Business
On this episode of the Superpowers podcast, Bill and Chris have a passionate conversation with the infectiously optimistic David Kidder, New York Times Best-selling author of The Startup Playbook and The Intellectual Devotional, and the co-founder of Bionic, a company that installs models and strategies to help large businesses grow. David’s professional journey began at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he studied industrial design, played lacrosse and began his decades-long career as a founder and entrepreneur. A self-proclaimed “interdisciplinary nerd” with a love for making things, by age 28 David had founded and sold personalized mobile content provider Smart Ray for $40 million. David then embarked on his journey to becoming a writer. “I started doing back-to-back interviews with entrepreneurs.” He wanted to learn the keys to making a successful business. “I would ask them two questions, how do you bet your life and what do you do in the first five years not to die? That became the Startup Playbook.” In 2013, David started Bionic. As he told Bill and Chris, “It’s a service company that helps large enterprises grow and we do that by installing growth operating systems. It’s the idea that venture capital and entrepreneurship are forms of management.” Today, Bionic takes in over $20 million annually in revenue with 55 employees and 10 clients. Through all of his successes, David has relied on his superpower – an ability to act on his obsessions and turn them into passions: “My philosophy is centered around the concept of ‘overcoming’…it’s all about falling in love with the grind, it’s the learning, it’s the ugliness of it. If you can’t get your spirit to be satisfied with that, you’re going to be very dissatisfied with the decisions you make in your life.”