Entrepreneurship Can't Be Taught?

Can entrepreneurship be taught? Serial entrepreneur Katie Stearns says no, and explains why grit beats a great idea every time.

Katie started playing "bike shop" while the other girls played house. Since then she has run Minnesota's first real estate staging company while raising three sons, sold karaoke to Minnesota bars on straight commission right out of college, and built You Betcha Box, a gift box company featuring more than 100 Minnesota food makers, which she sold three and a half years ago.

Now her kids are grown and she's going after something much bigger: earrings that work as earbuds, built for women who want to hear their AI, their calls and the world around them all at the same time.

We get into the part of entrepreneurship nobody teaches, which is sales. Why a pitch to investors is a sales call. Why you should fall in love with your customer, not your product. And why her billboard in Times Square would say four words: Women are not a niche.

CHAPTERS:
00:00 Meet Katie Stearns, serial entrepreneur
01:00 Building businesses around three sons
01:40 Born an entrepreneur: the kid who played bike shop
03:00 Can entrepreneurship be taught? Her controversial answer
05:00 Build a deep bench so one vendor can't sink you
06:00 You Betcha Box and 100+ Minnesota makers
08:00 Sales: the skill schools don't teach
09:30 Selling karaoke on straight commission
11:30 Get in front of your customers
12:30 AI and the next generation of founders
13:30 San Francisco: why events are the new marketing
15:00 Radical empathy: love the customer, not the product
16:30 Perfectionism, bias and pitching as a woman founder
18:00 Blings: earrings that double as earbuds
20:30 Why earbuds fail women
22:00 A Qualcomm NDA and her first patent
22:45 Times Square billboard: Women are not a niche
24:00 Where to find Katie

Connect with Katie Stearns on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/katiesterns/

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