Game Changers Do Business Differently

After many months in the making, we are so excited to introduce our latest feature, Game Changers. Game changers are those entrepreneurs who change how business is done, regardless of industry. Over the past couple of years, I have met many game changers and have walked away impressed with not only their accomplishments, but how they see the world and do business differently. The 2010 Game Changers featured in this issue represent the most exciting entrepreneurs in the NYC area.

Here are a few attributes the game changers share:

• They indentify opportunities that others do not see, like Barry Silbert, who as an investment banker noticed the need for transparency and centralization in the trading of illiquid financial products.
• They scale their businesses faster and often with fewer resources, like Nihal Mehta who leveraged existing technologies to create one of the top mobile apps in less than a year.
• They understand that your are either on the right side of business velocity or the wrong side, like Eric Litman, who anticipated the Apple App Store would revolutionize the mobile industry before it even launched.
• They either develop new business models or transform old ones, like Fabrice Grinda, who realized he could create a more sophisticated, more profitable, global Craigslist.
• For the complete stories of all this year’s game changers, click here.

I have learned a lot by speaking with game changers about their businesses. Perhaps the most important thing I have learned is very closely related to a common definition of the word “entrepreneur”: someone who indentifies and pursues an opportunity without regard to the resources they currently control. Game Changers find opportunities and aggressively go after them, and do so by building new business models so they can scale quickly, often without a lot of resources.

Many of us went into business because, among other things, we believed we had a better way of doing things and wanted to change the game. But as you build a company, you get bogged down with things like managing people, and doing things the way your clients and vendors think you should be doing them. So, some of those things that you originally had in mind when starting, give way to more conventional ways of doing business. Over the past year or so, I try to spend at least two hours per week outside of the office with a notepad, without the distraction of emails and other interruptions, so that I can think strategically about how to significantly grow my business. Said another way, I am trying to change my own game.

How are you working to change yours?

P.S. – To assemble this list of Game Changers, we reached out to many respected business pioneers to find out who they believe are truly disrupting business as we know it. Many thanks to those who helped us identify this year’s Game Changers.