Manil Uppel, Co-Founder, Delivery Solutions on Advice #Advice4Entrepreneurs

I'm starting a new series called #Advice4Entrepreneurs. I ask the same two questions to close out the interview: 1. What advice can you offer budding entrepreneurs? 2. What skills that you use now do you wish you would have paid more more attention to back in college or the early part of your career?

This series are those last two questions.

 

Transcript

Jeff: One last question. What skills that you use today? W do you wish you would have paid more attention to back in the early part of your career or back in college?

Manil: I think I came from a corporate background, I used to work with Cisco, in tech-support consulting and then eventually sales for them. And then, we went, I went from there to having an app that delivers booze. So nothing prepared me for that switch.

But I think one thing that if I look back now is in my career, I didn't have a lot of  entrepreneurs and I was not exposed to that role. It was almost like for 15 years, I was in a corporate role and that's the only role I knew. And I never bothered to look beyond my book is all about habit for this company.

This is my mission. This is all I'm doing. No re so I think getting out of your comfort zone and [00:35:00] looking at other people and just engaging, with people who are different than you, and who are doing different things that helps us all. Much sooner. And also I think finding the right mentors, right?

You don't have to go figure everything out yourself. There are people who have seen this movie before. There are people who have started this movies and you don't have ad grade rules. I think, off hour, one hour with those people is really, save you a lot more time and effort.

These are things that I didn't do in my year and I. If I just explored more and Brendan Sergeant mender, that would have made maybe, I wouldn't have done maybe, I made I dunno, 15 mistakes. I probably wouldn't have made 25 then if I had some exposure there,

Jeff: wow. That's fantastic. I'm going to ask one followup question. So I lied one followup question on that, and I bet I know the answer to this. You mentioned lack of mentors, and I hear that from a lot of the kids that I've talked to in various colleges around these things. I'm curious how many people have re young people have reached out to you to ask, to be mentored or to ask for maybe a half hour of your time, just saying, Hey, I'm a young entrepreneur.

Give me three or [00:36:00] four thoughts or something. I'm just curious. How many kids have reached out to you?

Manil: Zero. The only my my school, I went to business school. And duke has a very good entrepreneurship program. So

Jeff: cost me some money in the final form, just so you know, and the bowl and when sentimental, but, oh,

Manil: But yeah but duke did have a an entrepreneurship.

With this, go to the alumni or now in entrepreneurship. And, they invited me to come and chat with, all of their students for their current class and stuff like that. So I think that was one thing I did last year and it was like highly fulfilling, but it was under their do banners in their facility to them, but nobody or Gallogly as commons and I'm trying to do something.

I have lots of say and it's very important, right? It's very important that you don't have to reinvent the wheel from scratch every time. It's

Jeff: well, you just have to have the guts to ask that's the point I want to get at. Interesting. Man, thanks.

Thanks for the time today. Very interesting stuff.