A New Story an Entrepreneurs
One of the best things about my job is the diversity of people I get to interview. One day I am chatting with the deputy director of the FBI, the next I am interviewing an Olympic gold medalist. One unusual publication I write for, Tuck Today, the alumni magazine of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, unfailingly comes up with fascinating interview subjects. My latest story was about alumni entrepreneurs. I interviewed more than 20 of them about their start-ups, but really their stories were about creativity, innovation, and social responsibility. The group included the founders of Cranium and Sobe as well as the creators of a new and wildly popular board game, Morphology, and a socially minded burrito chain, Boloco. I learned a remarkable amount about entrepreneurship, and my conversations with this group of inspiring, smart, charismatic people still stick in my mind.
Here is just one quote that I particularly love. It’s from Sherri Oberg, the wise founder of a small pharmaceutical company that created a drug used to detect coronary artery disease: “One of the great things about entrepreneurs is that they’re very optimistic. It’s what enables them to go after incredibly difficult challenges that people with lots of experience would think are too difficult. And if we didn’t have these people who are very optimistic and high energy, who believe they can do anything, we really wouldn’t make very many breakthrough inventions. Looking back 20 years, I certainly have a different perspective now than I had then, but if I had known what I know now, we would have never invented a drug that makes such a huge difference in cardiology. This is a drug that can save people’s lives.” Read the full story here.