Ben Jabbawy
CEO at Privy
Go getter and ecommerce extraordinaire Ben Jabbawy is the founder and CEO of Privy. His passion for entrepreneurship has helped him empower and inspire hundreds of thousands of small to medium sized business for nearly a decade and he's not stopping now!
Who is your hero? (In business, life, or both.)
My hero in life and in business is my father. He came to the U.S. alone, without a penny to his name. He worked hard, took risks and was able to put himself through MIT, raise a family and provide his family with incredible values and an entrepreneurial spirit.
What’s the single best piece of business advice that helped shape who you are as an entrepreneur today, and why?
Entrepreneurship is about conviction and optimism. While building out this business and previous businesses, I’ve seen time and time again that investors, customers, and recruiters all seem to say “no” to entrepreneurs.
But I remember reading something that Jason Lemkin (founder of Docusign) wrote that has really stuck with me: If you can get to 10 customers, you can get to 100. If you can get to 100 customers, you can get to 1,000, and so on.
What’s the biggest mistake you ever made in your business, and what did you learn from it that others can learn from too?
It’s so easy to look for comparable companies and say, “If this is how they sell their product and go to market, the same can work for us.”
I’ve mistakenly felt so much team and investor pressure to move faster that I’ve blindsided the internal feelings that our company is different. As the founder, you need to have patience and be willing to test things that work for your business, even if they fail. You also need to be willing to be brutally honest about tests that fail. Making key hires before you understand basic business issues could be detrimental.