How to Build Something with Seth Levine

What is an entrepreneur? To me, it can be kind of a loaded word. It often seems to imply that you are trying to create a million-dollar business, but is that always the case??

Seth Levine is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and is right at the heart of entrepreneurship. I'm not sure what image comes to mind when you think of a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, but Seth is probably a bit different than that. But what is true is that Seth's love of entrepreneurship started young.

A Young Entrepreneur

"I always had a little bit of an entrepreneurial bent when I was younger," says Seth. "I was that kid who would go off to the candy store and buy the box of gum and sell it off one piece at a time."

But Seth took it even further than that. He grew up in the Northeast, where it snows frequently. Like many kids, he made money by shoveling snow, but he came up with a unique business model.

"I came up with this idea that I would sign people up to a subscription plan. They would pay a certain amount per month for the winter, and no matter how many times it snowed, I would go shovel their walk."

Choosing Hands-On Entrepreneurship

An integral part of being an entrepreneur is the hands-on building aspect - stumbling forward and bumping into reality.

Seth has a moment where he faced this choice as well.

While attending college at a small liberal arts school, he attended a lecture by a woman who had studied the welfare system in America. The chapel was packed full of students listening to this very academic speech. In the end, Seth walked away confused and underwhelmed.?

Three days later, a single mother who had been on welfare came to campus to speak on the book she wrote about her experience. Seth felt this was a perfect chance to hear from someone who had lived the experience rather than just studied it from afar.?

He attended her lecture with a much smaller audience, but his experience was profound.?

Seth says, "It completely changed my life. I said to myself, walking out of that chapel, I want to be in this room. I don't want to be in the room of 500, who want to study it from afar. At the time, I thought I wanted to get a Ph.D. in psychology, and I walked out of there and said, I do not want to live that life. I'm going to do something different."

Unicorns or Camels

When it comes to entrepreneurship, Seth talks a lot about its faces in his new book, The New Builders. He and his co-author Elizabeth MacBride tell the stories of the next generation of entrepreneurs and argue for the future of American entrepreneurship.

Seth says, "The term entrepreneur was sort of overtaken by Silicon Valley to mean a tech entrepreneur building a tech business."

According to Seth, this idea that we only value businesses with high growth potential hurts entrepreneurship.

"We talk about unicorns in Silicon Valley, and that's fine for my business. But, if you think about the economy more broadly, it's just not a very good economic, broad-based economic model. It doesn't produce many companies that are successful. I like to think about the camels, not unicorns. They're not mythical, but they're hardy. Small businesses are the workhorses of the economy."

Valuing All Businesses

For Seth, there's nothing wrong with a technology business growing rapidly. In fact, many of those businesses are the enablers of small businesses by creating tools for them to use.?

"Primarily, venture-backed companies have created these sort of tools. That's amazing. I think that's fantastic. But when we only value those, and we don't value the shopkeeper and the mainstream businesses, that problematic."

Passion and Purpose

Seth believes that it takes passion and purpose to be a new builder.?

"New builders don't typically start businesses based on a classroom experiment. They're not theorizing about potential large markets. Instead, they see a problem that resonates with them personally, and they decide they want to build a business out of that passion they have."

The Myth of The Solo Entrepreneur And The Importance of Allies

Seth says that the myth of the solo founder is detrimental.

"For starters, no one really starts a business alone. Even those that we think about as superstar entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates all had people around them that were very integral to starting their business, not to mention mentors and other people around them. I think that myth causes people to think they have to do it themselves."

Seth calls for more support for new builders in his book, including mentoring.

"One of the things that people can do to be helpful to new businesses is to just lend a hand with some of their knowledge and expertise to a local chamber that works with these sorts of businesses because that's something that is really needed."

A Bright Future

While there are certainly challenges and disparities in entrepreneurship, Seth is optimistic about the future.?

"What writing New Builders left me with is a sense of optimism. I think that while we're talking about a decline in entrepreneurship, challenges with getting capital to the right people, and systemic racism, all those things are challenging. But, by the end of it, I came to realize that these challenges aren't insurmountable obstacles. There is a bright and optimistic future."

So whether you have dreams of starting a million-dollar business or opening your own local shop, entrepreneurship is still the way of the future. Start down the path to find allies and be an ally for those around you.

Learn More

Seth Levine is a partner and co-founder at Boulder-based Foundry Group, focusing on making early-stage technology investments, participating in select growth rounds, and identifying and supporting the next generation of venture fund managers.??

Seth also co-founded Pledge 1%, a global network of over 7,000 companies who have pledged equity, time, and product back to their local communities. If you want to learn more about Seth and his work, visit his website. You can also find the new book he co-authored here.

This article was based on 2 pages With MBS. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can listen to the full interview here and subscribe, so you don’t miss an episode.