(energetic upbeat music) - Welcome to Forum 360.

I'm Mark Welfley your host today.

Thank you for joining us for our global outlook with the local view.

Can you think of three entrepreneurs that you admire?

How about Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Oprah Winfrey?

Before these entrepreneurs and countless others became billionaires that changed the world, they were ordinary people, with an ethic for hard work, a relentless drive, and a dream.

They also were fortunate to have one other asset on their road to success, a mentor.

Chances are these entrepreneurs would not have become who they are without the guidance, wisdom, words of encouragement and hard, honest truth of a mentor.

How many would-be entrepreneurs are there who might be something greater than they are if only they were mentored?

My guest today Michael Goldberg has been in the middle of mentoring young entrepreneurs for more than two decades.

Goldberg is also the executive director of the Veale Institute for Entrepreneurship at Case Western Reserve University.

Goldberg has also created a massive open online course called Beyond Silicon Valley: Growing Entrepreneurship in Transitioning Economies which has attracted more than 175,000 students from 190 countries and received multiple awards.

Goldberg is the author of Beyond Silicon Valley: How One Online Course Helped Support Global Entrepreneurs.

He has conducted seminars on behalf of the US Department of State, on entrepreneurship in 28 countries, across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe.

He is here today with us, welcome, Michael.

- Thanks, Mark.

- Great to have you here.

So tell us a little bit about your background, how you got into teaching and specifically into entrepreneurship with young kids.

- Sure, no, it's great to be here.

So I'm a Northeast Ohio native, I grew up in Shaker.

I did my undergraduate at Princeton University and then had the opportunity to live for three years after Princeton running voter education projects and teaching in advance of South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994.

So working in the nonprofit space.

Then came back to the US and did a joint MBA, master's in business administration and masters in international affairs at Wharton University, Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins.

And then this was sort of the emergence of the first internet wave you and I are old enough to remember, using our phone line to connect to the internet.

Our kids do not have that privilege of slow internet connectivity, but I worked for AOL, America Online, which was the leader at that point, their dial up internet connectivity.

I worked in a group that did international joint ventures and a really interesting time to be there before we merged with Time Warner and then I ultimately left the company and got into venture capitals, so venture capital, venture capitalists invest in startup companies, and I had done work at AOL and at Microsoft evaluating investments and acquisitions and startups, and then partnered with someone in Israel to do that in the medical space.

So then that brought me back to Cleveland, as we both know.

And your viewers know Cleveland is a hotbed of medical innovation in particular, and this fund that I was working on was focused on Israeli med device companies that had nice synergies with our medical institutions here in Cleveland.

And through that started teaching first part-time at Case Western Reserve University, teaching a venture capital class and eventually taking a full-time teaching position there, and then as you alluded to in my intro, I now run our Veale Institute for Entrepreneurship on our campus on both teaching and running an entrepreneurship institute here in Cleveland.

- Great, do you only work with student entrepreneurs at Case or does your work extend beyond Case Western Reserve and the students there?

- So at Case Western Reserve we have a focus on student entrepreneurs.

So undergrad and grad students, we also work with alumni that are starting companies.

We also work with faculty and staff, many of them are working on, particularly our faculty may have gotten a research grant to pursue particularly in engineering and in healthcare to look at a particular, you know, innovation.

And then we are working with them as they look to help commercialize and create new ventures out of that.

But lastly, the community piece, so I've done a lot of work both sort of in the city of Cleveland as a mentor, and then through this online class which I developed, getting to know people from around the world.

So when people ask for help, whether it's a current student somebody in the community or somebody via LinkedIn from overseas, I try to be as helpful as I can.

- Excellent, so how do you match students with mentors, whether in the business world or the faith community, or just wherever, how does that connection start and work?

- Yeah, I think mentoring, as you alluded to in the opening is critically important.

And I think many of our most successful entrepreneurs when they're interviewed about their journey, will often point to moments along the way where someone helped them.

You know, in the case of working at a university, one place that we start is with our alum.

So we've got amazing alumni at Case Western Reserve but whether your tapping into an alumni base of a high school, public, private high school, a university, these networks, that form, and the allegiances that form to the institutions or schools that folks went to.

So we have a number of people, not surprisingly who are graduates of Case Western Reserve that wanna give back, particularly to our university.

- Okay.

- So a lot of the mentoring that we do at Case, not exclusively, but often ties into alums, some of whom may be here in Northeast Ohio but they may be in other places that wanna give back.

When we look at the students, different students, have different needs in terms of mentoring.

We may have engineering students that are interested in starting a business, maybe don't have that background.

You might have business students that are looking into getting into something and maybe do product development on the engineering side of things.

We have amazing nursing students at Case Western Reserve University that are thinking broadly about starting businesses.

So it's a little bit of sort of a dot connecting or sort of connecting the dots as we think about what type of mentor or mentors might be most appropriate in this case for us student entrepreneurs.

- Do you set them up with interviews, students and the mentor kind of talk to each other for half an hour and, you know, find points of connection or do you handpick the mentors?

How does that connection continue?

- It's a little bit of all of the above.

I mean, we've experimented things like speed dating, which you know, maybe works on the dating side.

You and I wouldn't know.

But we apply that in the mentoring state, so we've done events back pre pandemic, we have a wonderful makerspace facility called Think Box on our campus.

And we had tables of folks and we'd literally sort of organized it like someone may be at a site where they're, you know, interviewing a prospective date.

That's a good way, because I think what we also find is like that what the spark that may happen between a mentor and a student entrepreneur, like it might not always be obvious.

I mean, sometimes you might know, hey, a particular mentor or alum is looking to mentor a really bright maybe a young female entrepreneur sort of on our campuses.

Sometimes you can pair up by background what they studied but sometimes you just never know.

And I think that, you know, there's sort of a wonderful thing that happens somewhat organically where someone is talking about something they're doing, and it's like, oh my, my kid does that.

Or, I mean, they might have a knowledge.

So oftentimes like just a glance at a business idea or somebody's CV, doesn't reveal the full breadth of their background.

So sometimes those kinds of things where you just do this sort of speed mentoring can really work to get them in front of multiple people, versus just saying, "Hey, Mark you and I are gonna sort of sit for an hour and a half an hour," and maybe there's not really a deep connection around the idea or the experience.

- Yeah, thanks.

Can you share with me a success story or just a story, perhaps starting with a student came to you with an idea, and then you don't have to name the students, but like, what was the idea, you know, what was the speed dating situation like?

And where's that product now?

And like, take me, through a process, I'm interested here.

- I think one of the exciting things that's happening not just at university campuses, but also at high schools is there's a tremendous number of programs and support for students that want to try an entrepreneurial idea.

So it could be in a class or it could be through something outside of the classroom extracurricular.

So we have a program at Case Western Reserve.

It's actually part of something called the Great Lakes Energy Institute.

And that is a program where they bring in, they call they're called Think Energy Fellows.

And these are students at the university, graduate or undergraduate with ideas.

So there were two students, Prince Lucas, or Prince Ghoshe and Lucas Fridman which I mushed their names together.

Princeton Lucas, they took an idea originally through the Think Energy Fellowship program called Boundary Labs that actually had to do with shop floor efficiency.

And, you know, one of the things that we really try to do both through that program and other folks at Think Box that help them, nonprofit organizations in Cleveland called Magnet which works with physical product entrepreneurs.

So there were a lot of opportunities for this student team to get in front of a number of other folks to sort of test some of their concepts.

Fast forward these students upon graduation applied to an accelerator called Y Combinator which is probably the leading accelerator program in the world, Dropbox, Airbnb, several other companies entrepreneurs have sort of come out of that program, and our students were accepted.

Now, they were graduates at this point.

They had unfortunately started the program in the middle of the pandemic, so they actually flew out to San Francisco for the program at the beginning of 2020, finished the program sort of online.

But it's an interesting example of like, you can literally go from a program at the university like the Think Energy Fellows where you're sort of having an idea for something, but it's not a real business to all of a sudden you're at demo day at Y Combinator.

Not all of our student journeys are like that.

And frankly, most of the student ideas whether they're developed in the classroom or extracurricularly, don't make it most entrepreneurship ideas sort of end up on the cutting room floor somewhere.

But that experience of taking it through and every once in a while you see something that actually works out.

- I'm interested in hearing about, and we've heard of score the retired organizational retired professionals that generously give their time to mentor students.

But if there's somebody out watching today who has some skills and some interest and wants to serve their community in some form of mentoring or mentorship, how do you recommend they get started?

What can they do, how do they engage?

- Well, I think, you know, universities are a good place to start, so, and we've got wonderful array of universities here in Northeast Ohio.

Many of them have someone who does exactly what I do at their universities, so Kent State, University of Akron, Ashland, Cleveland State, John Carroll among others have really vibrant entrepreneurship centers or institutes.

So those individuals that run those institutes would be a good place to start.

Some of the alum would say, "Hey, I wanna help."

Or even if you're not an alum, let's say you're, you know you've lived and worked and studied in other places but you wanna get involved with Case Western Reserve or Cleveland State.

So that is one good place to start, you know, LinkedIn, which it's funny, like my kids, their, their social media use is not, they're not super excited about LinkedIn, but like, I think for folks like us, you know, working professionals, students and even folks at the back end of their career, I often find that that connectivity on LinkedIn is a really interesting way.

Both, you know, I use it all the time to sort of connect with mentors and others to speak, our students are using it, but it's also an opportunity to actually for those that wanna get back involved.

There are LinkedIn groups, like we have a couple of different LinkedIn groups for our alums.

And oftentimes you may see programming.

I mean, what's happened very recently with us is because we're doing so much online programming sort of you know, during the pandemic and we're opening these things up for our alumni.

So one really nice way for alumni to sort of connect back into, you know, in our case entrepreneurial programs is to join a program.

You know, most of these things are free.

So that's a nice way to connect, you'd hear a speaker.

You might hear a professor and you start to do things, you might not necessarily be sitting in Hudson or Cleveland or somewhere else.

You could be out in San Francisco or Honolulu or Cape Town but connecting with our alumni as part of our program is another way that folks can reconnect.

- We're talking to Michael Goldberg.

Michael Goldberg is the executive director of the Veale Institute for Entrepreneurship at Case Western Reserve University.

And we're talking about mentoring young entrepreneurs.

So my next question is about students mentoring others.

Do you ever see like one student with a basket of skills and an idea kind of mentoring working with, is there a lot of interconnection inner communication between students or is this is the mentorship primarily, you know, an older adult working with who's been there and done that, working with a young college student that's just getting their feet wet with the idea.

- No, absolutely.

I mean, Startup Weekends which are really cool opportunities like Cleveland State just had one called StartupVikes that we encouraged some of our students from Case Western Reserve to go to, are ways for students over a very short weekend to work on the idea.

So what happens in some of those cases are let, let's say that we were both showing up at a Startup Weekend.

I may not necessarily even have an idea, but you're been noodling around with an idea.

So the Startup Weekend format is you sort of show up, you would pitch an idea, I would pitch an idea and then teams form around, it's like, oh, Mark's got an interesting idea, I'd like to spend some time working around.

And I think what's very interesting even for students is like, not surprisingly, the many of them have experience in different disciplines.

So you may have a computer science student that's gifted in doing mock-ups of a particular app, you may have a business student, or an accounting student, or a engineering student.

So I think that, you know, mentoring, sharing of knowledge particularly at events like Startup Weekend can really work really well.

- It sounds really interesting, a lot of high energy... - Oh yeah for sure.

- What skill do you find is most lacking in an entrepreneur at the college level where you interact?

- Yeah, I mean, there's actually, Angela Duckworth has a book on grit that came out recently.

Like this, oftentimes people are sorta like, what is the secret sauce that sort of makes a great entrepreneur and this element of grit and the willingness to persevere, I do find, and this is no knock on my students or any students but like students are often very busy, they're doing a variety of different things.

Like I think to be a successful entrepreneur you have to keep hammering away at the idea, continuing to talk to potential customers, getting feedback, doing what we call customer discovery.

And I think sometimes students, they lose a little energy in that process, you know, and particularly like if you're talking to people of our age, like we're not always checking emails or texts, but like we do pick up the phone and like one of the things that I'm often telling my students as they try to get this customer feedback 'cause they'll say, oh, I sent an email to someone.

I was trying to get feedback on something I got.

And it's like, well, did you call them?

And it's like, I mean, you might as well have asked them did they, you know, some other unsaved, you know it was like, this is, you know, older people use the phone.

So I think that kind of, 'cause not even so much about a work ethic, 'cause I think our students are, do work hard but it's you got to be creative to get feedback.

- Sure, changing gears and looking at the entrepreneur concept internationally, compare contrast entrepreneurs from say the United States and how they think and behave versus say those from Israel or the Middle East or what's the entrepreneur scene like across the world since you've traveled and... - Well, no, I'm happy.

I mean then this course, which you mentioned at the beginning of the intro, which was called Beyond Silicon valley, which actually was based on a workshop I did when I lived in Vietnam with my family where the Vietnamese government was interested in getting perspective about how they could become more like Silicon Valley.

And I was like, actually, you guys look more like Cleveland than you do Silicon Valley because of really the role of government philanthropy in the private sector and coming together.

There are very few, I mean at this point, San Francisco and Silicon Valley is a private capital driven and led entrepreneurial ecosystem in places like Cleveland, Vietnam, many places in Europe, I've traveled Latin America, Africa, you have government philanthropy in some way and the private sector coming together, because it's hard, everybody recognizes that you need, as we think about particularly like tech-based startups like that have high growth potential.

So everybody wants the next Google or Facebook or LinkedIn in their community, but it's hard to enable that.

So you see, you know, a variety of programs.

I mean, oftentimes unfortunately on the government side it's not always the most creative, you know, I mean, government officials are not typically entrepreneurs.

So setting up programs sometimes doesn't necessarily enable.

We've actually been really lucky in the state of Ohio, the Ohio third frontier program which requires a matching money.

So the idea that if you want government money you've got to bring at least that amount of money in match from an outside source.

So I think we've actually done some nice things in Ohio that are models for other parts of the country and the world.

But it's a slog, I mean, it's hard to get, I mean, everybody wants, you know, high growth, big unicorn exits, but it's hard to do it.

- Sure, is there a type of student or a type of person that makes a good entrepreneur, I mean, can you talk to someone for five minutes and say, you know, you're gonna make a great entrepreneur.

They may not have an idea, but you think you've got it or can the entrepreneur, the student just kind of come out of nowhere to say, "Hey, you know, I've got a great idea and I've got the grit to back it up and make it real."

- Yeah, I think part of it's timing.

I feel like with a lot of my students, given student debt, given a whole variety of factors, like they often time don't necessarily wanna take that leap because it can be very scary.

And like frankly, when you're looking at, you know a salary and being able to get experience like many of our students are like, even the ones that I think have that probably secret sauce to be successful as an entrepreneur are often afraid to make the leap.

Oftentimes they don't necessarily have the ideas and they may, you know, be passionate about the idea of starting something but they don't have that particular idea.

So I think one of the things that I enjoy doing at a college level is I get, like, I teach a entrepreneurial strategy, it's basically like an intro class.

I have a lot of engineering students.

A lot of them take it their senior year, they're like, I've already taken a job, but you hope that you can sort of plant a seed of interest that maybe at some point, they come back to this at a future time when they wanna take more risks.

'Cause I do feel like the risk tolerance piece is often what drives students to make the leap, in addition to some probably personality characteristics.

- In doing research for this interview, it seemed that the 900 pound gorilla in the room between a mentor and a mentee is the hard truth that the mentor delivers sometimes some very hard truth about either the product idea, the personality of the entrepreneur, and that there seems, and can be an impasse for a period of time and perhaps a long period of time.

Have you seen that play out, a mentor giving hard truth to a student?

And are there any kind of you could call it secret sauce, but anything that can squeak the oil on the right gears to make that relationship work when the hard truth does come out?

- Yeah, I think the best mentors are the ones that share unfiltered hard truth.

I mean, it doesn't matter if we're raising our kids or talking to students.

I mean, there are perhaps some strategies to get, you know in this case young entrepreneurs to listen.

I mean, I have seen cases where the hard truth is so unfiltered and so harsh that students can take it the wrong way.

I mean, there is a little bit, I think, generationally of young people, these days being told how great they are at everything, right?

So we don't love, you know, giving negative feedback, even as parents like we're, you know we all think our kids are so great.

So I think it's hard and perhaps harder given some of the dynamics today because you know, giving hard truth may not wanna be received.

I mean, I think that there's, for the good student entrepreneurs, they get that they're probably need help.

You know, so I mean, I typically see it being, you know, when it's done and when the feedback is based on experience or other insights that are useful.

I mean, I had seen situations, it's funny, we were talking about mentoring, like even a Startup Weekend, sometimes my students feel like over mentored.

So like I'm at a StartupVikes event, like they were trying to get their work done, like to do all this customer discovery and they constantly had these mentors floating around and like, so there is a moment where you're like, okay, mentor, like actually I need, I appreciate what you're saying but like, I need to do the work that you told me to do before we can talk again.

So there are times when it's like maybe too much mentoring.

- The last 30 seconds or so that we have, can you give me a brief immediate reaction to whether entrepreneurism, mentorship that whole concept has changed during the pandemic?

- I mean, I think this resilience piece, like because things have been so challenging and you know in desperate times come some really interesting ideas.

So I'm pretty bullish on what I'm seeing in the startup world.

I mean, in the markets, both on the public side and private markets like venture capital remain optimistic.

So I'm hopeful that there's gonna be a lot of creative ideas that come out of this.

- Good to know that entrepreneurship is still alive and well.

- Hope so.

- Yeah, you can't place a value on the wisdom of someone who has been there and done that, or someone who can help get more done faster or help solve a problem, or validate an idea, or even at times just be a good listener.

These are a few of the many benefits of mentors.

Mentors come in all shapes and sizes and one size, as Michael has mentioned today, it doesn't fit all.

Mentorship is a great way to give back to your community and there is no shortage of entrepreneurs ready to soak up your wisdom.

I would like to thank Michael Goldberg for mentoring us through the world of mentoring entrepreneurs today.

A shout out to my Forum 360 mentor, Leslie Ungar.

And with that, we'll turn out the lights on this show but keep our minds open until next time on Forum 360.

Thanks for joining us.

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