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Good afternoon, everyone.
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My name is Eric Wells.
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I am joined here with my co-host, Nicholas Snellings.
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Hello, everyone.
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Today we will be interviewing Warren Sharp, creator and founder of the well-respected Sharp Football Analysis.
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Warren has turned his passion for NFL analytics and betting from a hobby into a full-time career.
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His company success allowed him to quit his professional career and pivot to working as an entrepreneur, running a business that supports 20 full and part-time employees while making a huge footprint in the industry.
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He has over 500,000 followers on social media platforms, including the biggest reporters in the game, like Adam Schefter, NFL front office executives, coaches, and coordinators.
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We are fortunate to welcome Warren Sharp today.
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Good afternoon, Warren.
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We're glad to have you on the podcast today.
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Thanks for having me.
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Looking forward to talking a little bit about entrepreneurship with you guys.
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Yeah, of course.
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Um, so tell us a little about what motivated you to begin this journey.
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So I started back when I was just a youngster watching football.
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I loved football.
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I loved watching it with my dad.
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My dad would always get mad though, halfway through the games of when his favorite team was losing, he'd just like storm out of the room, be like, forget this.
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And I figure out why is he so mad about this?
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What is the coach doing maybe that's not right, that the coach could be coaching the team better?
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What are the players not doing that they could be better?
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And so basically, that sort of started my journey of like figuring out why teams win games, why teams lose games, how teams could perform a little bit better.
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When I was in college, I went to Virginia Tech, I studied civil engineering there, um, and I started building some computer models to try to predict the outcome of NFL games using those computer models, which incorporated data from statistics that the NFL players and their teams accumulated throughout the course of games.
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And then once I got out of college, I started continuing to pursue that off to the side, like as a little hobby of mine in the evenings while I was working a full-time job in Washington, DC as a civil engineer, getting my professional engineering license.
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And I continued that sort of career path of being an engineer while always watching the NFL games, betting on the NFL games, being curious about the NFL.
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I started sharing some of my predictions publicly in different message boards and forums, tracking my results, and got really good at my accuracy and started pursuing that a little bit more seriously.
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I was contacted by some people who work out in Las Vegas who wanted me to kind of help work with them behind the scenes to provide them with the strategies and angles so that they could then pursue some betting-related uh ventures of theirs.
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I'm still doing my engineering work.
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And then finally, I think the pivot point for me was um as I was continuing to share and grow on social media and share my stats and my data, my analysis, some NFL teams started reaching out to me and they wanted me to come in and work with them as a consultant during the season from a game planning perspective and a play calling perspective and optimizing their results perspective.
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And at that point, I realized, you know, with the money that I'm making from that, and I had launched my own website that it was time to move away from trying to do engineering and the NFL and just focus on football itself.
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And so then I pivoted, I left my engineering job, which obviously was a pretty high-paying job and a uh a job that was supporting myself and my family to go pursue this path.
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And uh I haven't looked back since.
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Um, it's only gotten better and better from there as I continued that journey.
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All right, that sounds great.
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So, what what sort of resources did you have uh before starting this uh this career path?
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So, the good part about running an online business, as I'm sure you can imagine, especially one that provides information, uh football predictions, football analysis, game previews, things like that that just somebody would read or access on their computer or their iPhones or you know, mobile devices, is that you're not actually producing widgets.
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You don't have to manufacture anything, you don't have to build anything.
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So I just needed the startup capital to basically buy websites, buy data.
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Um, and I started doing everything myself.
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Like I did not while I was doing this, I was working solo for several years, you know, probably a decade before I actually started bringing on employees.
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And so I didn't really need all that much.
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You know, I could do this out of my house, I could do this
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with uh without too much startup capital.
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Um, really, the main thing was uh I just needed to develop the website and develop um my resources and my data, my information, and my infrastructure.
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Uh, and I was able to do that without too much startup capital.
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Obviously, things are different now that I have a lot of employees, but fortunately, it's a positive cash flow position for the business.
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Um, we we we make more, there's always there's always been profit every year that we've been running this.
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So uh it's very easy to support the employees that we currently have and potentially decide if we want to pursue new ventures, hire new employees because we do have the capital that we uh that would allow us to go down those paths.
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So when starting off, uh did you did you face any major challenges or what were the major uh roadblocks that you faced?
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So I think probably the first thing is just um getting over the hurdle of deciding you want to give up that full-time job, that other job that you had that you got your degree in.
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Um, and and so I think it was more of a mental roadblock at first.
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It was just like, do I really want to risk everything in the future that I could have if I just stayed with this job?
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Because you guys know, and I'm sure you can imagine, once you get out of college, your first job, and you're working there for five or so years, let's say you're working with a lot of people that are more senior than you.
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You're you're you have bosses that are telling you what to do.
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And so you look at those people and you say, eventually, like if I stay at this company, I should be wanting to be that person.
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I'm I want to be my boss eventually.
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And I'm looking at those people and who they are and what they have, and I'm thinking, like, is that where I want to be 10 years from now, 15 years from now, 20 years from now?
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Or do I want to try to do something else where I could be my own boss and I could make potentially, hopefully, a lot more money than those guys?
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Because ultimately money is one of the driving factors of this.
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So um, it was more of a mental roadblock.
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It's like I I it it was easy for me eventually to get to the point because I started making more money on the football than I was making at the engineering.
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But it was nice making both at the same time.
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But once I started making more, I I got over that mental hurdle and went this direction.
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Another potential roadblock is just, you know, the competition that exists in the space that you decide to become an entrepreneur.
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Like, who else is out there doing these types of things?
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You have to distinguish yourself and set yourself apart in some way.
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So, what are you gonna do?
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How are you going to be better?
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How are you gonna be different than what everybody else is doing who is already there?
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Because you have to find a way to get people to want to buy your service, buy your information, buy your analysis when there's a lot of other people in the space.
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And so I think that's definitely one of the other um hurdles.
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Um, another complicating factor, I won't dwell on this too much, but like I was approached by people who wanted to buy into the business, like sit put in their time, resources, or sweat equity and own a large stake of the business.
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And that would reduce my ownership down from 100% to whatever that percentage is that we were negotiating.
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That was a difficult several months of trying to figure out do I want this person involved with the business?
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What would be the benefit?
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What would be the risk?
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And um, so that was a that was a challenge.
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Eventually, I decided not to partner with that uh individual who was who had an infrastructure behind them and just continue pursuing things myself.
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So fortunately, I still own the vast, vast majority of the business on my own.
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Uh, but there's you know, that was obviously something that I had to figure out mentally and get past.
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So, in your experience, um what would you recommend as a mindset for a new upping uh coming entrepreneur?
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Well, the first thing is um you have to have a little bit of willingness to have risk in your life because there's the easy path, which is just I'm gonna work for somebody else.
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But when you realize that like working for somebody else isn't necessarily easy, like it might be easier, but it's not easy.
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Like you guys have parents or you got friends that are older, you know, those people have professional careers and and their jobs aren't easy.
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They might not be entrepreneurs, but it's not necessarily easy getting up and going to work for somebody else, working a set number of hours, coming home.
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Like working in general isn't going to necessarily be easy.
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So once
you realize that, like, yeah, it might be a little bit more risk, but there's risk involved with your job.
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You you don't know what your boss is going to decide.
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You don't know how somebody else's performance might impact the overall trajectory of the company that you're at.
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And maybe it causes problems for you eventually, even if you're doing a good job.
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Uh, you don't know if your company makes good decisions with their financing, or maybe there's a bigger competitor that comes in and makes your company obsolete to a degree.
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And then through no fault of your own, you have to find a new job.
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So there is risk just in life in general, getting out of bed, going to bed, there's risk.
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Like every there's risk everywhere.
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So once you become uh familiar with risk and willing to take risks and weighing like the positives and trying to figure out I mean, I have an engineering mindset, so it's always about problem solving and thinking logically, what would happen if this were to occur, what will happen if this were to occur, figuring out which is the most optimal long-term decision, and then pursuing that path.
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Um, so there's elements of that that you have to be like willing to undertake risk.
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There's also the timing of everything.
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Like one of the biggest, I think the things that I would recommend the most is just because you have an idea and you think it could work, doesn't mean that you should like immediately go do that when what I did at least.
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I mean, I can only speak from my own personal experience.
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I tried to keep doing the other thing.
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I keep trying to do my engineering job, which was hard and difficult and required a lot of hours because I was focusing on that and then at night doing this other stuff.
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But I had like a real stable source of income for years doing that.
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And I was able to build up a lot of you know financial backing because I didn't just pivot straight to this other thing right away, but I was able to make money sticking with the engineering for long enough.
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But there will be times maybe for other people that you got to jump right then and there, you got to take that risk, and that's when maybe you need to have investors come in and help bankroll you so that because you're not making enough money yet, but you need to buy things for the company or you need to pay for your mortgage, and so you got to figure out other ways.
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So every situation is going to be different, um, but you the timing of it and figuring
out the timing is definitely something that is important when looking to become an entrepreneur as well.
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Uh, I so I think risk and and timing are two important factors here.
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Thank you, Warren.
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I think I think that was very well said.
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Uh, what is the what is one piece of advice uh you would give a college student to help them succeed in their their business or their business ventures?
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Um, well, I guess a couple of things.
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One would be you no matter what you're trying to do, the easiest way to get there is to outwork everybody else who's trying to accomplish the same things.
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You know, I don't sleep a lot.
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That's because I I I have a lot of people that rely on me, but it's also just a motivating factor.
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Like I'm driven to do this, I love to do this.
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Um, I want to spend as much time doing this as possible because it's the way for me to get from point A to point B where I want to be as fast as possible and and and provide enough for other people, my family, my my the people that work for me, uh give everybody more opportunities.
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And so um you have to be very driven and you have to be very motivated, you have to be passionate about what you're doing.
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Um, you have to care about it a lot because if you're it can't just be something where you punch in.
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Sure, every single job is gonna have elements of tedious crap that you have to do.
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Every job is gonna have elements of like, man, I wish I wasn't doing this today.
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But you have to like when you realize the long-term goal and it's always in the back of your mind, I think you can push through those walls and um and and just be very dedicated and committed to what you're doing.
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So uh hard work.
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Um the other thing I think is is important is creative thinking.
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Um so it's not just like the the the work ethic, but it's also being creative at the same time because everything is constantly changing, especially with AI and all the other things that are happening out there with development and business and competition and whatnot, especially on if you're running a web-based business, that sort of thing.
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Um, you have to always think about the a couple steps down the road.
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What could we do that might be different to distinguish ourselves?
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Because you're not just gonna be able to come um and have success if you start a hamburger business right next to like a Burger King and McDonald's and three other hamburger businesses, and just think that like my business is gonna succeed because I'm the one who's running it and I'm I'm just I I really have confidence in myself.
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To you have to have something that's gonna make people want to come to your specific hamburger business.
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Why would they want to come there?
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What types of advertising could you do?
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What type of different products could you make?
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What types of so there's always things that you have to creatively think about and and and study that competition, study the people that are doing the same type of things that you're doing.
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How could I do what would my idea be that could be better and different and more appealing to people that could then get me in the door, get a foothold here?
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Um, and so I think those three or two things, you know, being very highly motivated, self-motivated, while at the same time being very creative and constantly researching and uh constantly thinking of new things to do, uh, those are two things I definitely think would be great skills to have as you're looking to pursue being an entrepreneur.
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Yeah, I think I think those are some great points.
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Um it seems like the the knowledge that you're giving us is really gonna push people forward.
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I think like a lot of our viewers are gonna be able to take this information and hopefully turn it into something good and maybe turn a profit off of this.
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So uh we appreciate having you on today.
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Uh it's been a pleasure.
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Um we're we're very glad to have you answer all of our questions and everything.
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Um so thank you for your time and uh it was nice speaking with you, Warren Sharp.
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Yeah, good luck, everybody.
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Uh being an entrepreneur, there's a lot of reward at the end of the day, uh, but it is a difficult journey, but it it can be much more fun than trying to work for other people and not really pursue things.
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Um, so everybody's in a different situation.
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Not everybody is going to um want to be an entrepreneur, not everybody is going to have success if they decide to be an entrepreneur.
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There's going to be failures, you got to get back on track.
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But uh hopefully, you know, everybody out there who is looking to pursue that path, good luck and you know, study hard and we'll see you see you out in the real world at some point.
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Thank you.