Dave: Hey everyone, Dave here with another episode of the Philly Tech Connect podcast. Today I am speaking with Don Samoil. Don is an experienced serial entrepreneur who’s been through the dot-com boom and bust. He is the current chapter leader of the Philly location for the Founders Institute, which is, well, I’ll let him describe it best, but I think of it as an accelerator for startups. So there’s obviously some nuances that make it differentiated from some of the others. He’s going to be talking today about FI, about his background, and all things startups. Don, how are you doing today?
Don: Great, thanks for having me.
Dave: My pleasure. You have a varied history. We were talking before this call about first-generation Romanian immigrant parents. Been through startups in some very interesting times. Boom and bust. Tell us a little bit about your background in startups.
Don: Thanks. Yeah, I try to explain to people a lot of people have obvious reasons, concerns, fears, you know, am I suited for entrepreneurship or, you know, am I going to make it? It’s like, look, I mean, the odds are tough, right? I mean, you know, 80% of startups do not return anything measurable to their investors, right? So that being said, you know, there’s a, you know, again, as you pointed out, my parents, you know, I was telling you got off the boat with $25 of net worth they were allowed to bring with and broken English and raised two kids and within a dozen years we’re living a middle-class lifestyle. So, you work hard, you fly yourself there. There is no end to the opportunity. Don’t let anybody tell you, you know, the odds are stacked against you. Ignore it. You know, obviously don’t order your Rolls Royce just yet, but, you know, don’t let anybody tell you you can’t do it. And so I was blessed, you know, I got involved with the dots, had a lot of fun, made a lot of money on paper, and like kids with Bitcoin, NFTs, whatever, I thought, “Oh, this is going to go on forever.” I didn’t sell. I lost most of my paper riches. You know, I was in New York and, you know, the tech crunch and 9/11 and so on, and, you know, it sucked. But, you know, you pick yourself up, and you keep working, and you get involved with more, and if you’re an entrepreneur, more startups. And you fail, and you start again, and you fail again, and hopefully you succeed here and there, and you learn. And that’s basically been my path, a lot of mistakes, and, you know, a handful of successes that I’m very grateful for. And, you know, then a few years ago, encountered Founder Institute just by happenstance. You know, a friend had been telling me about it, and I was like, “Yeah, I’m involved in six different startups right now. I don’t have time for whatever that is.” And then when I got involved with this company, like, “How are you so much smarter than most of the founders that I’ve worked with?” And she laughed, and she said, “You know my story. I came from Nigeria a few years back and didn’t even speak English.” So it’s not that I had some knowledge or network or expertise, but I had a drive, and I started my venture, and I found Founder Institute, and they beat the crap out of me. It was hellish. They only graduated a small percentage. She was one of 1,400 applicants to the Silicon Valley Chapter, and she was one of 27 graduates. But when she came out, she was, as I say, ready for sharktown. You know your numbers, you’ve got your customer identified, you understand the competition. You’re ready to go. No guarantees, but you know, again, this is a woman that, again, I’m very pleased to have been an advisor to her company, still an advisor. And this is the company that’s going to go places because she got, aside from all of her innate abilities and her drive, she got the help that she needed. And that’s what inspired me to start the local chapter, is because I wanted other people not to have to make the same mistakes I did a hundred times over, right? If you can learn from somebody else’s mistakes, get some coaching, get some guidance, we can accelerate this path. You don’t have to have years of failures. Maybe you have a few months of failures, and then you hit. So, that’s what inspired me to get involved. And I’m a big believer, again, I think Founder Institute is a terrific organization. If it’s not for you, if it’s something else, find a mentor, find the resource, go online. But educate yourself. There’s tremendous resources available right in the days. There was no internet, couldn’t go and Google. There was no Google. I couldn’t Google “how to be an entrepreneur.” I read books. And those were very useful. Some of the old classics, Dale Carnegie and so on. Read them, read the classics, read the new ones. Just, you know, sorry, I, you can stop me anytime.
Dave: t’s my pleasure just to allow people the space to kind of go where the conversation takes them and they share their knowledge. Super interesting. You have obviously, through Founders Institute, which I want to get more into, encountered a lot of startups by means of the programs. Some make it, some don’t. When you think about the 80/20, the 20% that do make it, what are, in your opinion, some of the differentiators that make them stand out?
Don: It’s a great question. More than anything, you know, it’s drive and perseverance. You know, again, I’ve been guilty of it more than a few times myself. Most entrepreneurs started out by saying, “I’ve got the idea, right? That’s it, that’s golden.” Let’s stop and think about, you know, who are the big successes out there? You know, was Google the first? Hell no. In fact, you know, again, I was just telling somebody the other day, like, you know, don’t think anybody else has any great, they could be, you know, the world’s best VC and so on. They’ve still passed on thousands of great opportunities. If you would’ve said Google to most people back in the day, like, no, Yahoo owns search. What are you talking about? Myspace owns social networking. What the hell is this Facebook thing? Hey, just a couple of years ago, if you’d said Nvidia would be one of the largest companies in the world, like, there’s Intel, there’s AMD. I mean, they’re a little niche player making some video chips. So, it’s not the idea, obviously. You want a good idea, right? If you’re trying to sell poop on a stick, you’re probably going to have challenges, right? So, you do want to have a good idea, but that’s not what’s going to, you know, you could have the greatest idea. If you just sit there and, so don’t sit around and watch Shark Tank and say, “I could do that.” Fine, watch it. Be inspired. In fact, I’m an investor and advisor, and a guy who went on Shark Tank and didn’t get an investment, but I believed in him and I think he’s going to do very well. So, but, you know, he got off his butt and he did something, and he got himself on Shark Tank. So, watch, learn, whatever. Get inspired, but that’s it. It’s doing it, it’s perseverance, it’s just making the mistakes, learning from them, reaching out, asking, tweaking, trying, talk to customers, right? Don’t just say, “I’ve got a great idea. This product should sell well.” You know, lots of, you know, those that, you know, are old enough to remember New Coke, right? Coca-Cola was the number one beverage in, and they decided they needed to change their formula and all the marketing gurus said, you know, “This is it. We’re going to tweak our formula,” and it was a multi-million, maybe billion, I don’t know, dollar disaster, and they had to change their formula back. So, you know, talk to your potential customers. Don’t think you know everything, you know? Ask the customer, “Do you like what I’m producing? If I made X, would you buy it? How would you?” So, not just, “Would you buy?” Because, you know, “Hey, Mom, if I made such and such, would you buy it?” Like, you know, yeah, Mom’s going to say yes, Grandma’s going to say yes, you know, your friends are going to say, “Yeah, absolutely. It’s a great idea.” You know, go out, test market, say, “Okay, you know, would you be interested? Yes? Okay, how would you use it? You know, if it came in different flavors or colors or whatever, which ones would you want? Dig a little deeper.” All of a sudden, you know, would you want the poop on a stick? Sure, absolutely. Okay, but, you know, would you want it in different flavors? Maybe I wouldn’t want it so much.
Dave: So, no, I mean, it makes sense. I love that all the things that you mentioned are really more, you know, they’re innate qualities or things that we have potential control over, our own drive, our perseverance, our ability to execute, the ability to do customer discovery. Those are all things that, you know, we are capable of if we want to. It sounds like these table stakes for an idea, you know, has to kind of be good enough, for sure. But, what I’ve heard is from some of the other, you know, well-known accelerators out there is that they are investing less maybe in ideas and more in people because so many people are pivoting anyway. It’s almost, what’s really the point? Is that, you know, how your guys’s approach at FI and tell us just a little bit more about Founders Institute and the way you guys approach selecting companies to join the program.
Don: Definitely. The old saying about, you know, bet on the jockey, not on the horse is true. Much more important. In fact, so one of the things that I encourage anybody, again, I’m biased, but go to FI, take the Entrepreneur DNA test. I found it fun and interesting. It was kind of a little bit of a MENSA test combined with some other stuff, so I thought it was fun. And it gives you some insights. They’ve been doing this for, I mean, FI is about 15 years old. The DNA test is probably about a decade old or something, so they’ve got good data. It is an indicator of where your strengths and weaknesses may lie in terms of your entrepreneurial approach. So, yeah, I would say take it. But even if it says you know you have some weaknesses, okay, either work on the weaknesses or find co-founders, find resources, right? Find ways to, you know, everybody has weaknesses, everybody has issues and challenges. You’ve got to find a way around it, under over, around. That’s again, perseverance and just working at it, you know? So, FI hopefully will help you understand. Look, some of the questions are pretty obvious to me, but, you know, maybe not to everyone. So, if you answered, yes, I want to clock in at 9 and clock out at 5, I want to know what my paycheck is going to be every week and so on, I do not like risk, you know, entrepreneurship is not for everybody. If you love doing X and that involves, you know, working for someone else, doing something else, or just, again, working, you know, being, I don’t know, again, a singer, a dancer, whatever, right? You theoretically, you could call yourself an entrepreneur, but, you know, you, if you are your own product, then great. I mean, again, some of the media stars that have become billionaires by diversifying. So, good for them, right? They took. But, you know, generally, what we look for is something scalable. So, if your dream is to open a coffee shop and just run that coffee shop, that restaurant, that lemonade stand, whatever it is, fantastic. Happy to talk to you, give you my advice or whatever. But you’re not coming to FI because you’re not scalable. If you want to create a chain of lemonade stands all across the country, let’s talk right now. Now, this is something that we can help you with. We can help you learn. Is lemonade the right product? How do I differentiate my lemonade from everyone else? How do I deal with all the regulatory issues and so on, right? If you have one lemonade stand, maybe you’ll be able to skirt the rules. But if you want to open a chain, guess what? You know, they’re going to be wanting to understand your ingredients and, you know, are you keeping all your products clean and safe and so on and so forth. So, there’s a lot more to being an entrepreneur than just, you know, selling, you know, Girl Scout cookies or whatever, which is a great place to start, right? I encourage, I really encourage, um, parents, or if you’re young, you think, you know, nowadays, right? You, I want to create an app, right? That’s what you hear out of a lot of young, “Oh, I’ll create an app that does XYZ.” Great, go do it, um, try, learn, because there’s really nothing, nothing bad about trying it and figuring out that, for whatever reason, you don’t like it or it doesn’t work. Or that, that’s great knowledge to acquire.
Dave: So, yeah, it’s a big step, and it’s the one that I think, you know, people really, you know, you need to take, which is to kind of, you got to give something a shot. Um, had a conversation with, sort of, someone who was, asp, call an aspiring entrepreneur the other day, and they had kind of come up with all these reasons why XYZ was going to fail, it wasn’t going to work out, or why the conversations weren’t going to go anywhere. And it was a lot of barriers, kind of mental barriers to, “Hey, this is why I shouldn’t take action today, and why I should kind of have some more exploratory conversations.” But ultimately, not really take that step. Um, and it sounds like, you know, that is the hurdle that we need to get over to kind of be in that 20% of the ones that make it out. Um, Don, thanks so much for your insights today. Um, you know, for people that want to learn more about FI, yourself, the journey you guys are on, where can they get in touch?
Don: So, FI is, is Founders, du you know, globally. So, wherever you are, you, you will get geolocated to, you know, the chapter that’s closest to you. So, so we have founderkeystone.com that is our chapter for Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Delaware, etc. So, if you, you know, send me a note at donf@founderkeystone.com, I’d be happy to talk to any entrepreneurs. Um, yeah, and again, we, it’s, it’s a great program. Um, you can come in, drop out within a few weeks, fully refunded. We shred all the papers. There’s no, so give it a shot, check it out. Um, learn from it. Um, that’s, I would say, don’t, don’t hold back, just give it a shot, and, and by all means, reach out, happy to talk to any potential entrepreneurs.
Dave: And is there a, uh, an upcoming, maybe deadline or cohort, and just kind of how often do programs appear?
Don: So, thank you, we have a cohort starting at the end of March. So, if you are looking to join our program, please hurry. Um, again, love to, we do webinars and in-person events in the, you know, Philly area, we’ve got, you know, Philly and Princeton and now Pittsburgh. Um, so we’re doing events locally and online, and, uh, we do cohorts, they’re 13, 14-week programs typically twice a year. So, we have one in March, and we’ll have one probably starting around Labor Day. Um, but by all means, reach out, and, and always happy to talk to entrepreneurs, you know, outside of our program, um, give you some guidance, point you in the right direction. If, if we’re the right place, that’s fine. Right? Um, I, I want you to get some, some help, because it’s, it’s a tough journey, but it’s worth it.
Dave: Awesome. Well, this episode will be out next week, so hopefully it will be available for people to get in on that March cohort, if it suits them. Um, thanks again so much, Don, for, uh, talking with us today.
Don: Hey, my pleasure, and I encourage people to check out, um, PTE, lots of great content. They should join the Slack, lots of great conversations. I’ve met some really great people, and you’ve got some great programming, so they should, they should certainly check you out. And I’m sure you have, um, you know, URLs and whatnot, um, around the podcast.
Dave: Absolutely, phillyentrepreneur.com. Thanks so much, Don.
Don: My pleasure.