Rob (Mr. Story Pitching) Kramarz interviews Bob Friedenthal, a leading LinkedIn Expert

In this fascinating interview, Robert Steven Kramarz (Rob) interviews Bob Friedenthal, a leading LinkedIn Expert.?Rob shares the story behind the writing of “Born to Star” and his newest course,?Story Pitching .

This interview will really help you raise startup capital.?I guarantee it!

Rob and Bob share their insights and have a bit of fun.

You will learn a ton from these gentlemen! Don’t miss out.

Please enjoy the video below and the transcript that follows.

Rob Kramarz:

Hi everybody. Hi, vision masters out there. I am your host, Robert Steven Kramarz, founder of Intelliversity. And this is your Vision Master podcast. And today, well, it’s a good interview because I’m interviewing him, and he’s interviewing me.

Meet Bob Holt Friedenthal, who’s an ex-Navy veteran expert on LinkedIn, which is where we probably are meeting right now. So, vision masters, this is Bob Holt Friedenthal. How do you do? Say something, Bob.

Bob Friedenthal:

Yeah, thank you. First let me give you my contact information. Phone number is 310-736-5787 and email address is [email protected].

I call myself a LinkedIn junkie because I discovered LinkedIn about 15 or 16 years ago and became addicted to it. It’s a business world, a business community. And so I’ve been on this trail ever since. I’ve got a staff of people that work on LinkedIn accounts. So anyway, I am so lucky to be interviewing you, Rob.

Rob Kramarz:

Thank you Bob! Rob for our friends here. Robert Steven Kramarz is my pen name, so.

Bob Friedenthal:

Beautiful. And a fascinating guy, incredibly intelligent. And we’re going to talk about one of his books,?Born to Star,?as a starter, and there are some additives to that too. So Robert, why don’t you take over?

Please tell us who you are.

Rob Kramarz:

Didn’t you want me to tell them who I am, and summarize who I am, which led to this book?

Bob Friedenthal:

Sure, absolutely.

Rob Kramarz:

Now, in this part of my my career, I’m a VC, venture capital partner and continue to be an angel investor. Also, I’m an author and advisor to Vision Masters, another way to say innovative entrepreneurs who crave the secrets for how to scale a company and finance a company. Because if you are anything like me, originally somewhat introverted and an idea person, I didn’t start life living in the real world. But once all these great ideas started bubbling up, as Elon Musk kindly points out, he didn’t realize when he stated that he had a lot of buzzing ideas going on in his head and other kids didn’t. So that was my experience too. And so later on, as I began to make mistakes in the real world and was less than successful at the very beginning. I began to crave the knowledge of how to be successful in the real world when I have innovative ideas that I want to realize. That’s your situation.

So I have all my life, in addition to making mistakes, sought every possible secret to realize my, manifest my original ideas in the real world, and scale them. That meant getting?them funded. The exactly the situation you find yourself in. By nature I’m a vision master myself. The big mistake that I made, which I continued to make later in life is to spend about two-thirds of my career?being some other vision masters second in command.?I was the guy that, early on, an inventor would come to me with great ideas but don’t know how to run a company, and usually had limited communication abilities. They needed me to run their company. And I said yes. And why did I say yes??Because I sought the holy dollar and the glory of being the CEO.

So this was satisfying for me, but the problem was I was not expressing my true nature, my own gifts. And it came to a head when Bill Gates asked me to run Microsoft sales in the early 80s, and I was the first candidate they asked. And I was sitting at dinner with Bill Gates and Paul Allen and declined the offer, which was a big mistake, too, considering that they weren’t that big then. So who knew? And Steve Ballmer, who’s now worth 70-some billion, took the job, and he got that seat. But I declined it because I really just didn’t want to be yet another second in command, or in this case, third in command to somebody else that was maybe even more brilliant than I was. And I was tired of that. And it’s time to do my own thing.

And that’s what I’ve been doing since. More recently, I’ve decided to make a difference in the world, create a legacy. I am doing this by offering what I’ve learned, mistakes I made, shortcuts and powerful lessons about scaling a company men and women who are now starting – maybe a little earlier in the process – and who crave the knowledge of how to finance and scale a business in the real world. I want to help them actualize and manifest their great ideas. So that’s who I am.

Bob Friedenthal:

Great stuff. So tell us about your book.

Rob Kramarz:

So?Born to Star, well, it’s the story about the issues I just talked about. It’s a series of stories of billionaires and some not-so-billionaire vision masters who, some of who succeeded and some of whom failed in realizing their ideas, scaling their ideas. In some cases, they failed first and then succeeded. Some are cases that tasted their first succeed and then failed. But the study of these individuals revealed a secret that only a few authors have written about and acknowledged. And that’s because the billionaires don’t want to give credit to anybody else as to the source of their success.?But the secret is revealed in Born to Star.

Bob Friedenthal:

Okay!

Rob Kramarz:

And that’s what I want you guys to buy, read, and review. Born To Star is now on amazon.com for the first time. It took about three years to develop, three or four years, and it summarizes this cool secret – it’s what makes Elon Musk successful AND it’s not what you think. This secret applies to Steve Jobs and so on and many others.

Bob Friedenthal:

You also have courses that you are interested in people.

Rob Kramarz:

Yes, get?Born to Star. But don’t miss my new course on story pitching. The course is a powerful method for vision masters to communicate successfully and gain investors’ trust through telling stories.

Bob Friedenthal:

Excellent.

Rob Kramarz:

You can sign up for?Story Pitching ?on the Intelliversity website but?Born to Star ?is the best way to get started.

Bob Friedenthal:

So it’s helping get people’s vision of where they want to go. Isn’t that right?

Rob Kramarz:

Story Pitching is more like a method. You know where you want to go, but you crave knowledge or secrets if you are anything like me because it’s not just knowledge. You crave the secrets for how to get there. How do you take these ideas out of your head and make them big and scaled in the real world to make a difference? Not a little difference, a big difference. Why not?

Bob Friedenthal:

Okay. So one, you’ve got the book that you’re promoting, in essence,?Born to Star,?and the other part is the courses you have that will help guide people along.

Rob Kramarz:

Right. And there’ll be a course on the?Born to Star?secret soon, and there’ll be a book on Story Pitching soon. But right now there’s a book on one topic and a course on the other. You should do both.

Bob Friedenthal:

Excellent.

Rob Kramarz:

The place to start is the book Born to Star.

Bob Friedenthal:

Okay

Rob Kramarz:

If you’re trying to raise capital right now, then call me or go to the website and enroll in?Story Pitching , which would be helpful to you.

Bob Friedenthal:

Yeah, I’d love to hear that too, but we don’t have time today. Listen, I think you’ve gotten the point across of who you are, what you do, what’s contemporary now, where people need to be thinking because we’re all struggling with this changing world and this changing economy and thinking, how can we do things better than what we’re doing now that,

Rob Kramarz:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It’s all about change. Because if there were no change, you wouldn’t even need your intelligence. You could do things automatically.

Bob Friedenthal:

Yeah, that is very true.

Rob Kramarz:

Your intelligence is all about adapting.

Bob Friedenthal:

Yep. So why don’t we do this? Why don’t we finish this off give us contact information for the listening audience and et cetera? And that’ll be good enough to go, and we’ll top it off there.

Rob Kramarz:

Okay. So for the book, Born to Star, Born to Star, at amazon.com. Just type in Born to Star Kramarz to get right to the book. That’s where you can buy it. It’s no longer on our website for sale. And then, for the story pitching course, go to intelliversity.org and then look for the courses, and the Born to Star courses are there. And you can.

Bob Friedenthal:

Okay, excellent. And again, I’m Bob Holt Friedenthal. If you’re interested in having an interview, I love doing these. I started them about 14 months ago, and I’ve done about 200 of them. And I was really surprised about how many people were viewing these. And I don’t put this out as a podcast. We typically send them out to people’s LinkedIn accounts, do it as a post, and that kind of stuff. It’s all about visibility today.

Rob Kramarz:

It’s part of it. You don’t want too much negative visibility. I admire Elon Musk in many ways, but Elon has proven over and over again how important a second in command is, the right second in command. Because when he tries to do stuff on his own, like take over Twitter, it can be a challenge.

Bob Friedenthal:

It’s going to be interesting.

Rob Kramarz:

Thank you, Bob.

Bob Friedenthal:

Thank you. Appreciate it.

This article originally appeared on the Intelliversity website on