The inspirational acceptance speech of Greek American angel investor, Marina Hatsopoulos about innovation, mentors, entrepreneurial spirit, success and failure, work ethic and the Greek start-up ecosystem. Marina was the Keynote Speaker & Aristeon Award Honoree at HAWK’s Conference on Entrepreneurship.
“My parents were born in Athens, Greece and met in Boston. After my father became a professor at MIT, he founded and built Thermo Electron, so I’m a product of the American Dream. I was taught that anything was possible if I worked hard enough. The American Dream has been getting a lot of knocks lately for leaving so many behind. As our parents and grandparents from the villages of Greece always knew, the root of all opportunity is in education, and our public school system is failing our neediest populations. Inner city students are being denied choice for an adequate education and thus any hope for a better life. This is the biggest civil rights issue of our day, and goes to the heart of any discussion about opportunity. I always dreamed of being an entrepreneur. After I got my Masters from MIT in Mechanical Engineering, I tried to get a management position, but nobody would hire me because I had no experience. It was a Catch-22. So I pivoted and went to MIT’s Technology Licensing Office and was introduced to the inventors of a new 3D printing technology back in the days before anybody knew was 3D printing was. I didn’t feel ready to be CEO, but like many Greeks today, I decided to make my own opportunity. Four of us out of MIT—the two inventors, my husband Walter, and I— started the business. After two years, we shipped our first beta unit, just two months after I gave birth to twin girls. We grew the business to become the second leading 3D printing company, with 125 employees, but by that time we had four children, the Company was growing like crazy, and I was burned out, so we sold in 2005. Since selling I’ve been on corporate boards and doing some angel investing. I’ve also become connected with the startup scene in Greece. By way of context, the Greek economy, shattered in 2008 by the debt crisis and austerity measures, shrank by 25% over six years. The loss of 1 million jobs resulted in peak unemployment of 28%, and youth unemployment of 1
58%. Since the crisis began, over 500,000 Greeks have left—many of them young, highly-skilled, and educated. Crisis & Failure are not fun. Nobody wants it. But if we learn from it, failure often opens up new possibilities and opportunities. The crisis has caused tremendous hardship, but sometimes radical change for the better is only possible through a shock to the system that removes any other way out. With no jobs available, people are creating their own jobs by founding startups in agriculture, food, tourism, logistics and technology. The crisis has forced Greece to pivot—to reboot and create a new engine of growth. Instead of more government jobs and endless financial support from the EU, Greece can build its own way out of its economic problems. The country is coming out of the crisis with a radically new mindset and culture. Entrepreneurship offers economic opportunity and unlike the old bureaucratic government jobs of the past, it rewards very different attributes, like risk-taking, innovation, drive, and team-work. It does not reward punching in the clock or political maneuvering. Greeks have always been natural entrepreneurs outside of Greece. Of the Greek immigrants in the US labor force, 16% are small-business owners, the highest rate of any immigrant group. To support these startup efforts are technology research centers, incubators, accelerators, & startup competitions. The big news is that EquiFund, a fund-of-funds supporting entrepreneurship and innovation has recently committed to investing €320 million in venture, private equity, and tech transfer funds in Greece. Legislation has improved, although the Greek government needs to open markets and reduce bureaucracy in order to make its way off the bottom of the list for its business-friendliness. Still, some of Greece’s challenges— high unemployment, limited access to capital, & small local markets— actually enforce the fundamentals of strong start-ups: availability of welleducated talent motivated by equity, a focus on profitability, and early globalization. While economic growth in Greece in 2017 is at about 2%, my family and friends in Greece don’t feel it yet. People are downtrodden and have little hope. Yet when I’m with entrepreneurs in Athens, it’s like I’m in an alternate universe, because there’s a bubbling excitement about the future. 2
Of course, this startup activity will take years to impact the overall economy, so it’s not a fix for Greece’s current debt issues, but over the coming years it will create many jobs. Already entrepreneurship has become a new aspiration, and Greece now has the opportunity to grow and thrive. In Plato's Republic, the four cardinal virtues are wisdom, temperance, courage and justice. These form valuable guideposts for entrepreneurship. Wisdom is knowledge. When you’re doing a startup, you need to know everything that’s happening in your field, which requires continual dialogue with the market. This is often where technology entrepreneurs fail, because they’re introverted engineers who would prefer to do an experiment or code software than pick up the phone. This is dangerous. A lot of times I’ll be asked at a networking event what I think of a business idea, but it doesn’t matter what I think; it’s what the customer thinks. You need to listen to your customers, although it doesn’t necessarily mean you do what they say. Early on, I was told that the parts from our 3D printers were crappy, but a crappy part is better than no part, and we had the only means to get any part within an hour or two instead of a day or a week. Listening is hard, and it requires you to release your preconceptions, put aside your arguments, and just hear what another person has to say. It’s a skill that has been entirely lost in today’s divisive political climate. We’re all so sure we’re right, and that the other side is stupid or missing the point, that we don’t try to understand where someone else is coming from. In doing a startup, such deafness can be fatal. You need a strong mentor who will tell you what you don’t want to hear. In my case, that was my husband Walter. I see many entrepreneurs who have early success—or, even worse, early media coverage of potential future success—and they begin to drink their own Kool-Aid. CEO Syndrome is what happens after receiving such accolades, or surrounding yourself with people who tell you how great you are. You start to believe you have all the answers, and you stop listening. This is very dangerous. Recognize your strengths and weaknesses and fill them in with others on the team. My biggest weakness was management itself as the company grew: being a mentor, teacher, & helping each employee grow. Ironically, I 3
learned management skills from a couple of the people I managed. They took time to explain things, delegated projects and supported their subordinates without micromanaging. Of course, in the beginning there wasn’t a whole lot of management to do. On my first day as CEO, I went to the office all dressed up, bright and early, and the office was empty, other than a note on my desk saying that the guys had been up all night coding and would come in some time in the afternoon. Hire people who are complementary, not in your own image. Our founders were so different. Jim was a quirky MIT PhD who ran around naked with gold spray paint on his body as part of the Ignobel Awards at MIT, and Tim slept on a mattress in an MIT lab. They both loved dumpster-diving for old equipment and had rigged up all sorts of mechanical devices. Jim has the most incredible breadth of technical knowledge of anyone I know, and Tim is this out-of-the-box creative guy who tries crazy things that nobody else would try and gets them to work. Each one of us brought something to the table that we needed. The magic of our chemistry lay in our differences, not in our similarities. The most essential piece of wisdom is judgment to make good decisions. Hire people with good judgment and encourage an open exchange of opinions among your team. At Z Corp., we used to get into heated debates —never personal—and everyone’s opinion mattered. That very Greek dynamic helped us reach better decisions. Although it’s important to know what’s going on in the world, it’s at least as important not to allow what other people are doing to influence your better judgment. For example, there was a time when people were raising tons of money from venture capital and spending like crazy for growth. I was told “profitability” was a bad word, that growth was all that mattered. Later, lean startups became a thing. There are waves of fashion in entrepreneurship and technology like in anything, and it’s important to stay your course. The second virtue, temperance, is the control and self-restraint over our appetites and desires. My interpretation in applying this to entrepreneurship is that it means setting aside your pleasures in order to focus. Every day is a race. There’s too much to do and inadequate resources: time, money, and people. This requires you to give up lazy days at the beach and nights out drinking. You can never get it all done, which makes it a game of priorities. Many great ideas need to go to the bottom of the list, and you’re 4
constantly making decisions without enough information. Something is always reaching out to try to derail you. Much of it is good, interesting and worthy, but it is still off-track. Just say no. As we built the business, I was raising children, so my life for ten years was entirely devoted to work or family, with no time for extracurricular activities. I tried to combine work and family whenever possible. We put a nursery in at the office. It had a glass door and a window, and was right behind my desk, so I could see what my twin girls were doing all day. A nanny came and watched them for the first year of their life. Playing with them was a welcome break from work, and after a time going back to work was a welcome break from them. This all worked until Jim taught them how to push the button to reboot peoples’ computers. While working hard is important, working smart is even more important. Find the path of least resistance. For example, we had trouble finding an affordable computer scientist so we ended up hiring a chemist to write our software. Entrepreneurship is messy. Perfection is your enemy, because if you take the time to go from 80% to 100%, you give up too much. Opportunities to get derailed and waste time on achieving perfection abound. Excellence is not perfection; excellence is good enough on the beta machine so you can iterate one more time and still get to market before the competition, with a product that’s much better because you got that first prototype out to some early testers who gave you valuable feedback. Don’t plan on exiting in the next year, because that’s extremely unlikely. Assume you’re in this for ten years, so it better be something that feels important to you, because this is a huge commitment. The third virtue, courage, is the willingness to confront pain, danger, discouragement and uncertainty. This requires resilience and endurance. One of the scariest moments for me early on was public speaking. My voice cracked, and I was awful, but I kept doing it and ultimately I ended up enjoying it. An entrepreneur spends a lot of time with a blank sheet of paper. This requires a willingness to play in the unknown, and to be creative, making up rules where there are none. Nobody tells you what to do. Nobody slaps 5
you on the back to tell you you’re on the right track. In fact, most people are telling you why your idea makes no sense. You need to be comfortable questioning all assumptions, and not taking any single person’s word— including your own—as gospel. What might’ve worked in the past for other companies may or may not work for you. You need to stand by your decisions, and when you make a mistake, you need to own it. The most courage you’ll need is in facing failure, which is an inevitable part of entrepreneurship. When you fail, you need to put your ego aside, stop feeling sorry for yourself and self-reflect. What did you learn from that? What can you take away to improve your chance of success, or how do you need to pivot? The reality is that without failure, and the risk of failure, we’d never be able to push ourselves as hard. Failure is our path to excellence, and there’s no way around it. When we push past our laziness, past what we think is good enough, and past what we think we can do, there’s a phenomenal sense of fulfillment, and we produce what we never thought possible. A word of caution. Socrates said, foolish endurance is not courage. Entrepreneurs sometimes follow their vision blindly, despite what the market tells them. This is foolish. Courage is facing new information and adjusting course. We tried to raise venture capital early on, but in the 1990’s the internet was taking off and hardware was out of fashion. We ended up bootstrapping, which made us reach profitability early on, so we ended up building a stronger company as a result. The fourth virtue, justice, is a human longing to do a duty that ultimately bonds a man in society. Socrates believed that each human has certain natural abilities, and having each one do the single job one is naturally suited for is the most efficient way to satisfy the needs of all the citizens. This requires self-knowledge. One may wish, as I did, to be a concert pianist, but possess the fingers of a mathematician. At Z Corp., we learned to let Jim and Tim soar in the areas where they were so gifted, and we stopped trying to get them to be something different. What I find striking is when you find someone—and this can be in any possible profession—who has a deep passion and intrinsic skill in what they do. I’ve met individuals who embody this ideal: a marble carver, an engineer, a masseuse, a photographer, a technician, a housebuilder, an OB/GYN, a cobbler, a house caretaker, a hairdresser, an entrepreneur, and 6
a sports trainer. These people I’ve met display a fire in their soul, because they’re doing exactly what they should be doing. It’s magic, and it’s a worthy—and attainable—aspiration. Entrepreneurship is not for everyone, but its lessons are universal, and apply to life in general. Don’t let anyone else—or your own inertia— determine your course. Whatever you do should feel important to you, and also to the market. Have the courage to face your fears, learn from your mistakes, and be brave enough to change course. Grit is perseverance that empowers you to overcome obstacles in achieving your goals. This country was built on grit, although grit seems to be going out of style. We as a society have come to a mind-set that stress, hardship and all uncomfortable feelings need to be avoided. What if, instead of trying to make everything easier for ourselves and our kids, we worked to become more resilient, so we can handle whatever comes our way? Fulfillment comes from what we earn, not from what we’re given. And, practically speaking, in the economic realm, we’re not competing with our own soft American selves, we’re competing with people from China and India, who are competent, well-educated, and have tremendous drive. Let’s allow for some pain, as our parents and grandparents did when they got on the boat to come to America, and push through that discomfort in order to achieve our dreams.”
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