Episode #315: Sergei and Vadim Revzin on the Entrepreneurial Journey

Sergei Revzin is a Venture Investor at the NYU Innovation Venture Fund where he leads the university’s technology investments. He has mentored hundreds of entrepreneurs all over the country through his work with Venture for America, and has been an early employee and founder at tech companies in NYC and Boston.
Vadim Revzin is an Entrepreneur in Residence at GenFKD, a national non-profit, where he teaches entrepreneurship at State University of New York. He’s advised hundreds of startups, and has been both a founder and leader across several early and growth stage startups.
Sergei and Vadim co-host a weekly podcast called The Mentors, featuring stories from successful founders and creators.

We explored a number of topics pertaining to both the entrepreneurial journey, breaking out of traditional family values, how to overcome the challenges of being an early stage startup, as well as innovation inside large companies such as Cisco, so sit back and enjoy, what happens to be my first episode with identical twins, Vadim and Sergei Revzin.

Topics Discussed:

- Being identical twins

- Early stage startups

- Common traits amongst successful people

- The value of diverse experiences

- Breaking out of traditional family values

- Getting buy-in

- How to encourage entrepreneurial thinking

- The value of encouraging external pursuits

- Why extrinsic motivation is not enough

- Innovation at Cisco

- The corporate spin-in model