Zach Kaplan - Inventables'ın CEO'su

my name is Zach Kaplan I'm the CEO of Inventables online hardware store for designers for me it started when I was a little kid I built everything from Legos to constructs you name it if there was like a construction toy out there I had it in my high school they had a team taught class called psych tech and so this is like 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 the abstract of their 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 and I didn't see that the point is much just learning physics or just learning how to use a lathe but when you combine 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 into well what are the physics of a roller coaster or how do you learn how to weld so those two guys totally inspired me got me going on 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 him it was a Nokia phone so we imported him from London for about 50 bucks of phone and mind you at that time we had different systems between the United States and Europe those phones didn't work in America we put them 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're paying because 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 started to shape my ideas of like whoa so what is a business really doing and 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 they really they said just go start the company because they knew that's what I really want do they believed in me and they were just supportive and the best ways possible my goal at the time was when I graduated I want to be making just as much money as the job offers I got to go be an engineer one of my friends talks 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 people can realize like well 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 the 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 you 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