There has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. Being an entrepreneur requires nimbleness, flexibility and creativity above all else. If you are an innovator, it’s an exciting world full of possibilities. But if you run a traditional business, figuring out how to succeed in this dynamic world can be a challenge. We sat down with Sheera Goren, co-founder of Zygo, the first wireless headphones for streaming underwater audio, to discuss her greatest lessons in entrepreneurship and how larger businesses can start to think and innovate like a startup. We spoke to Sheera about:

• How startups make decisions about company strategy

• Managing the challenge of needing to be a “jack-of-all-trades”

• Risk and how to manage it

• How to benchmark goals for growth

Of the thousands of business ventures that entrepreneurs launch every year, many never get off the ground. As an entrepreneur, how do make decisions regarding company strategy?

On the fly! You cannot predict everything that is coming so you have to do the best you can with the information you have at the time.

The genesis for Zygo was a swimming class that we originally thought was the business but within five months, we realised the margins weren’t there. Everyone wanted the hardware piece of it. So, we pivoted into hardware as an organic turn based on customer feedback.

My biggest piece of advice when it comes to strategy is that you must listen to feedback from your customers. Your actual business might be a subset of what you originally went to market with. Your strategy might shift based on market circumstances you could have never predicted, and that’s OK but you have to be willing to change direction.

At Zygo, we make a lot decisions based on customer feedback but alongside that there is also a level of intuition. It’s scary because you never really know if you’re making the right decision, but you have to listen to your gut.

The problems entrepreneurs confront every day would overwhelm most managers. How do you manage the different challenges, especially in areas where you are not an expert?

The biggest thing is to learn your own weaknesses very quickly and be honest about what you don’t know. The best asset for an entrepreneur is to be resourceful and this is a lesson that can translate into any business. Know that you don’t know everything and ask as many questions as possible. You can always find your way to the answer. The problem you are trying to solve is the easy part. The business side of things is sometimes more challenging!

The fact is that you will never know everything. You might make mistakes, but you won’t make them twice. And the people you’re asking who have the answers probably learned from their own mistakes in the past. Remember that nothing is too far-fetched even if you’ve never done it before.

What risks have you had to take? How did you manage them?

From a personal finance perspective, I went from a successful legal career to a startup with no salary so it was, at first, a significant personal financial risk.

There was also a general risk of failure and the constant question of whether our business would succeed. When I started Zygo with my co-founder Charlie, I was 30 years old and at that time, it really felt like I should have been further along in my career, rather than starting over. There was a lot of pressure to be successful.

I think this fear is especially significant for women in business. There’s a fear that if you don’t know it, you can’t do it. And even if you have the best ideas in the world, the fear of not knowing how to do something will stop so many women from even starting. You need to be confident enough to learn and grow.

Today, the biggest risk that weighs on me is not being able to return investor money. The happiest day of my life will be when we can repay all the investors who believed in us.

Of course, the startup world inherently comes with risk, but you have to believe in what you’re doing. It’s about finding your “why.” And this is something that is important for everyone, in any business. There will always be challenges and obstacles, but if you believe in your product or your business, you can manage the risks. At Zygo, we continue to be bullish on the category. Of course, we don’t know what will happen but we do know that the world is not going to go back to not streaming underwater so we’re confident in the future.

How do you benchmark your goals for growth?

To put things simply, as long as we are growing in any capacity, it’s a good thing. Going into this year, the key things we’re looking at is that product issues are going down (ie: the product is getting better) and that we’re putting all the learnings to date into Zygo 2.0. Our goal is to get a second product to market that is significantly better in performance.

It’s also important to note that sales numbers are not our only marker of growth. It’s about company and product growth and the health of the business as a whole.

What’s one lesson that larger companies can learn from an entrepreneurial mindset?

One major challenge for larger companies is that they can’t often be as close to the product as a start-up and as a result, they can’t pivot as quickly. It’s like righting a big ship – it takes forever for change to happen. Having more nimbleness in our product roadmap and our overall strategy is something that we are going to try to maintain even as we grow.

One of the biggest lessons we learned was about product design. Our first product was built from the outside in meaning we had our engineers make a product to work within a specific design and concept. However, we have since learned that we need to build from the inside out. Instead, we will make a product that will work as well as it possibly can and then design around it.

Zygo was recently named one of Time Magazine’s Best Inventions for 2022. For more information on Zygo, go to https://shopzygo.com/