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Can you tell me the story of your prior successes, challenges, and major responsibilities?
I started out as a one-man content team, which was empowering in the sense that I was able to control the amount of work I was taking on and ultimately play a role in deciding my quality of life. Within a year, I had grown this out to a few dozen writers I could rely on for larger scale projects, and I inevitably got into content system architecture to save myself as much time as possible from managing so I could focus on growing business and/or jump into whatever rabbit hole of learning without coming back to everything burned to the ground. I started working on some pretty cool sites with entrepreneurs that were incredibly knowledgeable about how the digital space operates.
In 2017, I joined my friend Troy Osinoff’s agency JUICE in New York City and met some awesome entrepreneurs and fell in love with the city. I was essentially in charge of the copy and content for accounts like Kenneth Cole, DraperU, and a ton of high-performing eCommerce businesses.
Around the same time, I also started out as the first writer for CoinCentral, which would turn into one of the top cryptocurrency media sites. This started out as an awesome project because I got to write about the fundamental tech and projects behind some super exciting blockchain projects. I already had a large amount of interest in this space (in 2016, my team and I won 1st place at the 2016 Miami Bitcoin Hackathon). Soon my articles were ranking between #1 and #3 for a ton of high-value keywords. The site was growing faster than any site I’d ever worked on before, and my role quickly scaled up into becoming the Editor-in-Chief of a 30+ person media site that gets hits from everywhere such as Bloomberg to the Department of Homeland Security.
My major responsibilities are ensuring everything my team and I write is quality and my projects can operate at various levels of scale.
One of my largest personal challenges is learning how to manage burn-out, which has been a crucial skill when it comes to scaling teams and working on multiple projects.
Can you tell me about a time when you almost gave up, how you felt about that, and what you did instead of giving up?
For most entrepreneurs, particularly those that operate primarily in the digital realm, “giving up” is often built into the process in the form of iteration and re-prioritization. When it comes down to brass tacks, giving up is essentially just make a decision between two things, one of them being the current challenge at hand, the other being anything from a better opportunity or just a moment to gather your sanity and avoid burnout. Each point of failure for a new business venture serves as a milestone to reflect on what you could have done differently.
You stop framing the concept of “giving up” as a failure when you take full responsibility for your time, actions, and attention. It’s all about building an anti-fragile career, work ethic, and standard for happiness. I think that’s what separates a veteran entrepreneur from an amateur. It’s having experienced multiple points of failure that the idea doesn’t phase you anymore.
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