New podcast series ‘The People Behind Innovation’ makes its debut

This past week I sat down with Vance Brown to discuss the origins of Exponential Impact (XI) and the lessons he has taken after starting numerous successful software companies. This conversation is the first of many; I will be interviewing impactful entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators surrounding the XI ecosystem to learn more about the their stories and takeaways in a new, bi-weekly series titled “The People Behind Innovation”. The series is available under Google, Apple, Amazon, and Spotify streaming services, or on Anchor with no account needed to stream. Please contact my email, owen@exponentialimpact.com, if you have any comments or founder stories.

What were some of the skills you utilized when starting your first company?

I think you can never do it alone. If I have one skillset as an entrepreneur, it may be that I’m a talent scout — I’d say that’s my greatest gift. Not necessarily what I know, but I can see that other people know something, and I need to get together with them to build a team. That first software company that I had developed software for the building industry. It was more of a family business, as my brother had a building company, and my other brother was a true coder — a software developer. Honestly, it was a lot of grit and determination. I would drive down to Atlanta, go to home builders conferences, and invite people to see our software.

Some of it is gut, some of it is instinct, and some of it is training. It certainly helped being an attorney in intellectual property: knowing how to structure a company with the entity we wanted to form, how to register trademarks, how to copyright, the licensing components. From a technical standpoint I had degrees in economics and computer science.

Why are you passionate about entrepreneurship?

I love starting from nothing and seeing something emerge. That kind of zero to one, infinite growth. I just love watching something emerge that didn’t exist before, and having a passion for what I was doing turned out to be the main thing. As a result of that, it wasn’t about starting a company to go and make a lot of money. In fact, I always started a company with the idea that I wanted to do something I loved to do — why am I getting up in the morning?

From the very beginning, I always had the mindset that I’m doing it to build a job that I love with other people in something that was bigger than myself. It was always, with starting these three software companies, to build something that could survive the test of time. And the money does come, but if that’s the starting point I haven’t experienced that going so well.

Where did this idea for Exponential Impact come from?

One thing I found about myself, when organizations that I was running got too big were they no longer felt entrepreneurial, I lost interest. I liked when they were small — from zero to 300, 400 employees. I left Cherwell when it had around 600 to 700 employees and started looking around Colorado Springs to see what else was going on; we were an international company and weren’t focused as much on local Colorado Springs and what we were doing as a community.

When I resigned as CEO to look around and try to help our community grow, I started asking around. I was in a meeting with other leaders in the community, and one of them said: you really can’t do high-tech, commercial software in Colorado Springs. I was just flabbergasted — I’d been involved in two of them. I didn’t know at the time that they’d be the two biggest that are headquartered here. Soon there were a lot of others, but those were mostly defense-related companies. In fact, this person said, if my kid did high-tech in the commercial arena, I wouldn’t advise they live in Colorado Springs. That was like throwing the gauntlet down. I then inquired: do we have any organizations that help entrepreneurs get started and what do we do to help? I started exploring other cities and seeing what ecosystem they had to help entrepreneurs in the way of accelerators and incubators. That really started the process of thinking of Exponential Impact.

Why is it important that entrepreneurs take a holistic approach to life?

My wife, Betsy, was really helpful in helping think through what we were envisioning, as not just an incubator accelerator focused on how you scale a company, but how you avoid burnout and destroying your life in the process. It was more of a holistic frame of mind. Not just thinking about above the water line — when we think of an iceberg and what you can see — because most of our lives are below the water line and dealing with all the rest of it. I found a lot of entrepreneurs fail, not because of the business idea or the technology, but oftentimes because of other things that are going on in their lives that are distracting or cause burnout.

Why does Exponential Impact take a mentor-focused approach to startup growth?

Our biggest differentiator from other accelerators and incubators is our mentor-driven community. We’ve had over 100 mentors come in and help these companies — and they do it for free; it’s really amazing. We’re talking about experts in a variety of fields — sometimes they’re experts in law, accounting, and those traits — but sometimes there are entrepreneurs that have done extremely well.

Your chances of surviving by having people who have been there before you — maybe you can avoid some of the landlines they faced — is incredible. But it’s also had an amazing impact on our community of us all coming together and helping each other, that kind of synergy. Things would emerge that we would never expect and surprise us.

Being believed in is one of the most powerful emerging things that can happen. If you’re an entrepreneur you’re going to feel — all the time, typically — that you don’t have what it takes and it’s not going to work out. All those voices in your head, the inner critic. We just need people in our lives to say, hold on, you’re doing some good things and let me help you.

Want to hear more? Listen to “The People Behind Innovation” on Google, Apple, Amazon, and Spotify streaming services, or on Anchor with no account needed to stream.