Meet Jake Voorhees

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jake Voorhees. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Jake, first a big thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and insights with us today. I’m sure many of our readers will benefit from your wisdom, and one of the areas where we think your insight might be most helpful is related to imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is holding so many people back from reaching their true and highest potential and so we’d love to hear about your journey and how you overcame imposter syndrome.

Imposter syndrome is something we all face in our careers. Many people experience this without knowing what it is, or without having much of a relationship with the phrase “imposter syndrome”. But I am sure you can remember a time when someone asked you for help with something, or presented an opportunity, only for your first thought to be, “Well I can’t do that.” Imposter syndrome can impact and stay with us for years. Many people never have it erode away. I first could relate to this blight that professionals experience, even incredible established ones, when I was a TEDx organizer. My teammates and I would meet amazing individuals at conferences, and immediately compliment and try to recruit them to be a future speaker. We’d encourage them to apply to do a TEDx talk. The responses were generally surprising. No matter how far along folks were in their career, they would often say, “Well, I’ll be ready after…” Despite all of their accomplishments in their field, it didn’t seem like quite enough. They still thought they needed more to be credible for TEDx, even though active organizers were telling them to their face that they should apply. Unbelievable? Or is this the intera that we face from imposter syndrome?

What is the interesting thing about expertise is that it is relative. If you’re a 24 year old college graduate with a history degree, and you return to your local high school as a guest speaker, then you are certainly the expert. But what if you have a 40 year professorial career, get invited to keynote a conference in your industry, and then you discover a Nobel Prize winner will be in the audience? Maybe imposter syndrome sets in for you.

And the reality is for high achieving individuals, at least those who have high achieving and accelerated goals, you may experience this feeling often. Many times per year, or each and every time you receive a new opportunity or challenge. Which is a good thing, but only if you first garner self awareness around imposter syndrome, and develop a set of tools and best practices so that it does not hold you back. It is your responsibility to defeat imposter syndrome – no one else’s.

Document your success
In 2017 I started a YouTube channel. As a civil engineering undergraduate major, I always found myself in a mentoring role for younger engineers. Eventually, after answering the same questions over and over, I started uploading videos in this niche on the YouTube platform. Before long, I started to feel like an imposter, as other channels were run by people with career coaching certificates, businesses, and books on career advice. But I remember feeling attached to my episode count. I was dedicated to the goal of uploading 100 videos in the first year. I remember not even wanting to share the channel and project with anyone before I had at least 10 episodes. By the time there were 25 or so, I remember loving to include that count when reaching out to people for interviews and responding to people with questions. I knew that the more episodes I had, the more authority and credibility I would inherently have. Was there truly credibility as my episode count increased? At 100 episodes, no one was going to give me a degree in engineering student mentorship. This was a psychological thing for me. I knew the more episodes I had, the more seriousness and authority the channel had, and this impacted my confidence. So whatever this means for you, whether you’re putting out content, or coaching people, or adding clients, or shooting weddings – it doesn’t matter. Document your success. Quantify your newly established and blossoming thought leadership, and communicate that to the world. It will help more folks understand you are the guide they are seeking, and it will definitely boost your confidence along the way.

Focus on unique value
It’s easy to get caught up in the identity of who you are and what credibility you bring to the table. This is the same for a professional corporate career, for entrepreneurs, and for anyone building a community or content project. Reverse engineer your behavior when you search for content online. You search something, and boom, there are your results. If it comes up in the first few pages of your search engine, you barely care about the authority and background of the person. If it provides value, people will read it. So consider this with your team at work, or clients or community. Focus on providing value to these people, particularly if your value can stand out and be unique – this is how to best help people. Just because you have a book and or a wall of degrees, doesn’t mean you’ll be a good colleague or coach or leader. Again, people get caught up in the, “Well I’ll be ready for this when…” type of thinking. Consider where your support can be different and better, and if you are adding value and helping them, everyone wins.

One of the ways I love deploying unique value is communicating business stories and lessons, very similarly to Aesop’s Fables. Where after I share the business story, there is some simple takeaway for the listener. Some examples include the founder/business stories for purple cow (Seth Godin), the golden circle (Simon Sinek), and leading with vulnerability (Brene Brown).

Accept praise
My final suggestion for handling imposter syndrome is to truly accept praise. Have you ever given someone a compliment and they brush it off, they say something that gives the credit back to you, or how they barely helped? They think they are being humble, but what they’ve done is bad. They essentially rejected your gratitude, and they also missed an opportunity to boost their confidence in a small way. When someone praises you, just say thank you. And if you truly want to be a better professional in that field, you can ask them what it was that you specifically helped with. You’ll probably be amazed, as more than likely, you helped them with something that you’re not even focused on. If you’re a mentor or coach or adviser to clients, I find about half of that work is simply reassuring them. Giving them confidence. So when they give it back, take it. Confidence is another thing, like experience, that we cannot transfer or teach. You must grow it over time. Increased confidence over time is the one absolute kryptonite to imposter syndrome. So let your confidence grow!

Keep these tools in mind as you navigate your career and constantly battle imposter syndrome. Where can you document your success, provide unique value, and accept praise better?

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

Jake is a startup co-founder, marketer, TEDx speaker, YouTuber and community organizer.

He appeared on ABC’s Shark Tank on October 27, 2019 as Managing Director for the startup, NERDiT NOW. Jake helped NERDiT NOW grow from $157,000 to $1 million+ in revenue in 18 months. Jake is a founding board member of The NERDiT Foundation, which helped deploy 10,000+ laptops to underserved and at-risk communities across several states in the USA, and multiple African countries. He traveled to Kenya for this in 2019.

Since 2023, Jake has been co-founder and CMO of AthletiFi, a dashboard reporting tool for families and fans to better track the performance of elite youth soccer players they follow. AthletiFi is post-MVP, angel funded, has a four person engineering team, and a former-MLS player in another co-founder.

Jake is an experienced marketing & user acquisition professional. From 2021-2023, Jake led a marketing team for a $250 million civil engineering firm with 1,400 employees, where he managed the companywide marketing plans for 80 business units across 40 offices in the USA.

Through his work as a TEDxWilmington organizer and on the YouTube platform, he helps entrepreneurs and startup teams with their pitches, decks, and subsequent content marketing. Jake has a YouTube channel with 110,000+ subscribers focused on helping engineering students pitch themselves and navigate their career journey. He used this experience to help TEDx speakers position their videos on the TED YouTube channel. 25+ TEDxWilmington speaker videos have over one million views.

Jake also spends a significant amount of time on community organizing, particularly for startup pitch events, niche founder meetups, and mentorship/advisor events for founders. He is a Young Friends board member for Philly Startup Leaders, founding member and organizer for the CryptoMondays Philly chapter (largest web3 meetup community in the world), founding member of the VRARA Philadelphia chapter, and a Venture Cafe ambassador.

In 2024, his focus is connecting with more founders and venture capitalist professionals in order to better help source startups for VCs, and support pre-seed/seed phase founders through events and access to other resources.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Personal branding, community building, content marketing.

Personal Branding
When people think of you, what is the first thing they consider? For those of us who navigate multiple hats, its okay that your personal brand be a few different things to different group. But where can you ensure that people know you are an expert in whatever topic you want? Do you have a blog/podcast/YouTube channel on this? Do you release content on LinkedIn and share industry articles with your opinion on it? Do you organize meetups or have any volunteer/board roles within organizations in that industry?

Community Building
Most entrepreneurs and professionals strive to build a business and brand around that business. But the key is to build a community. And if you authentically build a community around something you’re passionate about, you’ll develop more than average expertise is that field. And if your career or business is built around that field, and you’re actually helping folks in that lane, then the business or career opportunities will present themself.

Content Marketing
I think there is no better way to fight imposter syndrome, develop a strong personal brand, or build a community than through content marketing. Again, what blog or podcast or YouTube channel can you start in order to build a community around that? What questions do they have and support do they need? How can you attract people to you through content in order to build a community, which will inherently change your life and career.

Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?

Right now, I’m highly focused on building and managing a community of sportstech founders in the startup space, and sports entrepreneurs in general. The focus of the community is to participate in virtual meetups, and network with other sports founders and entrepreneurs. The mission of this networking is to share ideas, resources, and connections to critical people (like investors), in order for the community members to help one another along their journey.
Email me at hello@jakevoorhees.com to more info or if you are interested!

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