Most people won't
bryce.vc
bryce.vc
Let's not forget the CEO, who committed and risked resources on a hunch or instinct or who-knows-what.
If I had to pick one of the two to ask how they had the nerve to act and to learn from, I'd pick him. (Of course I'd prefer both and not to belittle her gumption and skills to back it up).
- What did he see to suggest risking those resources? ... To create a team of outsiders to work on the core app?
- How likely did he expect things to work out?
- How did he explain the expenditure of flying the others in to the CFO or whomever?
- Or did he make a unilateral decision without asking others?
- Did he just get lucky?
- Had he done things like this before and succeeded? Failed?
- Was he worried about making waves in his organization? Did he?
Plenty more questions pop up...
That is the lesson I am going to take away. Ideas matter, but if execution is the thing you can change, then embrace the people that tell you your execution sucks and have ideas.
[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=neg
[2] http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/voices/2012/05/negging-lat...
Robert Cialdini, for example, is heavily cited as an influence within the PUA community. So calling a "neg" a "pickup technique" might not even be accurate. I imagine the idea of "lower the value of a high-value target to penetrate their shield" probably predates the term PUA by quite some time.
As a founder, I am always looking for that combination in my users.
The bonus was offering herself as the solution. I'll venture that his decision was made even before she finished the sentence.
(Or maybe you haven't, but they wouldn't hire you. That would have been an interesting interview. "So, Mr X, where do you see yourself in this business in five years time?" "In a prison cell nearby, looking out through the bars at the smoking ruins and laughing.")
Not to mention the fact that whatever his answers are they are specific to his organization, what he sells and who he is surrounded by.
Once again, interesting questions but I'm not sure either way the answers matter that much. I don't think how he handled this particular case (noting though that you did want to know if he had done these things before) you can draw any clear conclusions.
Separately I wonder if the person who pitched him were not an attractive woman but say an unattractive woman or man what the results would have been and what would have happened. (That said I've had great results pitching people by email which is more or less a neutral.)
When asking to work for a company, there is always the tension between the company needing one's input (in other words, their product really suck in some way) and the company willing and being able to act on the input. The OP's story flashed back the other stories of the designer that went to Google to bring some design expertise and just dropped the ball because it was an endless uphill battle.
[1] Of course, the other way round, if she's a freelance designer invited to award ceremonies and walks at CEOs pitching ideas to improve their companies, she'll eventually find work I think.
That could have killed the thing. "Logo, All the app and ratings" is not three things. Still, some alcohol may have been involved so this could have made sense at the time.
It was more probably the nerve and familiarity with the product that convinced him.
It's very common in these kind of scenarios that either a) the same criticism / suggestions have been made regularly over a long time by people inside the company which have gone ignored, or b) the company has a culture in which that information never reaches the CEO, either out of fear or because of middle management layers.
In both those cases, the CEO is actually mismanaging the company and completely undermining the motivation and loyalty of his employees.
I've seen this happen time and time again. CEO's and managers don't accept internal criticism or suggestions, don't give their people the freedom to take action themselves, but some outsider swoops in with an impressive Powerpoint presentation (or dress) and suddenly they see the light.
It's the opposite of taking risks (you can blame the outsiders if it fails), it's actually cowardice.
Even if that's the case, I think sometimes this is what needs to happen that makes you realize the change/s that has to be done to be better. (be more transparent, fire some managers or key people, etc.)
Either way it's a very strong vote of no confidence in the existing staff by the CEO.
Unless there is a long story of trying to improve the app internally, it appears this CEO decided at the bar that his own staff wasn't good enough and needed to be replaced with external consultants without considering other root causes (including himself).
Executives that are easily persuaded by the sales pitches of external consultants and don't listen to their own people are a dime a dozen.
So yes he took a risk. This was one of many. If it didn't pay off, he could take others.
I mean I want it to be true. I'd like to live in a world where it's true. But I don't actually have any hard evidence besides the testimonials of people who have found success, and I'm not sure if it's survivorship bias or an accurate picture of how one can become successful.
My theory is that chances of success are incredibly variable, and trying hard and putting yourself out there will increase that chance, but I can't figure out a ballpark for the baseline.
Is it even possible to crunch the numbers on something like this? I feel like we'll never know.
Knowing you gave it a shot is the important part, I suppose.
Its not a lie, its big data crunching the numbers that are out there, and those numbers say if you are poor you are most likely going to end poor, or perhaps dirt poor.
I've done a lot of things that people relentlessly told me I had no chance of accomplishing.
1. Extraordinary, and able to achieve what others cannot. 2. Lucky, and by chance successful in an area where success is hard to find. 3. Being told that you have no chance of accomplishing things that are actually not very hard. 4. A living example of how anybody can do that which they set their mind to.
If you're 1, then other people can't use your experience as a guideline. If you're 2, then people can't use your experience as a guideline. If you're 3, then people can't use your experience as a guideline.
If you think you're 4, then you're either 1, 2, or 3, and just don't realize it yet.
Same here. I just use the commentary from the naysayers as "fuel for the fire", if you will.
On that note... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-qhWahjOgY
I've found that since the advent of email (and before that postal mail) it's much easier though. You fire off an email and you forget it. If something happens it happens. So you don't really feel the rejection.
By the way separately some of the best cold calling salesman are people who can't register or feel the annoyance or discomfort of those they are pitching. People who are able to feel this (either visually or by vocal tone) have a much much harder time overcoming the negative feedback. (Source: This is based on anecdote and observation over many years in business.)
I think this is one of the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs. Winston Churchill once said "Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." A lot of people, however, can only tolerate so much failure. At some point, failure wears them down and they lose the will to keep trying.
Trying is never zero-risk but not trying is always 100% risk of failure.
The bigger the risk the bigger the reward usually, that's how capitalism works.
Work a 9-to-5 at a safe company, make a nice salary, have little risk
Work a 9-to-7 at a startup, make less money but have equity, have more risk of the company going under but have a bigger shot at reward
Start your own company, have no salary but 100% equity, risk being homeless, reward being a billionaire
Every choice you make is a risk-reward calculation and you have to decide what's important to you and whether it's worth risking for a bigger reward.
So, if you try 10 times, your chance of never succeeding is around 90%. Or, saying it another way, the chance of succeeding, at least once, is 10%
The question is should you be trying this in the first place?
Did you know its actually more likely you will survive a plane crash than have a successful startup exit? Now, would you still hop in a plane you know its going to crash?
With that logic you should, chances are you will survive, maybe.
Here's how I'd approach this scenario:
Did you know its actually more likely you will survive a plane crash than have a successful startup exit?
First, I'm not actually convinced that this is true at all, but let's go with it for the sake of argument...
Now, would you still hop in a plane you know its going to crash?
Since we're working with analogies here, I'll say "yes". Why? Because continuing to work a routine, corporate 9-5 job, is such a mind-numbing, soul-sucking, draining life of desperation, that - by analogy - it's about equivalent to "remaining in the burning building, on the 99th floor, surrounded by flames, falling beams, and smoke" versus "get on the airplane that might rescue you, but will probably just crash".
So, get on the airplane (or start the startup) and at least have a chance at living, or keep the corporate job (stay in the burning building) and consciously choose death.
Of course this is all somewhat subjective. Not everybody will agree that the soul-sucking corporate bureaucratic world is analogous to death. But for some people, with certain personality types, biases, whatever, it is.
There are plenty of places where a person can BS the whole day, build gangs, do no productive work for years and yet take away a fat salary, get travel opportunities, big bonus and manage to get routinely promoted.
Its called politics, and luck.
Such people win more often than the hard working ones.
And he ends with "you gotta be willing to fail ... if you are afraid of failing, you won't get very far"
Which seems to be a surprisingly common theme among successful people:
Mark Suster has a famous mantra: "You don't ask, you don't get"[2]
Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, told a story of how he got Steve Balmer advise him once[3]
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkTf0LmDqKI
[2] http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2013/05/15/the-one-word-t...
You could think about it as creating your own luck.
The only problem is that at the end of the day it's still luck.
That's different from just rolling the ball down the lane. If I don't change something up and learn from my mistakes and learn how to angle the ball and learn how much force to give it then i'll keep rolling the ball in the gutter, sure i can shrug to my friends and tell them I "tried" but i'd know deep down that I didn't... Don't fall into the fallacy of staying in your comfort zone and trying just for the sake of trying.. You'll never grow. You have to be willing to challenge yourself and do things just a little different next time to really become better and finally get that strike.
And when all is said and done you'll probably be a pretty good bowler..
then you can blog about it.
What I find weird is all that inspiration/motivation about hard work and going after your dreams is very big in MLM businesses yet ~16million people account for ~$32billion in annual sales (divided equally: $2,000/person) [1]. I don't have any specific source on startups, but the thought that working as hard as you can will make your dreams come through seems prevalent, too.
My thinking (and I'm really wanting a conversation over this because it's an interesting topic) is that not only should one work hard, but make smart moves. Using startups as an example, a person could hack away 100hrs/week on a social network for pets while another person could be putting in 20hrs/week on a monetization tool for Instagram. The former is putting in more hours, but the latter has a higher chance (if by only a tiny percent) simply because it's in a position to 1. be acquired and 2. solve the problem of Instagram not having a model. So they're both putting in work, assuming good attitude, and taking the chance as OP's point was. Yet it seems the defining factor is where all that energy is directed to.
Other Factors can include but are not limited to: having the right contacts, being in the right place at the right time, having a unique insight into the market, etc. Looking at a list like that might be dispiriting because the items all appear to be frustratingly correlated with random chance. And that's partly true. But what is also true, is that doing certain kinds of work often has the interesting side-effect of raising your chances for bumping into one of those other factors. Which is what you were saying above.
For example, working hard in, and paying attention to business in a given industry for a while might a) Give you insight into how something might be done better, and b) introduce you to people working in that industry who could help you out by b1) teaching you more about it, b2) directing you to others who can, b3) becoming a collaborator with you, or b4) pointing you to capital resources interested in solving relevant problems.
I mean, yeah in the end, in business you're likely to fail. Most businesses fail. Most people who have the right attitude and do the requisite work fail. But you can't get to the top of the mountain without hiking.
Depends on what you mean by "good chance" obviously. And "succeed".
"accurate picture of how one can become successful."
I looked at your website from your profile.
Being successful at the "creative" things you are good at would be much more difficult than some of the other less creative things you have listed.
There are (from my observation and I believe this is common knowledge) many people who have really good creative skills in music, art, acting etc and no where near enough opportunities for those people to make a good career out of it. In that case the hustle is probably even more important than the skill level (not that that's not important). But even with hustle it can be random. And there are many people hustling to get ahead. You aren't competing with people to get a job as a dental hygienist who really isn't super into their job, right? Some of your competitors are really totally over the top in their commitment to doing what you want to do. They aren't phoning it in or anything.
Like with dating or landing a job you only have to be right one time (well assuming you find "the right one").
Not like selling where you have to find a certain number of sales per time period. So you have to assess how much time and effort it takes to get a sale and extrapolate.
Corollary: whatever bold move you want to try, make sure that failing is not going to be a problem, especially a financial one. Note that in this context it is assumed that embarrassing yourself is most definitely not a big deal, which is way easier to say than to act upon.
In the story linked, what was the worst thing that could happen to this lady? The CEO taking the remark the wrong way and being pissed? Or laughing at her, maybe? Who cares?
You quit your job and start a company? Depending on the kind of company, your chance of success will vary considerably. After you failed, you just get a new job/go back to your previous job and that's it. You lost a couple months of incomes, some savings, and you can laugh at your epic failure with your friends.
The dirty secret is that your friends will probably love you more after you failed, because truth being told, they are unlikely to want you to be more successful than themselves...
This same idea can be applied to self-empowerment and it works for people. Just because it's cheesy doesn't mean it doesn't work. I mean, even knowing you're taking a placebo can still lead to positive outcomes.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3304496/Be-lucky-its-a...
I agree with pkulak that a lot of self-empowerment stuff is bullshit. And some of it is dangerous bullshit. But a lot of it is effective bullshit because it works to counter the ineffective bullshit that lives in our heads.
It's crazy. But, then, we're made out of meat. The whole thing's crazy.
Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a really good book about this kind of thing: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002SKDGQ0
Therefore, you can... act self-empowered, which can make you feel self-empowered, even if you're not actually self-empowered? You're starting to lose me here. How are these ideas related at all?
edit: I see; you mean that if people BELIEVE that acting as though they are successful will help them become successful, then it actually might help them become successful as their expectations influence their actions. Fake it 'till you make it.
Yeah, same here. I mean, it's absurd to think that we have any control whatsoever over our fate. We clearly don't have agency or free will when you get right down to it. We are just particles in motion, deterministically following a path that was laid down by forces outside of our control, far before we were even born.
It would be the height of hubris to think that we can wrest control of our lives from the unseen, unknowable, mysterious forces of fate, and use conscious choice to drive ourselves towards any sort of "goal" or anything.
Just typing this, I realize how stupid I've been all these years, thinking that all this "hard work" and "sacrifice" and "effort" and "action" could actually lead to anything. Thanks for the enlightenment, I'm going to go take a bath with my toaster now...
Blaming the victims of poverty and disease for their lack of success and positive thinking is a real downside of this empowerment movement. It's also used to exploit people and make them act against their own interests. All this american dream stuff and poor people protesting against public healthcare.
It's the perfect excuse to individualize all kind of problems. You just did not work enough and put not effort into it. It just does not help to actually solve these problems.
Empowerment is great and courage and confidence are great to have. But there _is_ a lot of bullshit in this space.
Of course there are things outside of our control. But since you can't control those things, there isn't a whole lot of point worrying about them, is there? (From the point of view of the individual).
I agree that there are systemic issues with "the system" as it exists today, and I have my ideas about how we should address some of those issues in terms of public policy, etc. But, at the end of the day, you can only play the cards you're dealt (so to speak).
What you can control, though, is your reaction to things, regardless of whether or not you can control those things. If something bad happens (you get dealt a bad hand) you can quit (fold), and jump in the bathtub with a toaster and end it all. Or you can soldier on and make the best of things, and maybe, just maybe, improve your lot.
I'm reminded of a couple of old sayings / parables I heard once. One goes like this:
A master was living in a house in the woods. One night, a storm came through and tore the roof off of his house. He said "I am happy, for now I can see the stars shining in the night sky more clearly".
The other is:
A man was running from a lion, when he came to the edge of a cliff, with a sheer plunge 1000 feet down to jagged rocks. With no where else to go, he went over the edge and started climbing down some vines. Now he's trapped, with rocks below him, and the lion above him. Then a mouse appears and starts chewing on the vine. He notices some strawberries growing on the cliff face and plucks a handful and eats them. They were the most delicious strawberries he ever had".
It's the perfect excuse to individualize all kind of problems. You just did not work enough and put not effort into it.
I guess it depends on your perspective, but - in my mind - this isn't about "blaming the victim" or anything. Life does suck sometimes, and some people certainly are dealt shitty hands. I just think that you can only take the hand you start from, and then make the best of it through conscious choice and effort.
And as somebody who grew up dirt poor in rural southeast NC, living below the poverty line for large swathes of time in my life, I've literally been through this. I could have accepted my lot in life as a poor, uneducated, country bumpkin, but I refused to do it. I couldn't control that my parents weren't wealthy, or that our public schools weren't great, or that my dad never graduated high-school and was basically illiterate. But I could control my actions, by choosing to spend my time in the library studying instead of hanging out behind the school playing handball and smoking weed... After high-school I could control choosing to work 3rd shift, buffing and waxing floors at a grocery story, then getting off work at 7am to drive 35 miles to be in class at 8:00. Believe me, Discrete Math at 8:00am when you've been up all night is no fun. And then going and sleeping on a couch in the library for an hour or two before your afternoon classes, that's no fun either. But I made a choice that I didn't want to be a poor, uneducated country bumpkin, so I made the sacrifices I had to make.
I could have gone out on dates, went bowling with my friends, gone to football games, and thousands of other things... but night after night after night I sat home alone with a stack of C and C++ books, downloading code from BBS's (and later, the Internet), learning to code and honing my skills.
It wasn't easy and there were tradeoffs (there is a reason I never got married and had kids, for example), but I got out of redneckville and have gone on to have a pretty decent career, and now I am the founder of a startup that has some real potential.
So, yeah, put me in the camp of people who do put a lot of stock in the idea of "individual empowerment", because I've experienced it firsthand.
P.S: You come off as patronizing as fuck to point that someone getting a job is not an actual real world problem.
Yes, you have to ask. And do. And put in tons of hard work.
The interesting bit, I think, is how the protagonist challenged the traditional relationship between employer and job seeker. Instead of pandering by praising Uber's design, she had the guts - possibly because of whiskey :) - to offer thoughtful criticism of the product.
As someone who recently finished a tough job search, I found this concept very liberating. Following the traditional process - researching a company's best features, trying to say the right things in interviews, waiting for callbacks - can feel discouraging. It can be like a bad round of speed dating.
Finding a creative, respectful way to point out a company's flaws is an innovative approach that, when done appropriately, can shift the ball back into the candidate's court.
That said it really helps if you're already hanging around at a party with a CEO of a big, in the news, growing startup and thus have insider access to tell him exactly what you think after a few drinks.
Sigh.
I know Travis personally. I met him years ago, before Uber was even a twinkle in his eye, and he was running his last company, Red Swoosh.
There's no "insider" here. I graduated high school, turned 18, and moved to the Valley in 1999. I stayed there for the next 10 years. My parents are not technical and I'm from a small town in Indiana.
I did not get a college degree and I did not go to a prestigious university. I knew no one when I moved there. Eventually, years later, as the startup community coalesced and we all recovered from the pit of despair that was 2001-2002 in the Valley, people started having parties.
I went to socialize. I met many of the "heavy hitters" you see today. And I built a successful tech company with many of them as customers.
Yeah, the articles love to talk about Stanford grads and whatnot. Maybe they had it easier than me. I don't know. What I do know is I came out there with nothing but guts and a car (that literally exploded on me a year later) and...most importantly...no belief that I couldn't succeed or that I wouldn't make it.
It does take guts to pack your shit and sleep on the floor for a while, but eventually it does pay off. I'm running my second successful tech company now, this time in Austin, where again I know most of the folks in the startup community. Not because I'm some sort of "insider", but just because I went out there and met everyone, and I asked them for advice.
There's nothing stopping you, or anyone else reading this, from doing the same. Can't afford a ticket to the Valley, or don't want to deal with immigration laws? Find a booming startup metropolis somewhere else and get to know the people there. Startups are global now and it's a beautiful thing. But don't buy into the negative media hype.
Really your short bio of your self makes a better "most people won't" anecdote than the original post.
I don't think my comment was overly cynical. I don't mean to tell anyone they are incapable of accomplishing things and I definitely don't believe that you have to start out privileged to make an impact on the world.
I've done similar things sometimes (not playing at that level but, similar in the end) and what I felt was a big discomfort and a really huge passion for something.
You want to defend your values.
These two together creates a willingness to change the status quo and make something better can move mountains. At the same time I can say this seconds you are terribly fragile.
Not even courage is needed. That's why it's so difficult to explain, it's something you feel inside and need to get out.
Is this lack of willpower or the lack of challenging the status quo innate or learned? Is it possible to go from somebody who doesn't to somebody who does? All the great doers that I have ever met don't follow the same routines. They don't have a magic formula that will work for you. The echo chamber of self-help books works for some people because it gives them the kick they need. For others they 'feel' better but they don't actually change their behaviour. What seems to work is to understand yourself and to understand when you are productive or creative. Then, encourage this time and cultivate it so that it becomes a regular part of your routine.
Amazing how societies all have this same period, whether it's college or 3 years in the woods. The rules are weirdly the same - "there's a time for everything, and it's college" translates to a random tribe in Africa almost literally.
A competent designer gave a criticism and a solution. She was offered a job if she could fix the issues. Seems like a story of hard work by a good designer and team who displayed a dedication to their craft. Show up, work hard, and don't be afraid to pitch your ideas you believe in.
Although, I appreciate that the designer took his offer seriously. More importantly, it's the guts of a founder in this case that made it happen.
You do know that was a coincidence right? or even a miracle given how well things ended up. Has the uber guy been a little pissed or in a bad mood the results could have been drastically different, and yet your blog-worthy suggestion is to take a leap of faith and see if it works.
Who cares, we are telling unexperienced, unprepared and even untalented kids to quit school and launch a "startup", whatever that means now.
The point is to take the risk. Sometimes you'll find the person in the bad mood, but sometimes, just sometimes, it works, and when it does, it works great. And you don't need to share w/ the world the 5 other people you tried it on who weren't feeling serendipitous that day.
History is told by the victors, after all.
So I think you misread the narrative, it's not about striking gold.
I've always wondered: what did it take for him to come to <em>believe</em> that this wasn't crazy, but real? To have the courage to say it publicly?
We'll never know. Unfortunately, not long after his great discovery, in November 1958, Taniyama committed suicide. He was only thirty-one. To add to the tragedy, shortly afterward the woman whom he was planning to marry also took her life, leaving the following note:
<blockquote>We promised each other that no matter where we went, we would never be separated. Now that he is gone, I must go too in order to join him.</blockquote>
. . . In his thoughtful essay about Tayniyama, Shimura made this striking comment:
<blockquote>Though he was by no means a sloppy type, he was gifted with the special capability of making many mistakes, mostly in the right direction. I envied him for this, and tried in vain to imitate him, but found it quite difficult to make good mistakes. (94) </blockquote></blockquote>
—Edward Frenkel, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Love-Math-Heart-Hidden-Reality/dp/0465... and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality</em></a>, which is recommended.
What mistakes have you made lately?