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Giles Shih - Making an idea into a business

Giles Shih, President and CEO of BioResource International, talks about his company’s origins including founding along with his father. Giles also advises entrepreneurs to get out there and learn as you go.  Created by Kauffman Foundation.

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  • male robot donald style avatar for user Jake.Steele54
    When you have an idea, what is the process of actually creating a business? I know there are legalities, but what are they? Also, how do you decide which structure would be right for your company?
    Thanks for any response!
    (2 votes)
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    • blobby green style avatar for user Rhonda Tilford
      To create a viable business the first step is to envision the product and/or service. Once that has been determined the core mission and target population should be identified. Depending on that answer; the question of whether the entity should be profit or non-profit will help to determine which legal structure is most suitable. The key factors that drive which type of company is best include the potential growth, liability, and mission. An example would be if a person was thinking about opening a shelter for homeless veteran's. This could easily be viewed as a charitable mission which are usually non-profit. The most common forms of for-profit businesses are Sole Proprietor, Limited Liability Company(LLC), S or C-Corp, Limited Liability Partnership(LLP).
      (3 votes)
  • male robot hal style avatar for user Eric Buchanan
    Any pro-tips on how to avoid family conflict while working with them like you mentioned around ? My father and I go through different viewpoints while working together pretty often and I always wonder if there is a way for both of us to see each others side and really figure out which way would work the best? He has the wisdom but I have college accredited classes.
    (1 vote)
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    • leaf green style avatar for user Audrey Darrow
      Wisdom is far more valuable than accredited classes. I started my business with no formal business education. I was knocked down constantly by those family members who had all the accredited classes but no entrepreneurial spirit. Also, if you work from a place of EGO because you have book smarts you will fail. Even if you have education, you need wisdom, advice from others and the knowingness that you don't know everything and you never will. If the WISDOM is coming from a place of spirit and not EGO, I would be very open to listening. When it comes from a place of EGO, meaning I know what I read in a book and you are wrong, then I would walk away from that and ask for mentorship from someone who has true wisdom.
      (2 votes)
  • leaf green style avatar for user mercymissionglobal
    Is this only for confined chickens? Free range chickens can be fed on this?How ? because they roam free and thus get all the wriggly worms and all that!How can they then be big and green?
    (2 votes)
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  • purple pi teal style avatar for user Lissa6719
    How does culture affect a family business?
    (1 vote)
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  • piceratops seed style avatar for user Stephen H.
    Was it actually beneficial to not have taken a business class? Having your own perspective.
    (1 vote)
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  • blobby green style avatar for user Tina Wyckoff
    As I am going through this course, I can't help but notice an entrepreneur missing from your list. Has Khan Academy thought of contacting Walter O'Brien for an interview? I don't think he'd pass up the opportunity to advertise on your site, in order to find new talent, considering he made an entire television series for that purpose.
    (1 vote)
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  • blobby green style avatar for user reneekenny
    Do you have any idea whether the chickens feel okay with this? Does it give them indigestion?
    (3 votes)
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    • leaf blue style avatar for user MrLogic642
      I have also considered experimenting on animals cruel and still do. I am not sure that the chickens even have a choice though. They can not communicate, can not escape, and are not strong enough to resist. Lots of people do actually feel sad for them though.

      However, people did not stop with chickens, and even got to the point of breeding entirely different species of animals with each other, such as dogs with cats.
      (0 votes)
  • leaf green style avatar for user zlbowers1
    At seconds Shih says that even though him and his father would argue they were all still trying to make the business go forward. This statement is very similar to Eric Schmidt's​ statement about his relationship with the founders of Google. Why can this type of model work for some but break others?
    (0 votes)
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Video transcript

- My name is Giles Shih, I'm President and CEO of BioResource International. My father is a co-founder in the company, and he is the inventor of the technologies. I have to credit him for being kind of entrepreneurial in the very beginning. It takes a certain amount of vision to kind of see things where they could be, or where there isn't anything yet. He was doing some studies to convert poultry waste into energy, biogas energy. And he noticed that the feathers that fell into the manure, that went into the digester would disappear, and so being kind of a entrepreneurial scientist, he said there must be some kind of bacteria or microbe that can digest the feathers. He knew that feathers are made out of protein. And so he had the idea, and the brainstorm, to take something from nature, and use it in some unique and helpful way to grow the industry. And from that genesis of that initial project, now has spawned two products that we sell commercially. As the cost of animal production increases, using enzymes like ours saves a lot of money. So we thought well, we're just a small company, but we have a unique technology, and then we can put some pieces together and just see how far we could take it. The idea of trying to do something that was impactful, that was what drove me to start the business with my father. I was finishing up my PhD in microbiology at Emery University in Atlanta, and just didn't see myself working in the lab for the rest of my career, and I wanted to do something that had an immediate impact, and had value, and so this seemed to be a good opportunity, and I figured well, how hard can it be compared to graduate school? Turns out it's hard in a different way, but it was been a very good process for us to go through. One of the unintended consequences of running this business, starting it with my father, and growing it to this stage, is that we have developed a newfound respect for each other, a new relationship that isn't often achievable between a father and son typically. And I won't lie, there were some difficult points, especially in the beginning of the company where we had to make a lot of quick decisions without a lot of information, without a lot of experience. And it was almost based on opinion, and gut, and we would often have differences of opinion. And we can joke about this now. I would go over to my parents' house for dinner on Sunday evening, and we used to call them the Sunday night fights because invariably we'd start talking about business for BRI, and have difference of opinion, and start to get more and more heated, and my mom would have to kind of step in and kinda settle us down a bit. What made it successful is that we put it out there, we didn't hold any strong resentment or hard feelings against each other. What we were all doing was trying to go forward and do the best for the business. I never took a business course, ever, before I started the company, and I just learned by doing, and being persistent, and diligent, and being honest about what I could and couldn't do. So I tell people that you just need to get started, just go and do it, and you learn as you go. The other part of it is working with my father, and being able to take something that's essentially a family business, and grow it and scale it to something that is now beyond the scope of what we ever thought was possible.