Latest news with #MikeLazerow
Forbes
16-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
The Dirtiest Job You'll Ever Love: Why Chaos Builds Success
The best entrepreneurs embrace the chaos. Most professionals try to avoid career chaos. What could be more natural than trying to stay as far as possible from uncertainty, rejection and failure? Unless, of course, you want to build a company. Those negative waypoints are exactly the things entrepreneurs learn to love. There are good reasons any leader should learn to embrace discomfort, entrepreneur-style, even if you're leading within an established organization. After all, every career journey crosses some rough patches, particularly in an economy undergoing the kinds of upheavals that are everywhere these days. Here are 6 counter-intuitive principles that all successful founders follow, consciously or not. They can help you through any messy career passage. Love the journey Founders know they won't have the wherewithal to withstand the blows of entrepreneurship if they don't love what they're doing. The blows are inevitable. What matters is how you respond. Kass and Mike Lazerow - the husband and wife duo who built Buddy Media and then sold it to Salesforce for $750M - have written a book dedicated to that. Their book, Shoveling $hit: A Love Story About The Entrepreneur's Messy Path To Success, outlines 50 lessons they learned through their company's many hair-raising ups and downs. Gary Vaynerchuk, serial entrepreneur, agrees that you need to love the journey for its own sake. 'If you don't like it, it won't work. If you're doing a business for the money it's the number one strategy that makes people fail. It's not a hokey thing to say you have to enjoy the journey.' Love losing Part of the journey includes failure, mistakes, and just downright dirty work. 'One of my favorite things about entrepreneurship is when I lose,' Vaynerchuk said. 'Because I think it allows me to not get as the amazing poet once said, high on my own supply.' You also have to love figuring out what won't work and be able to drop it. As Mike Lazerow puts it: 'We love throwing things away. We love the pivot.' When you're willing to see past work and ideas as just that–past–and not as something that needs to be justified, you allow yourself to see what will work in the future. You can focus then on that, without being anchored to the past. Love the competition Jim McKelvey, cofounder of Square, credits an aggressive move from Amazon in part for the success of the company. When Square was a young vulnerable startup, Amazon announced a competitive product. It was 30 percent cheaper and had all of Amazon's power behind it. 'We didn't have their scale or their servers or their talent or their brand name,' he said. 'We don't have a listening device in everybody's home. We just don't compete very well head to head with Amazon especially when they're undercutting our price.' What did the team do? Nothing. 'We aggressively did nothing against Amazon,' he said. 'The miracle is that our strategy (of doing nothing) was successful. Amazon ultimately got out of the market and when they did so they mailed a Square reader to all of their customers. 'We got market validation and all of their customers,' he said. Sometimes waiting out a huge competitor that doesn't have your passion is the best strategy to help mature a new market. Love fundraising Plenty of founders are visionaries first and foremost. They enjoy the process of thinking about what they want to build and working with their teams on the product. But that's not enough. You have to love to pitch. As an entrepreneur, you're selling all the time. You're selling to customers, of course. You're also selling to employees and to investors to get them to invest their money in you and your idea. Liz Zalman, multiple time founder and co-author of Founder vs Investor taught this to herself. 'I used to hate fundraising,' she said. 'But since then I've figured out it's essentially a sale. I am selling a vision to somebody who has capital and I want their money. And so the question is simple: what are the things that I need to say in a particular order in order to get them to agree to give me that money?' Rahul Vohra, cofounder of Superhuman (acquired by Grammarly) has also learned to embrace the process of pitching. In fact, when he's down, he pitches himself. 'It's very easy to lose sight of a ginormous opportunity because you're just dealing with the day-to-day,' he said. 'One trick that I would highly recommend to all founders is to go back to your last fundraising deck and literally pitch yourself. Read through it and you'll be like, oh yeah, yeah, this rocks, we are going to be a huge company.' Love the mission You go through tremendous mood swings as a founder, sometimes in the span of an hour. You win a major customer and get a big rush. Then a key employee quits, and you wonder if that will start a stampede out the door. The emotional ups and downs are challenging, so you have to hold onto your north star. You have to remind yourself of your mission. Gusto cofounders Joshua Reeves and Eddie Kim talked about the reason they started Gusto, which helps small and medium businesses get HR benefits. 'Both of our families worked at small businesses and we really believed there was an opportunity to make that experience so much easier and simpler,' Reeves said. 'We saw how many owners were in pain or frustrated. That's actually what got us most excited.' Love the pattern more than the idea Knowing if you have an idea that can go all the way is learned through experience. You have to learn from your mistakes and use your hard-won insights to see patterns. Kass and Mike Lazerow created the 'Go Gauge" as a framework for you to be able to see if your startup has legs. The Go Gauge is: Before you fall in love with your idea, you can run it through the go gauge to see if you can build a business out of it. Even if you have checked all these boxes, success is not guaranteed. The only thing that's guaranteed is that there will be plenty of dirty work along the way. The advice of these successful founders is: Make sure you will love it.
Fox News
02-06-2025
- Business
- Fox News
Boulder, CO To California: How Radical Policies Are Undermining Our Nation (ft. Kass & Mike Lazerow)
Story #1: Following the terrorist attack in Boulder, CO as an illegal immigrant attacks a peaceful march in support of Israeli hostages with Molotov cocktails, what does that say about the impact of illegal immigration and radical ideology in America? Story #2: Will is joined by Kass and Mike Lazerow, serial entrepreneurs, investors, and authors of 'Shoveling $h!t: A Love Story,' about the brutal realities of building businesses, maintaining marriages through it, and raising families in the chaos. The three share the lessons they've learned from their entrepreneurial successes and failures. Story #3: A CNN anchor loses a debate after a trans runner wins a track meet against girls in California. Plus, Will and the Crew ask the question: What would it take for the Dallas Mavericks to give up likely number one pick Cooper Flagg? Tell Will what you thought about this podcast by emailing WillCainShow@ Subscribe to The Will Cain Show on YouTube here: Watch The Will Cain Show! Follow Will on X: @WillCain Learn more about your ad choices. Visit
Fox News
02-06-2025
- General
- Fox News
Bipartisan senators blast 'rampant' antisemitism
All times eastern Making Money with Charles Payne FOX News Radio Live Channel Coverage WATCH LIVE: Will Cain interviews entrepreneurs Kass and Mike Lazerow
Fox News
02-06-2025
- Business
- Fox News
An Esports Heavyweight Turns 25 With an Eye Toward the Future
All times eastern FOX News Radio Live Channel Coverage WATCH LIVE: Will Cain interviews entrepreneurs Kass and Mike Lazerow
Forbes
01-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
NYC Tech Week Offers Lessons For Creating Successful Startup Partnerships
It's Tech Week 2025 in New York City and is the place for startups, companies and venture capitalists to network during hundreds of privately hosted events across the city. New York Stock Exchange's Celebration of Entrepreneurs event with Stifel on June 2nd will be a hot ticket. The event is honoring New York-based entrepreneurs and investors Kass and Mike Lazerow. The Lazerows are the husband-and-wife duo behind the successful startups Buddy Media and as well as investing in more than 100 startups like Liquid Death. The Lazerows spent the last year capturing their secrets of success in their book Shoveling $h!t: A Love Story About the Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success. I had the opportunity to interview the couple prior to the event. It's no surprise that one of their secret weapons is building strong partnerships. The duo is not the first married couple to have a successful partnership in business and in life. The comparison between business and relationship partners is an apt one. Both require partners to get along with each other, learn how to manage stress and tough times, and hope for a successful and fruitful future. And both can get messy sometimes, as the Lazerows humorously and candidly detail in their upcoming book. Below are the lessons they shared on a critical question: how to choose the right business partner. Whether you are an entrepreneur or an established company seeking a strategic business partner to grow your business, the advice below will help you find partners that can guide you to new heights. There are several important elements of a successful business collaboration, including the concept, business plan, and cash flow. For Mike, one element stands out as the most important factor. 'The most important decision that a founder makes after they decide to start a company is who they start it with,' he shared in the interview. The Lazerows are passionate about this answer based on multiple experiences. Mike shared an interesting perspective: you often don't understand the importance of this lesson until you make the mistake of not getting it right. Mike recalled teaming with visionary artist Jonathan Cramer. Mike and Cramer were friends outside of business and Mike was excited to support his friend's business venture. Jonathan and Mike teamed up to bring Jonathan's concept, known as Shape Matrix, to market. But despite the momentum and investors, the commercial applications they'd developed never took off. Mike believes that the relationship between the co-founders—and their different visions for the partnership—was the main reason the startup never flourished. Mike is a serial entrepreneur, and Jonathan is a gifted artist. 'Let's just say we were not the most compatible co-founders, and the company suffered because of it,' he said. They approached the partnership from different perspectives, and as Mike now recognizes, they should have talked more deeply to ensure that they were both on the same page. The good news is they recognized this and were able to part ways amicably – something that does not always happen. Starting a business as the sole founder is an excellent approach for many entrepreneurs. In fact, companies with solo founders often survive longer and generate more revenue than businesses launched with multiple founders. But not all entrepreneurs have the skills needed to go it alone. While solopreneurs have more freedom, they're also left to do more by themselves, and risk and responsibility are entirely on their shoulders. It can be helpful to share the entrepreneurial burden—especially if you make a wise choice for your business partner. It's no surprise, then, that some of the world's leading companies have multiple founding partners. Microsoft and Apple, for example. Or Cisco and Clif Bar. But before taking the leap to starting a company with another co-founder, the Lazerows stress the importance of asking a series of questions: By asking the right questions, partners can make sure they're truly aligned and avoid potential issues. That's not to say that co-founders should be carbon copies of each other. While co-founders should have things in common with each other, such as values and respect, they should also possess complementary skills, perspectives, and strengths too, as Kass says, to 'fill in your gaps. Simply put, business partners should understand their strengths—and play to them—while allowing their collaborators' talents to shine. Kass compares partners leading a company to guiding a boat. One partner is at the front looking for land, while the other is trying to get everybody to paddle at the same speed and in the right direction. Kass stressed that successful companies have teams that don't worry about each other's work. 'There's this implicit trust, which I think is massive, and the leaders of the company specifically know what they don't know,' she said. She continued, adding that successful entrepreneurs 'recognize they know what they don't know and are not intimidated by working closely with partners that know more than they do.' This helps avoid micromanagement which is often a cause of tension and frustration. For Mike and Kass, ensuring alignment of vision and values is essential to help business founders create a successful partnership. They stress spending lots of time asking questions like 'What do you want to accomplish together?' and 'What are the principles that you hold dear?' Culture—a team's shared beliefs, customs and behaviors—is another must-have, noting you can't spell culture without 'cult.' 'When you're running a company, how you create and disseminate the values and morals of the company, not just the mission, but who we are as people and who we're going to hire, that cult. I always say you're building a cult in the culture,' shared Kass. Building a successful culture is a sign of accountability, a shared work ethic, and similar values and has been linked to success. Starting a company can be messy. But as Kass and Mike Lazerow know very well, picking the right co-founder can make the journey much easier.
