Podcast
Inside Outside Innovation
Hosted by Brian Ardinger, Founder of Inside Outside Innovation podcast, InsideOutside.io, and the Inside Outside Innovation Summit · EN
Inside Outside Innovation explores the ins and outs of innovation with raw stories, real insights, and tactical advice from the best and brightest in startups & corporate innovation.
Each week we bring you the latest thinking on talent, technology, and the future of innovation. Join our community of movers, shakers, makers, founders, builders, and creators to help speed up your knowledge, skills, and network.
Previous guests include thought leaders such as Brad Feld, Arlan Hamilton, Jason Calacanis, David Bland, Janice Fraser, and Diana Kander, plus insights from amazing companies including Nike, Cisco, ExxonMobil, Gatorade, Orlando Magic, GE, Samsung, and others.
This podcast is available on all podcast platforms and InsideOutside.io. Sign up for the weekly innovation newsletter at http://bit.ly/ionewsletter. Follow Brian on Twitter at @ardinger or @theiopodcast or Email brian@insideoutside.io
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The Entrepreneurial Journey with Maria Flynn, Author of Make Opportunity Happen
Apr 30, 202400:19:12Tap to summarizeOn this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Maria Flynn, author of the new book, Make Opportunity Happen. Maria and I talk about the entrepreneurial journey and some of the hands-on things you can do as an entrepreneur to make the journey more effective and rewarding. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty, join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs and pioneering businesses.Interview Transcript with Maria Flynn, Author of Make Opportunity Happen and Co-founder of the Digital Health KC InitiativeBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Maria Flynn. She's an entrepreneur, co-founder of the Digital Health KC Initiative, and author of the new book Make Opportunity Happen: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Align Your Own Stars. Welcome, Maria. Maria Flynn: Thank you for having me. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm super excited to have you on the show. Our good friend Melissa Vincent, who runs the Pipeline organization down in, in Kansas City, connected us and said, hey, you need to talk to Maria and get her opinions and insights on what's going on in the entrepreneurship space.And with your new book coming out, we figured it'd be perfect time to have you on the show. Let's give a little background of how you became an entrepreneur and, and maybe a little bit about your journey. Maria Flynn: So, I grew up with entrepreneurial parents, so it was kind of in me from a early age. I went on into engineering and that was a great foundation to launch as an entrepreneur.And then I found myself as an intrepreneur inside a larger company, Cerner Corporation, so healthcare IT. And that was a great training ground to go on in my own entrepreneurial endeavor later, but I had that real urge to go find what that was. When I left Cerner, I went looking for what it was. Kind of just out there, leap of faith, not knowing what I was going to find. And I found my co-founders in Orbis Biosciences. It's a pharmaceutical manufacturing technology company. We started in 2008. And we sold it in 2020. And since then, I've been working with entrepreneurs, which is how the book came about, is I was repeating the same stories in a book as a way to scale yourself so that I could help more people. So, I'm excited that it's out in the world now. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, let's dive right into it. It's called Make Opportunity Happen. And so, I would imagine that through your journeys, it wasn't just you figuring out how to do all this kind of stuff. What were some of the biggest inflection points in your career that you write about in the book or otherwise that helped you figure out the entrepreneur journey?Maria Flynn: Yeah, so after you sell a company, you go into a period of reflection. And when I really thought, you know what is my value and what do I do uniquely well. It was around, you know, getting things done and ironically when I started to jot a few notes down, there was a book that came out that was about getting it done. I was like, oh no, somebody came out in the world with the book. And then when I looked at it, I was like, no, my book is very different. You need to know many things as an entrepreneur, and you don't have enough time. To read all these books. So, this book is kind of a guide to get fast track on certain things from hiring to firing, to building your board, to raising funding to strategy.And it's kind of a compilation of all the things I learned from getting things done as a kid, working in my parents' business, to tools that I learned when I was at Cerner, to what made Orbis successful. And it goes through different pillars. It's about execution, perseverance, adapting. And your support system and then your mindset is entwined in all that.Brian Ardinger: What I liked about the book, and I, and I got an advanced copy of it, it's almost like a textbook or a guidebook that you can kind of pick up at different times during your entrepreneurial journey. You really do a good job of providing kind of templated pieces. Let's say I'm trying to hire, or I'm trying to, you know, understand how to figure out the mentors that I should be working with, and you have little guidebooks or little templates that the entrepreneur can follow to help if nothing else just put some structure around what is oftentimes an unstructured practice of entrepreneurship. Maria Flynn: Yes. And so, you can think of it as a series of frameworks that, as you've been through the journey, a lot of this stuff seems like common sense. But when you're starting, like how do you start to think about some of these things?So that's what these little mini sections are meant to do, to give you a story, to give you some lessons learned that either I learned myself or other people helped me learn. And then a way to go forward and think about it for you. So, it's not just about theory, but it's how do you put something into practice.Brian Ardinger: You've had a chance to work with entrepreneurs in addition to being one yourself. What are some of the biggest pitfalls or misconceptions about entrepreneurship that you've seen out there? Maria Flynn: I think a lot of times people think it's super easy, particularly sometimes, with scientists and they think the hard part is the science and then all the business commercialization is the easy part.And so, I work with them to help them see people bring different strengths. And sometimes when you pair different magical people, you get something even more magical. And then sometimes you're so ingrained in the entrepreneurial learning that once you start to do something, we've made it sound so hard.So, kind of a fine balance of like, yes, you can do this, but know that nothing is as easy as you think it's going to be, or as quick as you think it's going to be. So just having the right tools and support system around you that you're going to be successful. And then knowing how to make adjustments. So a lot of times when we start on something, no idea is perfect from the beginning and how do you adjust with market data so that you are getting into something that's viable. Brian Ardinger: Yeah, I think that's one of the key points, especially early times with maybe a scientist or entrepreneur that kind of, I, I find this a lot with like software developers who become entrepreneurs. They know how to build things. They build things regardless of its, you know, wanted by the marketplace or how you sell that to the marketplace, and they kind of fall into that particular trap versus listening to customers and, and that discovery process that oftentimes you have to go through to actually figure out what business you are creating and why.You know, in your book you talk a lot about aligning stars and this metaphor of constellations. Talk about how you came up with that and, and how does that play out in what you've written? Maria Flynn:<...
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AI, VC, & Data Insights into Corporate Innovation with Thomas Thurston of Ducera Partners
Apr 23, 202400:27:55Tap to summarizeOn this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Thomas Thurston, Chief Technologist at Ducera Partners. Thomas and I talk about AI, venture capital, and some interesting data insights into what makes corporate innovation work or not work. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators. entrepreneurs and pioneering businesses.Interview Transcript with Thomas Thurston, Chief Technologist at Ducera PartnersBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Thomas Thurston. He's the chief technologist at Ducera Partners. He was introduced to us from a mutual friend at Amazon, Kate Niedermeyer, who said you have a driving interest in helping corporate innovators and investors be more successful by unlocking insights from data. So welcome to the show Thomas. Thomas Thurston: Hey, thanks. Great to be here. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you. As I've alluded to in the intro, you're a data scientist, a venture capitalist, focused on this particular space for a long time and a pretty varied background. So, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.Thomas Thurston: I like to think of myself as a data scientist who's been in the venture capital industry for almost 20 years now. The idea has always been how can you use. Data, AI, any, any quantitative tools to get insights into what's happening in private markets. So, what's happening with companies that aren't disposing a lot of data that are early stage or otherwise librarial shape environment. Today at Ducera Partners, it's an investment bank, where I'm Chief Technologist, as you mentioned. The way I would explain to Ducera which may be a little different in that it's kind of a startup investment bank. And the idea is we want to be disruptive in investment banking and really use technology as a backbone to do that.So, through AI, through analytics we build in-house, can we do that? Can we really be disruptive in industry that hasn't seen that much change in its business model for a hundred years? And since the bank was launched about six, seven years ago, we've done over $750 billion in transactions. We're averaging around a $100 billion a year in deals, and we've done that all with you know, somewhere around 50 people or so, although it's growing quickly. I really do think it's been the technology that's been able to enable us to really change the way we do things. So, I'm proud of that.My story really started a long time ago when I was at Intel in an incubation group just like everyone else. They had a new business incubator, about a dozen or so projects. We were one of those projects and we were starry-eyed, hoping to build a billion-dollar business for Intel. We got our blue badges ready to go every morning. And it's kind of what you might expect the first year or, so it was amazing. We were doing great, and then one year we were super strategic.We got this funding a few years later, we were no longer strategic, and it got shut down instead. Those decisions had nothing to do with us. So, one day someone up in top of the ivory tower thought it was optics for strategic, the next time it wasn't. And I'm pretty sure nobody was thinking about our project when that decision was made to shut it down and everything related to what we were doing.So, I think it just was demoralizing. You give your blood, sweat, and tears to a project. At end of the day, it didn't matter, right? Something completely random blew up your project. And I just remember looking at all these cubicles at Intel and just seeing all these projects just like ours, everyone's smart, everyone's doing their best, everyone's working hard to be innovative and just wondering, does this ever work?I mean, what? Because you know, at the beginning I thought we couldn't possibly fail. We've got this big, you know, like the best of both worlds. Big company, excitement with a startup. Couple years later, you're so grizzled and battle scarred. You're like, can this, this even possible? Because any of these projects ever work.And I wanted to know what percentage of the time projects like this succeed or fail at Intel. And of course, I realized that nobody actually knew. Because like every big company, things get started when shut down all over the place. And it's nobody's job to run around and track it and, and kind of make a database out of it.And if you think about the contrast at Intel, you can measure latency in picoseconds, right? They measure absolutely everything. But when it comes to all the money, I was finding in venture capital and M&A, and new product launches, kind of all this growth, money going to work, there just wasn't much in the way of quantitative metric.It was like every other company; people do their best deal by deal. You win some, you lose some and hey, and no one could say what percentage of the time it worked. So, I just decided to start studying it myself. Spent over a year collecting data on all the product launches, all the deals I could find, to see were any of the variable’s decision makers had in the beginning correlated at all with how those deals performed 5, 7, or even 10 years later.Brian Ardinger: Well, that's the first question I want to ask, because I think you're correct that most people don't track it or, or don't track it well. Why is it so hard to track new innovation and especially, you know, at the earliest stages? Is it because they're used to tracking different types of metrics or talk to me about that.Thomas Thurston: It's something they're all capable of doing. But also, yet I have yet to find a big company that's actually tracking this. Usually as you know, different groups are launching new innovations or products around the company. It's not centralized, so these projects kind of get funded. They come and go.Usually when they go, they go very quietly or they, the team gets reshuffled or something. So, there's no big announcement, and again, it's just no one's job to try to add them all up and track them. Everyone's doing it off in silos, and as you probably have experienced, there's a venture capital group. They're off doing God knows what in their thing and they're kind of behind some kind of closed door. The M&A group is behind another closed door doing something else. They have different stakeholders, constituency. It's not centralized. But if somebody can kind of put their arms and call it data and actually start to mine it. That's the downside. Brian Ardinger: And no one wants to talk about failure, especially with an existing company that's making money, et cetera. You know, the last thing you want to do is say, hey, my great idea was a bomb and now what do I do? Versus like in a startup world where it seems to be, if you fail, that's part of the natural process because there are things that fail when you start new things.Thomas Thurston: Yeah. In big companies, especially. We've...
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