NU Law grad Ben Hernandez and Samara Mejia Hernandez at the law school on Thursday, October 19th, 2017. Photos by Jasmin Shah.
This week’s DPELC-MSL Speaker Series featured Samara Mejia Hernandez and Benjamin Hernandez. Samara is an early stage investor at MATH Venture Partners and Benjamin is the Founder & CEO of NuMat Technologies. Though they are now fixtures in their industries, their personal and professional backgrounds differed from that of a lot of their peers. The married couple interviewed each other at the event and had a candid discussion about their non-traditional paths to entrepreneurship. Here are a few insightful quotes from their conversation:
On what makes someone an entrepreneur: There’s a whole myth of what an entrepreneur looks like. They look a certain way and have a certain background, but I don’t believe that at all. Some of the most successful people I’ve seen are not what you see in TV shows or movies in terms of what an entrepreneur is. We need to dispel that myth immediately. We all have ideas – probably some of them are good ideas, most of them are really bad ideas but we think they’re good ideas. The main factor that makes an entrepreneur is, are you willing to act on that? Are you willing to have the courage to take risks? Because there are some risks, and it’s frightening, and if you are someone who has benchmarked yourself against the top percent of society academically, it’s really scary to deviate from that path.” – Benjamin
On finding a job in venture capital: There’s no clear path. I just went to 1871 and asked startups how I could help. I needed the experience. I started helping out startups. A lot of what I was doing was networking. I was providing value to companies, providing value to VCs and I still didn’t have a job. But a lot of it is networking, a lot of it is doing the job before you’re actually doing it. – Samara
On legal training and entrepreneurship: A lot of times there’s the adage that lawyers are fundamentally risk averse, and I don’t think that’s true. I think that comes from lawyers, if you practice law, ultimately your job is risk management. That’s really what you’re doing however you distill it. If you think about what it is to be an entrepreneur, yes you take the risk of taking a leap, but that’s more of a personal characteristic or desire, but then your job as a CEO or someone in a leadership role of a startup is basically removing risk from businesses. When you systematically remove risk from businesses, their value goes up. That can be technical risk, IP risk, commercial risk. So, the lawyer’s toolset of issue spotting, systematically understanding risk, and prioritizing them is a valuable toolkit that translates well to entrepreneurial environments. – Benjamin
On diversity in tech: How do we change it? I believe we get more underrepresented groups into the investing roles… Once you have more women and other underrepresented groups becoming founders and having successful exits, and being able to invest that back into the community as angel investors, that’s going to change as well. Because there’s going to be more people that look like them and are going to be able to raise money from them. – Samara
