With a passion for empowering entrepreneurship through technology and education, Jedi has made a name for himself as a local entrepreneur in the Philadelphia area. From running companies like Web Junto to his current ventures with Open Forge and Startup Wars, Jedi has a wealth of experience to share. Tune in as we delve into Jedi’s journey in entrepreneurship, his love for technology sparked by video games, his college years studying computer science and artificial intelligence, and his decision to break free from the corporate grind to pursue his own path.

Key Moments

[00:10:06] Transition from services to scalable mobile app.

[00:10:51] Scaling entrepreneurship game creates challenges, roller coaster.

[00:15:53] Freedom to create, inspire, and impact positively.

[00:18:18] Stability and vision vital in entrepreneurship.

Find Jedi Online

https://openforge.io

https://www.startupwars.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jedidiahweller/

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Transcript (Provided by CastMagic.io)

Seth [00:00:00]:

Entrepreneurs Enigma is a podcast for the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, the wins and the fails that we all face being entrepreneurs. How we learn from adversity. Every week, I talk to a different entrepreneur with a story to tell. I’m Seth Goldstein. Come with me on the journey. This is Entrepreneurs Enigma. Let’s get started. Hey, everybody.

Seth [00:00:33]:

Welcome to another edition of the Entrepreneurs Enigma podcast. I am your host with the mostist, Seth today. I have a good budy of mine. I’ve known Jedi for, I think, 15 years, or some insane amount of time. He is a local entrepreneur to the Philadelphia area. He even comes with a tagline. How about that? It saves me on trying to figure out a title for this guy. Empowering entrepreneurship through technology and education.

Seth [00:00:59]:

So, Jedi, when we first met, was running a company called Web Junto. Now, that’s why I learned the word Junto, hence the reason why I’m using Jinto for marketing. Jinto, the newsletter, because I like the name. It’s a Ben Franklin reference. It’s Philadelphia. It makes perfect sense. So thank you, Jedi, for the education on that. He runs two companies right now.

Seth [00:01:21]:

One’s more, the parent company of the other one, but enough to talk about both here, open Forge and Startup Wars. Startup wars is a simulation kind of teaching kids and students how to do a startup before they actually have to do a startup. So it’s going to educate them on it a little bit, which is kind of nice. He is a mentor for the Founders Institute, fully startup leaders. He is a dressel grad, so he is helping out Drexel a lot. And Temple University, and he has helped youth hack in the past at University of Pennsylvania. Jedi, how’s it going, buddy?

Jedi [00:02:00]:

Going fantastic, Seth. Good to see you. And it’s always fun, buddy.

Seth [00:02:04]:

It’s always fun with you.

Jedi [00:02:05]:

Good time. I didn’t actually realize that the Junto, because that was like, 15 years ago, almost. Yeah. That’s crazy, man. That’s really cool.

Seth [00:02:15]:

Long time ago, back at Philly Cohab, so Hatch, wherever that Co working.

Jedi [00:02:21]:

Space City.

Seth [00:02:22]:

Coho City. Coho. I’m not sure if they’re still in business anymore.

Jedi [00:02:25]:

Yeah, I don’t know either. I don’t know. I mean, so much changed since the Pandemic.

Seth [00:02:30]:

Oh, everything’s changed. Exactly. So Jedi is calling in from his office where he has a physical background.

Jedi [00:02:37]:

Oh, yeah.

Seth [00:02:38]:

I like to highlight that. That’s an actual background. He took the effort to put in an actual background just for the show. I appreciate that, budy. Put all the books up there for the show. He’s staring it down afterwards now. I’m joking.

Jedi [00:02:49]:

Yeah, no, definitely. And if anyone hasn’t seen these things before, these are called books. They’re what we used to read.

Seth [00:02:55]:

They’re made out of dead trees.

Jedi [00:02:57]:

Yeah, they are.

Seth [00:02:58]:

I got a bunch of them behind me, too, so there you go. Jedi, how did this all get started? You have to go back to your childhood, unless you want to. But how did you first get interested in technology? Because you’re a little bit younger than me, but not too much younger than me. So you kind of remember you’re a digital transplant, not as much of a digital native.

Jedi [00:03:21]:

Yeah, I mean, I actually got into technology through gaming, believe it or not. Actually, my whole career was actually based upon gaming. Do you remember the old video game Tribes Too?

Seth [00:03:34]:

Yes.

Jedi [00:03:36]:

Do you remember you used to have to have HTML and CSS background in order to build a clan page in Tribes Too because they didn’t have sophisticated.

Seth [00:03:47]:

It was a MySpace kind of only a game because MySpace, that’s where you first learned CSS was. If you want to make anything, if you look at this now, it’s out of the box. You get a social network. No, MySpace and Tribes Too was all about like, you need to know low.

Jedi [00:04:04]:

I mean, so basically, I was a kid at the time, I learned how to code just from the video games, because every kid is interested in something. A lot of kids are video games. Yeah.

Seth [00:04:16]:

Right now with Roblox, he’s coding up Roblox games because he wants to know how to do it, and he’s becoming a coder now. He’s like, I know, asking me like, hey, Daddy, how do I do this? I can’t read that code.

Jedi [00:04:28]:

Yeah, well, it’s actually really fascinating. I think we’re going to see a lot of the younger generation having programming skills, even with Chat GPT, AI, all these things coming up that make it easier to do certain things. I mean, it makes it easier, but you still have to put that high level thought together.

Seth [00:04:46]:

I think we’re going to crack if you don’t writing me a 300 word essay on food, it’s not going to give you a good answer.

Jedi [00:04:55]:

Yeah, exactly. But the cool thing with coding is that there’s defined best practices in each of the coding languages, and so Chat GPT knows what those are instantly. So when you ask a question like, okay, create me a function that can calculate the tax rate of something, you will do it right, do that piece perfectly. And there’s not a lot of concern for the legal side of that when you’re doing these bare minimum functions. Because it’s like, I did something small.

Seth [00:05:31]:

That’s what I did with WordPress. I couldn’t find a plugin that I wanted. I didn’t find an updated plugin for making all external links go target blank. And so it did it for me and then told me where to put it. I was like, Dude, or it, way to go. Do something more advanced. It’s like, no, yeah, it’s like, here’s some references for you to go look well, it’s just helpful. But I was like, you’re not going to do it for me? It’s like no.

Jedi [00:06:04]:

Yeah, exactly. But yeah, anyway, we digress.

Seth [00:06:07]:

We digress, but we’re good at that. So you went to Drexel and BS. And CS.

Jedi [00:06:15]:

Yes, exactly.

Seth [00:06:17]:

A bachelor’s of science in computer science. And then you say you did on computer engineering minor. As if you didn’t have enough gear headiness in the major.

Jedi [00:06:25]:

Yeah, well, actually I was computer science major and then I also specialized in artificial intelligence. Like a minor. Yeah, actually these books are actually AI related. But yeah, I don’t do a ton of that anymore. It’s just more of like a passion hobby. I started out as a kid getting excited about technology through gaming and I felt that was a great way to learn. So going to college I went for computer science. That was a great way to get a job right.

Jedi [00:07:01]:

And figure out what I want to do.

Seth [00:07:03]:

Did you ever get a job or did you immediately jump into your own thing?

Jedi [00:07:08]:

I did get a job. I had a couple actually. It worked well, I think from the employer’s perspective. But I was bored senseless. I mean, I was never meant for working in enterprise situation.

Seth [00:07:24]:

Corporate takes a special person. There’s not many people that can do corporate successfully, I don’t think.

Jedi [00:07:29]:

Yeah, exactly. Well, also, like climbing the ladder is not something I’m interested in. I much rather just build my own ladder.

Seth [00:07:36]:

Exactly. I like to build your own ladder. I love that. So you did the corporate grind for a little bit and you didn’t like it. They loved you, I’m sure, because your head and does great work, but you’re like corporate. Too political, I’m sure, and stuff like that. And you’re too friendly for corporate. That’s the problem.

Seth [00:07:58]:

You’re not ruthless. You have to smile.

Jedi [00:08:01]:

Right.

Seth [00:08:03]:

If anyone’s watching the video, Jedi has the biggest smile. I have a big smile. Jedi is known for his huge smile. He lights up a room and he’s always smiling. Not good for corporate. Yeah, not good for why are you smiling? We’re down 15 points on the stop price. I’m happy I’m here. So you left corporate and then you serve web junto?

Jedi [00:08:28]:

Yes, I started my first well, actually first I actually went out to the West Coast and I worked for a startup out know that startup? Yeah, that startup failed miserably. It actually was like a tinder swindler type situation where the founder fled the country and everything absolutely crazy. Yeah, that’s a whole story on its own. We only had time for it, but yeah, needless to say, he ripped off myself, our investors and that kind of thing.

Seth [00:09:00]:

Your teeth. In the startup world, everyone has to get taken to something at some point.

Jedi [00:09:03]:

Yeah, that’s a good point. It taught me a lot and I got to learn a lot from working out there about just like Silicon Valley and startup industry. So it was a helpful experience in many ways. I mean, sometimes best way to learn is to get burned and then figure out what hurts. Right? So I figured out what I didn’t want to do. And then yeah, I started my first business web junto with Liz. That went really well. We built it up to a multimillion dollar business.

Jedi [00:09:34]:

And then when me and Liz split, I took over operations under OpenForge, and that went fantastic. We still have OpenForge to this day and build mobile applications and it’s been great. Yeah.

Seth [00:09:49]:

And then, of course, you’re not satisfied with just one project. I mean, I’m joking and kind of being sarcastic about it. I’m like the ultimate person with, like, five projects, how they sleep kind of thing. But you’re not doing Star Wars, which is really cool. Tell us a little about that.

Jedi [00:10:06]:

Yeah, so I guess I’ll rewind for a second just to talk about the transition because I think if any founders out there have a services company, often you’ll see founders of services companies. It’s relatively easy to make money in a services company, but it’s not scalable. It’s not like a very scalable business. And a lot of founders find that after a while. So basically what happened was me and the team, we got together at one of our company retreats with OpenForge and we took a look at our books, we took a look at our pipeline, we took a look at our vision. We said, hey, well, hey, things are going really well. We’re making our customers a ton of money. And this is in the mobile app industry, the mobile app.

Jedi [00:10:51]:

And this is fantastic, but how do we scale it, right? And what do we want to do next? And so the team, we decided as a group, we said, you know what, we’d have been doing the Philadelphia Junto. We had been piloting out this idea of startup wars, like a way, a game to teach people about entrepreneurship and how to start a business. And we said, you know what? Why don’t we just create this? Why don’t we do it? It doesn’t seem to be competing with any of our current customers. It’s a game. And typically we do enterprise HIPA compliant applications, that kind of thing. So it just seemed like a win. And so we took that leap and we had a big roller coaster along the way.

Seth [00:11:34]:

Oh, you have to. It’s entrepreneurial enigma.

Jedi [00:11:36]:

Right, exactly right. Yeah.

Seth [00:11:40]:

Star wars, it’s a simulator, essentially. It’s teaching people how to do a startup with less risk, essentially.

Jedi [00:11:48]:

Yeah, that’s correct. Like you said, it’s a simulation platform for entrepreneurship. Basically, what we do is we take different types of businesses, like a restaurant, a food truck, a services company, a tech company, and we put them inside an actual gameplay setting for students who are trying to learn how to create their own business so they can learn by doing and screw up carefully.

Seth [00:12:17]:

Yeah, I wish that was around when I was starting my business.

Jedi [00:12:21]:

Yeah, absolutely. It’s actually been crazy because when we took a look at the space, we didn’t really see anything that had education at the forefront. We saw games. There’s a ton of startup games, but they’re going to be games where you just click a bunch of times. Right, okay, hey, I can now win. Right.

Seth [00:12:38]:

What is it called? Chore Core. Something like that. Yeah, games where you run a restaurant and you click. You have to go get this there. You don’t see the books.

Jedi [00:12:49]:

Yeah, exactly. You don’t see the books. It’s not scheduled or structured from a learning objective perspective. There’s a lot that goes into the curriculums that higher education and high schools create for students that just doesn’t exist in the current gaming industry. So basically what we’ve done is we said, okay, let’s take some of the best practices of the gaming industry and some of the best practices of the education industry, combine them together and it’s been working out really well, actually.

Seth [00:13:21]:

You’re onto something. Exactly.

Jedi [00:13:23]:

Yeah.

Seth [00:13:25]:

Your little subs start up is blossoming. We’re going to take a quick break, hear from our sponsors, and get right back to the show.

Jedi [00:13:32]:

Yeah, it is. It definitely is. We’ve had, I think, close to 10,000 students now.

Seth [00:13:38]:

Oh, wow. You were just launching this sucker.

Jedi [00:13:41]:

Yeah. And the crazy part is we weren’t even intending to go to Ed Tech first. We actually intended to go to consumer first. We built this as a mobile app first, and then when COVID hit the educators, they were saying, hey, we really need a way to engage asynchronously digitally online. So we said, all right, we can pivot, we’ll try it out. But it was still a mobile app. And then finally when we kind of got to a point where we kind of perfected the gameplay core loop yeah. We were ready to be used in a couple big universities like Ohio State University.

Jedi [00:14:15]:

And then all of a sudden we realized, well, crap. When you have a state university wanting to use your actual product, there’s a lot of restrictions and there’s a lot of kind of like red tape. But important qualifications you have to hit. One of them was access for all the students.

Seth [00:14:35]:

Now, what we didn’t realize, every student has a mobile phone.

Jedi [00:14:39]:

Exactly. Yeah. We found that maybe like 5% or less of the students, they weren’t able to actually do the assignment, which at that point was like extra credit assignment. So it’s an optional assignment if you.

Seth [00:14:52]:

Wanted to do it.

Jedi [00:14:54]:

Exactly. So all of a sudden, we had to pivot the entire platform in order to adhere to this new requirement by the customer base. And that was like a huge transition. Took us over a year to basically pivot from mobile to web fully. But yeah, we were able to do it. And luckily we used I know. You know, we build a lot of ionic applications and so since we were using Ionic, it was already a PWA, a progressive web app out of the able. Yeah.

Jedi [00:15:28]:

We were able to basically put the mobile view right on web, and then it didn’t look nice. It wasn’t pretty.

Seth [00:15:36]:

Functioned while you rest.

Jedi [00:15:38]:

Exactly. Yeah.

Seth [00:15:41]:

That’s thinking outside the box. It’s pivoting. That’s growing. It’s failing fast, succeeding fast, all that good stuff. And that’s the key. So here’s a question for you. What is the best thing about being an entrepreneur in your mind?

Jedi [00:15:53]:

I think it’s the freedom to create and inspire from a creation standpoint. For just me personally, I love the freedom of it. Right? Yeah, that’s a lot of work. You’ve had your business for years. Sometimes we’re there 16 hours a day on the weekends, we’re called It Doesn’t matter, you have to be there. But the cool part is just being able to kind of have a vision and just build it, build something new, especially something that impacts people in a positive way. At the end of the day, I always tell people, I don’t have the cure for cancer, I don’t have the solution to global warming. But if I can help a student who is an engineer or is doing those things, if I can help them be a better business person and understand these mechanics about launching their business, then, hey, we’ve helped them save the world to do something.

Seth [00:16:55]:

So what’s the scariest thing? What keeps you up at night?

Jedi [00:16:58]:

Oh, the anxiety, man. Definitely the anxiety. Yeah. Not knowing, like, hey, what’s going to happen tomorrow? Is something going to go wrong in the next build?

Seth [00:17:12]:

Did you back it up first? All that stuff?

Jedi [00:17:15]:

Yeah. Did we hit the correct demographic? Does the demographic respond in the right way? I always tell people, and I always give this advice, which is, as you’re building out your product, or even before you’re building it out, you should really try to create a community around what you’re doing. And so that helps to offset that risk a little bit. But even when you do create a community, how they end up using it is probably going to be a little bit different in practice than when you’re surveying them, when you’re talking with them. And so that can cause challenges as well. So, yeah, I’d say just the anxiety of the unknown.

Seth [00:17:55]:

That’s it. What’s the most important thing to carry with you all the time?

Jedi [00:18:01]:

Carry with you all the time? That’s a good question. Isn’t that a good one? I would say I think having some stability in your life because you’re talking as an entrepreneur, right?

Seth [00:18:16]:

As an entrepreneur, as yourself, what’s important.

Jedi [00:18:18]:

To you to I think I think carrying stability behind the scenes is really important. I was actually just talking with my wife Madonna about this. We had a really good conversation about, like, when you’re in a corporate job or when you’re just in a job, things are laid out for you. When you go to work, you generally know what to expect now, maybe in the day to day operations. Like, okay, surprises come up in XYZ, but someone has laid the vision out for you. Right. In entrepreneurship, it’s different. You’re paving the path, and no one can see more than 5ft in front of them.

Jedi [00:18:56]:

And so that creates so much instability there, which leads to the anxiety. I find that it’s really important to have a lot of stability at home, because that way, when you go home, it’s not like you’re going from one unstable place to another. Unstable place. Yeah.

Seth [00:19:15]:

It doesn’t help. Exactly.

Jedi [00:19:16]:

Yeah. For me, personally, I have a pretty regimented routine. I work out every day. Everything has a time and a place. I try to structure stuff at home. Well, be well organized. It helps to kind of counteract the chaos at work.

Seth [00:19:35]:

Yeah, there’s no idea. Exactly. Work is chaotic. Home should be kind of Zen.

Jedi [00:19:39]:

Yeah.

Seth [00:19:41]:

So, Jedi, where can people find you online? Where’s your big watering? LinkedIn.

Jedi [00:19:46]:

Yeah. I’d say for content more related to education and technology would be LinkedIn for more software and just technology would be Twitter.

Seth [00:20:03]:

Artists. Formerly known as Twitter.

Jedi [00:20:05]:

Yeah, exactly. I’ll tell you what, it was so weird. Like, the first morning I woke up, I didn’t see that they had rebranded, so I just typed in Twitter on my phone to pull up the app, and then all I see is this X come up, and I’m like, did it get deleted? Like, what happened?

Seth [00:20:19]:

We can go into the whole nother story. We can go in the branding app and how you don’t do it.

Jedi [00:20:24]:

I know. Yeah.

Seth [00:20:25]:

I mean, you can change the name.

Jedi [00:20:26]:

Great.

Seth [00:20:27]:

You lost all the equity in the branding name, whatever. But do it fully still. You go to Twitter.com, it takes you, whatever. That’s all in our story. So, Jedi, thank you so much for being on the program. This has been so much fun. We’ll have to do coffee in real life soon. Yeah, that’ll be so much fun, budy.

Seth [00:20:45]:

I’m so glad I got you on.

Jedi [00:20:47]:

Yeah, no, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. And yeah, feel free to for anyone who’s watching or listening, please reach out. Always happy to have a chat and give advice or receive advice, because I’m learning something new every day as well.

Seth [00:21:00]:

That’s the case. Absolutely. We’ll see everyone next time.

Jedi [00:21:03]:

Awesome. Thank you.

Seth [00:21:05]:

That was a great show. If you’re enjoying entrepreneurs Enigma, please view us in the podcast directory of your choice. Every review helps other podcast listeners find our show. If you’re looking for other podcasts in the marketing space, look no further than the Marketing Podcast Network at Marketingpodcasts Network. Goldstein Gear hopes you have enjoyed this episode. This podcast is one of the many great shows on the MPN Marketing Podcast Network.