Photo by Danny@customphotoshoot.comAlex Mashinsky, who is bringing cellphone service to New York subway platforms, brought advice for entrepreneurs to the most recent NJ Tech Meetup at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken.

By Esther Surden / For The Jersey Journal

The first step toward becoming a successful entrepreneur is to take a personality test, a managing partner of the company that is bringing cellphone service to New York subway platforms told a group of NJ Tech meetup members at the group's most recent meeting.

"In my opinion, you cannot cheat your personality,” Alex Mashinsky -- an entrepreneur with Governing Dynamics, which founded Transit Wireless -- said at the March 22 meetup at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken.

“Most of the entrepreneurs I know are on the bleeding edge. Others know how to jump in at the cutting edge, and some people just know how to take ideas that have been tried before and build them up, create a real company out of them,” he said. “These tests can tell you that you should be on the bleeding edge or the cutting edge, or maybe you shouldn’t be an entrepreneur at all, you should have a job.

“A lot of success is about personality, about understanding what are you good at,” he noted.

Mashinsky said that he has been successful seven times because he stays at his comfort zone. Pointing to the Gartner Hype curve chart, which shows the wave of start-up innovation, he said: “I’ve built companies seven times and I’ve always been at the bleeding edge. I’m always off the charts. I tried to build up the curve, but it didn’t work out for me.”

Often, Mashinsky said, he will stay with a company until someone says it’s time to go, that the company needs a real CEO, not a founder, to take it forward. Afterward, he’ll undertake the whole start-up process again.

Understanding what you are good at will save entrepreneurs a lot of time, he said, and saves investors a lot of money because you are matching your personality to what you are trying to do.

This allows people to focus on the things they are good at and allows other people on their team or support group to do other things, he said.

Mashinsky was an early proponent, he said, of Voice over Iinternet Protocol (VOIP) technology but “got thrown out of some conferences” while promoting his idea because the voice service companies didn't want anyone disrupt their "cash cow.”

So Mashinky wrote some patents and sold his idea and equipment to other people, who were willing to disrupt the status quo.

“It took about five years of struggling to convince people my idea was right, before I was able to raise $130 million and take the company public,” he said.

Mashinsky’s second message to entrepreneurs: Tenacity is just as important as inspiration.

His recent venture, Transit Wireless, surprisingly wasn't such an easy sell, he said.

“You would think it would be a no-brainer, that the MTA would want to bring this service to the 7 million riders each day,” he said.

It took Mashinsky three years to convince the MTA to do a survey, and even after 70 percent of the public wanted cell service in the subways, it took two more years for the MTA to issue a request-for-proposal. At that point all the established carriers, plus American Tower, came in to bid against Transit Wireless for the exclusive rights to build the system underground.

Mashinky’s tenacity paid off. Transit Wireless received the contract, established carriers are on board, and the company has already brought six stations online and is expected to eventually bring wireless service to all 277 underground subway stations.

Esther Surden is publisher of NJTechWeekly.com, an online news site covering all aspects of technology in New Jersey. She is an experienced journalist who has been covering the business of technology for more than 30 years.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The next NJ Tech Meetup, NJ’s largest tech community, is Tuesday, April 10, at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken. The event starts promptly at 6:45 with networking, followed by presentations from three start-ups and a talk by entrepreneur Tad Martin. RSVP required at www.njtech.me.