Erik Hanberg Reflection

I found the guest speaker Erik Hanberg to be very interesting and insightful. Some of the topics that he covered where, the entrepreneur mind set, it is both luck and skill, and how he started his own.

The entrepreneur mind set he talked about was that you have to think about not making a salary and to to be limitless in terms of you growth. When working at a job with a salary there is only a set amount of money you can make, since you can work only so many hours. When you have your own business you can make as much as possible because you get payed by the amount you sell and not necessary on the amount you work. Therefore you can make as much as possible. This is one part to the mind set of an entrepreneur because although it is an attractive thought it can also be freighting. Since you could go months without being paid or hardly make anything for a certain amount of time. It involves having this aspect of getting over fear and jumping into the business rather than letting fear consume you.

Being a successful entrepreneur involves both luck and skill. Skill is needed in order to get it going and to get noticed, but to be a world sensation you need to have some kind of luck on your side so that you can reach that point. Erik gave the example of Bill Gates in one of the books he read where it talked about the skill and luck of Bill Gates life. Gates Skill came from the fact that he learned a lot about system design and tinkered with the new technologies in high school. He also had access to locations where he could get more information like at the University of Washington. The luck came from the fact that he was born into a well off family so he could focus on higher education, and his parents taught him that he could do whatever he wanted to do and had the power to do it. Also raised at an important time in order to launch the technology. All these factors is what made him a successful entrepreneur, and the message being that with hard work, and a little luck, anyone can become successful.

Erik started his own business, or his wife did with Side x Side. Where she was a graphic designer who got enough business on her own that she could start her own business and use that as income. This inspired Erik to start his own, his first being his own publishing website for his books. Erik started with a gag website with a pun of "Lefties for Obama" and it took off. So it then gave him the idea to publish through a his own website for his books if their was enough interest. He got that interest very quickly with an email list and eventually published his book and made money off of it. He then used that experience to help other authors publish their books and makes a living off that as well.

Overall I thought Erik had a lot of good things to say about being an entrepreneur and what obstacles one has to face on the road to become an entrepreneur. I especially found it interesting on how he marketed his products, as some people asked in class; as I have published apps before an was unsure if online advertising was worth it or not.