- You have to show up every day. The endless days where nothing works have their own arithmetic that adds up to breakthroughs of genius. The sun will come.
This is what learning looks like
- Everybody works for free at first. Free doesn’t really mean “free” though. Free means that you’re an investor. If you’re the entrepreneur, it means you’re an investor in your own company by working there every day. If you’re an employee, free means you’re proving that you can add value to justify your salary. Places like IBM or Dell do not demand this level of accountability.
- Don’t build it until someone has bought it. No, for real. Seriously. No exceptions. Get the signature and the check. Those two things mean your idea doesn’t suck.
- Everyone has a skill-set that makes them uncomfortable. They medicate this with their comfortable skill-set. That’s why when your startup has a sales problem, you can’t find the engineers: they’re all hiding in the basement coding a new feature.
- Stop blaming anyone else for everything else. It’s your fault. Until you admit it’s your fault, you can’t be in control of the necessary changes that will fix the problem (leads into #6).
- Be ready to change things all the time. That’s part of why you have to keep showing up. What you did on Day #1 didn’t work then, and it’s still not working. You don’t figure out the right model until many days later.
- But don’t change things without a hypothesis. Changing things randomly and without a purpose goes by “schizophrenia” in the DSM.
- Your idea is worth absolutely nothing until you’ve executed and sold something.
- Entrepreneurship can be a self-cleaning oven. It gets hot and miserable in there sometimes. The pain is how you know it’s working.
- You always have a choice each day. You can love it, or you can leave it. If you don’t love it, but you haven’t left it, ask yourself what you love hiding from more.
- Leverage a community of people. You will not do it alone. You have to find a group of people that you can help and get help from. If they’re the right people, this will make more difference than you can see in the windshield.
- Take critical feedback in silence. Once the feedback is done, say thank you and go apply the feedback. NEVER use this as an opportunity to tell why the feedback isn’t relevant to your situation. If someone cares about you enough to share criticism with you, don’t tell them that they’re wrong. That’s an efficient way to lose your connection to reality.
- Stay connected to reality by varying your sources of advice. If your technology is a bleeding edge hyper-green technology, you better go talk to a business development guy who likes capitalism. That’s the only way you’ll know if your idea is worth a dime.
- Read all the business books that challenge you, and do it until you’re overwhelmed. At that point, switch to fiction and then go to sleep. CS Lewis should take the edge off.
- Tomorrow, start again. Learn from screw-ups. Be willing to screw everything you do up. But always remember that success is 10x more powerful than screw-ups, and way more fun to be excited about.
- Minimum Viable Product is enough. In other words: Less is more.
Besides being able to control the jukebox and drink yerba mate all day, the thing that I love most about managing the community at Tech Ranch Austin is all the folks who come in the door. They all have stuff to teach me, even about our own business model. Lesson #1: always be prepared to let people teach you what they want to teach you.
Ask the Penguin why the Open-Source economy will save us all
Yesterday Tom Kane walked in the door, and today I have an e-mail from him with an essay titled Coase’s Penguin (For a TED talk, among others on this topic, click on Tom’s name). For those of you who don’t know that Linux’s log is a Penguin, it is. What Linux did to computing was beat Microsoft at their own game (creating an operating system), and it was done by millions of programmers all over the world contributing a bit of programming for free. These programmers represent 3-4x the computing power of Microsoft. Another example of how open source dominates previous models is Wikipedia vs. Encarta (Google them to figure out who is the reigning champion).
Here’s the point. Allowing people all over the globe to volunteer on a project means that the project will receive more hours than a project with a small team of salaried workers. It means there will be relentless innovation and improvement. It means that everyone will have access to the same relentlessly improving information. And it means that this information is free. I’m not talking about Linux anymore. I’m talking about a sea-change in our economy. I’m saying that decentralized individuals are creating more efficient software / hardware than even the giants like Microsoft can.
This is very important when I think about the work we’re doing at Tech Ranch. Kevin will be able to cite some very specific sources to describe why lowering the barriers to entrepreneurship is so important, in the days to come. For now, this post serves as a way for me to gather my thoughts on why opening the model of entrepreneurship is so vitally important, especially for my fellow recent-graduates for whom the job market is being unkind.
What I see this meaning to us is nothing short of a re-education of how we are to think about working for the rest of our lives away from a 9 to 5 existence, and into a much more organic work environment of loose, opportunistic coalitions of “freelancers” coming together to take down a project that has an interesting dollar amount associated with it. The group will form ad-hoc, delegate responsibility, act quickly, and once the objective is completed the group will most likely disband as the individuals go in search of other opportunities. Seth Godin had it right. The economy is getting tribal.
This loose organization is very important because it assures individuals that suddenly have the power to do something revolutionary: something that heretofore only the privileged have had the power to do. This open-source model gives you and I the power to say, No. No to our boss. He doesn’t exist anymore. No to pain-in-the-ass clients. No to an employer relocating our family. No to the alarm clock even. You and I get to say no, because our participation was voluntary to begin with. The economy is becoming open-source, and there is too much work to go around for any of us to be doing things that we hate.
Liberation say to to the things we hate means the freedom to say YES to the things we love. Our lives, and the world will be better for it. Just ask the Penguin.
So do yourself (and the rest of us) a favor. Ask what you said “NO” to recently.
I hope this helps.
Entrepreneurs, here is an important distinction in your customers that I learned at the Wizard Academy a few weeks back. As you sell your product or service, you will deal with two meta-customers in your business. One is ideal. The other is a time-suck. Respectively, they are called Relational and Transactional. It’s important to learn to spot the difference on sight because while the Transactional will make himself extremely visible and demand all sorts of customer service, he will only make up about 20% of your profits. The Relational shopper accounts for the other 80% and is where your long-term interests lie.
Be on the lookout for shoppers demanding a discount
[NOTE: This knowledge comes from the retail game, but the concept applies to technology entrepreneurship because the strategies people use when they shop at Best Buy will mirror the strategy they use when they shop for your product or service.]
Let’s say you’re selling your consulting services, and are faced with one Transactional shopper and one Relational customer. Notice that I am calling one a shopper and the other a customer.
The Relational customer views today’s sale as the first in a long series of transactions. By taking care of this person’s needs, he will grow to trust you and come back repeatedly. This is because his greatest fear is making the wrong choice (we’ll compare this to the Transactional fear in a moment), and therefore he is looking for someone with expertise in whom to place his trust. This is why the Relational customer is your best customer. He assumes you are the expert. Moreover, he wants to pay you to be the expert, so he doesn’t have to be. He’d rather pay you to have it off his mind. Once you establish your expertise (read: your monetary value), Relational customers become repeat customers.
This works because the Relational customer considers time spent comparing prices part of the purchase price. That means he’s not interested in getting the lowest price. He’s interested in not buying the wrong thing. He isn’t going to slam you with endless negotiations to lower your rate $10/month because that’s a waste of his time. He wants to trust you, and pay you what you’re worth. He’s got better things to do with his time than haggle (Sorry Ramit) for a slight discount.
Transactional shoppers, on the other hand, are thinking about this transaction only. We all get in Transactional mode from time to time, like comparing the prices of gasoline. That’s because we know that it’s all basically the same product. It makes our cars run, and so we’re willing to drive to the station across the street to save five cents a gallon, and we aren’t concerned with developing a relationship with Shell or Texaco. The Transactional shopper operates this way to buy everything from gas to bulk coffee to your consulting services. He loves shopping for the lowest price as much as LeBron James likes playing basketball. And he couldn’t care less about developing a relationship with you. Remember this distinguishing characteristic and don’t be afraid of “offending someone” and demanding your rates. The Transactional shopper wants to negotiate below your established rate so he can get a deal.
The biggest fear of the Transactional shopper is paying more than he absolutely has to. Therefore, he will spend his free time to investigate for months in advance. By the time the Transactional shopper gets to you, he has talked to five competing service providers and is trying to start a bidding war as if you are a car salesman. Don’t let him. Securing his business isn’t worth the discount. The Transactional shopper will remain noisy and troublesome, all the while paying you less money than you are worth. In terms of the 80/20 Rule, transactional shoppers make up about 80% of your stress, and about 20% of your revenue, because they rarely spend money until they’ve gotten a deal.
Meta-Lessons from this. Your ideal (Relational) customer doesn’t care about price nearly as much as he cares about buying the right thing. He knows that he needs your services; he knows that there are risks, and he wants to trust you to do a great job over the long term. He’s developing a relationship.
The Transactional shopper (less than ideal) is the person who responds only to SALE prices. He will hound you without remorse for a discount. A transactional shopper has the potential to take up more of your time only to pay you less money than you’re worth.
The Relational customer knows instinctively that a super low sale price is probably too good to be true. Since they are afraid of buying the wrong thing, an abnormally low price begs the question, “what’s wrong with this guy that he has to give his stuff away?”
This is good for you. It means that you can focus your energies, like Ramit keeps saying, on serving the right customers, and let the wrong customers fall by the wayside. Focusing on cultivating good relationships with clients means that you get to do the work that you’re good at, for an appropriate rate. Don’t worry about hanging onto the people who never seem to be satisfied. Just tell them one of your competitors is having a one-time sale that you can’t match. They’ll be out the door and take their unreasonable demands with them.
I hope this helps.
Take a blood test. Submit to the needle invading your arm. Send off for the results.
When I got the results back, they confirmed my nutritionist’s suspicions: my body had developed an allergic reaction to gluten. That was December 2007. That month was my last gluten hurrah. I haven’t eaten most grains, OR beer, since. But in the 30 days of December I went on to devour all the wheat possible. I ate a lot of sandwiches. I drank a lot of beer. And once that clock hit 12:00a.m., January 1, 2008 I switched from Belgian Ale to Champagne; from crackers and cheese to just cheese. I switched to the gluten-free lifestyle.
This is the stuff I don't eat anymore
The switch made my life better. Cutting gluten out of my diet improved the arthritis I was experiencing in my joints. The dietary changes were worth it almost immediately. Plus, within a few months I found gluten-free beers from Belgium. But until this year, I didn’t have the breads and pastry problem resolved. Any of you who have had to experiment with gluten-free baking know that it’s near impossible to get the consistency right without the gluten. I’ve had marginal success with some recipes, and others were a disaster. My diet actually moved on from grains. Me and grains became like those people you see every 6 months or so in the grocery store, and have nothing to talk about anymore. We drifted apart.
Some light broke through the gluten-free shroud recently. The e-mail asked me if I wanted to try some new gluten-free products from Houston. I said hell yes. Soon after I got one of the best care packages of my life (sorry mom). It contained 3 different cakes, cookies, and delicious white bread for making toast and sandwiches.
Free food makes gluten-avoidance not suck.
Since this isn’t a cooking blog, I won’t go into all the details. Here’s the skinny on the gluten-free stuff I got. The Carrot and Cinnamon Cakes were outstanding. Moist and rich. I brought them into the Tech Ranch for lunch and we polished them off in an afternoon. The Ginger Cake seemed a bit lacking in the ginger department though. The cookies were fantastic. You don’t realize how much you miss chocolate chip cookies until you take them warm out of the microwave…
If any of you all are looking for great gluten-free alternatives for you or a family member, check Gluten Free Houston out. My only regret is that they are in Houston, not Austin.
Hope this helps.
Not spending the weekend at SXSW Interactive feels gnawing and incomplete. I am a tech entrepreneur, after all. Shouldn’t I be running around 6th Street, badge dangling around my neck, iPhone out, tweeting #SXSWi hash-tags all day.
The beauty of iPhones makes Steve Job's Calligraphy classes evident
The answer is probably. I’m pretty sure that I missed out this year, especially given the panels by such Thought Leaders as Gary V and Ramit Sethi, not to mention missing any opportunity of carousing with Jonas and Kevin.
Why am I not at SXSW this weekend? What’s the real reason?
The real reason is that I don’t own an iPhone, and everybody knows that you have to have an iPhone to attend SXSW. I’m only partly kidding.
There are two SXSW parties that I’m a factor at. Both are Piryx parties, and since Jonas is the COO of Piryx in addition to Tech Ranch Founder, I get to show up and be counted.
But in actuality, my lack of an iPhone is causing problems. Keeping me out of South By is just one of them. As much loyalty as I have to my Sony Walkman phone (I know, right), I’ve begun to realize that working with a bunch of techie entrepreneurs makes not having a smart phone a liability. I owe my phone some loyalty. The camera broke, it doesn’t record video clips anymore, and it hasn’t worked as a walkman since it survived being run over by my Silverado. I’m blown away the thing hasn’t left me by this point.
This isn’t the 1980s, but status symbols are alive and well. If your gadgets don’t show how geeky you are, you’re out. From the CTAN investor who publicly mocked my phone at a Door 64 meetup, to the girl who asked me to text her my phone number only to stop and ask if I, “could text on my phone,” I’ve gotten the hint. I hear you world. It’s time for the iPhone.
Now the question is how practical I should be about getting the dang thing. Fortunately, my last 2 year phone contract just expired, so when I’m ready to go buy the phone, AT&T (or Verizon) will take the brunt of the iPhone’s cost. At this point, I have 2 questions that will determine when I pick up the phone.
1. What new features will Apple inevitably roll out in June for the next generation of the phone?
2. Will the iPhone finally loose its bonds to AT&T and will I have the option to join the far superior Verizon network when I upgrade to the iPhone?
The first question is kinda geeky, I understand. But if the new version of the iPhone upgrades to 4g speed, that’s surely worth waiting for. Apple tends to roll out new and necessary features with each iteration, so it’s something to always consider when buying their stuff.
The second question is pretty important. The AT&T network can really suck wind at times, and the biggest complaint I hear from iPhone users is the spotty data coverage. Even Steve Jobs gripes about it. If I’m going to take the plunge, sell out, and buy into the tech hype, I’d better have a decent wireless network so next year at South by Southwest, I can judge all the people who show up with cell phones that look like this one:
Phone: Post Chevy Silverado run-in
I told Yoko that I can't text her my number from my "rotary" phone
I only sorta hope this helps…
This is a post from the Tech Ranch Austin blog, and a response to Tech Ranch Partner Cristi Jakubic’s blogging post about why not to blog.
When Cristi Jakubic writes something, everyone around the Ranch pays attention. This goes double for me. Few others have the experience she does in the trenches of marketing. Cristi speaks from this experience, having earned her stripes on the Silicon Valley Battlefields.
Y'all come on by, ya hear?
She is one of the people that I try to get as much free advice from as possible when she has a moment between consulting entrepreneurs. That’s why I was blown away that she wrote a blog about reasons not to blog (please suspend your sense of irony for the moment). I was surprised because I had never questioned blogging as integral to a good marketing campaign in the 21st century. But since Cristi raised the question, you all should take note.
I’m going to attempt to address Cristi’s argument, and offer my own flipside to many of her arguments. I’m doing this because (spoiler alert) I think blogging is hugely important in the long term for each of your start-ups.
To Cristi’s first point, “Blogging may not be my calling.”
Yes. I agree. I have no doubt that most people aren’t called to blog in the same way that Che was called to run around in the jungles of Cuba, or the way that Henry Ford was called to revolutionize the world’s understanding of manufacturing. Some people are called to share ideas, and blogging is a great tool to facilitate that. And I also think that blogging is mostly a great tool to create a relationship with your customer. It’s a means to your ends of successful entrepreneurship (your calling). If you write engaging content that people come back to regularly, they will ultimately feel like they know you. Just like a celebrity, as a blogger, you earn fans who read your blog and “know” you well enough to trust you at your word, whether they’ve ever met you or not. This trust means sales for your company.
To her second point, “I like to create value for my customers and let them speak to my record.”
Nobody can argue with the person who lets their results speak for themselves. And this makes blogging less attractive because it’s such a long-term investment and the value it creates is very hard to quantify. I’m pretty sure even The Google hasn’t come up with analytics for blog posts => sales closed. I still believe that effective blogging drives traffic to your site, and makes you more credible. A good blog actually gives your customers one more way to tell other people about you. I love sending the tweet that says, “Hey, check out this awesome blog I found!”
To Cristi’s final point, “Although I have passion and energy about launching my venture, blogging seems like bragging.”
I think Cristi makes another good point here that blogging isn’t about bragging. Blogging is about providing value for free to your customers. Blogs that brag are blogs that aren’t read. Blogs that give it away for free get people coming back over and over, developing that long-term relationship and trust that I mentioned in the previous paragraph. I was doing a bit of social media work with a local start-up in the wireless industry, Movero, and I remember telling them that their blog needs to provide lots of free content for their readers about wireless devices. Apple releases a new iPhone, Android stops sucking, anything in that area, they need to talk about it. People love coming to one place for the latest info, and that’s not bragging, that’s sharing.
That said, let me share with you that Tech Ranch RULES. You should come start your venture with us. Cristi will make your marketing sing.
Ok, that’s out of my system.
—Bottom Line—
Blogging is writing. Writing is painful. Hemingway once said, “Writing is easy…You just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.” Cristi is right again. If you find blogging painful, you’re just like the rest of us. And I take that one step further and say that if something is painful, and you find yourself resisting on Facebook, or Twitter, or TechRanchAustin.com, you’re not alone, and consider how the more painful something is the more necessary it is to pursuing your calling. I think writing is absolutely necessary, and I would encourage you to deny the pain any power, and simply do it in spite of the pain. We are entrepreneurs, after all.
In conclusion, I’m challenging Cristi to come up with a blog explaining 3 ways that blogging is absolutely crucial to the marketing of a start-up by next week. If she write this, I’ll write a blog post of her choosing.
I hope this helps.
Conquer your enemies. Use your own agility to make your opponent move even slower. The faster you can make decisions and take action, the more deadly you will be when facing your opponent.
Entrepreneurs, take note: This book on military strategy will make your start-up better.
There is a business book making the rounds at the Tech Ranch that, similar to the last paragraph, seems like it’s about military strategy. But it’s not. The book, Certain to Win, does talk a whole lot about military strategy. The first half of the book finally explains how the Nazis used the Blitzkrieg and tore into the French lines. Turns out, that was a two-week campaign that made all the difference for the Third Reich, and made the war last as long as it did. The Nazis were far outnumbered, had obsolete technology, and lacked the resources of the Allied troops. Let’s replace the Third Reich and the Allies with small start-up vs. Microsoft, David vs. Goliath.
It’s been said that Bill Gate’s Biggest Fear is, “that some kid will brew up the next killer app in his garage in Kenosha and Microsoft won’t own it.” What’s the difference between your startup and a behemoth like Microsoft? The answer should be a cultural. Since a small start-up lacks the sheer resources of a Microsoft, they have to have a culture of quick decisions, made with an emphasis on agility, not brute strength. The difference is between a Business Plan and a Business Strategy.
Before I explain this, I want to make sure everyone understands that, just like the rest of you, I’m glad that Good triumphed over Evil in World War II. I’m not advocating the sickness of Nazi ideology.
What I AM saying, what Certain to Win says, is that the Nazis achieved success against a more powerful opponent because they made decisions faster than their bigger, bureaucratic opponent. This structure meant that agility won out over far superior numbers AND technology.
I am suggesting that we model aspects of this structure in our respective start-ups. This structure will make us more agile and enable us to take down giant corporations (at this point, Microsoft is probably more Nazi-like than your start-up I’m sure). By moving twice as fast as a bigger company, a start-up can release a beta in a few months, while the big guy is still sitting in meetings, waiting for approval. Google is a notable exception of a billion-dollar company that structures itself like a thousand tiny start-ups. Google is regularly releasing betas, some of them better than others. By releasing the beta, Google invites the feedback of millions of users who ultimately decide if the product is hot or not.
This is how structural agility in a start-up should manifest.
Stop making Business Plans.
Business plans are like computer technology. By the time you get all the figures and graphs printed, your financials, just like your microchips, are obsolete. Your startup has changed, and your numbers are based on what used to be true. Following a 20 page business plan inhibits making decisions based on what is true now. In a start-up, sticking to your original plan is a very reliable way to become obsolete yourself because you are making decisions according to old information.
What do you do when your carefully made plans go astray? Hint: the right answer isn’t panic.
Rely on Business Strategy.
Instead of making a step-by-step plan of how to drive from Los Angeles to New York, ask yourself a few questions and develop a strategy that will enable everyone in your company to make quick decisions. Why are you making this trip? If the goal is to arrive as quickly as possible, then fill the tank up and hit the gas. Or if the goal is to get the most out of the trip itself, then you can spend time enjoying the scenery. Either strategy will get you to your destination
The only way to make it as a startup is to create a culture that encourages innovation and independent thinking by your employees. Let’s go back to the analogy of traveling from Los Angeles to New York. If you’re the CEO and you’ve fallen asleep halfway through the Texas Panhandle, any of your employees that happen to be behind the wheel MUST be empowered to make a decision without rousing you from your slumber. If they have to wait for your approval to change lanes, the opportunity will pass you by before you can take advantage of it.
How can you create a culture where strategy is more important than a plan?
I hope this helps.
TED was here over the weekend. And he brought with him some really interesting news on what motivates us in the workplace. Author Dan Pink, who has said many things that I like, including the statement that Right-Brainers will take over the world (GO TEAM), gave an inciting talk about the nature of motivation in business. Specifically, it incited a conversation between Kevin and I, and this blog post. Kevin and I spent some time talking about it this week in terms of how we do business around Tech Ranch, and how I get paid for what I do.
Dan Pink and the Right Brainers will Rule the World
I’ll sum up Dan Pink’s talk as very useful and frankly encouraging overall. Pink makes a solid case for autonomy in the workplace, citing Google as a great example of a company that is hugely successful because they allow their employees to spend 20% of their time working on lo que quieran. This has meant a high level of billion-dollar innovation for Google. Pink then contrasts work that is done for individual pleasure, with work done for financial incentives. He cites comparisons that seem to indicate that only menial jobs are done better, or faster, with incentives attached. He claims that high level work is impeded by financial incentives, or commissions, for example.
Essentially, Pink is saying, mostly accurately, that the more complicated, or creative a task is, the more unfamiliar the tools at hand are, the more likely incentives are to hinder the process. This is because incentives externally increase the pressure, which in turn focuses our brains down to the bare essentials, almost like fight or flight. A heightened state of awareness of only specific variables, ignoring what our brain deems inconsequential. But the external pressure may mean we focus only on getting our task done, as opposed to being focused on the joy of doing it.
Most people agree that intrinsic motivations are MUCH more powerful motivators than anything external, and if you let people drive their own excitement, they will produce much greater, more creative work.
I agree with the philosophy of this statement. I want everyone to work in an open environment where they self-manage the work they do each day. However, I disagree with his blanket statement that incentivizing work is harmful. I don’t think it always is.
I think “creativity” is the crucial factor here. Since the work that I get to do at the Ranch involves lots of creative processes, the question Kevin and I discussed was how to motivate my best work over the long term. [If he asks any of you, just tell him that money enough to move into The Austonian and hire a personal tailor is sufficient creative motivation.]
At this point, I’m going to delve into semantics for a bit. I’d like to define creativity as a skill that can be practiced, much like an Olympic athlete practices snowboarding, or even curling. The Olympic athlete is a good example, because there is a spectrum of different ways in which individuals are naturally talented at being creative. I also think it works because of the following principle: performance improves in high pressure situations assuming a high level of skill as a result of lots of practice. Practice results in an internal feeling of control.
Dan Pink talks about pressure focusing our brains and reducing creativity. I would suggest that the pressure focuses our brains down to what we know, and ignores the unknown. This is great if you know that running will save you from a sabertooth tiger, or going to the store will re-stock your bacon. There are simple solutions to these problems. However, knowledge jobs involve complicated problems that require creative solutions. Creativity often involves changing the rules into something new that people don’t know and feel less control over. Hence incentives, which lead to pressure, may mean a decrease in creativity in the workplace by narrowing focus.
Here’s the question I’d like to ask:
I’m wondering what it would take to practice creativity so well that one would become an Olympic caliber “Creative.” What would it take to be so familiar with unfamiliarity that you could work on a commission-only basis for your innovation? Olympic athletes do their best under the bright lights of competition, with gold medals on the line. The pressure to be the best in the world, coupled with a lifetime of practice equals broken records reliably. You can count on the best, each time you turn on the Olympics. How might this be applicable to creativity in the business world? Can we cultivate an internal sense of control over the unfamiliar? Can we practice creative and innovative thought?
For my part, consider me training every day to become the Shaun White of Entrepreneurship. What are you training for?
Hope this helps.
Here is a question that I’m posing to the greater entrepreneurial community, inspired by my new favorite blogger, Ramit Sethi of IWillTechYouToBeRich.com. What is the scariest risk to your business idea? I think there are two basic answers to this question. And I am convinced that I know how far you’re going to get in the entrepreneurial game depending on your answer. Each answer reveals what you’re concerned with being the biggest hurdles in birthing your dream into reality some day soon. Evaluating the most important hurdle to tackle next is crucial to executing well on your business idea. Being concerned with the wrong things, things you have no control over, will keep an entrepreneur mired in fear, doing nothing. Fear kills ideas.
The two answers to my question are: “The scariest risk facing my idea is theft,” OR,
“The scariest risk facing my idea is succeeding.”
Theft or Success?
Which are you most worried about? It’s important. Whether you give answer or the other determines how much effort I will invest in nurturing your idea.
In my experience, people who are worried about having their ideas stolen are not serious about starting a business. Sure, there may be some things that you need to keep to yourself, but being unwilling to share anything with people who can help is lethal. Ideas require lots of input from a whole community to thrive. Those of you who doubt this, remember how Sony’s Great Idea, BetaMax? There is no such thing as a Great Idea that will bring instant success. Great ideas are beat out by Good Ideas all the time because of better execution. I run into folks at the Tech Ranch on a regular basis who refuse to share their idea because they are afraid of theft, when all I want to know is what resources they need. Not sharing your idea is equivalent to giving yourself an excuse to do nothing. If someone is too afraid to share their idea, it’s a safe bet they are looking for an excuse to continue doing exactly what they were the day before. Doing nothing is always the easiest option, and it’s the biggest hurdle you have to get over in the beginning.
Moving on.
The other answer to the question, “Will my idea succeed?” makes me very likely to help. It means that you know that Great Ideas are brought into reality via sustained hard work. Simply put, if you have a good idea, I’m willing to bet that 100 other people have the exact same idea right now. I’m also willing to bet that the person who executes the best on the idea is the one who succeeds, not the person who had the idea first. Facebook vs. MySpace is a great example of the early bird losing the worm. MySpace came first, but Facebook executed better, and is currently the second most visited website on the internet behind The Almighty Google.
How to execute on your idea is the crucial part, and those who are worried about success will come to the Tech Ranch in their search for how to answer this question. These are the people who sign up for our Venture Forth Program, our Pioneer Program, and Renting an office at the Ranch. The people worried about their idea being stolen are still going about their day-to-day lives, letting time slip away from them.
Success will change your life. It will bring about all sorts of unforeseen events. The problem is that change around us is terrifying. Change around us requires change within us, which is often the scariest thing in the world other than running out of bacon. Yet, being willing to change ourselves helps us make it over the next hurdle, one step closer to reaching our goals. I guarantee that you’re doing things exactly right to stay exactly where you are. I also guarantee that if you do something “different,” or, “dangerous” it will change your life.
Are you willing to make the change success will demand of you? Speak up, and success answers.
I hope this helps.
Edit: My buddy, John U reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point and Gladwell’s discussion of Mavens and Connectors. After you read the blog, read the Wikipedia synopsis of Mavens and Connectors.
In this, the Age of Twitter, I propose a new category of attention spans. Let’s call it the
“Twitter Attention Span.”
Wanna go ride bikes?
The Twitter Attention Span resides between someone highly focused on one thing at a time, and a classic ADD case of someone who can hardly remember the last thing that came out of their mouth. Someone with a Twitter Attention Span can focus intently and process basic information on about a dozen topics or people an hour. I fit the Twitter Attention Span. I skim a lot of information and retain the big picture for almost all of it. I don’t become an expert on any of what I skim, but I am able to filter what may be a useful resource for me my network, whether it’s a business connection or simply a place selling something really cheap.
A recent example:
When my close buddy Ken set up his Hi-Def TV up for our Super Bowl Party this year, he used an HDTV antenna that he saved around $70 bucks on. He saved the money because I randomly came across www.monoprice.com, (via @TechCrunch) which sells Home Theater accessories at wholesale, not the ~2400% mark-up that Best Buy typically adds. Without MonoPrice, Ken would have spent over $100 on an antenna.
His girlfriend, Andrea, asked how I found the website, and I didn’t have a good answer on the spot because I find lots of useful things without thinking about it. The real answer came to me this morning: I wouldn’t have seen that link and sent it to Ken without Twitter. I spend about 20 minutes a few times a day reading my TwitStream and the things people link to. I stumbled upon MonoPrice during one of my Twitter excursions.
I like learning new things, having new experiences, and especially meeting new people. I have a ravenous appetite for things I’ve never done before. At some point I realized that I was often “the guy who knows the guy.” I’m not the only person who does this, but I am really good at it. With it’s constant stream of new information, Twitter is a great tool for a guy like me. But most of the population hasn’t caught on to this yet.
For example:
One of the many blogs I stumbled upon today was titled “Is America Rooting for a Twitter Downfall?” I skimmed the article enough to come away with the following statistic: only about 17% of people with a Twitter account regularly use the service. That means 83% of people who sign up for Twitter don’t stick around and use it.
I wondered why, and came up with my “Twitter Attention Span” theory. Twitter delivers a TON of potentially information, unfiltered, in an entirely novel way. Not everyone is cut out to filter all the information Twitter provides for usefulness. They either get overwhelmed or get bored and quit using it.
On the surface, Twitter may appear to be a bunch of narcissists shouting their ordinary lives into the digital ether. To a certain extent, it is just that. However, it’s also the only place on the internet with a live feed of people’s reading lists, their sudden epiphanies, their fears and worries, and their suggestions for “life hacking.” All this information is being shared by folks just like me. There is a lot of valuable information that gets tweeted out every hour if you have the ability to filter and sort it all for the gold nuggets in the Twit Stream.
That’s why I love Twitter. I hop on my Twitter Stream, skim the posts 140 characters at a time, and click all the links that seem interesting, and then skim that content. Sometimes it’s a rabbit hole. Other times I save my friends money. The other day someone at Tech Ranch Austin even told me that he met a future company executive through my BarnBuildr program. I never know what I’m going to learn, or who is going to gain big because of a piece of information that I happen upon.
Helping someone get the one thing they need makes my day. And Twitter is one of my favorite tools for doing just that. You should use Twitter. Here’s to everyone having a Twitter-Span.
I hope that helps.
