If you're struggling to make your mark in a business with history, the challenge is real.  So is the opportunity to break new ground using powerful legacy tools and experience.  This episode is all about finding the difficult, but valuable, balance between innovation and history, harnessing the past for a better, energized future.  

Whether you are born an entrepreneur,  or born into a family of entrepreneurs, there is no doubt that moving beyond the family legacy can be both a burden and an opportunity.  

Anthea Sargeaunt started her entrepreneurial career right out of high school, building a business to pay her rent through her post secondary education path and launching her ambition to build something meaningful.  Her lessons in entrepreneurship motivated her to create something world changing, while respecting the boundaries between family and business - an age old problem to which she applies a modern approach.  Her company, 2S Water, has a huge mandate - to enable real time water testing and help enterprises and governments to improve global water safety.   But, transitioning from intergenerational legacy to leading edge innovator is daunting in many ways, and running an engineering-focused business as a risk taking entrepreneur is no less overwhelming.

Today we are exploring the strange and wonderful world of Venture Capital. Kristina Milke started her career as a chartered accountant, with ambition, but an unformed game plan. Being open to opportunity however, brought her to one intersection after another, where she was able to stretch her boundaries and grow her talents in some really diverse organizations.  

 From industrial supply, to aerospace, to her tenure at the incredibly innovative growth company Intuit, her last employee role before launching into venture capital, was as CEO at Investopedia working on its sale.  She credits her life journey to having an innovation mindset – being ambitious to learn, but open minded about what form that learning would take.  

Today Kristina is supporting her favourite type of startups, technology,  into scaling opportunities, while mentoring the founders behind them using her own hard earned leadership and investment skills.  VC is innovating itself – as an industry traditionally dominated by niche risk takers, all the way through to the IPOS where big investment banks flourish, there is a  growing peer to peer investment community supported by regional and national angel funds whose investment theses cover almost any type of business vertical market.   Through mentorship, networking and focused collaboration, there are some amazing things happening in the world of growth and venture capital that are putting many new entrepreneurs squarely on the map. 

If your business dreams include breaking amazing new ground, solving problems previously undefined, and doing something entirely new, this episode is for you.

Today we meet Chris, who after 20 years of pursuing her medical profession, found herself at a cross roads where she could stay with what she knew, or take the road, not just less travelled, but break new ground, by building a brand new category of business.

For those of you who have read "Blue Ocean Strategy", this will be a great exploration of the model with an incredibly bright and articulate R.N. who found herself being more than just "a nurse with a business' - in fact she created a new business category in the conservative legal market where the foundation is literally in "how we have always done things", in other words, legal precedent.

Building a business by innovating a new category is, let's face it - not for everyone.  It can take years to succeed, your main barrier is that your prospective clients probably don't even know that they need you, and your primary tool is educating on the opportunity and hoping to get that one convert who will help you gain momentum.

Chris Rokosh did this, and 20 years later, has both the scars and the success story to show for it.  Her journey isn't just about getting here - it's about staying focused on the core values and purpose that drove her along this path after the door was kicked open by a chance conversation that lit the spark of an idea.  The hard work came after that - as we learn from other stories of innovation in category as well. 

Get inspired by this conversation with Chris who is an amazingly articulate, compassionate and insightful human who has walked the talk and invests daily in becoming a better entrepreneur and leader, with her company Connect Medical Legal Experts , on our fourth episode of Prime for Growth.