Note: This is part of my new Follow Friday system where I I get a little more in depth with one follow friday each week. To learn more about what I am doing please click here.
Spencer Thompson
@sokanu , @sthomps
Spencer is a web entrepreneur who is killing it with Sokanu. He’s already raising a Series A, has a brilliant concept and is located nice and close in Niagara Falls. Sokanu is going to be out soon and is something you should really check out. We first ‘met’ after discovering each other’s blogs and the connection has flourished ever since.
First of all, I’d like to thank Alex for coming up with this great idea on his blog. It’s a great twist on the traditional follow friday used by many people on Twitter. Secondly, I’d like to thank Alex for having me on for this week. Even though Alex and I have never met in person (yet) we communicate very often through Skype, Twitter and GTalk. He’s a great guy (and really smart) and so I really appreciate this.
I’m not great about talking about myself, since I believe that humbleness is one of the most important qualities that we have as businesspeople and entrepreneurs. I find that many people, especially young entrepreneurs, tend to take the art of self-promotion and branding to the next level. I always try and live by the quote “those who say the least often tend to know the most”.
With that, however, I will introduce myself. I am currently 19 years old, and the co-founder & CEO of a web startup called Sokanu. Sokanu’s mission is to help individuals around this world find their passion in life. We try and do this by offering a unique social learning platform aimed at providing a customized experience to each user.
The idea came about last year while I was in high school. I noticed that the majority of my classmates had no specific idea as to what they wanted to do with the rest of their lives and struggled to receive guidance from anyone, let alone an online source. Very often parents and guidance counselors do not allow their child to grow according to their talents and passions for certain activities. We are taught that a job was something you needed to get in order to pursue your passions on the side.
So we have set out to change that. We try to be really involved in the education and learning space, because I believe that the current education system needs to be transformed to meet todays criterion. I try to blog a lot on our company blog at http://blog.sokanu.com, and it gets pushed to my personal blog at http://futurephilanthropreneur.wordpress.com. I tend to talk about people that have found their passion in life, education, different types of learnings, startups, personal development and careers.
As a first-time entrepreneur (I don’t count smaller businesses when I was young) I realize that I know 0.0000001% of the information out there. Taking this approach has made business a lot easier, in that I am on a constant quest for learning. Kevin O’Leary from Dragon’s Den has a great quote when he says “my goal when I go to bed at night is to have more money than when I woke up”. I take the same approach, except I substitute money for knowledge.
I approach business as the ultimate sport. I am a huge sports fanatic (go Arsenal, Federer, Adam Scott, the Mets, Stanford Cardinal football, the Canucks, the Knicks and the Colts!). If you haven’t already, I encourage everyone to read this post from Mark Cuban –>http://blogmaverick.com/2008/01/03/the-sport-of-business-2/
This is how I try to approach business, day in day out.
I also am fascinated with how people think. I think that psychology and behavioural economics are two of the most important subjects for any business, and yet are usually ignored. I study in the field of cognitive neuroscience in my spare time, because I love to know what makes the brain tick and how that affects our decisions each and every day.
I believe this is more than enough about me, as Alex just asked me to write a couple of paragraphs. I’d like to thank Alex again for this opportunity, and for anyone that has taken the time out of their day to read this. If you would ever like to get in touch, please send me a tweet @sthomps or @sokanu. Thanks!
