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Course: Entrepreneurship > Unit 1
Lesson 5: Zach Kaplan - CEO of InventablesZach Kaplan - CEO of Inventables
Zach Kaplan, CEO of Inventables, talks about how his early education helped shape his entrepreneurial roots and describes how a popular movie taught him an important lesson in entrepreneurship. He then recalls the moment when he had to decide between starting a company and taking a job. Created by Kauffman Foundation.
Want to join the conversation?
- Zach speaks about learning some engineering in High school. IS there some where on the internet I can teach myself those skills?(13 votes)
- https://www.coursera.org/course/statics1
The current course is almost done. You can still sign up for it and check out the material. If you wish to have a more traditional education, you can sign up for the watchlist and you will be notified of when the next course offering is available.(13 votes)
- At2:05, Zach says he started he first company in school. What company was he referring to and what did that company do?(4 votes)
- What is the relation of opportunity cost and trade off(3 votes)
- when you have an idea of some type what are the steps to turning it into your own company.(2 votes)
- It depends on what you want to do. I would recommend getting a prototype to sell, or selling to consumers with the understanding that they'll have to wait for a deliverable, and going from there. Your business will change and evolve a lot along the way, but I firmly believe it's important to make sure that people are willing to pay for it and that it provides value. If it does, get feedback and tweak from there, and then get into the nitty gritty paperwork, hiring, etc. if it doesn't work, get back to the drawing board and repeat until you are able to generate money to some degree.(2 votes)
- I would rather see the interview of those two guys that combine theory and practice. Selling something that doesn't work for a lot more money is the reason people hate, novelty items are cool but to make it an ongoing business and teaching it to early entrepreneur is somewhat a mistake. And lastly can anyone give short explanation with southwest thing?(2 votes)
- He talks about learning and some engineering in high school.(2 votes)
- he's talking about engineering and etc, i wanna learn more about it(2 votes)
- Funny, I learned how all of this works through World of Warcraft auction house. Every one would spend 1100$ just for a simple battle pet. I became sooo rich! XD(2 votes)
- i wish sitech was at my school(0 votes)
Video transcript
- My name is Zach Kaplan. I'm the CEO of Inventables, an online hardware store for designers. For me, it started when
I was a little kid. I built everything from LEGOs, to constructs, to you name it. If there was a construction
toy out there, I had it. At my high school, they
had a team-taught class called Site Tech and so this
is high school engineering. It was Jim Howie who was the shop teacher and Jeff Jordan who was
the physics teacher, those guys had vision, they were way ahead of the maker revolution so to speak. They saw that abstract
or the analytical things like physics needed to be combined with the practical let's make it. That's where I got really excited because when they were
separated, I didn't see the point as much just learning
physics or just learning how to use a lathe but
when you combined them and there was a goal of
let's build a rollercoaster, that's when I lit up and
I was like really excited. I would dig in to what are the physics of a rollercoaster or how
do you learn how to weld so those two guys totally inspired me, got me going in this track. It was towards the end of high school and I just wanted to
get going and figure out can you sell anything? The first time I dabbled
in this was with eBay so The Matrix came out, it was huge, everybody wanted that
phone and the only place that we could find it was in London, they were selling them,
it was a Nokia phone, so we imported 'em from London for about 50 bucks a phone
and mind you, at that time, we had different systems
between United States and Europe, those phones
didn't work in America, we put 'em up on eBay,
people were in an auction buying them for about 350 bucks a phone and this was a huge lesson because why were people
paying $350 for a phone that didn't work? So if
you talk to these people, they were paying 'cause
they wanted the phone from the movie and it
was worth that to them and that was like a big
eye-opening, educational experience that really just
started to shape my ideas of so what is a business, really doing it, how do you price these things
and how would you even learn about that, but the whole
experience blew me away. When I was in college, I actually started my first company during school and I remember towards graduation, there was this decision point, do I continue with the
company or do I get a job? My parents encouraged me to
do whatever I wanted to do but really they said
just go start the company because they knew that's
what I really wanted to do, they believed in me and
they were just supportive in the best ways possible. My goal at the time was when I graduated, I wanted to be making just as much money as the job offers I got
to go be an engineer. One of my friends talked
about how some entrepreneurs are living in the future,
they're seeing it a little bit differently or a little bit
before the rest of the world and coalescing the ideas
so that people can realize wow that's really
interesting, I would love to buy that product or
share that experience. When you learn about something unexpected, it expands your understanding
of what's possible and now you can come up
with all these new ideas. Entrepreneurship is, to
some extent, a same kind of process where you're
starting a new business and you're starting it with
just a subtly different take on the way that maybe
people have done it before so think about the difference
between Southwest Airlines and United or American, right,
they're all three airlines but Southwest approaches
the problem from a different point of view and so
entrepreneurship, in many ways, is having that point of
view and then delivering a new experience from that point of view or assembling the pieces
together in a different way that yields a different result. It really comes down to your motivation to just go do it and go try so I hope that they
get inspired to realize like they can do it
too, it's not that hard.