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Course: Entrepreneurship > Unit 1
Lesson 11: Dave Smith - CEO & Founder of TekScape ITTop of the World, Ma
When Dave Smith came to the harsh realization and he alone was in charge of his future, he took a resourceful route to become an expert in his field. Mixing the desire to make it with the imagination to fake it, he went to great lengths to connect with TekScape IT customers and make them believe that his tiny organization was big enough to solve their trickiest problems. Created by Kauffman Foundation.
Want to join the conversation?
- Are there any convos with entrepreneurs who AREN'T in the tech industry? I want to hear from more mom-and-pops, restaurant owners, etc. What's with the silicon valley bias?(9 votes)
- Definitely. I agree that Khan Academy should produce more videos that highlight a wide variety of businesses in a wide variety of fields. Perhaps the owner of a law firm would make a good interview.(4 votes)
Video transcript
- My name's Dave Smith. Name of the company is TekScape IT. I ran away from home at 15 years old. It was about 10 p.m. right
before my 16th birthday I broke into the Boy Scout's house. I opened the window and
I went in the window and I closed the window. That's called breaking in, unfortunately. I slept on the floor there. I eventually went back home
about a week or so later. I get a knock on the door, my mom's like oh somebody's
down here to see you. It's the police, they handcuffed me and then drove me to the station. I cried my eyes out, I was terrified. I'm 16 years old and I'm
sitting in jail for five days. I had this delinquent friends
that I was hanging around with and I'm like, I'm done
with them. (laughing) That's the end of that. I'm like, I don't want to
ever go through that again. That was a changing
point in my adolescence. And the other changing point
is when I graduated high school because I barely passed and
then at the end of high school as I'm getting my
diploma, I say to my mom, I'm like top of the world, ma! I was super excited about it and two or three days later nobody cares. You know, nobody cares
about me succeeding anymore. Because when you're going through school the teacher's primary job is to make sure their students get the
grades that they need to get, that's the goal. As soon as I got out of
it, nobody cared anymore. It's kind of like a shock. And I went to my mom after that, I said, can I go to college? She's like you're out of your mind. I'm not gonna pay for
you to go to college. You got arrested and you
barely passed high school. Do you think I'm gonna give
you any money to go to college? Where it dawned on me
and I'm like oh my god, I gotta do this on my own. I gotta figure this out on my own. How do I do this without having help? So that's where it began and that's how it kind of started. I was doing data entry,
I was a stock clerk. And then my step father passed away. That was kind of the final piece. I said alright I need
to do something big now. I'm gonna make bigger decisions in life. I'm not gonna be lackadaisical and live in small town Connecticut and grow from small town Connecticut, I needed to make much bigger decisions. I need to take challenges. I'm gonna move to Boston,
I'm gonna start a company. I'm gonna move to New York City. I'm gonna go there without any friends and live in a studio apartment
and just believe in it. My father we used to have a saying, can't never did nothing. And it's the most broken English but what he was trying to get across and I didn't realize until
after he'd passed away is that if you say that
you can't do something you've failed before you've begun. You have to continually
push forward past the point and never say that you can't do something. So that value that he instilled in me throughout my entire childhood is what gave me the ability to know that I was gonna be successful
and believe in myself. If you don't believe in yourself you're not gonna be able to
stick your neck out there and say okay I need double
the credit line that I need 'cause I know that I'm gonna be able to develop this business. You just have to believe,
and you have to push through all the failures and the people
that say they can't do it. Every aspect of your
life creates a decision in which pushes you on a certain path that ultimately gets
you to where I am today, sitting in front of you. I'm happy to be here but if I didn't have any
of those life challenges beforehand, I wouldn't have
perspective to sit here.