Be Selfishly Selfless: Interview with Derek Lidow, Founder and Former CEO of iSuppli​

I recently with one on one with Derek Lidow. Derek is the founder and former CEO of iSuppli​ and the author of the new book The Entrepreneurs: The Relentless Quest for Value.

Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?

Derek: Thank you, Adam.

I was trained as a scientist. I nevertheless felt that being a scientist would be too lonely. When I got my PhD in Applied Physics, I went to work in industry developing new devices like lasers and semiconductors. Once in the real world, I was surprised to find that the people who were getting promoted were not necessarily the smartest. This confused me at first. I thought that meritocracies always promoted the smartest people. It took me a few years to figure out that the people I admired and who were getting promoted were the people good at leading others. To be successful you didn’t need to be the most knowledgeable or the best scientists. Of course, being comfortable with technology was an added plus for someone who ultimately had to lead engineers and scientists. 

Once I figured that out I spent all the time I could learning about leadership. That’s when my career started to take off. After 19 years I was promoted to be the CEO of a large global public semiconductor company. After five successful years as CEO I yearned to develop my own ideas and I left to found my own company from scratch. 

Over the next eleven years I grew my company to become a global leader in the market research arena. Then, a much larger company came along and bought us. Shortly thereafter, Princeton University contacted me about teaching entrepreneurship, which is what I have been doing for the past dozen years. I have developed four different classes,  written three books and over 100 articles about entrepreneurship, innovation, and leadership. 

I feel very fortunate to have had the unique experience of being a successful big tech company CEO, a founder of a successful tech company, and now teacher and scholar on what makes entrepreneurs successful.

Adam: What do you hope readers take away from your new book?

Derek: I hope readers take away five things from reading my latest book, which is called “The Entrepreneurs: The Relentless Quest for Value.

First, entrepreneurs have much even bigger impacts on how we live our lives than we realize. Matter of fact, they are the single greatest influence on how we live. They impact how we live our lives more than governments, religions, or big businesses.

Second, my book describes how entrepreneurs impact the world on such a large scale and how they are responsible for most of the innovation that excites us.

Third, while entrepreneurs are responsible for creating and delivering almost all the things we enjoy, make us healthy and feel safe, their innovations have unintended consequences that we often overlook or miss. Some of these unintended consequences, like entrepreneur enabled climate change, now actually threaten our existence.

Fourth, throughout time, governments have been ineffective in controlling entrepreneurs and the unintended consequences of their innovations. Legislators, and even autocratic rulers, do not understand how entrepreneurship works and therefore implement rules and regulations that are almost always misguided.

Fifth, armed with this new understanding of how entrepreneurship works, there are some simple things we can do to entice entrepreneurs to spend more of their productive efforts on helping solve the problems they instigated, like climate change and inequality. This makes the book worth reading, but I will add that the book is written as a series of stories, so it is a fun and interesting read for anyone.

Adam: How did you come up with your business idea and know it was worth pursuing? What advice do you have for others on how to come up with and test business ideas?

Derek: If you are asking about how I came up with my book idea, it was because I was shocked about how much bigger impact entrepreneurs had on our lives than I, a teacher of entrepreneurship, ever realized. I thought this was important for everyone to know.

If you are asking about the idea I had for the company I started, I created the company to track the tech world’s value chains in new ways, in ways I asked for as a CEO but nobody could provide to me. I was making 100-million dollar decisions without critical bits of information. So, I put my money where my mouth was, and I retired as CEO and started a company to provide this information. I knew other CEOs wanted this information just as much as I had. 

In both instances, I knew that knowledge was needed and if I could find it, it would be valuable. Of course, as an entrepreneur who founded a company, I was able to monetize the information I discovered. Now, in academia, I publish for everyone to read and to use as they see fit.

Adam: What were the key steps you took to grow your business? What advice do you have for others on how to take their businesses to the next level?

Derek: My first book, Startup Leadership, is explicitly about how you grow an idea into a value producing self-sustaining enterprise. Many of my Forbes pieces have been about this as well. 

Growing your business is tricky. I know too many founders where growth has stalled out. I know others who grew without the right prerequisites in place and ultimately lost or destroyed their businesses. My advice would be to seek out advice from others about what foundations need to be in place to maintain control while accelerating growth. Growing a business is not a one-person job.

Adam: What are your best sales and marketing tips?

Derek: The best salespeople can sell just about anything. If a salesperson isn’t making sales, then you need to get someone else that can. Sales is a profession with its own specific skills sets, which both you and your salespeople should know. 

Marketing is a different beast because marketing smartphone apps is different than marketing running shoes, which is different than marketing airplanes to airlines. But there is one thing that all the best marketers have in common. They all know, understand, and empathize with their customers, whether it be a consumer, big global business, or otherwise anonymous user of their app. This allows them to think like their customers and potential customers, which then helps them determine the who, what, when, and where of how to sell to them.

Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader? How can leaders and

aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?

Derek: Effective leaders make everyone around them feel they will be successful. They do that by outlining a vision of the future that everyone around the leader wants to be part of and feels is likely to happen. 

Leadership is a skill set. 

Effective leaders are self-aware. They know what they are capable of and know when to ask for help.

They are good at creating and building relationships to build successful teams.

They know how to motivate people to get others to dedicate their lives to achieving the leader’s vision.

They know how to lead change by making people want to change rather than resisting change.

Finally, startup leaders understand—and can architect—how value is created from ideas and then turned into tangible enterprises. 

To take leadership to the next level, someone needs only to improve their mastery of one or more of these skill sets. Improving mastery of a skill comes from practicing the skill with ever increasing standards, aided by good coaching.

Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?

Derek: Leaders with the five skill sets I just listed understand how to get others excited about joining their teams and dedicating themselves to making the leader’s vision a reality. In so doing, team members visualize their own success. Successful leaders continuously reenforce the understanding of their team members about how achieving their vision will them successful. Their vision clearly describes everyone’s role and how it complements everyone else’s role. 

Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?

Derek: 1. Invest in knowing yourself because that leads you to understand when to ask for help and how to improve your skill sets most productively.

2. You succeed by helping those around you succeed.

3. Understand your customers deeply and empathetically. That includes both external and internal customers.

Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?

Derek: You succeed by being selfishly selfless. In other words, you can get what you want, but you get it most effectively by getting others to help you achieve. And you get others to help you by helping them succeed first, before you.


Adam Mendler is the CEO of The Veloz Group, where he co-founded and oversees ventures across a wide variety of industries. Adam is also the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. Adam has written extensively on leadership, management, entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities and non-profit organizations.

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Adam Mendler