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Welcome to The Pivot Point, a student-led podcast that shines a spotlight on the vibrant city of Las Vegas while exploring the transformative journeys of students, professors, and executives. My name is Bardia Eivazi, an MBA student at UNLV. Join me as I delve into the stories of those who have embraced change, overcome obstacles, and made significant strides in their academic and professional lives. We're more than just a podcast - we are a community dedicated to empowering student voices and inspiring the next generation of leaders. Tweet us @pivotpointunlv!
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You're listening to locally produced programming created in
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KUNV Studios on public radio. KUNV 91.5. The content of this program does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz and More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the
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Nevada System of Higher Education. Welcome to the Pivot Point where we talk about all things pivot, all things business, and all things Vegas. I'm your host, Bardea. Let's get the ball rolling. Hello everybody and welcome back to The Pivot Point. I'm so excited for this episode today because with me I have an academic entrepreneur. He is the Executive Director of the Trost Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Mr. Leith Martin. Thank you for being here today.
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Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.
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So your background is pretty diverse, many different industries of business, including, I believe, construction and technology. Can you briefly tell us about your career story?
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Sure, my undergraduate degree is in engineering. I have an MBA. And when I got out of graduate school, offers were big companies. So it's like FedEx, Exxon, Intel. And honestly, I dreaded going to work every day in a big company. Just the thought of going and doing stuff that may or may not be relevant drove me crazy. And so the director of my MBA program knew a guy through a club in Birmingham. I went to school at the University of Alabama and he recommended I go meet with him. He just started a company. So I went and met with him. It was 1997. He was 25 years older, laid the P&L on the table, said I've been in business for a few months and I think there's an opportunity here. He offered me a commission only sales job. So I turned down several offers from big companies to go to work for a guy who just moved his company out of his basement. And after the first year, I had done over a million in sales and so he offered to sell me a part of the business and invited me to run the company. And we scaled that company pretty quickly to over 10 million revenue. I exited that company in 2010 after completing a program at the Harvard Business School designed for people who run and own companies. I met a business partner there, moved to Vegas, we started another company. I actually did that company in 2016, that was a technology-based company. And then got involved in UNLV in 2016, running the Church Center. At the time, it was the Center for Entrepreneurship, but later we received a naming gift. That's awesome, so what is it all about? So the Church Center is designed, it's pretty inwardly focused on students. It's designed to provide students with experiences that mimic in some way what they might experience in the real world in regards to entrepreneurship. We do that through lots of different methods. So we host regular competitions on ideas, so idea competitions, we host business competitions, We host speaker series where we have entrepreneurs come and talk about their experiences, but we also have lots of individuals who come and talk about different parts of the business process, right? So how to give a pitch, how to create a personal brand online, all those kind of things. And then we also have a book club that typically every year we bring in someone who's written a book around entrepreneurship. We buy their books and we give them out to the students, and then we invite the author to do a Q&A with the students at the end. So we do lots of different things specifically designed for helping students understand what entrepreneurship is, and maybe even increase the likelihood they might succeed based on some of those experiences. We do a lot of mentorship. We have lots of students and teams who work with mentors. And then we also do some other things around helping students and faculty determine the commercial viability of their ideas. But obviously everything is around entrepreneurship. Right, right. Do you also dabble in research? Yeah, good question. So I'm what's called an administrative faculty member. So I'm not tenure track. So we do have, I have a research director whose name is Yong Lee. Yong does lots of research, academic research around entrepreneurship. We have a couple other affiliated faculty at the center. One is a guy named Hans Rawhouser. Hans does lots of academic research around training around entrepreneurship and how it can help lift people out of poverty. He does lots of stuff in Central South America, but he also has done some more recent research around blockchain and how blockchain can be used in different parts of the world to help solve societal and social problems. And then we have another faculty member who is affiliated with the center. His name is Woo-Yong Park and he does lots of academic research around innovation and how technology innovation, how some companies are successful, some are not. But I don't actually do the academic research. Most of that's done by some of our team.
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Yeah. If that professor can tell me anything about blockchain, that would be great. Yeah. I'm still very confused about the whole process behind it, but it's really interesting to me. So what challenges do you see nowadays in terms of students wanting to be entrepreneurs? What kind of challenges do they face going into the business world now?
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Well, I mean, I think it's a unique time to start businesses. There are definitely lots of tools that have come online that are potentially quite disruptive, not just from an academic, I mean, entrepreneurship standpoint, but in general business. Obviously some of the tools that have come online in regards to chat GPT and some of the AI tools can dramatically drive up efficiencies, but they also potentially can cause displacement around different opportunities or functions or job functions that may not have faced those disruptions in the past. But in general, entrepreneurship is probably going to look somewhat different going forward, I think, especially in the realm of funding. So there are lots of venture groups now that historically might have provided significant amounts of capital up front to start different companies that now think that maybe you don't need 100 engineers, maybe you need 20 engineers and certain AI tools and so you could potentially grow companies with much less funding than maybe you would have had to have in the past. So the implications of some of the current tools that have come online have some pretty significant changes potentially in the way that entrepreneurship and scalable startups work. But also in general I would say that oftentimes we sometimes I think provide information to students or young entrepreneurs that you know you quote-unquote should follow your passion and I'm not implying that you shouldn't do things that you're not passionate about but what I am suggesting is that sometimes that advice can be a bit tough because the reality is if society doesn't value your passion, then you may be passionate and working on something that no one values. So making sure that you find product market fit on the things that you want to do is incredibly important so you don't spend a great deal of time and effort on things frankly that aren't going to lend, you're not going to find a market for. But then the other thing is young entrepreneurs today are incredibly focused on the societal benefits of companies they start. And that's incredibly important. I think that's a significant shift in the way people think about starting companies. And I think in the meantime, there's gonna be lots of sorting out, I guess for lack of a better term, what that means, right? So for example, lots of young students who want to start companies, I'll use a really simple example, they'll start a t-shirt company and for every t-shirt they'll sell, they'll give away a t-shirt to someone in need, right? And you know, the reality is that sometimes you're better off focusing on something that provides benefit to society and making enough money that then you can help directly those people. Right. That's the challenge. So that's the challenge that some people have in trying to figure out what companies they start where they fulfill some sort of inner goal in terms of helping, but at the same time,
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make enough money where they can be impactful longer term. Exactly, something that I kind of run into is sustainability. Like products that are higher quality and sustainable can be more expensive to make. So companies, it's hard to adopt that, especially at the outset.
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Yeah, that's a great point. I think that the thing that's interesting to me about sustainability is that if you ask generally people Is sustainability important in your decision making and buying products? It's almost like it's a universal. Yes. Yes We want to say yes, everyone wants to say that right? I mean if you ask people are you a healthy eater the vast majority will say yes, they are not right So I think that there's some issues in being honest with ourselves, but also I think in general on open-ended questions like that, in terms of sustainability, we make the assumption that people are willing to make sacrifices in the air, specifically to do business with more sustainable companies. But the research shows that we're only willing to do that to a certain point. Are we willing to pay 5% more? Are we willing to pay 10% more, 15% more, 20% more, and usually relatively quickly people's buying habits don't align with what they might say in regards to sustainability. So when you're starting a company, it's not that you shouldn't consider sustainability as part of the mission, but you should understand that oftentimes, depending on who the customer is, that buying decision ultimately will be affected by how much something costs. And yes, while it may be important to them, it is only important to a certain point. And that's to be incredibly careful in the way that we build companies around sustainability alone. Yeah, it can be a cherry on top. It can be something that can be
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part of a mission. But if it's the only mission, sometimes it's not enough. It's true. It's sometimes these ideas, they take the back burner, like they become such a long term goal. Like maybe right now we can't do it, but later on, what's our goal? We want to be able to have, you know, 50% of our product to be recyclable or sustainable, things like that. But that was my question, like are people willing to pay more to for a better impact on the world or things like that? The social impact of their companies that they buy from. Most of the research shows that they
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they want to be, but if the cost is significantly more, or even marginally more, then they have to make choices that that's not going to be the case. So that's why I think it's tough to build around that mission alone. Ultimately, it comes down to, are you providing enough value that people are willing to spend their money on something that you provide to them? And if sustainability is something that's important to them, and you also provide value at that price point, then maybe it can be part of your mission. Right. It's tough.
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For sure, it's tough. Right. So kind of going towards more of the academic side now, where do you see the future of academic education in terms of entrepreneurship heading?
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You know, it's a really, really good question. And the reason I say that is because I don't think it's limited to entrepreneurship and some of the significant changes that we're going to see around education in general. Historically, traditional academics or traditional academic environments, we have for a very long time been able to provide you with a piece of paper at the end of a program and tell you that that piece of paper has value in the marketplace. And for many, many years, that has been the case. I think that the pandemic has probably broken some of those traditional thoughts around traditional academia because people have become much more accustomed to receiving the information they want on their own time frame. And oftentimes traditional frameworks of academics are a little more difficult. I think you see a lot of pushback from students saying, look, why do I have to show up every day at four or whatever? Why can't I take a significant amount of this information in a more convenient time for me and then work around other things that may or may not be in person?
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On that note, it was just all working from home. I guess that's what the mentality kind of comes from.
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Yeah, and I think that even before the pandemic at the Trosh Center, we had reached out to lots of students and said, OK, what do you want in terms of your academic experience when it comes to entrepreneurship? And most of our students pre-pandemic said, you know, we still want the case discussions. We still want the class discussions. We still want to see the speakers because we get a lot of benefit to those. But it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to show up to hear a one-hour lecture on how to write a business plan or a one-hour lecture on how to do a pitch deck. And so even before the pandemic, the Troche Center has started kind of pivoting to where we were providing a bit of a hybrid academic experience so that students, we would, for example, require, if you were taking an academic course, we would require that you might attend somewhere between eight and 10 events during the course of the semester. But the vast majority of the in-class lecture work was recorded and posted online. And so students would attend some of these workshops that we would host at the Trost Center. But they didn't have to be our events. They could be events that were hosted by a community partner like StartupNV or by Startup Vegas or the SBDC. And as long as it's related to entrepreneurship, then we were OK with that. And so even pre-pandemic, we'd started trying to pivot to where we gave students the maximum benefit for their experience and valued their time because most of our students at UNLV specifically, most of them work. And if they're gonna come to class, they're foregoing something else that they have an opportunity to do in terms of their job. And so I think that that was just a sneak peek as to the direction I think that we're going. And the other thing is, is that in individual situations, depending on individual motivations or access to information, individuals who are motivated to a certain degree can find a lot of information online. The question is whether or not you still need certification as proof of that, that diploma at the end. And in certain technical fields, coding for example, not so much anymore. I mean, there are lots of companies now that will give you a test. If you're capable of passing the test, they'll interview for a coding position. And so I think some skill-based things, I think diplomas or degrees all provide a signal to the marketplace in terms of maybe a certain level of intelligence, a certain level of commitment. There's all other signals that it provides to the marketplace. But I think the reality is a certain skill-based positions, it's gonna be more about your ability to function as opposed to your credentials. And so I think those are going to be some pretty significant shifts over time in the way that we perceive academia and the value of academia in the future. Absolutely. So what are some other upcoming events that you guys have? Yes, so we typically release the week before the semester. We release all of our events for the fall. We typically add two or three events during the semester as well, depending on who we meet and we think might be a value to students. We host somewhere around 20 events a semester. If anyone's interested they can go to StartupTree and UNLV. It'll take you to our website which has a list of all of our events so you can RSVP for it any time. And these are not online or recorded, right? So it depends on the event. Okay. Many of the events are in person. Right. We do some virtual events. We have recorded some events in the past and we have made those available on a web campus site that people can use if they have some interest in some of the events we've recorded in the past. But it's something that we struggle a little bit with because let me give an example. Pre pandemic, we would host an event. Let's say a speaker. We could expect to have somewhere between 40 and 50 people there. Post pandemic, 15, maybe 20. So the pandemic has definitely changed people's perception of in-person versus virtual events. And so I think everyone's probably struggling a little bit with engagement when it comes to free versus post pandemic. I read an article on Fortune Magazine just on the way over here about the number of people that leave their positions if they're actually called back to full in-person work. Oh my god, they would leave. They would leave their job. And so I think in general that's going to change the way that we see the delivery of programming in the future.
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That's insane. Well, I personally love anything in person. I think business should be. I mean, how does it affect networking? Networking to me is all in person. It's all about being in the room.
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That's important.
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I think as a general rule in my experience, if I've met customers in jobs, in business I've started in the past, if I've met customers in person, if there's a problem, those customers almost always give me a chance to solve that problem. If I haven't met them, then they just disappear and you don't know where they went. And so in-person is still incredibly valuable. And I don't think that's going away anytime soon. Absolutely.
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So going back to a little bit about the lessons you've learned over your career, as an executive leader, what advice would you give the students who are just starting at the UNLV Lee School of Business?
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Well the first thing, if I was talking specifically about their academic experience, for example, if they're just starting in the business school, one of the most important things to do is to take advantage of all the different things that your university experience has to offer. The opportunities that you have when you graduate in terms of potential job opportunities and other things are going to come from networking events that you showed up for, attending events that you hear people speak, provide insights as to career choices that you may make, join clubs because those are people that you might work with in the future. And oftentimes what happens is we get caught in the mission of graduation. And obviously that's the ultimate goal. But I do think universities provide a significant amount of activity or opportunities outside of the classroom that a lot of students don't take advantage of. And so my first advice would be, find as many things as possible and take part in those things. Because there's lots of really cool stuff that you can learn from those activities. The other thing I would say is that if you're talking specifically around entrepreneurship is make sure that you understand what that is. Oftentimes I think that the world of entrepreneurship is a bit glamorized and I think that can sometimes be a bit misleading in terms of what that lifestyle looks like, as opposed to being this euphoric experience, it can be, but it's more often you sleep under your desk because there's too much to be done. It's rough on relationships because guess what, you're working a lot.
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Sleeping in your car.
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Sleeping in your car. It's probably rough on credit scores because at times you've had to do things financially you wouldn't normally do because you're trying to make the business off the ground. And so sometimes I think that this misguided way that we look at entrepreneurship sometimes can unfortunately give students the impression that it's something that it's not. I'm not saying it's not awesome. I am saying it's hard. Yes, absolutely. And if a student, sometimes I have students that, this is the way I look at it is, I'm not trying to convince you to be an entrepreneur. I'm trying to show you what it's like in some ways so it increases the likelihood you'll be successful. But I'm also, I don't want you to step off the curb and get hit by the bus because you thought it was something different than it actually was. Exactly. And then the other thing is is that you know we this whole hustle culture that kind of exists online and social media, it seems to imply that that the universe owes you something for effort. And there's always this, you know, don't quit one day early or don't do those kind of things. But if you're working on the wrong thing, you can work as hard as you can for the rest of your life, and guess what, you're never going to be successful. Yeah. So using the tools that are available and the ways to try to figure out customer dynamics, product market fit, those kind of things, will increase the likelihood you'll succeed, and that's what we try to incorporate in terms of the tools that we incorporate into some of the stuff that we do. Because you're not automatically going to be rewarded just for effort. That's not the way it works. Yeah, it's so important that you share all these messages. And if I can share one, just from my brief experience, is to find a mentor who can tell you all these things and tell you the reality, tell you everything that you need to know. I think you'd be a great mentor because of all of that. So that's really cool. Well, so to your point of mentorship, my first business partner, as I mentioned, he was 25 years older than I was, and I can remember going and asking him all these hypothetical questions, right? So I'd be like, well, what do you think this customer, or what do you think they would like, or how should we structure this, and da-da-da. One day he said, Leith, I don't know, just call and ask him. And that sounds so simple.
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Yeah.
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And it's advice that I've used millions of times in my own career, in that I can wonder forever, or I can try and fail, or I can find someone who might know and ask them. And guess what, in five minutes I could have the answer. And so that's why I think mentorship is important. You can lean on the experience of someone else. But also just generally being inquisitive about the things that you don't know can be incredibly important on dramatically increasing the likelihood to succeed instead of trying to failing to figure it out. Yes, it's important. It helps with your creativity, keeps you humble, keeps you realistic, keeps you everything you kind of need to be in business, just asking questions. Yeah, for sure. Be inquisitive about the world, to be honest. Okay, so would you like to play a little lightning round? Of course, yes. Okay, so let's get this started. Coffee or tea? Neither actually. I'm almost exclusively, this sounds I guess a bit boring, but I'm almost exclusively water. Oh nice, that's a great alternative. You will catch me probably maybe, almost never will I drink a soft drink, but maybe a couple times a year lemonade, but mostly water. So that's a, I understand this is a lightning round, but that was the question. No, no, you're good.
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I've been loving jasmine tea recently. It's been so good. Just relaxing.
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Anyway, morning person or night owl? So I'm typically a night owl, but it doesn't function very well in my life. So I've been converting to the morning because that's necessary. Yeah, it's really hard when you're a night owl to switch it around. If you had one superpower, what would it be? Oh, that's a great question. I think in general, I've always thought, not necessarily time travel because I think there's too much caught up in the risk associated with time travel, but the ability to be able to teleport anywhere I think is something that would be the the best, right? So yeah if I want to go to Australia I'm there in three seconds as opposed to you know 20 hour flight or whatever it is. That's a that's such a
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great one. I never even think of that. Favorite show you're watching? You know
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that's a I wish I had one. I've in the past I've gone through like Narcos and some of the other shows. But if I'm honest, there's not a single one that I'm like, I cannot wait till the new episode comes out. So right now I don't have one that, if you've got a recommendation, I'd be willing to take it because I don't have a good one right now.
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I myself, I think I've finished all my shows.
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That's kind of where I am. I don't really have something right now. Things are like in the pipeline, I think, but I don't know. I don't have anything that I'm just overly excited about at the moment. Absolutely. Twitter or X? Listen, I think I like X for no other reason than that it just shows that he doesn't care. And I don't really know any other way to put it. I mean, the reality is, is the vast majority of make decisions based on what we're worried about, what people might think, or also what, how it might affect our career and our jobs and so we don't say things or do things because we're worried about losing a job or whatever. And you can tell Elon does not care. And if nothing else, I respect it.
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I could literally spend the next five hours talking about how much I'm scared to, you know, do things the wrong way. But people do it all the time and they're successful or things like that, I don't know. But yeah, I just saw they had to take down that sign off the building.
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And I think the only reason he even put it up there was just to, it seems so bizarre, but it's almost like he's batting around different org groups and saying, I'm just playing here.
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Yeah, it's so funny.
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It's weird.
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Okay, if you could start a whole new company, what industry would you want to disrupt?
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Oh, that's a good question too. So listen, in my own career, I had a student ask me this question a few years ago and it was such a good question I couldn't even answer the question. The question said, the student said, if you could tell your 25-year-old self something, what would you tell that person? And I told him, I said, look you got to give me a week to answer this question because I don't even know what I would say. And so the next week I came back and I said, the first thing I would tell myself at 25 is that every five years, if I look at my career I had maximized the potential of that opportunity right so if I started a company at five years I should have I should have sold after that I either got bored didn't care anymore or the value changed based on market conditions or whatever maybe and then the other thing was is that you cannot out execute market conditions so doesn't matter how good you are if your market is falling you will fall with everyone else. And the irony is, is the better you are and the better your team is, the longer you'll survive, but unfortunately that's to your detriment because if you'd failed earlier, you would have gone and done something else faster. Oh, interesting. So when you asked me the question in terms of industry or what industry I'd like to disrupt, one of the things that I think is sometimes overlooked is when you look at certain hype cycles, usually those hype cycles create attraction to the brightest in the world. And so what happens is the brightest and smartest in the world beat each other up over five to seven years, depending on what that particular hype cycle is.
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And only if... Is it zeitgeist?
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Is that kind of the equivalent term? Maybe. So only a few win. Okay. Right? Right. So if you look at AI, for example, the reality is that there will probably be a few big winners, and it's got a great deal of potential to disrupt lots of industries. But in terms of the maximum amount of value created, there will probably be a few winners. But yet, they're attracting all the money, they're attracting all the people. So sometimes I think that there are what I call unsexy industries, that no one wakes up in the morning and says, I can't wait to be fill in the blank, a plumber or whatever. And so sometimes industries that are incredibly mature, I think, are ripe for disruption because you can take some fairly sophisticated business principles, tools, and other things and make significant changes in those industries. So my next cycle will probably not be in the hype cycle industry. It will probably be something that's a bit boring, but a bit mature, but has a great deal of potential.
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Interesting.
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Last question. Sure. What's one skill every entrepreneur should develop?
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The thing that I like or think is incredibly important is just generally resilience. And the irony is that I don't mean resilience in the face of lack of opportunity. I think the truth is sometimes you have to be resilient enough to say this isn't working and go change into something else. Because I always remember the story this young man was talking about one day He was trying to get a job for example, and he had a degree in construction management he showed up every day every Friday on this job site to try to get a job and and No one would ever see him and he'd bring a resume. He'd show up at the job site He'd give it to the security guard the security guard would say thank you. He would leave and nothing whatever happened so he did this every week for like six or seven or eight weeks. And finally, the guy that was running the job site called and said, are you this young man that shows up every Friday and tries to disrupt my job in order to get a job here? And he says, yes, that's me. And he says, I love it. You have a job. So my point is, is that in general, resilience is incredibly important when it comes to entrepreneurship, because the truth is, if you look at the risk associated with success, it's too high. And so resilience, I think, is incredibly important.
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Awesome, awesome. So just closing out the show, I just want to highlight some of the events that you already mentioned, but we'll just refer to them one more time. So if you're interested, you can look for the, I think one of the earliest ones is the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp. Three days, one day per week in the fall. You can go to unlv.startuptree.co slash discover slash events to just look up the details of that. I read that you can, if you attend all three sessions, you get $100 on your RebelCard. Awesome.
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Yep, we added that as an incentive, I guess, to attend all the events. Cool. That's awesome.
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And then if you want to learn more about the Trucks Center, you can go to entrepreneurship.unlv.edu. Thank you all for listening to the Pivot Point. Thank you all for listening to the Pivot Point. You can follow us at PivotPointUNLV on Twitter, all one word, and hope you enjoyed the show.