Advancing the Gospel of Building Businesses

Thom Ruhe

with Thom Ruhe

CEO of the Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative

Advancing the Gospel of Building Businesses

Advancing the Gospel of Building Businesses 857 1200 33Voices

Moe and Thom Ruhe discuss how the entrepreneurial mindset is about looking at the world in terms of creating value for others

The Hard Things About Starting Things

Two of the best books ever published on entrepreneurship were released in 2014; Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things and Peter Thiel’s Zero to One:  Notes on Startups or How to Build the Future. While neither was written to discourage the act of starting a company, both will paint the most vivid and accurate picture of the challenges that await any entrepreneur who’s bold enough to do what’s never been done before.  “There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience.  Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.”  In those two sentences, Horowitz reminds you that startups are a struggle. Still, those who are most likely to succeed will ‘embrace that struggle.’

Over the course of the past decade, Thom Ruhe has been as big an advocate for advancing the entrepreneurial agenda as anyone, and his work with JumpStart, the Kauffman Foundation, and now as CEO of the Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative, LLC is now making it possible for anyone with ambition to get in the game.  Just as Horowitz and Thiel do, Ruhe speaks with candor and holds nothing back.

Here are a few of the questions that anchor our dialogue:

  • The modern challenges facing today’s entrepreneurs

  • The mental fortitude of those most likely to succeed

  • Is ‘being lean’ and ‘going bold’ mutually exclusive?

  • Is anything less than a 10x improvement in a product/service acceptable?

  • The shift from founder to manager and from manager to leader

  • The optimal path to securing capital

  • The three things any business has to get right in the beginning