In this module, we talked about entrepreneurial opportunities and ideas.

We worked through the two by two a framework of entrepreneurial opportunities.

And we also talked about the different contexts in which it tends to be

easier to ideate and to formulate new entrepreneurial ideas.

To flesh out this concept a little bit more,

I sat down with President and Co-Founder of Digital Mint, Marc Grens.

Marc is working in the digital currency space and they focus on Bitcoin at Digital Mint.

He talked with me about how they researched

the opportunity and they formulated their idea and

how they grew their firm based on the interplay between opportunity and idea.

I thought he gave me a lot of really good insight into these concepts from

a practical perspective and I hope you enjoy our discussion.

Hi everyone, I'm here with Marc Grens,

co-founder and president of Digital Mint and they work out of Catapult Chicago,

one of our entrepreneurship hubs here in the city.

Marc thanks a lot for being with us.

Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me.

We're wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about Catapult

and who works out of here and a little bit about how you guys operate?

Yeah, sure. Thanks again for having me here.

Catapult was founded about five and a half years ago by a group

of seasoned entrepreneurs in the tech space in Foley and Lardner which is a law firm.

That had some extra space and they're

figuring out some interesting things that they can do with it.

So they decided to make an advanced tech center to allow companies that need,

that are growing there to raise capital and that had

more resources and had more needs to be able to expand and grow into some space.

So it was found on that premise and then it expanded

into a little bit more of a stronger community.

So each founder has to pitch in front

of all the other founders in order to get accepted into space.

Currently, there's about 14 of tech companies within the space.

Most of them have raised capital and moved on to bigger and better things.

How long has Digital Mint been here in Catapult?

We've been here for about 14 months.

Came here out of 1871.

We're allowed to stay within Catapult for two,

four years and then we're hopefully off to the next spot.

Great. And then how many people do you have on your team right now?

Currently, we have five full-time.

We have an engineering team based in Ravenswood, another three,

and we're adding another three to five employees in the two offices we currently have.

And tell us if you could,

about a couple of your most exciting recent milestones.

We've expanded from, when we first came into Catapult we were in four states.

And a year later today we're in 10 states where we operate.

And you work with Bitcoin and digital currencies, right?

Correct, yes, we do. We do.

We've been working with, in the Bitcoin space since 2014 when we founded the company.

That's awesome. It's a pretty turbulent industry, right?

Yes, I think just like any emerging market or new currency or asset that comes in play,

I think a lot of individuals are not familiar with it.

And then once you get to a certain tipping point or buzz which has happened,

we've seen over the last year,

we've had a lot of mad rush of capital which has exploded

the price over 100 percent within the last three to four months.

Well, thanks a lot for introducing us to Catapult.

And best of luck to you and Digital Mint.

Yes, thank you.

Mark, thanks a lot for meeting with me today to talk about your entrepreneurial venture.

And you're a thin tech venture, is that right?

Yeah, that's correct.

And you guys work a lot with Bitcoin and with digital currency.

And what I'd like you to talk about if you could is,

when did you first see an inefficiency or an opportunity in this sector?

I mean, what was it that really piqued

your interest you and your co-founders and got you thinking about,

"Hey there might be an opportunity in here to launch a project that will grow."

My personal interest started sometime in 2013

after a few friends have brought up Bitcoin.

And I just went down a few rabbit holes and

read up on it and went down a few more rabbit holes and

realized that some sort of universal token digital cash can have some serious disruption.

And it was in 2014 when a group of us had an idea that what a great way

to deliver Bitcoin and as an onramp by buying and launching Bitcoin ATMs.

So we did that in 2014.

And it wasn't until early 2015 that we realized that

this business is much larger than we could have ever imagined and

to the extent of tens of billions of dollars and

actually trillions of dollars of disruption around the entire world in the cash markets,

into the payment industry and into the banking industry as a whole.

In early 2015 my co-founder Jonathan Solomon and myself were working at other ventures.

He was at Coinbase which is

the largest Bitcoin exchange in the market and most well funded.

And I was working for a company called Megalytics as

their chief strategy officer

amongst making some angel investments and some other businesses.

And we decided to put everything behind and said, "We're going all in."

We thought at that time the only way to really build

a sustainable thin tech company is we had to give 100 percent.

So we had to put everything behind.

So you're in a growing sector,

this digital currency space.

And it sounds like you ran into a couple of happy accidents like surprises along the way,

it's growing around you and new opportunities emerge,right?

And you have to respond to them.

How do you keep your focus despite the fact that you're in a growing,

turbulent space as you build your venture?

It's long term thinking and

realizing that we're not in this business just to cash flow it.

We realize that there was the opportunity because of the cash flow,

because of how much money you can make from a unit economics perspective.

Each machine, in each location,

would drive a certain amount of revenue.

But we realize that this opportunity is much, much, much bigger.

In terms of all the adversity from regulators and

the banking industry and a lot of those who just

don't understand this concept of digital currencies,

we just had to stay focused on building a long term company.

And we also had the moral responsibility to be

the educators to all those other industries.

And those big players that we need to collaborate with in the banking sector

to make our businesses really build and thrive internationally.

We had to really educate them and spend time to understand what their concerns are.

And I think that was really a big differentiator

and some of our surprises which ended up becoming some of our successes.

When you're in a growing industry like this one,

other new entrants are going to be joining it as it

grows and then you have to think about differentiation.

And I think you just hit on one of your points of

differentiation related to the education and sort of the moral component.

Could you talk a little more about how you guys strategically

differentiate yourself from competitors and potential competitors?

Yes. In addition to the collaboration with

the large banks in the space that deal with other,

they would call high risk financial services like check cashers, currency exchange,

payday lending, those banks that really support that,

are the ones that really fit in the realm of understanding Bitcoin.

Our strategic difference is to spend several,

several hours in meetings to educate them and

teach them on how digital currencies and Bitcoin,

Etherium and the other tokens that are out there can be of value to them and help

them improve their efficiencies in

their business and how they could take advantage of that.

So that's number one. In addition,

we realized in a new market like this,

there's still an asymmetric gap of information that people

have an understanding of this new digital currency like any other new protocol,

like the Internet was in the early '90s.

So we took it upon herself to build

a customer service support desk and filled every single inbound call,

respond to every IM chat on website and

every e-mail and go above and beyond for the customer.

We really think that became

a strategic differentiator versus some of the other competitors in the space.

So what are some of the inefficiencies in this sector or even problems if you will,

that you see as opportunities that you want to improve and build value in relation to?

Yes, I think, go back to my original point in education,

the inefficiencies are just understanding a,

what is Bitcoin from a simplest?

And how does it benefit you?

How does it benefit you as a merchant to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment?

Why do you want to accept this when you have Visa,

MasterCard, PayPal, Venmo, and other payment rails?

Why should Bitcoin become an option?

Also just from an owner of Bitcoin,

why is this something of value?

Why does it have a store of value?

We can't stress enough on

our responsibility to be the ones to provide as much education as we can.

Many times when an entrepreneurial venture gains traction and starts to realize

a little bit of success and it looks like its going to incur more success,

its threatening to the established elements in

a particular competitive field or if there are any more established larger organizations.

Do you see any of that and how do you strategize in that context?

Sure. I think it's like any industry when you're building a zero to

one protocol or you're building infrastructure around it as

Claude and Christian said we call them the incumbents.

And we were the ones that are disrupting to basically moving their cheese somewhere else.

But what we take in the response of

being the collaborators within the space of those of whose we're

disrupting instead of taking the one extreme there were

these libertarian anarchists and

Bitcoin is going to destroy the U.S. dollar and banking industry.

We don't take that approach because we don't believe that's going to be successful.

We take the other side of the spectrum.

So let's work with them.

Let's educate them on this so they're aware of it.

And then what ends up happening is they relax the constraints

and then they tell us more of their issues that has to do with currency,

that has to do with payments,

wire systems and all these other things within the banking sector.

And then we become the one that they come to that help,

"Can you help solve these problems?"

So those ones that viewed us as a threat in

the beginning are now the ones that are viewing us as becomes

one of the strategic advantages of those ones that help solve

their payment problems or their financial technology problems.

And then last question.

How do you think you guys are going to keep yourselves alert,

stay hungry as you grow,

as the industry grows?

How are you going to,

how will you remain alert to

opportunities like you did in the beginning when you saw an opportunity,

the problem and you want to do something about it?

Now you have customers,

now you know kind of who your competitors are.

How do you stay entrepreneurial?

First off you have to love what you're doing.

Me, myself and Jonathan my co-founder love this business.

We eat, drink and sleep digital currencies.

It's not just a job.

We wake up, we come in at 9:00 and 5:00 o'clock we leave.

It's a nonstop ordeal, it's a passion,

it's curiosity and it's just having our pulse.

And also having humility and humbleness to know that there's going

to be competitors in the space and not to frown them,

not to fight them.

We take the approach to collaborate with competitors,

to learn from them and see what they're doing and how we can work together.

And they give us ideas and we sometimes give them

ideas versus taking this sort of closed off approach.

But I do believe that in this space of something of very

asymmetric it does take an obsession to be able to do this.

And I think especially in digital currencies we believe that's what it takes.

Any time we're hiring we hire someone

a big sort of filter is how much passion you have for the space,

what kind of curiosity,

how far down the rabbit hole do you want to go?

And that's an easy way to weed someone out.

Whether they have really good skill sets or not,

the passion for what we're disrupting,

what we're doing is number one.

So that helps us stay on the pulse because we surround

ourselves by people who are just as passionate as we are.

How do you handle failure?

We actually have that as one of our core values and cultures we accept failure.

We look for failure first.

No ideas that are brought to the table especially that of the founders,

which is number one of our core values,

should be challenged early and often by the rest of the team.

It's just part of our DNA in terms of failure.

Throw out ideas but find a way

to destroy your own idea before you present it to the group.

So it really just fits into the culture and how we do things.

Wow, much continued success to you and your team.

Sure.

And thanks a lot.

Thank you, Patrick. I appreciate it.

That was a really interesting discussion.

I like the way Marc talked about how they made mistakes in particular,

how they've committed errors,

but how they've used those as a means to adapt

their venture by redefining the opportunity and reformulating the idea.

As you move forward with your own ventures please keep that in mind.

Your opportunity will evolve as the environment around your venture evolves,

and you will have to adapt your idea in relation to that.

Interview with Marc Grens of Digital Mint at Catapult

Entrepreneurship I: Principles and Concepts

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