What this Dorm Room Fund investor learned about entrepreneurship from the Navy

Andy Salamon spent five-and-a-half years in the U.S. Navy before jumping into the finance world. The Harvard grad and current Wharton MBA candidate has since moved to the startup scene, as an investor with First Round Capital’s Dorm Room Fund and as an intern with vendor payment (and StartUp PHL-backed) startup Tesorio.
Here’s what he learned about entrepreneurship in the Navy, he said in an interview with university startup newsletter LaunchQuad:

The Navy, like a lot of really large organizations, is tremendously bureaucratic. Anything new that you come up with in the Navy, the first answer you’re going to hear is “no.” Either because there’s no funding, or it’s too hard, or whatever. You’re going to meet resistance, and you have to figure out how to use it to get bounced sideways and forward instead of back and stuck. It was a tremendous lesson for me. The second thing is just the value of true grit. People learn this in all sorts of ways, through sports or whatever, and even for me, the things I was successful at in the military were just because I tried, and tried really hard.

Read the full interview
LaunchQuad, a weekly email newsletter that features Q&As with students or alumni in the business world, is run by Penn sophomore David Greenstein.