What sparked your entrepreneurial journey?

Question

Ed Baker · Answer

The question is what sparked your entrepreneurial journey? My answer to this question is a bit different depending on which of my three entrepreneurial journeys you are referring to. My very first startup was called datesite.com. It was a crush site that I built while I was in college at Harvard where you could enter email addresses of people you had a crush on and see if you matched with other people at your school. I think the main thing that sparked this initial journey was the fact that I was too shy to ask anyone out myself and I thought this product would be useful for students at Harvard and it turned out within one week a quarter of all of the students at Harvard had used it. My second startup was called Friendly, friend.ly. It was a social question-and-answer website where you could ask people questions about themselves and answer questions about yourself and it used questions and answers or a Q&A as an icebreaker as a way to meet new people. So Friendly was actually another dating site in disguise because it was really a way to meet new people. I think the thing that sparked this entrepreneurial journey was the fact that I was living in Silicon Valley and I had just graduated from Stanford Business School and everyone was starting companies and I felt like I should start a company too. Silicon Valley was a great place to start a new company and there were a lot of other entrepreneurial people around me and it was a really exciting time back in 2008 to be starting a new company. My third entrepreneurial journey is building AnyQuestion, the app that we are on right now. And the thing that sparked this entrepreneurial journey of building AnyQuestion was really the fact that I thought of a product I would want to use myself that hadn't yet been built when I was training for Ironman triathlons. I wanted to be able to ask the best triathletes in the world questions and learn from them and I was surprised that there wasn't a platform where I could do that. And that is why I started to build AnyQuestion in order to build a platform where people can ask the best experts in the world questions and learn from them. And it has since then become more of a place where anyone can share their knowledge, especially their tacit knowledge. So in summary, my first startup, Datesite.com, was based on building a product that I wanted to use myself, that I felt addressed a need that I had and that others had. And my current startup, AnyQuestion, also I have built in order to address a need that I have that I think others have as well. With Friendly, the inspiration was more just being in Silicon Valley and being around a lot of other people who are starting companies and feeling like that would be an exciting thing to do. So those are the things that have sparked my three entrepreneurial journeys.

Ryan Durkin · Answer

What sparked your entrepreneurial journey? There's a few key people in my life that I know had a big impact on me wanting to be a founder and start companies. At this point, I've started five different companies and it's what I love to do the most. First, my mom and my dad were both business people and while they didn't start their own companies, they worked for a company called Market Basket that really valued hard work and loyalty. Knowing that they were business people growing up made me want to be a business person. The second person is my stepdad Dave. He owns his own business and has for 30 plus years. He recently retired. His company making gravestones and monuments for people showed me that you could go and own your own business starting out. Third, a mentor of mine growing up was a man named Mr. Cartolano. He owns a ticketing agency in Boston where he sells tickets to sports events like the Red Sox and Celtics and concerts. He's owned the company his entire life. Fourth was a man named Bob Anson who during my sophomore year of college I interned for. He owned his own company called Mass Innovation in real estate buying abandoned mill buildings and rehabbing them. I'll never forget him asking me one day on a walk around an empty mill building asking me what I thought should go into each part of the mill. I was 19 at the time and I couldn't believe that a person of that prominence was caring about my opinions as to what this empty mill building could become. In the fifth group of people is I had a lot of positive male role models growing up on the golf course at Indian Ridge. From my bosses Mike Miller and Scott Ganey to all of the entrepreneurs I caddied for like Chris Doherty. Chris owned his own real estate company as well. A lot of the people I've gravitated towards in my life are entrepreneurs and people who have run their own companies. While I was on the golf course caddying and working in the bag room I would often hear stories from these men about them building their businesses and finding opportunities. Later in life I would meet thousands of founders in Boston and New York and Silicon Valley and I feel most comfortable with other founders and business owners. It's my life's passion.

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"What sparked your entrepreneurial journey?"