Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation! JLD here and welcome to episode 1860 of EO Fire!

We're right chat with entrepreneurs on fire, seven days a week in U Fire Nation.

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Now let's chat with today's featured guest, Derek Brown. Derek, are you prepared to ignite?

I absolutely am, let's go to Fire Nation.

Derek is the joyful CEO of exec, and previously led part development teams at both Adapar and LinkedIn, and he's a self-proclaimed, potty animal.

Derek, take a minute, fill in some gaps from that intro and give us a little glimpse of your personal life.

Yeah, so I am the proud father of three, husband of one. I am a good old boy from the south, it's somehow made it into the Bay Area of Silicon Valley, and now live here in New York City, the big apple itself.

Still doing tech and leading a fantastic company here in Soho, New York.

Well, with all of that, Derek, in your entire journey intact, what is today the one area of expertise that you would say you're specialty lies within?

Yeah, I mean, so that's quite a arrogant bold question, and I only ask arrogant bold questions, Derek.

Yeah, that's great. I love it. So I would say that my area of expertise is building high execution, high functioning teams.

Let's talk about that specifically. What don't we, the average entrepreneur, know about building highly functional, highly productive teams that frankly we probably should.

Yeah, there's a number of things. The biggest thing I would say though, is that when you're an entrepreneur, it's so easy to get bogged down by the ideas.

You've waited so long to start the venture, to start the company, to start building the product. You have the ideas, oh, we're going to be big, we're going to be a billion dollar company, and you get so lost in your own thought that you forget about actually doing the work.

And so it's so easy to get lost in the idea and lose the execution along the way.

And so the number one thing I would tell people trying to build a high executing team is to focus on the execution, which sounds simple, but it's easy to get lost along the way.

Focus on the execution, Fire Nation. Now Derek, being a self proclaimed party animal, you've probably had a lot of ups, and you've probably had a couple of downs too.

And that's actually what I want to talk about right now is, what you consider your worst entrepreneurial moment to date. Derek, take us to that moment. Tell us that story.

Well, you're starting up some bad memories for me there, John. So I was leading a nonprofit. This was when I was in my early 20s.

And leading a nonprofit, we had started pretty small and in living rooms throughout the city. I was living in at the time, basically in a small group setting.

And we were moving into our large group gatherings for the first time. And so we had some press about kind of our launch and things like that.

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