I recently interviewed Techstars Co-Founder and CEO David Cohen on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:
Adam: Our guest today is the leader of one of the largest and most successful startup accelerators in the world. David Cohen is the co-founder and CEO of Techstars, which has backed more than 5,000 companies with a combined market cap of over $145 billion, including 29 billion-dollar companies. David, thank you for joining us.
David: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Adam: You grew up in DeLand, Florida, a small town in Central Florida, and you fell in love with technology at a very early age. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What early experiences and lessons shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?
David: It makes me think of a couple of things. One is working in my dad’s accounting firm. He was an entrepreneur. He had his own business, and I remember working in that firm and seeing him creating the world he wanted to create, and people sort of depending on his business for a living. I was just doing data entry as a kid, but that was formative for me, to sort of see my dad’s entrepreneurial world. Then, around the time the internet was being born, even before that, I just got interested in computers and technology. I remember saving up to get an Apple IIe computer and wiring it up to a photoresistor so I could tell if someone had gone through the door to my bedroom and log it, building little games and just sort of falling in love with technology. Those two things would intersect at a moment when graphical user interfaces were being born. The internet was about to be born, and that was obviously a huge wave of innovation that was unleashed. That sort of led me into entrepreneurship and the intersection of building my own things with computers and technology.
Adam: Techstars isn’t the first thing that you built. You were a serial entrepreneur before starting Techstars. Can you talk about those first few companies that you built? What were those companies? What were the key lessons that you learned from those days?
David: Really, right out of college, I went to a job interview. I like to say I’m 1 and 0. I’m undefeated on job interviews. That job interview happened to be for a company that did dispatch software for paratransit vehicles, so people going for dialysis treatment or other non-life-threatening medical appointments. The company provided that as a service. They would go pick up these people and bring them to their appointments. The night before the interview, I went to the bookstore and read about the programming language they were using without buying the book. I was able to pretend to know something about it because any good programmer will tell you all languages are learnable. That’s what I had been studying: engineering and programming. I went to that job interview, got the job, and got involved with a company that was basically doing dispatch as a service. Then my entrepreneurial streak hit. A couple of years later, I started a company to build that in the Windows graphical environment, turning it into software instead of a service. That’s where the inspiration came from. My first company was an ambulance dispatch software company called Pinpoint Technologies that we built up and sold to a public company. Then I had a few other experiences. I built a company in the music space that delivered opportunities to buy concert tickets or merchandise related to music you liked, as well as a mobile social network. Some of them worked. Some of them didn’t. That led me to angel investing as a career.
Adam: How did Techstars come together, and how did you and your partners build it into one of the biggest and most successful startup accelerators out there?
David: The experience of having built three or four companies and then starting to dabble in angel investing led to it. I was making some angel investments, and I thought, “Man, this is a great way to turn maybe a medium-sized fortune into a smaller one.” It just didn’t seem like it was going to work effectively, but it sure was fun. Like any founder, you want to figure out how to take something you enjoy that is kind of broken, or frankly kind of sucks, and unsuck it and turn it into something awesome. Around 2006, when we started Techstars, there were a few inspirations. One was a group called Y Combinator that was just getting started in the Bay Area. They were doing early-stage investments in very early companies and trying to mentor them. Another was Charles River Ventures, which was doing a program called QuickStart. They were writing $100,000 checks after a 20-minute meeting. That’s it. One 20-minute meeting, and they decided yes or no. That high-velocity approach of supporting founders at the earliest stages appealed to me. I had played with angel investing and didn’t think it was a very good way to invest. It wasn’t structured enough or hands-on enough. I thought that could be professionalized and made more accessible to people who were interested in it.
I also had another motivation. I was living where I still live today, in Boulder, Colorado, and I wanted the startup community here to be better. I wanted to do something that would supercharge the startup community and, over a long period of time, make it stronger. Those ideas came together in Techstars. We would take applications from founders who were very early in building technology companies, fund them with a small amount of money, much smaller than today’s amounts, and surround them with mentors who had been there and done that to help them succeed. We just tried it. We thought, “What’s the worst thing that could happen? We make some new friends and lose a little money,” which, by the way, is better than what happens with angel investing in a lot of cases. We decided to see what happened.
In that first year, we had an outcome that was pretty amazing. It basically paid for the second year right away. It turned out there was a lot of demand for this idea. My co-founder, Brad Feld, coined the word “accelerator,” which is now a very common term meaning investment plus mentorship over a fixed period of time, not just investment and hoping something good happens. That has become a very important part of the startup ecosystem. A lot of great companies have been built through that model. You mentioned 29 unicorns. Since then, hundreds of unicorns have come out of accelerator programs as the model has spread around the world. The original idea really came from my own pain as a founder, having done it myself without mentorship. I have stories about missed opportunities because I didn’t know what I was doing or because I didn’t have the one connection I needed at exactly the right moment. I understood how valuable those things were, and that’s really the idea behind the mentorship-driven accelerator we created at Techstars.
Adam: You can only be so successful going it alone. Surrounding yourself with people who can provide guidance, coaching, wisdom, and knowledge to help you get to that next level is essential.
David: I get asked a lot by founders, “Give me an example. You say that’s so valuable.” They don’t necessarily know that because they haven’t built a company yet or been through enough experiences. I give them my favorite example, and I have many more since starting Techstars. Before Techstars, we sold our first company, the dispatch company, to a public company. About four years later, the CEO of that company said to us, “Do you guys know you left half the money on the table? You weren’t very good negotiators.” My first thought was, “Well, why did you have to tell me that? Now I feel bad.” But I’ve seen that same situation so many times in the context of Techstars, where we get the right mentor on the phone with an acquirer, and we double the exit price. That’s the value of mentorship in a moment. Someone who’s done 100 deals and knows how to negotiate, advocating for you during a 30-minute call, can completely change the outcome. It’s so powerful to have somebody introduce you to the CEO of a company you’re trying to target as a customer and say, “This is someone I trust. You should really look at what they’re doing.” I think it’s especially true now that we’ve entered the age of AI and so much noise. Everybody’s emailing everybody and knows so much about everybody else. Human relationships are going to matter even more.
Adam: What makes a great mentor? How can anyone become a great mentor?
David: I wrote something a while ago called the Mentor Manifesto. It’s really a collection of social norms that evolved around the Techstars system. Fundamentally, it’s about sharing your experience without assuming it always applies or is always the correct answer. It’s about being Socratic, asking a lot of questions, and then sharing your experiences, what happened to you, and how it might apply. But no matter what, you support whatever the person you’re mentoring decides to do, recognizing that it’s a learning opportunity. If they do exactly what you suggest, hopefully it helps them, and you learn from that. If it doesn’t help, you learn from that too. If they choose a different path, you’ll learn from that as well. Having a learning mindset as a mentor is, counterintuitively, the most important thing, rather than putting yourself on a pedestal and assuming you have the right answer to everything. It’s about sharing experiences and giving first as a cultural value, with no expectation of getting something back. You probably will get something back eventually. You just don’t know who it’ll come from, and it won’t necessarily be transactional. Having that spirit is what makes the best mentors.
Adam: David, I love that. The best mentors don’t tell you what to do. They teach you how to think. If you’re a mentor and you tell the person you’re mentoring exactly what to do, and they do it, it doesn’t really help anyone. If things go poorly, they’ll blame you. If things go well, they won’t take ownership because you drove the decision. They’re not really getting better. They’re not really growing. I love the advice you shared. The best mentors have a learning mindset. The best mentors understand that mentor-mentee relationships are two-way relationships. As a mentor, you can and should learn as much from your mentee as your mentee is learning from you. The most successful leaders, the most successful people, are always trying to learn. They have a growth mindset. The most successful mentors have that same growth mindset.
David: Then those become the best mentor relationships. As you said, they become two-way. I think about people who were early mentors to me when they say, “It’s become very two-way, and I learn as much from you, or more, than you’ve learned from me.” That feels so good. It’s about taking responsibility and then trying to give back to the person who has been helpful to you in your career. This is what we call Give First. It’s a cultural value we have at Techstars. It’s not transactional. You don’t have to keep score. You can pay it forward, sideways, or however you want to contribute back to the network around you. When it becomes two-way, it’s so powerful and gratifying. Frankly, long mentorship relationships where all I’m doing is saying, “Here’s what I would do,” and I’m not learning anything in return, aren’t gratifying at all.
Adam: If the relationship is one-sided, it’s not going to last very long. The relationships that sustain over time are genuine relationships where both parties actually want to be there. You’re not going to stay in a completely one-sided relationship. Recognizing that, as a mentor, you have as much to gain as you have to give, and recognizing that, as a mentee, it’s your responsibility not only to receive but also to give, is incredibly important.
David: That’s the philosophy that built the Techstars mentorship network. Many of the founders of companies you use every day are mentors in the system, and the next generation is learning from them. It’s an amazing virtuous cycle. That’s the thing I’m most proud of about the Techstars network. Every wave of founders gives back to the next generation. They become the angel investors. They become the mentors. I use that term very specifically because I think of advisors differently. Advisors are often compensated with equity or cash. Mentors are simply there to be helpful. Once they are helpful, the network naturally tries to give back to them with opportunities. Again, it’s so non-transactional. That’s the most important thing.
Adam: What do you look for in the companies that you invest in? What do you look for in the people that you invest in?
David: Fundamentally, we are very people-focused because we’re such early-stage investors. We’re looking for people who have what we call intrinsic motivation. They have a desire to change the world, and they have a vision of how they might do that. Obviously, they have to be talented and understand how to create technology and bring it into the world, but they’re driven by something bigger than a spreadsheet. They’ve got their fantasy Excel file or their fantasy Google Sheet, which is, by definition, wrong. That’s not what’s driving them. What’s driving them is the desire to change the world and make it better. Think about investing in a company like PillPack, now part of Amazon Pharmacy. The motivation was to prevent people from taking the wrong pills at the wrong time because the founders had personal family experiences with that problem. They were determined not to let it happen to anyone else. Or think about Uber, which had this vision that you’d be able to push a button and get a ride anywhere. At the time, people thought that was crazy. They said, “You’re not going to get into a car with random people.” But it changed the world and created countless jobs. The founders had a vision of the future, and it was driven by something much deeper than money.
Adam: Can you talk a little bit more about your process? What is the secret sauce? What allows the companies that come into a really good accelerator program to leave that accelerator program able to raise significant money and be on a path to attain meaningful success?
David: The product we’re offering isn’t the capital. It’s not even the program. It’s really the network. It’s a network of very high-quality people who care about helping startups succeed, who want to Give First, who want to open their networks, provide credibility, and allow those startups to leverage those relationships to find customers, talent, or capital. It’s a massive unfair advantage. I’m a geek, so I like to think of it as the rails for your startup. It’s what you’re building your startup on top of. It’s like having a co-founder with incredible connections. Are you going to be more successful starting a company with Reid Hoffman or with someone you just met who hasn’t done anything yet? Reid Hoffman is going to open a lot of doors. Now imagine a network of thousands of people who can do that for you, who want you to succeed, who are invested in your success, and who care about building personal relationships with you. Ultimately, it’s the network that makes the difference, and it’s why we have a much higher success rate getting companies to the next level than investors or founders trying to do it entirely on their own.
Adam: When you examine the companies that have succeeded compared to the companies that haven’t, what are the common threads? What are the patterns among the most successful companies that have allowed them to become so successful?
David: Fundamentally, they’re obsessed with the problem. They’re completely obsessed with it. They live it. They breathe it. They can’t stop thinking about it. At the same time, they’re not attached to the solution. They have an idea of what the solution might be, but they’re totally willing to throw it out because they care so deeply about solving the problem. To me, that’s the number one characteristic. They’re obsessed with solving the problem, not protecting their original solution. They’re willing to pivot, change direction, and stay relentlessly focused on the customer and the problem they’re trying to solve. They go to bed thinking about it. They wake up thinking about it. People talk a lot about passion, but I think passion is table stakes. Obsession is another level. The people who do the best aren’t motivated by money. They’re intrinsically motivated by something they simply can’t stop thinking about. They try to quit, and they can’t. They have to keep going. They have to find another way around whatever wall is standing between them and eliminating that problem from the world. It goes back to what I talked about earlier. Unsuck the thing that sucks and that you care deeply about. Beyond that, they’re often great storytellers and great networkers. Those skills help because startups are incredibly resource-hungry. They need capital, customers, talent, and relationships. If you’re good at telling stories and getting people excited about what you’re building, you’ll have a much easier time attracting those resources.
Adam: When you talk about the importance of being obsessed with the problem, not the solution, what’s interesting to me is that you’re describing two characteristics that, on the surface, seem like they could conflict with each other. But when you put them together, they create an incredible ability to solve problems. One is focus. Single-minded focus. You’ve identified this problem that you’re deeply passionate about, and you’re determined to solve it. The other is flexibility, adaptability, and agility. You’re laser-focused on the problem, but you don’t really care exactly how you’re going to arrive at the solution. You’re totally open-minded about the path. It’s ultimately the combination of those two characteristics that allows you to achieve the kind of success we’re talking about.
David: A couple of analogies come to mind. If you’re going on a trip, you know where the destination is, but you don’t know every road you’re going to take to get there. Or think about riding a bicycle. If your head is down looking only at the road right in front of you, you’re probably going to crash. If your head is up looking toward where you’re trying to go, the bike almost takes you there. For those who cycle, I think those are good analogies for building startups. I talk a lot about vision and focus and reconciling those two things because the best entrepreneurs have this huge vision. They’re going to change the world in a massive way. Investors say, “But that’s so far away.” The entrepreneurs respond, “Sure, but I’m intensely focused on the next step.” As long as you have both vision and focus, they work together beautifully. Vision without focus is useless. Focus without vision is also useless. You need both. You have to be executing with tremendous focus while always keeping your eyes on the larger vision.
Adam: A couple of the other important characteristics that you’ve either mentioned directly or alluded to are communication and persuasion. How can anyone become a better communicator? What are the keys to effective persuasion?
David: It’s one of the major focuses of the program we run. Whether you’re trying to convince an investor, a customer, or a partner, it’s all a form of sales. Some people are naturally good at it. Others are naturally weaker. We run workshops to help people understand that a lot of it comes down to directness and clarity of communication. Literally, many people will never ask an investor, “Will you invest in my company? It would really help me if you did.” They’re simply too afraid to say those words. I believe there’s an approach to learning those skills. Not everyone will ever feel completely comfortable doing it, so someone on the team has to be able to sell. That’s something we look for in co-founder teams as well. It takes the courage not to beat around the bush, to make direct requests, and to have direct conversations.
It’s also about adopting the mindset of solving the other person’s problems. If you’re talking with an investor, a customer, or a partner, they have concerns. An investor might not be ready because they’re uncomfortable with some aspect of the opportunity. Your job isn’t simply to argue with them. It’s to understand what’s making them uncomfortable and help remove that concern. We spend a lot of time teaching communication skills because it turns out that if you’re a better communicator, you’re a better fundraiser. If you’re a better communicator, you’re a better salesperson.
One thing we teach extensively, and something I believe in strongly, is reflective listening. If you’ve ever been in therapy, you’ve probably heard a therapist say something like, “I think what you’re saying is this. Do I have that right?” Everyone has experienced moments in important conversations where it feels like the other person has said something significant. Reflective listening is an incredibly powerful skill in those moments. You might say, “I think what you’re saying is you’d love to invest, but you’re uncomfortable with the valuation. Is that the concern, or am I misunderstanding?” By focusing on the key issue and making sure you understand it correctly, one of two things happens. Either they’ll correct you, which is valuable, or they’ll confirm that’s exactly what they mean, and now you can move the conversation forward. Reflective listening helps you make sure you’re truly understanding what’s being said and whether there’s any additional nuance you’re missing. It’s a powerful technique, and it’s valuable far beyond the therapist’s office.
Adam: We’ve talked about some of the biggest drivers of success. What are the most common causes of failure, and how can they be avoided?
David: I’ll answer that in the context of startups because I think that’s what you’re asking. People become too attached to their solution. The symptom is that they run out of money. People often say startups fail because they run out of money. I don’t think talented founders fail because they run out of money. I think they develop tunnel vision around the thing they’re building, and they stop listening to the market. You have to balance your intuition with what you’re actually hearing because the market isn’t going to tell you exactly what it wants, but it will guide you. Having tunnel vision and refusing to pivot when something clearly isn’t working is ultimately what causes startups to fail. It’s stubbornness. It’s a lack of willingness to hear what customers and the market are trying to tell you because of an internal conviction that has become disconnected from reality.
Adam: That really goes back to being flexible, being adaptive, being open-minded, and being agile. You mentioned the importance of listening, whether it’s listening to the market, listening to your customers, listening to your advisors and mentors, or listening to the other people on your team. The most successful leaders are the most successful listeners. You’ve been around many people who today are leading incredibly successful companies. What do you believe are the keys to successful leadership? What can anyone do to become a better leader?
David: On the first point you’re making, I like to teach founders that you’ve got two weapons on the sides of your face, and you’ve got one liability on the front of your face. You should use those two weapons more than the one liability. If all you’re doing is talking, you’re not understanding what’s going on, and what you’re saying isn’t informed enough. Many of us have had experiences where we’re in a boardroom, and there’s one or two people who are just talking, talking, talking. I often hear founders say, “David, one of the things I love about what you do in the boardroom is that you’re mostly listening, and when you finally say something, everybody turns because you’ve thought about it and synthesized so much.” I think that’s an underrated leadership skill. People often assume the loudest, most boisterous person in the room must be the leader. Very often, that’s not the case. It’s often the people who have the best listening skills. I definitely agree with that.
Adam: When you’re talking, you’re not learning. When you’re listening, you’re learning. To your point, if you walk into a room and all you want to do is talk, most people are going to tune you out because they’re going to recognize that you care about listening to yourself. You care about you. You don’t care about us. The best leaders understand that leadership isn’t about me. Leadership is about we. Leadership isn’t about my own parochial self-interest. Leadership is about helping the people around me get to that next level. It’s about helping the people around me become the best versions of themselves.
David: The other element that I personally admire in leaders is conviction around values. It’s having a set of values that are immutable, values that you establish as a founder or, in some cases, as a CEO. It’s hard to completely change a company’s culture once it exists, so founders play an enormous role in establishing the values that define the company. You try to hire based on those values. More importantly, you fire based on those values. You can have high performers who aren’t living the values, and there’s no question those people need to go. Many leaders miss that. Leading by example around those values and making sure everyone understands how important they are, whatever those values happen to be, is one of the most important traits of strong leaders.
Adam: Do you have examples where you’ve seen that play out? Where you’ve seen leading with values manifest itself in a positive way or a negative way? What did you learn from those experiences?
David: It’s often hard in this context to talk about other people when things go wrong, so I’ll use a couple of examples from my own career because we can always be introspective about our own mistakes. On the positive side, Techstars has this Give First value. We try to be helpful to founders and entrepreneurs with no expectation that anything transactional will come back to us. I often get asked why I helped launch so many competitors. We helped launch dozens of other accelerators around the world that are now competitors on some level. My answer is simple. They were trying to help founders succeed. They were investing capital and mentorship, and I believe that helps founders. That’s part of our mission and our vision. Even when it didn’t seem like it directly benefited us, we tried to live that value. In some cases, we eventually acquired those organizations for one dollar because they wanted to join forces, and that allowed us to expand. We never expected that outcome. In other cases, they’re still competitors today. But if they’re helping founders succeed, then we’ve accomplished our mission. You simply have to live your values.
On the negative side, I’ve had companies exit where we had a fiduciary responsibility to maximize returns, even when founders might have preferred a different outcome. Those situations are hard. Business sometimes forces you to balance competing responsibilities. I know I’ve made mistakes in that area over the course of my career. I also see portfolio companies talk about values and market themselves around those values without actually living them. The market eventually figures that out. There’s a lack of authenticity that damages the brand. It’s a dangerous game to treat values as marketing. They have to reflect who you genuinely are and how you genuinely want to show up in the world.
Adam: A topic we haven’t covered yet, but one that’s essential to success in entrepreneurship, business, and innovation. What are the keys to getting to a place where you’re at your most innovative, and how can leaders create an environment and culture that fuels innovation?
David: It starts with caring deeply about the thing you’re working on. If you care, you’re going to listen to the market. I love the phrase, “Usage is like oxygen for ideas.” You’re going to get your product in front of customers. You’re going to watch what they do. Innovative companies simply do things. They’re not hiding in a corner building something for three years before anyone sees it. They’re rapidly trying to solve the problem because they’re obsessed with that problem, and they’re using customer feedback in real time.
That phrase, “Usage is like oxygen for ideas,” has always resonated with me. It came from Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress. We included it in our book Do More Faster. It’s so true. Innovation comes from doing, trying, and failing. Small failures are part of innovation. They’re part of entrepreneurship. You don’t want catastrophic failure. You want lots of little failures because you’re trying enough things to discover what really works. That’s the mindset. Put one foot in front of the other. Stay obsessed with the problem. Try things. Don’t be afraid of small failures. Learn from them, and involve your customers throughout the process. The Innovator’s Dilemma explains that this becomes harder as companies get bigger. When you’re small, don’t fall into that trap. Keep iterating quickly and keep trying new things.
Adam: But it all starts with caring. It all starts with being intrinsically motivated, being invested, and wanting to put in the time. If you care, if you’re dedicated to figuring something out, you’re going to invest the time. The more time you invest in trying to solve a problem, the more likely you are to solve it. When you’re spending your time doing something you don’t really care about, maybe because someone is paying you and it’s just a paycheck, you’re probably going to do a satisfactory job. But you’re much less likely to do an extraordinary job. When you deeply care, when it’s your baby, you’re going to figure out how to get it done.
David: I couldn’t agree more. I’ll bring this full circle. Early on, you asked me what I look for in founders, and I said intrinsic motivation. I’m a huge believer that you can’t build a startup simply because you want to make a lot of money. Of course, somebody will occasionally do that, but generally speaking, you have to want to change the world. You have to genuinely care about the problem. That’s true in every part of life. You’re not going to be a good spouse if you don’t truly love the person you’re marrying. You’re not going to excel in a course unless you care about what you’re learning. You’re not going to learn how to ride a bike or ski without falling down a bunch of times. You have to want it. You fall down. You get back up. You make progress. You learn. We keep coming back to the same ideas because they all lead to the same place.
Adam: As a leader, you need to surround yourself with people who are intrinsically motivated. It’s not enough that you have intrinsic motivation. If the people on your team aren’t intrinsically motivated, you’re going to run into the same problem. You either need to hire people who are intrinsically motivated, or you need to figure out how to motivate people, not merely through financial incentives, but by getting them to a place where they show up every day interested in the problem they’re solving, recognizing the meaning behind what they’re doing, understanding the why, why we do what we do, and bringing that intentionality every day.
David: You just tied something together in my brain from something a mentor said to me a long time ago. Walt Winchell, a personal mentor of mine, once said, “Hire first for motivation. Not for skill or experience, but first for motivation.” I’ve always practiced that, mostly because he told me to, and intuitively it felt right. It’s pretty counterintuitive to a lot of people because they hire for skills and experience. But when you’re trying to build something, hire first for motivation. When I think back to all the people we’ve hired over the years who really wanted to help founders succeed, who really wanted to work in this environment, and who genuinely wanted to learn how to be investors, they ended up becoming the very best people at the job because skills can be learned. You have to have the motivation first. You actually helped me by tying those ideas together in a more concrete way than I’d thought about before.
Adam: I appreciate that. Something that’s top of mind for everyone today, whether you’re an early-stage entrepreneur or a Fortune 500 CEO, is AI. What should leaders understand about AI?
David: This is an incredibly important technological wave of innovation. I feel like I’m living at exactly the right time because I may get to experience three transformational waves. The internet obviously changed the way business works and the way people communicate. AI and intelligence in general are now doing the same thing. If you’re not already a believer, become one. This is very real. It’s changing everything. Then quantum computing is coming right behind it, and that’s going to transform technology again in a completely different way. This is the hundred-year period when the aliens would look down at Earth and say, “Wow, Earth really changed,” because of these three technological waves.
You have to become AI-native in the same way companies had to become internet-native years ago if they wanted to survive. AI is going to touch and change everything. If you’re the leader of a company and you’re not AI-native, you’re going to struggle. If you’re an incumbent company, you actually have a tremendous advantage because you have data, customers, and brand recognition. Now you can rebuild your systems almost overnight. You can create AI agents that do things for your customers that would have been impossible to imagine just a few years ago. You need to take advantage of that opportunity before someone else catches up to you and builds an AI-native version of what you do. Make sure you have people throughout your organization who truly understand AI. Make sure they’re thinking about AI as the first way to solve problems, not automatically adding another person to the task. Think first about where you can gain leverage from this new intelligence and this technology. It’s going to feel strange for a while because we’re still very early in this innovation cycle, but it’s going to be incredibly powerful. It’s a fun time to be alive, and leaders need to pay very close attention to it.
Adam: David, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?
David: Make sure you’re working on something you genuinely care about. Life is too short. You need to care about unsucking the thing you’re trying to unsuck. Everything else tends to fall into place naturally if you do that well. If you’re trapped doing something that isn’t fulfilling and you’re only doing it because you have to, of course we all have to live in reality, and not everyone can immediately change their situation. But if you can find a way to work on something you truly care about, or participate in things that genuinely matter to you, success comes much more naturally than if you’re trying to force your way through something that feels like a grind every single day.
Adam: David, thank you for all the great advice, and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.
David: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
