Dr. Hossein Rahnama on Entrepreneurship

Dr. Hossein Rahnama is a computer scientist and an academic entrepreneur. He is a visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab and Toronto Metropolitan University, where he co-founded Ryerson Digital Media Zone (DMZ) - ranked the #1 university-based tech incubator worldwide. His research explores artificial intelligence, data governance, and the transparent design of data-driven services. He is also the founder and CEO of Flybits Inc., a data intelligence company that serves a global customer base, and has written more than 30 publications and patents in computer science.

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Transcript

Roy Sharples: 0:06

Hello, I'm Roy Sharples, welcome to the unknown origins podcast. Why are you listening to this podcast? Are you seeking inspiration? an industry expert looking for insights or growing your career? I created the unknown origins podcast to provide access to insights and content from creators worldwide with inspirational conversations and storytelling, about art, architecture, design, entrepreneurship, fashion, film, music, and pop culture. Dr. Hussain phenomenon is a computer scientist and an academic entrepreneur. He is a visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab, and Toronto Metropolitan University, where he co founded Ryerson digital media's are ranked the number one university based tech incubator worldwide. His research explores artificial intelligence, data governance, and the transparent design, data driven services. He is also the founder and CEO of fly bets Incorporated, a data intelligence company that serves our global customer base. RENAMO, has written more than 30 publications and patents, and computer science. So what inspired and attracted you to be an entrepreneur in the first place?

Hossein Rahnama: 1:29

Well, I always say that entrepreneurship is a mindset. It's not necessarily what we are being taught in business school, that it's always about starting your business. And I think I was very fortunate in my in my life, and also in my academic career to work with people who really shared that mindset with me. My dad was an entrepreneur, I was very excited to you know, observe other entrepreneurs read about them. And I think the university that I went to Ryerson University in Toronto, really was very good in balancing discovery based research along with an outcome oriented approach, and an entrepreneur, entrepreneurship. And I think all of those combined, gave me an opportunity to really find that balance between creating uniqueness using research and discovery based research, but also understanding from very early on how that research can solve a big problem or do things differently and more effectively. So in a nutshell, I think, learning that mindset, from early on, was really helpful in my career, to become an entrepreneur. And what I say these days is that you got to teach kids from K 12 programs, how to become an entrepreneur, that doesn't mean they need to go start a business, but teaching them that mindset that, you know, do things, sometimes differently, manage uncertainty, you know, figure out productivity metrics more effectively. I think it's something that everyone will benefit from. And I was very fortunate that I had mentors in my career that helped me to develop that mindset,

Roy Sharples: 3:27

yes, standing on the shoulders of giants by seeking counsel, from people you trust, respect and admire, and to find those positive role models who can share their skills, insights and expertise, to help nurture your ideas. And you're absolutely spot on, about entrepreneurship, not necessarily being about the skills to initiate, develop and run a business but more about being core skills for life. So things like critical thinking, creative thinking, leadership, and by leadership, I mean, leading by action to find the future by breaking through the status quo. The other point is, well, that you mentioned around your education at Ryerson University, that's kind of where our worlds first kind of collided back in 2008 2009, where you were running the Digital Media Zone lab at Ryerson. And I was totally inspired by the studio mentality that you'd created but also the creative instinct and the innovations that you were developing interconnected, moving ideas into concepts and there was multiple concepts that you developed at that point, and one always stood up stood out for me, and I've frequently told the story and throughout time where you'd created this idea of where you would monitor someone's day in a life and at the end of each one of their days, it would then convert their day in a life to become an a cartoon of your day and I I've used that in so many scenarios, especially in productivity scenarios. And it's always been like, a catalyst for the imagination. So you're entirely to blame for that.

Hossein Rahnama: 5:14

It's amazing. You remember that ROI. And, you know, I can't believe it's been almost more than 10 years, since we last met. But yeah, that was, that was a very fun project. Indeed, I think more than that, I think it big credit to my team to really support it, you know, our organization, advancing itself from a research lab into a global company now, and also the support the mentors, the friends that we have had to really help us to get here. What I always said is that it's not about an individual. You mentioned leadership. And I think one thing that is really key in teaching our upcoming generations on leadership is that that that collective intelligence, that teamwork that we developed to do this together, so a lot of the credit, is going to my team, and also the mentors and supporters that we have had,

Roy Sharples: 6:18

what is your creative process in terms of how do you make the invisible visible by dreaming up ideas, developing them into concepts, and then bringing them to actualization?

Hossein Rahnama: 6:32

I think within the context of product design, and you know, especially, you know, a lot of the things that are happening in the digital economy are driven through new products, is this ability that you can really imagine, and you can really have that top down approach in building and conceptualizing concepts, validating them, critiquing them, really visualizing them using them before, you know, starting to, you know, code the program or, or prototyping using a digital tool. I think it's really about that abstract thinking that top down approach, especially if it's built around solving a problem. What I have observed, and I've been fortunate to observe is how different students with different disciplines go about this, you know, creative process, I teach a lot of computer science students, and when you want them to develop concepts, usually they are being trained to do things bottom up, okay, let's build the requirements, and then code the requirements, and then design and then validate. And then I also have an opportunity to work with creative designers, user experience, experts, and they follow a very different approach. They have a back of the envelope approach, they sketch things on a piece of papers. And I think, you know, there are different names for these approaches in the market, from design thinking to Agile processes, and many others, I think, in a nutshell, is that we need to have all of these processes, working in tandem, the ability to imagine things, the ability to conceptualize things, the ability to sketch things and talk about it and tell stories about them. I think storytelling is becoming more and more an important element of building, you know, new products, designing great things. And combining all of these things together into a framework allows you to move things from pure ideation, into, you know, prototypes and applications and products that can solve problems. One thing I learned, in many cases, the hard way, was I my training was a training of a computer science student. And when we started fly bits, the startup that I created out of university, we built a platform that was doing so many different things, you know, we because the training we had in school was that well, you will get a better mark. If your assignment or your thesis can do very complex things. And I brought that thinking into the industry world to the entrepreneurial world. And every meeting that we went to early on, the feedback was the same. Wow, you guys are very smart. This is amazing, but I really don't know how to use it. What problems are you guys solving and what pain point you guys are going about? We then learn Learn that and then we tune our product to really address pain points. So at the same time, if we only started with the pain point and followed an incremental approach on building the product, we would have never built a product that we have today. So I think my lessons learned and going back to your question about the creative process is to really put all of these streams really not worry too much about the technique, whether it's agile or design thinking or sprint based design, you know, the understand the big world, understand the philosophy understand this story, but then follow a very rigorous process against the pain point to bring and converge all of these elements together.

Roy Sharples: 10:48

I like how you function at the nexus of art and science of creativity, and recognizing that you really need both in terms of being able to turn your imagination into a product, service or experience and to bring that to market successfully. What are the key skills needed to survive and thrive as an entrepreneur?

Hossein Rahnama: 11:12

First of all, I think you entrepreneurs are different. The first skill set or ability is to truly understand what type of an entrepreneur you are. And with that, you know, excel at key points that differentiates you from others, but also augment your skill sets. Through, you know, bringing a great team that collectively you can be successful. So I think the first question I always ask is, what type of an entrepreneur? Are you? Do you have a passion about something? Are you passionate about something? Do you have a great idea? Do you have a technological breakthrough, that you really want to use it as a competitive advantage? All of these are great, but the way you go about them and turn them into something impactful, like a company, the pathways are sometimes different. So I think the key question is, okay, why am I you know, an entrepreneur, and which pathway do I need to take to really succeed. And then I think a lot of it is, I don't believe that you're born as an entrepreneur, I think everyone, anyone can become an entrepreneur. But there are skill sets and abilities that you gotta develop. And you really need to have a character that, you know, you can learn and discover, I think as long as you have that, it's not it's not the genes is really bringing all of these together to create that entrepreneurial impact. The other thing that I have been working very well is, each company that you build, or each, you know, venture or initiative you create has its own DNA, understanding that and not necessarily copying others, you know, if, you know, you should always have a role model, you should always have, you know, successful entrepreneurs as your role models to follow, but their company is different than your company. As as humans, you know, we have different, you know, genomes and DNase, then same thing for companies really figure out what your company is all about. And use some of the principles of being an entrepreneurs, entrepreneur, but don't copy others,

Roy Sharples: 13:45

Right! Understand and respect history, and infuse best practices into finding the future to innovate and not reinvent the wheel. But you have to find your own unique and authentic voice and style, to create and innovate on something new.

Hossein Rahnama: 14:01

The second thing I would say to become a successful entrepreneur is that learn to play in your league. When you are an early stage entrepreneur, it's actually the most fun part of your entrepreneurial journey. You don't need to act like a big company, you don't need to talk like a big company, those days will come and you will miss the early days. If you're going to an investor, you know if you want if you have an investor pitch session, present as a very early stage entrepreneurs because there are investors who are dreaming to meet you during the early stages you do need to present your company as a late stage company. So I think that's another thing that you know, I have seen sometimes entrepreneurs with no missing tensing all we really need to act, you know, like a big company. No, not Not really. You know, they are always opportunities for companies who are starting early. And it's also very fun. And then the third thing I would say is that which is, which is, you know, again, different from founder to founder different from company to company, but to in order to increase your chances of success as an entrepreneur, one thing I've seen working very well is the ability to shutting down your ego, ability to listen, ability to collaborate, the ability to have these micro failures, I don't believe in this saying that, Oh, it's okay to fail, keep failing. I don't believe in that. But I think when you shut down your ego, when you have that humility, when you have that courage, when you have that ability to collaborate, and then your chances of success will dramatically increase. So putting all of these together, and also understanding who you are, if you are the N A type that you really need to guide the company with, you know, a command center, okay, that's how you are run it that way. But if you are not, and you are a consensus builder, you don't need to act like the first guy, bring your strength points together and build a great team through consensus and guided that way. And that's what I mean meant by figuring out the DNA of your company, your character, and then build competitive advantage accordingly,

Roy Sharples: 16:35

as you reflect back upon your life and career to date, what are your lessons learned in terms of the pitfalls to avoid, and the keys to success that you can share with existing, but also aspiring entrepreneurs?

Hossein Rahnama: 16:50

How many of them, do you want Roy? I'll mention a few that I think may be useful to your listeners. And I kind of share more tangible examples, because there are lots of great books out there that they can read that really go through the details of this. The The first thing I would say is that, again, if I want to, if I say a lot of entrepreneurs want to start a business or want to manifest their capabilities, and vision in form of a company, I use that as an example. The first thing is that find people who can augment your skill sets, you know, and build a team that can collaborate very well, one of my first mistakes at the beginning of starting the company was I thought, Oh, if I go and bring that super expensive executive who is working for a fortune 50 company, and bring him to the company, that will be a big thing, it will give me a lot of credibility. You know, it was a wrong decision, the person was a fantastic person, right? It was not just the right context for him to join coming from a company of, you know, 50,000 people to a company of less than 10 people. So what I would say is that, believe in yourself, believe in your team, and then demonstrate value, don't think that you're missing a fundamental gap that you need to go and bring super experts from, from out there. The second thing I would say, which again, was something that I learned the hard way, when I spun off the company from the lab, the first advice that I got was that okay, go higher, go higher, your sales team, right. And I think that was a very wrong advice and a wrong decision by me, because what do you expect from a company that is just started and a spinoff from a lab, your product is not complete? Right? Even if you bring the best possible sales executives in this company? Where are they going to sell? Right? So when you are that's what I said, stop playing your own league and understand which stage of growth you are in. The advice should have been double down on creating a great product, Excel on on building a great product, then after that, go and build the sales organization. And this is something that is not just on the entrepreneur, it's the whole ecosystem that needs to understand that you need to have VCs and venture capitalists who understand the growth cycle of a company. You know, there are lots of investors out there that frankly, they don't care whether you're selling biscuits or software, they just say, Okay, show me how you're growing your revenue, we don't need that you don't need those investors, you need to have people who are truly understanding the growth cycles of the company and investing in the right priorities in your companies. So those were some of the key lessons that I learned during the early stages of the company, then I think as you grow the company, sometimes I joke with my team that this is like driving, you know, you start with a basic card on a on a regular road, and then you go to NASCAR, and then you go to f1, that car is a car, but a very different car, very different road, you need different driving skill sets. And I think during each, you know, tournament or lap, you will learn new things. And as you grow the company, you will learn as a founder and as a CEO, that it's your character and your communications and your the ability to build trust with your team that matters more and more and more. And that's why especially for technical founders, who their training in our education systems in, in North America and Western Europe are very much, you know, incremental, and procedural, especially in post secondary education, you don't learn a lot of those things in school. That's why you need to have mentors, you need to have people who you look up to, you need to join, you know, professional clubs that you know, allow you to really share ideas with people, you will learn that you will need less and less technical skills, but you will need a lot of EQ, trust building communication team building to be able to scale the company from one level to another. And that is why in many cases, you see that technical founders will have challenges as the company grows. And sometimes they feel that they need to find someone to replace them, sometimes they are being replaced by the board. It's a lot of it is because those soft skills, those those those honest signals that you need to understand and develop with your team to scale the business

Roy Sharples: 22:33

navigating forward. What's your vision for the future of entrepreneurship, and the role of creativity,

Hossein Rahnama: 22:40

I think the entrepreneurship and this ability to, to build design great things, when things are uncertain, is becoming more and more important, considering what's happening in the world, it is no longer a nice to have or a cool to have. It's a necessary skill set. And as a result, I think the future of entrepreneurship can only be designed if we start teaching kids from very early on, about the power of entrepreneurship, about the ability to think like an entrepreneur. That doesn't mean everyone should go start a business. But you can have entrepreneurial artists, you can have entrepreneurial engineers, you can have entrepreneurial medical doctors, right. But that means we need to have not just University textbooks on entrepreneurship. But we need to have children children's books on entrepreneurship, and also educate the next generation of entrepreneurs with the means of entrepreneurship the instruments, which is no data, can we teach our children about the power of data, but also the value of privacy? How can we can we have children's books on data sharing and data sharing consent and privacy and all that we need to have those types of Education's from very early on, if you're thinking about the future of entrepreneurs, the future that is ahead of the world, again, based on where we are now. And based on the time that you and I are targeting is very uncertain, very, very uncertain. It's going to be a very competitive world ahead of us. Globalization may change to become these these clusters of competitions or hyper competitive clusters of competitions in the world. We need to have very different skill sets in order to compete like that. And that means we need to start training entrepreneurs from Very, very early days in their lives, and I hope that it will be that will be the case. And I think one last thing I say, which is, you know, very close to my heart, and what I'm passionate about, is the transformation of our posts that can re education that you will no longer silo people into buildings and say, Oh, you're an engineer, you go to building a and you're a business student, you go to Building B, and designers go to Building C, that is a fundamental impediment to creating entrepreneurial impact. I think with that in mind, we are now going to have educational systems that are very interdisciplinary, that are that have less hierarchy, but it's more outcome oriented rather than input driven. And while these, you know, great students and talents and entrepreneurial talents are creating great intellectual property, but in parallel, they understand how to apply that intellectual property into, you know, economic growth metrics or productivity metrics. So I think with all of these happening, and being an optimist, I think by putting these in place that will define the future of entrepreneurship.

Roy Sharples: 26:26

The new order is a modern education system that instills creativity as a core discipline at the grassroots, and is nurtured throughout the educational system, which recognizes intelligence as multifaceted. It embraces emotional and social intelligence, critical thinking, and practical problem solving and integrates science, arts and humanities has equal parts of the learning Jigsaw by encouraging learning that zigzags across disciplines and domains, with continuous learning pathways open to anyone willing to invest effort and time to advance their knowledge, values and skills, building a set of beliefs and moral habits as essential to prepare and qualify people for work and social integration with a shared purpose and collaborative culture. The result is better health and wellbeing, increased social trust, greater political interest, reduced cynicism, greater engagement, and a population that embraces diversity and difference. entrepreneurialism is about fearlessly leading toward invisible horizons by applying a do it yourself sensibility to finding the future by being adaptive, persistent and resilient, and bringing new solutions to life. To be independent, to be independently minded and self sufficient from start to finish. Always finding an alternative by rejecting the banal and status quo, and doing things in your own voice and style. So don't let the future leave you behind. Follow your heart and do what you love by falling in love with your craft, pursuing it with intensity and being exceptional at it. Everything you need is already inside of you. So free yourself from others expectations and walk away from the games and boundaries they impose upon you. Only you know your true worth realizing your full potential. To live a fulfilled life means unlocking and applying your creative potential to do and excel or what you love. Remember, our outputs are the next generations inputs. And that comes with accountability and responsibility to pass the baton to the next generation by leaving the world in better shape than you found it. So make it count. It is all about attitude, imagination, and execution. Do you want to learn more about how to create without Frontiers by unleashing the power of creativity? Then consider getting CREATIVITY WITHOUT FRONTIERS. How to make the invisible visible by lighting the way into the future. It's available in print, digital and audio on all relevant book platforms. You have been listening to the Unknown Origins podcast please follow us subscribe rate and review us for more information go to unknownorigins.com Thank you for listening!