Here's some stuff tannerpowell has liked. To find more cool stuff, check out Explore »
If your goal is to start a company, it is mostly a waste of time to work anywhere but a startup.
I agree. Large company experience prepares you for the rigors of navigating fiefdom and hierarchy and pleasing your boss. Those goals don't align you with creating value in the marketplace. But that's the entire point of startups! Get closer to the metal, not farther away.
There are lots of people who wanted to do one thing but then got "practical" and did something else "first." The idea was that they'd be successful and sock away money doing the practical thing, and after that they could go back to the thing they loved. Bronson was sure that, among the hundreds of people that he interviewed, someone would actually have been successful with this strategy. It sounds so reasonable, after all.
But he encountered exactly zero people who pulled it off. Everyone who tried got sucked into the "practical" career and were never able to extract themselves from it. Too comfortable, too many expectations from friends and family, too easy just to keep doing what you're doing.
We talk about when MINI USA had five employees and some of the strategy behind the early work. And we explore why the dream of getting business without pitching isnt all it is cracked up to be. Thanks again to Kevin Kelly and continued success with the show.
"If only I had ____ I would succeed." These simple words will kill your dreams faster than anything else you could say or think. There are so many self-defeating thoughts that an entrepreneur can have, and they often take this very simple form.
One of the more common phrases you hear if you spend any time around aspiring entrepreneurs is "If only I had a technical cofounder..." This is a cringe-worthy thing to say. If you want to build a technology company, how is it that you can start without a technical background? It is not impossible, but damn near close to it. If you don't possess the skills currently to build it yourself, then you've got a problem. There is an inverse correlation between how much you need something and how readily available that thing is to you. When it rains it pours. This applies directly to your ability. If you can code, design, market, sell, and ship your product, then you will have one hell of an easier time finding people to do each of those things for you. If you can only do one or two of those things, you've got a lot more needs, and it will be that much harder to fill them. Self-reliance fixes this. So what is a non-techie aspriring entrepreneur to do? The most straightforward thing possible, naturally. Code. Learn to do it. Learn to build. Pick up a book and type out the examples. To create great things, there are blood sweat and tears. It might take two years or ten, but better a dream realized in ten years than not at all. The good innovation -- the innovation that makes the world a better place and builds real wealth in society -- that stuff is done by radically self-reliant creators who get their hands dirty. Not talkers. Not dreamers. Builders. So I leave you with one simple command as you work on your dreams.
You should follow me on twitter here.
An old friend of mine stopped by the office the other day to ask me about our new business process. He has a smaller agency and they’re looking for strategies to help grow the shop. The first time we ever met he was helping us with some of the work connected to launching the Florida Truth campaign. CP+B was about 60 people back then so he’s seen us go through a lot of changes and I think we were both surprised by a lot of what the conversation revealed as the drivers of growth for us. I wanted to jot them down while they were still fresh in my head.
1. Tell other people your dreams. This was the biggie for us. For years Chuck and I had this secret understanding that we wanted to be a great agency some day. Whatever that meant. But it was one of those aspirations that you didn’t dare say out loud to anybody because it was just too ludicrous. People would laugh and they would point and they would say “There go those guys that wanted to be great!” FAIL! But to succeed you have to risk failure. So eventually decided to tell the whole agency what we wanted to become. Our mission statement. We had a friend who was at Fallon in the early days and he had been a part of creating there’s and I don’t know if I remember it exactly but it was very simple and basically said that they wanted to be, “The most awarded agency in America.” We thought about what we liked about the ad biz and it wasn’t awards it was the culture jamming. So our mission became, “To create the most talked about and written about advertising in the world.” At the time we probably hadn’t yet achieved that goal in Miami or Florida. So it was embarrassingly lofty. My friend was actually shocked to know that that was our mission statement when he first met me. I’m sure he would have laughed had he known. But in the agency we shared this mission with everybody and made little cards to tape to your monitor or desk so that during the day we could make all the hundreds of decisions we were faced with, with that mission in mind. Within weeks the stalemate between the status quo and something new had been broken and the agency began to clearly move toward this new shared goal. Out of the thousands of little decisions that shaped our future you could feel that more than half were suddenly talking us someplace we wanted to go. I wish we had had the courage to do it sooner.
2. The clients you currently have are your true new business machine. I see so many people overlook this. “If I only had a client like this or a client like that.” It’s key to have a clear idea in your head of the new ground you hope to break and the new case history you hope to prove with each new client before you start work. What is going to be different about the agency six months after the arrival of your new account? How is this new revenue and this new campaign going to make your agency smarter and more capable than it was prior?
3. Find some real passion in the building for the business or take a pass on it. We have a rule that says we can’t pitch a piece of business unless at least one of the partners is passionate about that business. And billings/money is not an acceptable reason for passion. It can be anything BUT money. Maybe you like that it’s family run. Maybe you love that they’re the underdog. Maybe you love that it’s a chance to build something from scratch. Whatever the reason is find it and if you can’t find a reason say thanks but no thanks. In the end you will be defined by your clients. There are no two ways about that. Such is the lot of the parasites of the business world. Agencies.
4. Don’t model yourself after other agencies. Stop stealing all the decks from other shops to find a great pitch. Actually, steal them. read them all and visit everybody and find out all you can. Then when you know enough, forget it all and make up your own process and your own pitch. It’s like a Jazz musician finding their unique voice. At the beginning it requires a lot of study and practice and emulation. But in the end nobody should or could sound quite the same. When you find it, your pitch and your process is better than any of them because you can tell it honestly and genuinely. The way to find your pitch might take a while but there’s a real sure fire method. Spend six months to a year making a quick note of every time you’re feeling really good at work and what you’re doing at the time. I guarantee a pattern will arise and with luck it won’t be about lunch or golf.
So that’s four. There were actually a couple others but they can wait for another post and another time.
I just watched this three times in a row. Now I'm compelled to go back and watch American Psycho.
The album is available for free at milesfisher.com.
Now that I’ve been here for a few years, it’s clear to me that the Silicon Valley echochamber has its clear negatives as well. Being out of touch with the average American consumer is one obvious negative. Chasing down technological rabbit holes is another.
One of the most common conversations you’ll overhear at any startup event is one entrepreneur giving another entrepreneur their elevator pitch. Or, you’ll overhear an entrepreneur giving their pitch to a prospective startup engineer. In fact, I would argue that many startups spend more time talking to other people “in the know,” than they do potential customers, whether those startup savvy people are investors, job candidates, fellow entrepreneurs, advisors.
Stop reading blogs so damn much
Have a strong vision that’s flexible yet specific
Ignore the competition
Don’t go to startup events
Forgo short-term opportunities if they are clearly short-term
Be skeptical of opportunities that are both hot, and easy
Remember that you only need one big success
I was very surprised to read this post on Andrew Chen's blog. Since I've moved back to San Francisco, I figured everyone here was *all about* the web 2.0 scene.
I enjoy going to web events occasionally, and I've met other company founders who are really awesome. But for the most part, I've never really understood the appeal of immersing yourself into the scene here. People in SF seem to lack balance, they are unable to connect to normal users.
Even events like SXSW bother me. They are simply ways to meet other entrepreneurs and pat each other on the back. Nothing is learned or accomplished. If anything, it makes you even more disconnected from the normal world. You leave SXSW with the desire to build yet another location based social network, with tight Twitter integration.
I've also always believed in the "one big success" idea. So many entrepreneurs go from company to company, idea to idea. Either they are incredibly smart and can come up with ideas faster than I can, or they are chasing the wrong goal and are starting crappy companies just for the sake of having a company. I waited many years to start a company. I waited for the idea that was worth quitting my job for, taking a risk on.
I know my time at Apple greatly affected what Posterous is today. But I wonder if my time in New York also helped shape the product into something more accessible to the mass public. While I was in New York, few of my friends were programmers, and none were super techy.
I remember a long time ago when I was showing off Posterous to a friend. Well, it wasn't called "Posterous" and it was only on my local machine. My friend suggested that instead of making a standalone product, I should make it a plugin for Wordpress or Movable Type. I told him I have zero interest in installing and managing Wordpress, and hundreds of millions of other people don't want to either.
I think if I had been immersed in the web 2.0 tech scene, Posterous would simply be a Wordpress plugin, and only used by geeks like me :).
