Michael Mandel, founder of CompStak, discusses his journey as an entrepreneur, including overcoming investor doubts and making the choice between college.
Michael Mandel, founder of CompStak, discusses his journey as an entrepreneur, including overcoming investor doubts and making the choice between college and starting a company. He shares his experiences in building CompStak and revolutionizing data sharing in the commercial real estate industry.
It took like a year of trying to sell CompStak to investors before we raised a penny. Um and really it was it was all about like making the pitch, getting the feedback, understanding which feedback was and which feedback to take, and constantly tweaking and tweaking and tweaking and tweaking so that like whatever objections you continue to hear, you come up with an answer for it so you don't hear it the next time. So there's fewer and fewer of them. But so that's an important part of it. The other important part of it frankly is just having like absolute conviction that you are the expert in what you're doing. You know, I think that the reality was everybody's asking is commercial real estate a big enough market? Cuz they don't know anything about commercial real estate. So I had to like build up my conviction that like, you know what? I'm the expert in this market. Let me tell you how
it is. Let me explain to you why you're wrong and why this is the right opportunity. And I think like as I've said to a lot of entrepreneurs starting and it's like there's two ways to manage the rejection that you get. And like one is to give up and say, you know what? This isn't worth it. Forget it. Um and sometimes that's the right move. Sometimes there Sometimes like the the feedback you're getting is reflective of the fact that maybe your idea isn't as good as you thought it was. Um and the other the other thing that you can do is just let that like rejection fuel you. Like make you just anger you to the point where you need to prove everyone wrong and and make it and make it happen anyway. And I I certainly, you know, took the the latter approach and used it as fuel to the fire to to continue to to grow and