I would have never predicted I would end up starting a company that made tracking devices for pets. I think I was always somewhat risk averse but always had that itch. My parents immigrated from the Soviet Union and my dad was a small business entrepreneur. That’s how he survived and they did everything in their power to try to convince me not to start a company.

My parents immigrated from the Soviet Union and my dad was a small business entrepreneur. That’s how he survived and they did everything in their power to try to convince me not to start a company.

Starting a company, I knew, was going to be a huge leap of faith. If you really want to take a risk, you have to see the one reason out of a hundred that it will work and then you have to ask yourself, do you believe that one reason more than you believe each of the other 99 reasons that it won’t work?

With the rise in social media and just in general, it is really easy to get caught in comparison mind set. I think probably everyone now suffers from that more than generations before us because you can see everybody’s success, you can see everybody else’s happiness, and that makes it really hard as an entrepreneur. It makes it really hard when things are difficult, when you hit road blocks, to see how you’ll get through them. You’ll wish you had done something differently. You’ll wish you’d picked a different idea or you had taken different actions and that’s a really dangerous mind set. I think as an entrepreneur that was sort of the biggest lesson was, if you can find a way to have really high conviction about what you’re doing, that helps, and then just trying to be really diligent about staying focused and blocking out all the noise. — May 7, 2018 • Photo by Loraine Terrell