Revenue Chat with Vitaly Golomb

VITALY GOLOMB ON REVENUE CHAT WITH TONY DURSO. The two business experts chatted about entrepreneurs, the Bay Area and which industries are mostly affected by the ongoing industrial revolution.

Tony Durso is a 4-time author (i.e. Elite Entrepreneurs) and he hosts two weekly Talk Shows: The Spotlight, a one-hour weekly show dedicated to stars, greats and game changers and Revenue Chat. Revenue Chat is a weekly podcast that uploads every Friday. Each episode, over 15,000 downloads, features an Elite Entrepreneur who achieved success in business through hard work and overcoming adversity, providing superior advice, guidance and tips to today’s entrepreneurs, small business owners, as well as C-level executives. For the most recent show on Revenue Chat, the host Tony Durso interviewed IEG - Managing Director Vitaly Golomb about his book on “Accelerated Startups” and asked about Vitaly’s insights about the trends, future technologies, the ongoing industrial revolution and its inevitable effects on today’s economy, labor force and society in general.

Vitaly Golomb moved to the San Francisco Bay Area when he was 8, became a techie when he was 13 and started running companies while in college. Now he travels up to 20 countries every year, is one of the most dynamic and in-demand speakers and trainers in the world of startups, VC and innovation.  During his travels, Vitaly realized that the challenges and problems entrepreneurs have to change, were all quite similar – no matter where he went. This realization led him to write the book “Accelerated Startups” (available on amazon, audible and itunes).

Read the following section, to get the full scoop!

You are in 20 countries – every year – talking about, teaching people how to be better at what they do already and you are also an investment banker. That is just the tip of the iceberg. Let me back up, give our audience a more rounded view of yourself and let’s get into accelerating startups.

Sure. I was born in the Soviet Union – in the Ukraine. My parents brought me to San Francisco when I was eight years ole. I grew up in the Silicon Valley, went to the same High School like Steve Jobs and Steve Wosniak. Here it started very early for me in the startup world. I went through the dot.com wave, I went through the last 15/20 years here with the different waves and really I am kind of a prime example of the Silicon Valley mindset - Go Big or Go Home and tackled really big, hairy problems and build innovative technology. So what I do now and for the past few years, I try to export that frame of references, that mindset to a lot of talented, very smart set of engineers all over the world who come maybe from a more traditional business background where the value system is quite different, then the types of things that we go after here in Silicon Valley

What about M&A, Venture Funds and specific sectors relating to your book “Accelerating startups”?

“Accelerating Startups” is really a book; it’s kind a manual to Silicon Valley mindset. It is targeted to entrepreneurs all over the world who have a dream of building a product and it is a step by step to go from idea to product to company in the various steps. From funding the company, building the team and making choices and building something really scalable that can go all the way.

What are the future technologies or say the next industrial revolution according to you?

Well certainly AI is an area and it is a bit of a buzzword – essentially it is automation. It is automation of a lot of things that have been done by humans in the past. We will be increasing more automated in the near future which means things can be done a lot faster, but which also means that some professions will be quite disrupted. So for me that is every single sector. You can already see happening in the financial sector and others – manufacturing as well. Surely manufacturing itself is quite interesting because with commercial 3D printing which is not publically well known much yet, but I spent the last couple of years actually at HP and got a good taste for what’s coming in the 3D printing world on a commercial side. It is going to disrupt manufacturing in a lot of really positive ways where the US will become a leader in manufacturing again because you will be able to manufacture much closer to the customer but it also means these factories will be a lot less human and much more automated. So those are a couple of core areas. Certainly a lot of very exciting and interesting things are happening in healthcare – you will see breakthroughs in the next few years and also already happening that will be on par with the discovery of the germ theory and beyond that. We are talking about nano bots in your blood stream and a lot of other really, really interesting and exciting somewhat scary things but overall medicine will change quite a bit. And there is a lot of innovation across all sectors – in finance, in transportation, in logistics. You know a lot of things will be changing and at the same time there are exciting on the other hand there will change the way how our economy works which may affect - very likely affect – large swaps of our labor force.

Give us the biggest hit first.

Biggest hit first? Well … economist driving a certainly a big topic of interest right now. You can say there are some 4 or 5 million professional drivers in this country. It is second biggest single kind of category of profession after retail clerks who also btw will be highly affected by automation - and there are just as many people relying on that profession like diners and gas stations and things along the way – all of that will be largely automated away… very, very quickly. So the interesting thing is, we are now hitting the third Industrial Revolution and, you know, some people say with every industrial revolution, we had a lot of these professions be automated away but look at all these new things we got to do.  The main difference is that the previous two industrial revolutions took all about three generations to go through. We are going through this much, much quicker. So we are leaving behind a huge part of the population that won’t be able to adapt quick enough You know, you are not going to take someone with High School education or less and turn them into a software developer overnight. It just not going to happen. These people do not have the background. And an education is really a big focus criteria for me because that is the only way that we will be able to keep up with the demand and the complexity of these future categories and future labor categories especially. On the one hand, we need half a million developers in this country. That is way a lot of the companies go to Europe, Eastern Europe especially, and South East Asia to find software development talent because there is just not enough of it in the US. On the other hand, it is not something that easy for someone to pick up overnight. It takes many years of education.

It seems to me that AI, Deep Machine Learning, regarding re-education of these huge swaths of our population that is going to be left behind, is going to be a big thing I can see that happening, but let me change gears for a second. Silicon Valley: The global clusters of innovation. What do you mean by that?

So a cluster of innovation is what is required for any particular industry. So any industry as it goes through several generations of its development, you have various different players in a particular region. In Silicon Valley since right after WW II, innovation and technology has been a big focus area that was driven by Stanford by Fredrick Terman there, by the US government defense department investing and being the first customer for the first 20 years. So very fascinating history and what that’s developed over the course of the last 70 years, is that you have the entrepreneurs with experience, you have all the service providers, like lawyers and accountants, etc. that are specialized to these kind of companies. Your venture capital, you know the Wall Street of venture capital is here. You have large corporations that are innovation and technology driven that have thousands of employees that specialize in this. So Bay Area is about a seven and a half million population and about a quarter of those people work directly in technology and innovation. Another half or so are their spouses and then you have kids and retired people. So we are highly specialized in that here, much like in Hollywood you may have a specialized cluster of people in the entertainment sector in New York more in the finance industry and advertising. You have this phenomenon all over the world and what is really special about Silicon Valley is not just a capital that we have here – the venture capital – but you have about 50,000 director level managers who have experience of going from zero to hero with a technology company. Kind of from idea to an IPO or a big sale and scaling those companies. That is something that you cannot replace – the type of experience. So that means, everybody comes here if they are trying to still go form 20 people to a150 people to 1,000 people in a  matter of a few months or a year.

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