Matt MacInnis – Inkling.com

Matt MacInnis and the other founders of Inking represent many of the qualities of successful entrepreneurs - passion, dedication and technical know-how. Taking advantage of his position at Apple and the ability to see trends in education and publishing, MacInnis moved out of Apple and founded his own venture. MacInnis was also able to leverage the early success Inkling experienced and changed the business model to one of training and service rather then ePublishing. The move allows Inkling the flexibility to pursue other ventures while still maintaining the quality product they set out to create at the beginning.

I believe that Matt MacInnis holds many skills and ideals that I personally think successful entrepreneurs need to have. He offered some important details about how a startup needs to establish itself and some of the challenges that they are going to face. I am always intrigued at the experience level of entrepreneurs like Matt MacInnis. They tend to be risk-takers and are able to see where opportunities are available in the market. Leaving a company like Apple was no doubt a difficult decision. Yet, he was able to see an emerging market and one that he could step in and fill. Matt speaks passionately about the effective qualities of leadership and the importance of communicating with your team to ensure that everyone is on the same path. Matt has astutely understood that he needs a competent team of employees to build his company. He has made recruitment an integral component to Inkling and one that will likely pay huge dividends (assuming, of course, that they do indeed hire the ‘right’ people). I believe that this is crucial, particularly for a small startup like Inkling. I certainly would consider investing in Inkling and see the untapped potential for cloud-based books and digital textbooks. I will be interested to see how Inkling moves forward in the future!

I think Matt represents a strong model for future entrepreneurs. He took advantage of the knowledge he gathered in working for Apple to identify a gap in the market, and then capitalized on his experience to figure out how to fill that gap. He also saw that changing Inkling's business model could make them more profitable and made the risky decision to pursue those opportunities. Matt demonstrates how taking smart, calculated risks can really help a business to grow.

It sounds like Matt had insider knowledge of the field, and was able to foresee some emerging markets that were opening up as the tablets started to come into fruition. That is a very important element I feel for many of these entrepreneurs, that they have a strong connection and understanding of the field they will work in. This post provided good insight into some vital elements of being a founder. One above all rang true with me: trust. To trust in a team is a critical element. You simply can't make it alone, and have to build a good group in order to succeed.

I have to say that I would jump as high as Matt MacInnis ask me to if I worked for him and that if asked to invest, I'd be reaching for his business plan and my chequebook simultaneously. He definitely sounds like a person I would trust with my money. Based on Martina's presentation of Matt's bio and the way he spoke about leadership and navigating the uncertainty of new stages of growth in his business I think that he is a great model for the entrepreneur/CEO. I really liked his discussion of values in hiring--if you hire based on your founders' values, then your culture should reflect those values. While he reported some bumps along the way but the mention of a shift in the business model to the larger scale business-to-business seems to indicate a continued push for growth.  It also provides some proof that that the company has not gotten too big for him.

I thoroughly enjoyed watching and learning who Matt MacInnis was from the link and synopsis that was provided on this post. While I was watching the interview there were several key words that caught my attention that Matt MacInnis used such as: fog, trust and communication. As a young and aspiring entrepreneur all three of those words are incredibly powerful and not because they are either positive or negative but because it teaches me what it takes to be a successful CEO and Founder of a company. I admire Matt MacInnis for walking away from the safety net of the big and mighty company of Apple because he had an idea, a pain point, that he wanted to explore this idea with the "gut instinct" of just how popular iPads will become. Matt MacInnis was confident enough in his leadership skills that after spending 8 years with Apple and the extreme secrecy in which the company operates in he knew what part of that culture he wanted to keep and what part of that secrecy culture he was walking away from. Additionally I learned much about how to be a successful entrepreneur from the interview when Matt MacInnis talked about the hiring process. He would ask certain questions at the end of the day because he wanted to see how the employee prospect would react and respond to the question. This was a topic that I was noticing that had not been mentioned yet in this course. Then finally his venture. Creating e-textbooks or books that are cloud based learning is an area that I am passionate about and I am looking forward to sharing what myself and my project partners are working on when it is our turn in the "opportunity forecast" portion of this course. The leadership skills that Matt MacInnis possesses is a set of skills that I will look towards as a role model in my future plans.