Editor’s note: Veteran entrepreneur and investor Donald Thompson is a regular contributor to WRAL TechWire. His column appears on Wednesdays.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – I recently had the opportunity to sit down with veteran entrepreneur and startup coach Veronica Kirin, who spoke to me from her home in Berlin about the hazards of being a small business owner. In a lightning-fast five-year period, Veronica founded, scaled, and sold her own tech company which, she says, helped her build a platform to stand on. 

But, in the process, she went through months and months of back-to-back 70-hour work weeks and a deep level of burnout. Now, she coaches startup CEOs and small business owners and helps them learn to scale their own businesses without pushing past their 24-hour human limit. 

She calls her clients “empire builders”: people who manage lots of projects and have big ideas with regular frequency. In our call, we talked about efficiency and integration, culture, pronouns, the Greatest Generation, and how entrepreneurs can pull their pieces together into a single, integrated business ecosystem to work smarter, not harder toward their goals and dreams. 

You can hear the full conversation on my podcast, but I wanted to share some pieces of it here because a lot of what Veronica and I talked about is game-changing strategy for entrepreneurs. 


DT: Tell me about your clients: the entrepreneurs and empire builders.

VK: That’s what I call them. We have more than one thing we’re offering to the world, and it’s on a 70 year plan. I’m not here just to build a business and exit in five years, which is what I did, but it was part of something bigger. It created a platform for me to stand on. So, I talk a lot about small business owners and managing a lot of little buildings. We think really big and we want a lot out of our lives. And so, we figure out how to make one building, then we make another and another. Eventually, we have all of these moving pieces, and it’s overwhelming. 

What I do with scaling is that I help small business owners and startup founders take all those buildings and turn it into a skyscraper, so that all of those pieces are working together. That’s what I did at my former company, Green Cup; I pulled all the pieces together so that my efforts in one area helped another area with much less overall effort 

DT: When I think about my own roles and investments, it does look like everything is independent, but actually, there’s so much overlap in the form and the function. If you don’t slow down to see the overlap, you treat everything in its own silo, and you never get any efficiency.

VK: Right. You have created all these things, thus they’re all connected and you can grasp that and capitalize on it. You need to have that strategy there, and then a long-term vision, because you can do it all, but you may not want to do it all right now. You have to build that foundational floor, then the next floor and the next floor, and get out of those floors so that you can focus on the big picture. 

When you’re in the middle of the building process, you can’t focus on anything else. It needs so much attention, but once the momentum is going, you can let it go and build another floor. I don’t want you just floating around building another thing when you don’t know how it integrates into the whole.

DT: You’re also an author and an anthropologist, so tell me a little about your book, Stories of Elders: What the Greatest Generation Know About Technology That You Don’t, which examines the paradigm shift of the high-tech revolution. Has that work given you any strong perspectives that you’re willing to share about what you see in the future? The past doesn’t always equal the future, but it does give us glimpses of how to prepare in advance. What kind of trends do you see coming? 

VK: Well, one thing that I heard a couple different times is “I never want to live with automated cars.” And at the same time, I interviewed a couple people who were the first to ever get electricity within their towns. And people wouldn’t come over because they were scared of the electricity. It seems so bizarre to be afraid of electricity, but they really thought that it would jump out of the sockets at them. They had no idea how it worked. We still don’t know how it works. 

We still have no clue, but it’s like we’re always on the bleeding edge. We live on the razor’s edge of time. We live in this fine, fine, fine moment between present and past and future. It is impossible to grasp, and that means we are constantly evolving. We are constantly inventing. We are constantly changing. 

But, there’s always going to be an edge, and it’s important for you as an entrepreneur to understand that you have an edge too. And you may want to consider moving it or having compassion for the younger generations, whose edge is going to be different than yours. If you don’t want to move your edge, that’s okay. But they’re not crazy for taking advantage of these things; to them, it’s normal. 

What I really want for entrepreneurs is that they are careful of their comfort edge as well as their time edge.

DT: I appreciate that. It’s too easy to only ever have perspective that is from our vision outward. And then we tend to negate the vision and perspective of others. Think about it with music, right? That music’s too loud! What is this rap?  

But expanding your edge? That’s what entrepreneurs have to continue to do. As we grow in scale, sometimes, the larger the business gets, the more you settle in, right? And that’s not where innovation lives, that’s not where fast growth lives. That’s not where scaling lives. We may manage risk differently as individuals, but we still need to be seeking the next set of truths. That’s really, really powerful. 

Listen to the rest of the conversation on The Donald Thompson Podcast.

About the Author

Donald Thompson is an entrepreneur, public speaker, author, podcaster, and executive coach, recently named one of “Forbes’ Next 1000: Upstart Entrepreneurs Redefining the American Dream.” He is also co-founder and CEO of The Diversity Movement, a results-oriented, data-driven strategic partner for organization-wide diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. He is also a board member for several organizations in marketing, healthcare, banking, technology and sports, a Certified Diversity Executive (CDE), and a thought leader on goal achievement and influencing company culture. You can connect with Donald on LinkedIn and at donaldthompson.com