Being like The Sex Pistols can help your startup? | Hacker News Reader

Being like The Sex Pistols can help your startup?

blog.smartupz.com

19 pointsJarekS16 comments

Arguably, Malcolm McLaren was the entrepreneur in the Sex Pistols story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_McLaren#The_Sex_Pistols

Wasn't he more like a VC or Angel Investor?

No, Malcolm was the mastermind. He saw the punk trend, was a fixture in the scene, and figured out the right positioning for a new group and drove his product into the appropriate market channel. He wasn't the public face of what he built, but he put the Sex Pistols together and made them tour and got his wife Vivienne Westwood to style them.

What is exactly what I expect from the VC (early stage VC). Find group of talented people, with good idea, then help to position the product on the market using portfolio companies as helpers and his brand for PR. Style everything, and then sell thru the IPO.

Lesson 1: it's more important for your bass player to be outrageous than skillful.

Well... the names like Sid Vicious or Johnny Rotten say a lot... ;)

I like the idea a lot... And I think we can draw some interesting parallels to other kinds of artistic activities. Let's see... My mother's a scupltress. Anybody :)?

I bet a sufficiently motivated essayist could draw comparisons between, say, hacking and painting.

I had too much to say in response to this, so I just wrote it in a blog post.

http://robertelwell.blogspot.com/2010/03/please-kill-me-how-...

I think your rebuttal is missing a very important point. Though you may not agree that The Sex Pistols were the best product, there is little doubt that they were the brand that is heavily associated with the genre.

In another start-up comparison, The Sex Pistols weren't the best technical solution, but they got users.

Users don't matter if the product breaks and never gets fixed.

Great post!

Obviously a very content free article. As a proud punk, i call it bullshit. Although hacker culture is a lot like punk culture. But thats true of almost any creative subculture filled with misfits with attitude problems.

Sex Pistols were a boy band. A marketing creation.

Bah.

"Never Mind the Bollocks" still sounds good to this day.

Sex Pistols rebuttal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yhlx0-LLDE0

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