YouSaid · the spoken record

Sean O'Sullivan

lines on the record
59
first
2022-01-17
most recent
2022-01-17
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

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  1. “I started a company right out of university. So RPI had one of the first back then used to call these things incubators where you had startups that wanted to be tenderly coiled in the arms of the mothership. So I was inspired by all of the companies, all the students that were basically starting companies out of school. And I thought, wow, I would love to be able to start my own company. So I had had some experience while working my way through school. I went to IBM and worked for some bigger companies. And so I had that experience working for bigger companies. And I really decided early on that I wanted to start my own company just have more impact and more control over my destiny.”

    2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I graduated high school at 16 and I went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and I decided since I thought I knew everything there was to know about programming computers at that point I decided to become an electrical engineer which is what I studied and then computer and systems engineering and then I went through all of the engineering programs that you go through multidisciplinary engineering programs you go through and regular engineering school”

    2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Was making more than all my high school buddies, twice as much or three times as much as the minimum wage. And he just gave me a real shot. So deeply grateful. And my mom is so committed to education that made sure that all of us went to college, which was just a great achievement. So my way through out of poverty was to go into technology. That was the skill that I had. If I was born in the 1800s or riding horses or something was really important, I would fail as a man. But when I was born and where I was growing up in this age and era, I'm actually really good with computing and whatnot.”

    2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “There's a program called the Civilian Employment Training Act, which was for the poorest of the poor, and basically it was supposed to give you jobs to get you ready for real work experience in life. And so I got the jobs that they would give you, of course, were mowing lawns or being a janitor. So I was a janitor at my school, which is actually kind of a humiliating thing to do as a 14-year-old kid, you can imagine it. And I went down to the county office building. Sam France allowed me to just work as a data entry person in that office initially. And then I was able to start doing data entry and working with the printouts and things like that. Then I was a programmer. He gave me really big jobs. Like I programmed the election system and I programmed the inventory systems for the county and I programmed all these other things. And then he took me off the aid program and started paying me as a regular staff person.”

    2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, I got into these series, like the Tom Swift series and the Nancy Drew series and Charlotte's Webb. It was just fifth grade reader, but it's also what got me interested actually in science and engineering.”

    2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “We had wood stoves, and if we went to sleep at night in the winter, maybe you'd put a glass of water by your bed and it would be ice in the morning. So it was really, really hard way to grow up. But summers were fine. I would work on farms. The West Timers had a carrot farm and they would pay a buck an hour to weed, started working there, I think it was eight. I worked on hay farms paling hay, but I got away from that hard scrabble existence by the world of reading. I read a lot of books. I actually set a record in fifth grade for the most books ever read. It was like 535 books in one year. Actually, it's just the school year. So if you think of the school year as being 180 days, it is actually more like two or three books a day because it didn't include the summer.”

    2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I had a happy childhood. It was a difficult childhood. I was born one of nine children. I was the eighth of nine. And my biological father, who is a lawyer in New York City. And when I was three, our family, because of abuse effectively, had to leave New York City to get away from him. And so we went up to upstate New York in Skahari, New York, where we had a hard scrabble existence for a bunch of years with having to, for example, go on welfare. He was deadbeat dad. So he wasn't paying the child support. All nine of us were under the age of 12. So she had to rely on public assistance. So that was a difficult experience growing up because we were underfed and it was a very cold place to live in upstate New York.”

    2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Entrepreneurs. Our conversation covers Sean's path to entrepreneurship and investing, accelerator strategy, sourcing ideas, working with entrepreneurs, preparing businesses to exit SOSV's programs, investing in Fawan rounds, drivers of success, and positioning in the venture ecosystem.”

    2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Story to share and something to prove. That said, this field moves quickly so as the disclaimer goes, past accessibility is not a guarantee of future capacity. My guest on the third episode, Adventure is Eating the Investment World is Sean O'Sullivan, the founder of SOSV, a billion dollar global venture capital firm that seeds one hundred fifty companies a year through startup development programs that support entrepreneurs across hardware, bioengineering, China, mobile apps, and the blockchain. Sean is pretty much done it all. He grew up on welfare, found his way to technology in the 1970s, and started his first company in his early twenties. That company called Map Info was the original street map technology well before the days of the internet. Sean formed more companies and began angel investing with the proceeds. Along the way, he created 20 patents for ride sharing, coined the term cloud computing, appeared in Ireland's version of Shark Tank, and formed a series of startup development programs to support early stage.”

    2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source