Why Do Military Veterans Make such Great Entrepreneurs?
Meet the Veterans who bring their unusual discipline, perspective, and problem-solving skill to the world of game-changing start ups.
I first met Joseph Kopser six years ago in Mosul, Iraq. He he
was an Army major serving in a cavalry squadron at the time, and I was a reporter for The Washington
Post.
Kopser, 42, who retired from the military last week,
is now the CEO and co-founder of an Austin, Tex. start-up called RideScout--a smartphone
application that aggregates all of a user's potential ground transportation
options in real time, everything from buses and Zipcar to rideshare options
with friends or strangers.
On Memorial Day, we remember members of our military
who made the ultimate sacrifice. I've interviewed thousands of soldiers over the years. One
thing they've told
me repeatedly is that the best way to honor that sacrifice is
to remember those who gave their lives--and to live lives worthy of them.
Today, I'd like to start telling you about some veterans who do just that.
These are men and women who become entrepreneurs, trying to change the world
for the better.
Military training is often cited as good
preparation for business leadership. People might know a few
anecdotal examples of this, like the fact that Fred Smith was a
Marine officer who observed the military logistics system before he founded
FedEx.
Still, the more prevalent story seems to be of
veterans who have difficulty transitioning to the civilian world--stories of
PTSD and movies about returning veterans in crisis. (Indeed, I've
written a lot about troubled veterans and even military suicide in
the past. These are very real problems.)
However, veterans bring amazing advantages to to the
entrepreneurial game--things like discipline, perspective, leadership ability,
and the learned skill of seeing problems as opportunities--to say nothing of
having accomplished ambitious goals with the weight of a gigantic bureaucracy
on their backs.
It Started With Pentagon Traffic
Take Kopser, for example. A 1993 West Point graduate,
he and his classmate and Army buddy Craig Cummings launched RideScout while Kopser was still
on active duty, running the ROTC program at the University of Texas at Austin.
Kopser came up with the idea during a Pentagon
assignment, when he had to figure out how to get to work efficiently within the
Washington, D.C. traffic nightmare. Enter Cummings, who had left the military
to become an investor and entrepreneur. Kopser recalled sitting on his back
porch in Arlington, Va., telling Cummings about his daily commute.
"I live five miles from the Pentagon, and I could
walk, ride, or drive, but...if something goes wrong, my whole day is
ruined," Kopser said. He'd been up half the night before looking for a
website or app that would show users their transportation options in real-time.
No dice.
"So I explained RideScout," Kopser said.
Soon after, Cummings called back.
"That is a billion dollar idea to change society
as we know it," Cummings told him. "I'm going to give you the money
to make it happen. Give me your USAA bank account number."
That was in early 2011. Today RideScout is in beta after its launch in Austin during
SXSW, and has closed over $700,000 in seed financing. The plan is to
expand to Washington, D.C. and Seattle by the fall.
An "Equal-Opportunity" Opportunity
It's not just officers, who are generally
college-educated and a bit older than enlisted service members, who find great
success in the entrepreneurial world when they're given the tools to succeed.
I talked this week with Dave Liniger,
the founder of RE/MAX, the giant, international real estate company.
Liniger has a new book out, My Next Step, about
his ongoing recovery from a medical condition last year that temporarily
paralyzed him. What struck me from his early story was that he took the first
steps toward founding RE/MAX while still on active duty in the U.S. Air Force
in the 1970s.
"Even as an E-4 [senior airman, getting]
hazardous duty pay, it was poverty wages," Liniger explained. "So, I
had read a book on buying and fixing up houses and selling at a profit. That
started my entrepreneurial career."
His first property was a $10,000 duplex that he bought
with just a $500 down payment.
"I sold it in six months for a $6,000 profit. All
of a sudden I made more money on one real estate investment than I did on my
entire salary and three part-time jobs," he said.
Liniger had dropped out of Indiana University after
three semesters, enlisting in the military in the 1960s. He served in Vietnam,
and said the experience changed his life.
"The military was incredibly important to me and
my success," he said. "As a farm boy growing up in Indiana, my
parents instilled in me a very good work ethic, but when I went to college at
17, I had no goal, no idea where I wanted to be."
The Air Force gave him motivation. "I fell in
love with it from the first day. It grounded me, gave me a sense of
purpose," he said.
As we'll see in the second article in this series,
which highlights my interview with Air Force veteran and "Godfather of
Silicon Valley" Steve Blank,
the military itself deserves a lot of credit for having created the antecedents
of the phenomenal tech explosion we've seen in this country over the last
half-century or so.
In fact, the hardest thing about writing this kind of
article, frankly, is the sheer number of great veteran-entrepreneurs who
prove the point. I'm always eager to hear about more of them, so feel free
to reach out to
me here.
