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Terry Hsiao is an entrepreneur, advisor, and investor with extensive experience in cloud software, mobile apps, wireless networks, and fintech. He has founded multiple companies in the mobile ecosystem that Sybase, Verifone, and Kaleyra acquired. He also helped with Kaylera’s (de)SPAC public listing on NYSE in November 2019. For the past three years, he has created and taught a sequence of four courses on entrepreneurship at Marymount University in Arlington, VA. Terry has shown a knack for transforming novel ideas into thriving businesses, emphasizing innovation and scalable growth. In his entrepreneurial journey, Terry won multiple pitch competitions and received awards such as Entrepreneur of the Year from the Asian American Chamber of Commerce and Top 100 Minority Entrepreneurs in 2017. He shares his best advice to a first-time entrepreneur in today’s choppy waters.
Editor’s note: This is the seventh in a series of guest posts where people from all walks of life share their best advice in times like these. A big thanks to the leaders who volunteered to share their life experiences. Reflection on the past is a deeply personal exercise. The willingness to share it with the world, especially in the written form, is a commendable act of vulnerability. For this alone, they have my deepest gratitude.
My Best Advice
“My advice is to assume your business will be wildly successful.
Number one, it helps you visualize it. As kids growing up in our back yard, we visualized making the last-second shot to win the game. We visualized hitting the home run, bases loaded, two outs, in the bottom of the ninth. Visualizing success puts you in a positive attitude and frame of mind. It points you toward thinking very deeply—deeper than anyone else—about the problem, the solution, and the ecosystem.The other reasonyou want to assume you’ll be wildly successful is it puts you in the frame of mind where you do not cut corners, don’t do anything stupid that you’d regret, and you don’t burn any bridges.”
