This is Entrepreneurial Week at Marquette and in conjunction with that our Emerging Media guest speaker tonight was Justin Beck, co-founder and CEO of PerBlue, a profitable small business building mobile and social games in Madison, Wis. The company site says Beck is a passional software entrepreneur who began programming at age 12, graduated from the University of Wisconsin, where he studied computer engineering and computer science.
Beck, who is unquestionably mature beyond his 23 years, offered more pearls of wisdom that can be shared here. Right off the bat, he told us, our goal should be productize our value. Then we won't be bound by how much time we have on this earth, but instead we would bound only by how much we can distribute it.
Explaining why he is willing to move from company to company if he feels it's right: "We all want really good first days. ... But what's really important is to have really great last days." He doesn't condone work-a-holicism. "The real key is when you work lots of hours you cannot do really cool stuff." He added that you can make a lot more money by choosing to do the right things instead of choosing to do a lot of things. For example, he said, computer/software behemoth Apple doesn't rush to produce more products faster than CEO Steve Jobs can truly focus on.
More wisdom from Beck: When you take over a new company, the first day you should spend doing technical support or customer service so you can get a really good feel on customer feedback and customer complaints. Fire the customers who are the most work but the least profitable. Dream customers require the least attention but produce the most revenue. And with respect to the next five years, he said: billions of smartphones will be sold instead of hundreds of millions of mobile phones; social is not a platform but an idea of how to do things; and journalism will learn a different business model that is not based on advertising. (Let's hope so!)
One last thing, he said – don't get married or too attached to a company. Amen to that!
Beck, who is unquestionably mature beyond his 23 years, offered more pearls of wisdom that can be shared here. Right off the bat, he told us, our goal should be productize our value. Then we won't be bound by how much time we have on this earth, but instead we would bound only by how much we can distribute it.
Explaining why he is willing to move from company to company if he feels it's right: "We all want really good first days. ... But what's really important is to have really great last days." He doesn't condone work-a-holicism. "The real key is when you work lots of hours you cannot do really cool stuff." He added that you can make a lot more money by choosing to do the right things instead of choosing to do a lot of things. For example, he said, computer/software behemoth Apple doesn't rush to produce more products faster than CEO Steve Jobs can truly focus on.
More wisdom from Beck: When you take over a new company, the first day you should spend doing technical support or customer service so you can get a really good feel on customer feedback and customer complaints. Fire the customers who are the most work but the least profitable. Dream customers require the least attention but produce the most revenue. And with respect to the next five years, he said: billions of smartphones will be sold instead of hundreds of millions of mobile phones; social is not a platform but an idea of how to do things; and journalism will learn a different business model that is not based on advertising. (Let's hope so!)
One last thing, he said – don't get married or too attached to a company. Amen to that!
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