The Entrepreneurs with Ben Lehnert & Derek Lidow

The Entrepreneurs – Ben Lehnert & Derek Lidow
  • 5.0 (1)
  • ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Two Princeton professors. Two nine-figure exits. 1000s of entrepreneurs coached. Zero b******t. Most business podcasts give you either ivory tower theory or bro-ey motivation. We give you what actually works—because we've built it, scaled it, sold it, researched it and now teach it to the next generation of founders at one of the world's top universities. And we’re on a mission to help you succeed. Derek Lidow ran a global semiconductor company, then founded and sold iSuppli for nine figures. Ben Lehnert built and sold Wunderlist to Microsoft for nine figures, then led design at SAP. Now we're Princeton professors on a mission: compress the world's best entrepreneurship knowledge into frameworks you can actually use. Every week, we bring you battle-tested sprints, exercises, and advice from our award-winning "Entrepreneurial Journey" framework. We interview founders in the arena. We share insights from our webinars and office hours with real entrepreneurs facing real decisions. Whether you're launching a coffee shop, inheriting a family business, or building the next unicorn—we've guided thousands through these exact moments. No fluff. No generic motivation. Just proven tools to help you sprint, not stumble, through your startup journey. New episodes weekly. Subscribe now.

Episodes

  1. 4D AGO

    Sprint 7: Making good decisions under pressure

    Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.io If you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership. Starting your own business is stressful. But making good decisions in high-pressure moments doesn’t have to freak you out. In this episode, Ben and Derek walk you through how to stay level-headed and make better decisions. Accurately understanding your own capabilities is an essential starting point, specifically understanding your motivations, traits and skills. Knowing where, when and how to be confident in your decision-making is critical to not screwing up, withstanding brutal startup pressures, and ultimately making better decisions because of your teamwork and leadership.

    13 min

  2. FEB 10

    Sprint 6: How much will your customers pay?

    Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.io If you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership. In this episode, Ben and Derek explain the last missing piece in the “capturing happy customer” puzzle is figuring how much they would be willing to pay. You can ask a potential customer, but their answer may not be a good choice for you. You want to set a price that gives you a fair profit by capturing its full value—whether tangible (like savings) or intangible (like a super fun experience). You need to set a price that takes into account other alternatives a potential customer in achieving a similar state of happiness. Naive pricing can set prices too low and destroy your ability to be profitable or too high and turn away potential customers, threatening your ability to stay in business.

    10 min

  3. FEB 3

    Sprint 5: How many customers can you get?

    Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.io If you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership. In this episode, Ben and Derek coach you how to think through how many customers you can reasonably expect to capture (while the next sprint leads you through how much they might pay). To figure out how many customers you might get, we take you through several steps. You will need to reason through how potential customers will find you and decide they love what you are doing so much they want to be your customer (and not a competitor’s). Many great ideas fail because founders forget that they need to go out and thoughtfully solicit customers. This is a critical risk reduction exercise.

    11 min

  4. JAN 27

    Sprint 4: Starting with the most receptive group for your idea

    Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.io If you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership. In this episode, Ben and Derek walk you through how to figure out exactly which group of potential customers most wants what you will offer. We explain how you find the persona that will be easiest and most profitable to make super happy. Your competitive advantage comes from how much better you know a customer group than your competitor, so this is important! This sprint enables you to segment potential customers into groups, called personas, which in turn helps you more precisely target your sales and marketing efforts.

    9 min

  5. JAN 20

    Sprint 3: How to test your ideas

    Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.io If you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership. In this episode, Ben and Derek explain how to properly test your idea with potential customers. Until you confirm your idea for making groups of strangers very happy works, it doesn’t make sense to invest the time and money to implement it. And no idea is perfect out of the box. This is a very demanding session, but the benefits in risk reduction are immense. We first walk you through our extensive material on: Testing ideas with strangers. We then challenge you to plan, then execute and then think about and analyze the ton of information you will gain from asking open-ended questions to strangers. Come back to this sprint and its exercises as many times as you need until you feel confident in your idea.

    12 min

  6. JAN 13

    Sprint 2: How to find good startup ideas

    Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.io If you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership. In this episode, Ben and Derek walk you through how to find good ideas for your startup, buy understanding how to tell and eliminate bad ones. First, you will learn about The Fundamental Principle of Entrepreneurship which underlies every successful business idea. This principle applies to for-profit and non-profit ideas and ventures. In the sprint exercise, we teach you how to do an assessment of your ideas and how to prove an idea’s potential for success.

    11 min

  7. JAN 6

    Sprint 1: Why do you want to be an entrepreneur?

    Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.io For more support, accountability and support join our membership. In this first sprint episode we explore the importance of understanding one's own deep motivation for wanting to be an entrepreneur and the correlation with success. We emphasize the significance of preparation and learning in the entrepreneurial journey, as well as the reflection on good and bad motivations for entrepreneurship. Understanding one's ultimate selfish desire is highlighted as a key aspect of motivation. The sprint exercise helps you uncover your own personal motivation to be a founder and start a business. Takeaways Understanding your true motivation for being an entrepreneur is highly correlated with your chances of being successful.The key to determining if your primary motivation to be successful is strong enough is whether you have a strong desire to prepare.Use the sprint exercise to reflect and uncover your own motivations Chapters 00:00 The Motivation to Be an Entrepreneur05:02 Reflecting on Your Motivations10:27 The Importance of Preparation and Learning

    16 min

  8. JAN 3

    Getting Started – How our platform helps you start up your business

    Explore our expanding library of free sprints on www.theentrepreneurs.io For more support, accountability and support join our membership. Welcome to The Entrepreneurs! This first episode introduces our brand-new platform and the concept of sprints to deliver critical entrepreneurial insights, tested and proven tools, and self-guided exercises to help you succeed on your startup journey. All sprints are based on Derek’s extensive, world-leading research, his 3 books and the various classes we’ve created and taught at Princeton. With jointly more than 1000 students and 100s of entrepreneurs we’ve mentored, we’re excited to offer the same guidance now to founders of all kinds, anywhere in the world. Lastly, we share with your a glimpse into our future build-out plans as well as our membership plan that offers premium support for those who want more, such as 1:1 video coaching with Ben and Derek, private community chat, and members-only events and webinars to answer your burning founder questions. Our mission is to help you be successful entrepreneurs. So, please share with us any and all feedback on how we can make the platform better for you.

    9 min
  • 8 Episodes

About

Two Princeton professors. Two nine-figure exits. 1000s of entrepreneurs coached. Zero b******t. Most business podcasts give you either ivory tower theory or bro-ey motivation. We give you what actually works—because we've built it, scaled it, sold it, researched it and now teach it to the next generation of founders at one of the world's top universities. And we’re on a mission to help you succeed. Derek Lidow ran a global semiconductor company, then founded and sold iSuppli for nine figures. Ben Lehnert built and sold Wunderlist to Microsoft for nine figures, then led design at SAP. Now we're Princeton professors on a mission: compress the world's best entrepreneurship knowledge into frameworks you can actually use. Every week, we bring you battle-tested sprints, exercises, and advice from our award-winning "Entrepreneurial Journey" framework. We interview founders in the arena. We share insights from our webinars and office hours with real entrepreneurs facing real decisions. Whether you're launching a coffee shop, inheriting a family business, or building the next unicorn—we've guided thousands through these exact moments. No fluff. No generic motivation. Just proven tools to help you sprint, not stumble, through your startup journey. New episodes weekly. Subscribe now.

Information

  • Creator
    The Entrepreneurs – Ben Lehnert & Derek Lidow
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    8
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2025 The Entrepreneurs – Ben Lehnert & Derek Lidow