In this episode, Scott Becker reflects on the highs and lows of his entrepreneurial journey, revealing the core principles behind building successful businesses.
Full Episode
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. Today's discussion is a longer discussion that comes out of businesses, and we're going to call this building businesses, winners and losers, or winning and losing, whatever you want to call it. But here's the background on this. I've had the good fortune of building two successful businesses.
One, the fabulous healthcare media company, which became a really successful healthcare media company. Second, building this great healthcare legal practice. And these two things ended up being somewhat related in their own way. But ultimately, two really nice successes. The legal practice became one of the largest legal practices at a billion-dollar firm over a very long period of time.
Now, I've really seated that baton to some of the junior people that are no longer junior people. They're fantastic partners that lead a lot of that practice. Similarly, the media company became a really successful healthcare media company and great, great success. Now, the thing that's fascinating about it is anybody who's built businesses, it's almost like talking about stocks.
There are stocks that you have that are winners. Palantir Technologies is one of my winners, but you don't often hear about some of the stocks that you have that are losers. And one of my losers is something called Astera Labs. So when you build businesses, you invest in stocks, whatever you do, you're going to have what I think of as winners and losers.
In addition to sort of building his businesses, Russell started a couple of other businesses, invested with venture capital funds like Andreessen Horowitz and invested several individual startup companies. Russell served on some boards of directors. And this is not so much
telling you this because of credibility for credibility or to brag, but telling you it because it goes to the backdrop to, my goodness, if you do this long enough, you get plenty of wins, plenty of losses.
And I think both are very instructive because so many of the lessons that I've seen over the years come from the fact that I've learned from the investments that have turned to zero or the companies I've been involved with that have ended up fizzling out versus continuing to be really successful or struggle. And there are lessons in all of those things. And I'll sort of try and go through
common lessons in business that we have sort of come towards and lived through. I start with this concept that so much is about building great teams. And I'm a huge fan of the Jim Collins perspective that you literally could do almost anything you want if you build a great team. What I've seen in businesses is
When I've built great teams and really invested the time to build great teams, whether at the law firm or at Becker's Healthcare, I've had great, great success. And the people that run those teams today that were part of the teams that I was building now are the leaders of those places.
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