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Erik: To what do you aspire?
Ben: I aspire to have impact. I aspire to understand but hopefully alter how people
go about being entrepreneurs. I used to be an entrepreneur myself. It's something that's
very challenging, I discovered, but something that's immensely rewarding, and so what I
hope to do through my work is help give people the opportunity to be more successful entrepreneurs,
that if they have a dream, that they have a desire to change the world in some way,
that I can provide them some of the tools to help realize that dream.
Erik: And how are you going about understanding what tools you can provide?
Ben: So I'm an academic, which means I have this great job, what I view as the best job
in the world, maybe other than being an entrepreneur, but, you know, I think we each have our very
complementary roles, where I try to be understanding through a couple of mechanisms. One, I do
a lot of research, and so that means I spend a lot of time in the field, talking to entrepreneurs
such as yourself, I also spend a lot of time gathering data sets, and then I also interact
with a lot of entrepreneurs in my classroom, and I try and fold all that in together because
it helps me triangulate. Each offers a different perspective, and then through that see some
challenges that entrepreneurs are having, and hopefully see some solutions too.