Peter Schroeder Podcast Transcript
Peter Schroeder joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of The Digital Executive podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Peter Schroeder. Peter Schroeder is an accomplished DJ, entrepreneur, and technology pioneer. With over 20 platinum records, 40 gold records, and a triple nomination for the prestigious Danish DJ awards, Peter is one of Denmark’s top DJs, entertaining audiences of up to 180,000.
He was also featured radio host by the age 12 and appeared on talk shows and TV stations across Denmark. In addition to his music career, Peter has over 20 years of experience creating cutting edge technologies for companies such as Facebook, Samsung, and Airbnb. He’s a true innovator who works closely with businesses to address mission critical telecommunications. Enabling them to quickly implement, manage, and expand for success.
Well, good afternoon, Peter, welcome to the show.
Schroeder Peter: Thank you so much for having me.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. I’m so excited to get into this podcast. You’re an accomplished DJ. You’ve done quite amazing things throughout your career, of course, but we’re going to jump right into the questions, Peter, you’ve got quite the story and that career, as I talked about, what inspired your career path?
From radio host to successful DJ. And now you’re a tech entrepreneur.
Schroeder Peter: That’s the funny thing. There’s not really, it just seems to happen to me. Like I, I can’t help it. If there’s something that’s fun to work with or that interests me, then I just got to play around with it. And that’s really just how my whole life has been.
It’s not really that I make a conscious decision that now I need to do, go do this and this. It just kind of happens. I think it’s, it’s really that entrepreneurial spirit and probably my ADD that, that you know, drives me to do that. But I never really made conscious decisions per se and to make the shifts either.
Brian Thomas: Totally understand sometimes we get really just ingrained into the passion we have and we just things kind of take off from there, So I do appreciate it. I know you’ve done a lot of travel and so forth as being a pretty like I said international, famous DJ starting out of Denmark, but let’s jump into the next question, Peter.
What was the biggest challenge you faced as a new entrepreneur and how did you overcome that?
Schroeder Peter: So, I, I feel like I, I’m still facing challenges every day after doing this my whole life. I mean, I started my first company when I was 14. And it got acquired when I was 18. So, there’s always been things happening.
And being an entrepreneur is really just a perpetual roller coaster is what I call it. It’s there’s always ups and downs, but I feel like this past 10 years where I’ve been working on, on my current company, there’s just been a lot of, of self-discovery. I would almost say this is also the biggest by far company that I’ve ever built.
And, and, and some of the things are, you know, how, how do you actually scale a staff? How do you work from home all of a sudden when Covid happened, right? And, and, and, and how do you deal with, with managing people? Because I’m, I’m a terrible manager. I’m a good leader, but I’m, I’m a terrible manager.
And I don’t like managing people. So, how do, how do you do that when you don’t like doing it, right. And, and, and have no interest in it. So that, that’s been some of the challenges I’ve, I’ve really had to dig deep and figure out how do I deal with that so that the company keeps growing.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And I appreciate some of the insights, a lot of our podcasts have talked about some of the challenges with remote work because of COVID and, and the way businesses being operated nowadays with this hybrid model. So, I do appreciate that. And Peter, what three traits do you think are critical for entrepreneurial success and how have they helped you?
Schroeder Peter: Yeah. So, if I, if I was to, to, to look at myself and see what, what might probably might have helped me through the years and at least most one of the things is probably being a little bit naive and believe that you, you can do certain things when other people say, I’ll tell you that it’s not going to work.
I mean, I, I started that phone company by cashing in my wife’s 401k, 16, 000 not taking any investments and think you can you know, compete against AT& T, Verizon, and these kind of companies, that’s, you know, ridiculous if you think about it that way, but I have this, this belief that what I was building could sell and I don’t think you need to sell and, and become, you know, the, the number one overnight and, and, and beat these guys or even compete against them.
You really just have to sell a few items to kind of get that, get, get the things going and, and, and keep developing your product. So, so that’s, that negativity is, is definitely something that helps me, you know, keep going when other people tell you that it’s not going to, going to work. And then I think stubbornness you know, some people will call it persistence or other words, but I’m, I would almost say that only my wife would also say that I’m, I’m very stubborn.
So, when someone tells me that I can’t do something, I mean, then I’m going to definitely show them that it can be done. And., I mean, the worst thing you can do if you want to see me fail is telling me I can’t do something. So, stubbornness is is, is a big motivation factor for me that helps me kind of, full force forward and use negativity as a, as a, as a fuel and a positive thing.
And a third thing, I think I think it’s really kind of, kind of the same persistence or, or stubbornness. It’s, it’s the, it’s the ability to, you know, not, not be below any, any role really and like, just, just get the job done no matter what. I don’t think you’re too good to do certain things.
Just, just get it done and, and get the, your, your, your company going and, and just, you know, don’t anything. Doesn’t have to be perfect. When you first launch stuff. going and get something out there because without that, then you don’t have any business at all.
Brian Thomas: Thank you for sharing and really unpacking those three traits.
I can tell you a lot of entrepreneurs on the podcast. There’s something about entrepreneurship, but I think we’ll have a little bit of that stubbornness. And I think that’s what makes us successful is we were able to persist on when either others tell us we can’t do it, or again, as you said, negativity sometimes spurs some motivation.
So, thank you. And Peter, let’s talk about tech. We are a tech platform podcast. I’m a technologist. Are you leveraging any new or emerging tech in your tech stack today? And if so, does this help tells you apart from your competitors?
Schroeder Peter: I mean, I don’t, I probably don’t even have to mention AI, right?
It’s, it’s almost obvious, especially in our industry where, you know, we provide a phone service or business phone service, right? So, it’s, it’s a given that we have to not only use it on, in our own internal systems but also roll it out as a part of our products. So, yeah, of course we are, we’re doing that.
But one of the, the more interesting things I, I think that we’re, we’re working on right now is, is, is. Leveraging the ability to tell who is communicating with you no matter what, how they communicate with you. So, let’s say you have a business, and you have a customer that calls you and then they text you the next day and maybe they will send you an email or a direct message on Instagram or something like that.
So, what we’re building right now is, is, a tool that allows you to know that it’s the same person that contacts you, but also. be able to communicate with them from the same platform without really having to worry about how they communicate with you. You just have to do your job, and, at, you know, providing a good service to the customer.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a tweet or, or whatever it is. So, so those are the, some of the things, and, and it’s based on, you know, some blockchain-ish technologies that we, we kind of, been, been working on for a while. And that, that I find really fascinating.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And I appreciate you sharing what you’re doing in your business.
As far as your tech stack, we have a lot of technologists in our audience that are really keen on these things and love to follow some of the latest and greatest. So I do appreciate you leveraging, again like you said, blockchain-ish, but that an AI has certainly been a big topic of 2023 and it will be in this year as well.
So, thank you. And Peter, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Schroeder Peter: Thank you so much for having me. That was fun.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Peter Schroeder Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
