#137 Jivko Bojinov, Co-Founder and SVP of Strategic Projects at ShipBob: On Playing Professional Tennis, Putting in the Work, Resilience, and Taking Things from Zero to One | 20 Minute Playbook

About Jivko Bojinov

“At the start of your career, maximize learning and not your title or your pay, because the dividends that you would make over your lifetime from the greater knowledge and experience that you have early on your career are exponentially higher than getting an extra 5K on your signing from a company out of school.” – Jivko Bojinov

Jivko Bojinov played professional tennis before co-founding ShipBob with Dhruv Saxena and Divey Gulati in 2014.

Jivko is currently the Senior Vice President of Strategic Projects at ShipBob. Over the last eight years, he's led the development and launch of almost every major strategic initiative that ShipBob has shipped, from their transition from owning their own fulfillment centers, to developing an asset-like partner network of fulfillment centers, to the launch of affordable two-day shipping for all of ShipBob's customers.

For more, explore the transcript of this episode.

Chapters

In this episode, we deconstruct Jivko Bojinov’s peak performance playbook—from his favorite book to the tiny habit that's had the biggest impact on his life. In it we cover:

(00:00:00) – Introduction
(00:01:21) – A fascination with eCommerce and logistics
(00:02:57) – Making the most of opportunities
(00:04:57) – Inspiration from pro tennis and Rafa Nadal
(00:09:21) – Perseverance under pressure
(00:10:57) – The early morning habit
(00:12:22) – Humility, resilience, and The Count of Monte Cristo
(00:15:30) – Why you must fall in love with the problem
(00:20:07) – Maximize learning early in your career

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Castbox, Pocket Casts, Player FM, Podcast Addict, iHeartRadio, or on your favorite podcast platform. You can watch the interview on YouTube here.

An Idea Worth Trying

Jivko opts to go to bed very early and wake up very early, so that he has long chunks of time each morning to spend with his family. An early morning habit can give you time to yourself to reset before the workday begins.

Our Favorite Quotes

Here are a few ideas we'll be thinking about weeks and months from now:

“To me, e-commerce is one of the greatest frontiers still where the American dream is still alive and you can have folks from zero to no education or zero to no funds figure it out, make it happen, and bring business commerce to not only their livelihood, but to also parts of the country that are maybe underserved.”
“At some point, once you realize what you want to do, you've got to burn the bridges of everything else and have a deep level of focus.”
“I think there are two facets to resilience. One is the ability just not to give up and to keep going under a great degree of pressure. And the second part to it is where you can bend and give, but not break.”
“You need to find something that you love doing, and you need to keep refinding that in whatever problem you're solving.”