In this episode of the Where Parents Talk podcast, host Lianne Castelino interviews Margo Machol Bisnow, an author and speaker with a background in the US government and nonprofit sector.
Bisnow discusses her book, ‘Raising an Entrepreneur,’ which features 99 stories from diverse families whose children have achieved entrepreneurial success. She emphasizes the importance of parents supporting their children’s passions, embracing failure as a learning opportunity, and creating conditions that foster entrepreneurial thinking.
The conversation touches on Bisnow’s personal experiences with her own entrepreneur children, the changing job market, and specific parenting methods that encourage independence and self-discovery.
Her key message is for parents to believe in and support their children unconditionally, fostering a mindset of curiosity, resilience, and confidence.
MARGOT MACHOL BISNOW
Author, Raising an Entrepreneur
Speaker
Founder, Non-profit organization
Former Federal Trade Commission Commissioner
Former Staff Director, President’s Council of Economic Advisers
Mother of two
“I would say to parents, your goal shouldn’t be that your child ends up in a career where they can make some money and they’re miserable. You shouldn’t have as a plan, oh, my kid’s going to spend 40 hours a week for the next 40 years doing something they hate. Parents have to understand that if their child has a passion for something, if their child wants to do something, if it gives their child joy, that’s great and they should be happy for their child. I want to define entrepreneur. So for me, an entrepreneur is anyone who starts something.”
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Welcome to where parents talk. My name is Lianne Castelino. Our guest today is an author and a speaker. Margot Machol Bisnow has spent 20 years working in the US government and also previously founded a nonprofit organization. Her latest book is called Raising an Entrepreneur. How to help your children achieve their dreams.
99 stories from families who did. Margo is also a mother of two adult children, both of whom are entrepreneurs themselves. She joins us today from Baja, California. Thank you so much for taking the time. It’s my pleasure. Although since I’m down here, I should say, el gusto es mio. Margo, as we mentioned, you pivoted from a 20 year career in the U.
S. government, including as staff director of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, to writing and educating people about entrepreneurism. Why did you choose to pursue this path? My older son, Elliot started an organization called summit or summit series in 2008. I’m actually, the reason I’m in Baja is there’s a big 1200 young entrepreneurs at a summit conference down here this weekend.
And I just hadn’t met a lot of entrepreneurs at that point. And I would go up to them and I’d go to his events and I’d say, I’m just so curious. how you turned out the way you did, so willing to work so hard on something you believed in and take on so much risk. And they all basically told me the same thing.
They all said I had someone who believed in me, who told me I could do anything I put my mind to. Most of the time that was apparent. And even more, most of the time it was their mom, but not always. There are some people who had, a grandmother or a stepdad or a teacher or a neighbor, but not always their mom, but someone along the way always said.
I know you can do whatever you put your mind to. I believe in you. And I was so struck by this. I just kept talking about it. And the kid said, you have to write a book. And I said, I can’t write a book. And they said no, you have to write a book. They finally wore my, wore me down and I decided to write a book and they wrote the foreword and they said, everyone needs someone to believe in you.
Sometimes that’s even your kids. So I had no idea what I would find. I picked 70 people, super diverse, half men, half women, every race, every religion, every socioeconomic background, born overseas, immigrant parents, Canadians big families, small families, divorced, married parents. Just every educated parents, parents who hadn’t finished high school, married parents, whatever.
And to my amazement, they were basically all raised the same. And I just got so excited about it. And as we were talking before, there’s so many unhappy kids today. And I just, it’s so important to me to get this message out to parents about how to raise happy, confident, resilient, thriving kids.
Absolutely. And it’s interesting, Margo, because I don’t know how many people would make the direct correlation between a parent and how they’re raising their child and potentially raising an entrepreneur. I don’t think we think about the parenting behind entrepreneurism. How would you go about trying to explain that to somebody, especially in today’s world where you know, there’s more and more entrepreneurs, there’s no doubt about it.
And in the two years, your book came out in 2022, since your book was written, there’s probably even more entrepreneurs because of the world that we live in. So how would you go about explaining that to parents who may be, We’re raised differently, don’t believe and have confidence in their child pursuing going into business for themselves.
There’s 20 different things I want to answer. First of all, I would say to parents, your goal shouldn’t be that your child ends up in a career where they can make some money and they’re miserable. You shouldn’t have as a plan, oh, my kid’s going to spend 40 hours a week for the next 40 years doing something they hate.
That’s not a good plan. I would also tell parents the world has changed since we grew up. When we grew up, you had to have good grades in all your classes. You had to get into a good college. You had to graduate. You had to get, maybe go into graduate school. You really had to get ready for a great job that would last you your lifetime.
It’s not that world anymore, and Parents have to understand that if their child has a passion for something, if their child wants to do something, if it gives their child joy, that’s great and they should be happy for their child. I want to define entrepreneur. So for me, an entrepreneur is anyone who starts something.
It’s not just some guy with a job, with a for profit business. It can be anyone with anything they’ve started that they believe in. My younger son is an entrepreneur. He started a band. My older son is this entrepreneur. He started a conference series. So I think it’s really important when I talk about entrepreneurship, it’s more just.
A way of thinking and a mindset. I also want to say you can’t make your child an entrepreneur any more than you can make them an orchestra conductor or a doctor. You can create the conditions. So that if it’s a path they choose, they’re ready for it, but it’s not something you can force.
Of the 70 entrepreneurs in my book, only five have siblings who are also entrepreneurs. And in all five cases, they also have a sibling who’s not an entrepreneur. So I think it’s really important for parents just to understand that you can create the conditions that if that’s the path your child wants, it’s there.
Something that they’ll be able to launch their way into and the final answer to your question is that I think the biggest difference between entrepreneurs and people who go into other jobs is their attitude toward failure. If you’re a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant, you’re very risk averse.
You don’t want to fail. If you’re an entrepreneur. You understand that failure is how you learn and grow. I always love the Billie Jean King quote, we don’t call it failure, we call it feedback. And if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks. And if you’re afraid to take risks, You can’t be an entrepreneur.
So all of these parents raised their kids. So when the kids failed at something, they weren’t scolded or punished. The parents said, what did you learn? What would you do differently next time? Do you think this is something that you should change? Why would you change it? How would you change it?
They made them start thinking about, they didn’t say, You didn’t hit the home run, make the home run, you ruined it for your team, or oh my god, you didn’t get an A in your class, that’s, or oh my gosh, you’ve really screwed up on this, whatever, they didn’t do that. And I just think if you want to have a child who will become entrepreneurial it’s really important.
Not to scold them when they fail, but to let them experience that failure is how they’ll learn and grow, and that you will be with them every step of the way. You’re there for the inevitable setbacks. You know there will be setbacks. You support them, you’re there for them, and you know you’ll, that they’ll get there eventually.
So on that note, Margo, you talk about having parents create and support the conditions in which a child who wants to start something as an entrepreneur can thrive. What are some of those conditions? I think you’ve outlined a couple of here in terms of, embracing failure and those kinds of things, but from a parent’s perspective, what do those conditions look like?
Yeah, so that’s a great question, Lianne. Every entrepreneur I’ve spoken to had a passion outside of school. And in every case, their parents supported that passion. Sometimes it took a big gulp. Sometimes it wasn’t what the parents had in mind. But when the parents saw how much joy their kids were getting from it, the parents were so proud of you for your success in that.
And Because it was a passion that the young entrepreneurs, future entrepreneurs had picked themselves, it was something they worked really hard at. Because they worked really hard at it, they learned grit and focus and determination. They learned the trade off between hard work and results. They learned how to pivot when it wasn’t going well.
They learned how to recover when they fail. They learned how to, survey the course and figure out what they could do better. They learned all these incredibly valuable lessons that when they did become an entrepreneur helped them. They became confident. I, they became confident not because their parents went in and asked their teacher to change a grade or because everybody on the team got a trophy.
They became confident because they learned it. And if they worked hard enough at something that they could succeed. And they all learned these traits. A lot of them, it was sports. Not all of them. The ones who became artists, they started with that when they were younger, they started acting, they started singing but they started directing whatever, but most of them, what they do today has nothing to do with.
What they had as a passion when they were growing up, but it was the skills they learned and the support they got from their family. So along those lines, when we talk about passion based learning, and we talk about how parents can cultivate a passion in their kids for whatever it is from the interviews you’ve done from your lived experience, etc.
What. What should a parent try to do to have a child discover their passion? So what does that look like? And then the other part is what age should that begin ideally?
So let me answer the last second question first. There’s not an age there’s, it’s not a one size fits all. And several of these entrepreneurs had three different passions growing up. They had they wanted it. They did one thing and then it morphed and then they did something else. And then it morphed and then they did something else.
That’s okay. Some of them, it didn’t happen until they were in high school. Some of them had happened younger. Very few of them were selling things or, being, quote, entrepreneurial. When they were young, I think two of the 70 had lemonade stands. How do you help them discover it?
For me, this is the most important thing a parent can do. I believe every child is born with a gift, and I believe it’s our job as parents to help them figure that out. And when parents tell me that their kid’s in high school and they have no idea what their gift is or their passion is, I’m just like, you’ve never given them a chance to figure it out.
You’ve had them so programmed every minute of their life that they never give up. Had that opportunity. We did was we just wanted to expose them to everything. And if they liked it, they got to keep going. If they hated it, they had to finish the semester or whatever we’d paid for the summer.
They couldn’t drop out after two days. But at the end of the three months or whatever, this program was, if they hated it they could move on. They didn’t have to keep going. Both of our. Kids discovered what they loved when they were about 13. For my older son, it was tennis. And for my younger son, it was writing music.
It was serendipitous for both of them. My younger son, we’d signed him up for a summer of sports camps. He broke his leg the first week. Oh. I was looking for something for him to do. Everything was booked. I found this thing that included Writing music on the computer. I’m like, you’re going to this.
And by the end of the summer, that was it. He wrote 30, 300 songs before he graduated from high school. I used to say, I feel sorry for parents. Whose kid doesn’t give them a new song in their inbox a couple of times a week. And And I know you’re in Montreal. He married a woman from Canada.
He has a band and they’ve started singing. His band is Magic Giant, but they’ve also just started singing together somewhere in between. And I know he’s toured in Canada before and I’m sure they’ll be back. And my oldest son, it was tennis. He played every sport. The end of one summer, there was a couple of weeks with nothing to do.
I said, Oh, here’s a tennis camp. He really liked it. He wanted to take lessons. The next summer it was, he was running back and forth between baseball and tennis. And the, after that, it was just tennis. And at that point, all the people who ended up top hundred in the country were already doing regional tournaments.
We don’t play tennis. We don’t know anything about music. We couldn’t advise him. He just wanted to play. He kept losing. He said, I know what I did wrong. I’ll beat him next time. And he fought his way up to 35 in the country. And, I had these kids who were just doing something.
They love five hours a day. And. Seven days a week, and it wasn’t something that either of us knew anything about. But that turned out to be a good thing, because they had to figure it out on their own. We weren’t pushing something on them. And I’d go to these tournaments with the top hundred tennis players, in the country, the kids, and I was like the only one who didn’t know the rules.
So I think you just expose them to everything and you see what there is. I was, my oldest son has a five year old and we were interviewing kindergartens, going around to kindergartens. And this one class the teacher had. All the kids write what they wanted to be when they grew up and they had drawn pictures and it was like I want to be a ballet dancer, I want to be a carpenter, I want to be a firefighter, I want to be a fisherman.
All these different, kids have this passion in them, this thing about them and it’s just our job to look. to pay attention that this five year old, he saw somebody like swinging on the rings. He’s I want to do that, and then we were at a restaurant and people were singing and dancing.
He looked for a minute and walked away. And I said, Somebody else’s kid is going to look at the people singing and dancing going Oh my gosh, I want to do that. It, you have to look as a parent. You have to see what gives your child joy. And you have to tell them, by the way, you have to tell them we’re so proud of your success in that.
And trigonometry. Like when have you ever used trigonometry? Lianne? You have to tell them you’re proud of their success and the thing that matters to them. There’s so much to unpack in what you just shared there, Margo, but I’d like to hit on a few points if I could. It strikes me as a lot of what you’ve just described has everything to do with the self awareness of parents without even talking about the kids yet, right?
It’s are we as parents projecting what we think they should be doing on them? How we were raised, all of these different things. But as parents have no shortage of things to worry about and there will be parents out there who are helicopter parents who are other types of parents who say they don’t know better and they need guidance and this is the way I guide them to give them a path that they could follow because I know my child very well.
How do you, when you meet parents and you talk to them about this subject, how do you answer a parent like that with that kind of perspective? Thank you. It’s what I said in the beginning. I would look at them and say, really, that’s your goal for your child, that they should spend 40 years being unhappy.
Really? And also I would tell them the world has changed. My dad was a professor. I grew up in university towns. I didn’t know anybody who hadn’t been to college. Half their friends had PhDs. I just thought that’s the way the world was. So you can imagine when my older son announced after two and a half years of college that he was taking a semester off.
Gulp. It’s not something I ever anticipated. And I look back now and it was actually like one of the smartest things he ever did. Because if he had spent the last year and a half, not studying subjects that he wasn’t interested in, he never would have started this organization summit, which he actually started a month before he would have graduated.
And if he’d stayed in school for another year and a half and then, started working and stuff and then become interested in entrepreneurship, I think The moment would have passed him by. Somebody else would have done it. The reason it’s become such a big deal was when he did it, it was the first time young entrepreneurs had gathered together.
So it really taught me a lesson. It’s the world is different. And you just have to acknowledge that. And people say Look at what all the biggest jobs are in the world now. None of these even existed. None of these companies existed when we were growing up. There was no Nvidia. There was no AI.
There was no streaming. There was no Instacart. There was no Google. There was no Microsoft. There was no Apple. There was, there was nothing. None of the biggest companies in the world. Existed and you got, it’s not your world anymore. Let them go. Absolutely. Certainly with those examples.
Now, when you did your interviews for your book, were there any specific parenting methods that let’s call them unique or different that you ran into of these parents of entrepreneurs that really struck you? I think what struck me the most is that no matter how different these families were, some had parents who were doctors, some had parents who hadn’t graduated from high school, and no matter what, they all had a lot of expectations.
about behavior, about how you’re part of a family, and how you show up for meals, and how you are polite, and how you help around the house, and how you’re financially responsible. They all had expectations about behavior, but they all gave them huge freedom. To an independence to explore.
And some of them, they let them go overseas. They let them change schools. They let them, like big decisions. I’m miserable at the school. I can’t stand it. I want to go somewhere else. Sure go live with my brother’s family in California for a year and go to school there, I want to go to Africa and work on a, work with people, indigenous people or whatever. Sure, go ahead. So they gave them huge freedom on the big things. But in terms of expectations about behavior and responsibility and, politeness and, not watching television or during the week or, whatever, like being there for the family dinners.
They were, so in that way, they were all similar, which really surprised me. Could you give us a couple of examples of some of these families because you interviewed the mothers in all cases as well as the child. A couple of examples that really, had an impact on you. So I started out interviewing both and then I realized that the stories were pretty much the same.
And, but that in a lot of respects, the entrepreneurs themselves were more open. The parents were more protective. And so then I just interviewed the entrepreneurs for how they were growing up. So I didn’t interview every parent. But I’d love to share a few stories. One would be John Chiu, the movie director whose film Wicked comes out in which I’m super excited about.
His parents were immigrants. They have a Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto. And from fourth grade, he discovered, filming. He’d gotten a little movie license. And on a vacation, he just fell in love with it. And it was like all he wanted to do. And he had a little company in high school, and he was filming people’s weddings or whatever.
And his parents thought it was weren’t that enthusiastic. They wanted him to have it like a normal job. And So I think he was in ninth grade. He was supposed to be asleep. His mom came in. He was doing a movie on his laptop and his mom’s put that away and stop wasting your time.
You need to get some rest. You need to be prepared for school tomorrow, which is really important. And he burst into tears and he said, you can’t make me stop. It’s what I love. It’s what I want to do with my life. And she said, go to sleep. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. And the next day she picked him up at school and she’d gone to the library and she had 10 filmmaking books.
And she said, if you want to do it, be the best. And he said after that his parents were like the most supportive. He went to USC film school. He had a small film that he showed, as a senior, when he graduated, which ended up getting him an agent, I think. And his parents were like what are you serving?
He’s serving, so they all drove down from Palo Alto to Los Angeles to serve, food and champagne to his parents. He said they were always just the most supportive people in the world. And that was a big gulp for them. Love that. I can tell you beautiful actress who’s Canadian Emmanuel Shrieky and her she always loved acting and her mother died when she was.
I think in high school and her mother was very sick and her mother whispered in her ear, she said, you can go be an actress for both of us. And Emanuel said she’s always carried that with her. Are both, of course, people who, they’ve, they, their passion from when they were young continues today.
Most of them, as I say, their passion changed over time. And evolved. I would say one other example that I really love for a different reason. Most entrepreneurs, not the actors or musicians or whatever, but people who start something it’s because they got really knowledgeable about it. And then they realized something about it that could be done better or differently, or changed, or added to, or improved.
There’s this one Joel Holland, whom I adore. And he was in high school, he went into the counselor’s office to try to find out about different jobs. And, he thought the information they had was just dreadful. He wrote to a company and said, hey, if I can interview, CEOs of different kind of businesses.
Would you fund it if I can get these, all these people? And they’re like, sure. Cause he said he was sure they, he couldn’t do it. And so he started interviewing all these different people. And one of the people he interviewed was governor Schwarzenegger in California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. And he said, he realized it should have been.
a really interesting video, but it was just visually boring. And he thought, gee, if only I could have the Hollywood sign or something behind that. And he realized that you just couldn’t get stock footage. So he started a company called Footage Firm, I think, and started going around taking films of All these different places and putting it online.
And he’d gotten into Babson where he wanted to go to college and he wanted to keep going. He said to his parents, can I please take a year off and just work on this? They were sure. And and so he went and he was working on it part time at school. And he actually was at that first summit that my son did in 2008.
And he’d been getting these six figure job offers from wall street. He met all these other young entrepreneurs and he thought, if I can get a job offer now, I can probably get one in the future. He told his parents, turning down these job offers, I’m moving home. I’m working on my company. And they’re like, okay, great.
We love you. So he moved home. He worked on his company. Eight years later, he sold half of it for 10 million. He got an RV. He started driving around the company. And he realized there are all these fabulous places to stay, like wineries and farms and places he would have loved to have stayed, but the only places he could stay were these horrible RV parks.
And he thought, there has to be a better way. And so he started this organization called Harvest Hosts. You pay 80 a year, you get 2000 places to stay and you stay in any of them for free and the people are, welcome you because you’ll probably buy some of their stuff. So he’s now started two different things.
And in both cases, it was because he got familiar with something and then he saw something that was missing or something that could be changed or something that could be done better. So I love that. I do too. The innovation and always, super supportive, even though sometimes it was a big gulp.
Absolutely. The ingenuity, the innovation, the ideation it’s very energizing. Definitely. Margo, you are, in touch with all kinds of parents and families still in the speaking that you do. What do you want readers of Raising an Entrepreneur to leave with? Believe in your child, support your child, teach your child to be curious, teach your child that failure is how they learn and grow, teach your child that you’ll be there for them, no matter what, you support them, you love them, and help them find their path.
Lots of wonderful advice, Margo Machol Bisnow, speaker, author of Raising an Entrepreneur. Really appreciate your time and your insight today. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. It was my pleasure. Here’s the book. Thank you.
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