In this episode, I chat with Vinny Lingham about his time spent working in a corporate career and how it acted as a stepping stone to entrepreneurship. With a hunger for knowledge and an appreciation for information, Vinny is a massive advocate for skill-building experience and it’s evident in the way he talks about work and career opportunities.

Hailing from East London in South Africa, he spent time in the corporate world before branching out to start his own companies. After building his first businesses, a search engine marketing platform in 2003 and incubators in South Africa, he moved to Silicon Valley to build up more tech entrepreneur experience. In 2015, Vinny started Civic, an identity platform, which is his current focus to develop to adapt in the COVID-shaken world.

Aiming for knowledge over experience

Coming from debt, being cash-strapped, and having learnt through a year of failed attempts to start things, from franchising to working on his dad’s business to trying to build businesses.

“I made lots of mistakes back then, it was a difficult time… I did a whole bunch of things that all failed. I moved on. That was a lost year, but I learnt a lot. ”

To fund himself through a couple of difficult years, Vinny got a full-time corporate job. In his time working in corporate life, the most important thing he realised was how crucial it is to learn on the job. To work hard and gain lessons through dynamic data and changing information make the hours working for someone else worthwhile. If you’re working in a corporate company and hope to start your own business at some point, Vinny’s advice is to make sure you are gaining worthwhile insights from your experience:

“If you work in a business where it’s dynamic and things are changing and you’re learning new things every single day, you need to maximise those hours. You need to plough in as many hours as you can. If you work twice as hard as everyone else, you can learn twice as fast in a business where data is changing. If you can develop specialised skills in a certain area and you raise yourself, especially in a new industry that’s emerging, you become an expert, you can find a gap in the market and start your own business.” 

It’s important to realise that having a “wealth of experience” is not a good representation of how much a person can offer. More often than not, this is one of the biggest fallacies which corporates companies often buy into: A candidate for a job requires X number of years, and they’ll rule out the perfect person because of “inexperience” despite the treasure chest of information they might have. As Vinny pointed out, this creates a niche gap in the market which means the knowledgeable job-seeker will tend towards starting a new company rather than fighting for a job.

The fallacy of the work-life balance

Too many people are ambitious but aren’t willing to work hard to achieve. There needs to be intention to work to align with the ambition for results. And the two need to work together. You can’t only work smart and you can’t only work hard. If you try to balance your work and career and your leisure and your life at 50/50, you don't really give either enough they need. But if you can integrate both your work and your life, letting each other feed, then they can complement one another.

“If you’re trying to create wealth, then you can’t have a work-life balance because the opportunities that present itself don’t care about your life.”

The scarcity vs abundance mindset

Growing up in South Africa makes one guarded about losing something, which leads to a “scarcity mindset” and a conservative fear to mitigate risk. In developed economies, on the other hand, there seems to be a more prominent “abundant mindset”, where there is not the same drive to cling on to something out of fear of losing it. 

“If I could go back in time and change one thing, I would have done differently is I would have moved away from South Africa earlier to adjust [and adopt an abundance mindset].”

On this point, Vinny noted that to combat issues of scarcity mindset means keeping overheads low, and take calculated risks, while reducing expenses to combat possible loss. Be frugal to be abundant and maintain cash-flow. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, to be abundant, there needs to be an element of constraint. 

To young startup founders: Just take the damn advice

In closing, Vinny offered a key piece of guidance:

Learn from the mistakes others have made already. The advice hasn’t changed over years and learning through your own mistakes when you can avoid them makes for unnecessary use of time, energy, love and money.

“I got all the advice I could have got. I just didn’t listen. Listen to people who have been there and done it. Don’t mistake the same mistakes they made and listen to what they have to say.”

You can find Vinny on Twitter, or through his website.