EIR Live

It was really late at night. I was kind of sitting there thinking I cannot face writing another proposal. And on my coffee table, I had a book called This Diary Will Change Your Life. And this diary, which was a really old diary, was actually by two artists. They go as a collective, Bendrick.

And as I was looking at this, I was thinking if I only had the creativity that these guys have, it would be so nice. I will figure out what to do. And then I kind of thought, you know what? I'm just gonna drop them a line and see. So I just found their agent, dropped the agent a line, and this was like four or five in the morning saying, Hey, like I have a mobile agency.

I would love to work with this creative duo. Would you guys be interested? Really thinking nothing will come from it. I go to bed, wake up like eleven or whenever it was, there is already a meeting set up. That's actually how the agency started getting its real start because before I was just really struggling.

Welcome to EIR Live, where we dive into the lives and lessons of entrepreneurs and residents. I'm Ilya Tabakh, together with my cohost Terence Voor, ready to bring you closer to the heartbeat of the innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. Every episode, we explore the real stories behind the ideas, successes, setbacks, and everything in between. For everyone from aspiring EIRs to seasoned pros, EIR Live is your gateway to the depth of the entrepreneurial journey and bringing innovative insights into the broader world. Check out the full details in the episode description.

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Alright. Welcome to another episode of EIR Live. And today, we have the esteemed guest, Mia Bennett, along with my cohost, Ilya Tabakh, who's always around hanging out with me on on on the podcast. And this one is going to be a treat, people. So I'm gonna tee it up, and I'm gonna introduce Mia to our audience and but I'm sure I won't give her as much justice as she's gonna give herself.

So we're gonna ask her to walk through her background and and story, then we'll just dive into it. But, you know, I've gotten a chance to know to know Mia over over a year now, you know, sort of approaching a year and a half to two. It feels like yesterday when I sort of joined the one day group, you will, but I've had the privilege to get to know her, the grit that she has, the inspiration that she brings to the table, and honestly, just getting after it like any other entrepreneur would do and doing that and wrangling a bunch of other entrepreneurs, which she will get into, you know, on on the chat today. But Mia really started her career, you know, in the early days as a management consultant, right, providing strategic guidance and advice, right, to some of the world's, you know, largest and sometimes even slightly smaller organizations, right, helping to guide them to get to the outcomes that they're looking to achieve. And then became a serial entrepreneur in many ways and and then sort of took those skills into the corporate world, right, to help corporates innovate as an EIR as well.

And now she's sort of starting on this other chapter of her life where she sort of did that multiple times and now she's taken all of those skills to recruit other EIRs into this very mysterious role. So Mia, that's just a little bit about your background. Can you walk us through your journey for our audience?

Well, hello everyone. I really liked that introduction. Thanks, Terence, and you're very kind. Let me get us back to the beginning. Absolutely, I started as a management consultant, but I will confess that my actual goal was to be an entrepreneur.

It's just that I didn't have the confidence and I felt I had no skills. And, you know, as I was about to graduate, I was thinking, what would be the thing that will give me a lot of different skills that will open opportunities? I kind of thought, finance, consulting, I happened to miss all the deadlines for finance, so consulting it was. And my thinking was, okay, I'll do a lot of different projects, I'll learn a lot, I'll get to work with people, I'll build up my skills and eventually I'll make the jump. This is how I ended up in consulting.

I did that for a few years, really starting from strategy technologies, then slowly pushing more towards the strategy side. And then eventually at some point, and we can talk about this later, at some point, I ended up in a role that I absolutely loved, a great team, great projects. And I felt if I don't make the jump, I will never leave. Like this is it, like this is the perfect job. So I just thought, that's it, I'm just going to jump.

So pretty without a plan, I do not recommend this. I ended up leaving to start a company and of course I didn't have a plan. So I just started an agency thinking, we'll figure it out, we'll do work for clients and eventually there will be some product. This is how the serial entrepreneurship came to be because I ended up building a lot of different things, a lot of trial and errors. And then eventually whenever something would work, it would be rolled out as its own company.

And I, at the time, I didn't think this was an odd thing to do. So we ended up building a lot of companies in a relatively short period of time. And then once this chapter five, six years came to an end, I ended up going back to consulting, but really with this entrepreneurial hat to be able to build a new part of a business for them. So I joined PwC, built a practice around emerging technologies for them. And then off the back of that ended up getting a role, which we didn't actually call it AIR, but it was very much an AIR now that I look back thinking about new directions, who to partner with, what kind of new products to build.

And then that's when it led to that first official EIR role with Citi Ventures and then a few smaller gigs along the way, all the way to one day, where originally I joined to be an EIR for a couple of hours a week. And then that just grew. Just because working with founders is absolutely incredible, one day is a really interesting company and I kind of ended up taking on a lot more as you mentioned, I now work with quite a large team working with a lot of founders, lot of entrepreneurs. Yeah. And a lot of really good days and tough days along the way.

We had a lot of stops there. Maybe if we can kind of dig back into the initial management consulting piece. One of the things that I found from kind of career long management consultants is that they start with a lot of tactical skills and end up in a lot of relationship and sort of business development skills. Was kind of the first contact with management consulting what you anticipated to be and kind of what were your and going back a little bit, what were your initial impressions and maybe what were some of the kind of surprising things that happened in that initial encounter?

This is such a nice question. So my only impression of consulting was that it's going to be project based, I'm going to do a lot of different things. Like really, that's how naive I was. The first role I had was with IBM. IBM had at the time had just bought a part of PwC and they really weren't quite sure what to make out of this.

It was a really, really interesting part, and this is going back twenty five years ago, so was quite a long time ago. You're absolutely right, very tactical, a lot of amazing, amazing training. Honestly, I feel I owe so much to this company, to IBM because they really trained us up properly. I think we had like two, three months of just all of us being in a random city, living together, working together, learn those skills. And coming to your point, we will start eight in the morning to go and do a lot of training work.

And then five, six, the partners will turn up. And that's when the relationship piece would start. And there was a time where we were working on a project and I was very dedicated to do a good job. Anyway, so somebody turned up, they invited us to dinner and I refused. I was like, No, no, no, I got to finish this project.

I will see you tomorrow. The next day I got called into the office with the person who was training us and he was like, part of your job is in relationship. So if you are asked to go for a party, if you're asked to go for a dinner, that's part of the job. There is no, I will finish the project. And at the time I was really shocked by this, do you know?

Because I kind of thought you get a role, you do a good job, that's what it is. And not really realizing that there's a lot more to this puzzle. Yeah, so it's really interesting. And then after this particular period of time with IBM, I ended up joining a much smaller consulting firm. That was all about relationships also.

It was really interesting, we worked with a lot of major media companies around the world. And even though I was very young, I ended up going and running a lot of these projects in different countries. I don't really know why, why they trusted me. I was just this young buck knowing nothing, but the team, they were just incredible by dividing opportunities for the younger folks. And again, a big part of that was establishing credibility, building the relationship because you're talking to the CIO, CTOs, you know, just getting them on that journey and being able to push interesting ideas forward.

Yeah, so it's a really nice combination. I really didn't expect it. And you know what? Until you asked a question, I hadn't appreciated how much of this relationship building they had fitted in as well. Yeah, it's an interesting one.

Well, and one of the things I sort of love about that, two things. One is on a previous episode, we spoke with a EIR named Jen Millard, who went through Sears' kind of retail training program. And she mentioned that, you know, they used to do talent development in a very different way, you know, when she sort of was first in her career. And I love sort of thinking about because, you know, in a startup context, you don't always have time and maybe not even resources to do that. But it's really interesting to think about how do you develop your people?

How do you develop your capacity? I think in consulting, generally most of the top tier consulting folks realize that if they want to scale, they have to sort of give their people opportunities early and often otherwise their organization's not going to grow. And so it's great that you were kind of in a place where, it seems like at least from short conversation that they bought into that philosophy as well.

Absolutely, because there are two pieces. One is the training, the other piece is the culture. So there is a lot of emphasis on, if I go back to my own experience, really understanding the history of the company, the why of the company, who are you know, the visionaries within the company, moving between different departments to really get a sense of what to do. So I worked for that company for roughly three years and I did all the way from requirement gathering kind of BA type jobs to actual coding. I actually coded a lot of different, on different projects, being a developer, doing a lot of testing, memories, doing a lot of testing, doing a lot of the management of the whole process, lot of strategy.

So they really, really invest. And of course, somebody green doesn't really know how to do anything, but it's just through this trial and error and somebody kind of watching over you, you'll get the experience. Yeah, they invested a huge, huge amount. I'm so incredibly grateful. And I really wish we continue.

I think some of this has been lost. Maybe a lot of companies don't do it the way they used to.

I'm probably going to double down on this because, there's something to be said about we're sort of in the the world of startups and entrepreneurship and building things and and that's the world we live in today. But the world we came from, you know, it was a was a was a world of structure where they had training, they optimized for efficiency, and sort of making people stay around as long as possible by training them and putting things in front of them to keep them around for for many of many of years. Right? So I it's something to be said about large companies and their ability to train people, you know, to have a certain set of skills that they can then go out into the world and build on top of, right? And I got that training for sure at EMC, right?

And I had no clue at the time I was joining an organization that was world class IT infrastructure. Right? I had no clue that it had one of the best sales forces for training people in the tech industry. Right? Outside of IBM who also had a really good program for training salespeople.

Right? I just didn't have that that context. I was I was young. Right? But it felt like school a little bit when when I was there.

We had to pass all of our tests 90% or higher on all technical exams. You're fired if you did not, you know? So it was very the the the culture, and I don't wanna make it seem like EMC was this insane culture, but it was a culture in sales where either you were excellent or nothing else mattered. Right? And that sort of really lit a fire under me for the rest of my career where I sort of learned how to tell stories that would move people.

I sort of learned how to get in front of the C suite or a systems administrator sitting inside of a data center, right? I sort of got the ability to build those relationships up and down the stack and how to communicate sort of with with people even though I was like ten years younger than most of the people that I was sort of doing this stuff for. So I feel I feel a lot like me in the sense that why do people even trust me to talk to people with this level of of responsibility? But in many ways, it it sort of gave me the infrastructure for the rest of my life and my career to go out and be good at BD, to be good at telling stories, to be good at pitching when I did get into the world of startups. And and I sort of forgot about all that.

Right? And we're sort of going down memory lane right now. So I think it's something to be said about large companies to train people, you know, that you have to get that on the fly when you're building a startup. There is no program. There is no curriculum.

There there are no tests. You know, there's none of that. You just you learn it today. Hopefully, you have it right by tomorrow. Otherwise, you might not be in business.

Right? And so I do think the velocity of learning in startups, right, is faster than in a corporation where you get to take your time and they hold they hold your hand. So talk to us a little bit about that transition, Mia, from the large corporate training, you got the skills, it's technical, and now you're moving into let's build this agency, right? I have this set of skills, I know how to build relationships, but talk to us about that transition.

Well, my good friend, I thought I did have all of the skills. So by this point, I kind of thought, yes, I've run a bunch of projects, I know how things work. But of course I knew within the context of these really large companies, as you say, they have processes, they have structure, you know, it's clear who's supposed to be doing what, they know who customers are. So doing it is a little bit easier to plan or have ideas when you know, who are you selling to? You have a budget, you kind of know the path, you have resources.

I don't know why I did not appreciate a lot these. So once I started doing my agency, the really nice thing is that because I was in the media industry and I was in the cutting edge of media industry, so we did a lot of on demand videos, this is back in those days, was super cutting edge. Mobile, people were just starting to talk about mobile, not so much in The UK, but a lot, I work in Asia quite a lot, so people were very actively looking into mobile delivery and roughly around the same time iPhone launched. So because I had been immersed in this area, it was, I guess, a nice conclusion to get to that, hey, maybe there's a trend here, maybe I can find some sort of niche in the mobile space. But really it was just by coincidence that I was in this space, I knew the media industry, I knew a few folks there.

And that's how the agency started. I just reached out to the contacts I had within different media agencies, different broadcasting companies to see if we can do something for them with mobile. And then I realized nobody really believed in it. And once you don't have the big brand behind you, sometimes it's just a different conversation. You're suddenly are not getting those calls picked up.

A really nice lesson to kind of be able to build deeper relationship, really leverage what you have. And, you know, in those early days, I ended up doing a lot of RFPs, you know, responding to a lot of proposals, because that's how you do it in a corporate. The RFPs will arrive, you sit down behind your desk, you write a bunch of proposals, some of them will win. And I remember in the early days after we did about 30, I didn't get anything. I was like, that's it.

I am not doing any more proposals. And actually, I'll tell you the story. It was really late at night. I was kind of sitting there thinking I cannot face writing another proposal. And on my coffee table, I had a book called This Diary Will Change Your Life.

And this diary, which was a really old diary, was actually by two artists. They go as a collective Bendrick. And as I was looking at this, I was thinking, if I only had the creativity that these guys have, it would be so nice. I will figure out what to do. And then I kind of thought, you know what?

I'm just going to drop them a line and see. So I just found their agent, dropped the agent a line, this and was like four or five in the morning saying, Hey, like I have a mobile agency, I would love to work with this creative duo, would you guys be interested? Really thinking nothing will come from it. I go to bed, wake up like eleven or whenever it was, there is already a meeting set up. That's actually how the agency started getting its real start because before I was just really struggling.

We ended up doing this really interesting, really, really creative project with these folks. It wasn't super commercial, but it immediately got us so much PR, so much attention that I never had to do any more proposals. People will come to us because they suddenly saw the quality of our work. And then it clicked for me that because I'm a tiny person now, the only way to win is by partnerships. So I ended up building a lot of partnerships to shorten that sales cycle and effectively get projects that way.

So really changing the path and doing things slightly differently and really rapidly building products and testing. So I cannot tell you how many products. I think we might have built in space of five years, possibly more than 40 products, build, launch, and then realizing nobody cares about a random product. I thought, okay, next time, maybe we should talk to people first. So there were a lot of these lessons that we learned through these trial and error, but a really new set of skills were really required compared to before.

Like things could not be tidy, things could not be structured. You got to just go, there's an opportunity, go, respond, be fast. And frankly, if it doesn't work, not a big deal, we'll try again. This is quite a different path and different attitude, I think. But it was helpful to have that foundation that you knew when you needed to, how can you do quality work, otherwise let's be scrappy.

There's so many things I want to kind of pull at. If you would let me jump in here for a second, Terrance. First of all, the RFP thing, I spent the first chapter of my career, you know, studying to be a professor. And so everything was proposal, RFP, you know, publication. And then when I broke out to go be an entrepreneur, kind of my second chapter of my career, I found it sort of preposterous on how much sort of folks were focusing on being good book report generators, Because I had just broken out of this world where that was sort of the only way really of doing things formally.

But it's just interesting to sort of think about where is your advantage? Where can you sort of operate? Larger companies have very good and established processes. So So in many cases, they're quite good at being able to do that. But it's just really interesting to see, you know, somebody that's used to the RFP process coming out and, you know, kind of starting to do their own thing.

And it's just like, this is what you You know? Let's respond to an RFP. And I'm like, you and what team? Right? You and what army?

And against what? You know, like, just competitive bidding generally in a lot of things if it's you against a lot of large incumbents is very, very difficult. And so it's just interesting that that was It's a good way of like thinking about what do you have to do differently and what do you have to have to win and sort of the asymmetry between large established organizations or you know, larger teams and ultimately kind of smaller, more agile teams. So I just wanted to sort of double click on that a little bit.

Absolutely. Because, you know, I don't know, looking back at it is such an obvious thing. But at the time, I felt I knew what the method was because he had worked before, not realizing a different context. You really need to be a lot more agile and do things differently. It's a really interesting lesson to learn.

And just that part. So that was the other thing is a lot of the time you can be successful at larger organizations by sort of repeating and really getting efficient at the things that have been built to make the company successful. In that environment, it doesn't really breed folks that sort of land on their feet and assess where am I, you know, what do I need to get done and then put a plan together. And so what you just described is, you know, sort of a really important and one of the things that I think makes EIR as effective is by having sort of a foot in each or in multiple cultures, you can sort of be the bridge, be the translator. Right?

And and Terrance and I love talking about the the role of the EIR as a translator. He makes fun of me. I make fun of him. It's you know, everything works out. But but I think that translating function, you know, understanding kind of what unique perspective perspective you you have and being able to make your resident organization more effective because of it is like one of the maybe the top thing that that EIRs can deliver.

So I love that you're sort of leaning into that in your discussion a little bit.

A 100%. And and and also you learn that velocity and speed is your friend against the bigger people. But when you when you get a shot, you have to get it right the first time. When people give you a shot and and add that value, and Mia just took her shot. Right?

They don't teach you to take shots like that in big companies. They don't teach you to send a cold email out at night. They don't teach you, like, you can cold email the CEO of a company. But when you're an entrepreneur, you need to feed yourself. Like, that's that's the only shot you have.

So why not? You know? And somebody might just answer, right, and and give you a shot. And and,

you know, a

lot

of times people don't answer and I think

That's right.

You know, at the same time, we need to build this resiliency that it's okay.

That's right. That's okay.

You only need one.

That's it. You only need one person to respond. Right? And so talking about EIR role as a translator, let's talk about you transitioning into your your first EIR role. Right?

Say taking the experience that you had learned along the way in management consulting with the agency, you you did PwC, right, and you led special projects and alliances there. And now there's this little weird sort of role that sort of just popped up in the world called the entrepreneur in residence at a financial services company that we know as Citi and you made that transition. Talk to us about how you heard about the role. Right? Did you know what the heck an EIR was at the time, you know, and walk us through what you did there at Citi.

So how did I hear about it? So in reality, the role I had in PwC, not the first role, but the second role was really an EIR role without that title. And because it was that type of a role, I had a massive network of investors, entrepreneurs, people in incubators, accelerators. I was very well connected within The UK. And I was very active in the scene, whether it was to connect people, run events, be in conferences, I was very much a fixture for a period of time in London.

And as a result, I had this really nice network. Within this particular role, I ended up creating quite a lot of really nice commissions, interesting projects, really interesting new paths to move forward for certain startups I managed to bring into PwC. And one of the people within my networks is a really dear, dear friend of mine now, Uri, he had collaborated with me on and off as part of this particular role that I had. And then at some point he was working to set up City Ventures. City Ventures didn't have this program.

So they had an investment part that was based in San Francisco and they were in the process of setting up a venture building side. And there were still discussions happening. He was working on the design. And then at some point he reached out to me to say, Hey, this is kind of similar to a lot of the work that you're already doing. Do you want to have a conversation?

And that's sort of how it happened. When I joined, I think they had a really small team. I think I might have been maybe the second or third hire into the, I was a third AIR to join that team. And it was a hugely, hugely exciting time because we were just starting to think about what does this structure needs to be thinking, okay, how do we And we thought about it in two different ways. One, how do we try to change the culture?

Because if you think about it, Citi is a beast. You know, like a very traditional, really well structured, very hierarchical business hugely. And then on the other side, we want to say, okay, let's change the culture a little bit so they will be amiable to us. But on the other side, how do we identify these entrepreneurs, bring them in, figure out what the project should be, support them through that process? So we had these two sided role and really, really interesting.

It was really amazing to see how quickly you can capture people's hearts and minds. We had, sorry, I'm just bringing so many good memories. It was a really interesting role. We had a lot of different people who were just hungry, hungry for a little bit of interest, for innovation, for something, either just doing whatever the day job was. Amazing, amazing talented people apply to create these teams.

And I sat in the London office looking at institutional banking, but we had another side in New York, which was specifically for FinTech. In fact, some of the folks from the FinTech team ended up joining one day as well. Brian Mies is actually one of my colleagues from Citi Ventures. So that's kind of how I ended up getting into it, but it wasn't a huge shift because I was doing similar things in PIRBC. So I was a sponsor for the very first accelerator that we ran in that company.

I was involved with a lot of these relationship buildings, a lot of commissioning for different projects. So it wasn't super far, it was just a lot more structured and suddenly you had your own space to experiment and do interesting thing. And also, I think the difference was that in Citi, they do have labs around the world where they have really strong technical talent and each lab will specialize in a specific thing. And we were lucky enough to work with these labs. So in a way you have the business talent, you have the technical talent, you have the resources, you can make things happen.

Citi, at least at that particular moment in time, super keen to experiment and figure things out. And it was just a really wonderful place to be.

Let me ask you a question about this. So it sounds like at Citi, you were one of the first three in The UK, right? Did they already have EIRs in The US already?

So the project was, I'm not 100% sure if they started at the same time, but the actual project was being effective birth by one person from New York, one from London and URI. So it was still very new everywhere.

Okay. My early exposure to City Of Finchers was D10x, right?

That's right, that's the program.

Oh, okay. All right. So D10x, I knew about D10x and people had told me about it, but I think it had legs at this point, right? Wasn't I think this was around nineteen, twenty twenty when I heard about it. Yeah,

so we probably started in, I want to say 2016.

Okay, Okay. Yeah. That that makes a ton of sense. And so that sounds like an incredible ride. And and one, you had multiple other EIRs that you can bounce things off of when they got into the environment.

You were also what we used to call looking for the rebels. I used to work at a firm called Mott forty nine, right, as an operating partner. And we used to help people recruit these EIRs in their corporate environments. And they used to say, well, we don't have any entrepreneurial people in our company. And we used to always be like, are you sure?

Know, find

They're always there.

They're hungry. They just don't want to raise the alarms because you're paying them very well and they have security. But the moment you give them something else new to do to sort of create another path for the company, you might find that you have a lot of entrepreneurial people in your company. So we used to ask them, who are the rebels in the company? Who are the people who are always going against people at the all hands?

Who are the people who always have new ideas? Who are the people who, you know, give us those people, they should be in the venture building function of the company.

That's right. And do you know, like it's such an amazing way to also keep talent because a lot of these people, okay, they are well paid, they have security, but at some point they're going to get tempted. So this is such a nice way to keep talent, to keep them engaged, really get those amazing ideas out of them. They already know the business, understand the customers already connected. It's such a wonderful way to leverage this group of people that you're right.

Sometimes they seem like the rebels.

The rebels inside the companies. And honestly, think it's a great way for people to get entrepreneurial experience on training wheels is what I like to call it, you know, because now you don't lead the corporation and you know something called customer discovery, right? You know you need to actually fall in love with the problems and marry the problems and not the ideas and the solutions that you have, right?

Terrance in Citi, in Citi Ventures, you have no idea how much customer discovery we did.

Oh, that's good.

The really amazing luck that we have is that, of course, part of the business force, at least on the institutional banking, every client will have an account manager and the account manager knows them pretty well. So it was pretty easy to ask the account manager, please, we're looking for this type. And then suddenly your calendar is full of meetings. And it's just such an incredible power to have to be able to have those meetings back to back, go through it, really check assumptions super quickly and come up with those really, really deep problems that you know your client really desperately needs, and you can build something really quickly off the back of it. We did a lot of that work and had never like customer discovery has never been that smooth, I feel.

That's right. It's interesting because you go from, you know, sort of this big financial services institution as an EIR to solving problems for the world. All right, so let's talk about the transition to you becoming an EIR again but this time at an organization called Zynq, I think I'm pronouncing it appropriately.

That's right.

Zynq VC in London and I know them to you know do venture building but coupled with social problems that exist in the world that are big and meaty that people need to solve. So talk to us about what is Zynq? What was the role like there? And what did you do as an EIR in that residence?

So I feel this is a rite of passage. All entrepreneurs at some point they will decide they need to do something for impact. And I think this was my period after City Ventures, felt, they offered me a permanent role there. And as I was contemplating, should I say or not, I kind of felt maybe it's time for something new. And then I kind of jumped into something impact driven.

So Zynq at the time, actually have always been about impact, only that every year they have a slightly different theme. And in that particular year, their theme was how might we help people who've been left behind in ex industrial cities? And I was born in one of these cities, I was quite familiar with it, so it really resonated with me. And I kind of felt, Hey, I actually would love to be part of this and see how we might solve something that's real. And I have always have believed that not always, but for a lot of social problems, there could be commercial solutions for it.

It doesn't have to be just commercials. There are ways that we can actually bring these two worlds together. It just needs a little bit of creativity and thinking how you can align interests. So Zynq was hugely seductive for me. I kind of thought, yes, I really would love to learn more about cities, how things are structured, how we might help people.

And under this theme, they had a lot of different dimensions. It was actually very broad because you could take this theme under health, you can think about mental health, you can think about the actual city infrastructure and transport and so on. And the idea was that you will spend some time, you'll collaborate with a few fellows, come up with interesting ideas, test them really quickly. And if it works great, if not, you will switch to something else. So I ended up, did a few jumps there, eventually really focused on how can we help young men who are not going to university have more opportunities for jobs or their careers.

And it was an interesting thing because I feel I went with so much enthusiasm to start. And then we did a huge amount of customer discovery, a lot of, you know, ideal style being in the environment and in the context, we spent a lot of time in these types of cities, we connected with a lot of people across these communities. And then I feel, I came out of it feeling that this was a problem that really needed government support, because when I looked at the long term plan for this particular city that we had really gone deep, there were a set of strategic plans that actually would have made things worse and worse and worse. I'm like, you can't really fight it. So I eventually ended up just helping other teams here and there doing the same kind of work I was doing at Citi and eventually kind of wrapped up that chapter, probably not as, do you know, not as the way that I really wanted to, I felt a little bit disillusioned towards the end of it.

I had this grieving period where I felt like, Oh, but why didn't it work? I don't know, it was just a little bit hard for me to get over it. And then eventually I went back and incidentally ended up going back to kind of help on a similar theme in a different country. And that made it a little bit better because I jumped from there to doing a project in Saudi Arabia for a while and then ended up with City of Abu Dhabi, again, within the same theme of how can we help specific cities. Yeah, so it went a bit full circle.

Just to jump in real quick, from like a very different context, I think it does help. Two things. One is the impact thing and sort of what drives people. I think part of the reason that, you know, everybody gets hit by the impact bug or, you know, sort of other things is they're sort of intentional and thinking about how can I use my skills and my capabilities to affect the world? Right?

And sometimes that's not purely monetarily. And so I've seen a lot of folks get really interested problems, ideas, whatever, and dive into it. But sort of this balance between sort of pre commercial, early commercial, commercial scale, a lot of folks haven't really spent any time outside of pure commercial world. And I accidentally did just because of sort of the academic basic research, some of that stuff, and got to think a lot about how do those functions kind of work together, right? What is basic research?

How does it ultimately get commercialized? Why don't professors want to commercialize their technology? Turns out that a lot of them are at least are in university because they want academic freedom and they're interested by some really esoteric idea that they don't care if it's got a commercial outlet. But I think there's a lot of value in sort of understanding. You mentioned aligning incentives.

And I think in a lot of these conversations, it's ultimately a question of economics, right? Looking at how do you create kind of stakeholder ecosystems and make them metastable over some period of time, right? And I think that's like that is not an obvious thing on how that fits into sort of your day to day. But it was cool to kind of hear you working through that and actually came up in our last discussion also on how do you kind of make stable communities. So I just wanted to kind of highlight that and love the fact that you were kind of digging into that a little bit earlier.

Do you know, you said something really nice that you want to align all of these people or these stakeholders over a period of time. And I think what is quite a big difference for impact driven projects versus the simple commercial ones is that it really does need a lot of time and a lot of patience. Do you know? Because there is just so much that's not in your control, but if you stick at it, eventually it will come together. If I look back now that it's been quite a few years since saying, so I have the power of hindsight now.

When I look back, there were a couple of other ARs who ended up doing some interesting projects and at the time they were pretty small, they didn't really seem they will go anywhere. Do know, they were just interesting things to do rather than something real, but over time with a lot of grit, a lot of patients just not giving up, they have managed to shape and form and figure things out. And now they have both have really, really incredible businesses who are doing really interesting stuff. And one in particular is actually pretty commercial as well. They've raised quite a lot of money.

They're doing a really nice job, but it really required quite a substantial amount of time and patience, you know? And I think I lacked it a bit.

Just to double click on that, this is sort of the concept of the ten or fifteen year overnight success.

Right?

It's the what happened in hindsight and as reported by the media or whoever's kind of covering how did it go down is never how it actually, you know, and a lot of these, you know, startups even or movements or whatever start with, you know, an idea, then some seed of, hey, this idea seems to be working, but the real realization is five years away. And then like seven years after that, they're like, oh, this thing exploded overnight. Right? But like, I love both successes and failures actually talking to the folks that were in the trenches from day one because the story you get directly and what could have gone wrong, how high were the highs, how low were the lows is like completely different than the TechCrunch article or the article in the whatever, right?

You know, this is why whenever I speak to entrepreneurs, especially people who are first time founders, a lot of times they have these aspirations that I want to be like this person. I'm like, please don't compare yourself. Whatever story you have heard is a PR managed story. It doesn't happen like this. There's just so much hard work, so many heartbreaks and you know, like opportunities and luck that goes into it.

But people don't realize it. Do you read the article? It sounds so easy.

I love this idea of talking about luck. And I like to talk to people about this is that you can work hard, but you need a little bit of luck at some point. And sometimes I like to tell people I like to create my own luck, right? So, you know, good entrepreneurs are good at creating their own luck. They might not know when it's going to happen for them but they keep tugging at the thing in hopes that eventually something will fall, right?

You know, that will that will be game changing for for you and hopefully your family and others to get you to the outcome. And it's it's interesting, I wanna go back just a little bit when you said how you you landed your first role, why you did the thing at Zynq, right, The the first thing I want to sort of underscore for our audience is that usually, and I haven't seen one person on the on the podcast yet, usually, your EIR role is created for you or it finds you. You don't find it. Okay? That is a theme with every single person that we interview.

Usually it's just not like EIR role just floating out there for just anybody to just get. Usually somebody in your network through relationships usually will find you to say, Hey, there's this kind of weird thing that we're working on that we don't really know what it's going to be but you're kind of sort of the right person to do it, right? Yeah. And that's basically how Mia's first EIR role found her, right, at Citi. And it just led to other interesting things

And later

I'll pause there. Any reactions to that?

You know, and you will see that every organization will define the IR differently because it's basically whatever it is that they need, whatever is the magic that you bring, we will make it work. This is a really, really interesting role. I don't think it's everybody's cup of tea because there is so much ambiguity and there are so many random skills you need to concentrate in one person to build relationship, to understand technicality, to understand how to build a business. It's just a lot of different things together. But for those who are, do you know who makes them tick, it's actually really a wonderful role to have.

Absolutely, completely agree. I think Ilya is going to jump in with something. I can always tell when Ilya's gonna jump in because we do this so much together. So jump in, Ilya.

No. Absolute absolutely. The the funny thing is this this is actually one of the reasons that, you know, Terrance and I started the podcast in the first place is every EIR we talked to is like, I'm probably not like everybody else, but right? And they're almost, not almost, to the person, say some version of that statement. But what we found out is that by adding a couple modifiers and helping to think about what the residence is, they do actually start to look a lot more similar than you would expect.

So we normally say, hey, are you more horizontal or are you more vertical? So do you work more on the capacity of the organization to be entrepreneurial or connect intentionally with outside world? Or do you work on kind of spinning in or spinning out a venture? Right? So horizontal vertical.

And then what's your residence, right? Are you enterprise? Are you academic? Are you public? And as soon as you add those two modifiers, it turns out that folks are actually a lot more like each other than they would ever expect.

I and think what's funny is we're finding more and more sort of examples of where somebody has experienced whatever problem, executive misalignment, no investment, not being able to transfer sort of innovation activities into the commercial pipelines of the company, challenging established revenue streams and cannibalizing your own business and everything that happens around that. And like, I can keep going, but it's really interesting to sort of a little bit of structure all of a sudden creates a lot of sort of pathways and avenues where folks can start to relate and share experiences. So I definitely hear what you're saying, but I think in a lot of the conversations we've had, is a lot of like, a lot of these sort of really interesting gems and insights that folks have that it would be amazing if we could sort of spread broadly to folks. Hopefully conversations like this can enable us to continue to do that.

That's great. I really liked the way that you categorized because suddenly kind of made sense. You can look at the horizontal vertical. Really super interesting.

I don't want to beat this one to death, but we're going to because then Amiya became an EIR again. Okay. But this time her residence was different. So the residents that you get a chance to play this role of EIR in will wildly dictate what you actually do and what you're working on. Okay, my role as an EIR in the university was to mentor students.

For example, my role at Mock forty nine was to actually build ventures that we were going to spin outside that were going to be net new companies, with their own separate cap tables, right? And some of them were going to be spin ins and be a brand new business unit to a corporation. My role as an EIR at SAP, wildly different from the one at Mott forty nine, wildly different from the one at one day, wildly different from the one at university, right? So the same thing is true from you going from Citi to Zinc and so now finding this very mysterious company that was growing at a rapid rate in London, right? As a school almost for entrepreneurs, but you can also graduate with your MBA along the way.

Talk to us about you making the transition to becoming an EIR at One Day and what you're doing now that's different from when you started there.

I joined One Day before it was called One Day. So One Day originally was called dorm. It was supposed to be a dorm room, people join, they will get mentorship. So pretty straightforward, no MBA. And at the time, I had decided that I said, I'm retiring.

I had moved to Spain, to a little village, and after six months of not doing anything, my partner was, for the love of God, you can't just stick around, you got to find a job. And I kind of thought, okay, I'm going go back to London, I'm going try and find maybe something in a startup role, maybe a COO type role. And around the same time, somebody reached out to me, or maybe I applied for dorm, they were looking for somebody who will take on two or three founders, so nothing more. And I kind of thought, well, mentoring, that's not so hard. I already had a bunch of clients and I kind of thought, okay, two, three, that sounds great.

I had a really quick interview and immediately I had like a few founder conversations and I absolutely fell in love with it. It was just such a bizarre thing because I kind of thought it would be a nice little thing to keep me connected to the world whilst I'm fighting my actual gig. And in parallel, I was actually interviewing for another startup, this was the thing that I was going to actually do. And what I found about OneNate that was very different, it was basically mentoring first time founders, but not the type of first time founders I had worked with before. So before I had worked with, you know, the typical founder, they've kind of have some experience or are super bright, or do you know they come from a technical background, the founders with the original one day, they were people who just wanted to build a business all the way from, hey, I want to do a retail business to, I want to do food, I want to do tech, like all across the boundaries, but also hugely diverse.

Doesn't matter how you define diversity, whether you're talking about race, gender, race, like it doesn't matter, like that's what it was. And I was just, do you know, almost going again from kind of wanting to try impact to going back to commercial world, then I came back, I'm like, hold on accidentally, this is actually really nice. I feel like it actually matters what I'm doing. And, you know, it made me feel I'm sharing things that are almost secret, like nobody knows these. Like my clients or my founders were just so far from the startup universe that it felt suddenly was super valuable.

And it was just such a wonderful feeling to see them and see how quickly they transitioned. And I really loved it so much. So I ended up getting more and more involved and because I had come back from a venture building background and I had a lot of structure over the years, I brought a lot of that structure into one day. So back in the day, Terence, we had the group meetings that our classes now back in those days were spot classes, like the first version of those were structured by me. You know, like I just ended up bringing a lot of these things, the risk is assumptions that you come across that was, and I think I brought into a company.

So different concept came in and I just ended up collaborating so much that as we ended up doing this pivot to the MBA, I was very involved with the curriculum and with the training, I ran the very, very first beta test of the MBA, just to go through end to end to see if it actually works with some test subjects. And this is kind of how I ended up getting more and more involved. Eventually, took over the role of the head of the faculty to look after all of the AIRs, all the way from recruiting, training, making sure everybody's happy, everybody knows what they're supposed to be doing, we're delivering what we're supposed to be delivering, because now we have this two sided thing that we're trying to solve. One is, let's make sure we build a good business, also let's make sure you're getting your MBA. So bringing these two sides, like the real commercial side, but also the academic sides together and helping our mentors and founders so hit this particular nostalgic metric.

So this is how it happened. It happened very organically in a way.

It's an incredible story because, you know, I actually heard about one day in a bar in London actually, through one of the mentors who I had helped coach and train during their mock forty nine days as an EIR. And they were talking about, well Terrance, if you wasn't doing this, what would you be doing? I was like, well, you can't get this from my LinkedIn profile, but at some point in my life, I actually want to be a university president, right, of of a university. And people were like, woah, I never saw that one, you know, but I can see that actually. I can actually see you doing something in academia.

Right? So but from the from the standpoint of entrepreneurship, said, but, know, haven't found the right thing in the university that will make me tick. The only thing that I would go and do at a university is probably lead up the entrepreneurship center. That that that's probably the closest thing that's gonna get me inside of a university full time. And, I said, but if there is a way where my background in entrepreneurship and venture building could be combined with academia, that would be incredible.

If a venture studio and a university could have a kid, that's the thing that I would wanna go and do. And he said, have you ever heard of this group called One Day? And that is basically how I heard about One Day. And this gentleman named was Phil, Phil White. Phil exposed me and taught me about One Day.

And I said, okay, you know, I'm going to follow these guys for a little while and see if there's something there. And, over time, I just started to to just become a believer after having conversations with, with Phil. And he was just like, I'm telling you, you're gonna get such a high from from doing this work. And he's right, and a year and a half later I'm still getting a high from from helping people out who, like you said, are so far away, so far removed from the world that in the language that I speak every single day. You know, I speak startups and term sheets and like this stuff every single day and they don't have a clue what half of those things are.

To be able to see the light bulbs come on for some of them, know, I think it makes it all worth it for me and why I decided to be an EIR one day. But I gotta tell you, it's the environment where I've seen so many incredible entrepreneurs who've done incredible things in their careers. I have no clue what secret sauce you guys have on us or spell you have on us to recruiting guests, but you guys are really good at recruiting some incredible people into helping the founders at One Day. So talk to us a little bit about that, you know, are there certain types of people that you guys target to become EIRs to help support the founders at One Day?

I think we have really been trying to focus on people who have AIR or venture building experience, but more than that entrepreneurs. One Day is a really funny organization that doesn't matter who you come across across the business. Doesn't really matter all the way from the top to bottom, doesn't matter. Every single person has been an entrepreneur at some point. So everybody in the company really understands how tough it is to build a company, what it requires to build a company, and everybody genuinely wants to help, because we have all gone through it, we've made our millions of mistakes.

We want to make sure that the next person doesn't. And so there is this really nice energy internally where people are genuinely excited whenever there is anything that could push founders forward and build interesting ventures. And I think some of that transmits. On the other side, Terrance, I think when you joined us, we had this really amazing lady. I think you worked with Rhonda.

Yeah, I correct? I did. I did.

So we had this really incredible lady who actually did a lot of the recruitment before I took over the recruitment. So the secret sauce is really hers because she did a really incredible job of just picking amazing, not just amazing entrepreneurs, but really people who fit the culture, who were really driven by the right things. They really wanted to help. They really wanted to push these founders forward. So she did an incredible job.

And I think I inherited a lot of good things she has set up and off the back of that, we really have tapped into our network. So you're absolutely right. A lot of people in our 120, 130 group of mentors would have heard from somebody else. Do you know? So it's a lot of word-of-mouth, a lot of connections, a lot of people.

I think, Terence, I think you have recommended four or five people in at least.

At least for It even might more.

So they're all very nicely connected. And of course, we try our very best to look after the mentors. Doesn't mean it's it's all false. Like it's still a company that's building and there are things that are not as smooth as they should be, but at least everybody is working really hard. And relatively speaking, there are a lot of really nice changes that happened very quickly.

And I feel if people knew how tiny the core team was, they will not believe how much we're delivering. It's actually a really tiny team. But yeah, it's a really interesting place to be. And after all of it, all of what I said, I think it's the founders that keep the mentors coming back. Do you know that just the fact that they are really so diverse or just so wonderful, there are just so many bright people of different backgrounds, different aspirations, different inspirations it's really great to have the opportunity to work with so many people.

I'm going to make a comment and then I'm going to pass it over to Ilya because I do want to underscore the diversity that I see across one day and from every aspect. I And tell people this when I'm taking admissions calls with people who are thinking about one day, which is, you know, what tell me the one thing that's unique about this this group called one day that I won't find anywhere else. And I said, I'll tell you something that's pretty unique because I've been a part of most of the programs that you're probably looking at in the marketplace and or I've advised to coach them or invested in companies that went through their programs. And I said, for the most part, there's not too many places where you can go get experience building your company right and learn from the people who've already done it and they all don't look the same and don't have the same trajectory and background and what I mean by that is that you can be in the classroom with somebody who never touched a college campus or uni in their entire life, you know, or you can be on a call with somebody who's a medical doctor right now in their daily lives looking to build a business, or you can they can be a actual practicing lawyer who has retired already and they're looking to build a company for the first time but they've never done it before.

I said the spectrum of people, the high school, like the spectrum of people that you will be in a cohort with, everybody will get a chance to be humbled and learn from somebody, you know, because you are literally in people who have had eight degrees of some people who have no degrees yet, right? But we'll get their first one and we'll learn, right, this process of being an entrepreneur while also learning how to be a good student, while also learning how to build great relationships, while also learning how to test things in the wild, right? And I just don't think you're going to get that breadth of experience in one cohort anywhere else on the planet. And I have three degrees myself and I still don't have that breadth of experience. So I don't know many places where you can do that where people actually care, right?

They're here for you and not for them. They've already done pretty well for themselves actually. They don't actually need to be here. You know, they're actually here because they get a high from helping people like you build the next great thing in the world, right? So that's something I want to underscore about about the diversity and I know Ilya is going to take us to the looking forward, you know, for the rest of the podcast.

Well, and and actually maybe just make a quick observation. I can't speak to one day directly, but I will say that one of the things that we've observed generally in kind of the EIR network and then, you know, more generally, I've observed in my professional life is that having connectivity to diverse networks is sort of a interesting superpower. Right. And even to Terrance's point about sitting down and talking to a colleague mentor and learning about, you know, one of the more interesting ways to be a business or innovation hipster is to have a powerful network, right? Because you always hear about what's coming up in three years.

And then if you've made that jump from, you know, research to technology to sort of other orbits of knowledge, you start to develop the ability to be that hipster in multiple orbits. And so it sounds like in some of the things you guys are talking through at one day, there's a little bit of that flywheel effect of bringing interesting diverse people with kind of robust networks, I guess, is the way that I would describe it, and then all the magic that happens there. And by the way, since all of them were entrepreneurs, I bet you they also have that instinct that you shared earlier in the conversation about who's the smartest or who's the best. Let's go talk to them. Right?

And those those two things are combined are, you know, unstoppable. I'll pause for a second because I'm sure you got some thoughts there and then we can go forward.

So you're absolutely right. There is something really quite powerful about having these diverse networks. I think we are in one day, we're at the beginning of that journey. So we have a very, very interesting group of founders. We absolutely have a wonderful group of mentors, which is equally as diverse with really different backgrounds.

I don't think we have leveraged it properly yet. We're still in the experimental period to see actually how can we tap into it that will naturally these connections will happen. We're in that process. Think I have really high hopes because I think we haven't even tapped into like more than 5% of the power of the network. Do you know?

So we have a better way to go, but I think at least the foundation is there. We just need to kind of figure out what to do next. Because I think this is my hypothesis, not the company's. We all know that you cannot build a business just on your own. Like it's just not going to happen.

Even if somebody wants to be a sole entrepreneur, you really need to have a few people around you. And a lot of our founders are of course, single founders, they're coming through the program because they're getting the MBA, it's a very, almost solo journey. But I really would love to see if there is a way that we can connect them together because I think that's when the real magic could happen when you have these complimentary skill sets together. And if there is nothing stopping them come together to build a business together and at the same time do their MBA. I think that's kind of my secret wish that we enable this a little bit more so we can have co founders and really be stronger together, but we'll see, we'll see.

Tried when I had my own founders, I had roughly about 30 founders and I constantly tried to do matchmaking to different degrees of success. But yeah, I think there is a really nice potential here. I would love to explore it over maybe the next year.

What's interesting there, this sort of touches on another thing that I found is that when you're young or earlier in your professional career, or at least this was the case for me, folks don't really appreciate to how long term of a game this is. Right? And and there's some interesting folks that talk about, you know, sort of what's the value or what's the opportunity if you can sort of think of a lot of these things as a long term game and where is the multiple, you know, kind of the maximum leverage that you can put forth. And I think, you know, especially early in my entrepreneurial career, I didn't really appreciate sort of the long arc of how long I was going be having these conversations for. And we were actually chatting with another lady that I had worked on on biofuel maybe a month and a half ago, something like that.

And we started thinking about it. I'm like, man, last time we were talking about this was fifteen years ago. Right? And she's still in biofuel. I'm no longer directly in biofuel, but it's just like the networks are so dense and connected.

And getting folks to fully appreciate who are your peers that are really kind of passionate about the same set of problems and are likely to be hacking away in ten or fifteen or twenty years and then building stuff together. Maybe not in the same company, right? But ultimately, you're going to end up at the same things with the same networks and things like that. And I think folks really underappreciate sort of the value and power of that over even the medium term time horizon, let alone twenty or forty years.

Yeah, because also a lot of these relationships last. So I give you an example. Back in the day, when I started my company, we had an early client. Eventually this early client became a co founder on another business we built together that's still going after like twelve, fifteen years. We ended up having an exit from that business, but this is from a client we're still in touch with them.

I had my very first employee when I was at the agency, eventually built a bunch of different products. We built a few businesses together. This is like fast forward fifteen years, he's a founder of a really interesting Microsoft. I'm now working with him again. Do know?

So a lot of these relationships continue and I've known him for like, I don't know, fifteen, twenty years. We've worked with each other for quite some time. There are a lot of these overlaps. In fact, the story I told you earlier about those two artists that I wanted to collaborate with, I ended up working with them and then their agent ended up becoming my co founder for another business that we built to get to know. So a lot of these relationships form and, you know, especially a lot of times when it comes to finding a co founder, people think, okay, that's it, I'm going to start searching my co founder.

Whereas actually these things happen organically over time, as you get to know them, as you build a relationship, you build a trust, you really understand together how can you fit, what is a complimentary set, and then it will almost naturally happen. But it needs a lot of that upfront investment into relationships and doing work together without actually expecting anything back. But eventually that return will come.

And was going to say it's interesting because it's almost like this blind trust that becomes this unspoken connection over time, right? With different people. You don't really talk about you guys getting closer. You just keep working with each other because you enjoy it. And it sort of just becomes this unspoken connection sort of, over time.

But it starts off as blind trust. You don't know them from a can of paint. We're gonna do this thing together and then eventually you just continue to work through it and the blind trust sort of becomes this, you know, unspoken connection over time.

There there's a really good passage, actually. There's a a book called The Almanac of Naval Ravankant, that a buddy of mine wrote. And, one of the chapters, opening chapters talks about how to get rich. And the funniest and sort of unexpected part was focus on long term relationships with high leverage. Right?

And it kind of talks through there's a pretty good tweet storm that Naval did a while ago that sort of tried to bottle a lot of this. But as we're talking through it, I'm like, man, we're sort of rehashing some of that conversation. So I'll put a link in the notes. Well, as is our tradition, we're little bit over, but I think the discussion was really good. As Terrance and I joke, can And actually, there's no joke.

We can definitely keep going. We do like to sort of ask We're building a bit of a network of EIRs and have some pretty interesting alums of the show at this point. What's helpful to you and kind of what you're working on from that network? Is there something that we as a network can kind of do to support you?

I will say the obvious one that we are looking for amazing, amazing entrepreneurs, people who have this ability to mentor really well. So EIR is with this angle, somebody who would have a passion for pushing our founders forward to success. So if anybody is willing and keen, I would love to connect. Yeah, that would be super, super helpful. That's really what I want to do.

I want to build a really amazing network for our founders.

Where can they connect with you at? I mean, what's the best way to get in touch

with you? Easiest, LinkedIn. So you can easily search for me, Mia Bennett, find me and drop me a line.

Okay. And what's something, you know, not going to let you go without asking you this question, which is tell our audience something before you go that's not on your LinkedIn that they would not know about you, that you enjoy doing or engaging with.

So as part of the story of me deciding to retire from London to a little fishing town, I also became slightly obsessed with renovating old properties. And Spain, as you probably know, has a lot of abandoned places. So exclusively, I look for abandoned places that are at least a 100 years old. And then over time we renovate them. So we ended up building a little nice little portfolio of those.

That's kind of like the creative outlet for the weekends, which is really quite nice. And, know, there are also a lot of really interesting commercial opportunities in this space. I don't want to spoil it too much, but again, if somebody was interested, more than happy to share more. Yeah, this is maybe something a lot of people don't know.

That's super interesting. I did not know that. So now we're going to talk more about old historic buildings that I know about potentially. So that is very interesting. And lastly, Mia, do you have a dream EIR role that if you can wave Imagine one and do it today, what would that be?

You know, if you had asked me a few years ago, I would have said a company who's doing deep tech, like I would love to work with scientists, you know, with really super smart people. I find it so incredibly stimulating. But now that you're asking me today, I feel in a way I do have that dream job. I think one day is a really, really interesting role and has a lot of space to still figure a lot of things out is actually pretty challenging. It's really, really hard.

And whilst it's really hard, do you know he has the opportunity for me to kind of learn and figure things out? So it's super interesting right now. So let's see, but after this chapter is closed, maybe deep tech.

All right. Well, we have a very interesting guest that you have to meet. You two will be in the same EIR network and he'll, you know, I'm talking about, but I won't say the person's name until your episode and their episode come out. So thank you so much, Mia. We're so grateful for your time today.

And thank you for all the insight. We really appreciate My

absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me on. It was really great talking with you and going back to past memories. So thank you. Thank you for the opportunity.

Of course. Great discussion. Thanks for your time.

My absolute pleasure.

The thing that caught me about this episode was how many and how many times I sort of had to pause and be like, man, I want to talk more about that and diving in. I actually appreciate you stopping the flow of conversation a couple of times and just saying that, hey, I think Ilya wants to jump in. It was just, it was awesome. And I guess not surprising, right? There's a lot of, the more conversation we have like this, the more I noticed that there are certain personality quirks and habits and things like that, that I have that aren't unique, right?

That are maybe not common, right? But definitely not one of a kind. And sort of Mia's propensity to be like, you know, I got to reach out to these two artists because I think this collaboration is going to be awesome and just say, I'm doing it, right? It's something I do all the time. I'm like, who's the smartest and the thing that I'm working on, I'm going to go talk to them, right?

And so I do it all the time. And then this whole idea of like network and alignment and incentives and sort of piecing together tactical and strategic and things like that. I'm like, man, there's just a lot of common background there. And so it's cool being able to turn over and go through some of these really interesting stories and stories like Mia's because I think it really helps folks think about which parts do I have, which parts don't I have, and maybe who can I learn from, who's a little bit ahead in the game in the direction that I want to go? And I think that's really what I enjoyed about this episode.

There's just so many more directions we could have gone that we had to sort of in the interest of keeping it at only over fifteen minutes instead of over an hour. And it was great. So that was mine, you know, there's there's a few other reflections, but I think that's the main ones. What what's what kind of stuck out to you?

Yeah. I'm gonna try not to be long winded on this one because I have so many, and and I'm gonna call this the onion episode because there's so many layers to it that we can peel back to really we can create a part one, two and three from this because there's so many layers. She got into, deep tech, relationships, impact. I mean, many different layers to the conversation, the diversity of her recruiting the entrepreneurs and residents in the current environment that she's in right now. But what really, really, really is sticking out to me about Mia is her ability to build, create and nurture relationships over twenty five plus years, right?

And still doing it, right? And this is a theme that that we're starting to see, right, in some of the entrepreneurs in residence is that relationships matter. Relationships are key and not just for the moment. They're they're relationships that people have literally poured their heart soul into and developed over, like, decades. Right?

You know, so I I need for people to understand that the importance of relationships is not just about you being a great entrepreneur. It's not about you just having a great product. You also have to be a decent human, right, and and to maintain relationships with people. So her underscoring the the the the relationships was a sort of a critical theme that I saw. But also, you know, impact.

You know, at some point, we all do well for ourselves, but we are thinking about how do we get back to that next generation of entrepreneurs, the next generation of people. How do we, you know, give back to society as as a whole? Because the more we give that back, you know, the more good can be created in the world, the more better companies are created, the more people are disciplined enough to do the things that we know is already hard to do, right, in building anything new. And, you know, she's done that in multiple layers of her career and that was also a theme, you know, whether that's with One Day, whether that's with Zinc VC or other things that she talked about or the work she did in Abu Dhabi, right, and helping helping out there. So many layers to this this episode, for for Mia but it remains exposure, access, impact.

That's the thing that we saw underscored here in the episode with Mia and I can't wait for our audience to listen to it. Thanks for joining us on EIR Live. We hope today's episode offered you valuable insights into the entrepreneurial journey. Remember to subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes and check out the description for more details. Do you have questions or suggestions?

Please reach out to us. Connect with us on social media. We really value your input. Catch us next time for more inspiring stories and strategies, Keep pushing boundaries and making your mark on the world. I'm Terrance Orr with my co-host, Ilya Tabakh, signing off.

Let's keep building.