BE 401: 3 Work Habits of a Successful Startup Founder with Alexander Harmsen
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This is the Business English Podcast, Episode 401, Three Work Habits of a Successful Startup Founder with Alexander Harmsen.

Welcome to the Business English podcast from All Ears English. Get the English skills you need to achieve your dreams in global business. For a presentation, a meeting, or your office party, this is Real Business English with your favorite American hosts, Lindsay and Michelle, coming to you from New York City and Colorado, USA.

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Save up to $100 off the normal price before the price goes up. allearsenglish.com slash professional. And I can't wait to see you in one of our live speaking events. One more time, go to allearsenglish.com slash P-R-O-F-E-S-S-I-O-N-A-L. See you there. Hello, Alex. Welcome to the podcast. How are you? I'm doing really well. Lindsay, thanks for having me on.

Absolutely. I'm glad to have you here. So listeners, I'm going to introduce our guest today. Today on the show, I have Alexander Harmsen. Alex is a tech entrepreneur who is passionate about AI, finance, and autonomy. He founded PortfolioPilot.com, an AI financial advisor with over $30 billion in assets on platform. He's raised over $30 million in venture capital and went through Y Combinator. He's also a

He has also been recognized by Forbes 30 Under 30. Welcome again, Alex. Glad you're here. I appreciate that intro. I'm excited to share some lessons and hopefully impart some wisdom. Who knows? I'll say as well that I'm actually ESL myself.

And my first language is Dutch. And I was pretty, you know, pretty early on. We moved to Canada when I was eight. But, you know, so I don't have much of an accent. That's great to know. That's great to know. That's very inspiring. I love that. I love that. Alex, in your bio, I mentioned that you...

won an award, the Forbes 30 under 30. And that's what I would love to focus on today. Kind of a unique angle here for a guest episode. First of all, what is Forbes 30 under 30?

Yeah, every single year, Forbes creates this list and they're looking for entrepreneurs or venture capitalists or artists or musicians or just interesting people, I think, across the country who have done something fascinating, something to stand out.

I mean, it feels a little bit bad. I don't want to sound arrogant, but I mean, hopefully the people under 30 is like a much smaller pool of people who have sort of like done something breakout and done something interesting. And so I assume like a pretty big part of the reason why I won that award a couple of years ago is because of that previous company that I started.

this autonomous vehicle company, Iris Automation. Like you said, we raised a pretty significant amount of venture capital funding, about $25 million. And we have three offices and expanded globally. And we had a team of 50 people and we're potentially the first

autonomous vehicle company to actually get scaled commercial approvals across nine countries. Okay. Yes. You know, sort of move beyond just R&D. I see. So you think the award was based on kind of the founding of this autonomous vehicle company? Is the company still running now? Are you, do you have vehicles on the road at the moment?

They're actually flying autonomous vehicles. And so we're not talking about self-driving cars. We're talking about drones, air taxis, cargo delivery, agricultural surveys, mining exploration, forest management. It's still going now. We sold the business in 2021. There was a big partner of ours and then a private equity firm that basically did this leveraged buyout. And...

Basically, three and a half years ago, you know, sold the business, went through this transition and we bought a house in the Bay Area in San Francisco and started a family. We have two toddlers now, a four-year-old and a two-year-old. Super cute. Yeah.

And my wife also runs a startup company in the pharma tech space. And then I started this new company, Portfolio Pilot, this financial advisor. All right. So clearly you are doing big things. And I love that you started a family and all of that good stuff, too, because sometimes we don't want to become so successful. We forget about other aspects of our lives. Right. That's really important at the highest levels.

So Alex, clearly you're doing something right. And you've won this award 30 under 30. Can you give us today three tips or tactics or strategies or things you do or did to win this award? I'm sure you still do the things that you were doing then. What are the things that you do that would get you to this level of success? So maybe our listeners can learn from this and implement some of these things in their daily lives.

Yeah, absolutely. Happy to share. Even before we went on the podcast, I wrote down sort of like a few different thoughts. I think what it truly boils down to is three things. Focus long term, focus short term and be persistent. And so I can like sort of anecdotes and stories for all three of those. Great. Let's let's talk about the first one. So focus long term. Tell us a little bit more about what that means to you.

I think that there's this Bill Gates quote that talks about, like, you know, we overestimate the things that we can do, you know, in the next year, but we underestimate the things we can do in the next decade. Yes. I think it's so true. Like, I think it was...

you know partly foolishness naivety you know i was i think i was something like 23 24 years old when i started iris automation and we were taking on a significant amount of regulatory risk and we were taking on a certain amount of execution risk and technical risk and you know basically building self-driving car type software computer vision algorithms ai and in the retrospect had no idea what we were doing you know started with something

thing that really drove me over the course of seven years was that there was this larger vision and the idea of there being these large commercial drones and air taxis. And I felt like there were millions of dull, dirty, dangerous jobs and significant amounts of sort of this like old school industries that could be improved. And there's something about just having that vision

you know, in my head every single day and every single decision that I make tying that to this very long-term thing. It very much felt like in a year, you know, we didn't do that much, but it compounds so quickly over time that, you know, most of the people that I talk to

And I truly think this is just a big differentiator. I think most people don't have some long-term vision, long-term five years, 10 years. And after a year, they move on to something else or they really just think about the next promotion or they just think about the next step or buying something or saving for X or let me learn this one skill.

And if you have this long term vision, you are able to chain together all these different things, then you can truly achieve something amazing. Yeah, I love that. It also sounds to me, you can correct me if I'm wrong. It sounds like it also needs to be something bigger than just ourselves, bigger than just our careers, because what you had in mind was way bigger than you. Right, Alex? I mean, yeah.

You're talking about autonomous mining. Maybe it's like the craziness in me, but definitely the ideas that I have and sort of these long-term visions are all tied to, you know, something at the scale of a billion people are changing or creating an industry. And it's...

Along the way, obviously, everything I'm saying here is like a significant amount of randomness involved too, right? There's a lot of luck involved in where I am right now. But I genuinely think that this focus on long-term allows me to capitalize on a lot of things along the way. Mm-hmm.

And I think it stopped me from going off in these like very exciting other directions. Yes. As you can imagine, along the way, there were so many people we could have hired or things we could have done or things we could have added to the business. And it just didn't quite fit into this one singular long-term focus.

yeah you know saying no is almost as important as saying yes interesting okay so that is the first tip and i feel like we can all relate to that you know take the long road vision right take that long vision not five years not 10 years maybe 20 years how do you want the world to be different right and this could be at a massive scale or it could be a little bit smaller related to our own careers the impact we want to make on the world personally

I love that. Alex, what would be the second thing that you have always done to win an award like this that has gotten you to this level of success? Yeah. The second part is focus short term. Okay. So the exact opposite, but I love it. The exact opposite. And I mean, it ties in in some ways, right? And

I also think sort of as an aside that, you know, this award in particular felt like a tiny detour on sort of this path that we were already on, right? Yes, yes. I think it's unlikely that

you know, you will win an award like this if you focus on trying to win an award like this. Sure. It's not about the award, right? Mostly just like right place, right time. I happen to be the right age. You know, I'll focus on sort of this long-term, you know, vision with Iris Automation. Focusing short-term, I think is like, when I say focus short-term, I mean today. Yeah. Okay. Every single morning. I mean,

I have some sort of routine. Before kids, it used to be like go on some sort of long walk and think about this. Now it's typically the 20 minute drive back from daycare. Yeah, I stop and pick up a coffee. And I think, what are the three most important things I should do today? And

Obviously, I have a list of, you know, 500 things I actually will do today. But I like to think that my day is either successful or not successful based on whether I get these three things done.

Okay. Okay. Today, like it's very simple things. One of them today is just I need to send a proposal to, you know, this guy I met yesterday. One of the three things that's going to take me, you know, 10 minutes, you know, we already have sort of this template, I need to just do it.

But that one thing is like such high leverage that it's better than, you know, four hours of me just doing emails, you know, this afternoon. Yes. Yes. I love that. I love that. At the end of the day, like allows me to focus both on this like very long-term focus, right? Every single day I think, okay, what is really going to move the needle a year from now? Yeah. If I'm able to win this contract with this guy, right?

You know, in the next week, that's really going to move the needle. And so what do I need to do to get one step closer to securing that contract? Send out the proposal. Now, Alex, there's like every single day, three things, no more, no less. It has to be this like very small list of like very tangible, achievable things.

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Yeah. At the end of the day, do you have a formal kind of ritual where you sit down and say, I was successful or I wasn't? Or you just kind of, you just know at the end of the day, whether you did it or not. I just don't go to sleep until those things are done. Love it. It's entirely, it's quite common for me to, you know, put the kids to sleep.

You know, 8, 8.30 and then look at my list and say, oh, I forgot this, you know, to do this one thing. Let me just knock it out and do it right now. And basically just don't wrap up for the day until I've done those three things. And so the chance that I go to sleep without all three of those things done is pretty low. Okay.

I love that. All right. It's a powerful combination that we're building up here. Long-term focus combined with short-term actions, short-term focus. I'm curious what your next tip is, Alex. Uh, be persistent. Okay. Tell us more. And I, uh, I think it seems very easy, right. To just say like, stick to something. Uh,

I heard someone say recently a phrase that like really stuck with me. They said like companies only ever die once you give up on them. And like,

no company dies because you run out of money or because you have a founder breakup or because you can't figure out, you know, what to build or because your customer fires you or whatever it is. Like at the end of the day, like the company only truly ever dies if you give up on it. And I think this fits a lot into this idea of persistence. And I think,

I am taking it to a level that like few other people take it to. Like, I think when I talk to people and say like, be persistent, even if I'm thinking about, you know, an internship that I got in college, you know, I saw a TED talk. Oh,

of this guy talking about changing the world at a scale of a billion people and bringing food and water and medicine delivery to a billion people without roads around the world. And instead of building roads, you could use these little package delivery drones to fly and reach these faraway places, these inaccessible places, or these washed out places. I said, this is

This checks all the boxes, robotics and computer vision and software and AI and aviation and aerospace. Right. So all the things I was interested in, so I got to work at this company and I emailed them.

And no response. And then I emailed them again and no response. And then I emailed them again, no response. And then I found a phone number from some forum that they filled in, you know, two years ago. And I called them up and left the voicemail. And I called and left another voicemail. And I called and left another voicemail. And eventually the CEO of this company said, you know, stop calling me, stop emailing us.

Like, we don't have an internship program. You know, we're a three-person company. We're just getting going. And I emailed him again and said, no problem. I'll set up your internship program. He's like, okay, fine. Let's get on a call. Like, you're pretty persistent. And I got on a call and he said, look, you're a Canadian guy. We're an American company. I don't even know how the visas will work out. I said, okay, I'll sort that out. I'll figure it out. I'll look it up. Yeah.

He said, I don't have much money to pay you. Like, okay, what can you pay me? He said the amount is, that was more than I was expecting anyway. Wow. Yes. Yeah. And he said, like, I don't even know what you would do. It was like, okay, here's all the things I've done in the past. You know, what if I build XYZ for you? He said, well, you know, X was an interesting, but Z is interesting. Okay.

okay, maybe talk to our one engineer. And he interviewed me and they said, okay, fly down and join us. And I was there for three months. And at the end of three months, they gave me a full-time offer. And I think even that level of persistence is very rare for people. And I got no's along the way. And I should have taken the hints that there wasn't a position available here. They did not want me. And

And it took me to Bhutan and we did, you know, I met the prime minister of Bhutan for a week flying. Yeah, amazing. Packaged delivery missions with medicine, you know, delivery outside of Timfu and in the Himalayas. Wow. Absolutely incredible experiences that came along from that. And obviously that, you know, went into all these other things. Even thinking about getting investor money right out of you.

I contacted, you know, one person, two people, three people. After 30 people, we got our first very small, you know, 10K check. It was only after 262 people that we finally closed this, you know, small round that we actually wanted. Yes. And the next time, you know, I had to pitch 117 people and then 86 people and, you

I think there's like a scale associated with that sort of persistence that is, I mean, I think probably crazy. Yeah, but it's- Lots of people have called me crazy along the way, but I like to think it works. And, you know, there's a level of persistence there along with the short-term and long-term focus that I think is actually like one of the only ways to really get stuff done. Yeah. That, you know, and a bit of luck.

I love it. This is such a good and I love how all three tips really are different, but they work together in a really beautiful combination. And it is a little bit crazy, but that kind of creates some magic. And it means you're doing something big, right? I love the fact that you contacted the CEO four, five, six times. Most people would just respond with that first message.

lack of reply as, oh, they don't have any openings. Most people think within the box, but it sounds like you kind of think outside the box to use a cliche, right? I love it. This is so good, Alex. I wish we could talk for another half hour, but I think our listeners will really appreciate these tips and be able to run with them. I think whether our listeners are in a career, working at companies or building their own company, they will be able to use this. Alex, where can we find you online? Do you have a website, a blog? Do you have a book that you've written?

No books yet. Twitter is probably the best way or X. It's Alex Harm is my handle. I tweet pretty often. And then, you know, obviously I would love for people to check out PortfolioPilot.com, you know, our AI financial advisor. It's like completely free to get started. And, you know, it's-

the next big thing that I'm working on. Yes. Already something like 30,000 users. And so it's taking off quickly. And I like to think that, you know, I didn't quite plan for this, but I'm sure that over the next 10 years, you know, this is going to be something amazing. Amazing. Well, thank you for coming on and inspiring us today, Alex. Very good tips. And I'll encourage our listeners to go and check out what Alex is working on. So thanks again, Alex, and hope to have you on again soon.

Thank you so much, Lindsay. Have a great day. Thank you. Take care.

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