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Occasionally we get a legend on the Startup Grind stage, and we had just that last week in Dallas when Phil Romano, the founder of Romano's Macaroni Grill and Fuddruckers, both popular US food chains shared his experiences. At the beginning of the interview he says, "My mother and father went out and mortgaged their home to get the money (for my business). You talk about the fear of failure. If you fail you're done. Boom." Wow.
Often times in tech or Silicon Valley we think that we have a monopoly on great entrepreneurs and the great companies around the world. It's simply not true and Dallas based Romano is living proof of that. It's a great interview led by Chapter Director Lee Blaylock (founder of Who@), check it out below.
For the past 15 years Derek has been building communities. He is the co-founder/CEO of Bevy, a SaaS product that helps companies like Salesforce, Atlassian, Google, Snowflake, and Adobe build virtual and in-person communities. Bevy has raised $60M from Accel, Upfront Ventures, and others. He co-founded Startup Grind, a community of 600 Chapters in 125 countries educating, inspiring, and connecting startup people. Since 2012 Startup Grind has hosted 20,000 events. In 2010 he co-founded Commonred which was acquired by Income.com. Derek also previously worked as a product manager at Electronic Arts. He currently lives in Palo Alto CA with his wife and four children.