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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian LoFermento, and we have got an incredible guest for all of you here today.
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This is someone who has an amazing entrepreneurial story.
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This is someone who, to me, it just sounds like he sees possibilities everywhere and he truly believes in the possibility of technology, entrepreneurship and society and humanity as a whole, and how all of these things are intertwined.
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So let me tell you all about today's guest.
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His name is Trevor Caverco.
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Trevor loves investing in, co-founding companies with and hanging out with other founders, especially in the Web3 space.
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Trevor started out as a pro athlete.
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He got drafted by the NHL's New York Rangers all the way back in 2005.
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But that story doesn't necessarily have a happy ending.
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I can't wait to hear him tell us about this, because a few years later, his career officially ended.
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After a car accident, he was hit by a fully loaded transport truck.
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He was sent to the ICU and diagnosed with a catastrophic brain injury.
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But it's not the end of the story.
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Of course.
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There is a happy ending because, with hockey over, he knew that he needed a new purpose in life and at the perfect time, he discovered entrepreneurship.
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Since then, he's founded multiple companies.
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I'm excited to tell you, because the first one that he did it failed, as a lot of things do.
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But then the second one he sold it and over the next 12 years, he built multiple startups, including Polymath, which has since raised $75 million.
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It's done eight figures in revenue.
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And most recently, he co-founded Sapien, which is a data marketplace that helps long tail AI models close the performance gap with big tech via a mobile data labeling game.
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So if you're thinking to yourself, gosh, this guy sees technology in different ways than the rest of the world, you're absolutely correct, but he also deeply loves entrepreneurship.
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So I'm excited about this one.
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I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Trevor Kiverko.
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All right, trevor, I'm so excited that you're here with us today.
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First things first.
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Welcome to the show, thanks for having me.
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I'm really excited to do this.
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Heck.
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Yes, trevor, I'm expecting some stories from you here today, and we're going to kick it off by you taking us beyond the bio.
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Who's, trevor?
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How'd you start doing all these cool things?
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Yeah?
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no, I'm a founder through and through.
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That's kind of to your earlier point.
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I love just being one, I love hanging out with other founders, I just live and breathe it.
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And that was kind of like a pact I made to myself when I was younger, after transitioning from an old career to a new one, that this is kind of the life I chose and this is what I love.
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So since then it's been kind of a full-time journey in this industry and I've loved every minute of it.
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Yeah, I love that, trevor, especially because, just doing the research ahead of our conversation here today, I want you to take me back to the hospital room because obviously you I mean your entire life was geared towards becoming a professional athlete, which you very much succeeded at, and then it took that big turn and I want to hear about that spark, that moment where you found entrepreneurship and what was so appealing to you, because I feel like it's not just the business side.
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It sounds in your story like it was also part of the mindset and the drive to go along with it.
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Yeah, I'm from Canada so that's kind of a rite of passage is to play sports, especially hockey.
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So that was my first career.
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I was kind of in that I guess junior world of like being competitive, and then as you kind of grow up you move into more serious competitive teams.
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Canada does it a little differently than the US.
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There's not a lot of collegiate sports, it's more like private junior clubs and stuff and such.
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And I woke up one morning I was drafted to the New York Rangers in 2005.
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And that was like a big dream of mine and just hanging out with that organization and the quality of people, especially the competitiveness, it's just like such a small margin of error that you really have to be prepared, you really have to be disciplined.
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And looking back, I think that's one of the things I took away from that part of my life is just like how incredibly competitive it is and how if you want to be at the top of your game, you can't really screw around.
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And um, and yeah, it was kind of unfortunate after in my early 20s I was in a pretty bad car accident that um, abruptly kind of ended the career and it forced me to kind of go through a bit of a self-reflection and figure out how to reinvent myself.
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But luckily, because I was, I was young, there was still some time to do that.
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I think there's always time to do that, but for me it was always time to do that.
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But for me it was especially natural because I always, you know, like new challenges and trying new things and I was lucky that the recovery was very positive.
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It was kind of unclear at the diagnosis.
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I was in pretty rough shape.
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I was actually paralyzed on the left side of my body because it was a diffuse brain injury, but kind of concentrated to the right side.
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So it created all these, all these, uh, these handicaps.
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But, um, again, I just got really blessed and lucky to recover well from it and and um, just tried to seize every day from there on in and realizing how, uh, how precious, precious life is.
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Yeah, trevor, you said something right there you interjected on yourself about there's always time, and I really appreciate that insight and especially that attitude, especially because, having seen your career trajectory, obviously a lot of people will point towards your successes, trevor.
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But I love how it's even it's very prominent in your LinkedIn profile.
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You don't hide the fact of my first startup it failed.
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It's right there and you highlight that part of your journey.
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Of course, all of these I got a lot more of that, a lot more of those as well.
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That's just the one I.
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Trevor, talk to us about that then, Because I feel like people overlook that when they look at people's successes.
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Yeah, I think the one thing that was really helpful for me was just kind of moving to Silicon Valley early and, above all else, I think that culture is okay with failure and it's really not a big deal and it takes a lot of the risk away from trying.
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And that's kind of the approach I had early on.
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It was just like I'm trying to do this for the long run and, even though it is tough getting started when you don't have a network and you don't have a lot of experience, if you have that kind of mindset of growth and learning, success is just inevitable.
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So for me it was just embracing that mindset.
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You don't have to be in California to do it.
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I think you should be.
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I recommend a lot of people spend time there, especially in Silicon Valley.
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But just cause, like, the networks are so important and the surface area of luck is so much bigger when you're in an area where there's a lot of like-minded people that are ambitious.
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Um, but yeah, for me, even when I wasn't there, I kind of uh, again made that pact to myself that you know, this is what I'm going to do, this is who I am, and this is a win.
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Lose or draw.
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This is the um, the work I want to do every day.
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Yeah, Speaking of the work that you want to do, obviously, Trevor, so much of your professional career has been within the tech space and a lot of people might think to themselves all right, NHL to the tech world.
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What is that link?
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What was it about the tech space that?
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That's what drew you in.
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Was it something that was an intentional decision of yours, or was it I love how you say the surface area of luck?
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That's such a cool way to phrase it.
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Was it it just your surroundings?
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I'd love to hear why you went in that direction yeah, it wasn't anything fancy, it was I don't know what I want to do next.
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And I actually went back to school briefly and was going down a certain career path that was more traditional and a little more like nine to five and it just it didn't appeal to me at all and it was just kind of like I didn't fit in it.
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Just I think that's a healthy career as well, like I don't.
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I don't look down on on that lifestyle or career choice, but for me I just know it didn't align with my kind of goals and my personality.
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So I know choice sounds like it.
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I'm not gonna.
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I'm not gonna get a real job.
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I gotta go and be an entrepreneur from or be a wantrepreneur, I should say.
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And I was definitely in the wantrepreneur side because you know, I had no idea what that meant and I kind of believed all the TV shows.
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It was like glamorous and it was fun and it was just like instant success and IPOs and stuff like that.
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But it was definitely a reality check because there actually wasn't a lot of crossover from an athletic world to an entrepreneurship world.
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I think I've appreciated more of the lessons I learned as I've gotten older from that first part, but a lot of it is brand new and, like you know, going to the gym every day other than having the discipline, it's not really going to help you build a product that people want and get customers.
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So a lot of it was just a fresh, blank slate of learning a new skill.
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And entrepreneurship, I do believe, is a skill that you can learn.
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It's not something that you're necessarily born with, inherently yes.
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I love that, trevor.
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I love the fact that you called out it's the not so glamorous side.
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When I tell people I have a business podcast, everyone immediately asks me the same question oh, do you like Shark Tank?
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And that's what everyone thinks entrepreneurship is like.
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It's just Shark Tank.
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People pitch, someone says here's a few million dollars, go build it.
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But of course that's not the reality.
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Thinking back, I would imagine I'll contradict one part of what you said, because, being a professional athlete, to me the biggest crossover is facing adversity.
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And obviously you faced it, not just with regards to how your career ended, but also along the way.
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All those tough nights, the nights that you had tryouts, the nights that you were waiting for someone to pick you for a team.
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I'm sure draft night was a very exhilarating time for you and your family.
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So you face that adversity along the way, same adversity as when a business doesn't work out or when a product doesn't work out.
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What's your attitude?
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Take us into those very moments, because that's what ultimately makes or breaks people in this world.
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Yeah, I actually.
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The draft night was kind of funny.
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I actually didn't watch it with my parents or anything, it was the GM just called me.
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I didn't even think I was going to get drafted and then I was like, oh cool, I guess I'm on the path to being a New York Ranger.
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But no, to your point, the thing you brought up adversity I should have said that that is a huge, huge skill to learn is to fail and be okay with it.
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Huge, huge skill to learn is to fail and be okay with it, and to not really care about adversity or to care about it in a positive way is absolutely paramount.
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Another one for me was just the bias for action.
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I think I lacked and I lack present tense a lot of skills that a lot of my peers have, but I would just take action more than anyone.
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I would just go and jump off the cliff and build a plane on the way down, and I think that's, looking back, like I kind of had a bit of imposter syndrome to a lot of other really smart people in Silicon Valley about like really prestigious engineering degrees and deep networks.
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But over time I realized like all that doesn't compare to having a bias when you're getting started and also um a way to deal with adversity.
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You see a lot, of, a lot of kids these days where they, you know, went to a fancy school and they've kind of always succeeded and never failed in their life, and then when they go to their first investor pitch and they get rejected, or they go to recruit their first executive and they they get rejected, they can't really internalize it and fail forward quickly.
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So definitely appreciate your comments there that those skills that partly were learned in the professional sports world did definitely apply.
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Yeah, trevor, I want to go a little bit deeper into a very important point that you just made, which is your bias towards action, because I love that.
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I think it's something that we all need to embrace.
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It's probably something I wish we all learned even more as children about imperfect action.
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It's something that, when I was reading about your VR project that you founded all the way back in 2014, it's within the realm of VR and you, especially, you write it right on your LinkedIn.
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We eventually helped sell a penthouse, despite the product being suboptimal.
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To me, that's something I love, trevor.
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Is that imperfect action?
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You didn't wait for things to be perfect?
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Talk to me about that, because, of course, it goes along with your bias towards action, but it just seems like that's been your mindset along the way.
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As tech changes, you've continued to change and experiment as well.
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Yeah, there's a big lesson there of being.
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There's a famous phrase in Silicon Valley which is if you're proud of your product, it means you launched too late, and it's 100% true.
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If you're in the tech world, it's all about building something quickly, putting something together and then experimenting both new features and also the target market that you're going after.
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And I think that's under the umbrella of a bias for action, which is not just being in a research, a self-imposed research prison for a year before you launch something.
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It's like being fearless, getting it out in front of people, getting ready to get rejected.
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You have to.
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If you're not getting rejected, you're not doing it right.
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And again like back to the Things that I think helped me in the past was just like I'm used to that.
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I'm used to like not making the team and even if you're on the team, not getting the best you know power play, position or not getting the all-star game, like you just kind of get used to failing.
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And then how you respond to that, because no one's going to be very few people are going to be on all those things right away.
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They have to like work their way to that and earn it.
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And I think another point of that is a team focus was how you cannot build this stuff on your own.
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No one can Steve Jobs couldn't, mark Zuckerberg couldn't.
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You need other people that have a common vision to join the team and you can't build a lifestyle business by yourself and I think AI tools are actually making it possible to build relatively big companies by yourself but like having the support of people who are not like you, who are not different skills than you, who are complementary to you is is table stakes.
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If you don't have that mindset of like recruiting a good team and working together, then you're just not going to reach the same heights that you would otherwise.
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Yeah, really well said it's.
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I think it's a Helen Keller quote where she said alone we can go so far, together, we can go so much further.
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And it's absolutely true and it shows and that's why we have that concept of you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
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If you're around big thinkers, you're going to start thinking big as well and, trevor, I think that you're living proof of that, which fast forward.
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Let's talk about one of your big success stories, which is fast forward.
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Let's talk about one of your big success stories, which is, of course, polymath.
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You started it in 2017, and obviously, it went on to do very big things and it continues to thrive.
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With that in mind, you can see the contrast, trevor, and I want to hear your vantage point there.
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What's the contrast between companies that make it the success stories that we hear about versus the ones that fizzle out?
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Because I'm going to safely call this out for listeners every single entrepreneur has those failure that fizzle out, because I'm going to safely call this out for listeners Every single entrepreneur has those failure and fizzle out stories as well.
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So, trevor, what's the difference?
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Yeah, there's a lot of differences.
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I think luck is a big one, and what I said earlier, it doesn't mean you just like roll the dice and hope for the best although that's part of it but it's like increasing, I call it your surface area of luck, or a lot of people call it that, which is like A time-based.
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So if you try everything in one month, even if you try a lot of things like, you're not going to have the biggest surface area.
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You've got to try it over a long period of time.
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There's another saying in Silicon Valley it's get rich slowly.
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It's like quickly is not the right mindset, because it takes a long time to build an impactful business.
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But, in terms of some of my failures and successes, I had some early projects where it wasn't a luck problem, it was a methodology problem.
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It was it was doing.
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It was not doing certain things that should have been done, like talking to customers and building and iterating on product really quickly.
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So I kind of think, at the time, you think you're unlucky, but looking back you're like, oh, no wonder that didn't work, so I was doing things all wrong.
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It's true, though, that there's no like right way to do things, but there are a lot of commonalities between how some of the best companies get started and it's important to focus on your stage.
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If you're a pre-product market fit company, you should not be listening to podcasts on how to manage a $100 million business or how to manage a go public process.
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That's not really relevant to you at the time.
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But to finish the question, like a lot of the projects that did succeed that I did later, I think, were a combination of learnings from the past, failures and doing them not perfectly Like.
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I'm looking back now at those and saying, oh, there's even more mistakes and failures within that.
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But also, just timing is a big one too, and to talk about luck, it's sort of luck, sort of not, but then it's also a timing thing and it's very true that timing does matter.
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You shouldn't overthink it, because you just got to focus on what you're doing and pick an industry and a product that you're passionate about.
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I think that is absolutely non-negotiable, because it is so hard and there's so many twists and turns along the way that if you don't genuinely believe in the industry and the product, it's a problem, although there's a lot of caveats that you should expect to evolve quite a bit, and no companies that are public on the New York Stock Exchange are the exact same thing that they started out with.
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They've all expanded and grown and failed and restarted.
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But yeah, for me, a lot of it was just a mix of some learnings from past failures and then good timing in terms of the right product at the right time.
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Yeah and Trevor, what I also hear and what you just shared with us is a level of strategy and intention, because you called out, know what stage of business you're in.
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Different stages require different focus areas, different decision making, and so I'd love for you to walk us through thinking about Polymath, for example, and obviously what you're working on now in Sapien, thinking about those.
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What are those inflection points?
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So what we focus on in year one of our business and especially if a lot of people who might be pre-revenue or early stages of revenue, where they're're either pre-product market fit, it's a little bit of a buzzword, but it basically means do customers care that you built something at all or not, and post?
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so post-product market fit is like okay, now you've got some revenue, you've got users, you're growing.
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Basically, the definition of product market fit is if you turned off your product, would anyone care?
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And most people, including me for most of my career the answer is no.
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No one would know or care if the product was turned off.
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And so if you don't have that luxury of having a product that people want and people care about, then you should be obsessed with nothing except achieving that.
00:19:08.673 --> 00:19:10.175
And what does that mean?
00:19:10.175 --> 00:19:14.824
It means talking to more of your customers, learning from them, listening to them.
00:19:15.150 --> 00:19:23.810
Do not think you're Steve Jobs and you can just like manifest something into existence that blows up, because that's also a misnomer.
00:19:23.810 --> 00:19:28.895
He actually had a lot of within those magical moments.
00:19:28.895 --> 00:19:37.040
There's a lot of failing that happened before that that you don't see, but but yeah, a lot of it is just like can you achieve that product?
00:19:37.040 --> 00:19:40.635
And if you're doing stuff that doesn't help you get product market fit?
00:19:40.635 --> 00:19:59.550
Like going to conferences, like recruiting advisors, like talking to investors nonstop it's not the right use of your time and what you do with your time is the only thing that you can control in a startup, and so you have to really be judicious about how you spend your time.
00:19:59.671 --> 00:20:03.921
And again, the answer is not really debated anymore.
00:20:03.921 --> 00:20:13.153
The answer is if you're a tech company and you want to be like a venture scale, if you're ambitious and you want to go big, you don't even have to pick a big industry to start.
00:20:13.153 --> 00:20:16.682
In fact, you should pick a really small and narrow niche and own that.
00:20:16.682 --> 00:20:21.020
If you look at any of the biggest companies in the world, like amazon they started with books.
00:20:21.020 --> 00:20:24.217
You talk about apple, anyone they started in one niche.
00:20:24.217 --> 00:20:25.380
They didn't boil the ocean.
00:20:25.380 --> 00:20:30.434
So I think that's that's kind of empowering that you don't need to take over the world in your first year.
00:20:30.434 --> 00:20:38.914
You just have to make a small amount of users and customers extremely happy, make them your champions, and then good things will happen and then you can expand from there.
00:20:39.631 --> 00:20:40.957
Yeah, really well said.
00:20:40.957 --> 00:20:42.195
This is the real stuff, Trevor.
00:20:42.195 --> 00:20:50.221
This is exactly why, when I started this podcast, we proactively seek out amazing guests like you, because this is counter to the advice that we hear Everyone's talking about.
00:20:50.221 --> 00:20:58.401
You know making a hundred thousand dollars a month in your first year in business, and that's what everyone aspires to, but so much of the real world advice is counter to that.
00:20:58.401 --> 00:21:11.490
I think back to business school and all my professors who said you got to have a three, five, 10 year plan and it sounds to me like you focus on those more actionable chunks of time of how can I invest my time today to set myself up for success in the future.
00:21:11.490 --> 00:21:15.721
What does that timeline look like in your head when you sit down for your executive time?
00:21:15.721 --> 00:21:18.135
Are you looking at six months from now?
00:21:18.135 --> 00:21:21.282
You work in a very fast changing industry of AI.
00:21:21.282 --> 00:21:23.132
How far out do you eye?
00:21:25.696 --> 00:21:30.065
Yeah, you're right about the traditional business school advice being.
00:21:30.065 --> 00:21:33.682
You're right about the traditional business school advice being wrong.
00:21:33.682 --> 00:21:34.450
I don't know how else to say it.
00:21:34.450 --> 00:21:43.351
If you want to work at KPMG or something, yes, you need to really be good at writing these big memos and these big business plans and these big, but that's not going to help you.
00:21:43.351 --> 00:21:57.038
If you're an early stage founder, you can't do that, you don't know enough, it's just a waste of time, and so you really need to be focused on breathing something into existence that people want.
00:21:57.038 --> 00:22:10.411
That's why, combinator, I highly recommend everything that comes out of that organization people want.
00:22:10.411 --> 00:22:13.557
So you need to wake up every day and look in the mirror and say am I in the path to building something people want?
00:22:13.557 --> 00:22:15.642
And then, when you say yes, you say well, prove it.
00:22:15.642 --> 00:22:18.414
How can you prove to me that you're building something?
00:22:18.414 --> 00:22:22.953
And this is a question, by the way, that is going to come up over and over again.
00:22:22.953 --> 00:22:24.739
It's going to come up from people you recruit.
00:22:24.739 --> 00:22:29.640
They're not going to want to join a company necessarily that just has no idea how to serve customers.
00:22:29.640 --> 00:22:34.198
They're going to want someone who's on the path to getting to that product market fit.
00:22:34.198 --> 00:22:35.109
Or talk to investors.
00:22:35.109 --> 00:22:37.818
Don't talk to investors before you have product market fit.
00:22:37.849 --> 00:22:42.756
Your life is going to suck, unless you're, like a seven time entrepreneur and you can just raise based on your name.
00:22:42.756 --> 00:22:46.996
And even, like myself, like I'm, I've been doing this for a long time.
00:22:46.996 --> 00:22:52.051
Like I would still tell myself, like use your ingenuity, there, this for a long time.
00:22:52.051 --> 00:22:54.060
Like I would still tell myself, like, use your ingenuity, there's no excuse not to get.
00:22:54.060 --> 00:23:04.115
It's not easy, but there's no excuse not to nowadays, because there's so many tools and the cost of getting users and revenue is so low now that it's just a matter of, hey, you don't have that, why not?
00:23:04.115 --> 00:23:05.903
Like you should be able to get it.
00:23:05.903 --> 00:23:11.003
You have a couple co founders working for just equity and you have a great idea.
00:23:11.003 --> 00:23:17.756
But, like, just start talking to people, getting users, get traction, get the flywheel spinning, and then it's going to make your life a lot easier, especially when it comes to fundraising.
