Man-Made Problems Demand Innovative Solutions

Some thoughts on entrepreneurship from Rachael Neumann, co-founder, Flying Fox Ventures 

From her interview with Lisa Leong on This Working Life Podcast

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Rachael Neumann is the Head of Startups for Australia & New Zealand at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where she focuses on growing the startup market, advising founders, and investing in early-stage companies. She is also a Partner at the Startmate accelerator and serves as Chair of StartupAus, advocating for a thriving startup environment. Previously, Rachael was the Managing Director of Eventbrite Australia and worked at Bain & Company, advising on technology and private equity. She is a founding board member of LaunchVic and holds degrees from Stanford and Columbia. Rachael now lives in Melbourne with her family.

• “Listen, there’s no better privilege, in life than to get to work with folks who are doing their life’s work. And I think it’s a combination of, you know, the passion and the vision that they have.”
  
• “They see a problem and they are not okay with how it is either not being solved or being solved currently, and they have this relentless pursuit to make it better.”
  
• “And that kind of passion sometimes makes them very difficult to work with, but it is so inspiring, and I mean, it is literally what is and what will continue to change the world.“

But what’s going on in their minds?

• “I think that it really comes down to mindset because I know there are lots of folks who are trying to figure out what are the tools or the skills, but really, I think it’s all about attitudinal attributes.”
  
• “And so if I think about looking across my portfolio of founders and hundreds of founders I’ve worked with, it boils down to, I think, 3 big characteristics.
  • The second is this relentless pursuit to solve it, and we say sometimes that means that they run through walls, sometimes they jump over hurdles, but they don’t let no stand in the way. And because if something is really hard and worth solving, either people will have tried before and failed or people will say it can’t be done. But if they wake up every day saying it must be done and I’m gonna figure it out, that’s a that’s a pretty crazy mix.
  • The first one is an ability to deeply identify and empathize with a customer problem.
  • And then that third thing is this high velocity learning loop. And that’s because they don’t come with solutions. They come with an identification of the problem. They try a bunch of things and often trip and fall and stumble, and so the speed at which they can learn, adjust, and try again, for me, that is the highest predictor of success of an entrepreneur.”

Okay, why should we bother?

• “Oh, man, because you know, what got us here isn’t gonna get us there and I think we just know that the world is changing at a pace that has never been seen before. Technology is advancing at a clip that we are failing to keep up with. |
  
• “Certainly, our policy can’t keep up with it. Our education system can’t keep up with it. And so, the only thing that can keep up is us, the humans, and we can only do that if we, I mean, quite frankly, evolve as fast as our tools are evolving and so, one, we’re sitting in a bunch of man-made problems in our environment, in our health system, our education system, and traditional approaches is not going to fix it because it’s the traditional approaches that quite frankly got us into some of these jams.”
  
• “And so we need to think differently and we need to jump at these mammoth-sized problems with, this mindset that, thinks really big, thinks really differently, and has a higher tolerance for risk.”