Guest Speaker: Shadrach White

    This week, after a couple delays, Shadrach White finally came in to speak with us. He is the CEO of a  cloud services company and a seasoned entrepreneur. An older gentleman, he seemed to have a lot of life experience to draw from when giving us advice. His talk was much briefer; he spent about 20 minutes telling us about himself and then opened things up for a long Q&A.
    One  thing that stuck out to me was how flexible he was in the direction of his business. Although he had a very clear vision of what he wanted to do and why,  he was also constantly open to identify and capitalize upon new opportunities. An example of this was how he took his cloud services company, which one might expect to operate in a consumer oriented market, and gear his service almost exclusively to government. In doing so they specialized themselves and built products pertaining to working with the government. He found and entered a very large and uncharted market. However, he still remains fluid and has plans to expand to the consumer market.
    Another thing I liked was how Shadrach sells himself and his product simply by being genuine and passionate. People can detect when someone is the real thing and cares about their work. Personally, this is also how I get by. I'm not insanely charismatic but I am always completely genuine and honest with the people that I deal with. This has gotten me far in life. It was refreshing to see the same values being employed in such a high up place. He also mentioned that when you're selling your business to an angel investor, you are actually selling yourself. This cleared up the big difference between angels and VCs for me: VCs are strictly in it for the money, angels are in it for the passion.
  In conclusion, this talk reaffirmed that my main selling point to investors/employers/any future business partners will be a genuine and earnest personality. I also learned a great deal about ways to raise funding for a company while doing the most to avoid things such as VCs that could potentially hurt your business.