The Role Mindset Plays in Business Growth and Expansion

Stefan Haney is the Strategic Advisor and CTO at Foundry, the Managing Principal at Vantage International LLC, and a business and technology leader who specializes in driving product innovation at scale. He spent more than eight years working at Amazon, where he led the team driving design and development for product shopping pages. As a member of the Amazon consumer shopping leadership team, he contributed to the strategy and innovation of Amazon’s homepage, overall navigation, checkout, and product pages worldwide, all while optimizing for different devices. 

Stefan was a key leader in building Seller Central and the Amazon Marketplace from $9 billion to over $160 billion in sales. Today, he is a Founding Partner of Foundry, where he is involved in acquiring and growing existing e-commerce brands.

In this episode…

An entrepreneur's mindset and set of beliefs play essential roles when starting, growing, and scaling a business. They help determine how the business provides products to its customers, how the company relates with its employees and customers, and how quickly it meets customers' needs. Take a look at Amazon: the company believes that the faster and more convenient their service is, the more likely those customers will go back to purchase from them.

However, changing an entrepreneur's mindset, belief system, or mental attitude toward their business is one of the hardest things to do — but it can be done. Stefan Haney advises entrepreneurs to evaluate their mindsets, belief systems, and the assumptions they have about their businesses regularly. If those assumptions turn out to be false and are instead holding the company down, then they need to make adjustments. 

In this episode of the Innovations and Breakthroughs Podcast, Rich Goldstein continues his interview with Stefan Haney, a Founding Partner of Foundry. Stefan talks about the role mindset plays in business growth and expansion and explains how intellectual property has been pivotal in Amazon’s growth. He also talks about the e-commerce marketplace he’s helping to build in Romania and how he evaluates brands for acquisition.