Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Erik: How are your mentoring relationships changing as your business grows?
Mike: Since we’re still a young company in the founders age we’re lucky that some
other entrepreneurs are providing us with some great insight, one of the things I’m
very thankful for, one of the companies I admire, Big Spaceship that’s located in
DUMBO, they had a Harvard business case study done about them and I remember reading that
and my business partners just reading it over and over and over again, [Erik laughs] and
being like ok how do they do this, how do they do that? And Mike Lebowitz has been - the
CEO of Big Spaceship has been great, and we’ve had coffee with him a couple times and he’s
just provided really great information and once in a while you want to see that that’s
happened you see that someone has gone through kind of what you go through and we really
admire that company and it’s always good to have someone you admire close by who, you
know we’re in the same building, kind of just wave to them and say, “Hi” and that
kind of daily interaction is just as much as a mentor someone who you call up once a
month and tell them everything that’s going on cause you feel like it’s someone that’s
doing the same things that you do and luckily for us now is that with our success there’s
a lot of companies that are asking us for questions. So, we mentor about three or four
other digital companies that just call us up time to time and ask us questions and uh,
that offers us that pass it along effect of someone is giving us advice on where we can
go in the future and then we’re giving advice to another digital shop that’s new and saying,
“Hey look, don’t worry about those little things, or this is how you can help to move
forward.” So, it’s actually very rewarding for me, it’s actually one of the things
I really enjoy doing and it keeps us very fresh into what’s happening from very micro
level in the digital scene, if you’re talking to a much smaller company and you’re hearing
what different types of clients are asking for. Reverse mentoring is always good because
you’re getting as much information and learning just as much.