1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bradley Harrison, Founder and Managing Partner at Scout Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: My question was a bit more like what percentage of these kinds of backgrounds have a combination of a stint at a major university like you did.

Bradley Harrison: I think a very traditional path to transition out of the military is to go to grad school. That is a very common path if you get out early in your career. If you’re getting out after 20 years, you probably already have a Masters or a Doctorate while you were in the military. The national labs population tends to not have the military background. Most of the people in the national labs have spent 10 years at Los Alamos, working under whoever was the pioneer in technology.

We have four quantum technology companies out of Toronto, Berkeley, Texas, and Los Alamos in New Mexico. The one out of Toronto had some different universities involved. The one out of Texas was just a bunch of people that had worked at Apple for 25 years.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. I’ve worked with people from military backgrounds. One of the key success factors in entrepreneurship is resilience and toughness. The population that you are talking about definitely has that by training. Even if they’re not doing venture-scale companies, I’m sure they are capable of doing successful and sustainable businesses, which is our mission.

Bradley Harrison: A lot of people misunderstand people with military training. Your average young soldier, who spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan, is required to make decisions under pressure every single day. They’re required to make that decision on the fly. I couldn’t agree more. I absolutely think they make the best entrepreneurs.

The other thing about these entrepreneurs is they really care more about getting the right investor and building the right company than they do about what valuation they raise at or how much press they get. They’re mission-focused. We have two unicorns in fund two and both are by military-led founders. We have another unicorn in fund three and one of the founders is an Air Force Academy graduate who’s an F-15 fighter pilot. We’re seeing the result out of that population.

Sramana Mitra: I’ll give you a bit more about how we think about entrepreneurship which is synergic with what you’re saying. Our definition is customers, revenues, and profits. Financing is optional. Exit is optional. What matters more are the fundamentals. Can you build repeatability in your business such that you can constantly sell whatever product or service to a large population of people to grow your business?

Besides resilience, there’s also the discipline factor. When you’re trying to build repeatability in a business, it’s not like you’re inventing brilliant stuff every day. What you’re creating is a process so that a whole bunch of people can follow that process and successfully execute on your missions across every level. The trick of that is discipline and regularity. It’s not necessarily being a genius.

Bradley Harrison: Totally agree. Customers, revenues, and profits are the same thing we focus on.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your comments and for sharing this unique snapshot of the entrepreneurship universe. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bradley Harrison, Founder and Managing Partner at Scout Ventures
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