In September 2020, Jonathan Berent walked away from his prestigious engineering role at Google X to start his own company.
“It was my burn the boat,” Berent told me during our recent conversation on One Day with Jon Bier. He was referring to the mindset (popularized in Matt Higgins’ book, Burn the Boats) that urges entrepreneurs to remove all safety nets, eliminate any possibility of retreat, and commit fully to their chosen path.
“When I left Google, I had no plan B. I had to get funding for this startup. I had to find a way to pay myself, and I had to find a way to pay others,” Berent says.
That huge decision resulted in NextSense, which manufactures bio-sensing smartbuds that read your brainwaves to enhance sleep, detect epileptic seizures before they happen, and potentially treat conditions like depression. Unlike traditional EEG monitoring, which requires patients to have electrodes pasted to their skulls in a clinical setting, NextSense earbuds are non-invasive. They work by capturing high-quality brain signals through sensors in your ear.
On the One Day with Jon Bier podcast, Jonathan talks to me about his lifelong fascination with sleep science, lucid dreaming, and the untapped potential of our brains. He also shares how he transitioned from running a Google Ads sales team to becoming a technical founder and the three key lessons learned that apply to anyone making the leap into entrepreneurship, regardless of their industry.
Go all in or don’t bother
Berent’s first attempt at entrepreneurship came in 2016 when he tried launching a company called Lucid Reality while still working at Google.
Looking back now, he realizes he wasn’t going to make any traction without putting both feet on the ground.
“In 2016, I half-assed it,” he admits. Even though Google allowed employees to start their own companies, he still didn’t feel completely committed. “I never had the full amount of time, the full amount of passion, and it went nowhere.”
The failed attempt came with costs. “I wasted probably $60 to $70,000 of my dad’s money, my aunt’s money, and my own money in that little trial experiment,” he says. But it also taught him a valuable lesson, becoming what he describes as his “MBA” in entrepreneurship and showing him what not to do when launching NextSense.
Related: Why Commitment — Not Just Planning — Is the True Driver of Business Success
Choose your team wisely
Building the right team has been a process of trial and error for Berent, who says he’s now on NextSense 3.0 after several iterations of his founding team.
He admits to making mistakes on his early hires. “I thought you had to be brilliant and passionate,” he explains. “Like, if you have enough passion and you have enough brilliance, you can do anything, right? But you can also blow up a team, blow up a company with brilliant, passionate people that aren’t aligned and don’t have enough EQ.”
Taking a page out of Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s hiring playbook, which emphasized the importance of preserving company culture, he is now expanding on the qualities he looks for.
”Yes, you need some passion and brilliance, but if there is also a little less ego and more humility, I’m going to double down on that,” he says.
Related: 10 Simple Steps to Build an Exceptional and Efficient Team
Don’t define yourself by your past
Berent’s most profound insight may be about personal reinvention. As a philosophy major at Stanford, he was labeled a “fuzzy” rather than a “techie” (meaning he was more liberal arts-focused than science). But when he became passionate about brain-sensing technology, he refused to let that identity constrain him.
He argues that self-applied labels often become our biggest limitations: “People think about their past, and they’ve adopted some identity, they’ve adopted some label. But we have incredible flexibility as human beings. We really limit ourselves so much.”
That willingness to reinvent himself took Berent from philosophy major to Google Ads director to machine learning engineer to founder – a journey that would have been impossible had he remained trapped in his original identity.
“Whatever label you have,” he advises, “get conscious of it and throw it away for a couple days and just see what happens when you stop identifying as something.”
Related: Want To Succeed? Turn Your Fixed Mindset into a Growth Mindset
