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Kidder offers startup wisdom
Submitted by rjpscb on October 24, 2011 - 3:06pm
News Date:
October 22, 2011
David Kidder, CEO of the online advertising services company Clickable Inc., has climbed a lot of mountains and languished in more than a few valleys in his entrepreneurial career.
It has been in his valleys, when success seems more distant than failure, that he has learned the most about how to build a business and overcome adversity.
"It's important to remember that there's never a bad time to start a company, booms, busts, whatever," Kidder, the keynote speaker at the daylong 8th annual RIT Entrepreneurs Conference at the E. Philip Saunders College of Business at RIT, said. "But it's incredibly hard to do."
Kidder said that, in the modern world, the stakes have changed for people. If the central goal in American life once was to buy a home and build equity in it, the goal now must be to build equity and value in a creative, productive work life.
"It's essential that you know yourself and foster your ability to create things, build a framework, to join with others who have skills you might not have," Kidder said.
Kidder, an RIT graduate, is known not only for his startup prowess, but for being the co-author of a best-selling series of advice books called The Intellectual Devotional. In the process of his research, Kidder has interviewed some of the giants of the entrepreneurial world and Friday shared some of the advice he has been given.
They include urgings to think radically, to be an ethical and forgiving leader, to find and focus on the big and best idea while shedding those that divert attention and energy. He urged those interested in the startup life to understand one's company, one's customer and one's market as completely as possible.
"The late Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs knew what people want but were unable to say," Kidder said. "You have to be able to throw out all the Bs and keep only the A and make it an A-plus."
More than 600 people registered for the conference.