Authenticity
Hi, I’m Eric, founder & CEO of Amari, a new supplement company that provides active lifestyle consumers with convenient, effective products that help them to play longer and recover faster.
We’ve started posting to LinkedIn about our experience launching a company and a product in the times of COVID. Our goal is to share what learn in the hopes that you will find it helpful as you navigate these unprecedented times.
Prior to forming Amari, I spent over a decade working at a nonprofit incubator that helped start ups in the local Boulder community and commercialize technology from a university setting.
I was fortunate enough to interact with roughly 700 startups, work directly with over 70 of these companies and another 300+ faculty research teams looking to bring their inventions to market.
I definitely got the feeling from companies who reached out to us for help thought we had a magic wand or some sort of cookbook for startups. The recipe was something like; one-part good idea, two parts customer, three parts funding and a dash of luck. Shake well and sit back and watch the profits flow in.The reality is that there is no recipe to follow even though many entrepreneurs wanted a map that showed them an established path to walk that would reduce the risk.
These days, our world faces unprecedented uncertainty, challenges, changes and economic pressures. As a result, now more than ever is the time to be authentic and blaze your own path.
Authenticity to me is having the gravitas to do what you feel is right regardless of what popular opinion might be. Everybody wants to follow in the footsteps of people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Reality is that each of those entrepreneurs were presented with an opportunity with a unique set of resources at a particular point in time. While it is nice to want to emulate the impact they have had on the world, you can never follow the same path they walked.
As an entrepreneur, it is your job to run your opportunity through your personal filters and apply your unique set of advantages to your situation. That is authenticity.
Whether you wanted it or not, we’re living in a world changed by COVID for the foreseeable future and that means everyone is figuring this out as we go. As entrepreneurs, authenticity and the willingness to take risks will help you figure out your own path through the maze ahead. No one is going to do it for you.
One very real emotion that personally has held me back from being authentic is fear. Fear of being wrong, the fear of being humiliated and the fear of failure. A big change occurred for me when I realized that no one really knows what they’re doing. Some just have a higher level of confidence in the approach.
The key is knowing when you’re wrong, identifying those moments and making the course corrections needed to fix it. As simple as that sounds, it’s hard to do in practice and will only become more important as the world moves faster and continues to change at an unprecedented pace due to political, economic, and biological/virus pressures.
My background
Prior to Amari, I spent 10+ years working with early stage CPG companies and commercializing technology from a University setting. We leveraged a community-based model that put the best domain experts in the room with our client companies. I was fortunate enough to learn from those experiences and now apply those lessons as an operator. Eric at AmariBotanicals.com.
