Jason Feifer | The Future of Entrepreneurship

Speaker A: Foreign. Welcome to another episode of the Ground Soul Origins podcast, where I connect you to outstanding humans and sustainable ideas. I'm your host, Scott Martin. Today we have the one and only editor of Entrepreneur magazine, Jason Pfeiffer. And, uh, he's also written, uh, he's an author. He wrote great book called Build for Tomorrow. And we talk about what's going on with Entrepreneur right now. Entrepreneur. Not just the magazine, but just like the state of entrepreneurialism, um, its intersection with, um, creator, uh, economy, and a little bit about a. Incredible comments. Loved having him on the show. So without further ado, let's paddle in. All right, here are with another episode with the one and only Jason Pfeiffer. Welcome to the show.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me.

Speaker A: Awesome. So this has been a while in the making. We've had a couple, uh, reschedules, and I was really stoked to see us on the calendar, and I want to kick it off right away. It's sort of the intersection between your role as editor of Entrepreneur magazine and your book. Change is inevitable. What is going to happen to magazines like Entrepreneur Magazine in the age of AI?

Speaker B: Uh. Oh, in the age of AI. Uh, well, so the book, by the way, is called Build for Tomorrow. Just to be clear, in case anybody's looking for a great book about how to navigate changes in your career or life, okay. What's going to happen?

Speaker A: It's about change. It's a pretty big change. So I thought, well, you wrote the book on change, and you're part of this magazine. You might have some really good perspective on this.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. So, okay, I think that everybody needs to ask of everything that they do this question. What is it for? Uh, uh, for, um, every part of your work and your business, everything that you put energy and effort into, the things that you think are most foundational to the work that you do. You should be asking the question, what is this for? And you should know the answer. And then you should keep asking the question because the answer might change. And when I think about media, I think, well, let's ask the question, what is content for? And decades ago, the answer to that would have been pretty simple. Content is for, uh, monetization. There's. There are two ways to monetize content, which is that you can sell ads against it, and you can sell sponsorships, you can sell subscriptions, you can sell ads against it. You could sell subscriptions. Two ways to monetize content. Now, today, you don't even have to talk about the age of AI. We just talk about the age of Facebook and Google, which gobbled up the majority of ad dollars, and also the Internet, which completely changed people's expectations for how they get content. It is now much, much harder. And this is not an entrepreneur thing, this is an everywhere thing. It is much, much harder to monetize content in those ways. Yes, you can still sell some ads, yes, you can still sell some subscriptions, but not nearly the way that you used to. So, all right, let's ask the question, what is content for? The answer has changed. I think that at this point, content is for relationships. Content builds relationships. People trust you because of the content, and then once they trust you, you can produce products or services or other experiences, things that people trust you to spend money on because of the content. And when you think about that, you start to realize for a media business to succeed in the next 10 years, regardless of if we're talking about interruption from AI or from any other digital service, or just changing consumer habits, you better be thinking about how you're building long term relationships with your own audience and then how you're expanding to serve that audience in other ways that they will trust you to provide because of the content. I don't care if it's AI. AI to me is just another tool. It's interesting, but it's also not interesting at the same time. But I do think that every media company needs to be thinking about that. We're certainly having those conversations at Entrepreneur. I'm very actively involved in those conversations. And some of the early things that we've tried in terms of some early services and products that we've released are a small indication of where we're going. But we have a lot cooking. And my guess, to be honest with you, is that a, uh, lot of media brands will not survive the next 10 years. And that's also totally fine because companies come, companies go. They are the products of economic environments and economic opportunities. Uh, and hopefully the ones that I am a part of identify and make the most of those opportunities.

Speaker A: I like where you went with that. That was relationships, human. And you know, when I think of Entrepreneur magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, I think of it as you've curated content that's very specific. And as an entrepreneur, it's my tribe, it's like I'm hearing, I'm not going to the sea of grayness and sameness that AI is going to bring in, whatever that information that seems somewhat meaningless, but the fact that it's like sort of in a, in a, in a nice container that understands my emotional state of being an entrepreneur with the journey. I go through the challenges hearing from stories and humans about that. That's what I see is almost like a defensive, uh, mechanism against, you know, AI. The piece that actually is where I'm also thinking might be kind of changes happening is I'm seeing more and more people producing content as themselves and their, and their, their, their point of view. But it's. I can totally tell it's AI that's like totally, um, changing that. And so you're gonna. My sort of speculative sort of nature of looking at the future, it's kind of filled with hope and also a lot of like, oh, man. And that, oh, man, is people that are gonna come forward as being entrepreneur experts, but they don't know anything about it. They just know how to do prompts or they made some look so good because they're using AIM prompts. And where. That's where I kind of like the idea of, like, magazines might have a leap forward because there might be some editorialized sort of like, gate of, hey, at least I know this has been vetted. But that's just my hallucination at this point.

Speaker B: Well, yeah, I mean, look, I think there's a strong narrative that's taking place right now that's arguing that human touch is, is going to become a premium quality and a signifier of value in an era where things are increasingly produced in digital and automated ways. And I think that there's probably a lot to be said for that. But it's also really important to remember that technological changes tend not to actually create wild shifts in the way that we behave. They just exacerbate existing behaviors. So you just talked about people using AI to present themselves as business authorities when they are not all, uh, that knowledgeable about business. We already have that. Just go to Instagram. And before that, you know, and before that, go to. Go to the, um, Go to. I mean, there's just a generation's worth of books written by absolute frauds who were telling you how to run a business. They had no idea how to do it at all. So this is not some new thing. It is a new tool that people are using for an old means. But also, let's not forget that when we talk about technological change, uh, we often make this mistake of treating the change as a variable, but treating everything else around it as fixed. So we only know what we know now, and we only react to things in the way that we react to them now. But now this technology is going to shift and change, and we're going to be unable to adapt to it. But that's not how things work. That's never how things work. Everything is a, uh, variable. And so if AI becomes more used as a primary means of communication, let's say, then we're going to adapt and shift as a result. Uh, we're going to start to recognize that we're going to start to value different things. Things. You know, there was already. Someone made this great point, it went viral on Twitter, which was that, uh, marketing that uses AI looks really cheap. Like what it broadcasts is that you don't have a budget for marketing. And I thought that was a really interesting, really interesting analysis because, uh, it's like Clipart. Yeah, it is like Clipart. That's exactly right. And there was a time. Clipart is a perfect example because there was a time at the beginning of Clipart when probably every illustrator's hair was on fire. They're saying, oh my God, here's this wave of cheap materials that people are going to use to replace the things that I was doing and making a living off of. And it turns out that that wasn't the case because people recognized Clipart and they devalued it and therefore they saw greater value in people who were creating more original work. Now, you could argue, but AI is different because it creates better things in Clipart. Yeah, yeah, uh, fine. But this, the same thing will happen, which is that there will be a recognizable pattern and there will be a cultural narrative that evolves about what is quality and what is not. We aren't fixed. We don't stay in the same place as technology runs circles around us. First of all, we are the creators of that technology, and then we evolve with that technology, and that's the way it's always been.

Speaker A: Man, that was such a. One of the best little encapsulated descriptions of what that. That to me is just. I love that that one's going to be a replayer. So, you know, when you think of being entrepreneurs and, and we're, we're evolving as entrepreneurs, we're evolving with the environment, and you're seeing the rise of what they're calling creators. Where do you see the intersection of creator and entrepreneur? Are these separate? Is it the same or is just a, an extension of an entrepreneur that's creating things like where, like where's your, where does your mind go with that?

Speaker B: I think that there are separate, Separate but overlapping concepts. Uh, uh, when I think of a creator, I think of someone who is building a business primarily off of either monetizing the stuff that they create. And when we're talking about, I mean, look, anything could be a creator. Someone who makes socks is a creator of socks. But you know, usually we're talking about writing or video or some kind of media product. It's kind of a small media company as an individual is usually what we think of as a creator. And they're either making money directly off of that content or that content is directly leading to wherever the monetization is. Um, a creator is a kind of entrepreneur. But not all entrepreneurs are necessarily creators. But I do think that entrepreneurs, who I'm now just speaking of as anybody making anything entrepreneurs have realized that the tools of the creator are really valuable marketing and community building tools. And that for a person to build a business they need to engage in some way in the same spaces that a creator does. You would be foolish, for example, if you had a product business and you weren't trying to figure out how to utilize TikTok. And uh, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's a great way to build an audience for any kind of company is to have a really compelling newsletter because then you're in people's inboxes on a regular basis and you're adding value. So, so the tools of a creator are really useful. I don't think that everyone wants to think of themselves as a creator. And actually, very interestingly, LinkedIn is very consciously moving away from the term creator. Now you'll see that throughout LinkedIn they were, they were courting creators, they were talking to their users as creators because people were coming on, they're posting on LinkedIn and therefore the idea was they want to be a creator. But what LinkedIn found, and um, the editor in chief over there, Dan Roth, just told me this, what they found is that most of their users don't actually identify with the word creator. They're a lawyer who posts on LinkedIn, but that lawyer isn't a creator, they're a lawyer. And so I think that that word, which is like many things that have ballooned outward to mean almost, almost anything to the point of uselessness, will probably contract to be a, uh, a hyper specific kind of thing. It's sort of similar to the Gartner hype cycle, right? Which is, um, which is, you know, for people who don't know, is um, a new piece of technology is introduced and then the expectations and the claims for that technology skyrocket way beyond any reasonable expectations and realms of um, rational dialogue. Uh, and then it comes crashing down because it can't possibly meet those expectations. This is, this is what happened in VR for example. And uh, then after that it starts to make its way back up and it finds enlightenment, the slope of enlightenment. It finds its actual usefulness in the world. And that happens with language, it happens with tropes, it happens with technology, it's happening with creators.

Speaker A: Wow, well said. You know, I think I'm guilty of using, I call my impact. Creators are who I, my community. People that want to make an impact in the world. But the truth is a lot more entrepreneurs and I've trained under Tony Robbins. I've been a five year platinum uh, partner. And he describes as this, he was. Most businesses are successful. They have three people that are sort of like um, um, individuals. Like one is an entrepreneur who cares about the bottom line. They're, they're focused on building, growing, making money. It's about the bottom line. The artist which is really the one creating the product or the um, you know, there's an artist even Apple. Like, I mean Steve Jobs would technically be very much an artist, but he was an entrepreneur too. So people can lean between the two and then you need the leader manager. These are the three sort of trifecta what you need in a business. I think creator is sort of like, it's sort of like a little bit more of a nudge towards their entrepreneurs. But they're creating things. It's kind of like a baby of classifying it and, and I agree with you. I, you know I kind of, I'm guilty of like leaning into the creator thing maybe uh, a little more than I should. But deep down I'm a entrepreneur and I'm an artist and I just have always found myself. I'm an entrepreneur first, but I'm also very much an artist. Like given the two, would I go for the bottom line or make sure my product is the way I want it? I always go to the way I want the product. So I guess I'm a little bit more artist. And I don't know what your definition of entrepreneurs is in your world, but.

Speaker B: Well, I mean I just say an entrepreneur is someone who makes things happen for themselves. Because what I found is that the word has been embraced by such a wide variety of people and I really love that. I want to encourage that because even if you don't follow what many people would think of as a traditional entrepreneur path, I think that the tenants of and the way of thinking of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship is so valuable to anybody that I love it, I encourage it, I want Entrepreneur Media, Entrepreneur magazine, to be a big tent kind of experience. But to your point about, you know, how where does the creator fall in these kinds of different categories? I think of it a little like my role at Entrepreneur in that my job is really to make sure that I understand and therefore the brand really understands the audience. Uh, somebody has to be the person who is directly engaging and interfacing with the audience. And I mean that just can't be everybody. Right? We have our sales team, for example, a great sales team. Their job is to understand the marketability of the product and to build great relationships with sponsors. But they're relying upon me, who's in a role of a creator, so to speak. I'm putting things out into the world, people are responding to them and then that drives relationships. That's the reason why I then go out and meet creators, groups of entrepreneurs, or speak at conferences or whatever. It's all because of that customer facing content production that I'm involved in. My job is to understand that, to understand where our users are shifting and what they need and want and how they think and then report that back to the rest of the company. And so that I think is in some way part of the role of a, ah, quote unquote creator. And in a larger organization they're the person who's creating the stuff that people are going to intimately relate to. And look, if you have a larger organization, it's more sophisticated. You should have like a, you know, you should have like a customer research team and a customer success team and all that stuff. But right, but if we're just really boiling it down to archetypes, then I think of the creator as someone who's interfacing with the user and is in dialogue with them and I think that's really valuable.

Speaker A: Mm mhm. Entrepreneurs, the role has completely taken the limelight now. It's it. I remember when I my first business card actually was Scott Martin, Entrepreneur, which I spelled wrong ironically.

Speaker B: You know, I, I, I spelled the word entrepreneur wrong in my email signature when I first started working at Entrepreneur.

Speaker A: So it's a slightly funny, nuanced word. But yeah, you know, and, and uh, and I remember it was. Is that the origins? It's French. Yes. Is um, you know, it was sort of like a fringe thing and now it's, now it's like everybody wants to become an entrepreneur. M. And, and in some ways I love that. In some ways. Is that a trend or is that just. I uh, was just now the direction because that's why I saw A thing from Cody Sanchez, just talking about, they, you know her and a lot of her peers are, if someone's got an mba, they'd rather have someone that's got entrepreneurial background. And I'm like, wow, that is like really big shift changes. What's your sort of take on the shift or the shift that we're moving towards in terms of the world of entrepreneur?

Speaker B: Well, I think that the, it's a good question.

Speaker A: Uh, the, uh.

Speaker B: Okay, let me find a way in on this. The pandemic drove a decade or decades. I should check the numbers. Long, uh, high in new business applications in America. And a very similar thing happened when the 2008, 2009 recession took place. People turned towards entrepreneurship. Why? Well, uh, you know, the rest of the foundation of the economy was crumbling underneath them. And they came to the conclusion, either on their own or because they got laid off, that the only person who would ever really long term care about and defend them would be them. And so they needed to do their best to take control of their own destiny. I think that's a very compelling way of thinking. You could say it's in vogue right now. Certainly is. We have the stories that now support that idea. Uh, if you go back a couple generations and you don't have the stories of Steve Jobs creating Apple in a garage and Mark Zuckerberg creating Facebook after dropping out of college and all of these stories, then the path of the entrepreneur doesn't make sense to people. If someone wants to quit their job and start their own business, their family is going to say, don't do that. Why would you do that? And their friends are going to say, are you crazy? That's a terrible idea. That's what happened a couple of generations ago. Because there weren't these stories of people building, creating their things. And now, now there are. We're, you know, we're really shaped by the large forces that help us understand the narrative of our world. And, um, those forces are stories. And the stories that we tell culturally, they are technology. And, um, one of the major shifts that's taken place in the last, let's just say two decades more, but certainly the last two decades is the degree to which technology has made business creation so much easier. It is just rapidly reducing the barrier to entry. I don't have to handle my own fulfillment anymore. There's companies that will allow me to do it. I don't have to handle my own payment processing anymore. I don't have to hire a cmo. I can find a fractional CMO I can find what, like, it's just. It makes it so much easier to build a business. So that's, That's. Number one is, is the stories that we tell, the cultural stories. Number two is the technology. And number three, which I alluded to at the beginning, is. Is economic forces that they probably in times of, in times in which companies were stable enough that people could get a job and stay in that job for their entire career and feel well compensated and taken care of, which is what people lionize. From the 50s. Whether or not it was true exactly, I don't know. I didn't live through it. But it's certainly the narrative we have of that time. Then it made less sense to start your own business. Why wouldn't you just go work at Ford your entire career? But that's not our economy anymore. So you combine those three things, and I think it's pretty obvious that more and more people would see entrepreneurship as a path. Now why did the word entrepreneur get attached to that? Not some other word? Uh, you know, that's some fluke of language and media and cultural zeitgeist. But I think it makes a lot of sense. That's the way that we're thinking and think that everything changes. And a couple of generations from now, we might have a different understanding of what work is like.

Speaker A: Beautiful. And, you know, you're editing stories and you're seeing, like, I see your posts and social. I don't miss anything you publish.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: And I see you being such a keen, uh, observer of detail. And my question for you is, is my hallucination is that you're really looking for these nuggets, these powerful stories or antidotes or moments in time. And I guess I would ask you, like, having probably more than the average person that's looking at entrepreneurial stories, what stories or what type of stories that you feel are really captivating your attention, that you're really going, this is fucking interesting.

Speaker B: Well, I am, um, especially interested in the personal side of work that's become my obsession. And that came out of the work that I have done and continue to do in understanding change. Because what I found was that the one thing that every successful entrepreneur had in common was this ability to adapt and to recognize that there was no point in holding on to the way that things were, because all that did was hold you back from figuring out how things should be. And the more time that I spent in that work and understanding that, the more I recognized how people bring a real cocktail of emotions to the work that they do. Their identities are often tied up in the work that they do. The challenges that they have in work bleed out into other parts of their lives.

Speaker A: And

Speaker B: you can launch a product and it can fail, and then you can feel like a failure. That's not really fair to yourself. You might have a wonderful family and a great social life, but you feel like a failure. It's just what happens when people really care about their work. It becomes something of themselves. So the shift that I've found, to the degree that it's a shift and not just something that was always there, but is how openly people are willing to engage with that stuff and how much of a deep desire there is to do it. This is the great lesson of the newsletter that I've been producing for the last year, which is called One Thing Better. Uh, uh, you can get it at onethingbetter Email. That's a web address. One thingbetter Email. And I think of it as. As a newsletter about the personal side of work. I think of it almost like, uh, my wife once called it work therapy. And I'll tell you, the thing that's so fascinating about it is that the more personal it gets, the more people respond, the more emails I get, the closer people feel to me, the more they want to share with me, the more they want to engage with me. I think that when you send that kind of signal out and you're really respectful of people and you're not doing it, uh, to parade vulnerability around, but you're in honest dialogue about challenging things, uh, I think that there's a need for that, and we could probably extrapolate that, whatever, blah, blah, blah, digital loneliness and all that stuff. But I think the bottom line of it is just that you got more people building things. And building things is hard and isolating and. And we have an opportunity to connect with each other and recognize that those things that were happening in isolate are actually things that we're all experiencing together. And that's a pretty powerful recognition. So that's something I am very observant of. And a thing that I'm always looking for in interactions and in interviews and in moments is something that just gives me a little additional insight into how people think, think and how people manage. Because I think when you reflect that back to them, they are very grateful.

Speaker A: And, um, they connect, connect to it. If it's something they've gone through themselves. I feel the same way. I felt the same thing. Or that's how I might feel. I'm glad I'm getting An insight here. So that's what I get. I sometimes get like, uh, insights that you're drawing this, like, really simple example of something that just happened or you read about, and I'm like, oh, yeah, there's a really cool little nugget there. So I, uh, really appreciate that. I want to be true to the time that you, um, because we had a tight timeline. Um, is there, um, where would you like people to, uh, follow you so they can follow up with you?

Speaker B: Yeah. Well, thanks for the great conversation. I really appreciate it. Uh, and, um, as you just alluded to the tight timeline, uh, whatever, everybody's busy, blah, blah, blah. But, um, I've just been in a real tailspin of, uh, my calendar lately, so I appreciate you letting this squeeze, uh, in. Um, uh, I would say that the best thing that anybody can do is go to that newsletter that I mentioned. Again, it's one thing better. Email, uh, each week, one way to be more successful and satisfied at work and build a career or company you love. Uh, and, uh, it's something I'm just really passionate about that work. And I read and respond to every response. Uh, if you get the newsletter and you hit respond, it goes to my inbox. I will get back to you. And, uh, I'd love to hear what anyone thought about this conversation or anything else.

Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Speaker B: Hey, thank you.

Speaker A: And for those of you still listening at the end here, um, again, uh, just go to Groundswell fm. Drop a voicemail to me on the mic. Let me know what you think of this episode, any ideas, any feedback, anything you want me to send back to me. Send me a voicemail. I'll forward it on to him. Um, just go ahead and hit the mic, and until next time, mahalo.