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Andrew Goldner on The Intersection of Tech

Andrew Goldner has always been passionate about technology. Now, as the Co-Founder of GrowthX, he’s able to help others harness their passions. GrowthX helps startups, corporations and countries commercialize innovation through capital, talent and know-how.

Andrew’s journey has been full of surprises and lessons, and he stopped by The Mission Daily to talk to us about some of them.

Always be ready for a journey. Where you start isn’t always where you end up. When we say Andrew has been through a journey, we mean it. He started as a lawyer, where he really found himself leaning in to his love for technology.

“When I graduated law school in 1998, the Internet was first commercializing. I discovered that I was able to have an outside impact on my career and the firm I was working at by leveraging the fact that I knew how the Internet worked, when just about every partner at this big firm – some of the top practitioners in the world – did not know how the Internet worked. This allowed me to step in and start creating a brand for myself. Even though I was only a first year lawyer and really had no idea how to practice law, especially as a corporate lawyer, I was actually having a lot of fun and having an impact on my clients beyond just the grunt work of a first year associate, because I proactively got in front of issues and helped them.”

His technology background allowed him to help his clients in unique ways. “For instance, one of the biggest clients at the firm was violating the securities laws and they had no idea, because they had stale information up on their website in a press release. They would have never made that mistake on paper. They just weren’t thinking of the Internet that way. And of course, the SEC laws hadn’t adapted to the i=Internet yet, so this was a really interesting time.

“So I from that time focused 100% of my practice on technology. I was recruited into a very, very big New York City corporate firm called Skadden Arps.”

He continued to mix law with his tech expertise. “I did licensing. I did corporate finance. I did M&A. It was an extraordinary time to do that, and by the way, you know, my clients were Marc Benioff and Salesforce when it was founded in ’99, Yahoo early days, Priceline, all the other famous names like Boo.com, which you might remember, Socks.com, Pets.com.”

But, eventually, Andrew found that the law life just wasn’t for him. “I left a practice at Skadden to get into the restaurant business. I had taken everything that I could have taken from the opportunity working at Skadden, and also started hitting the limits of what I was able to offer, and it was certainly a combination of both those things, that I was looking to get out.”

And he did get out. Since his law days, he has done a little bit of everything. He’s invested in restaurants and worked as a lawyer for salespeople at DoubleClick where his primary focus was what he calls “full legal wellness”. Now, he’s a Kauffman Fellow, and one of the founders of GrowthX. (Told you this was a journey.)

Be ready to give up your lifestyle: One of the things that almost stopped Andrew from making a change? His lifestyle. He almost didn’t leave his job as a laywer because he wasn’t ready to give up the perks. “I had been taking calls from a lot of different folks, but you get your golden handcuffs on. You build a lifestyle around it, and opportunities come along that you can’t afford to take. I passed on a lot of different things that might have turned out differently because I just didn’t want to give up my lifestyle at the time.”

But eventually, he did. And the rest is history. “I broke the golden handcuffs. I moved out of the expensive apartment in Chelsea down to Battery Park City. I downsized my entire life, and God bless my wife who was along the ride with me. So now I was in a position to look at something otherwise I really didn’t have the foresight and the maturity to look at before.”

Focus on what matters.

“More innovators need to be thinking about the customer, need to be thinking about the problem, and need to understand that taking an innovation to market is non-linear. Whether you’re two kids in a garage about the size of what we’re sitting in now or a Fortune 500 – innovators are making the same mistakes globally, and they’re failing at a rate that that’s untenable. It’s because they’re focused on features and functions and not problems and people.

To catch the rest of the interview, check out our podcast here.

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