Interview with Brent Beshore about starting his business Adventur.es.
This is part six of the ten part series. Follow the Starting a Business as a Young Entrepreneur interview series and don’t miss an interview!
Interview Series Sponsored by Hiscox Small Business Insurance. Hiscox specializes in protecting IT/technology, marketing, consulting, health and beauty, photography and many other professional services businesses, tailoring coverage to the specific risks in your industry.
At the age of 7, Brent Beshore partnered with a neighborhood friend to manufacture bows and arrows in the U.S. to sell in Guatemala. There might have been some holes in his plan, but Brent’s entrepreneurial roots and intuition have grown stronger over the past couple of decades.
Today, Brent’s endeavors are just as ambitious, and even better prepared. Brent is founder and CEO of venture capital firm adventur.es, venture partner at Gen Y Capital, an angel investor, and owner of Beshore Family Vineyards.
Brent has entrepreneurship deeply rooted in his genes. His great-great grandfather invented the bedspring and his grandfather helped in turning a $4 million dollar company into a $4 billion dollar company.
Adventur.es, founded in 2007, is a problem first venture capital firm that seeks out significant widespread problems to solve through starting new businesses and making select angel investments. A problem that the company is currently attempting to solve is obesity. After working with researchers for the last 18 months, they believe that they can make a difference and will be launching a new company in February or March of 2014.
Over the past 6 years, the company has experienced rapid growth, and was 28th on Inc.’s 500 Fastest Growing Companies list in 2011 and reached $6.8 million in revenues with 62 employees. Brent credits adventur.es’ success and growth to intellectual honesty. When trying to find solutions for challenging problems, most people have their own ideas of how to address that problem. Most of these ideas and viewpoints will be wrong. Brent pointed to the ability to adopt new perspectives and being honest through the process as significantly helping fuel the growth of adventur.es.
Q: What has been the hardest thing you have encountered as a young entrepreneur?
A: “The emotional rollercoaster…you can feel like a million bucks one minute and ten minutes later you feel like you’re scum of the earth.”
Like almost every successful entrepreneur on the planet – Brent has failed and struggled along the way. “When things are going great don’t burn out, and when things are going bad don’t try to hide. Early on in my career that was a huge challenge. I went through a period of two years where I think I cried in my office 2-3 days a week. You feel like you can’t do anything right and a lot of people are going to call you a failure. I finally realized, for the most part, people don’t care.”
Brent has reached a high level success at the age of 30, but one thing that he feels he still wants to accomplish is to have a big defining moment that makes a significant impact on the world. “I feel like we’ve done a good job. We made some money, we’ve helped quite a few people, but we haven’t had that hugely denting the world moment yet.”
Don’t settle for just the highlights – listen to the full interview audio below!
Interview Highlights
– Brent’s thoughts on whether starting a business at a young age is an advantage or a disadvantage and why he believes that young entrepreneurs should lean towards products instead of services.
– Favorite part about being an entrepreneur: “It’s just this incredible, awesome experience to bring together a community of people. I was the initial spark for it, but it’s grown way past me…the greatest reward.”
– What’s the best way you can protect your business? “Don’t try to control people. I know that’s a little counterintuitive because we think of control as a positive thing in the sense of – if you have control, that’s good. I’ve learned personally, the more open, transparent, and authentic I am, and the less I try to control them…the better things happen.”
– Best piece of advice for people under 30 to do right now: Read. The smartest people in the world are telling us their secrets. Brent reads 1-2 hours every day and says that they are the hands down most productive hours of his day.
– “Embrace the fact that you’re not always going to be productive.”
– If you could add any entrepreneur to your team, who would it be and why? Aaron Levie from Box. Intelligent, funny, intellectually honest and one of the best Twitter philosophers.
Listen to the full interview here:
[powerpress]
Read more interviews from the Starting a Business as a Young Entrepreneur Series
