Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed: Cyriac Roeding

by Scott Edward Walker on October 24th, 2013

To Our Clients & Friends: Welcome to our weekly series “Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed.”  Each week, we share a favorite video of a successful entrepreneur, investor or business leader on a variety of topics.  This week, we present Cyriac Roeding, co-founder and CEO of shopkick and a brilliant entrepreneur.

In this interesting five-minute clip (courtesy of Stanford University’s Entrepreneurship Corner), Cyriac shares some solid nuggets for entrepreneurs, including the following:

• “I really think it’s great to build an awesome feature; I think it’s great to build a great product; it’s also great to build a great company. You have to decide as an entrepreneur which type you are – what do you want to do?”  (at 0:55)
•  “The first thing that you need [to develop a business model] is an answer to the question:  ‘whose problem does this solve?’”  (at 1:41)
• “If you’re trying to build a technology first and then find a problem to that solution, you have a problem.”  (at 1:53)
• “It’s great to have a core technology, but it has to solve a real problem.”  (at 4:44)

I hope you enjoy it.  Cheers, Scott