Alejandro Juarez Crawford: Democratizing Entrepreneurship

The Sydcast

Episode Summary

How do we make it easier for people around the world to learn and get the tools to innovate and become entrepreneurs? In this episode, founder Alejandro Juárez Crawford shares his answer: RebelBase, a company that is helping people understand problems and launch experiments that can become solutions. Erudite and articulate, Alejandro is that unique leader who can share his philosophy about innovation and purpose while grounded in the everyday reality of what works and what doesn’t.

Sydney Finkelstein

Syd Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He holds a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Finkelstein has published 25 books and 90 articles, including the bestsellers Why Smart Executives Fail and Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent, which LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman calls the “leadership guide for the Networked Age.” He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Management, a consultant and speaker to leading companies around the world, and a top 25 on the Global Thinkers 50 list of top management gurus. Professor Finkelstein’s research and consulting work often relies on in-depth and personal interviews with hundreds of people, an experience that led him to create and host his own podcast, The Sydcast, to uncover and share the stories of all sorts of fascinating people in business, sports, entertainment, politics, academia, and everyday life.

Alejandro Juárez Crawford

Alejandro Juárez Crawford, co-founder & CEO, leads RebelBase, the SaaS equipping students, employees, and citizens to build solutions of their own. He serves as a Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Bard MBA in Sustainability. Previously, he led the boutique consultancy Acceleration Group. He earned his BA at Cornell and his MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Crawford led RebelBase as it built and successfully commercialized its library of educational modules, cloud-based interactive tools, and state-of-the-art methodology. In 2020-2021, his research has expanded to university systems from Bangladesh to Kyrgyzstan, through Bard’s new course sequence for changemakers supported by the Open Society University Network. He writes and speaks widely on expanding access to innovation, and keynotes events such as Erasmus+ ISYEC and Europe’s Towards Collaborative Practice. Recent publications include “An Ecosystem Framework for Credentialing Entrepreneurs,” from the Research Triangle Institute, and a chapter in the Federal Reserve’s Investing in America’s Workforce (Upjohn, 2018). In 2020 he co-won the Roddenberry Award to create a documentary about game-changing initiatives developed using the RebelBase platform.

Insights from this episode:

• Details about RebelBase
• What RebelBase does
• How to deal with pessimists
• Solving problems with people who understand the problem
• Details on the bottom-up approach to solving problems
• How to build a culture of experimentation
• How to maintain a culture of experimentation as the company grows bigger
• The importance of constructive criticism when building a product

Quotes from the show:

• “Up until now, it’s been very difficult for regular people to think that they could launch an experiment and how to make it work better, and RebelBase makes that possible. RebelBase democratizes and accelerates bottom-up innovation by enabling people who understand problems to launch experiments that could become solutions” —Alejandro Juárez Crawford [7:00]
• “When you give folks the tools to create these experiments, something dramatic happens (…) suddenly you’ve actually asked the person who understands the problem what needs to be solved” —Alejandro Juárez Crawford [17:25]
• “We do a lot of work on researching skills and mindset change by users on this platform because not every solution, not every experiment is going to succeed” —Alejandro Juárez Crawford [27:43]
• “Often, actually the experimentation that most people do is taking things we already know work and figuring out how to do them in new places and new ways” —Alejandro Juárez Crawford [35:50]
• “Comfort with failure is itself a trainable mentality” —Alejandro Juárez Crawford [41:02]
• “We are not just trying to encourage risk-taking, we are trying to encourage calculated experimentation where the point of our experiments is to learn what works, to learn from your users what to adopt, to learn how you could then move to a larger group of users and get them to existing channels” —Alejandro Juárez Crawford [46:45]

Stay connected:

Sydney Finkelstein

Website: http://thesydcast.com

LinkedIn: Sydney Finkelstein

Twitter: @sydfinkelstein

Facebook: The Sydcast

Instagram: The Sydcast

Alejandro Juárez Crawford

LinkedIn: Alejandro Crawford

Website: https://rebelbase.co

Subscribe to our podcast + download each episode on Stitcher, iTunes, and Spotify.

This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry.