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About Heidi Neck

Heidi Neck, Ph.D., is the Jeffry Timmons Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Babson College and Academic Director of the Babson Academy. A global leader in entrepreneurship education, she pioneers innovative teaching methods that shape how entrepreneurship is taught worldwide. She leads Babson’s Symposia for Entrepreneurship Educators (SEE) programs, empowering faculty to teach entrepreneurship “entrepreneurially.” Neck started the Babson Collaborative, fostering a global network of universities committed to advancing entrepreneurship education.

An award-winning educator, she has twice been name entrepreneurship educator of the year.  Her research focuses on entrepreneurial mindset and pedagogy, resulting in six books and 45+ scholarly works. Her widely adopted textbook, Entrepreneurship: The Practice & Mindset, has earned multiple accolades.

Beyond academia, Neck is a sought-after speaker and educator, regularly delivering keynotes emphasizing that organizations are not entrepreneurial but people are. Her ability to translate complex concepts into practical, actionable insights has made her a respected voice in the field. She also co-founded VentureBlocks, an entrepreneurship education technology company, and achieved a successful exit with FlowDog, a canine aquatic fitness and rehabilitation center near Boston.

Episode Highlights

Links and resources

• Babson College: Leading US educational institution on entrepreneurship
• Books by Heidi Neck
• Lean Startup: A popular approach to building viable startups, pioneered by Eric Ries and Steven Blank
• Design Thinking: A methodology to creatively approach problem solving
• Business Model Canvas: A popular framework to think through and develop the critical building blocks of a company’s business model
• Lean Canvas: A simplified version of the Business Model Canvas created by Ash Maurya, more suited for startups
• Miro: A software program to create diagrams and charts
• Effectuation: An explanation and framework that explains how successful entrepreneurs create their ventures, based on original research by Prof. Saras Sarasvathy

Interview Transcript

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Hello, Heidi. We’re so happy to welcome you to Invisible Ink today. Thank you for being on here.

Heidi Neck: Thanks, Shubha. for having me.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: You are one of my absolute favorite experts and authors on entrepreneurship. I have to tell you that I love the book. I’m still kind of working my way through it. it’s really good.

I know that you’ve taught entrepreneurship for many years – you’ve studied it, you’ve written books about it.  What brought you to teaching entrepreneurship in the first place?

Heidi Neck: I really haven’t been a goal setter, so I wish I could say this is what I planned and this is exactly how it was supposed to turn out. But I had narrowed it down to I was either going to be a corporate trainer or a professor, so I thought the professor would be a little bit more interesting.

So I decided to go that route. But then when you asked me how did I got to entrepreneurship – well, prior to going back to grad school, I was working for a really large corporation and I was rather bored. And so I really kept reading and was very interested in all of these startups and high growth companies.

And I think when I finally did get back to my Ph.D, I realized that what I wanted to study was around entrepreneurship and high growth companies.

Surprising Insights in Entrepreneurship

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: From all the work that you’ve done, is there like one thing that’s really surprising or counterintuitive that you’ve discovered through your research all these years?

Heidi Neck: I think, and this has been an evolution, I think one thing is that the business plan is completely outdated as a tool in entrepreneurship. You don’t see it a lot of times unless you’re probably going to a bank or the SBA that’s requiring such a business plan. I think that’s been really surprising to me as that’s kind of fallen out of favor and I completely agree.

I was one of the early ones. I think the second thing though is that entrepreneurship, in my opinion, requires students. People, human beings, to be self-confident and belief themselves that they can actually do this. And I think that’s never been taught, that’s never really been brought up. But I think underlying everything that I’ve seen over the years, belief in self is the one thing that kind of guides entrepreneurs to action.

Not necessarily belief in the idea, but definitely belief in self.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: That is actually a very interesting point and one that I’d love to dig into for a second. That’s an issue we know for women, right? And it’s an issue, even more so when you’re a woman in entrepreneurship. I’m just curious if you’ve discovered any actionable insights or anything that helps build that belief in self when you’re already battling so much uncertainty and am I even a fool for trying to do this?

What has worked and what have you seen, being, being effective?

Heidi Neck: I mean, this may sound elementary, but simply talking about it, I think we all suffer from imposter syndrome. And I bet if you walked up to a woman at a cocktail party and say, I suffer from imposter syndrome, I bet she’ll say, “So do I”. I think we all do, and I’ve encountered a lot of men lately who are talking about their own imposter syndrome.

So I think step one is admitting it and talking about it and having a network of support. And I think that’s why you’re seeing lots of different groups and networks for women entrepreneurs.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Excellent. So I’ll keep that in mind. 

Current Trends in Entrepreneurship

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: I want to start off with a survey of what’s going on in the world today.  Entrepreneurship is super popular. There are incubators and programs everywhere. Where do you see the gaps or the things that can, trap or, or guide entrepreneurs astray in terms of popular entrepreneurship, beliefs, approaches, and methods?

Heidi Neck: I think it’s more of space. And what I mean by that is a lot of programs, either in higher end or accelerators or incubators, are all working on that startup space. But one thing that I see absent and probably more important than even the startup space is the scale up space. So I don’t think we have enough methodologies or enough places that provide kind of a psychological safety net, so to speak, where ventures can scale up.

I don’t think we know enough about that. It’s also very context dependent, right? I think there’s steps that we can go through with a startup, but a scale up is very different.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: And has your research or your experience with startups pointed out or thrown any breadcrumbs that we can pick up on and start to build off of?

Heidi Neck: Well, I think it’s a matter of, it’s almost an entirely different field of study because when you’re in that scale up phase, you have to have a different perspective on people, on human resources. You have to have a different perspective on processes and how you build those into the organization. And you also have to have a different perspective around resources from a capital perspective.

So we always worry about people, process and cash flow, right? Cash is king or queen, and we have to watch that more closely as we scale up.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So if you’re a venture funded firm, I am assuming, I’m kind of translating what you said, that the scale up problem becomes really vivid, in that phase when you are in a Series A or so. But only a very small percentage of firms ever get funded by VCs. But clearly all startups, or at least most startups, have the ambition to scale.

My question is, outside of support system that VCs provide as a ready-made kind of turnkey solution, say, “Hey, here’s all the things we need to do to scale”. What can somebody who’s outside that system do? Have you seen things that have helped with that or anything that, can support a non VC funded firm to address the scale up problem?

Heidi Neck: I think you have to be cognizant of when you’re kind of entering this high growth phase, and sometimes it’s easier to identify in hindsight than when you’re in it. If you think about a life cycle of a firm, you don’t know when the startup ends and the scale up starts, but when you look back and you tell the story of your business, you can definitely see that line of demarcation.  So it’s really trying to figure out one, when are we in it and when do we really need to start building in better human resources, better processes, and focusing more on how do we actually get more cash flow in order to scale up. Without the venture capital. ’cause you’re right, so many don’t get venture capital.

And I think sometimes growth companies think they will get it, but even those don’t get it. So how do we grow with what we have?

Babson’s Entrepreneurial Methodology

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: It’s fascinating. Which brings me to my next question, which is, at Babson and elsewhere you have pioneered a different method of approaching entrepreneurship and experiential and reflective method. Can you just give us an overview of how you and Babson believe entrepreneurship should be approached?

Heidi Neck: So we approach entrepreneurship as a methodology for entrepreneurs of all kinds, and that methodology ultimately will produce entrepreneurial leaders. And the methodology is firmly grounded in a few different things. So first of all, we call our methodology Entrepreneurial Thought and Action, or ET&A for short.

So you may hear me use the acronym just because of, of habit. ET&A  is a mashup of I think, design thinking, lean startup and effectuation theory, and we kind of combine all those things in a methodology that helps students to think and act entrepreneurially regardless of what they do. So it works in a startup, it works inside a corporation, and it works for a nonprofit – any organization that you can think of.

And the reason why I say any organization is because organizations are not entrepreneurial. People are. So we have to focus on ourselves. How are we going to think and act entrepreneurially?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So if you had to describe in a nutshell, what is the essence of this ET&A method, how would you describe it?

Heidi Neck: I’ll start with the tagline. The tagline is, “Act, learn, build” in that order so we don’t learn and then take action. We actually act our way into learning because we’re dealing with conditions of extreme uncertainty. So at the end of the day, it’s how do we not only navigate, but excel under conditions of extreme uncertainty?

And then there are about six different components to it. But before we get into that, just remember that the tagline is, “Act, learn, build”, and it’s in that order.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: There’s a question right here, right? There’s a little bit of a tension here because time is the most precious thing for any entrepreneur, right? It’s not money. And I can waste, I can tell you from personal experience, it’s easy to waste a lot of time pursuing things that don’t lead anywhere, and you don’t know that they’re not going to lead anywhere.

So how do you, in using this method, balance attention, and where do you start acting? On the one hand, yeah, you have to act first and then learn. But on the other hand. there’s  “spend two hours sharpening the acts and one hour cutting”, as the saying goes. So where is that balance and how do you take intelligent, thoughtful action without just saying, “Hey, tomorrow I’m going to go do XYZ”.

Is there a basis for that? 

Heidi Neck: Yes. Well, first of all, I think I’d rather have loss of time than loss of money, so you don’t want to jump into something too quickly with my financial resources or someone else’s financial resources without taking a lot of action before. So don’t assume when I say action that means start the business.

So action is all about all that other stuff that you’re doing to either validate that the idea has legs or not. And validation and really all the stuff around validation comes from lean startup or design thinking. Getting the voice of customer. If we know we have a problem that we can solve, that a lot of people are willing to pay for it.

If we can solve that problem, then we start to have legs, and then we can start thinking about, well, maybe this is investible, or maybe we can get resources from X, Y, or Z. But the concept of entrepreneurial thought in action is like all that fuzzy front end stuff before you get to startup.

Applying the ET&A Method

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So can you just walk me through a hypothetical, let’s say I come to you with an idea, I have a world changing idea for something and I don’t know where it’s going to go. How would I deploy this ET&A method and how would I balance the thought piece and the action piece? Can you just give us like a fast forward scenario?

Heidi Neck: Absolutely. So ET&A is a methodology, so there’s no starting place, but I’m going to just kind of role play this with you. And let’s just say you’re, I’m assuming you’re a student and you’re coming into my office and you think, you’re like, “Heidi, I have the best idea ever”. Okay. And so let’s think, what could that idea be that we could play with?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Yeah. I’ll just give you an idea. Let’s do AI enabled logistics  management or something like that where you have a very fragmented market. It’s hard to match up the information systems and therefore everybody’s losing a lot of time and money, and I want to solve that problem.

Heidi Neck: So let’s call that AI Logit, just for, to have a word. Alright, so you have this idea for AI Logit.  My first question that I’m going to ask you is, why do you want to do this business?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Because I worked in the business before I came to business school, and I used to do a lot of excel spreadsheet work, and it used to drive me crazy’s a totally waste of time. And I thought there had to be a better way to do it.

Heidi Neck: Okay. But why you?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Because I know the business and I feel like I don’t know everything about it, but I know enough to know what a good solution would look like. And I feel optimistic that if I can figure it out somehow, I can put all the other pieces together that I don’t have today.

Heidi Neck: Okay, awesome. After we kind of get to understanding why and why you, what I really try to get at with the students is kind of around what’s their purpose? Because if an idea is not connected to what, brings you joy, brings you happiness, brings you curiosity, you’re not going to last.

That momentum will certainly start to peter out shortly. So let’s assume that this really connects to all the stuff that you’ve done, which seemingly it has. So the next question is three very simple questions. So before I give you those questions, let me kind of explain where these questions are coming from.

You as a student may be sitting in my office with AI Logit and I’m like, “Shubha, but how much do you think this is going to cost?”. And you’re like, “oh, Heidi, given the AI functionality and my lack of tech expertise and the technology people that I’ll have to bring in, I’m just guessing to get me to kind of the, through the first phase, it’s gonna be, gosh, probably $2 million”.

Of course, I’m like asking where this $2 million is going. And you’re like, “I am not really sure”.

I’m like, “all right, well, well Shubha, let’s just deal with that $2 million. Where do you think you’re going to get that $2 million? Where do you think Shubha, you’re going to get that?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Oh, I’m going to go fundraise and an investor’s going to give it to me.

Heidi Neck: Right? and then I would ask, and you probably are going to say yes, but then I’ll ask the student, “Do you know any funders or venture capitalists”?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: No, but I’m sure I could find a list on LinkedIn or something.

Heidi Neck: Yeah, exactly. And you know how well that works. So because we always think about the funding. What we tell our students at Babson is kind of think cash last.

Because we always have resources upon which we can start, but we’re always thinking about the money. So here are the three questions that will tell you what resources you have available to you today.

Who do you know, what do you know? And who are you?

And who are you kind of hearkens back to, why are you connected to this idea, which connects back to that why.

But the other two questions is, whom do you know and what do you know and whom do you know represents your existing network.

And what you know is your background and experiences as it connects to these.

This idea of AI Logit. So when you really think about who you know and what you know, those are some resources upon which you can begin to take some early action on AI Logit because do you have experience in this area?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Yeah, I worked in this before I joined business school for two and a half years. That was my entire career, pre-business school.

Heidi Neck: Yeah. And think about your network. Is there anyone in your network that you could connect to talk about this or get to other people that you need to in your network?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Well, the only thing I can think of is because I’m still maybe early in my career or it’s a new field to me. I know my past colleagues, maybe I have my alma maters’ network.

If I reached out to them and told them I was also an alum from that school and potentially maybe a couple of other folk of a peer rank, which is not too high, or  that I met at industry conferences and things like that.

But, when I tell you that, I would like to ask you what if I’m one of those people, let’s say who just came in or who’s new to everything and doesn’t have a huge network, how do I then get over that using this approach?

Heidi Neck: Great question and we will get to that. This is part of that process. So right now we’ve talked about kind of your why and what I call means at hand.

And so those means at hand is answering those three questions. Who am I? What do I know, Whom do I know? And that why? And that means that hand should connect to the idea.

So sometimes students come in with an idea just like you with AI Logit, and you have to look back, does it connect to my why? Does it connect to my resources? And the answer here is yes, but sometimes students don’t even have an idea and they’re trying to search for one. And so we do the same thing. We start with their why.

We see what they care about and who they know and what could they potentially, do. But here in your case, you have an idea. So we have AI Logit, so let’s assume that you don’t really know anything.

This is just an idea that you came up in your dorm room, something you were reading in the Wall Street Journal, some really cool podcasts you were listening to.

And this is yes, this would work. And you also know it’s your own problem based on your previous job experience. So I often ask my students, what are the first three things you want to know?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: I want to know, what would it look like if the problem is solved? It sounds very visionary to me, but I know from having worked there that it’s one thing to say what you want, but it’s a very different thing to have it implemented. And if my new me showed up in the office with this solution, I would want to know how will that look and feel like.

What does that answer look like? Would be my first question.

Heidi Neck: Okay. What’s your second question?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: I would want to know how much of a pain it’s going to be because, I’m pretty used to legacy systems in companies, and a lot of these are, they could be all over the place. They could be small businesses, they could be medium businesses, and they could be Walmart, right?

How do I, and they all interact with each other, which is where the problem comes, because Walmart will decide whatever they want to do, and the small vendor who’s selling to them has to either counter out to them or really struggle with the Excel spreadsheets. Right? So then that’s the second thing I wanna know is how much pain is there involved in kind of bringing, is this even feasible and will be?

And then the third thing I want to know is, will people pay for this? And if so, is it a real problem or do they not care because some lowly person like me is going to be doing the job and who cares? 

Heidi Neck: Yeah, so then for every question, and I think those are pretty big questions, I think those probably could be broken down into even smaller questions. I think for every question then you need to devise an action to try to answer either the whole question or the part of the question. Some may call this a hypothesis, but these are just to me, early questions and you’re taking early actions where you’re going to waste some time to figure out, where will it lead me next?

So in the first one, which is kind of, will it work? What does it look like? The one thing I would tell the student to do is actually draw it out on paper. Like, when you went into the system, what do you see? Uust to kind of do that for the second one. What was the second one again?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Level of integration like is legacy systems integration an issue.

Heidi Neck: Right, with Walmart and the small and medium sized, I would say talk to just one person in a large organization that’s using one of these legacy systems and just talk to them to the extent that you’re trying to understand their own problems. Not that you have an idea and you’re going to pitch it, but just to understand what their problems are.

Just at least one person, and if you’re really courageous, talk to five people by next week or by next Monday. And then the third, what was the third again?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: It says, will they pay? Who’s going to pay? Where is the budget going to come from?

Heidi Neck: So to me, that’s a bad question to ask. I would tell the student, because you really need to focus on that value creation part. What does it look like? What does it feel like, and can it be done? And if you’re talking to people and you recognize that they’re having the same problem that you had, that led you to this idea, if you build something of value, the people will pay.

If you’re solving a big enough problem, people will pay. So you don’t know what they’re paying for yet. So it’s hard to ask, would you pay for this? Because it’s just a vague idea right now.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Okay, I get it. Now I have a question for you on that. So I talk to a lot of founders where they’re driven by the problem, but they don’t really have an idea what the solution looks like. I give you an example of, I know what the problem is, I know what the solution looks like and I know what that delta is.

But let’s say I’m burning with the passion for, I don’t know, make this up, right, like some climate change related thing. And I want, I know what the impact of the problem is, but I don’t know what the solution is.

Heidi Neck: Well, that’s what we call search and discover. So sometimes I like that better than a student coming to me with a fixed idea that they’ve fallen in love with. So if I’m really passionate about, let’s say, let’s break down climate change a little bit. If I’m really passionate about plastics or microplastics in the ocean, I’m going to just start to really dig in, talk to people in the area, talk to people affected, read as much as I can, and just search the space of opportunity to see what ideas I could potentially come up with.

So if it’s climate change, if I don’t have a specific problem like microplastics, then I need to just start finding all those verticals under climate change. And then literally just searching in preferably non-obvious places. I mean, we can all Google or chat GPT. What are the five big things around climate change?

Not that really talking to people and looking at the research and learning new things about this problem in order to identify new solutions.

Balancing Action and Thought

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So my brain is a finance brain. So I’m going to ask a question right here. So I’ve seen a lot of people waste two years, three years of their lives on trying to solve some problem that is not going to go anywhere and life is short, right? I keep coming back to this time is my most precious resource. 

So how do I go from, “Hey, here’s a problem”, is, I don’t wanna say the word shortcut, but how do I find my way most effectively to something where I can actually do something with it?

And in this case, I’m talking about a venture.

Heidi Neck: Exactly. So going back to the beginning part of that ET&A methodology that I was talking about with means at hand. So if my passion area, my why, let’s say, is about helping people or helping the people resolve issues related to climate change or just simply resolving issues related to climate change.

So my kids are able to have a better life on this planet. That’s kind of, that’s my why. That’s my North Star. So then I have to go to who do I know and what do I know and do those two answers with respect to climate change lead me anywhere. And so if you do know something about this space, there may be something small that you can get started to just kind of test the waters of, is there a there, I love the story around Four Ocean.

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the company Four Ocean, they were surfing in Bali and the guys just started picking up plastic and saying, what can we make with this? Well now it’s a pretty popular company and they’re doing quite well with. Pretty cheap bracelets made of plastic that we took out of the ocean, that’s affecting climate change.

So it’s really helping you look at climate change from all different perspectives that connects to who you are and maybe what you love and what you know, and that will lead you to an idea. Now, the question that you brought up Shubha around, I’ve seen too many people waste their time for two or three ideas on a problem that they really want to solve.

To me that just means they really don’t want to start something. They’re talking about starting something and they like saying that they’re trying to solve this problem, but if so much time is going by and they really haven’t done anything, they’re just not into it.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So to you with your expert eye, what is a sign that I’m serious about something as an entrepreneur? because if you’re going to any kind of startup program, you get kind of caught up in the activity of being an entrepreneur as opposed to doing things like the noun as opposed to the verb.

Heidi Neck: Yeah. I think it’s showing evidence. If you are in like an accelerator incubator program, and let’s say I was your coach or I was your mentor, I want to know all the actions that you took last week and what you learned from each action. And if I’m not saying a lot of real action, and I’m talking action of talking to people, going to manufacturers, talking to potential customers, talking to vendors, whatever it may be, not sitting in front of my computer and Googling.

I mean, it was Steve Blank with Lean Startup that said, we have to get out of the building. And Steve Blank also said that a startup is just a temporary organization in search of a sustainable business model. I love those two things about the Lean startup. So you just have to go and do stuff. And if you’re scared to do stuff, if you’re scared to ask for things, then you probably, then you’re not ready. We have to have the courage to do an ask. There’s nothing in entrepreneurship that we can do without asking for something.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: What have you seen providing the most courage or the basis for the most courage? When you’re afraid to go and ask things, because you’re an introvert, you’re shy, you don’t think you know enough to the point of belief in self that you made earlier. Have you seen things where miracles have happened and people have come out of their shell and gone out and done things, or they would’ve been afraid to before?

Heidi Neck: Well, I think, it’s like an object in motion stays in motion. If you can help people take the small steps of acting, even if it’s picking up the phone and calling somebody or going to a meeting with a trade association, those are small things where you’re not risking a lot. And when you start to take these small actions, those lead you to other actions and those lead you to other actions.

So it’s this snowball effect, but the snowball’s getting bigger and bigger. And your courage is growing too because you just keep learning more. Other people are connecting you to other people. So sometimes taking those first three steps and those steps being small actions really start to build your confidence and your courage.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: I’m going to just push on a couple of things which I’ve seen with founders here. So one is, okay, let’s say I’m doing all the things you asked me to do. I’m going and talking to people, I’m writing my notes and said I talked to Heidi, she’s somebody who’s like a customer or an expert or whatever it is.

I’ve learned the following three things. I’ve bullet points of the summary for you. And then where is the thought part coming into this? Like now at this point, all I see is a jumble of like points on a graph. They don’t actually mean anything. So do I go in with a specific intent that say what is a specific, like these are five things I want to know.

Which is comes back to your three questions. And then if it’s all a jumble, how do I make sense of it? And where does the thought part coming in? At what point do I start to focus in on, is there like a hierarchy of questions of most risky, least risky? How does that whole thing play out?

Heidi Neck: So I think there’s two scenarios here. Scenario one is that you actually have the idea, you have AI Logit. So you had an idea at the beginning of week what this business was. Now tell me what this business is based on everything that you’ve done this week, describe the business to me. So I want a description at the beginning of the week, and I want a new description at the end of the week based on what you’ve learned.

And tell me what you’ve taken out of the idea and tell me what you’ve put into the idea. So again, the idea is evolving and you’re acting in order to learn and building on the idea as you go. Let’s assume scenario two, which is more around climate change and I’m not really sure what I’m doing. All those actions, if you were searching in that space and really digging in on the problem and talking to people that’s connected to the problem, tell me everything you learned and what are some business ideas that are coming to the top of your head based on what you’ve learned.

Not one business idea. A lot of business ideas, and then start to kind of think about which of these business ideas so far do I need to actually go out and collect more information? Are one or two kind of coming to the top that are really exciting to me? Then I can dismiss the five others that I came up with.

So I’m gonna play around with two business ideas right now related to climate change. And as I’m capturing both in scenario one and scenario two, I’m capturing a lot of disparate ideas about different parts of how it all fits together.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy:  Is there a way that you’ve seen work that, is it just, I’m here to come back as a business model canvas, but is there either that or something else that you think is very effective to point you to more insight, to sharpen your focus or to get more intentional?

Heidi Neck: Well see that. So that’s your finance head, connected to my marketing head, right? So I’m a fan of the Business Model Canvas and for startups, I’m a bigger fan of the Lean Canvas. just ’cause it’s a little bit more simpler. And then, there’s lots of different software and also just using Miro where you can continuously tweak and modify the canvas.

I’m for that if you need that structure. Some people don’t need that structure when we’re just talking about the idea, because right now we’re just talking about the idea and the problem it solves. And we’re starting to speculate by who the customers are, but we can’t really figure out who the customers are until we’ve really kind of solidified that core idea where we feel comfortable talking to people about it.

And you may have an idea of your core customer, and that’s great and that’s gonna be testable later on. But for right now, we’re really iterating on the idea and the problem we’re solving.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Okay, so we see a vague outline. I do all the work. I’m seeing an outline of an actual business. At some point I had to progress, right? Like I’m at many points, and I see this, I don’t know if you work with a lot of technology based founders, but I do. And at some point I see a technology which is really powerful and versatile, and they can deploy it here and they can deploy it there.

So at some point there’s a fork in the road and I have to make a choice, and that choice has consequences. 

In that moment, what does the ET&A framework guide me to do and how does it help me make those choices, properly?

Affordable Loss and Decision Making

Heidi Neck: So there’s an aspect in the ET&A framework called affordable loss and affordable loss says, what am I willing to lose to take this action? Not necessarily start the entire business, but to take this action. But in the scenario you’re talking about, where I have this really value add technology and I have four different forks, four different lanes I could go into, but I can only go in one because I don’t have the resources to go after all four.

And also that’s not very smart to go after all four at the same time. So how I would guide people, I’m like, well, what are you willing to lose to move forward? And that loss may be time, that loss may be your reputation or social capital, and that loss may be finances. I probably at this stage with the technology and it’s clear that there are four different, paths you can take is probably going to be loss of resources that you’re probably willing to lose.

Then you have to decide how much am I willing to lose? And it doesn’t necessarily be have to be your own money, but perhaps the money of a venture capitalist or a friend, family or fool. Just what am I willing to lose? And when you’re honest with yourself, this is different from risk.

When you’re honest with yourself about what you’re willing to lose, then you’re in control. Because if you lost it, you will survive. Okay. And let me give you a quick analogy on that and then we’ll go back to those four pathways.

So the analogy on affordable loss would be. I have, my dad and my mother were both gamblers and they went to Las Vegas a lot, when I was a little girl.

I didn’t go with them, but my mom, she always had this policy and she loved to play the penny slot machines. And she would always go in with X amount of money and let’s just say it was $400 one night. So she goes in with $400 and that $400 could last her an hour, it could last her all night. That $400 could turn into $4,500.

Okay? But she was never going to exceed losing that $400. And she knew that if she lost it, she would still have a good time. she wasn’t going to become destitute. It wasn’t her life savings, it was $400 that she could afford to lose. 

Therefore, she controls all the risk and she’s just gonna have a ball.

And if she makes money, great. If she doesn’t, hey, it was a fun night. My father, on the other hand, and this is a true story, in 1980 something, he went into, Caesar’s Palace Las Vegas with a diamond Rolex watch on his left, wrist. And that was about 11 o’clock at night.

By four o’clock in the morning, he no longer had that watch. He didn’t know what he was willing to lose. He was in it too much that he thought he was going to win. So he just kept on, and even lost the watch on his wrsit. That’s risk and almost stupidity. But my mother represents affordable loss. 

And this has been proven that entrepreneurs are calculating their affordable loss constantly, and they will stop if they think their affordable loss will be exceeded.

And all of that comes from Sarasvathy work on effectuation theory. 

Choosing Your Path: Balancing Risk and Opportunity

Heidi Neck: So if we go back to those four paths, the question is based on everything that I’ve learned, where do I want to play? Where do I personally want to play among these four paths, and what am I willing to lose to take path A, B, C, or D?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So you are almost like, just play it out, right? So it’s not How big is the price? You don’t care at that point, how big is the price? If Path A has a huge price, that’s 10 x the next best price. But if the price is too high, price is too high for me, then I won’t take it. So it’s an opportunity cost for me as an entrepreneur.

Let’s say I’ve got my PhD and I did like my entire thesis on this, and I’m risking five years of my life because it’s going to take me that long to build even the first proof of concept for industrial scale, I’m thinking out loud with you here, so you’re almost forcing me to balance all of those and bring them down to one assessment of which is the best bet for me, where I won’t like, feel horrible if it doesn’t pay out.

Heidi Neck: Yes. And if you think about it, a lot of times that’s how we live our lives. 

Let’s take the entrepreneur out of this and let’s say I want to move to San Diego, California. But I don’t, I’m very scared because I don’t have a job there. I don’t necessarily have housing there, and I have a whole set of friends here and I love my job, but just something’s drawing me to go to California.

Well, how do I kind of mitigate my risk? Well, I could take a leave of absence, maybe from my job. I could put my house up for Airbnb so I can move out to California knowing I can always move back to Boston because of what I put in place.

So I’m okay taking that. So it’s either contingency or I’m okay if I lose my house over here or if I lose my job over here.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So does this then from the same four pathway perspective, am I also looking at things that will reduce my loss because I’m building optionality? So for example, if if I pick path one and it fails and this plant blows up and it’s not going to be scalable. I’ve built an option. Maybe I built new IP, maybe I built something else.

And therefore that mitigates, is that also figuring in, is, should I also be thinking about that?

Heidi Neck: Yes, because when I’m talking about affordable loss, and let’s just say we chose path A, it’s not that you’re necessarily going to go all in quickly on Path A. It’s that yes, you’re going to start down the path and hopefully because you’re experimenting, hopefully because you’re kind of taking small actions and small actions lead to larger actions.

You’ll know sooner if it has legs or not. So you don’t want to spend the whole time planning on what this venture is going to be. You probably did all that in your PhD program with the technology. What you want to focus on is “let me get some traction and let me see what this traction is telling me”.

And if the traction tells me early that you’re not going to get a lot of traction, Heidi, I need to back off. And yes, as I back off, because I don’t want to lose everything, I may have gotten something out of it, whether it’s IP or just a lot of lessons learned.

So then I may come back and go to option B because I’ve learned so much and I’ve realized that option B, the B path was probably a better path to go down.

But I didn’t know that and I couldn’t have known that until I went to Path A.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So in this kind of scenario, are there things that allow you to make smarter choices by, somehow reducing your losses and therefore take a more informed decision? 

Heidi Neck: Yeah, and I don’t know if this is going to help Shubha, but there’s one thing I always want students to look for, and it’s disconfirming data. We go out and we look for data that supports our idea, and we find other people that love our idea. I want people to, I want to find people that are like, no, this is going to be horrible.

This sucks because of X, Y, and Z. And then I can ask why. So I’m looking at both sides of the coin as opposed to just looking for confirmation, which we know is confirmation bias.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Awesome. So then if I were picking from one of these four paths, I would want to know what is the one thing that’s going to make this blow up? And I’m going to go try to prove that thing exists because then I can exit quickly. So I’ve not lost all that time. By finding like the 99 white swans, it still hasn’t proved that there is no black swan, right?  Essentially that’s what you’re telling me.

Heidi Neck: Yes. 

Navigating Uncertainty: Small Smart Actions

Heidi Neck: And sometimes that’s hard to predict. So that’s why you’re just taking a series of actions, one action after another, as opposed to going from A to Z overnight. You’re going from A to B, B to C, D to E, et cetera. So the small smart actions are much more powerful than the one big plunge decision.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Got it. And one last question on that, which is. the other implication for me, from what you just told me is that I would look for actions where they would illuminate not just one path, but they would give me information on more than one path because?

Heidi Neck: That’s how I like to play, and that’s how I like to guide people because if you can play with multiple paths just early on, I’m not saying go after three different markets at the same time with a business that’s operating, but when you’re deciding maybe which path to go on or which market to go into, playing with all three in the beginning is okay.

At a certain point, you’re going to have to make a decision, but hopefully playing with all three is giving you information that you didn’t know otherwise to help you make a more informed decision.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So then I’ve done this stuff and that things can always go wrong later. Right? I can only know what I can know. And you only always have limited information.

Are there sign posts on the road or things that tell me that, yeah, I’m on the right path and it’s okay now to go to step two on the, on Path A, how does the ET&A method guide you on continuing to progress?

Reflection and Decision-Making: Knowing When to Quit

Heidi Neck: So reflection, even that kind of sounds hokey, but I think reflection is really important in this methodology because with all the actions that you take, and because it’s so action oriented, you have to pause and say, “what is this information telling me? How, what is what, where is this guiding me? Is it guiding me to continue forward? Is it guiding me to pivot a little bit? Is it guiding me to stop?”

And really thinking about that data, that you’ve collected, not that other people have collected, not that you found online, but the data that you collected and that you trust that’s guiding you in a certain direction. I mean, it’s hard to tell someone when to quit.

The two best pieces of advice I’ve learned from someone else, and it says, quit when you’ve exceeded that affordable loss or quit when you just don’t believe in it anymore. And it’s hard when you don’t believe in it. And you have all these people in your little ecosystem around you, and they’re asking you how it’s going.

And you’ve hired some interns or you have some employees and you’re sitting there going, “I don’t think this is gonna work”. But you have all these other people believing in you. It’s hard to say, “I’m done”,

But the day that you feel you’re done. It’s no different than when you’ve said, okay, I’m gonna quit this job in two years.

Actually, you’re already quit the job just by saying it.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Have you seen, examples of people who have been able to do that? I don’t know if the word is gracefully or better than in other ways. What makes that easier?

Heidi Neck: I’ve been asking my students like they’ll be working on ideas and the semester will go on and they’re still working on that same idea and they haven’t gotten a lot of traction. I’m like, it’s okay if you don’t want to do this anymore and it’s okay ’cause you’ve learned a lot this semester about the space.

It’s okay if you just want to quit and figure out what you’re going to do next. And they’re like, “Really?”. I’m like, yeah, that is a gift of choice. You just have to have the courage to move on. And the story that you can tell if people ask you what you know, that you took enough action that said this was going nowhere as opposed to starting it because you felt like you had to, and it was going to fail ultimately because you just weren’t into it or there just wasn’t any legs to it.

Direction Over Plan: Adapting to New Information

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Got it. Now we’re on the path. Let’s say we’ve decided there’s enough there that we’re going to continue to pursue it. At some point I’m going to commit, get resources from other people. Typically, this is money, but it could be other resources too, like partnerships and what have you. Now, the whole premise of ET&A from what I understand is it’s an iterative process, which means that it should allow you to change direction at some point.

I don’t want to use the word pivot, because it’s just become like something totally different, but let’s say that you have to change direction on a whole bunch of things when there is that commitment that’s already been made and your data tells you that you need to do that. How do you navigate that in a way that’s effective and doesn’t cause more harm there than there needs to be?

Heidi Neck: So one thing I like to say is a direction is better than a plan. So sometimes we have a plan of exactly what the venture is and how it’s going to go, and you have funders and people in the, in your orbit contributing to this. But all of a sudden, the data starts to tell you that we need to go in a little bit of a different direction.

If you stick to the plan, you run into a brick wall, but if you have a direction, you can at least go around that brick wall, iterate a little bit, and keep going in the same direction. So I would imagine any funder, any investor, any employees would rather to see the change in direction as opposed to going on the same path of a plan where the information saying you need to change direction.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So it comes back to, kind of connecting back to what you said earlier. You’ve been collecting whatever you know and whatever you think, and you’ve been crystallizing it into a hypothesis, right? I think my market is this. I think the problem I’m solving is this. I think what they’ll pay for is this. And because you’ve been flipping back and forth between action and thinking, you’ve got the data points and you’ve got the actual reason why you believe that’s very fact-based.

Heidi Neck: Evidence, Evidence, fact. Maybe it’s evidence.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Good point, well taken. So evidence-based approach. So it should be in theory, easier for you to, change directions and say, Hey, we had the following five assumptions and this one is no longer true. So this is why I’m going to make this change. And oh, by the way, because I’m still taking action to provide evidence behind that.

Here’s the reason why I think this is a reasonable bet.

Heidi Neck: Yes, absolutely. I mean, it’s, I mean, you’re a financial person. It’s no different than making sound assumptions for those pro formas, or are the assumptions completely fabricated and based in nothing. You have to understand where the assumption is coming from and what’s feeding into that assumption, and that’s evidence.

And if you have that evidence, then you’re going to be more confident to actually go a little bit in a different direction. To me, pivot is going into a major different direction. So I think here we’re talking about, we’re just taking a slight curve because this is where I’m really confident the data’s leading us, and I think this is a smart move to make.

Problem-Solving in High-Stakes Environments

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So it might be things like, I’m changing how I’m going to price the product or versus I’m no longer selling product A and I’m going to go sell this completely different other product, this different other market. Okay, that’s well taken. So now, I’m going to just ask you for a specialized case.

For a lot of founders, especially in STEM and capital intensive businesses, the stakes are much higher. And the pitfalls are potentially deeper. So I’m just going to ask you if you have any insights or advice to offer to those who are working in those high stakes environments. How would they apply this methodology to, to get on a better direction and to sharpen their process?

Heidi Neck: So that’s a really great question. The ET&A methodology is simply a methodology that helps create a bias for action. Okay? It’s not necessarily a methodology to help you start a business. It’s a methodology of how we’re going to approach this problem. So let’s say you’re in a capital intensive STEM-based business and it’s, it’s going to take you quite a while to get to profitability.

You have lots of different rounds of funding coming in. That is the organization, okay? But within the organization, there are lots of different problems that will emerge, and that’s when you turn entrepreneurial thought and action into a verb. And we do this at Babson, let’s ET&A, that okay, what are we trying to do?

What do we have that we can use to actually solve this problem? And what are some potential solutions? What are we willing to lose to actually move forward on some of these solutions? So it is just that, it’s a problem solving methodology. So I think if we take ourselves out of, let’s use ET&A to start a venture as opposed to let’s use ET&A to solve our problems in a non-obvious way.

Because in that capital intensive organization in stem, there’s so much uncertainty. So it’s like when you’re not really sure what to do, your only choice is to take action to kind of figure out what to do next.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: In other words, you’re taking this big blob of uncertainty and you’re breaking it down and you’re applying kind of in a fractal kind of way. You’re applying that same methodology for every little problem.

Which brings me to the question of you have to, inculcate this methodology and way of thinking and acting into the culture of the organization. So if I’m the one building the STEM startup, how have you seen this becoming embedded in how we do things, for lack of a better word?

Heidi Neck: As I said earlier, organizations aren’t entrepreneurial, people are, and so through practicing the ET&A methodology, that’s a way that we actually help our students think and act more entrepreneurially or develop that mindset in an organization setting. And I do have experience with this.

I can’t really talk about who I worked with, but I did work with, a company in the biotech space and we brought through a lot of people through this ET&A methodology training. And so they started having the vernacular around this. They understood what. Everyone was talking about when they were like, we have to ET&A our way through this, or they use some other adjectives as well that’s connected to the methodology.

So that common terminology represents a common way of thinking. That common way of thinking leads to kind of a common way of acting. And you can train people how to think differently, and it’s just offering a framework like ours, to help them to start thinking differently.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So I’m sold. Let’s say I’m running a biotechnology startup and I want to apply this method. Where do I go? How do I start? How do I get better at this?

Heidi Neck: It’s so funny you asked this Shubha, because Babson just finished actually I, I did it for Babson. We just developed something called the Babson Mindset game, and it’s called the Babson College Mindset Game. But it’s based on an exercise that we’ve been doing with students with MBA undergraduate students, MBAs, executives for many years.

So I’ll tell you what the physical exercise is, and then just imagine that we’ve kind of turned that into a digital exercise. So you take a group of people, let’s just say we have 20 people in the room, and you put them into five groups of four, and you give them a jigsaw puzzle and you say, okay, everyone needs to put together this jigsaw puzzle as quickly as they can.

And they do, and it’s pretty easy. It’s big pieces. And then we, whoever went, whoever completes the jigsaw puzzle, first wins, and then we whoop and holler and Shubha, you’re group won, way to go. And I’m like, all right, let’s just, let’s shift gears.

Let’s do another exercise. And then this exercise, they’re thrown into a room.

And in that room, the only thing in that room are a few tables. And on those tables are pieces of fabric and they’re quickly told, you can only pull five pieces of fabric from the table. And I actually have designated leaders of different groups. You can choose whatever group you want to go into, and your goal is to build the best quilt you possibly can with these pieces of fabric.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Okay? So you can go where you want to go. You can only choose five pieces, and you have X amount of minutes to complete this. And we’ll see who has the most creative quilt. Okay, How are you going to judge creativity?

Heidi Neck: Exactly. they’re like, how are you going to just create, I’m like, you know what’s creative? what’s not creative?

And actually in the end it doesn’t matter. So they all work and they’re creating these quilts on the ground. And some of them are rather traditional, some of them are really unique. Some of them aren’t really quilts at all, but they call it a quilt. So therefore it is a quilt. And we share everyone’s designs and then we go back into the classroom and I ask them one fundamental question, what did you prefer working on today?

Did you prefer working on the jigsaw puzzle or did you prefer working on the quilt? And typically, I don’t know, of those 20, let’s say. Eight preferred the quilt and the, and 12 preferred the jigsaw puzzles. And then we could start talking about why. Alright. For the jigsaw puzzlers, why did you prefer working on that?

And you can imagine some ideas come out of, oh, well, it was clear what we had to do because we just had to complete the picture on the front of the box. we were able to separate tasks quickly, edges versus the inside of the puzzle. It was competitive, so it was fun and we were going as fast as we can and we’ve done it before.

And, we were super excited because we won and it was really structured and clear. All these kind of things are coming up and then you are all right. For those of you, the eight of you that liked the quilt, what did you like about it? Well, it was creative. We only had to use our imagination.

 We kind of had to coax the right people to join our team because we liked the fabric that they were bringing. It was a little chaotic and we weren’t quite sure what we were doing, but the design of our quilt unfolded over time, and what we created was our own. All right, so let’s just say we have those two kinds of dichotomy created.

Entrepreneurial vs. Managerial Thinking

Heidi Neck: The reason why we do this exercise is because the puzzles are more analogous to how managers think, and the quilts are more analogous to how entrepreneurs think, and it’s not an either or. But let me just quickly explain. Good managers set a goal, figure out what resources they need to achieve that goal, start to allocate resources efficiently, start to measure progress along the way, and then done.

Let’s go on to the next goal. Entrepreneurs, however, they just kind of, they kind of start off with what they have and start creating something. And it may change over time, depending on who we bring onto the team and what knowledge we have as we collect additional information. And everyone’s kind of chiming in on what we should do, based on what they feel, where the organization should go.

And so there’s lots of uncertainty and lots of decisions to be made. And sometimes it’s right and sometimes it’s wrong. That’s the reality of a startup, of that fuzzy environment of, we’re not really sure what we’re doing right now, but we’ve got to figure something out. And and I think for years we’ve tried to think of entrepreneurship as management, and that’s not where the big cool companies have been coming from.

They’re thinking more in this quilt way. The one thing that’s important before we end this part of the conversation, Shubha, is that it’s not an either or. I’m not solely a manager or solely an entrepreneur. Both ways of thinking are important, but we have to recognize the environment that we’re in and that environment will dictate whether we should think more managerially or more entrepreneurially.

So if we’re in an environment that is somewhat certain where we can trust the existing data and we can kind of look at our options and predict where we’re going, the managerial mindset works quite well.

But when we are in a very uncertain environment where we’re really not sure where things are going and we’re not sure the direction we should go just yet, we’re just kind of just going to start and see what kind of emerges, then that’s when the entrepreneurial mindset is needed.

And we can go back and forth, but oftentimes we trick ourselves into thinking that we’re can be in a certain environment and we trick ourselves that we do have options, that we can predict where we’re going to go, and that’s when we start to fail. So the entrepreneurial side is about creation. The managerial side is about facilitation.

And you do go back and forth between creation and facilitation and an organization all the time. But you have to think about what environment am I in and which way should I be thinking at the moment?

That represents kind of a different way of positioning ourselves in a particular problem.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So if I were to take, what you just told me is fascinating. I’m the founder of this biotech startup, and I’m trying to inculcate this. First of all, I have to become self-aware that I need to flip my hats from a managerial to an entrepreneurial type of thinking, depending on what problem I’m solving, and which is hard enough given that I’m moving out of my PhD mindset right into something completely uncertain, which probably is freaking me out anyway, because it’s already uncertain and very different.

And then secondly, once I’ve done that and I’ve taken all this funding because I need to build this huge capital intensive organization, I need to find a way to systematically, maybe through meetings or a way of approaching problems or standard methodology that we always use when a problem comes up, we go through a standard process, but i it’s something that I have to keep doing constantly.

And it’s not something that I’m there once and can check the box and say, okay, I’m done. I’ve kind of figured this out. That’s what I’m taking away from what you just told me. Is that fair?

Heidi Neck: It is fair. And going back to the biotech company that I worked with, for years, we brought every, all these people through this quilt and puzzle exercise. So the terminology that they started to use themselves within the organization is this a quilting situation or a puzzle? And so if that’s how you start to change the culture.

You bring everyone through a similar experience. The experience resonates with them. And, it’s better than doing Myers-Briggs.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Ouch. I love my Myers-Briggs!

Heidi Neck: Me too. Yeah.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So then if I don’t have the resources to bring someone like you on board, I’m already scrambling. It’s, I’m a startup. What’s a shortcut I can use to bring this as soon as possible and as effectively as possible within my startup environment.

Heidi Neck: I think even listening to this podcast, someone could do this exercise quite easily, get some puzzles, get some, pieces of quilt. I’ve also done it with puzzles and stories, but like they draw stories as a group on a flip chart. But the problem with that is the stories are a little bit too fun. so then they start to choose the stories more than the puzzles.

And the trick is you actually want to get a pretty good even mix of puzzles versus quilts. And we did, when we digitized the game for the Babson College mindset game, we built in on the quilting side of the game a lot of frustration and uncertainty. So I’m definitely getting the distribution where people are, don’t like the stories or the quilting as much as they do the puzzles.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So then if I am, I recognize that it’s a quilting situation. How do I know if I’m there? I guess this is my puzzle, brain speaking, which is I need to know, I need to move forward. That’s why I’m here in a startup and I have a problem and I’ve identified it’s a quilting problem and not a puzzle problem.

And then what? Like how do I know I’ve solved it,

Heidi Neck: So I don’t know if you ever know you’ve solved it. but if you’re asking, how do I know if I’m in a quilting situation versus a puzzle situation, I would look at the amount of data that you have around you. And if you can trust the data that you have existing and it’s leading you in a certain direction, you probably can go that direction.

But if you’re in a situation where you’re saying, I’m stuck. I don’t know what to do. I’m not really sure what direction to go, just answering yes to those questions says you’re in a quilting situation.

A quilting situation is more about creating the future, whereas the puzzle situation is more about predicting the future.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Okay, so then if I recognize that I’m in a quilting situation, I need to start figuring out what building blocks do I need to put in place, which means what future do I want to create? What do I know about that future and what are the minimum bricks I need to start building towards that future? And that’s about all I can do.

There is no solving, there is only creating.

Heidi Neck: Yes. And ultimately what you’re creating may will solve, but you’re going into it with a creating mentality rather than a solving mentality.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Awesome. I cannot believe that an hour has flown by. So I will, I could talk for hours, but I want to be respectful of your time.

Heidi Neck: I’m surprised it’s gone by so fast too. It’s been awesome talking with you.

Actionable Insights for Entrepreneurs

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Likewise. So then if I had to bring it all full circle, I’m a founder. 

I’m sitting here and I really want to get more effective, can you give me maybe three pieces of actionable insights or advice? What can I start doing tomorrow morning to become more effective as an entrepreneur?

Heidi Neck: And where are they in the process, these entrepreneurs?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: A very good question.

Let’s say that they have committed to a path, but there’s a lot of uncertainty around funding. They maybe haven’t gotten their first funding round yet. They know they need capital. but I’m kind of stuck. I don’t know which way to go. I don’t know what to focus on, but I need that funding and I need to move forward.

What do I do now?

Heidi Neck: Well, I want you to be able to answer, the fundamental question of how big is your problem and how many people are willing to pay for the solution. Because until we can answer those two questions, any potential investor will not look at us, So I think we assume that because we have this great technology that someone’s going to invest in order for us to move forward.

But we need to prove that this technology is solving a problem for a very large number of people. Then I think the investment will come. Then it’s about finding your network and who can introduce you to some investors. What angels can you find really just getting out there. But you have to have the answers to those questions.

Yeah. This is my technology. I can certainly explain it in a way that my grandmother would understand. That’s important and this is the problem that it’s solving and this is the number of people it’s solving the problem for, and I’m not looking for an exact number. I just want to know as an investor that this is a big enough market to invest in because I’m not going to invest in a small market unless it’s a completely niche unique, and it’s gonna produce that 10 x in a short period of time.

Other than that, I want to make sure it’s a big problem for a lot of people.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Got it. And then the relation to kind of, or the connection with what you just talked about is using this entrepreneurial thought and action methodology to get to those answers, because I now have a very clear destination. I need to prove those three things, which you just laid out. Now, how can I get from where I am to where I need to be by asking the right questions, taking the right actions, and collecting those proof points.

Heidi Neck: That would be number one and number two would be never shy away from asking for help, ask for something. If I don’t ask for something, I will never get it. But think about it. If I asked you, if I asked you for this pencil, let’s just say I asked you for this pencil. There’s a couple of things that could happen.

One, you can say no, two, you can say yes, or the third thing is no, but. No, but I can give you, this eyeglass case that I’m holding up right here, so there’s a 66% chance you’re going to get something by asking

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Which is either yes or a no, but.

Heidi Neck: A yes, a no or a no, but

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: the 66% is the yes and the no, but are both wins.

Heidi Neck: Exactly. Those are both wins.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Okay. That’s number two. What’s number three?

Heidi Neck: That’s a good question. What is my number three? There’s a few things floating in my mind and I guess it’s more of life advice and I stole this from somebody. And I think this will go back to the why stuff that talking about earlier, and this is the quote, the trick to life is not getting what you want, but wanting it after you get it.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: I love it.

Heidi Neck: Really think about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons for you.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Awesome. I know this has been a phenomenal conversation. Is there anything that you wish I had asked but I didn’t?

Heidi Neck: I don’t think so. You asked a lot of things and you’ve given me a lot of things to think about as well.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Fantastic. Heidi, this has been an amazing conversation. I know that our listeners will love it, and we have a lot to learn from it, so I really appreciate the time that you’ve taken to share all of this with us. Thank you.

Heidi Neck: Thank you, Shubha. It was a pleasure.