Irv Segal
The Seasoned Blackjack Player of Entrepreneurship
August 15, 2006 | by brett | Permalink
Irv’s email read: “I’m a 46-year old entrepreneur who has founded 40 startups before I finally got this one right. Let me know if you’re interested.” Of course, we had to schedule an interview to see how he finally got it right.
The one startup that he really got right is SysGen Inc.; where he is the President and CEO since starting the company from his home in 1997, initially offering his services as an AS/400 programmer, project manager, and computer system validation expert. He has grown that into a successful company that provides outsourcing solutions for software vendors, please visit the website at sysgeninc.com.
Sys Gen Inc. was an interesting company to hear about, but the real reason I was in Chicago was to hear about Irv’s trials and errors in entrepreneurship. An interesting analogy that Irv had to offer related blackjack to starting a business and keeping it successful. “Starting a company is like blackjack. You don’t have to win every hand, but you have to have enough chips to continue playing the game, and you have to win back some of those chips every once in a while too.”
Most of the lessons we learned from Irv in our interview relate to this theory that blackjack is like entrepreneurship. Like gambling at the blackjack tables, Irv said that the hardest part about entrepreneurship is pulling the plug on a venture. It’s just knowing when to get out is the hard part. Irv said that he’s stayed in too long, and pulled out too soon many times in his entrepreneurial driven career, much like a conservative or overly-aggressive blackjack player.
The rush of winning a hand for gamblers is the reason why they play, and Irv gets the rush of thinking up a new idea and working on it like it is the next biggest thing. The rush is what keeps a player at the tables, and Irv still thinking up new ideas. It is also why a player refuses to leave a table after losing chips, and why Irv is stubborn to leave an idea because of that slight notion that “this may be it.”
But at the same time, a player has to know his risk. If a player gets a hand of 17, they know that the risk of going over is likely and they probably won’t ask for another card. Irv recognizes this concept, and realizes that a new concept has the most risk attached to it, and his job is to minimize this risk. He does this by taking existing ideas and trying to make it better.
So entrepreneurship really isn’t that much different from a blackjack. Sure there is more creativity and complexity to starting a business, but blackjack has the same themes such as minimizes risk, experiencing a rush, and knowing when enough is enough. And Irv Segal is the seasoned veteran.
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