Many people have different journeys when starting a business. Sometimes we're lucky and the first business that we have, the business is a success. Sometimes though, these ventures fail but the lessons we learn can be quite beneficial. That is exactly the story of what happened with my guest, Bruce Thompson from Nerra.
As Bruce said, "...I did another startup before this start up. So I learned a lot from the first startup, which failed from a commercial point of view. But it gave me a lot of learning going into this one, and I had a huge amount of valuable experience from the first one...the problem was that I was essentially acting as a middleman, and I wasn't really developing value for myself. So that was a fundamental learning that I got from that experience, which I definitely paid attention to with the next startup...
"I think a lot of this stuff kind of has to be experiential. You have to kind of learn from your mistakes. I think prior to the first one, I would have spent a fair bit of time thinking, what am I going to do? But until you've had the experience of a startup, I think it's perhaps a confidence thing. You don't really know what you might be able to achieve. So perhaps it limits your thinking in terms of what you're prepared to have a go at. So going into the next startup, I didn't really hesitate. I just chose something that I thought would be really interesting and just went for that. So I don't know. I mean, maybe it's a case of different strokes for different folks, and perhaps I'm sure it also depends on the sort of support that you have around you. If you're in your first year at University and you meet a bunch of guys who have very like-minded thinking around some specific opportunity that you identify, then I think that's a lot easier. You've got a lot more skills to leverage and probably a whole infrastructure of support from the University to support you.
"But if you're going out on your own and you haven't really had a lot of experience in the field that you're embarking upon, which I've never had, I'm quite adventurous in that respect, then things are quite challenging. But having said that, I think it's not necessarily a disadvantage to have no experience in the field that you're looking to pursue, because I think you can have very blinked thinking if you've sort of had a career in a specific field. And that can be limiting."
Listen in and see how Bruce used lessons that he learned from his first venture to help him through the journey as he started working with the eBike industry and how having the right mentors and supporters in his corner along with an incubator program were a great benefit to his journey.
About Bruce: Bruce Thompson grew up on a farm in a sparsely populated and beautiful region of NZ... as he says, "it was an idyllic childhood." He dropped out of University after four years of switching majors. He then began a career in Australia’s offshore oil & gas industry; that took him around the world. Bruce’s current goal is to see his start-up, Nerra, reach fruition and achieve commercial success. With Nerra, Bruce is aiming to re-think ebikes through a more sustainable and holistic approach. Bruce once received a Police Certificate Of Appreciation for tackling an offender who was smashing shop windows. As a start-up founder, Bruce doesn't have much free time, but he enjoys music, outdoors, reading, technology, rock climbing, mountain biking, and meditation.
Connect with Bruce on LinkedIn or visit him online at nerra.net.
#startup #ebike #sustainability #environment #commuting #safety #innovation #incubator #mentorship #coaching
