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Course: Entrepreneurship > Unit 1
Lesson 8: Giles Shih - President and CEO of BioResource InternationalGiles Shih - Making an idea into a business
Giles Shih, President and CEO of BioResource International, talks about his company’s origins including founding along with his father. Giles also advises entrepreneurs to get out there and learn as you go. Created by Kauffman Foundation.
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- When you have an idea, what is the process of actually creating a business? I know there are legalities, but what are they? Also, how do you decide which structure would be right for your company?
Thanks for any response!(2 votes)- To create a viable business the first step is to envision the product and/or service. Once that has been determined the core mission and target population should be identified. Depending on that answer; the question of whether the entity should be profit or non-profit will help to determine which legal structure is most suitable. The key factors that drive which type of company is best include the potential growth, liability, and mission. An example would be if a person was thinking about opening a shelter for homeless veteran's. This could easily be viewed as a charitable mission which are usually non-profit. The most common forms of for-profit businesses are Sole Proprietor, Limited Liability Company(LLC), S or C-Corp, Limited Liability Partnership(LLP).(3 votes)
- Any pro-tips on how to avoid family conflict while working with them like you mentioned around2:00? My father and I go through different viewpoints while working together pretty often and I always wonder if there is a way for both of us to see each others side and really figure out which way would work the best? He has the wisdom but I have college accredited classes.(1 vote)
- Wisdom is far more valuable than accredited classes. I started my business with no formal business education. I was knocked down constantly by those family members who had all the accredited classes but no entrepreneurial spirit. Also, if you work from a place of EGO because you have book smarts you will fail. Even if you have education, you need wisdom, advice from others and the knowingness that you don't know everything and you never will. If the WISDOM is coming from a place of spirit and not EGO, I would be very open to listening. When it comes from a place of EGO, meaning I know what I read in a book and you are wrong, then I would walk away from that and ask for mentorship from someone who has true wisdom.(2 votes)
- Is this only for confined chickens? Free range chickens can be fed on this?How ? because they roam free and thus get all the wriggly worms and all that!How can they then be big and green?(2 votes)
- Weell, if the feed properly is mostly known the techniques we can use to develop a strong industry. Most of the food we eat, is not basically growth and coppered from the land. It is consumed by the sinthetic procedures that makes the food more and more suitable each time.(1 vote)
- How does culture affect a family business?(1 vote)
- business and culture is closely linked, there are always cultural factors in business(1 vote)
- Was it actually beneficial to not have taken a business class? Having your own perspective.(1 vote)
- As I am going through this course, I can't help but notice an entrepreneur missing from your list. Has Khan Academy thought of contacting Walter O'Brien for an interview? I don't think he'd pass up the opportunity to advertise on your site, in order to find new talent, considering he made an entire television series for that purpose.(1 vote)
- I am pretty sure that Sal started with those that helped support khan academy and then just looked for anyone he could get. The one you are talking about must just not have made it.(1 vote)
- Do you have any idea whether the chickens feel okay with this? Does it give them indigestion?(3 votes)
- I have also considered experimenting on animals cruel and still do. I am not sure that the chickens even have a choice though. They can not communicate, can not escape, and are not strong enough to resist. Lots of people do actually feel sad for them though.
However, people did not stop with chickens, and even got to the point of breeding entirely different species of animals with each other, such as dogs with cats.(0 votes)
- At2:51seconds Shih says that even though him and his father would argue they were all still trying to make the business go forward. This statement is very similar to Eric Schmidt's statement about his relationship with the founders of Google. Why can this type of model work for some but break others?(0 votes)
- It's mainly because of people's personalities. Some people can argue and the relationship stays, but some people argue and they cannot forgive the opposing side.
Hope that helps!(1 vote)
Video transcript
- My name is Giles Shih,
I'm President and CEO of BioResource International. My father is a co-founder in the company, and he is the inventor
of the technologies. I have to credit him for
being kind of entrepreneurial in the very beginning. It takes a certain amount of vision to kind of see things where they could be, or where there isn't anything yet. He was doing some studies
to convert poultry waste into energy, biogas energy. And he noticed that the feathers that fell into the manure, that
went into the digester would disappear, and so being
kind of a entrepreneurial scientist, he said there
must be some kind of bacteria or microbe that can digest the feathers. He knew that feathers
are made out of protein. And so he had the idea,
and the brainstorm, to take something from nature, and use it in some unique and helpful way to grow the industry. And from that genesis
of that initial project, now has spawned two products
that we sell commercially. As the cost of animal
production increases, using enzymes like ours
saves a lot of money. So we thought well, we're
just a small company, but we have a unique technology, and then we can put some pieces together and just see how far we could take it. The idea of trying to do
something that was impactful, that was what drove me to start
the business with my father. I was finishing up my PhD in microbiology at Emery University in Atlanta,
and just didn't see myself working in the lab for
the rest of my career, and I wanted to do something
that had an immediate impact, and had value, and so this
seemed to be a good opportunity, and I figured well, how hard can it be compared to graduate school? Turns out it's hard in a different way, but it was been a very good process for us to go through. One of the unintended consequences
of running this business, starting it with my father,
and growing it to this stage, is that we have developed a
newfound respect for each other, a new relationship that
isn't often achievable between a father and son typically. And I won't lie, there
were some difficult points, especially in the beginning of the company where we had to make a
lot of quick decisions without a lot of information,
without a lot of experience. And it was almost based
on opinion, and gut, and we would often have
differences of opinion. And we can joke about this now. I would go over to my parents'
house for dinner on Sunday evening, and we used to call
them the Sunday night fights because invariably we'd
start talking about business for BRI, and have difference of opinion, and start to get more and more heated, and my mom would have to kind of step in and kinda settle us down a bit. What made it successful is
that we put it out there, we didn't hold any strong
resentment or hard feelings against each other. What we were all doing
was trying to go forward and do the best for the business. I never took a business course, ever, before I started the company, and I just learned by
doing, and being persistent, and diligent, and being
honest about what I could and couldn't do. So I tell people that you
just need to get started, just go and do it, and
you learn as you go. The other part of it is
working with my father, and being able to take
something that's essentially a family business, and
grow it and scale it to something that is now beyond the scope of what we ever thought was possible.