Meet Bill Udell, Co-owner and COO @ Don’t Panic Labs 

What inspired you to become an entrepreneur or support other entrepreneurs?

I’ve always been drawn to solving problems, especially the kind that matter to people. And not just technically interesting puzzles, but ones that improve lives, businesses or communities. That kind of problem-solving is what drew me into entrepreneurship. It offered the freedom — and the responsibility — to build systems that could do real good.

At Don’t Panic Labs, our mission is to bring every innovator’s vision to life, but that’s not just a tagline. It’s a posture. We walk into the fog with founders, teams, organizations and support them as they seek to build clarity, momentum and durability. Not by doing it for them, but by doing it alongside them.

Supporting entrepreneurs is part of our DNA. It’s how we pay forward what others have invested in us and taught us. More than that, it’s what we’re built to do.

What advice would you give yourself if you could go back in time to when you were just starting out?

“Busy” isn’t the same as “building”.

That’s the advice I wish I could’ve heard — and really listened to — earlier. When you’re starting out, motion feels like progress. There’s a rush in having a full calendar, shipping lots of code and juggling a thousand details. But eventually you learn that all that activity gets in the way of building something that lasts.

I would tell my younger self to focus on foundations. Not just technical foundations, but relational. Invest early in trust. Learn to think in systems. Build patterns you can repeat. And maybe most importantly, create space to reflect. Direction matters more than speed, and clarity compounds over time.

Also, don’t sleep on culture. We have four core values at Don’t Panic Labs: 

1. Empathize then own it
2. Build smart
3. Deliver with pride 
4. Be the change you seek

These took time to emerge. I wish I had known sooner just how critical they would become. They’re not a garnish. They’re the glue.

How do you stay motivated when things feel overwhelming — or stagnant?

I zoom out.

When I am overwhelmed, it’s usually because I’m too deep in the weeds of reacting, checking boxes, firefighting, etc. It’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture when you’re buried in what’s immediately in front of you. But when I step back and remember what we’re building, and why, it shifts the perspective. The same problems don’t feel quite as heavy when you reconnect them to purpose.

And then there’s the team. I’ve been lucky to work alongside people who care deeply — not just about the quality of the work, but about each other and about the impact we can have. Their energy is contagious. Their thoughtfulness helps me reset.

We’ve built a culture where it’s okay to say, “This isn’t working” or “I’m stuck.” We reflect together, we challenge each other and we give each other room to grow. You don’t need to be perfectly motivated every day. You just need people who help you get unstuck when it matters.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve overcome and how did you overcome it?

One of the biggest challenges has been holding onto our identity as we’ve grown. It’s deceptively easy to drift. You get a few big projects, you start hiring more people and before you know it, you’re solving for speed instead of significance.

We didn’t want to become just another consultancy. But resisting that drift took intentional work. We had to make the implicit explicit. We codified our values. We defined our mission in plain language. We committed to patterns and principles that could scale by creating clarity instead of locking things down.

It wasn’t glamorous, but it was necessary. And it gave us something far more durable than any single process or project: a foundation we could actually build on.

How can the Nebraska community support you?

Keep showing up. 

That’s what matters most. Not because we need cheerleaders, but because we believe great things can (and should) start here. Not someday. Right now.

Support looks like asking good questions. Sometimes it’s mentoring someone who’s earlier in the journey. Sometimes it’s making a connection someone didn’t know they needed.