Steve Baxter Master Class - part 2: Steve Baxter on Ideas

Welcome to Part 2 of our Steve Baxter Master Class!

In this part of our Master Class with Steve we are going to be talking about How to Evaluate Ideas. As an investor, the ability to evaluate ideas is critical to Steve. Not understanding how to correctly evaluate ideas could be the difference between getting your startup up and running, and dealing with a range of problems that could have been easily avoided. In this episode, Steve explains how he goes about evaluating ideas, and gives you some tips so you can improve your thought process.

"G'day Steve Baxter here. I've been asked to give you some advice on how to evaluate ideas. The biggest ideas I evaluate nowadays are investments and businesses. You can probably see at the back there, we've got a couple up on the wall. Look for me on evaluating ideas, I don't tend to evaluate ideas, I tend to evaluate the person first and understand them.

I want to know that this is going to be hopefully a relationship over many years, not too many years, and so we have to understand, can we work together? are they fundamentally good people who have the right approach to business and I suppose life and people? Then we actually look at the person. We actually look at their skill level. What can they do? what are they an expert at? and there's usually teams, and in their teams what are the relevant skills like?

Then we'll look at the problem they are trying to solve, and right at the end we'll start to look at the idea, their solution to that problem. So, we tend to make the idea the last thing in some respects. We really want to understand the people first."

If you'd like to find out more about Steve and what you will be learning in the Master Class you can watch his introduction video HERE.

Make sure you tune in next week when we will be delving into Learning on the job vs Academic Training

People often credit their ideas to individual "Eureka!" moments. But Steven Johnson shows how history tells a different story. This fascinating tour takes us from the "liquid networks" of London's coffee houses to Charles Darwin's long, slow hunch to today's high-velocity web.

Incase you missed it, you can also watch Part 1: Why ongoing learning is Important