Today's Entrepreneur: Kohl Gill

Sylvie Leotin · April 6, 2011 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/18e2

No. 1 mistake: Feature-bloat

Vator is the home to entrepreneurs who embrace their passion and follow their dreams.

We are a diverse community of dreamers, builders, and trailblazers, who want to change the world, build great products, and better the lives of others.

We come from all over the globe, and from diverse backgrounds and ethnicities.

Some of us are fresh out of school, while others are experienced veterans and serial entrepreneurs.

It's addictive.

We are engineers, scientists, artists, historians and business majors; men and women, all burned by the same passion for entrepreneurship.

Today's Entrepreneur showcases our diversity, and gives our entrepreneurs an opportunity to share their journey with the community-at-large.

Today’s entrepreneur is Kohl Gill, founder of LaborVoices, and recent Vator Splash winner. Interesting note about Kohl: he is a former physicist turned social entrepreneur. According to his VEQ (Vator entrepreneur assessment test), Kohl is good at team motivation, thought leadership and negotiation skills.

I am: an entrepreneur, recovering physicist, transparency nut.

Name companies you've founded or co-founded: LaborVoices.

Name companies you've invested in: LaborVoices.

Name startups you worked for: LaborVoices.

If you are an entrepreneur, why? I want to change the world.

List your favorite startups: LaborVoices, Blekko, BetterMeans.

What's most frustrating and rewarding about entrepreneurship/innovation? Valuation.

What's the No. 1 mistake entrepreneurs make? Feature-bloat.

What are the top three lessons you've learned as an entrepreneur? Listen to your team. Listen to your customers. When in doubt, be open.

Sylvie Leotin

Sylvie Leotin is an entrepreneur, advisor, writer and polymath, with a unique approach to bridging the worlds of business, technology, arts and culture.

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Related Companies, Investors, and Entrepreneurs

LaborVoices

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on November 17, 2010

LaborVoices is a for-profit company with a social mission: ending labor abuses by enforcing labor market transparency. LaborVoices (LV) uses pervasive mobile technology to draw information from workers on abusive or deceitful employers and encourages employer responsibility for providing safe work environments. To accomplish this, LV provides a mobile technology platform for migrant workers - think of a cross between Yelp and Ask.com - to ask questions over the phone about a destination and receive answers from hundreds of workers currently at the site. LV gathers these questions and answers to generate reliable reputations of employers and worksites. This data is transparent, encouraging employers to improve conditions for better ratings; it’s also anonymous, ensuring that workers who report abuses are safe from employer reprisal. No smartphones are necessary - simply a normal cellphone capable of sending and receiving calls. We are currently running a pilot in Bangalore, India, and plan on reaching one million workers by 2012.