The Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center has launched the Milestone Makers Program. The Milestone Makers Program, seeks to help early- to mid-stage entrepreneurs set, hit, and celebrate milestones that drive their businesses forward. Each Monday, we will feature one of the selected candidates in the program's inaugural class. Today, meet Lucian Tarnowski.
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Founders: Lucian Tarnowski
- Categories: Education, Communities, Knowledge Management, Enterprise Software
- Website: https://bravenew.com
Milestone: Unleash our collective human potential via our online community platform.
Tell me your name and about your company?
I'm Lucian Tarnowski, Founder and CEO of BraveNew. We're an online community platform that focuses on encouraging professionals to learn from each other. We help individuals share knowledge, new innovations, and best practices with each other through peer to peer learning.
What milestones do you dream about reaching in your lifetime?
My lifetime mission is to help unleash our collective human potential. I would think of that less as a milestone and more of a life direction. We have reached a unique moment in history where we now have the technology, the means, and the appetite to really make the most of individuals to achieve our collective human potential.
What do you do on days where your goals feel out of reach?
One of my favorite quotes is from Mark Twain where he asked, "What are the two most important days of your life?" and his answer was "The day I was born and the day I found out why I was born." Which I absolutely love. It's this whole notion of finding your purpose and following it with passion and integrity. The journey of an entrepreneur is like a roller coaster. You have good days, you have bad days, you have good weeks, and you have bad weeks. On difficult days I remind myself that this is my life's work, I remind myself of the ‘why.’ It takes time, it takes patience, and it takes perseverance and persistence. It's really hard. Remind yourself of what your mission is and be really resilient and really relentless in what you're trying to achieve.
Is there an early milestone you've reached that's filled you with immense pride?
From the company's perspective it is hitting cash flow positive. It just feels like a major milestone when you don't have to continuously rely on investor's capital to keep the business going. That was a really difficult one to achieve and one we certainly celebrated.
On a personal front, five years ago I got into the Young Global Leader's Community with the World Economic Forum and this was just a phenomenal opportunity where I really learned more than I have from any other opportunity. I've been surrounded by a thousand young people from around the world in the business sector, social sector, politics, and academia. I've learned so many things from my friends and peers in that community it's just been an enormous honor.
How do you celebrate not so common successes?
There are celebrations with the team certainly. This is just typically having beers or lunch together to celebrate what we're doing. I think we need to do more of that actually, celebrating more steps on the way.
Celebrations with my wife who I think of as my biggest support in many ways, the reason why I'm able to do what I do. I have what I call my ‘bedroom board,’ and then there is that satisfaction of feeling that you're going in the right direction. Often it's easy as an entrepreneur to think about what is not going right, rather than the steps you're taking that are in the right direction.
About BraveNew:
The BraveNew platform enables scalable learning by powering engaging online spaces for professional communities to share knowledge. BraveNew powered communities enable multi-stakeholder groups to quickly assemble fully tagged, searchable knowledge bases leveraging machine-aided and peer-to-peer content curation. Through a design thinking methodology, peer-to-peer learning environments, and deep analytics, BraveNew is revolutionizing how knowledge can be shared and scaled.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
