{"id":15185,"date":"2016-05-02T13:30:55","date_gmt":"2016-05-02T17:30:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/?p=15185"},"modified":"2016-05-02T13:30:55","modified_gmt":"2016-05-02T17:30:55","slug":"alexskatell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/alexskatell\/","title":{"rendered":"Early Entrepreneur: Alex Skatell \u201908"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AlexSkatell\"<\/a>B<\/span>y age 10, Alex Skatell<\/a> already had a knack for knowing his market. He convinced his dad to take him to\u00a0Wal-Mart to buy 24-pack cubes of soda. From there he filled a rolling cooler with ice and the soda and went and sat on the smoldering hot corner near a halfway house and a golf course and just waited. The people came to him since he was selling soda for less than the local convenience store.
\n\u201cI was doing so well that after a while [the convenience store] called the police on me. I was 10 or 11. I was really young. And they called the police on me to get me to move because they said I was taking their business,\u201d Skatell laughed.
\nBut he saw a need and anticipated it. Supply. Demand. Market-setting trends. He sees them.
\nNow, he\u2019s anticipating the news, media and how stories will unfold and how people want to view, read, scroll or listen to their stories. Since his days on the corner, the construction science major has carried the same attitude into his ventures creating start-up Independent Journal Review<\/a><\/em> and co-founding IMGE<\/a>, a digital consulting firm. In the last year, Skatell was named to Forbes<\/em> \u201c30 under 30<\/a>\u201d rising stars in media and was also named to Wired<\/em> magazine\u2019s \u201c20 Tech Insiders Defining the 2016 Campaign<\/a>.\u201d
\n\u201cI made a bet that I thought iPhones were going to change how we communicate with one another. \u2026 And I made a bet that Facebook \u2026 was going to change how news was distributed. So I didn\u2019t just talk about it, I went about figuring out how this platform was going to do that and how could I best invest my time and energy into understanding this platform that would change how news was distributed,\u201d he said.
\nThis past fall Independent Journal Review played host to a Republican debate in New Hampshire along with ABC News<\/a> by providing first-hand accounts from the candidates\u2019 and viewers\u2019 perspectives.
\n\u201cSo what our experience allowed to have happen was for everyone in America to have input in who\u2019s up and who\u2019s down during the debate. That\u2019s what Americans are looking for in news. They expect the news not to tell them how to think, but show them what is happening and let them make their own decisions,\u201d he said.
\nSkatell\u2019s success looks like it happened overnight, but success and building two companies with 105 employees took a lot of rejection.
\n\u201cEntrepreneurship is also just getting rejected and punched in the face nonstop. You really have to be a glutton for punishment,\u201d he said. \u201cYou have a lot of people tell you no, and you have to make a lot of decisions that won\u2019t go over well with a lot of people, but you know you have to be confident in your decisions and your vision. The barriers to entry for just anyone right now are so low. You don\u2019t have to ask for permission.\u201d
\n\u201cI saw an opportunity,\u201d he said. \u201cThere have been several times in my life where I\u2019ve seen opportunities and I\u2019ve leveraged just a very little amount of capital at my disposal and made big bets on whether or not those things would change an industry.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

y age 10, Alex Skatell already had a knack for knowing his market. He convinced his dad to take him to\u00a0Wal-Mart to buy 24-pack cubes of soda. From there he filled a rolling cooler with ice and the soda and went and sat on the smoldering hot corner near a halfway house and a golf […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":15186,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[21],"tags":[159,1066,2693,2696],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-15185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumniprofiles","tag-alumni","tag-election-2016","tag-spring-2016","tag-spring-2016-alumni-profiles"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2016\/04\/AlexSkatell-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15185\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15185"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=15185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}