Michael Mandel, founder of CompStak, shares his journey from commercial broker to entrepreneur, discussing the motivations behind starting his own business.
Michael Mandel, founder of CompStak, shares his journey from commercial broker to entrepreneur, discussing the motivations behind starting his own business and how he overcame investor doubts. He emphasizes the importance of education, continuous learning, and building a business in an area of interest.
let's say you know, is that moment where you're like, I think I want to do something on my own. And let's say you're able to show up right now, you know, with that younger Michael, and you're able to give that younger Michael one piece of advice before launching a business. What would that be and why, given what you know now? >> Well, look, I think like intellectual curiosity, it's one of the key things we screen for in employees, and it's just so absolutely critical. Like you need to be the kind of person that's always looking to learn and questioning what's going on around you. I think that you know, it's just critical generally speaking to just think about, okay, what are you looking to achieve and what are the resources I need to do it? Like when I decided I wanted to get into commercial real estate brokerage, the I went and subscribed to the newsletters of every commercial
real estate trade publication and um and read cover to cover every real estate trade rag every single day, you know, so that I knew what was going on. And like when I when I got into tech, I started learning all and reading, you know, you know, Venture Deals back in the day, which was like the Bible, right? and like all the different books that you would want to understand and the blog posts that you need to read around getting to be raising money and getting into and in the technology industry. And I think you just need to like immerse yourself, you know, in whatever sector that you're in. There's nothing There's no like shortcuts. Well, now with AI there's shortcuts to everything, but like, you know, whether but like you need to immerse yourself so that you can you can do the critical thinking around those shortcuts even, right? Because you need to understand how things were arrived at
where they've where they've been. Um so I don't know that I can pinpoint one thing in particular, but I would just say, you know, it's a it's a function of like outlining your goal and then identifying what are the resources that will build build best help you understand what you need to know to achieve that that goal.