Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset

when there's a problem there are two approaches to it that growth mindset person will sit there and tell you all the ways they can make it happen that's right fixed mindset people are typically the ones that will tell you every reason it couldn't happen or why it would be difficult to happen and it all revolves around how do you define failure what we really say here at lucid is like failure is never final failure is an opportunity to to learn it's almost a springboard for growth [Music] hello and welcome to million dollar monday i'm your host greg mazzello bringing you real successful people with real useful advice for people with big dreams i understand big dreams i turned an investment of two hundred dollars and a lot of great advice from some really successful people into my big dream pro forma that today is a half billion dollar company [Music] well hello and welcome i am excited and also a little intimidated to introduce my guest for today at the age of only 25 uh he has accomplished already so much attending one of our nation's probably most prominent high schools graduating from three years in a great from a great university while not just only studying but holding down a number of jobs and playing a varsity sport and graduating in three years and is now a co-founder and ceo of a company we're going to learn a whole lot more about and through all of his successes he's been named by forbes magazine as one of the 30 under 30 people to keep an eye on i am excited to introduce you to andrew asher andrew thanks for joining us hey thank you for having me and thank you for that introduction yeah it's all true man you've accomplished a lot in your in your very young years so let's just get after it why why did you want to graduate in only three years uh it all comes back to the company so around my the start of my junior year two friends and i we got together and really just set out to solve this humanitarian issue we didn't have a background in drones but we saw people hanging off the sides of buildings trying to clean at great heights from things like lifts ladders scaffolds and we were just appalled we asked ourselves how has no one found a way to leverage existing technology to make this a safer job and we just became obsessed with that concept of how could we use drones to solve this problem of cleaning at heights so we could relocate people to the ground to get the same work done so i i was gonna say there's a a lot of meat packed into what happened in between but oh yeah essentially you know we spent a lot of time evaluating the market making sure this like actually had some legs to stand on and then just started prototyping trying to figure out if we could actually get a drone to clean a building and turns towards the the spring of that junior year we won the school's venture fund competition and we were starting to get some interest from like local angel investors and some startup accelerator programs and all those conversations were really exciting again we were just bright eyed college students and the one recurring message was hey this is a great idea it's got a huge market lots of potential it's not a good idea as a side project and to their credit at the time i was doing two majors i was playing a division one sport and i was working three part-time jobs on top of trying to start lucid but i was in this fortunate position again going back to my high school days where i had enough credits that i looked at my transcript and realized wait i don't have to make a compromise i could actually graduate in three years have both my majors and then be able to go focus all of my time on lucid and it ended up being the best decision i could have made so give give us some dates that we can um get some perspective on so you officially officially started the company lucid drone technologies on what day so i technically we incorporated in january of 2018 and then we we started working on the idea in fall of 2017 and i finished all of my academic coursework in the spring of 2018. okay so you start the company almost a year before at least uh six months before you graduate you graduate when was the business plan competition was that at davidson it was so it would have been in april of 2018 and i think that was really a catalyst for us as well we were uh partnered with a team of local mentors that each came from a pretty impressive background in business startups whatever it happened to be and we just learned a ton we went in like it was almost another class we were sponges trying to learn as much as possible and the way we tell a story is we went into that pitch competition with an idea which was a drone cleaning building but we really came out of it with a business idea and how we plan on monetizing on how we wanted to monetize it and scale it and really got a good foundation for the company because of it and uh how much was how much did first place win you so it was we tied for first place and there was a 25 000 prize we split but you know something when you're getting ready to graduate from college that's just about enough gas in the tank to get you along to some of the first steps of of making money it's very it's very meaningful money and well congratulations uh thank you do you remember any moment like looking at people climbing scaffolding or cleaning windows do you remember a moment in time that you said um maybe there's a better way yeah i mean it was really just that i remember it was more or less on a stroll through charlotte seeing people trying to clean these large buildings and it was a a particularly windy day for charlotte but i mean windy for charlotte's maybe like 15 miles an hour when and you could see this platform just flowing left to right kind of smacking against the building and i wouldn't say i'm afraid of heights but i also wouldn't want to be 200 feet above ground in one of those scaffolding platforms and unfortunately there are numerous stories of people that suffer life-altering injuries or ultimately lose their lives because of trying to work above ground so when we have the ability to introduce technology that can relocate those workers to the ground that they can go home happy and healthy to their families after each day at work that's really really powerful and meaningful technology so okay so you're walking down the street on a not so windy day for most places but nonetheless windy for charlotte you see some people on a a scaffolding or whatever and had you prior to that thought that someday you might want to own your own business had you had those thoughts prior to seeing that so i i think in a way i've always been an entrepreneur at heart i uh i've always loved building things like growing up i was a handyman around the house if there was something to be fixed i wanted to figure out how to solve it so i just always kind of had that practical approach to life but i'd say my truest business interest probably started my sophomore year at davidson i worked as a research analyst for a venture capitalist and just got a ton of exposure to some pretty game-changing startup companies that i was doing due diligence on so just learning about these founders and their stories and the real world problems they were solving i think coupling that with my jesuit education of wanting to find a way to be a man for others and create impact i was like what better way to find meaning and create impact than solving a really meaningful problem so i'm a big believer in the law of attraction i'm a big believer that when you want to own your own business because there's only two responses to seeing some people on a scaffolding on a big tall building on a windy day one is geez i feel sorry for them or i hope they don't fall and it's something you forget somebody might forget by the time they get home for dinner but for other people i say like with their antennas up like tuned into the world that brings us opportunities that brings us ideas a person like you that's a very creative out of the box thinker wouldn't just see a couple people on the scaffolding and wonder if they're okay but see an opportunity that in some ways kind of came to you through what i call the law of attraction greg i couldn't agree more at that point and it's it's honestly one of the principles i run my life and company off of is i i think there are two types of people in this world and it usually comes down to people that have either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset and those fixed mindset people believe everything's inherent like i'm not good at math i'll never be good at math type of thinking and then the growth mindset people are like i just have to seek out the opportunities and access to that learning to that education and i'm capable of growing to acquire any skill i want because when there's a problem there are two approaches to it that growth mindset person will sit there and tell you all the ways they can make it happen that's right fixed mindset people are typically the ones that will tell you every reason it couldn't happen or why it would be difficult to happen so i i really think that's a great point you mentioned it is a humongous that skill in addition to the law of attraction the skill to say there's a way because to summarize what you just said there's can't people and canned people and canned people are like can't people run into the mountain or a big building or a big blockade or something they think well we can't get around we can't get over it i guess we might as well go back home but can people are like no there's a way around this there's a way over it or around it or under it but we can find a way and that that really is almost a requirement for entrepreneurship because there are so many blockades so many mountains so many hills to climb that are unexpected speed bumps that are unexpected that the only way to really thrive and survive through a lot of those early years especially is having a can attitude can do attitude so am i right just kind of one point to touch off there i think it's a concept of failure and it all revolves around how do you define failure and i think that's something that's really set me up well is having a background in baseball where failure oftentimes is expected i just learned to lean into that discomfort and i'm sure you know from your entrepreneurial experiences you face so many hiccups and headaches with your original business plan and it's this never ending roller coaster with extreme highs and rewarding moments and then there's very low lows that humble the heck out of you and how do you respond to those moments and that what we really say here at lucid is like failure is never final failure is an opportunity to to learn it's almost a springboard for growth and my my co-workers they joke with me they're like you get oddly excited when there's a problem and i'm like yeah because then that means there's a solution we can work towards that's right that's right in my in my business so we tried to expand from an office in cleveland ohio uh to columbus ohio which is maybe a two-hour drive and we failed we had i identified a candidate that was going to be our first remote office and we failed that the final candidate we identified said you know i like you guys so much i think i want to start my own business the same way you did okay most people would see that as failure but i thought about it and thought about it and thought about it and i thought wow i wonder if there are a lot of other people like him that would want to own their own business but could lever off of everything we had to offer and from that failure if you will not being able to hire that person came the idea of franchising our business i love that which has been a key a humongous key to our success and and helped us take a great turn towards success all right lucid drone technologies your customers include some pretty famous structures including the atlanta falcons the texas a m baylor university tell us a little bit more about how did you sort of prove the idea that how did you get some of your first customers and where are you at today with the business oh goodness so uh this will be a immediate answer here because there's a lot to the story you know when we first started we thought let's take the path of least resistance and get a drone off the shelf and try to build hardware and software on top of it now that was great because it was low cost and helped us quickly prove out the concept of drone cleaning but we eventually just had so many headaches with this this third-party partner the technology wasn't that great and we kept having these repeated issues and we eventually had three drones with this company and all three of them like the controller wouldn't connect one of them the motor wouldn't spin and it would take them on average five and a half months to fix these issues so we got to the point in our business history where we're like drone cleaning is the future but we have to build our own drones and essentially i locked myself in this attic above a garage of one of our investors neighbors and for three months all i did was read books on drones robotics watch drone building videos read all these forums until three months later we emerged with this drone that could lift three times the payload of the previous one we were using we controlled every single aspect of that hardware and software and from there i'd say that's where like the truest vision for lucid was born like what we focus on at lucid is we build industrial drones for labor intensive tasks now when most people think of drones today they think of these smaller platforms with cameras that take cool pictures and videos and observe the world around them at lucid we think of these industrial sized drones that are capable of performing a meaningful productive task and physically affecting the world around them like cleaning and we understood that cleaning is a very difficult use case for drones in terms of the technology we needed to develop so by focusing on this modular platform we could easily pick and choose different features to launch new drone applications with the ever-evolving market and that vision for the product was put to the test much earlier than we anticipated at the onset of the pandemic we heard a lot of cleaning companies telling us everyone's sheltering in place exterior cleaning isn't happening that much but we're just overwhelmed with disinfecting is there anything you could do for these large facilities so we were able to in a couple weeks take that core cleaning drone technology and put together a disinfecting drone and work with some really exciting customers like mercedes-benz stadium and i never knew flying a drone inside an nfl stadium was a dream of mine until i was there flying a drone in between the sec football championship and then the falcons game the next day oh wow okay but you know now i'm happy to say uh we're back to really focusing on the cleaning drone that market came back with a vengeance and that's really our core focus today is working with these exterior cleaning companies and helping them get more jobs done and less time with less liability so i saw a video at your website which was cleaning a roof and i found myself wondering does the drone have enough strength to take a hose up with it so that it can spray the solution or does it have to come down and reload and go back up yeah so our drone is tethered to the ground and it's that hose that connects it to this on ground tank where you've got all your water and cleaning solution the only thing that drone has to carry is that hosed in the weight of the solution inside of it and again we build pretty big drones it's capable of lifting a lot of weight and say cleaning something like a roof that's no problem andrew you're a young man and for such a young man you've accomplished so much and i love hearing your story normally i ask people now that you had such a success what are the plans for the rest of your life but you have so much of the rest of your life let's talk about just let's talk about what are your plans for the next couple of phases of growing lucid yeah so right now the big focus is how do we continue to delight our customers and just capture more market share with cleaning you know it's such a green space where there aren't other companies focused on this today and what people might not realize is cleaning is a part of our everyday lives it's something that's regularly done something that we expect so we're just focused on dominating that vertical for now but at the same time we recognize what our technology is capable of doing so we've done a proof of concept test with a painting drone we can also compute in the future maybe use our drones for firefighting de-icing there are a whole host of these different applications that involve drones that spray some type of solution so that's really what excites us at lucid is continuing to find ways to provide value to the market by building these drones that can perform these productive tasks and i think if i read correctly you guys have had at least one fundraising round or have you had more yeah we've had a few fundraising rounds we've raised a couple million to date and are continuing to grow the team we're roughly a team of 20 now and i'd say that's been one of the most rewarding parts of the business is just getting to build a company culture and and going through the hiring and onboarding process and creating a place where people love to come to work and see the impact they get to have on a company like lucid i i think the important thing for any startup company to consider with fundraising is what does fundraising do for you as a company so i can tell you for us being young founders one of the most obvious things is it gave us access to knowledge and experience i have learned so much from my investor group who i still rely on heavily to this date for just wisdom and insights and best practices so i've gotten a ton of learning out of them but then obviously you get the access to the capital and the real thought is what milestones am i hoping to achieve with this that i couldn't otherwise and for us being more of a robotics company it's capital intensive you know if we were building an app or more of a software only company it might be a little bit different story but we've got inventory we need to purchase it was a frontier technology early on because we were doing something that hadn't been done before we had to spend a lot of money on r d to get it to this point and whatnot yep now you also if i remember if i've read correctly you've got a few i think it might be three provisional patents on your technology yeah so we've continued to add to our ip portfolio it something that depends on who you ask it's either a valuable competitive moat or other people will kind of disregard it so you always got to be careful with who you ask for an opinion when i get asked the competition question i think that the truest answer on competition for any business is how well do you hustle how well do you execute because at the end of the day if you do those two things right that's what matters more than anything yeah i agree uh ip for a lot of people means uh in this case intellectual property or patents and things other things that protect you from the competition and so finally you know for those people that are listening because our audience are people who are aspiring entrepreneurs maybe somewhat on their way most of whom maybe many of whom haven't raised money yet how did you find the money people um that are now involved in your business it all comes down to networking okay truthfully who you know is so powerful yeah we were fortunate through you know that venture fund competition to one not only meet alumni from our college that are involved in the startup world but also members of our local community that are active angel investors and one we worked really hard to cultivate and grow those relationships but then two we frequently ask well who else do you think we should talk to and we were let's just say unapologetically straightforward asking for introductions to people i think what we learned early on is that the worst thing that can happen is somebody will say no especially with asking for advice and i i think i've realized this as i've gotten a little bit deeper into my journey is now when people come to me and and ask for advice whatever it happens to be on on hiring on fundraising i get so much joy from being able to share that knowledge and i'm like if i feel this way how do other people feel when i'm asking and i hope they feel the same way and more times than not when you ask somebody for for some help you're going to get a yes because people tend to enjoy it people tend to love it i i was reading i was listening to um oh goodness who's the guy simon sinek you know simon sinek you know start with wine start with why that guy he was saying that actually when you do something good for other people it gives you endorphins almost like if you ran a a marathon or something it makes you feel good and i heard him talk about that and i i'm the same way i enjoy it and i think for all of those people who are listening that are wondering how they could build a business just ask people so many people love helping other people it's why this whole million-dollar monday video exists to get help to others and and so don't be shy to reach out to people because most people would feel honored that you asked and most people would have a lot of fun sharing some advice and maybe a few of those people might even say they might want to invest so andrew it has been great visiting with you i am very proud of everything that you have accomplished and uh i know that at the age of 25 you have a brilliant future ahead of you and i look forward to keeping in touch well thank you greg i really enjoyed the conversation and i appreciate you having me on [Music]

2021-10-18 01:47

Other news