My interview on April 23, 2023 with Cory Sylvester (HERE) reveals the heart of an entrepreneur who has been confronted with hundreds of tests that business-builders must pass to make forward progress.
Each business success has a different progression, but entrepreneurs at any stage should find this interview loaded with what business-builders will likely encounter and need to overcome to improve the impact they have on partners, employees, customers, and investors.
Cory's path to entrepreneurship wasn't a straight shot. He landed his first role at JP Morgan unconventionally, but his work ethic propelled him forward. Quickly ascending the ranks – from assistant trader to junior positions, the investment side, analyst, and finally, the coveted hedge fund role – Cory displayed a knack for identifying the tipping point for an investment's viability. However, this talent, he realized, could be applied more broadly than a single portfolio. Fueled by this entrepreneurial vision, Cory ventured out to create his own ventures: Union Realtime, Radius+, DXD Capital, and Managespace.
The inception of these businesses began in 2017 while Cory was investigating the self-storage industry; public announcements of new self-storage facilities seemed like a guaranteed recipe for supply exceeding demand. But upon diving deeper, a crucial ingredient was missing: accurate data. That's when the spark for Radius+ ignited.
It took two years for Cory and his partners to build the database that has formed the bedrock of Radius+, and this interview covers how flexible Cory and his partners had to be to “push through” the tough times. Each of the partners have had to learn skills to survive and thrive that they never knew or understood, and key to those for Cory were sales skills, which wound up pushing the company past a critical moment in its evolution. Successfully building those skills left a positive impression on the people he met in the industry who have gone on to be significant contributors to his expanding ventures.
In this video he speaks about his fears, motivations, obstacles, set-backs and disappointments. He describes where his determination comes from and what it has taken him to continue to pour his energy into the process of building these companies. He talks about lessons he has learned along the way, how his day-to-day activities and responsibilities have changed, how he broke through as a newcomer to the industry, how they took a huge risk on a pricing strategy, and how he has dealt with his fears.
You don’t need to be an entrepreneur to appreciate this hour-long interview; there are lessons for everyone in this discussion.
Cory can be found at any of the following:
is active on X, and I highly recommend you follow him at @StorageDataDev.
https://www.radiusplus.com/
https://www.dxd.capital/
https://www.unionrealtime.com/about-us/