3 years of hard work to figure it out, and 10 minutes to summarize it all. There’s something sobering about that.
I finally wrote out my very own guide to entrepreneurship. I don’t think there’s anything groundbreaking in it, but considering that there are so many books out there, hopefully the shortness and simplicity of this will be its appeal.
Enjoy!
Look closely at that picture. There are two Microsoft Zunes on the table and a bunch of photos. But those photos are digital images and the woman is manipulating the photos with her finger, dragging and dropping them onto her Zune. I was blown away when I saw the demo videos for Microsoft Surface. This is some seriously cool stuff!
Between this, Joost (by the way, I’ve got Joost invitiations if anyone wants one), and the Web 2.0 stuff coming down the pipeline it really is a changing world we live in. If I were lounging around with nothing to do, I can think of at least three businesses I would try to start right now using Microsoft Surface.
Can’t wait to see where this technology goes over the next few years…
It only took me two years but I finally upgraded the theme to the blog. The font’s a little small for my tastes, so I might change that but hopefully the new look is a big improvement over the old one!
When I first started out in business you could sum me up by just two traits: highly ambitious, and totally clueless. It’s not such a great combination, actually.
Mark Cuban says that in business you can fail an unlimited number of times as long as you don’t have a really catastrophic failure (like this guy, although even he managed to get back into his element). The great thing about business, Cuban says, is that you really only have to hit it big once and then, well, you’re set!
I take a thought like that, and I mix it with another thought I have:
I’ll be honest. I’m a little embarassed that I wrote the letter you’re about to read, and I’m even more embarassed that I’m posting it here for everyone to see. There’s nothing outrageous in it, I suppose, but I just can’t believe I actually took 30 minues out of my life to craft this letter to the CEO of Qwest, Richard Notebaert. I guess I can’t believe that I care about my TV service enough to write this letter (which I plan on actually sending; didn’t know how else to reach the guy). Maybe it’s just my shock at how absoutely terrible Qwest has been. Well, here we go, oh, and Google, feel free to index this on all the qwest-related searches:
A few years ago I read a book by Brian Tracy about the laws of business success. The book was basically a list of observations Tracy made about success in business (that was an insightful sentence).
Anyways, a lot of the laws centered around finding someone who’s successfully doing what you want to do and copying every aspect of them. A lot of laws talked about how you get compensated for exactly the value you create in the world (an idea I’ve seen expressed elsewhere and continue to be fond of). One law in particular made an unconscious impression on me:
When I was in college and dreaming about my super-success story in “someday” mode, it was typically a vision of pure ambition. The “who” part about the people I’d actually be working with remained mostly unspecified. The “how” part didn’t really matter. The “what” part just had to involve my core interests of technology and business.
So, in 2003, I started doing entrepreneurship for the first time. I lived in an apartment alone at the time, and decided that I would be a Web/marketing consultant and work out of my home. I had good credentials, so I was fortunate to get a $12,000 contract by being introduced to a company through a family connection. I had no budget, no strategy, no vision, no plan. I basically had one room dedicated to being my office and I had a client.
I recently stumbled upon RockStartup.com. It’s basically a documentary, split up into several episodes, that covers the birth of the website PayPerPost.com by following around the CEO/Founder, Ted, and the PR person, Britt.
PayPerPost (”PPP”) is a weird concept — PPP pays bloggers to write content, sources content from Publishers, and then earns money by charging advertisers to put ads on their blog sites. It’s been controversial because blogging’s rise to fame is due to its unbiased nature, and paying someone to blog, well, I guess it’s hard for them not to be biased.
But the success of PPP is another discussion. I’m more interested in the man behind PPP, Ted. Based on 10 minutes of watching RockStartup, I defnitely saw some “patterns” I’ve seen in other entrepreneurs.
When I was at Wharton as an undergrad, in my Senior year I took an Entrepreneurship course where you had to build some unique software, come up with a business plan, and then pitch it all to VC’s.
Our idea was terrible. We were going to build a system for people running political campaigns to help them get a sense of how people were planning on voting. We had a barcode-scanner-pen that scanned in a person’s survey responses, and then aggregated all the informaiton so that a campaign director could see how people felt about a variety of issues.
When I joined the team, I was the only undergrad. We were led by a charismatic, tall, deep-voiced MBA and everyone seemed to buy into his leadership cred. Eventually, people started dropping off our team for one reason or another. I think more than anything they just didn’t believe in what we had going on. But I needed this class for some kind of requirement so dropping the class wasn’t an option for me.
So I got to work pretty closely with our head guy. He was a former VP from Morgan Stanley, a Berkely-educated computer science graduate, and an imposing guy. He seemed intelligent, driven, and confident. I was actually pretty intimidated by him for a while.
But as we got to work together, one thing became clear to me: he had this idea that he was destined to be a multi-million dollar entrepreneur success story. And he was busting ass to make that a reality. The product itself, the concept, the company, the vision…none of that really mattered a whole lot. It was more about the success factor, the prestige of being a self-made man, a clever entrepreneur who saw the opportunity and cahsed out at 35 years old for $10 million…or something like that.
I can think of at least two other times I’ve seen that ilk of entrepreneur: Startup.com, the movie. Those guys succeeded in raising a lot of money, and spent a lot of time and money doing soul-searching, but not a whole lot actually adding value for the world. The guy was a former Goldman Sachs Investment Banker and again, had the air of “I’m a smart businessman who knows how to make millions of dollars in entrepreneurship.” Their company has since folded.
And the latest example? Although I have but 10 minutes of edited video footage to base my thinking on, I give the honors to Ted of PayPerPost.com. The cheering about raising $3 million, the getting up at 4am to hand out signs at the Today Show…somehow it didn’t have an authentic ring to it. It seemed more like token, crazy things entrepreneurs are supposed to do to make their companies successful. I guess it can all be summed up by being more about the experience of entrepreneurship and hitting it big, than your passion for whatever you’re doing.
By contrast, I know of a family member who grew a wildly successful company from scratch. He raised no money; his company was financed by getting new clients. He LOVED what he did. He retired in his 40’s and always talks longingly aobut his work days. He’s financailly set for life but is still involved in new business ventures.
I know of a local entrepreneur here in Phoenix who simply loves web design, and has made a lot of clients very happy by doing what he does best.
I think of Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, whose story is vividly recounted in a book he co-authored, and how his passion was the idea that Coffee could be a bridge to creating community in America again. It really had nothing to do with feeling like a clever entrepreneur and mkaing millions of dollars.
I think of Bob Parsons, CEO of GoDaddy, who made $50 million and nearly spent it all on GoDaddy before making it profitable. Despite being insanely wealthy, he’s admitted he’s not motivated by money, and just loves building a great company.
Look at Mark Cuban — a billionaire who actively writes about his businesses on his own blog!
My point is that there are entrepreneurs who are out for the glorty and the dollar signs, and then there are the people who really believe in what they’re doing, and how it will make a positive difference.
I think the truly succesful entrepreneurs — ironically — don’t really fret too much about *being* successful entrepreneurs. They just focus on adding value for the world, on overcoming challenges people said couldn’t be overcome, on taking their passion and doing something amazing with it.
Hell, I love learning foreign languages so much that I would almost be happy to accept a non-paid position to direct a foreign language products company. Not that I plan on leaving my current position, and in reality I’d probably want some actual salary or compensation, but *emotionally* that’s how I feel.
Anyways, I guess what it comes down to is that, as the brilliant Paul Graham pointed out, people choose their careers based on three criteria: (1) Prestige, (2) Ambitiousness, and (3) Doing What You Love.
I think the best entrepreneurs have most of their eggs in (3) and the rest in (2). I think the others have most of their eggs in (1).
Recently, we’ve been hiring several new people for Omedix. The nice thing about hiring someone is that they have no prior expectations about how things work. There’s no prior expectations about salary, bonus, benefits, commissions, work/life balance, degree of responsibility, etc. I basically get to establish a fresh baseline for their expectations based on the initial employment offer I make.
So, that’s caused me to think pretty hard about what kind of company *I* would want to work for, and what kind of employment situation *I* would want if I were applying for a job. After all, working today is a 2-way street. The “employee” (I hate that word but at least it conveys my point for this posting) — anyways, the “emplolyee” has to prove they can make worthwhile contributions to the company, and the company has to prove they’ll provide a rewarding, fun, well-compensated work experience. If the employee can’t cut it, the company hires someone else. It the company can’t cut it, the employee goes to work for someone else.
That got me thinking: I would HATE to work in a purely salaried position. It’s not so much that money is everything; I would just hate the idea of having a fixed compensation regardless of how much value I actually created for the company. Sure there might be a “you did well” bonus at the end of the year, and incremental raises, but for the most part my compensation would be fixed.
On the other hand, one of the things I really love about my current job is that, financially, if I create a lot of value in the world, I will be financially compensated for that. Conversely, if I royally screw up and wind up using a lot more of the world’s value than I create (otherwise known as when expenses exceed revenue), then I have to live with that. It can be nerve-racking sometimes, but also thrilling, and I like that.
So, anyway, my thinking is that today is just a different world. Back in the day, people would go to work for a large, established company, earn a flat salary, have a fairly predictable job, and be rewarded with pension plan and other long-term benefits after something like 30 years of service to the company. Yuck!
Today, people are constantly hearing about billion-dollar acquisitions ($1.6 billion for YouTube), and it no longer seems completely shocking when we hear about a 30-year old multi-millionaire. The super-fast rise of the Internet created a sort of “anything’s possible” mentality, and I think a lot of people in the “Net Generation” (let’s say that means anyone born in 1975 or later) have encountered the idea of working hard on an idea that might change the world, that there’s something intoxicating about it. The romance of it is alluring to our generation in a way that just wasn’t that common 50 years ago.
We see 30-year old Google billionaires, and use websites created by some guy out of his college room, or download software written by some guy who was a high school dropout, or visit the restaurant of some guy who’s only 35 that we all, I think, have a desire to taste the nectar of “anything’s possible”.
Set against that kind of backdrop, how exciting can it be to work at a predictable, corporate job earning a straight salary mostly independent of how well you do? I say that our generation demands something spicier. We want our companies to throw down the gauntlet and say “If you can produce, we will deliver.” We want to work in an environment where our salary, our potential, and our responsibility are limited only by what we think we’re capable of, not constrained by the shackles of bureaucracy or “how we do things here.”
And so, with Omedix, I’ve tried to do the best job I can to create that. My goal is to make “mini-entrepreneurs” out of every single member of our team. People shouldn’t be asked to bear the financial/emotional risk of starting a new business, so a base salary with benefits is still appropriate. But we also shouldn’t be constrained, so I think a very potent bonus structure is important.
We should each know how much we “cost” the company — the total cost of our salary, benefits, and bonuses. And we should each know how much value we GENERATED for the company. And so we should each have a sort of “profit”. And since it takes time, money, and energy to create the infrastructure in which that profit is created, most of the profit should go to the infrastructure — to the company — but a healthy share of that profit should go to the person that earned it in the first place. The more “value profit” you earn, the more you should be compensated.
I haven’t perfected the system just yet, and I’ll be honest — it sometimes feels like I’m playing with volatile chemicals when structuring incentive programs — but the right chemicals mixed together creates a powerful “chemistry” and lot of energy, and drives people to work harder, have more fun, make more money, and love their job. What could be better?
Details to follow…
So, I’m working from Starbucks right now (not such a bad place to get some work done on a Sunday night!). I had the chance of sitting next to a group of students from ASU studying frantically for their Computer Information Systems class assignment due sometime soon.
I couldn’t help but notice how they were conducting their work. First, they chose to work at the same time; there were three of them in all. That seemed to be a lot more entertaining than going it alone, but there was a significant amount of time being sucked up by random conversation and complaining to one another about the assignment. Second, they chose to work at Starbucks, where other students recognized them and engaged them in conversation, another distraction.
Just a few minutes ago, they decided that since they were hungry it would be a good idea to go upstairs to Gordon Biersch, a beer brewery (!), and get a table there to do some work (they all had laptops and planned to work there). Having been to Gordon Biersch before, I can personally attest that it’s not exactly the Phoenix Public Library up there. They’re going to a bar to get a programming assignment done?
And finally, one of the girls asked me if I knew any Visual Basic for Applications. I actually do so I offered to help. “Do you know what the code is to format a worksheet better?” she asked. That’s kind of an open-ended question, so I asked her to clarify. She looked puzzled, so I showed her a worksheet on my computer and suggested what she might mean by “better formatting”? At that point she lost interest and started looking away, so I stopped talking, she looked back at me, and said “Okay, thanks.”
Now, two or three days from now when that assignment is done, those girls will probably be busting ass all night to do the best they can and it will probably not look so good (at least based on 15 minutes of random observation).
All of this raises the very important question: To what extent is academic performance (or better yet performance in lots of things) due to raw work habits? These girls seemed plenty smart, but they wasted so much frickin’ time with the way they were working. What would have been more efficient? Either go to Starbucks alone, or go to an isolated area, pop open the book and STUDY what they need to answer, then answer the questions.
Instead, they wasted time socializing, obtaining food, and working in a popular area. They even talked about whose house they could go to because this person apparently did well on the last test and knew his stuff. So much time spent “organizing” to work, and almost no time spent actually getting anything done!
If I ever ran a University, I would require a mandatory “how to work productively” seminar for every student. That’s 4 or so hours that could save hundreds of hours over the 4-year college experience. Interesting stuff.
Recent Comments