Serial Entrepreneur Ben Johnson Discusses Business, Venture Capital Funding, And His Mission

Ben Johnson, a technology entrepreneur, believes that having a business mindset means having a mission and set of values, as well as a set of three to five objectives and key results. His mission for his business, Particle 41, is to be an agile software consultancy with a passion for persistence, communication and inspired product development. He also emphasizes the importance of balancing business goals with family responsibilities. The conversation is about a software development company that provides software development services to businesses of all types and sizes. They employ teams of software engineers, data scientists, data engineers, and DevOps specialists to help solve their customers' software problems. As an example, they worked with a manufacturing company to build a mobile app and industry tool to measure the thickness of the coating applied to parts they were producing. This allowed the company to reduce waste and improve their manufacturing process by providing them with reports of the readings from the mobile environment. The conversation was about the journey of a coder and the experiences he had throughout his career in software development. He started out by talking about how he had worked with a consultancy to build a kids' toys commerce platform, and then went on to start an online travel company, which made $70 million in annual travel. He also talked about how he worked on a vertical ad network, and the challenges of dealing with the VC market. Finally, he mentioned how the business had eventually fizzled out and ran its course. Overall, the conversation gave insight into the experiences of a coder, and the challenges they face in the industry.

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