wants to do the venture internally and will work really hard to try to convince management that they should pursue this as an internal corporate venture. But that doesn’t always work. Sometimes there are these disagreements. It can even be things like interpersonal conflicts or just differences in the vision for the future of the organization that lead to a breakup where the spin-out founders want to leave and do their own thing.

 

[00:08:40.470] – Sean

Well, I did a little homework on you offline, and I have a few questions teed up, so I’m going to get right into these. First one is, why are spinouts more successful than brand new startups?

 

[00:08:51.580] – Andre

Yeah, there are a couple of different theories. One of them is because they scale faster, because they’re bringing ideas and resources over from an incumbent organization that they’re able to scale faster and therefore compete more effectively in the marketplace. There are other theories as well. It could be actually what they transfer over is the value of the knowledge and assets that they’re able to transfer over. Sometimes they do it without permission, but often they’ll do it in cooperation also with the parent firm. They’ll sign an agreement or even a license sometimes if they need to take some key technology out. Most of these are actually friendly cases. Sometimes they do enter into some conflict when they’re competing or when the spin-out is really taking too much or overstepping boundaries in terms of proprietary knowledge and things like that. But for the most part, what they’re bringing is fair game and it gives them a scale advantage. It also gives them that leg up in terms of having more developed knowledge. You could think about it this way, too. A lot of these ideas that spin-out founders are pursuing have already been partially or somewhat validated within the incumbent organization.

 

[00:09:57.160] – Andre

For example, if a customer says, I really want this, and you hear your management saying, Well, we don’t do that, and we’re not planning to for these reasons. That’s already giving you some validation that someone’s interested in perhaps purchasing that opportunity or that idea. But that you don’t necessarily get with a de novo startup. And that’s why when you look at all the startup education that’s aimed at people who don’t have experience or who are not leveraging some idea from industry, it’s all about customer discovery. And they’re trying to go out there and discover who their customers are and then to try to validate their ideas. And that’s really the first three months or of a startup is that process. Well, imagine the leg up you have if a lot of that activity has already been done actually within the company that you’re working for. And so you can leverage that validation. Right.

 

[00:10:41.360] – Sean

The hit on one item here, which is scale. In tech, you always think about channel partners, how to build strategic relationships so you can get in front of not one customer, but thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. So I assume if you’re already with a company, large company, let’s say, and you to branch off, you can already maintain relationships. And if there’s an agreement in place like, Hey, we can still serve these customers, create a win-win situation, you can potentially get in front of a large amount of customers instead of starting from scratch, which could take you years to build relationships and scale at that speed.

 

[00:11:19.990] – Andre

Yeah, I think you’re touching on the vertical spinouts, which are the ones that find a way to become either a supplier or a customer of their parent organization. Those tend to be the more popular ones actually that are being pursued because they tend to lead to a friendly relationship. And because of those exchanges, there’s a potential for a long term relationship, including knowledge transfer back between the spin out and the parent firm as well.

 

[00:11:47.580] – Sean

Let’s take a quick commercial break. All right, the Tykr mobile app for both iOS and Android is now live. It includes all the same features as the web app, including stocks, ETFs, crypto, a watchlist, watchlist alerts. So if something changes, you automatically get notified, a portfolio tracker, and a confidence booster powered by OpenAI. Plus, it includes learning modules inspired by Duolingo, in this case investing, learning modules to help you get up to speed as fast as possible. If you’re interested, you can go to Tykr. Com. You’ll see the Apple and Google logos right up top, or you can go to the Apple App Store or Google Play Store and download the app for free. All right, back to the show. Now, let’s say you’re an entrepreneur that wants to spin out a venture, what should you know before taking that leap?

 

[00:12:34.510] – Andre

I think one thing that’s important to be aware of is your contractual obligations. So when you’re an employee or an executive, you usually have signed some contract, an employment contract. It could even be in your shareholder agreement as well if you are a shareholder in the company. And what you find in a lot of those contracts are what are called restrictive covenants. And there are basically four kinds. The ones that people about the most, I think, are called non-competes. People know about them a lot because they’re very popular. A lot of people sign them even though they don’t want to. But also they’re popular right now because they’ve just been banned by the FTC, although I know that there’s some legal wrangling about that that will continue for some time. But the other one that people think about less is the non-solicitation or no poach agreement that’s often in an employment contract that says that you can’t take employees or clients away from the company to to work for competitors or to create a new competitor. Then, of course, there’s the nondisclosure, which is supposed to protect the trade secrets with the proprietary information of the parent organization.

 

[00:13:40.910] – Andre

I think that it’s really important for spin-out founders to be aware of what they’ve signed and to make sure that whatever they’re doing falls outside of the boundaries that are created by those restrictions. If they choose to defy those restrictions, then they better be prepared to either be able to defend themselves from litigation or operate in a more stealthy fashion and perhaps let a lot of these agreements run out because they’re usually time-based agreements. But that’s often not that attractive because when the spin outside is hottest is when the opportunity is right there. You don’t have to wait a year and a half or something like that for your non-compet to expire before you can take advantage of it.

 

[00:14:23.580] – Sean

Have you ever run into a circumstance, and I’m asking this because I know about people in this exact position right now, where they want to spin out something, but there is a non-compet that was signed, there’s an NDA assigned. How do you navigate that? Can you create a win-win situation for yourself and maybe your current employer? Have you ever heard of a situation like that? I’m just curious.

 

[00:14:46.820] – Andre

Yeah, it’s difficult to do if you’re planning to compete directly, but there’s all these different circumstances where you’re going after a different niche than the parent organization. And so they’re often willing to sign a license and to basically They used the spin-out as a way to exploit that market opportunity that they weren’t going to go after anyway. And so I think there’s increasing discussion about these positive win-win situations for spin-outs in parent firms. And we’re seeing a lot of parent companies that are leading by example and are even promoting themselves and boosting their reputation by showing how many spin-outs that they generate. You think about a company like Palantir, for example. Palantir has generated a tremendous amount of spin-out ventures, and they have a huge alumni network that really help each other out in terms of funding these ventures and becoming early employees for these ventures. I think these positive examples are multiplying and they’re being written up. We’ve got 20 cases in the book, and other people are writing about this, and so people are becoming more and more familiar with these positive approaches that parent firms have.

 

[00:15:56.630] – Sean

I’m seeing that more and more as well. I know in the ’90s days in 2000s, it was like if you had a non-compet or an NDA, not or, but and, it’s like, Oh, shoot. Well, I got to wait for it to stop. Otherwise, I’m for sure going to court. Now I’m seeing more businesses that are like, let’s not work against each other. Let’s find a way to work with each other. Get creative. You obviously found something we can’t do. So you want to create a business and solve a problem. How do we help our current customers? How do we both create a win-win? I’m seeing more open-minded conversations today, but gosh, going back 10, 20 years, that was not as common.

 

[00:16:35.720] – Andre

Yeah, I think what was more common 20 years ago was firms developing a reputation for toughness around its intellectual property. That was in vogue. And so there were a lot of conflicts. And spin-out founders were called things like traitors and parasites, in other words. But I think that’s changing, and it’s taken a long time. But you can see that the The light is turning when you see that we’re seeing legislation banning non-competes. So there’s a pretty broad understanding that we want more competition. We’re living under capitalism. If we’re going to have effective capitalism, it’s supposed to involve a lot of competition. Well, where’s that competition going to come from? Well, in a complex technological world, it doesn’t often come from the garage or it doesn’t often come from the dorm room. Where it comes from is from established companies who maybe have invested a lot of time and energy in new technology. But as As we see, a lot of these companies, they can barely pursue or exploit the businesses they’re already in, let alone starting a bunch of little ones. It makes a lot of sense, I think, for the companies, for the parent firms, for the leavers, but also if you think about society or the economy in general, for these things to be happening.

 

[00:17:47.790] – Sean

This is more of a general question, but what does it take to create a spin-out?

 

[00:17:53.010] – Andre

What does it take? It’s interesting because a lot of people are stymied by restrictive covenants, and also sometimes just by the thought that what they’re doing might be disloyal or the fear that they might encounter litigation. But the thing is, I also want to mention with this litigation stuff, just because people sign a non-compet, it doesn’t mean they don’t do it. We see tons and tons of cases where the spin-off founders do it anyway. Often, they don’t end up facing litigation. Or if they do, actually, most of the time, they end up winning. Or in other words, the parent organization is not successful in being able to stop the spin out through an injunction. That’s often because it’s very difficult to prove that intellectual property has really been transferred. Because a lot of the time it can be argued that a lot of the quote intellectual property is actually industry knowledge that’s somewhat readily available to the people who are working in organizations in that industry. I think there’s a lot more defiance than people realize. It’s very, very common. Most of these are scrappy founders who they get over it. I mean, sometimes they have a legal battle, but they continue, and often they thrive afterwards.

 

[00:19:10.050] – Andre

There’s an example actually out of Waterloo here, Kik, which is a spin out of a research in motion. And they ended up having to fight off a patent infringement lawsuit, which turned out they ended up settling out of court. But Kik is still going strong, actually went stronger after the lawsuit ended. But what What we see often is that even when there is some degree of hostility, it’s not something fatal that the entrepreneurs can’t get over. They just have to be scrappy and often ready to fight if that does happen.

 

[00:19:41.850] – Sean

Right on. Where can spinouts find funding?

 

[00:19:47.220] – Andre

Yeah, that’s a good question. They do find funding from a lot of the traditional sources. Vcs love investing in spinouts, by the way, because they perceive that they have access to the knowledge of these larger firms. A lot of the Microsoft spinouts, they have this reputation that they had access to Microsoft knowledge, and VCs love that. But spinouts actually have a special advantage, too. A lot of the early funding for spinouts tends to come from the people that they worked with in their prior employment, perhaps executives that they work for that know their capabilities or coworkers or others. We actually see a lot of that. I would say about a third of the cases that we see, the first investor tends to be actually an angel coming out of the parent organization organization, not necessarily the parent organization itself, although we do see that, too. If you look at AstraZeneca is a good example. They try to promote spinouts, but they want to have a 20% stake in the spinout. So their equity investor is in the spinout, but It’s going to take a small stake, not large enough to control the company in any way, but enough to keep a foothold so that if they want to do an acquisition later, they still have access to all the information that they need.

 

[00:20:57.470] – Sean

I have heard that because you Again, going back to my comment earlier, you found product market fit, you found a solution, the company is not investing time and money, resources, the whole deal into that. So you’re going to do your thing. And if you built relationships with leaders, executives, they may say, Hey, we want to invest in your new idea and be part of this. We know the market. We know where this can go. It’s like that whole finding product market fit thing, you shorten from years down to months, if not, immediate. And you know, Okay, so we We know that we got the right team. We know the people behind it. Now it’s just a matter of, let’s get the funding in place, get this thing moving forward. So I could bet totally makes sense because so many startups, what is the percentage here in the States? It’s like 1% of startups raise venture capital. It’s very difficult. Where is this a spin out that, yeah, that makes it you can get funding even faster?

 

[00:21:50.290] – Andre

Yeah, I think there’s so many advantages, actually. That’s why I always like to say that most of the advice that’s given to entrepreneurs out there is bad advice. Nice that they need to come up with a totally new idea and then do the customer discovery and product market fit. The thing is, the best thing that probably a lot of people can be doing is go to work for a company that’s already doing something really exciting and learn how they do it, understand it, and then and then rift off of that into your own spin out later. And if you look at the cases that are out there, a lot of, and say, the majority of the successful firms have done it that way.

 

[00:22:28.570] – Sean

That’s a great perspective. I I 100% agree. Go work for somebody, you get a stable paycheck, you get good benefits, you get all that good stuff, and then you figure out what are the problems and see if you can create a spin-out solution against those problems. All right, I got another one here, which is What are some of the benefits for the parent company? You leave a company to go create a spin-out. What about the corporation that you just left? What are the benefits for that company?

 

[00:22:57.420] – Andre

Yeah, that’s an interesting question. We do, We spent a whole chapter on it, actually, uncovering all the benefits, because it’s such an important thing, I think, if we’re going to win over the parent firms so that they see spin-outs in a positive light, they need to know what their benefits are. We talked about one big one is the reputational benefit of being a place where people can go and innovate and do their own thing. So they have this human resource attraction benefit. But a big one that if you think from a strategy lens, we’re always talking about how there should be strategic alignment. And what that usually means for a big company is they should be focusing on one or two businesses. They shouldn’t be scattered all over the place. We know, for example, the conglomerates don’t do so well. There’s actually like an unrelated diversification discount for stocks that have companies that are to diversify So spinouts actually help a lot in that process of focusing. So rather than trying to develop all these different innovations internally as internal corporate ventures that may eventually become businesses for the parent firm, a lot of them are better The parent firm is actually better off letting them go so they can have more corporate coherence and better strategic alignment, focusing on the things they’re already working on.

 

[00:24:08.670] – Andre

There are other benefits as well that are maybe a little bit more long term, if you think about them. One of them is that a lot of these spinouts end up, as we discussed, becoming a partner in some way with the parent firm, either becoming a customer or becoming a supplier. But another way that it helps is that the continued relationship that typically occurs because there’s a social network formed between the parent firm and the spin-out also creates the occasion for the parent company to sometimes recruit back from the spin-out. So sometimes the innovations end up spilling back out of the spin-out to the parent organization, and they benefit that way and call those spill-ins. There’s different words that people use for that. And finally, even longer term, if the parent firm really thinks that the innovation perhaps is something that they should have pursued themselves, they still have an advantage in terms of being able to acquire the spin-out later. And there’s lots of reasons why. One reason is that they’ll know a more about the spin-out because it came from their organization. So it’s a lot easier to make a decision to buy something if you understand it better.

 

[00:25:08.200] – Andre

But also when they’re trying to integrate it, those networks and the similarities between the spin-out and the parent organization make it easier to integrate as well. Because often the spin-out founders, they leave in a small team, but they end up replicating a lot of the same routines and use the same language as the parent organization. So that makes that integration a lot easier. We get into great detail about these, and we have lots of great examples, too, in in the book.

 

[00:25:30.650] – Sean

No, that makes a lot of sense. And I see a lot of benefits there. You broke it down, but I can see big time, they really hit on a product that is going gangbusters. They can acquire it back. It’s another big revenue stream in the business. That’s a win. The talent pool, that’s a great place to be. They can recruit talent easier from that spin out. There is a ton of benefits for the parent company. When I hear these parent companies, this total put up the wall, don’t accept this type. It’s like, gosh, 1995, once their business model back, it just doesn’t work that way anymore. Be more open-minded. What I’d like to do next is do a rollup, and then we’re going to get into I’m going to ask you one more key question after that. What I’m going to summarize this episode on is five benefits of a spin out over a startup. I’m going to roll them up here. So number one, why are they more successful? So you already have industry expertise in the space. Product market fit is realized much faster. You don’t have to go create and test and beta test and test again a new product in the market.

 

[00:26:41.770] – Sean

You know something will work, and then you can scale a lot faster because you already have the relationship. So that’s number one. Number two would be, what should you know before taking the leap you really hit on? Know your contracts, what’s in place with non-competes as well as NDAs. But try to keep an open mind to have a conversations with that parent company about, Hey, I want to create this thing that solves a problem you’re not doing today. I know I have an NDA and a non-competent place, whatever other agreements. How can we make this happen so it benefits both of us? All right, number three would be, what does it take to create a spin-out? Number one, you better be scrappy. Be willing to push through those legal hurdles. That’s what’s going to cause a lot of people to stop, go get a job, and not pursue that entrepreneurial dream. So You got to be willing to go through those tough times. Number four would be, where can you find funding? So VCs do like spin-outs more than startups. You have a product market fit. You’ve got proven market. You’ve got key people in place.

 

[00:27:42.780] – Sean

Vcs really look for, you may know this already, but the audience, maybe just to hit on it real quick, is team. What has the team done before? What experience do they have? So you already have a team that has that experience. And then executives may be interested at this parent company to invest in your idea. And then number five is, what are the key benefits for the parent company? You can create a reputation for supporting spinouts. I didn’t think of that. That makes a lot of sense. If you are going to work at a company and you see that, it’s like, Hey, if you come up with an idea, we have proven in history to support spinouts, that’s going to attract a lot of people. Conglomerence, I love this one because I see this. I’ve seen this through the ’80s and ’90s. Conglomerence actually don’t produce the best results. You want to be more focused. That’s why a spinout is a better option for the parent company. And of course, that spin-out becomes really big. You can acquire it back. Love that play. And it’s a great place to recruit talent. So there are five reasons why a spin-out is better than a startup.

 

[00:28:47.120] – Sean

All right, before we get into the rapid fire run, what is one more key takeaway you can give our audience?

 

[00:28:53.410] – Andre

Yeah, I think one important thing to think about, because a lot of the people thinking about a spin out are employed right now as employees or executives at existing companies. It’s what you can do while you’re still there. I think the way to think about the employment is to think about the organization as a learning environment. What things do you want to learn to be able to be a good entrepreneur? Well, try to get involved in two kinds of things. Exploration processes where the company is trying to develop new ideas or new products or new initiatives. And also implementation activities where those new ideas actually put into practice and execute it on. What we see in the research is that the employees that manage to get experience in both of these areas, they tend to be more likely to leave and do a spin out and perhaps more successful as well.

 

[00:29:44.900] – Sean

Love it. Andre, this is great stuff. Next up, we’ve got the rapid fire round. This is the part of the episode where we get to find out who Andre really is. If you can, try to answer each question in about 15 seconds or less. You ready?

 

[00:29:57.100] – Andre

Okay.

 

[00:29:57.950] – Sean

All right. So what is your favorite podcast?

 

[00:29:59.560] – Andre

How I Built This podcast is a podcast that really sticks in my mind because I love to do interviews with the entrepreneurs, and they really do some great ones on that show.

 

[00:30:12.910] – Sean

Yeah, it’s a good show. All right, next question. What is a recent book you read and would recommend?

 

[00:30:18.120] – Andre

A recent book I read was the Blackberry book, which is the story of the rapid growth and also the end of the growth of Blackberry. They also made a movie based on it, which is a really great comedy, actually, that I recommend to anyone. Check out the Blackberry movie, End Book.

 

[00:30:38.000] – Sean

Blackberry movie? I didn’t even know this. Interesting. I’m going to check this out. All right. On that note, what is the What is your favorite movie?

 

[00:30:46.320] – Andre

I think my favorite movie, maybe it’s pretty unoriginal, but I love the Shoshank Redemption. I don’t know. There’s something about the way that movie was put together, that the level of storytelling is just really exceptional, and it’s my favorite.

 

[00:30:59.820] – Sean

I I think it’s been mentioned on this podcast a few times before. It is a great movie. All right, what is the worst advice you ever received?

 

[00:31:08.170] – Andre

Oh, jeez. Yeah, I think the worst advice I ever got was somebody told me, Don’t do an MBA. They’re not going to take you. You’re not ready. I mean, that was terrible advice, actually. It was exactly the right time to do it, and I’m glad I did it anyway. So I guess, Don’t listen to those naysayers.

 

[00:31:28.390] – Sean

You know why? Because they never went for their MBA yet. They still want it. So there you go. All right. What is the best advice you have received?

 

[00:31:39.210] – Andre

Yeah, I think best advice that I’ve received is to try Try, even though you’re probably going to not succeed. It’s like, I think there’s a saying in hockey, you miss all the shots that you don’t take. And that’s just so important in life. And I think people who fear that failure, they just don’t try anything. You really can’t get anywhere if you don’t try things. I like to take a lot of these little bets, and a lot of them don’t work out, but some of them do, and the ones that do really have crafted my career.

 

[00:32:14.110] – Sean

Right on. All right, last question here, the time machine question. If you could go back in time to give your younger self advice, what age would you visit and what would you say?

 

[00:32:23.850] – Andre

Yeah. I guess it’s interesting that I think I would go back to the first startup that I was actually involved in. It was a tiny little venture that I did on my own, and I ended up giving up on it because I guess I don’t know that I believed in myself enough to be able to deliver on it. I think I would go back and say, You know what? Just keep trying at it. And even if it doesn’t succeed, you’ll be better off for it than quitting. I guess I think there’s a lot of things that I quit too early that I wish I had just held on to a little longer, and I think they could have done some really interesting things.

 

[00:33:02.700] – Sean

I don’t know if you teach your students this, but I’m hearing this a little bit more, which is, Businesses don’t fail, founders give up. And you arrived in a great spot, so don’t beat yourself up. But there are people out there, if you just stuck with it a little bit longer, started asking your customers more questions about what they’re really looking for, what pains they’re going through, and just pivot just a little bit, you could have been in a much different position There’s a lot of people that have that hindsight discussion with themselves. So going back, founders or businesses don’t fail, founders give up.

 

[00:33:39.770] – Andre

Yeah, I think that’s true. Although sometimes it’s okay to give up, too, sometimes, because I think these ideas of being ahead of your time or being behind the times. Yes. These are important things. Momentum matters in a market like startup markets and investment markets. People care about these things, and And so sometimes it is okay to give up.

 

[00:34:03.210] – Sean

You’re right, because I’ve been there. We could talk about this in another podcast. I’ll wrap it up here. But I’ve had startups in the past that were too early and too late. Market timing is a key factor. You’re right. All right, we’ll talk about that the next time we have you on. But real quick here, where can the audience reach you?

 

[00:34:21.960] – Andre

Yeah, they can connect with me on LinkedIn pretty easily just to find my name there. It’s a somewhat unique name. And they can find There’s all kinds of content about me now online because of the book and promoting it and all this stuff. So if you look at spinoutventures. Net, you can find out a lot about myself or my co-author and about the book as well.

 

[00:34:42.810] – Sean

Awesome. Well, Andre, we’ll have all the links below. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciated the conversation. Thank you. All right. We’ll see you.

 

[00:34:50.970] – Andre

All right.

 

[00:34:52.060] – Sean

Hey, I’d like to say thanks for checking out this podcast. I know there’s a lot of other podcasts you could be listening to, so thanks for spending some time with me. And if you have a moment, could you please head over to Apple Podcasts and leave a five-star review? The more reviews we get, the higher this podcast will rank. All right. Stay tuned for the next episode. We’ll see you.