Kanye West, Startup Idol
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Edit: Wikipedia says, "middle class" and the college he dropped out of was an art school so it isn't like he was giving up a sure thing to take a course that was more risky.
Knowing what college professor's salaries are like, "at least upper middle class" is way optimistic, though "probably solidly middle class" is likely.
I don't buy the premise that you need to be poor to have an appreciation of risk. Risk isn't just financial, there is also career and personal risk. Think of all the well-off kids who didn't follow in their fathers footsteps or what their parents wanted and pursued their own dreams, at the risk of being alienated, disowned etc.
The interesting thing though about most successful rappers is that, while almost all of them come from poverty, they tend to achieve success early in life such that by the time they hit middle age they've been rich longer than they've been poor (Nas notes this in one of his songs)...
A guy like Jay-Z talking about hardship increasingly sounds out of touch :)
He stresses that the most important thing to him is actually having ideas and sharing them with the world. He says this over and over again, and I can't help but believe him.
> The risk for me would be in not taking one — that's the only thing that's really risky for me.
His risk is sort of a philosophical/existential risk. Not what many would consider an 'actual' risk to himself. This really does seem to be a function of the fact that he is rich and a celebrity.
Kanye's very fortunate that "having ideas" are "the only thing that's really risky for me."
Personally I don't find a lot of value in his "ideas" nor do I agree that he's risking very much. For all his nonsense about liberation from evil, he seems hellbent on integrating himself with the fashion world.
It's easy to look back and say, you're filthy rich now so you aren't actually taking risks, but taking risks is how he got there.
Having said that, I'm going through a stage in my life where I am getting to see the real character of people in terms of their risk appetite. Everybody wants to be an entrepreneur but when it really comes to doing it people chicken out. May be it's my circle but again that's my experience.
Also his music is pretty derivative if you've heard the music he is 'biting' or 'paying homage to' or what have you. I'd hesitate to call it pushing boundries as much as it is introducing it into the pop music lexicon.
Also people like The Kardashians despite their antics does that make them good... What is it they do again?
Lots of artists didn't 'go all gangsta' to make it. He isn't the first or the last.
The Blueprint being one of the greatest hip hop albums ever made is also highly debatable.
Claiming that soul beats weren't a thing in 2000 hip-hop is silly. Released in '99: Mos Def's Black on Both Sides, the Roots' Things Fall Apart. Hip hop started with soul beats, and soul has always been a part of hip-hop.
Edit: Removed part of comment that may have sounded overly negative.
i'm actually struggling to think of an idolized figure in tech who isn't an "asshole".
edit: put "asshole" in quotes, which gets my point across better
edit: and there are plenty of anecdotal "Kanye is a nice guy when you meet him" stories as well. Evel Knievel sued Kanye and described him as 'vulgar an offensive', after they met he said "I thought he was a wonderful guy and a gentleman":
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2007-11-27-ka...
Also read Paul Allen's book -- specifically the part where Gates tried to screw Paul by diluting his stock.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html
Certainly feared to some extent.
Also, I doubt all these tech figures are actually assholes. Arguably they're forced to adopt those personas publicly by an industry which demands it.
Maybe not as idolized as Jobs/Gates/Zuck, but there are non-asshole public figures in tech, such as Woz, Tim O'Reilly, Matt Mullenweg, Joel Spolsky. Being abrasive isn't a prerequisite to success.
> Who complains about what he is owed?
> And throw a tantrum like he is 3 years old
> You gotta love it though somebody still speaks from his soul
All Kanye West has ever wanted to do is create. If you watch the full interview with Zane Lowe[0], aka the interview that Jimmy Kimmel made fun of and started a whole firestorm over, you realize (if you haven't before) that Kanye sees bringing beauty to others as the penultimate goal in life (you could argue he values his family a bit more). In a sense I think that's what most people who get into startups, or really just "hacking" in general, want to do. Create. Bring beauty. Improve the world in a small way. Leave it better than how you got it, as my dad used to say.
Kanye has also gone through some of the exact trials and tribulations that people trying to start a business go through. If you listen to his song Spaceship[1] from "College Dropout" (his debut album) you can really hear the same kind of ethos as he tries to break into the music business while working at the Gap:
>> Taking my hits, writing my hits >> Writing my rhymes, playing my mind >> This fking job can't help him >> So I quit, y'all welcome >> Y'all don't know my struggle >> Y'all can't match my hustle >> You can't catch my hustle >> You can't fathom my love dude >> Lock yourself in a room doing 5 beats a day for 3 summers >> That's a Different World like Cree Summer's
I'm cherry picking a quote, and it might lose it's umph because of that, but besides the undeniable poetic like quality of his words (is my fanboy showing yet?) you can see the dedication, and the repetition he puts into his craft. This is directly applicable to those trying to get a startup off the ground; You need hard work and most of all you need to ship, and keep on shipping to perfect your product. In fact, when I was trying to get my first startup going I more or less listened to this song on repeat as motivation, because Kanye understands the self-doubt. He understands the constant pressure to succumb to social standards. He understands that people push back when you try and break out. In fact, Kanye probably knows this more than most of us, as a person of color. Yet even through all of this Ye still succeeds. In fact, (it could be argued) the massive amount of people who don't like Kanye are more a testament to his success than the people who do. But it doesn't just stop at music. For those who weren't aware, Kanye started off as a producer and against a lot of pressure to stay a producer became a rapper as well. One of my favorite Kanye songs isn't really a song, but a narrative of how he overcame this and got signed in "Last Call"[2]. As per the same BBC interview I referenced above, Kanye is trying to break into fashion, architecture, design, a myriad of industries using the same ideas and work ethic. Work hard, and make something "dope", while disregarding the way "things are done around here" (to complete the analogy for those less aware of the rap scene, Kanye was one of the founders of "backpack rap", a kind of suburban, every day, introspective way of rapping, as opposed to the massively popular "gangsta rap" of the day).
Beyond all of that one of Kanye's biggest messages throughout his music is that the message of "Stay in your place" is wrong. He is consistently trying to upset the status quo. This is a message that should reverberate among any of us trying to shake up an established industry, or trying to create a market that simply didn't exist before. Kanye sees what is "not cool" in the world and tries to fix that, whether it's jumping up on stage and proclaiming on live tv that Taylor Swift doesn't deserve an award, or using shoe design as a way to break the race barrier in fashion. He's just as much a hacker as any one of us who works with code or hardware.
Kanye also sacrifices for his art. He paid millions out of his own pocket (back before he was financially set, I might add) to produce his own music videos for "Jesus Walks", after the studios wouldn't go with the direction as he wanted. I can't pin down the quote right now, but I recall him saying something to the effect of "If that album [Late Registration] wasn't a success I would have been broke". As we all know "Jesus Walks" became a #1 hit, Kanye got his videos on MTV, and the album went triple platinum. He continues to shell out of his own pocket for tours (that consistently succeed far past expectations) and runs his own design company, DONDA. Rumor has it he is financing his stylist's new clothing line. Just because it's not software doesn't mean he's not a VC.
This might not be the most lucid post, as I'm typing rather frantically in order to get this out before the story drops off the front page, but tl;dr: Kanye West exemplifies the hacker spirit, and learning from someone who has succeeded so immensely as a creative person can't be the worst thing you can do.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR_yTQ0SYVA [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGM6N0qXeu4 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q602739kBr4
Some quotes that demostrate this wonderful side of him:
> Golly, more of that bullshit ice rap / I got to 'pologize to Mos and Kweli / But is it cool to rap about gold / If I told the world I copped it from Ghana and Mali?
> Always said if I rapped I'd say something significant / But now I'm rapping 'bout money, hoes, and rims again
> But I ain't even gonna act holier than thou / Cause fuck it, I went to Jacob with twenty-five thou' / Before I had a house and I'd do it again / Cause I want to be on 106 and Park pushing a Benz
Shame that only the arrogant side seems to be displayed on the media, and not his child-like personality...
You know what somebody's really made of when they have all of the money in the world. Then you watch them and see what happens. Everything Kanye does (at this point) he does because he feels it needs to exist in the world. Another million doesn't mean anything to him. $10 million probably doesn't even mean much to him. He doesn't do it for the money. Unlike lots of musicians, he didn't release 1 or 2 platinum albums and quit. He just keeps going. I align him more closely to somebody like Mark Zuckerberg than, I dunno, Huey? Zuckerberg has billions and just keeps on hacking. Kanye is a hacker through and through.
> Kanye also sacrifices for his art. He paid millions out of his own pocket (back before he was financially set, I might add) to produce his own music videos for "Jesus Walks", after the studios wouldn't go with the direction as he wanted. I can't pin down the quote right now, but I recall him saying something to the effect of "If that album [Late Registration] wasn't a success I would have been broke". As we all know "Jesus Walks" became a #1 hit, Kanye got his videos on MTV, and the album went triple platinum. He continues to shell out of his own pocket for tours (that consistently succeed far past expectations)
Did not know this any of this. Wow. Just one more reason to respect Kanye.
If you can pay millions out of your own pocket for anything, you were financially set when you decided to do that.
Essentially, artists have a lot of "credit" (i.e. they can elicit services for cheap due to the massive exposure it might get), but very little cashflow. They usually pay their living expenses through signing bonuses and use the rest of the contract money to finance the production of the album. In this specific case Kanye used a large amount of his own signing bonus for Late Registration to pay for the videos, while using the bare minimum the studio would give him to pay for just the directors. While theoretically he still would have had a lot of earning potential, and probably would have kept at least some of his "credit" if LR failed, he still would have been extremely cash poor. Kanye frequently talks about how bad he is with money and spending habits, so his financial situation was most likely pretty precarious.
Side note: this is part of the "scam" of record labels... they purposely keep the economic buying power away from the artists' wallet and keep it tied to the artists' image, which just so happens to be very dependent on the studio's continued marketing efforts. Kanye actually addresses this in an interview, where he talks about "who is really free?" when comparing an up and coming artist in a Maybach to a homeless man on the side of the street.
Your comparison to Zuck seems very apt... The Black Eyed Peas had a song ("Gone Going") on Elephunk that (rather ironically) talks about an artist that gets famous and rich and falls out of touch with his fans because of that. I've always felt like Kanye has been the antithesis of that image, he continues to make "dopeness" (his word, not mine), and the fact that even his most avant-garde music continues to go platinum is great affirmation of that ideal.
You may now resume your non-smug, non-celebrity life.