Podcast Ep. 112: Entrepreneur Beth Bostwick Discusses Her Passion for Purdue Innovates and Her Hopes for Boilermakers in Startup Culture

Kate Young:

Hi, I’m Kate Young and you’re listening to This is Purdue, the official podcast for Purdue University. As a Purdue alum and Indiana native, I know firsthand about the family of students and professors who are in it together, persistently pursuing and relentlessly rethinking who are the next game-changers, difference-makers, ceiling-breakers, innovators? Who are these Boilermakers? Join me as we feature students, faculty, and alumni taking small steps toward their giant leaps and inspiring others to do the same.

Beth Bostwick:

When I think about my own experiences in this whole startup world, I remember there were so many things that I learned early on, that I was told I should be like or shouldn’t be like, that really almost eliminated entrepreneurship from my mindset, from my thinking, or even that I could possibly do it. But at the same time I was always the square peg trying to squeeze into a round hole in those big glass buildings. I was always the boundary-pusher. I was the person who was always the, “Well, we could do it differently this way.” I think that when you’re an entrepreneur, you’re always looking for something that’s unique and different to have an impact.

Kate Young:

In this episode of This is Purdue, we’re talking to Beth Bostwick, serial entrepreneur and author. You’ll hear how Beth’s experiences at Purdue equips her to exhibit the entrepreneurial mindset that the university is working to cultivate through its Purdue Innovates initiative.

Beth highlights how Purdue is building more capability to support startups through Purdue Innovates. She knows from personal experience that Boilermaker alums are an amazing resource for Purdue startups, a special secret sauce for the university, as she says. You’ll hear Beth’s passionate insights into the world of startups as she details how young entrepreneurs can set themselves up for success.

She is especially focused on encouraging more young women to become entrepreneurs and consider building a startup at some point in their careers. Whether you see a market opportunity or maybe no one is addressing a problem that many people have, or maybe you simply want to be your own boss and build something new, Beth says entrepreneurship may be the right path for you. And she says, for any founding team, it’s respect for each other, trust, accountability, and a sense of curiosity that allows them to pursue game-changing businesses.

Listen as Beth describes her journey from the corporate world to becoming an entrepreneur. As a proud Boilermaker, she recognizes that individuality is not only valuable, but essential for the next generation to make a meaningful mark in the world. Here’s my conversation with Beth.

Beth, thank you so much for joining us on This is Purdue, the official university podcast. So let’s kick things off with your Purdue journey. When’s the first time you’ve heard about Purdue and what made you want to come here?

Beth Bostwick:

I’m going way back in the archives here. I grew up in Colorado, and it was always CU Boulder or CSU. I didn’t really ever think beyond the state, but once I graduated from undergrad, I was hoping to go on to medicine. So I had picked a major. But by the time I got out of school, I was just so burnt out. There was just no way I was going to consider anything schooling. I told my father that I was going to race bicycles and not go on to med school. He’s like, “What?”

Kate Young:

Quite a change.

Beth Bostwick:

He was like, “Oh my God.” But that was the very first moment I remember stepping into who I really was and trying to pay attention to what I wanted and what was important to me versus doing what somebody else thought was important for me. I’ll come back to this at other points down the road here.

But I think that initial thought that I was going to go on to do something different, as in racing bicycles, which had no monetary, I found, way to make a living with, but I was good at it. So I wanted to do something I was good at instead of having to struggle through all this school stuff. I was a good student, but it’s not something that I just aspired to be as a student.

And so, being outside was always something. In Colorado, we’ve got lots of great outdoors here. That was where I wanted to go. I remember I ended up getting married, met my husband at Colorado State, which is where I did undergrad. We got married, and we both realized that we wanted to go to graduate school in business. It was like, “Oh, okay. How are we going to do that? Because we have no money.”

First off, we had to get into the schools. So we applied to a bunch of schools. I remember once we figured it out … Where we had both been accepted, because we’re going to go married. We decided this was not going to be I go first, you go second kind of thing. It was like, no, we’re going to do this together and we’ll somehow make it work. Purdue was one of the schools that had accepted both of us.

We started to think about it more so because it was not in a place that was expensive to live. Lafayette was a little cheaper than New York City or someplace else.

Kate Young:

Sure.

Beth Bostwick:

Tuition was reasonable. I remember my father telling me when we were going through this decision process, he said, “You can’t go wrong with a big 10 school.” He said, “Purdue is a great school.” Now he’s an Iowa guy saying that about Purdue. But I remember thinking that makes sense.

We then came to Purdue and we had one semester of out-of-state tuition we could afford. After that, we were burnt. We were empty. We had no idea how it was going to work. It was like, “Well, let’s just go.”

That was the first literally choice I made as an adult to move on, because everything was in Colorado. All of a sudden I found myself in Indiana and it’s like, okay, I have to figure how to make this work. I’ve been married to this guy for about a year, maybe two, and I don’t know. It’s like all these things as a young adult you don’t quite think about till you are there. Believing in yourself makes a difference.

Kate Young:

So it was go and figure it out later, kind of, was the mindset.

Beth Bostwick:

Yeah. It was go … We knew we didn’t have enough money to make it through, both of us, a two-year program, but we thought we’ll just go and we’ll make it work. So we had the first semester, we could do that. Then once we got in and started to go to school, well, Peter got an assistantship in the Credit Research Center. He was working, I think, with Charlene Sullivan, actually. Then because I was married to him, I got in-state tuition, secret sauce there.

Kate Young:

Ah.

Beth Bostwick:

Then I got an assistantship the next year. And so, I had all my tuition covered. So we literally went to school, two of us, for an MBA, and we paid one semester of out-of-state tuition. Really, it was the best investment we ever made.

Kate Young:

With you and your husband both being Daniels School of Business alums, looking back, do you have any favorite classes, professors? What’s something that really shaped you as a DSB student?

Beth Bostwick:

This is something that not many people know about me. When I was in orientation, they’re trying to tell us about the program. We’re meeting the deans. It’s kind of scary. I mean there was, at that time, a couple hundred people. Not that big a class. I was like, “Wow, these are all really smart people. I wonder if I can keep up with it.”

But the thing that was interesting is it was one of the auditoriums. I remember looking at the PowerPoint, because it was probably PowerPoint, watching the screen, and all I could see were these blinking lights. It was like, “This has never happened to me. What’s this?”

As an athlete, because I’d been racing for a couple of years out here in Colorado, I was very attuned to my body. And so, this visual thing was a distraction. So I always found myself not paying attention to what anybody was saying. I was just listening to what they were talking about and trying to take it in. But I’m watching my eyes and then I realized that morning I started to get a headache, and I never got headaches. In fact, they’re a kind of pain I really can’t deal with. I could do muscle aches, I could be exhausted, all that stuff. But headaches were just another animal.

I remember as we were walking in the auditorium, I said to Peter, I said, “I think we need to go to the health sciences center.” I don’t know where the heck it is on campus, but my eyes are just not quite working right. Of course, I’m thinking about I may have to start studying and paying attention and be on top of this, and here my body’s not working in a way that made sense to me.

We went over to the health sciences center. They did an eye test. They said, “Your vision’s fine, but the thing that I was starting to notice is that the vision was not quite there.” And so, they ended up referring me to a neurologist in Lafayette. He put me through a whole battery of tests.

Within a month and a half, I’d been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. My body was literally shutting down at that point. Physically, I was very much a shell of who I was. I went in to resign, quit because I was failing everything basically at that point.

Dr. Ward Snearly, I think it was a graduate program he was heading up, but he was the person I had to go talk to. So I went in and I said, “I can’t do this. I’m failing everything. I’m exhausted. I don’t know what’s happening to me. I need to quit.” I remember he said to me, he said, “Didn’t you call me about personnel?” I’m thinking in my head, “I haven’t talked to anybody about personnel. No.” At that same moment, there was this thought in my head that, Beth, bite your tongue and just listen. Don’t talk. I said, “Yeah, I think I did.”

That then shifted everything, because from that moment forward, what he did is he helped me really rethink me and how I could be successful in the program. He would work with me to reorient my classes so that I would drop some classes and I can pick them up over the summer months, and then graduate at the same time as Peter.

The thing that I had to do, though, was choose the master’s in human resources because they had a little different credit hour mix than the master’s program, regular MBA program. I said, “Okay,” because he gave me an out. I thought I was dying. I thought I had no value. I thought I couldn’t do anything, and here everything I had built myself on as a strong, capable athlete, now I’m basically a shell of myself. He gave me that door to walk through. Now I had to walk through it and do it, but he gave me an option. So that was really, really powerful. So to this day, Ward Snearly is the reason I’m a graduate of Purdue.

The other personnel I’ll mention is Logan Jordan. He was a new associate dean at the time. Because I found myself in this huge hole I didn’t know how to get out, I didn’t really know anybody because I was just not able to engage with folks because, physically, I was all messed up. He always made me feel valuable. He always said hi to me. He just was this great person.

And so, between the two of them, when I look back at what was really a very impressionable time for me, they stand out, no doubt. Peter was helpful too, but they were the guys that made it work.

Kate Young:

Yeah. They really set the trajectory for the rest of your life if you think about-

Beth Bostwick:

They did. Yeah, totally. Can’t argue otherwise.

Kate Young:

What first sparked your interest in the entrepreneurship route? Was that when you were younger? You talked about, “I don’t want to do med school.” Was that in your mind at that point, or when did you figure out that that’s the path you wanted to take?

Beth Bostwick:

It kind of grew on me. It was through a series of things. As I went to Purdue, I wanted to get a good job and work in one of these big, tall glass buildings. I thought they were the coolest thing, because I grew up from the prairie here. There’s not many big glass buildings out here.

It was actually in one of those companies that I had been selected along with … I think there were a total of 25 of us worldwide from this major corporation that had been pulled out of our jobs to work on this redesign project for the company. We were basically tasked with rebuilding the HR function in such a way that it was going to be world-class. Half of us were HR people and half of them were engineers, scientists, manufacturing folks. I think we even had a couple hourly folks that were on this team. And so, it was a really big deal. We had six months to come up with stuff that was really innovative.

I remember one day going up to a whiteboard and trying to describe to somebody what I thought was going to be a really different way of looking at things. I remember it’s like, “Wow, this is really different.” And so, it had to be based in reality. At some point, we had to sell it to a division ultimately with whatever we came up with. So there had to be some financial benefit to it all.

But it really impressed upon me the ability that I as a person could have to really affect change. That was where I think the seed was planted, and I was good at that. I was always able to pick out these dots that seemingly were just not connected in some way and pull them together in some way that would help me to either sell a solution or help a person start to think differently about something, and here I was able to do it myself. And so, that was the very first place.

So it’s a journey. It always is. There is no destination in entrepreneurship, but there are things you hope to accomplish with it.

Kate Young:

When you were first starting out, I know you’re very passionate about helping young women within their entrepreneurship journey. Was there a specific mentor or women that you really looked up to at that time when you were younger?

Beth Bostwick:

I wish I could say that. No, there were no women doing this.

Kate Young:

So is that part of why you’re so passionate about this?

Beth Bostwick:

Yeah.

Kate Young:

Okay.

Beth Bostwick:

I’d like to clone me. I’d like to clone me, literally. I’d like more people to pursue startup entrepreneurship specifically in their career path. I’d like them to consider it, because one of the things, Kate, that when I think about my own experiences in this whole startup world, I remember there were so many things that I learned early on, that I was told I should be like or shouldn’t be like, that really almost eliminated entrepreneurship from my mindset, from my thinking, or even that I could possibly do it. But at the same time I was always the square peg trying to squeeze into a round hole in those big glass buildings. I was always the boundary-pusher. I was the person who was always the, “Well, we could do it differently this way.”

I think that when you’re an entrepreneur, you’re always looking for something that’s unique and different to have an impact. I think when you’re in large organizations of any kind, there’s a lot of history that goes along with those places. And so, you want to fit in, you want to belong, and so you do go along with some of that …

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:15:04]

Beth Bostwick:

… you want to fit in, you want to belong and so you do kind of go along with some of that stuff, but at some point you have to be true to yourself, and I think that’s really the piece that young women in particular should pay attention to. Who are they? Listen to who they are inside. Because yeah, there’s a lot of people that want to see you succeed and be helpful, but they’re also coming at it from their own perspective. They’re not you, and you need to be you because one, you’re not going to be happy if you’re not. And two, there are unique contributions that you can bring to this world if you’re you not somebody else. Now there’s tons of people out there to learn from, and that’s exactly what I want to be able to start laying out the foundation for is for people to begin to be okay with who they are.

Kate Young:

It’s kind of like you’re fighting that, well, we’ve always done it this way. Is that how you felt-

Beth Bostwick:

Oh, yeah.

Kate Young:

Yeah, in some of those companies?

Beth Bostwick:

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, I had to learn the hard way. I didn’t have a lot of tools out there to work with a lot of young entrepreneurs have today, but in each one of those moments when I had to get myself back up off the ground, it’s like, “Okay, so what didn’t work out here? How can I learn from this?” I learned a lot of resiliency. I would joke with people that, “Yeah, I’m kind of the Bozo the Clown…” When we were kids, we had these punching bags where they had sand on the bottom, you’d punch them and they’d slowly come back up. Well, I was Bozo the Clown because I got punched so many times and I got knocked over so many times that you just developed this innate capability to pull yourself back up. And yeah, it might take you a little while, but you can get back up again. And it’s that resilience that enables an entrepreneur to ultimately be successful. I mean, honestly for us, we just outlived all the rest of them. We just stuck at it long enough that we were able to do it.

Now, I think things have changed nowadays, there are more tools, both technology wise as well as just process wise in terms of your thinking that will enable you to move much faster, but you still have to have that resilience and that then points to the importance of a network. And this is something that I talk about so many times with young folks. You’re just getting started. You don’t even know what you don’t know. But by meeting amazing people and talking to people, being curious about who they are, respectfully curious about who they are and what they’ve learned and truly listening, it may not all resonate with what makes sense for you, but that’s okay, that’s called learning. And when you’re an entrepreneur, you’re learning everything. I mean, you’re drinking from the fire hose, and if you don’t know how to learn quickly, that’s going to slow you down a bit. But the resilience is what gets you back up off the ground.

Kate Young:

Absolutely. So after working for these larger corporate companies, Beth did some consulting work before launching an early stage startup software company with her husband Peter. At the time, they both had very little knowledge about startups, and there were plenty of challenges along the way. Beth shares more about this journey and the power of being able to pivot.

Beth Bostwick:

This is something that we did, and this is not what I would suggest, but I was running away from something. I was so burnt out in the corporate world that I could not imagine myself back in there. So by God, I was going to be successful in building this, whatever the heck it turned out to be I was going to make it somehow. And so there was that burning need to succeed in a way that was almost a, you said you couldn’t do it, or you said I couldn’t do it, well, let me show you, I’m going to do it. Now this is years, Kate, of working through that process, but ultimately we pivoted enough over several years because the first idea we had was like a track and trace type mechanism for drug tracking, pharmaceutical pills.

So just like in a lot of companies, you have a, when you go through drug testing, and I’m not sure how it’s changed these days, but you used to have to monitor exactly where that sample went so it wouldn’t be adulterated in some way, fake the results inevitably. And there were some problems with drug showing up that weren’t really what they were supposed to be. And so we had developed a patent and so forth, spent a lot of time on it, and we found out that the enabling technology for this to work, Walmart was struggling with. And it’s like, “So if Walmart’s struggling with it, well, there ain’t no way that Beth and Peter in their backyard will figure it out.”

So we said, “Okay, we got to start pivoting.” The word pivot actually wasn’t part of my vernacular because I just knew we had to change. Now, later on, when I went to one of the early TED conferences, I think it was down in Santa Clara, they used this word pivot and it was like, “Oh my God, that’s what we’ve been doing for years.” Just change, change, change because we were trying to figure out where things were. But it wasn’t until we really started to think about how you build a business, you had to make money at it. You couldn’t just do something to do something. I mean, you can, but you’re not going to make money at it to pay the bills.

I remember we followed the money, which is a term out of a famous movie or famous line out of a movie. What we did is we started to pay attention to how businesses made money. If you were part of the transaction, you realized you could probably start to generate some kind of revenue. And so we were thinking about what the technology was we developed and how could that be adapted to some other use. And so that’s when we started to throw the doors wide open. It’s like, okay, “Well, we’re not drugs here, we’re everything. So what makes sense?”

It was then several years later into this journey, there were some folks that approached us from the vending industry and they said, “Hey, we have this idea for this little store kind of thing, but we need some software, do you guys think you could build it?” And we’re thinking, “Yeah, I think we can build it.” That’s what we told them. Then behind the closed door it was like, “Okay, we had to figure out how to build it,” kind of thing.

So it’s like the fake it till you make a piece you’ve probably heard about, well, that was us, literally. We ended up building a very successful business out of it, but it was a lot of pivots early on. I was telling somebody not that long ago that we did the lean startup in about the most un-lean way you possibly could do it, because we didn’t know all those steps. We kind of had to figure it out. It’s like, “Oh, we got this done. Oh no, now what about all these other things?”

So one of the things that’s really important that I share with entrepreneurs is you can only plan so far in advance, and honestly, you have to figure out how to get to that next step because once you get to that next stair tread, another whole set of issues are going to show up and all the stuff, that the planning and effort you put in is probably not going to be worth it because you’re not going to know what it is you need to do next until you get to that next step.

And that’s a really hard concept for business students in particular to understand. And I think engineering from a different angle, technically you need to pay attention to some of that stuff. But in terms of building a business, it’s very much not like running a corporation because that’s what a lot of MBAs are trained for, go in and work with existing operations. But if you’re building something that has never existed before, by definition, you have to create things. You have to push the boundaries. You have to be open to possibilities. You have to see things differently because looking at it the way somebody else has looked at it is not going to create the solution that you need. It’s that nimble mindset that is so important to being a successful entrepreneur.

Kate Young:

Part of what Beth shares as an author and speaker is the challenges she’s faced and overcome throughout her life as a serial entrepreneur, which has also helped to strengthen her and Peter’s relationship. She shares more about leveraging the power of your thinking and how that’s made an incredible impact on her career and her personal life.

Beth Bostwick:

Peter is truly a life partner. I mean, I never really got what that meant, but I can say that now almost 40 years into a marriage that I get what a life partner is. One of the things that happened to us, and this is more in the later stage of building Ready Touch, which is the name of the company, we built software that enabled transactions to occur in these… They were private vending settings, it wasn’t like in the Pepsi Center in Los Angeles where you have vending machines. These were company campuses where they had banks of vending machines that they’ve replaced with open shelves, security was tied into these rooms, you could only badge in and badge out so we knew who was coming in and coming out. But people could literally pick things up and they’d scan a barcode just like you do in the grocery store, pay for it with a stored value card, maybe it was a credit card, but you knew who was coming in and out.

And the technology will enable these vending machine operators to move from just a couple SKUs, chips and sodas, to being able to sell in a market, a couple hundred SKUs. You could choose your product based on your customer needs, based on profitability. So these guys were all of a sudden now merchants, they weren’t just people who filled vending machines. Totally different skill set, totally different way of thinking. It was a real boon for a lot of people. A lot of people built amazing, or are building successful businesses.

But one of the challenges we ran into is some of the folks that we worked with were not easy people to deal with, and Peter and I were new business people, we didn’t get everything right. And one organization decided they wanted out of the contract essentially because we had these longer term contracts, and we said, “No, you agreed to this.” Well, they thought they could build our software for a whole lot less, and so they sued us and we said, “No, we’re not going to do that.” They sued us and ultimately won that suit, and we were devastated. I just can’t tell you. It was like we’d been sucker punched so fricking hard we couldn’t breathe after that because we’d spent 10 years building this company, our own money.

We didn’t seek investment because we were going through the Great Recession when we started this thing and Silicon Valley rolled up their sidewalks. We had no clue what was going to happen. We had no concept of the possibilities, we were probably going to have to lay off our employees. Because we realized at that point that we probably had six months runway left with our existing businesses, and it was not enough to sustain everything.

I remember it was late 2014, we went to visit family down in Florida for Christmas, and we took a couple days and stayed in New Orleans before coming back to California. Peter was reading a book around the power of your thinking. We pretty much had gotten to the point where we needed to really reassess things, it was very painful to think about. And I remember he said, “There’s really something interesting to this whole thinking thing, about paying attention to your thoughts and stuff.” So I said, “Okay, well, let’s talk.” And so we talked more and more and we realized that because we had no resources left, we had whatever savings… We put a bunch of our savings into this company. This was free. We could manage, we could think about our thinking. We didn’t have to pay somebody to consult with us to figure it out. We were already thinking with our heads.

So we decided, “Okay, what’s it going to cost us? We can try this out.” And selfishly, by paying attention to our thinking and really focusing on what we wanted, that got us out of the painful thought of all the possible negative things that could happen. So there was significant incentive to not ruminate about all the bad stuff that could happen.

So we really chose it as a way to get through that next six months because we really didn’t know what was going to happen once we hit May or so of 2015. We learned so much about ourselves. We learned so much about other people and the amazing power of you have in your own head in terms of creating the world you live in because of the way you think. It sounds so simple, and it sounds woo-woo. I mean, I was really questioning. I was like, “Really? I mean, we’re scientists here,” because we both had undergrads that were in the science space. And actually that was one of the reasons we chose Purdue. It’s like, “Okay, we’re in more with science engineering people, we’ll probably fit in better there than with business people.” But I think that the fact that we walked into it very skeptical was interesting because we had to figure out, well, what experiences had we had in our life that basically reinforced what we were learning about all of this.

When I think back to that first six months at Purdue, when I didn’t know what was happening to myself physically, there was a spinal tap that they did as one of the diagnostic tools that they were trying to use to figure out what was wrong with me. I had that spinal tap on a Friday, the next Monday I had an accounting test that morning. When you have a spinal tap, you want to lay on your back so the hole where they pulled the spinal fluid out seals up because if it doesn’t seal, then you end up with a really nasty headache.

Well, my hole didn’t seal up, and so I took that accounting test with a really bad headache. I, could hardly keep my head upright. I took that test and I managed to get over to Peter’s office, which was in the building next to Krannert there. And that next week, I literally had to lie on my back, just daydreaming because I couldn’t lift my head to do anything. I couldn’t eat. I could barely go to the restroom. It was just, I lost weight. It was just scary, honestly. And I remember the only way I could engage myself was how I thought. And so I didn’t want to think about, I might be dying of cancer or something. I thought about racing. I thought about riding in the mountains. And so I was on my bike every day climbing the hills, being around people I liked, who knew me, and being strong, physically strong, which is the total opposite. I found myself just lying there for, well, a whole week, literally, until that hole sealed up.

I remember referencing that thinking that I did when I was lying on my back as we were trying to learn about the power of your thinking. And I realized that I was actually practicing that powerful thinking process of just focusing on what I wanted when I was in my worst place that I could ever recall. And it was that experience that enabled me to start to leap beyond the woo-woo-ness of the power of your thinking to really start to leverage it. And so we ended up selling our company, going back to Ready Touch, we ended up selling our company literally right before we would’ve had to file for bankruptcy, all the papers were signed. We went right up to the edge of the cliff, but we didn’t go over. We’re still here, we’re still around. And we learned so damn much from that process, because then we took the next couple of years to unwind what actually happened. And it was because we…

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:30:04]

Beth Bostwick:

Unwind what actually happened, and it was because we were thinking about what we wanted, not what we didn’t want, which is the scary stuff that we didn’t want to go into. So there’s a little bit of ostrich in the sand kind of thing. The very specific question that I always ask people is what do you want? What do you want? What’s the outcome you want? And if you’re thinking about what you want, you by definition aren’t thinking about what you don’t want, which is the thinking you don’t want to spend your time on. You want to be spending your time thinking about what you want.

And then as part of that, thinking about how it feels, thinking about how you’re enjoying yourself, and that was literally what I was doing when I was lying on my back that week because I was imagining myself and feeling the bike under me as I’m going around these corners at 30 miles an hour in the mountains and just the movement of the bike and how gravity pulls you around the corners. That was what I was feeling that week. Those kinds of things. And that’s exactly what the power of your thinking does for you, is when you start to pay attention to the feelings, that’s the power, how good you feel when you’re doing something, and it shows. When you go into a room, people know you’re glowing, you’re feeling good about yourself. So, so powerful.

Kate Young:

Absolutely. And so is part of that what you share with younger people, with students as you mentor them? What kinds of advice can you give these entrepreneurs that are sure to face challenges and hard times?

Beth Bostwick:

Yes, you will. Absolutely. That is the entrepreneurial journey you are signing up for, by the way, is to have those tough times. It’s just that we all experience them differently. The trick is getting through them, and that’s where thinking positively about yourself inside is really, really important. Even though you’re in the depths of despair and you’ve got these traumas that you’re dealing with, like when we thought we were going to lose the company after all those years of working on it, if you can get yourself to think regularly about what you want to see happen going forward, that’s when the world starts to realign and you draw good people into your life, you draw people who can help you into your life. I remember Peter talking about an example when we were trying to sell the company. We were trying to sell it before we went into this lawsuit. And then when we came out of it, it was like, okay, well how are we going to sell it now with all this?

And I remember we had an investment banker that he was going around to shop the company with. They were up visiting somebody and they were having a great conversation, but they ended up being delayed getting to the airport, and so they just were squeaking onto the plane, and they were flying Southwest. And for those of you who’ve never flown Southwest, you get seating groups, you don’t get a seat assignment. And so if you get there late, then you’re left with whatever seats are left. And Peter always wants to sit at the emergency aisle seat, that specific one because he’s got more leg room. He walks into the plane, they held the plane for these two guys to get on, Peter and this investment banker to get on the plane. They walk in, Peter’s going down the aisle and he sees a aisle seat, but he goes past it knowing that the investment banker’s behind him, and he said, “Here, you take this seat and I’ll take the next one.” Thinking he’d be wat at the back of the plane.

The flight attendant says, “Here. Got a seat right here,” And it’s the aisle seat in the exit row, the favorite seat in the whole plane. Somehow everybody else was seated on the plane, but that seat was left for him. So that was a way… Because he had earlier in the day said, “Okay, I want something really amazing to happen to me, and I don’t know what it is, but just, I’m open.” And that was what it was. He came home and he told me about this like, “This is the greatest thing.” He said, “This really works.” So it was just little things like that. But that also goes to thinking ahead to what you want. What good things do you want to happen in your life? I mean, people can always tell you all the bad things that are going to happen to you. It’s like, okay, well, it’s good to be aware of that, but don’t focus on it. Pay attention to what you really want. And when I say what you really want, what do you inside really want, not in your heart.

Your head is mostly right, but it’s not always right. In your heart, if you’re really listening to yourself, that’s always right. That is something I do share with young entrepreneurs because sometimes you’ll get so caught up in the logic and why something’s supposed to work, but maybe it’s not supposed to work. Maybe it needs to work the way you think it should work, but if you’re not paying attention to that, how are you going to know?

Kate Young:

It’s almost like mental health awareness too.

Beth Bostwick:

Totally.

Kate Young:

I don’t know if you would’ve called it that back then, but nowadays when everyone’s talking about mental health, there’s a huge impact or alignment that I’m seeing there.

Beth Bostwick:

The thing that’s really important, and I always knew this as a cyclist. When I was competing, visualizing winning was always a key part of race prep. And there’s plenty of athletes out there that do that, this is just one specific aspect of that very same thing. There is a mind body connection, whether people want to acknowledge it or not, there is one, and it’s not always the physiological, it’s the thinking process. I mean, we don’t know enough about all that stuff, but there is a connection there. It is very powerful. And it’s also why there are no coincidences. In fact, this is one of the chapters in our book. There aren’t coincidences because your thinking is what helps draw things to you. How many times have all of us found somebody, and it’s like, “Oh, I was just thinking about you the other day. It’s amazing we met.’ Well, guess what? You’re thinking about that person, how much you want to see them, how much you’d enjoy being around them, going out for drinks, dancing, whatever, that energy is out there and it draws those people to you.

That’s why if you think negative thoughts about yourself, this is another thing I’ll share with students in particular, if you’re thinking bad thoughts about yourself, you’re just drawing more negativity into your life. If you’re thinking well of yourself like you’re your best friend because you always are with yourself, you’re never not with yourself. It’s a very obvious thing, but sometimes it needs to be said. If you’re hurting yourself, you’re not helping yourself. And I think that that’s a surprise because a lot of, especially young women, think they’re not good enough and it’s like, oh, you are good enough. You just need to believe you’re good enough. That is so important because when you’re an entrepreneur, you inevitably are going to have challenges. That’s what you’re signing up for when you choose to be an entrepreneur. But who are the people that you draw into your life? We realized that a lot of the struggles we were dealing with, once we looked back at it, were the direct result of our thinking that we weren’t good enough, we weren’t smart enough, we were never going to figure it out.

Well, we drew people into our life that weren’t very supportive. Gosh, don’t make your world harder. Think about the people you like to be around. Draw those people in. You’ll be way more successful. And oh, by the way, you’ll be really happy with it too.

Kate Young:

Yeah, surround yourself with that positive energy and positive people who believe in you too, right?

Beth Bostwick:

Exactly. And who wants to be around with somebody that’s… I mean, if you go to a cocktail party… Okay, we’re all adults. Go to a cocktail party. You don’t know anybody. You walk in, you start to meet people. If you’re talking to somebody who’s kind of negative about stuff, well, maybe you don’t want to stay with them, or maybe you do. Maybe you had a really rough day or something. Very soon after that, the positive people don’t spend time with the negative people and the negative people don’t spend time with the positive people, and that’s just an energy thing. You start to see the room separate out. You get to choose every day what are the kinds of things you want to think about, and the kinds of things you think about are what draws that great stuff to you, the great people, and that, I’d argue, money follows good things, but you have to have the good stuff out there first.

In fact, there was a group of senior design engineers that were working on their capstone project. I went and talked to them a couple of weeks ago here at Colorado State. I went through and talked about some of the history I’d had in starting our software company, and I said, “Oh, by the way, how you think about yourself shows. If you’re not thinking well about yourself, everybody in the room knows that. You don’t cover it up because that stuff just emanates from you. So if you’re really going to be successful at anything, you have to look at how you’re thinking about yourself, how you’re treating yourself in your head because that’s a direct reflection of the kinds of people you’re going to draw into your life. You can choose that thinking.” Maybe you grew up in a world where the glass was half empty, you can choose to look at it as half full, but that’s a conscious choice and you have to work at it. It takes time, but you can do it.

And my life is led very differently than what it used to be. I would choose this any day over the previous way I lived my life.

Kate Young:

Beth returned to campus for the 2023 Purdue Entrepreneurial alumni reunion last November, which celebrated the legacy of Boilermaker entrepreneurs, and she actively participates in coaching and judging student pitch competitions at Purdue. I asked her more about the Boilermaker students she’s met along her mentorship journey and which innovations and stories really stick out to her.

Beth Bostwick:

I went back last fall for the first entrepreneurial reunion. That was great. That was just amazing. I got to see all my friends from the Valley that came out for that. There’s a group of folks that I met out there and it was so great. So there’s three companies in particular I’ll mention. One is Glimpse. And this is a company that was started in the dorms. Three folks put this thing together in the dorms. Peter and I met them when we were there for our last entrepreneurial exec in residence, EIR program, in the dorms. And so he said, “Oh, you should really meet these guys.” And so we went out to dinner at East End Grill. It was just amazing what they were talking to us about. It was just so exciting because they were so excited. It was just a lot of fun. I think they’re based in New York. What they do is they put products in short-term rentals. So they work through Airbnb, VRBO kinds of properties. They’re on the road, they’re making things happen.

Next one is AERO V. I pulled these words off their site. So they develop cloud-based software solutions to advance power grid limitations and operational inefficiencies in the advanced air mobility sector. This is like such cool stuff. And Nick, who was actually one of the guys that presented last fall, he and I were at a reception that night after all the presentations. I was talking to a couple folks at Purdue Innovates because I hadn’t met everybody and turned around and I said, “Nick, oh, how are you doing?” And he smiled and he looked at me and he said, “You don’t remember me, do you?” I said, okay, tell me more because I’m thinking, “You’re right. I don’t remember you.” And he said, “I was a photographer when you were back on campus eight years ago as an exec in residence.” I thought, oh my God. This is the full circle moment that you just always hope to have happen where somebody who’s building a successful business comes back and says, “I remember you.”

Because when I was back on campus, a lot of stuff I was talking about was innovation and entrepreneurship and trying to get something going, so I’d like to think I had a little bit of a seed planted to help him begin to think about stuff. But he clearly is doing some amazing stuff. And then the third one is… By the way, he’s got funding through an organization called M25 Ventures, and they’re based in Chicago. And that company was founded by a Purdue alum, Mike Asem.

Kate Young:

Wow.

Beth Bostwick:

Yes. It’s so cool. It’s just so neat to see this. And then Ian Randolph I met as well at the entrepreneurial reunion, and he’s such an amazing guy. His company, MagLev Aero, they’re unlocking a clean and quiet solution for the urban air mobility mass market. So think drones, think personal aircraft. I’m making this stuff up by the way. He’s part of helping make that whole space happen. He’s a young Purdue alum. I mean, seriously, you don’t do this stuff to stay anywhere. Purdue just draws cool people in that have cool ideas. I mean, this is what’s so exciting about entrepreneurship is you can really affect things in a big way for a lot of people. And I think that’s really where Purdue Innovates is creating an opportunity for students, alums, faculty to take amazing ideas and commercialize them via startups. And I think that the whole ecosystem at Purdue is starting to shift. I mean, it’s always been there thinking about game-changing technology and so forth. But I think the difference now is recognizing the value of building startups to make it happen.

I don’t know that that was ever on the radar screen for a while, but I know with the SVB group, we’ve been working for years to try and get some of that going. So it’s really nice now to see that group incorporated into the Purdue Innovates organization.

Kate Young:

The Silicon Valley Boiler Maker Innovation Group for Purdue Entrepreneurs, that’s part of Purdue Innovates, which is a huge university initiative that you were just talking about. Why is it so important to you to serve as a mentor for other boilermaker entrepreneurs? I can tell you’re super jazzed about it. You’re excited. What gets you that excited? Why are you passionate about that?

Beth Bostwick:

Because I love to see square pegs go into square holes because I was one of those square pegs. It’s just, for me, there wasn’t a resource, there weren’t support systems out there for me, and it was really painful. It doesn’t need to be that painful. And I think that Purdue Innovates as a resource, it’s available to all Purdue folks and people should use them. I want people to knock their door down, going out and say, “Hey, help me think about this.” I’d love to give them more business because they’re the folks that are going to enable other entrepreneurs to be successful. And the reason I’m so excited about it is because I see how much I was able to help a lot of people live a different life because the vending marketplace and food service, it’s a negative margin business, vending in particular. Well, not so much today, and that’s because the technology we built to help them, those people are building amazing businesses now. And I think that that’s what innovation and commercializing really cool technology.

I mean, the whitest paint, I mean, gosh, I could think of a zillion things from that one. There’s not enough attention, I think, that’s paid to the value add that you as a founder get when you build a successful business. Everybody talks about the bank account and the money…

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:45:04]

Beth Bostwick:

… successful business. Everybody talks about the bank account and the money. Yeah, that’s nice, but I’ll tell you, the piece that nobody really pays much attention to is the real rewards you get inside when you see the effects of what you’re able to do that’s game changing for people in terms of their livelihoods, in terms of their views of themselves, access to resources that your technology enables. Wholly new things that didn’t exist before. So all the people are like, “Well, this is the way we do it.” It’s like, “That’s not my crowd. I’ll write this, let’s do it differently. We can do this better.” And people that are in that space are just so much more engaging. That’s why I just love doing this because there’s so much potential out there that if we really start to step up and allow people to step up, support them in stepping up, we could do some really seriously amazing, powerful stuff.

And that’s why I’m excited for the future, frankly. There’s a lot of stuff that people are doom and gloom about, climate and all kinds of stuff, but I see stuff coming out of Purdue, and it’s not just Purdue, there’s other places that are doing this, too. It’s really exciting to see what people are coming up with. It’s because they’re stepping out of the assumptions of the past and they’re re-looking at things. They’re not afraid. They’re not afraid, they’re exploring. And so anytime I can help somebody do that, especially young women, alums as well, it’s so rewarding for me to see that happen. So yeah, I’m jazzed.

Kate Young:

I love it. Now, we talked a lot about the Daniels School of Business on the business side, but it’s also unique because it has a strong STEM foundation. So how do you think business students can benefit from having and understanding these different ways of thinking in STEM related entrepreneurship?

Beth Bostwick:

The world is different now. I compare this to when I graduated back in ’89, it’s decades of difference. The thing that I think is really exciting is technology is at the core of any business today. That was not so in the past. And so I think if you’re really going to be a successful business person, you need to have a good, basic understanding of some fundamental different kinds of technology. I could just look at AI. AI is going to be incorporated into everything. I mean, people are trying to push it faster than sometimes it might be, or they’re not looking enough at broader, bigger picture of impacts there.

But I think that business people need to have a fundamental understanding of the different kinds of technology out there, not just in terms of going in and managing in a business and seeing opportunities, but when you understand what different kinds of technology are out there, it enables you to leapfrog your business into new and different ways of going to market, supporting your customers. And I think those individuals who don’t have that kind of a background, they miss out on those opportunities, they can’t see it. They don’t get access to it, if you will. And so I think that’s a really special uniqueness that I think will set Purdue apart from other universities, other educational institutions.

And I honestly think it’s also going to help Purdue start to, and this is I think really important, start to differentiate themselves from other business schools, not just because we have great engineering and great science coming out of here, but because we’re helping people think differently, we’re helping people recognize that just because we did it this way doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the way we need to do it going forward. In fact, we could do it three times better or 100 times better if we did this little bit at the front end and we kind of just avoided all this other stuff around there. Technology allows you the ability to start to do that in different ways.

Kate Young:

And Purdue always named one of the most innovative universities in the country. What is it that fosters innovation in your eyes when you’re a Boilermaker?

Beth Bostwick:

I think innovation is really made up of connecting dots that other people can’t see connected that way. Sometimes it involves really new technology and new different stuff, which is great, but it doesn’t always. I mean, the stuff that we built, it was, I’ll say kind of off the shelf where we weren’t able to patent any process or anything, so we didn’t have those protections. So building something with something that’s out there but looking at it in a different way, that can be a really powerful innovation.

And so I think really being able to step into yourself and recognize when you’ve got a belief or a dogma thought process even, and recognizing that maybe that’s not working for you, maybe that’s cutting off opportunities that you could be considering. I think that’s true for students as well, especially for students. But for alums, people who’ve got amazing experience, there’s new and different ways to explore things if you start to recognize, “Oh, maybe I’ve got a limiting belief over here that’s saying, ‘Oh, can’t do it this way.’ What if I just said, ‘Okay, no, let’s try and explore?'” That’s what innovation is to me. It’s really your thinking that that’s at the core of it.

Kate Young:

We often talk about Boilermakers being risk takers, too. So how have you built up your appetite, your tolerance for risk so that you can find stability in being a long-term entrepreneur? We kind of chatted about it this whole interview, but what are some of those things that you’ve done to build that up?

Beth Bostwick:

When I think about that question, I don’t consider myself a risk taker. Honestly, I truly don’t. I never have. And it wasn’t until several years ago when somebody said, “Wow, Beth, how can you do this? You’re kind of always out there on the edge.” And I thought about it, it’s like I never think about myself out on the edge, but I do think about myself more as somebody who will look at things differently than other people. And so where I saw possibilities and opportunities, other people saw risks and maybe fear. And for me, it was really all about having an impact and trying to make an impactful change, it wasn’t about the risk. So it was really looking at it from a different perspective. And to this day, I still don’t think of myself as a risk taker. It just doesn’t fit in my thinking.

Kate Young:

Beth is on the Purdue Alumni Association board of directors, part of the Purdue for Life Foundation, which helps everyone who loves Purdue stay connected, get involved and give back. She’s also a founding member of the International Council of Purdue Women and works on Purdue entrepreneurship related initiatives such as Purdue Innovates and the Silicon Valley Boilermaker Innovation Group. Beth says she is proud to serve Purdue University where giant leaps happen day in and day out. She clearly continues to care deeply about this Boilermaker of spirit and community. I asked Beth why Purdue left such a lasting impact on her.

Beth Bostwick:

Purdue is to me, all about, “How can I help?” Because that’s the way I experienced Purdue as a student when Dr. Snearly was saying, “Let’s see if we can rework your schedule.” It happened when I was in the valley and I couldn’t find folks to network with. And it wasn’t until I discovered the early stages of the Silicon Valley Boiler Innovation Group where the SVB group, you mentioned that. I was like, “Oh, I think I could fit into that group because I’m a Boilermaker. They can’t say I’m not because well, I have a degree here and everything,” and they welcomed me with open arms and we’re all so different. It’s just that spirit of openness, of accepting of, “How can I help,” that’s just exactly what makes Purdue special, and that’s whether you’re on campus or not.

Kate Young:

Absolutely.

Beth Bostwick:

Yeah, so I just can’t say enough about that. So any way I can give back and help make that better or more available, whatever, I’m in.

Kate Young:

You talked about pivoting a lot, but at Purdue we talked about another P word, persistence. What does that mean to you, that word, and how does it relate to your pivoting?

Beth Bostwick:

Well, I was going to say I don’t think of myself as a persistent person, but I do remember thinking back to when I was younger, if somebody said, “You can’t do that or You’re not able to do that, you’re not smart enough, whatever, fast enough,” I was like, “Well, I guess I’ll just have to show you.” And so it kind of started there and I think finally realizing after I couldn’t fit into the round pegs in the big companies anymore, I just said, “I just need to go be me.” And that’s when I embraced my squareness, if you will, and just be me. I think that persistence in continuing to believe in myself was really, really, really important. And I think that anybody that’s persistent enough or sticks with it long enough, whatever it is that they’re working on, will ultimately find success. The other part of it I’ll say, is success is your definition of success, it’s not what other people or the world says is successful.

And this also goes back to the power of your thinking. If you think you’re a success, then you’re a success. Success is not always the biggest bank account, success is the impact you have and choosing to have the impact that you have and supporting other people to help them have the impact that they want to have. That’s to me, persistence in a way that it’s continuous improvement, it’s everybody’s winning on that. There’s something that I remember when Peter and I were working on Ready Touch, this whole concept of vending, we were trying to understand how it operated and how our technology could help them out and so forth.

There was a point when I realized we’re looking at the whiteboard, that all these folks have to have each, an input. We had drawn it all up there and I remember thinking, “Wow, if everybody gives a little bit, then they get a little bit more than they give, then they’re going to want to give a little bit more.” And so that then started what I called the virtuous circle. In the valley, I realized people were talking about this thing called the flywheel, and it’s like, “Well, that’s exactly the same thing.” So if everybody gives a little bit, but when everybody gives a little bit, everybody gets a little bit more, that’s how you start to build a startup, that’s the magic. But getting that flywheel going is a challenge sometimes. But being persistent is part of getting that flywheel going to build a successful startup.

Kate Young:

I love that, that’s a super interesting answer to that question. We have all different answers, but I love that. Okay, what is Beth Bostwick’s next giant leap? It can be professionally or personally.

Beth Bostwick:

Oh my gosh, I’m so glad you asked this question. You probably know the answer anyway, but I’m going to make it really clear. I want to see Purdue set the standard and then lead in enabling women to build successful startups, that’s what I’d like to see. There’s nobody out there doing it. There’s people trying, but Purdue, I think can make that happen.

Kate Young:

I love that.

Beth Bostwick:

That’s my whole life at this point, is I want to help all entrepreneurs, don’t get me wrong. I think everybody can be successful if they truly choose to and they’re persistent. But I’d really like to see women step into that role as a founder of these startups because there’s amazing impact you can have that I’ve already talked about. There’s also amazing financial incentives. Look at some of the billionaires. Well, they all started some kind of startup in some fashion, right?

Didn’t take them centuries to do it. And I’d love to see more women be in that club. I think Purdue could help make that happen because we’ve got amazing folks that come out of this school with amazing abilities. You don’t have to be technical, but sometimes it is an advantage. But I really would like to see women step into that role at some point in their career because it’s pretty amazing when you think about it.

Kate Young:

Beth shares one last thought about her passion for Purdue and where the future is headed with important university initiatives like Purdue Innovates.

Beth Bostwick:

I’m just so excited about the university with the changes that are happening. I think President Chang is really setting the university onto a whole nother level. I think Ms. Daniels did an amazing job of getting the organization, also the entity of Purdue onto a really great place and I think President Chang’s going to take it to a whole nother level that people have just no concept of what the possibilities are because we are so many smart, amazing people working together. So I am really excited to see what happens next and I just want to be part of helping it make that happen.

Kate Young:

Well, Purdue is lucky to have an alum like you.

Beth Bostwick:

Well, thank you. That’s nice, thank you.

Kate Young:

We can’t thank Beth enough for her time. I loved her vulnerability, enthusiasm and spirit. If you’d like to learn more about the Purdue Innovates initiative, please visit purdueinnovates.org. And if you want to watch Beth’s advice on how to stand out among other entrepreneurs, head over to our podcast YouTube page, youtube.com/@ThisIsPurdue. She walks us through how a compelling question can go a long way when pitching an idea. And of course, be sure to follow This is Purdue on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Purdue is hosted and written by me, Kate Young.

Our podcast videography for this episode was led by Ted Schellenberger. Our social media marketing is led by Maria Welch. Our podcast distribution strategy is led by Teresa Walker and Carly Eastman. Our podcast design is led by Caitlin Freeville. Our podcast photography is led by John Underwood. Our podcast team project manager is Rain Gu. Our podcast YouTube Promotions is managed by Kirsten Bauman. Additional Writing Assistance is led by Sophie Ritz and our This is Purdue intern is Caroline Kime. Thanks for listening to This is Purdue. For more information on this episode, visit our website at purdue.edu/podcast. There, you can head over to your favorite podcast app to subscribe and leave us a review. And as always, Boiler up.