Our buddy Lisa Davidson is back, talking about all the various implications of how you manage your time as you try to build your book of business - and the result is a lot of fun. Lisa tells Scot about her own time management techniques, and how to balance the demands of managers, customers, and networking -- but the two old friends have a hard time staying serious the whole time.
Andy Chan’s a 23-year-old who broke his back playing football, and then tried to “walk it off”. For a year. This, coupled with an energetic personality and a strong desire to make something new, led he and his cofounder Connor Young to start VIT Initiative. VIT has all the buzzwords. They’ve launched a connected, cloud-enabled internet of things (IoT) workplace safety technology that reduces the risk of sprain and strain injuries. This week, Andy and Scot connect quickly and discuss starting a hardware company versus on that focuses on software alone, and they get into Andy’s interesting personal story.
Brad Kriel, founder of Velocity Robotics, is just coming off a regional victory in the AlphaLab Gear Hardware Cup, and will be moving on to the next round. The Hardware Cup is a pitch competition for early-stage hardware startups, and Brad is one of six US regional winners. The regional winners as well as the international winners are all competing to win the $50,000 grand prize, in the form of a convertible-debt investment by Startbot VC.
On this week’s show, Brad tells Scot MacTaggart about Autoset, a tool made by Velocity Robotics to make miter saw work more efficient. The two also spend time discussing how a return-on-investment (ROI) pitch gets made, and how Shark Tank can be bad for the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Very few people are working on a problem as large as this one! Mendel Bassman and his team of experts are working on ways to recycle used tires - recovering valuable substances like carbon black, oil and more. Mendel and Smart Tire Recycling recently won TiE Pittsburgh’s 4th Annual Startup Award & Business Mentoring Roundtable (BMR) Showcase, and are on a path toward major success. This week, Mendel talks to Scot about the practice he put in, the business plan he’s working, and what “supercritical fluid technology” actually means.