Family Dinner: Jim Streibich

Each week, The Garage is excited to welcome an experienced entrepreneur to join us for Family Dinner to share their founder story and some food with our Residents. It’s obviously our favorite day of the week--we listen to music, catch up on successes and failures, and get need to know advice straight from the source. This week, we got a chance to get to know Jim Streibich, Founder of Market Track and maybe more importantly, a former Wildcat! Through Market Track, Jim has revolutionized the price monitoring industry by pairing traditional marketing information with new and emerging technologies. He pulled from his experience with consumer package goods and marketing to totally change the game offering information, data on pricing, and analytics. These days, Jim is serving as a chairman of the company and is also investing in and advising technology based marketing companies. Jim received his BA and MBA from Northwestern, with a concentration on marketing and entrepreneurship.What advice did Jim have for our student founders? First, hard work. While there is the occasional unicorn, Jim shared that the basis of entrepreneurship is grit and hard work. If students are willing to work hard now, it will pay off. What else? Be disruptive. Even in your own company. Reiterating operations, products, or technology will keep a startup fresh and will ensure another new company doesn’t knock it out. Think about ways to change often. Like many entrepreneurs, Jim has also faced challenges. He cited the importance of establishing a good reputation in the market that is being addressed, and that it sometimes takes a lot of patience to establish that reputation. At The Garage, we are doing all we can to connect our students with the resources that they need to be successful and one of the most valuable resources we deliver is access to our extended network of vetted experts in every field. Jim reminded our students to take advantage of the people they know, reaching out for help when they need it, and always taking in advice. Finally, Jim talked about the simplicity but extreme importance of recruiting good salespeople and how they can really make things happen.Check out a clip of Jim’s talk with our students at The Garage below, and be sure to stay in the loop and find out who else we’ve had and sign up for our monthly newsletter here.