

The downside in that is that you got to be able to keep the entity off the guardrail.

The control people all go and they do best practices, which makes you perfectly optimized to the past.īeing and running a startup is going I don’t know what I’m going to run into, but it’s going to be fun. Let’s go out and explore stuff, and we’re going to run into things that people have never seen. I like the idea it’s Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, Ponce de León, Cook. That’s not generally my strongest environment. We got to build our own businesses to some degree, but there was high, bright barriers in control.

We had a degree of entrepreneurship available to us. I was with Shearson Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, and these are people who are big into control. I did almost 20 years in financial services. If you’re driving down a freeway and on one side is chaos and the other side is control, an entrepreneur, unfortunately, eventually starts steering to the chaos side because it’s pretty exciting. Within that mentality, you get really creative, and anything is really possible.ĭane: As you go up, I mean, there’s people who – I have heard it described it’s the pairing between chaos and control. I mean, it’s a – sitting and running your company, you are the last spot on the train where you have to problem solve anything and everything that shows up, and if you can’t solve it, there’s a problem. Tanya: Yeah, I would totally agree with that. You’re just rolling from one idea to the next realizing that solving problems is a skillset that a lot of people just never develop. You do the things like that and then just one thing after another.

You’re always looking for angles, and so you pick fruit, and you haul the hay. He was a general manager of a farm equipment dealership. There’s economics that were involved because we were in the – it was a small family farm. My entrepreneurship was really a curiosity. I wonder how this works, and it just builds a curiosity. Then you start tweaking in your mind going, oh, I like to fix things. Being able to contain the panic of, oh, my goodness, something’s wrong.
Reinvents yellow pages how to#
If your choices were fix something clear out in the field or walk clear back to the house to find something to fix it, you figured out how to figure it out in the field. It can be an event that you need to solve. Problem solving can be a number of things. You end up having to train your mind around problem solving. The environment that I grew up in was essentially on a farm in a small town in Idaho that my dad grew up in, and the major difference was that it was smaller when I grew up than when he did so losing population in that. Tanya: That’s Dane Madsen, one of the founders of, a well-known brand that he founded in 1996 and sold 8 years later in 2004 for $100 million to what is now AT&T.ĭane: It’s very, very much environmental. He has worked in innovation on three continents and is active in B2B technology-based companies solving big issues and, after over a decade of leading an industrial and fresh water process and product research and development company, is passionate about water-technology innovation.ĭane: I listen to a lot of discussion about entrepreneurship and I hear people talk about, oh, it’s my DNA, or it’s in my blood. He was the founder of, acquired by AT&T in 2004. In this Unmessable episode, Dane shares his internal struggles as he built and sold his company, and more importantly what he learned from his fascinating journey.ĭane Madsen is a Seattle-based corporate strategy consultant who has worked with more than 35 startups as an angel and venture investor, Founder, Co-Founder, CEO, Director, advisor, or consultant after nearly 20 years in financial services. His upbringing forced him to be nimble and creative in the solutions he brought forward and this core way of being was at the source of his ability to uncover a huge opportunity in the market when he built, which he later sold to what is known today as AT&T, for $100 Million. Dane Madsen grew up in a small farm town in Idaho, on the lower income side of the equation, but was trained to problem solve and fix things from a young age.
