131: Top 20 Countdown

Top 20 Countdown: Week 11

Welcome to Innovation City—powered by Venture Cafe—where Tyler Kelley and Michael Johnson, Co-Founders of SLAM! Agency, interview innovators, creators, and disruptors to discover how business is changing in the modern world.

Created and produced by SLAM! Agency in cooperation with Venture Cafe St. Louis and Venture Cafe Miami, Innovation City gives you an inside look at how rapidly business and culture are changing thanks to increasing diversity and inclusion, heightened creativity, and a stronger and better-connected business community. Venture Cafe is the largest combined gathering of entrepreneurs and innovators anywhere in the world. Events are held every Thursday in St. Louis, Miami, and other leading innovation cities around the globe.

Today’s episode is the eleventh of several highlight shows where we are taking a look back at our top 20 favorite interviews and conversations of all time. Today’s featured guests are:

• Ben Mizes, CEO and Co-Founder of Clever Real Estate
• Miriam Dorsett, Connection Doctor at Chibur

Some key points from Ben at Clever Real Estate:

• How little money can you spend to prove your idea?
• Proving your idea in stages
• How to test ideas to prove viability
• Don’t build something no one wants
• Starting Clever for under $200, with 1 landing page and a few phone calls
• How the real estate market has changed in the last 15-20 years
• How real estate commission rates are changing
• Why buyers will always prefer a human Real Estate Agent over an AI Real Estate Agent
• The hardest thing about running any company
• How to compete with massive competitors
• Pitching to investors
• Pitching to employees & selling your passion
• Finding financial freedom thanks to real estate investing
• Learning every job in your field to build the base of knowledge you need to be a better manager
• Listen or watch Ben’s full episode here

Some key points from Miriam at Chibur:

• Working with community organizations
• Finding people who are already doing good things and helping them accelerate their work
• Mentoring people at early stages of their careers
• Various forms of connection are necessary for growth
• Connecting to others, connecting to yourself
• Becoming a writer
• Writing as a tool of empowerment, of establishing and clarifying a sense of self
• Writing for oneself vs. writing for work
• Working with other writers and contracting out to other writers
• Writers need to unionize; why don’t writers have more power?
• Project IA; a tool for writers to put their work up for sale, where companies and publishers can bid on their work
• The struggle to remain present and stay off the phone
• “What Should I Caption This Picture?” Writing captions in advance for Instagram, by the time she was done, Miriam had written 700 pages of captions
• The importance of putting out positivity and refraining from negativity
• The importance of continuous creation
• Listen or watch Miriam’s full episode here