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TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Mark Birch, Global Startup Advocate at Amazon Web Services (AWS), has helped startups and entrepreneurs build communities and connect globally.
Birch spoke to the Startup Island podcast on Friday (January 27th) about his work after his keynote at the 2022 Meet Taipei Startup Festival. He joined host John Y to discuss building his community at the startup, focusing on business fundamentals, dealing with being a lone entrepreneur.
Birch, himself a business founder, emphasized the importance of having a strong community of founders and a developed ecosystem for startups to thrive.
“You can be an incredibly talented individual, or you can have an incredibly talented team, but often you also need an ecosystem and support mechanisms to push you along the way. .
He added that a well-developed ecosystem not only increases the chances of meeting potential investors and partners. It also provides an opportunity to meet other like-minded entrepreneurs, share ideas and overcome entrepreneurial loneliness.
Birch explained that the AWS Global Startup Advocate’s role is to help founders find the information they need at a given point in time. “When I sit down with founders, I’m always thinking, ‘How can we provide a resource connection,'” he said.
Birch said it also provides contact information for founders to answer questions about available services and strategies. “We offer 200[services]so we need to understand how to build a startup using these building blocks.”
Birch said the transition from paid employment to becoming a founder can be jarring for some. I said I had support options and existing connections.
“I often say that entrepreneurship is often very lonely because you have to jump into the ocean and swim by yourself,” he said.
Birch says building a supportive community is important for this reason. When he first started out as a founder in New York, he said, there was no ready-made ecosystem of tech entrepreneurs supporting each other.
“After all these years, the resources and communities we have access to are very different,” he said. “From there, you have a community that you can plug in.”
Aside from having a strong support network, Birch said he often emphasizes that founders and entrepreneurs need to focus on the fundamentals first. “Are you creating products that fundamentally add value to the world and change user relationships?” he asked.
Birch also talked about the concept of “active listening.” He said this helps founders deal with their own internal biases. “We put on ‘happy ears,’ which means we tend to hear what supports our beliefs and reject anything that goes against them,” he said.
“If you don’t listen with the intention of removing bias, you’re hearing a lot of signals that you’re going in the right direction, and you may not actually be going in the right direction.”
Birch also mentioned the value of having a mentor. “It’s good to hear an outside perspective so you can get it out of your own head. And even if you don’t listen to your mentor’s advice, it’s good to at least talk about it.”
He also said that burnout is a big problem among entrepreneurs and that being able to recognize one’s limits is a key trait of successful entrepreneurs. You have to do the hard work, but you also have to give yourself some downtime.”
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