Sid Mohasseb has many titles — entrepreneur, philosopher, published author, investor, professor, and public speaker. He’s had a long and rich career in many fields — software, consulting, turnaround, and more. Even if you don’t consider yourself an entrepreneur, there’s something you can learn from this episode!‘I fundamentally believe that we are all entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is exchanging what you have with something better, knowing that it’s not guaranteed.’
Our conversation with Sid touches on many subjects about business and life: – The entrepreneur mindset – Defining entrepreneurship success for yourself – The different types of entrepreneurs – The two elements of success — authenticity and consistency – The power of a working ‘ecosystem’ and more If you are interested in an entrepreneur success story or want to learn more about growing your business, listen to our previous episodes. More about Sid on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohasseb/ John: Thank you for listening today. Don’t forget to subscribe and share this episode. My guest today is an entrepreneur philosopher, Sid Mohasseb. He’s a published author, theory entrepreneur, investor, professor, and public speaker. Thank you for joining me today, Sid. Sid: Thank you for having me, John. It’s a pleasure. John: Well, it’s an honor because I am intrigued by your journey and that’s what piqued my interest to have you on this episode. Can you share with the listeners and audience members how you got to where you are, maybe share some of their backstory on your journey so people get a handle on how you became who you are. Sid: Sure, I can certainly try. My life has been filled with different ERAS, if that makes sense. So I came to the United States as an immigrant, when I was about 16 years old I came by myself and went to school then I started my first business when I was in college, it was an interesting business about facsimile which most people may not know what it is, now that’s a fax machine and creating a service and the idea wasn’t originally mine it was a company called flying tigers that hired myself and a friend of mine for a summer training. If you would internship and then they went broke and we took the same idea that needed about 200 million dollars and started it with about 8 or 9 thousand dollars and that was my first business. After I sold that to my partners I started as a consultant so that if you were the first period as a management consultant with a very small firm. I became their partner about six years later, their youngest partner and we grew the firm significantly by hundreds and hundreds of people in a very short span of time. I think the big takeaway there was that one day, one of the partners after a couple of years called me into his office and he said “Sid, something is wrong.” And I said, “What’s wrong?” He said that “You know consulting firms work off of these utilization hours and how many hours you’re billing, how many hours you’re working, and that’s every hour is measured against the billability.” And he said, “You have over a hundred percent billable time.” And I said “Well, so.. it says “Well, you have worked last year 100 at 3,000 and I don’t know 120 hours in the past year and that in a year you have 2080 hours, so you’ve worked about nine months extra in a month in here, how does that work?” Well, I like what I’m doing and so that the hard work pays lesson if you would and that’s how I became a partner, just working hard and that was the period that I worked with a lot of big companies and I had a boss first who became my partner later on who gave me a tremendous amount of opportunity, he took me as a 25-26-year-old into board meetings with board members at Union Bank and Mcdonnell Douglas and it was a tremendous experience. Then in the late 80’s I started my own consulting firm which gave me a real big lesson thinking that I was pretty hot and I was close, I had a closing ratio of about 97% meaning every time I went to a client 97% at a time I would walk out with an engagement. I started my own consulting firm and I had a big client, Mattel toys called me the next day and they said “Hey, we want to give you a project.” I said, “This is a piece of cake.” And that was the last client I had for about a year and a half after that, I just couldn’t get a client and I realized it wasn’t me that was hot, it was everybody that was building me up and positioned me, and so forth and that really gave me the value of the ecosystem and how important this. So during the next decade or so I got involved in the turnaround business and did some consulting as well and along the way I met some entrepreneurs and some opportunities. I started a few software companies purely serendipity it wasn’t that I was trying to be a software company owner or anything like that, so the turnaround company was when you buy a company from a bigger entity and then you try to turn it around and make it positive and they’re generally companies in trouble. So during that decade or so I started working with Startups and the software side and turnaround with mid-sized companies so the first period of my life if you were the first decade or so was really big huge companies, the second period was mid-sized companies and turnaround and getting my hands dirty in terms of running things and so forth. Towards the end of the 90’s, I’m one of those companies that I had, had some success called competitive knowledge and at some point, it was valued about a capitalization of 100 million dollars, then we hit the dot-com era where everything collapsed. I was lucky enough I mean some called me pretty intuitive, pretty for having the foresight of some sort but it wasn’t I think I got lucky by just reading the tea leaves before we really collapsed as I called it and I said “This environment is not something that’s going to work.” So I was able to actually return some money to venture capital folks and so forth, and that was again another period of my life. I started the third big trunk, I started the company. Actually, we did a carve-out bought a piece of a company in orange county and this is when I got a little more experience in international markets where I opened an office in China, in Hong Kong had offices in Europe, and in the US, and really in the distribution business worked with thousands of companies around the globe. So that takes us about 30 years or that tells me I guess I’m aging myself. John: Wow. That’s amazing, I’m gonna drill in, and sorry to cut you off because I know there’s a lot of gaps in there. Anyway, I’m gonna jump in, and maybe where did you originally come from to then immigrate and eventually did you bring your family over, or was it more for studying, like what was your upbringing? Sid: So, I came from Iran and this was about 2-3 years before the revolution that happened there and I came to study then very quickly we had the revolution there so my parents couldn’t come, I couldn’t go. I think the first time I saw my parents after that was about 10 years later when they visited and basically my friends became my family and I have friends here from 40 some odd years ago that we’re really close, we still see each other that’s you know unlikely scenario people don’t have that many friends that are that old, we are a group of 10-15 people that we’re still together and we’ll see each other because it was we created essentially a pseudo system, ecosystem, support system, that was basically with friends and the family then came for visit but they never came to stay. So pretty much I had disconnected if you would in a way, in terms of really living in Iran or having you know much to do with Iran. John: I would imagine the culture being completely different because even myself, my parents came from Vietnam and I know a lot of friends from Iran that came to Canada that’s where I live right now and just that nuance of how things work, how the school system, the public system, the private sector works? Did your parents give you that strong foundation to prepare you for the American way of living or did you have to engulf yourself while you were here at an early age? Sid: I think my parents gave me a foundation that was I would call it a mental foundation. Not necessarily I didn’t speak that much English when I came and I came because I decided to come at 15 years old, I went to the hospital because I had some stomach pain and I was reading a lot of magazines and a lot of newspapers and stuff like that and somehow I had the brilliant idea that I have to come to the United States to study and when I told my parents they said, “Absolutely, not.” Particularly because I have a disease called hemophilia which is a blood disorder. So they were very concerned about that but I think it was the foundation that they provided me mentally. Actually, in my latest book I have talked about, how that happened and the lessons for it because I think it’s important, it was an important lesson for me as well. John: That’s great, like putting yourself out there, like letting people know your perspective is completely different. A lot of people don’t go through that on immigration journey, a lot of the Americans or Canadians that live here are second, third generation so they don’t understand what’s really going on when you’re new to the country language, culture, and how everything operates and works right. So you’re thrown into this kind of environment then you created a network of friends, social circle that you are still connected with now and throughout those years, like why that entrepreneurial bug like you could have gone on any direction. In terms of college career, skills, opportunities but what drove you to push into entrepreneurship? Sid: So, I did a podcast with some folks, I did ask a couple with the folks that focus on immigrants and how do they come and all that. One of the things we talked about which connects who I am, you know the people call me the entrepreneur philosopher as you introduced me as well at the beginning. I fundamentally believe that we are all entrepreneurs every one of us, we have the talent and again I’ll go to great lengths in my book in my last book “You Are Not Them” to explain why I make that claim. The entrepreneurship is about taking what you have, your situation, whatever that situation is, whatever your origins are, and aiming trying to change that with a better situation. So you’re exchanging what you have with something better knowing that it’s not guaranteed, there’s a risk nothing is guaranteed in life, so all immigrants are particularly active entrepreneurs because they move from where they are knowing that there are lots of difficulties and in some folks in my case, it wasn’t as difficult as coming from some countries where kids are under guns, drugs, and this and that, and they have to escape tremendous poverty and all of that sort of stuff but in a lot of cases people who are immigrants, they are truly exercising their entrepreneurial talent they take what they have and they want to exchange it with something better knowing that there is a risk, so I believe that we’re all entrepreneurs. Now, how do we apply our entrepreneurship is different and it has to do with different situations, so if we’re exchanging, if the definition is exchanging what you have with something better, I would say, a mother, a housewife, or somebody who works 16 hours and collects a paycheck and then brings that paycheck home in order to exchange that where a better life for their kids, is exercising entrepreneurship within the context of what they are. If somebody is even in a corporate environment, everybody’s there is trying to make a better life for themselves. They’re trying to move up the ladder, they’re trying and they’re also constantly changing their situation with something better, they’re exercising that every day at work if they don’t, they tank they can’t take a situation, they’re given and they can’t improve it they’re in the business of improving the situation for the customer, for the company, for whatever it is. So they’re constantly doing that but in the corporate world, you’re exchanging all of that in order to get a better paycheck, in order to move the corporate ladder get a better title. So we have people that are on either extreme of things, you have people who are what I say in denial so you look at Elon Musk and say, “Oh if this guy is an entrepreneur then sure as hell I’m not.” So, you’re in denial, then you have people who are hustlers if you would weekend entrepreneurs they’re trying to do something because they don’t quite trust themselves, they don’t trust in their abilities and they’re trying to be risk-averse then you have the corporate entrepreneurs, and then you have some folks on the ultimate end of the spectrum, I call misguided they think fast-talking and bamboozling others is about entrepreneurship, no that’s being crooked so the talent we all have, how we apply it is different. Now if you look back to my life and what you asked why did I pick to be an entrepreneur, well I was an entrepreneur I just started exercising it and I did it in different environments if you can notice, so I did it while I was in college starting that business then I did it when I got into a company as a consultant, so I was a consultant, I was working somewhere but by exchanging my hours, my time, my effort I tried to improve myself and became a partner, and then I was trying to exchange my knowledge and capabilities in turnaround situations to turn companies around and exchange that with more success or more money or whatever you want. So if you look at everything that I’ve done they’re not the same but it’s about exchange so there’s an entrepreneurship element in it and maybe my risk tolerance is a little bit higher, maybe my ability to see things sometimes too early is different than others but we all have different talents and we have come from different origins as long as we find our own authentic way and that’s what all you know, this thing they call me entrepreneurship philosopher, that’s the reason I’m saying you have to find your own personal entrepreneurial philosophy in order to be successful because John let’s face it you and I are not Steve Jobs, about seven other billion people on the face of the earth we’re not Bill Gates, we’re not Elon Musk, we’re not Warren Buffett we’re different than them. Guess what they’re all different from each other, they have a different risk profile, they have a different personality, they have a different approach of life, they have a different set of priorities we’re all different, the reason one group of people as entrepreneurs in business or in corporate. However, you wanted to find them are successful it’s because they are authentic, they are, they have an ability to take who they are and improve it and make a better version of themselves. So I always say that you’re both the artist, all of us we are the artist and we are the art we bought Michelangelo and you know the Sistine Chapel we’re both the Mona Lisa and Da Vinci we’re the sculptor and the sculpture. The question is how do we shape ourselves and how do we evolve ourselves over time? Because life it’s not a picture, it’s a movie and some people look for you know how to’s, in terms of let’s get a how-to book off of off the shelf and let’s follow this and we’re gonna be successful. That doesn’t work, it doesn’t work because life is not like an IKEA that you go and buy a bookcase and then look at the how-tos and you put it together. There are so many different variables I come from a different place, you come from a different place, my family is wealthy yours is not, I am white you’re black, I come from a particular family that has a different value for education you come with a working-class family, I’m married to this person, have two kids you have no kids. There are so many different variables that make you and I completely different that makes everybody different so the question is how do we take those differences on our own and we create our own version, of our own philosophy, and how do we evolve that? Because the world is evolving and changing. John: Totally, so growing up I wanted to ask you did you envision yourself being where you’re at today? Like what was your kind of dream job? Your dream life? What did you want to become when you were younger? Your younger self? Sid: It may sound silly because I know a lot of folks particularly those who are successful, have routines, they have early visions, and they have a dream that I’m actually against this idea of a vision board and usually people push back you know what these vision boards are. You put who you want to be on a page, on a board of some sort and then you look at it and you say “Well, if I’m 12 years old or 20 years old and I put a vision board together I’m doing it based on my knowledge, based on my experience, based on who I am as a 20-year-old.” So why does that make a good vision? It doesn’t make a good vision, what is my judgment that 20 years old in terms of who I want to be, the idea is can I evolve who I want to be and take opportunities as they come now, if you look I’ve done a lot of different things and I wouldn’t change it I think I have tried, I’ve failed many times, succeeded maybe but I’ve tried to be open to opportunities and again you would see from the way I looked at things, for example, I looked at risk and entrepreneurship I say “Entrepreneurs are not risk-takers they are risk navigators.” that means risk takers are in Las Vegas now you go and you throw the dice and see what happens. That’s realistic and part of it has to do with lack but risk navigators are navigating risk based on an understanding and knowledge of situations and looking at the probabilities of which path is better, so if you’re close to looking at opportunities ahead of you you’re not navigating risk, you’re sticking with the simplest thing that’s possible as a result you’re compromising your future. Yes, we could all lock our doors in our room, do nothing, and hope somebody would give us a dish of food and we have a restroom and that’s all we need, well risk is minimized but that is not life, that is not growth, that’s not prosperity. Yes, it is life but it’s not. It doesn’t provide you prosperity, the other thing I believe and this from a young age is this idea of not leaving change to chance, change happens change is good. Actually, I say change is our best friend imagine this John, if there was no change, zero change it was always spring, always 72 degrees, always you would have hamburgers for lunch. If you have a kid, that kid is always 5 years old never grows, never gets married, never goes to college, never does anything and you’re exactly the same place that you have always been. You do this podcast and you do it every day the same way, the same place because there is no change, the questions are the same, the answers are the same without change there wouldn’t be any choice, there wouldn’t be any choice we can’t. If there’s no change we can’t choose between A and B, there wouldn’t be any prosperity, there wouldn’t be any love, there wouldn’t be any progress, there wouldn’t be any caring, there would be nothing no careers so change is good. The question is how do we embrace that change? How do we embrace the choices and evaluate the choices that it offers us? And that I believe is the essence of entrepreneurship to evaluate the choices to even ignite, more change so we have more choices and that’s how prosperity, I think becomes crystallized and it’s not for everybody, it’s not the same for me, it’s maybe different than many others and I’ve gone from running companies to being a consultant, to Fortune 500 CEOs to writing books to being an investor and I’ve made lots of investments in early-stage companies. So for me, the choice has been as they’ve come, I’ve tried to embrace them and that’s what I suggest to folks in terms of realizing who they are, how to navigate risk as a pilot because you know pilots navigate risk every day but there are different kind of pilots they’re commercial pilots. They go from point A to point B, they have a checklist, they check to get on the plane and fly then you have the fighter jet pilots who are faced with Lmes you know drawing things at you and like your startup not maybe running up out of fuel, no money and a different set of risks that they face so depending on how you define who you are and how you navigate risk, that’s how you would find the different opportunities that would come your way. John: Those are great concepts and perspectives that you brought up, I wanted to ask you because it seems like you have a wealth of knowledge, years of experience and you’ve worked with thousands of or if not hundreds of other entrepreneurs business owners through consulting some of the largest companies. What kind of synergies were are there in people’s intention? Because what I hear from you is yes there’s a risk, yes there’s action, yes there’s curiosity, yes there’s people that ignite and move forward grow right, and that’s the whole premise of I feel a lot of people are stagnant because they’re so risk-averse. So they get a steady paycheck or they want to stay with the company because of that holiday, of three weeks or pension or whatever it is. However, the more risk-averse you are then there are more opportunities, and the more challenges and harder it is then there’s also a lot of risks like there’s a failure, that’s potential but there’s also a huge abundance of growth and success that may come out of it. What were some of the things that you can gauge from all these interactions that you may like to share with some of the audience members? Because it seems like you’ve worked with so many of them. Sid: I have worked with many, so let me expand and you had a few ideas there that’s worth exploring. First let’s get take the person that you say he or she is at a job and likes the security, likes the vacation, likes it so when I say all of us are entrepreneurs and we’re exchanging something for other. That person is also an entrepreneur but he or she has defined the better in a different way, so if you may define better as you have a better house, and more money and I may define better as having more time with my kids. So I’m exchanging what I have which is my time, my resource, my mind, my all of who I am and I go to work and I spend eight hours at that in order to exchange what I have with something better, being able to at five o’clock go to a baseball game with my kid so I’m entrepreneurial except I don’t realize that I’m entrepreneurial, I don’t realize that I have done that and what is the risk is I may not be able to pay for my kid to go to Harvard, the risk is I may not be able to pay for tutors that would get my kid to Harvard, I may not realize that I can’t have a bigger house or I may not realize it but if I realize it and I’m consciously exchanging that’s purely entrepreneurial, that’s navigating the risk knowing what the exchanges are. So for example, I say Martin Luther King or even Mother Teresa they were Gandhi was an entrepreneur, they exchanged what they have with something they believed in and they believed that’s the right thing to do knowing that there is some risk, there is a risk to be killed, there is a risk for people not to be, there is a risk so the risk changes in terms of context, and the benefits change in terms of context but the exchange is there for all of us. Now you said, in all the people that I have seen do I see a pattern of who is more successful, and I have to say something that may sound a little silly but it’s those who are authentic, those who are not a copy, those who realize that they are not them. It’s not that they’re fearless, no. It’s not that they don’t get nervous, no. It’s not that they don’t make mistakes, no. It’s not that they are super intelligent or super accomplished academically, no. It’s not that they’re hustlers and they work too hard because that doesn’t just working hard, doesn’t necessarily translate into results, it’s just we can have a mouse and go around, running around and then they’re working hard but that doesn’t necessarily produce any results. So I think being authentic and having their own philosophy of approaching things in a consistent manner is a key, so let me expand that a little bit, so if you have a way of looking at life you have a way of dealing with situations that is your own then as choices come your way as you face situations, that those choices go through the filter of your mindset and because of that you choose A versus B we all do that doesn’t matter if you go on the street, you want to make a left there not a right there. I’ll give you an example, my wife always likes to go the same way so if you go to her mom’s place we always take the same place, me? I take different roads, I don’t like to go the same place, the same way that’s her choice, that’s mine we all make choices as we do that. So the key is that what is authentic if you have your own entrepreneurial philosophy, what becomes authentic is the way you look at choices and you make choice A versus choice B, but because you have a system of mindset your choices are consistent they are consistent and they connect from where you think about something you plan, you strategize to how you do things, to how you communicate things with others. So all of that becomes consistent and guess what consistently focused things, get the results faster so by having a systematic way of having these things from planning all the way to execution and doing you just become more effective because you have a consistent way of looking at challenges and situations now, the thing when I talk about entrepreneurial philosophy it’s very different than your beliefs, your beliefs is a part of this. So let me give you an example, I do believe that all people are equal but when I’m running a company all my employees are not equal, someone is contributing more, someone is contributing less, someone is in the warehouse, somebody is in the R&D Department, somebody is in public relations, somebody is in customer service, somebody is working 16 hours a day, somebody is goofing off 2 hours a week, so they’re not the same. So from a belief perspective, I do believe all people are equal but from an entrepreneur a philosophy perspective, I have to realize the contribution of people are different now when we talk about entrepreneurial philosophy and what we have it’s not constant, it’s not fixed, it’s an evolving factor because for us to remain relevant to the world we have to change, so consider Kodak, consider Fujifilm and they rejected using digital films then they’re gone. Consider Blackberry as a cellphone which was everybody at had Blackberry and where are they now it’s a limited market less than 0.0005% of the market because they didn’t stay relevant, they didn’t stay relevant because they were fixed, they were fixated on who they are and not who they can be. So that journey is the journey of a process and that kind of goes to my first book, that was about “The Caterpillar’s Edge”, you know a caterpillar before it becomes a butterfly, it goes to many stages and the process is very gooey, it’s very messy, it’s not like the caterpillar sleeps one night and wakes up a butterfly goes through a metamorphosis that’s very very complicated. A caterpillar has about 4,000 muscles you and I have a body as humans, we have about 600 muscles a caterpillar changes those 4,000 muscles to go from one kind of species completely to another who can fly. So this process takes time and it’s not just overnight and it’s constant and guess what when the butterfly is born one of the first things that the butterfly does is to lay x for the next caterpillar, so the circle continues, so this idea that okay here’s who we are, we’re now read 17 books and we’re all good and that doesn’t make you a true entrepreneur who’s always exchanging and I say “Practicing entrepreneurs are always an apprentice, they’re always learning, they’re always looking to exchange what they have with something better, they’re not satisfied and it’s not just because of money, they’re not satisfied because they think that they deserve more and they do. They think they deserve more and they think they can get more and they can’t.” So that process is what’s common along with all those people that you think are the people that I see are successful, they have a mission, they have a cause they know themselves, they’re not afraid of losing but they’re not stupid enough to jump into risks without having the knowledge of it, they may get momentarily success by taking unreasonable risks. Yes, you can get lucky but if you look at the consistent entrepreneurs that have been successful they have a way of looking at things themselves, and they leverage their origins and originality and they have their own unique way of being authentic in their leadership, it’s not the same, not all leaders are born the same and not our followers are born the same. John: Well, I really appreciate that I know there were a lot of points there that you mentioned. Can you maybe stipulate some of the biggest mistakes that you made over the years and maybe share with that how you overcame them or what did you do differently after you were engulfed in that mistake? Did it lose you a lot of money? Set you back a couple of years tarnished some relationships, like what were some of the biggest failures and mistakes, and what have you learned from since then? Sid: So, let me separate from a definition perspective. I think a mistake is when you do something the outcome is unpleasant but you don’t learn from it, that’s a mistake. A failure is when something didn’t work and you’ve turned it into a learning experience, so I’ve tried to avoid mistakes if that makes sense but I’ll give you some, I give you one when I started my background, when I left the consulting firm in the 80’s and started my own firm I thought that I was all that, I thought you know this all the success that I had as a partner of that old consulting firm was all mine it wasn’t, it was because everybody else was supporting me. I had ignored the power of the ecosystem, the power of others, so this has become one of the things that I have carried my entire life. I am not the one who’s doing it, I am just the one element in the cog here, sometimes I’m the lead, sometimes on the back but it’s not me, it’s everybody else that’s in the process. Unless I want to build something, I want to think about something, design something, manufacture something, build it, market it and sell it to myself and then pay for it and use it myself. I need somebody else, I need somebody to help me when designing it, I need somebody to help me make it, I need somebody to buy it. So the power of the ecosystem is one massive learning over time, another thing that I can think of in terms of failures that have turned into successes or learnings if you would. I have a tendency of being ahead of the market, it’s my fault and I have learned that I have pushed that sometimes to my own detriment if the market is not ready for who you are, what you do, the market is not ready it’s not how brilliant, it’s how relevant you are to accept, so I’ve had ideas I mentioned one the competitive knowledge one that in the dot-com era didn’t work that was about aggregating data over the net and creating KPIs that goes across the supply chain. About 30 years later people are starting to do it, now the time was wrong then the environment wasn’t there, the people weren’t thinking that way, it was a good idea but it wasn’t, so I have learned not to ignore the market signals, not to ignore my environment. I am only as effective when the audience can hear what I’m saying, and absorb what I’m saying, and act on what I’m saying. I’m not effective in an enclosed room, just having ideas relevant is important, so those are a couple of things real-life situations that I can share with you. John: Oh, that’s great I love that. Thanks a lot, Sid. One of the things I always want to find out is like what does success look like for you today versus when you were in your 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s because it’s always a moving target and it seems like during these lifespan stages in your life I know it’s personalized to your situation because you go through career, family, job, entrepreneur VC, whatever Startup speaker, author there’s all these stages. Where do you see your stage today and where do you want it to push yourself for the next 10, 20, 30, more years? Sid: So, I’m going to ignore the mechanical success is and this is what I mean, mechanical success is if you’re a consultant getting a project or two projects or five projects or moving from a manager to a director to a part, those are short-term goals that have to do with careers that all of us have had. Yes, it is considered a success if you move from one position to another position, so that could be I mean if I’m looking at it as an investor that could be, how many deals did I invest in, how many of them have an exit, how many went IPO, how many failed, those things are considered what I call mechanical things in whatever you’re doing. If you’re working for a company, well did you get awards for what you did? Where you recognized it? Did you get a promotion? Those are mechanical things but from a personal perspective, development perspective I think success has been kind of an evolving thing. For me as well, one that has been critical in building trust that is if people are trusting me and I’m delivering on that trust. I consider myself successful now, that could be in any situation, again. this goes back to the idea of the ecosystem, this goes back I am who I am because people trusted me, they trusted me if I was a consultant with what I said, they trusted me as a boss if they were my employees they trusted me as an investor to listen to me and to work with me or they trusted me as a professor. When I go to school and I teach the students to have to trust you, so trust is at the core of I think one of the key elements that I would call success, the other things as I am now I do 3-4 things now as you mentioned but they’re very closely connected. I teach at University both in the Engineering School and the Business School at USC ( University of Southern California) here, I write lots of articles, my articles are often in time and Newsweek in the USA today and independent in foreign policy, Startup Nation all sorts of different publications. I’ve got cases at Harvard Business Review, cases that are more academic, so there’s an academic element to me, there is a writing element, this is as you mentioned I am an author. I’ve got my recent book is “You Are Not Them” and the previous one I mentioned the “Caterpillar’s Edge” they’re both Best Sellers, they’re doing well and again it’s about you can see imparting knowledge of what I’ve learned to students or via writing and then I need to stay as a practitioner. So I make investments in early-stage companies and I stay active as an advisor to select companies. So I’m constantly looking at new ideas, new challenges so that what I preached is not disconnected from what happens, so if you look at all those three things, my success today is to be able to impart this idea to people. John, you are an entrepreneur it doesn’t matter what you do, doesn’t matter where you come from, doesn’t matter how much education you have or you don’t, doesn’t matter if you’re poor. You are an entrepreneur this talent of exchanging something you have for something better is within you, this is my mission is to tell people and try to provoke them to look at that talent and apply it, why? Because I believe that our world is changing significantly, I believe that we are at a critical juncture in our lives and what I’m saying not in our life, in human life this is a period of infliction where we are relying more and more on machines, artificial intelligence and all that. Regardless of how people are fearful of it, the greed of what tremendous productivity it would bring, it will overcome us and we will get to a place where lots of AI will be driving our lives and I believe that it is time for us to evolve to our next stage of being and that is about how we exchange what we have with something better and how we define that something better. So I think entrepreneurship is at the cornerstone of the next 50-60 years of our lives, of how do we become and how do we choose to be creative as opposed to fight AI machines and be fearful that they’re going to be replacing us. The reason we feel that we’re they’re replacing us is because we feel that we don’t have the ability to exchange what we have with something better, we believe that this is what we have the artificial intelligence and the machines are going to come and take over what we have, not realizing that what we have is subject to improvement and we are the artist and we are the art and we can take that and improve it so that’s what I call success if I have in your show, if I have touched one person I’ve succeeded. John: That’s amazing, Sid. I know you’ve spent a lot of time here, giving a lot of good insights value to our listeners. How can some of the listeners get in touch with you, reach out to you if they have any questions? And maybe get them to buy your book right, the newest one that you have “You Are Not Them”, you don’t mind sharing with the audience members the way. Sid: So, You Are Not Them as is on Amazon and they can get it in both written form or the electronic form. It’s called “You Are Not Them: The Authentic Entrepreneur’s Way” and as I mentioned it talks about the entrepreneurial philosophy, how do you build it change fear, nervousness, mindset, the idea of being a pilot, and I even use that, I use a lot of analogies as you can already see on how can you be a dancer when it comes to execution as opposed to how people define life and execution as a fight, so the book is on Amazon and you can search it under my name Sid Mohasseb which is M-O-H-A-S-S-E-B or the name of the book and the way to contact me is also through my first name and last name as an email so it said, “mohasseb.com” or you can go to my various sites and places, if you go to “mohasseb.com” you’ll find some of my links, to my articles links, to my speaking engagement activities, my consulting and advisory activities, and so forth. So I’m pretty easy if you just type in my name, I’m pretty easy to find. John: Amazing. Well, I really want to thank you for all the time that you devoted to the show. Do you have any final departing words that you would like to share with the audience members? Sid: “Don’t leave change to chance” because that’s what I’ve learned from an early age, “Don’t leave change to chance.” John: Great. That’s a great insight. Thanks a lot again, Sid. Sid: Thank you, John. John: Thank you.‘Entrepreneurs are not risk takers; they are risk navigators.’
