So Andre, tell me about your vision.
Yeah, I guess I have a vision for a kind of world where we live in a capitalism that's functioning properly.
I think that a lot of the problems that we see out there in the economy and the financial difficulties a lot of people face
have a lot to do with the quality of capitalism that we have. And so I have a vision for capitalism that's more competitive
that involves a larger number of smaller companies competing to increase product variety into lower prices.
So that's my vision.
Tell me more about that, Andre.
Yeah, I mean, how to get to that vision I think is the interesting part.
Because I think everyone who wants to have a better functioning capitalism.
But I'm a professor of entrepreneurship.
And so what I look at as the main force behind a good well functioning capitalism is the ability for new entrants to be able to come into the market.
And that's usually startup companies that are coming in with innovative products that are able to survive and to compete and thrive even against large incumbent corporations.
And so I'm always studying entrepreneurs and trying to understand how they do it, how they are able to build successful businesses.
And along the way, one of the things that I discovered or one of the aha moments for me as a researcher of entrepreneurship was to find out that
many of the startups that we see that are successful out there, they have their roots inside of incumbent companies.
So you think about all these big companies that are dominating the market.
Well, a lot of the potential startups that we're going to see coming out into the market are going to come from those organizations.
And there's lots of examples that we give in the book.
We're not using Zoom right now, but Zoom is an example of a startup, a spin out that came out of Cisco.
Cisco was developing WebEx, which is also a video platform, right?
And the founder of Zoom was working there and wasn't happy with the way that Cisco was developing the product.
And so he decided to take it outside and so became successful that way and was able to carry out his own vision inside of a startup
instead of being caught within this large incumbent company.
And there's so many examples.
And we talk about hundreds of examples in the book and we give a tremendous number of examples from interviews that we did with spin out founders.
And it can be very small scale stuff.
I mean, everything from really big companies like if you think about Apple and its founder,
one of its founders, Steve Wozniak, who was working at Hewlett Packard, right?
Or it can be just a lot of small companies that you might not even have heard of or tiny consulting firms or small digital agencies.
And when you talk to their founders and you find out about their startup story,
what you find out is many of them came out of existing companies, right?
They were working there and they learned the ropes there and then they came out and formed their venture.
And the thing is, you know, that kind of it goes somewhat counter to a lot of the narrative that you hear about startups in the media
or among startup gurus and things like that. Right?
Yeah, those folks, you know, they're often encouraging people to pursue innovation, but to come up with new things, you know, completely on their own.
And it's just not, you know, realistic about the way that most startups are done.
You know, most startup founders are actually spin out founders and they actually worked for incoming companies and got experience over time
and learned about business models and learned about opportunities before they left to start their own companies.
You know what? Now, the way you framed it, I just, the light bulb just clicked in my head
where a founder or someone who wants to be an entrepreneur instead of thinking, hey, I have to start this from scratch and do everything on my own.
Now, their focus could be, hey, I maybe need to go work for someone who is doing it right now and learn and learn and learn and learn as much as I can.
And then when I'm ready, then I take it and take the knowledge and then start my own, assuming the non-competes are not an issue.
But now the light bulb just clicked in my head and that can save entrepreneurs so much time and effort and pain if they get the vision.
So, Andre, what would you say is your goal for being on the show?
Yeah, I mean, my goal for being on the show is to help to spread the word about spin outs.
I mean, it's no secret that I have a book that's recently come out with my co-author, Sabita Yaganagi.
And this is a book that we wrote. It's a very thin book, as you can see. It's the Business Expert Press.
The purpose is to be able to reach an audience to spread the word about spin out ventures.
The book is like a – you can think about it as a how-to manual.
So, on the one side, it helps the people who want to be spin out entrepreneurs.
In other words, they're employees and they know that they want to do a startup and maybe they're not sure how or they're not sure what the rules of the game are.
And so, the book can help them to sort of figure out or to navigate that process right from the time that they're still employees to the time that they leave and do their own venture.
And on the other hand, it's also written in a way – because, you know, I think one really important thing to understand, too, is when we first – you mentioned non-competes, right?
And when people first hear about spin outs, the assumption is, oh, well, you know, a lot of these spin outs are probably going to run up against restrictive covenants like non-competes.
Or non-solicitation and no-poach agreements and, you know, non-disclosures and, you know, be charged with trade secret theft and things like that, right?
Like, there's this potential for a negative relationship between the spin outs and the parent organizations.
But I think the most important realization that I had when I started digging into the topic and the research is how many positive relationships there really are between spin outs and parent organizations.
And many of these, you know, many of these are not – they're not conflicting at all.
Some of the spin outs end up being customers or even suppliers of their parent organizations, right?
So they're actually in business together and they're doing transactions together.
Many other times, you know, the parent organizations, they can't pursue all the innovations that they produce inside and they know that, right?
And so sometimes it's better to let some of them go so that they can focus on, you know, their core business, right?
So that they can do their strategy properly.
And they also, you know, they want to be seen as like an innovative place to work and a fun place to work where you can develop your ideas.
And so there's an incentive for large companies to allow spin outs to happen and not to sort of crack down on them or to try to prevent them because they want to continue to have that reputation for being an incubator of innovations, right?
So there's – I think there's lots of potential for positive relationships between spin outs and parents.
And that's part of the message too that people don't know about, even the managerial side.
So, you know, a lot of people on the managerial side, you talk to them about spin outs and like, oh, hush, hush.
Like, I'm not sure we should be talking about that here, you know, because some of them worry, you know, because it doesn't sound disloyal, right?
Or maybe they're just not familiar with it and they're just not sure how they're handled or how other companies have handled them because it's not something that's discussed a lot, right?
So that's our – my goal, right, to be on the show and to maybe convince your audience that they can spend a little time looking into this topic, maybe read the book or read other things about spin outs.
And to just, you know, just directly, I suppose, spread awareness about the phenomenon as well.
Awesome. Thank you for sharing that.
I have one more question for you before we end today's segment.
And that will be how did you get started in this journey of going and looking for spin outs?
Yeah. I mean, that's a great question.
I mean, the first study that I did on this topic actually with the same co-author that I'm going to publish in the book on, we had used survey data, right, that other people had collected.
But, you know, and that's how we had studied the spin outs.
We wanted to be able to get more firsthand knowledge, and so we started doing qualitative interviews. So we had lined up about 20 spin out entrepreneurs.
And we started conducting interviews with them to get further insights about the process of spin outs and how they work.
And that's how we really got into it. That's how I really got excited about it when I started hearing all these stories, many of which, by the way, are in the book, you know,
many of these stories that the entrepreneurs were telling us, you know, were really fascinating and, you know, really reinforced the importance of spin outs and the experiences that these founders had in their previous employment, right?
Which a lot of, you know, it's not talked about a lot. A lot of, you know, I have to say a lot of spin out, even spin out founders and startup founders in general,
they want to sort of like almost disassociate themselves to some extent from their previous experience because, you know, they want people to consider their spin out to be innovative and not like part of somebody else's legacy.
And so often they don't talk about it, right? They don't necessarily advertise the fact that many of these spin outs got perhaps their ideas from a parent organization or perhaps their first customer or perhaps some of their early employees.
You know, there's lots of different resources that end up flowing from parent organizations to spin outs over time.
So that's how we got started. It was through the research and it just kind of kept escalating from there. We kept doing more and more studies and talking to more and more people until we got to the point where we're like, okay, now, we know enough.
So I think it's important to make a book and spread the knowledge around, you know, the world and not just stick with academia because, you know, we are launching a course, by the way, at my school next year on this.
You know, it's, there'll be probably hopefully 50 students in the class, right? And that's another way to sort of spread the word about the topic.
I'd like to also encourage some others to teach similar courses in other schools as well. But the book is the primary mechanism, I think, to go after, you know, the millions of people out there.
Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live. I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
We'll get more and more fun. We'll have more and more engagement as well. We'll invite people to participate in the show and thank you for giving us your time and attention. Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.