Jeffery: Welcome to Impact Investing, brought to you by the Supporters Fund, home to the first Tim Hortons. Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. I’m your host, Jeffrey Potvin. JP, let’s please welcome from the food truck capital of the world, Miami, Florida Shawn Gold from OpenVC. Welcome, Shaun It’s really good to have you here today.
Shaun: Wow. Thank you for having me. Food truck capital of the world. I would have said it’s the cereal capital of the world because everyone here is a flake.
Jeffery: You’ve got the best line, Shaun That’s why I love everything you post. You’re witty. You’ve got the right words, I love it. The actions are good. Did you enjoy the Tim Hortons?
Shaun: I did, I did, let’s.
Jeffery: I went outside.
Shaun: Let’s take it a step further. For all those in Canada, especially in the Ontario area, we’re coming on the weekend and weekends belong to club seven. That’s right. If you’re going to be in the Niagara region, make sure to check out club seven. I get I get my friend who wants to open a night club with me a plug. Yeah. No, he’s got plenty of spaces and I love Niagara. And it’s for all of Ontario’s sexy people. Part Saturdays belong to seven, baby. That’ll take care of my my ticket that he’s going to get for me.
Jeffery: That’s awesome. Yeah. Maybe there’s a little plug there. Everybody gets. Yeah. It’s a good way to segment and way to start this off. But unfortunately Tim’s was not sponsoring us today. Just happened to be in my hand. And I thought what a great way to segment this into the into the show. But regardless, Sean, it’s a real pleasure having you here today. I’m excited because I love all the things that you post. You really keep the venture world on its toes. And I think you also keep entrepreneurs always second guessing what they’re doing, because I’m sure you found every single thing that makes a lot of sense and a lot of no sense in what they’re doing. And, you really call it out. So that’s why I’m a big fan of everything that you post. And of course, all the conversations we’ve had, it always drums up around this startup community. So it’s going to be a great discussion today. But the way we like to start our show is we want to get one thing about you that nobody would know. And let’s go back to your University of Miami days, where you came from and all the great things that you’ve done.
Shaun: All right. Well, one thing about me that nobody would know, That’s a tough one because I’m pretty. I’m pretty transparent. I have a I hear here’s one. I’m taking one of my unproduced screenplays, and I’m considering doing a Kickstarter for it, not an equity crowdfunding campaign. So before everyone gets all excited, it’s a simple Kickstarter if I decide to do it. And yes, you get an actual finished graphic novel based on one of my screenplays, it’s it’s a science fiction, you know, it’s a set in Miami when when Miami was affordable and Trask actually moved to complete fantasy. So it’s going to be a little, little hard to digest. But it’s true. So that’s one thing nobody knows. But, taking it back to the old school, literally. Yes. So, went to the University of Miami solely to for my business. Okay. I got into far better universities and I turned them all down because I wanted to throw parties and I wanted to hang out with celebrities, and I wanted to go my own path. And that’s why I chose the University of Miami. Everyone said I was crazy, and as usual, they were wrong and I was right. You know, best, best choice I ever made, gave me, not only a degree in entrepreneurship from the university, and I paid those parking tickets, so I do have my degree. Thank you. But secondly, working in hospitality and nightlife with celebrities with high net worth individuals, with athletes, it teaches you a doctorate in psychology and philosophy and interpreting how people understand information and how they think. And it provided a strategic advantage and core competencies that apply to venture that apply to startups. A lot of times I don’t want to say I’m hard on startups. It’s just that there’s a dose of reality that I bring to the table, because when we were doing nightlife, it was very simple. The place was packed or it was empty. There were no excuses. There were no I needed investor. There was no oh, I need to get a strategic partnership. That’s either you were able to do what your business is supposed to do or you weren’t. It’s that simple. No, there’s no middle ground. So that kind of, you know, gave me a competitive edge to what I do now. But it was so much more than that because nightlife opened up a bazillion doors. I mean, because it built out a massive network of people from everything from entertainment to startups to Wall Street. You know, I wrote my books because of it. So it opened the doors, for, for publishing. I got into screenwriting, I got into lecturing, and I’m now up to almost a dozen universities, real universities, not new Jersey Turnpike Community College, or, as they call it, the point. You know, the real ones, like Georgetown MBA program and whatnot. So yeah, it all stemmed from being just 16, 17 years old and wanting to start something and not really taking any excuses and not really listening to what other people had to say. And also not really kind of, you know, being focused on what most founders and entrepreneurs are today. That’s like getting investor money. And it didn’t even occur to me at the time that somebody would give me money, whereas I feel like now it’s like, oh, just easy. I’m a founder. I have a pulse. I’ll just ask for $10 million. Pre-Seed no problem. And it just doesn’t work that way. And I feel like no matter how many times I write about it, because I’ve written a ton of articles which you can read on open VC, that app, on how venture capital works and, you know, what do people do with venture capital all day? How does a pre-seed round work and as a seed round work, what the metrics to have and everything? Just people just still don’t get it. It just here’s my deck. Where’s my meeting? Where’s my money? Like like that’s it. There’s no no thought is given to it.
