In business, you are always growing and changing. You may start with a product and then need a team, or start with an idea and grow into a 500+ person company with huge vision. Wherever you start, there are always more accomplishments to achieve and GroGuru knows this. Watch this clip to learn a bit more about the background, the team, and the future plans:
Patrick: Jeff is an agriculture technologist. You’re more of a big data, cyber security, system engineer, software technologist. What have you done to shore that up from a business standpoint?
Farooq: We realized our weaknesses. We are very strong in technology. At the same time, we also depend on advisors to help us bridge the gap as far as the business side. I learned a lot on the business side from working with some advisors over the last 18 months. I plan to continue to learn. With the growth plans that the company has, we also plan to add people who are stronger on the business side.
Patrick: I love that mentorship model. It’s something that all entrepreneurs can learn from. My background is technology as well, but I’ve been on the business side for a long period of time. I’m always trying to learn things from people who might have expertise that I don’t. In the early days of Entropic when we were starting to scale the company, we didn’t have someone in house who had a high amount of operational experience.
Working with our subcontract manufacturers, we had some great engineers. We had a good test engineer and a good product engineer, but not someone at the senior level who had dealt with pricing issues and negotiations. I was able to add someone on my board with that specific expertise. That was very helpful to us.
Farooq: Sometimes I’m faced with questions on how to address things on the business side. There are things like sales commissions and sales quotas. It might be easy for you, but I’ve been talking to my mentors to help me understand and navigate these questions. GroGuru is part of EvoNexus, the incubator here in town. We have benefited a lot from that and the mentors that we have there. I appreciate everything that we’re getting from them.
Patrick: I’m a big fan of EvoNexus.