How NOT To Build a Startup: Ned Hill, CEO of Position Imaging (Part 1)

I seldom get to interview an entrepreneur who is candid about his mistakes. Yet, people tend to learn more from failures than from successes.

In this story, you will see how Ned built technology looking for a problem to solve, an absolute no no.
You will also see the negative impact of not validating your product idea upfront.

Read on. This is a unique interview.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Ned Hill: I was born in Massachusetts and raised by a single mother. I have an older brother. It was a good upbringing for an entrepreneurial bent. We were poor. I had a father who’s a genius. He had a Harvard MBA with full scholarship but never did anything with it. I didn’t see him.

It was a good lesson to me as a child of what not to become as an adult. It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you don’t put in the work. I always had that in the back of my mind.

When I was looking for things to do, I wanted to create my own stuff. I had faith in myself. I didn’t necessarily have faith that big corporations would take care of me or allow me to do something that was impactful. I went to University of Massachusetts. My mom went to Smith. My father went to Harvard. I didn’t want to go to an Ivy school. Not that I would have gotten in.

Sramana Mitra: Is your mom still living?

Ned Hill: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: I went to Smith for undergraduate.

Ned Hill: You’re kidding! That’s fantastic.

Sramana Mitra: I went to MIT afterwards for grad school.

Ned Hill: What a small world! The disappointment with that is she was forced to do a single mom role and couldn’t flex her muscles. That was another lesson to me.

Sramana Mitra: Did you do a technical degree?

Ned Hill: I did economics with a couple of minors in sociology and psychology. I didn’t realize that I had a technical bent until I was out of college. I started to do some exploration into how they started tech companies. I took an entrepreneurship class at UMass. That opened my eyes to the excitement. It opened up my eyes that you could create your own job.

This segment is part 1 in the series : How NOT To Build a Startup: Ned Hill, CEO of Position Imaging
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