How Not to Die

Reasons #2, 7, 8, 14, 16, and 18. ;-)

Another inspiring speech is this one from Steve Jobs:

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-06150...

Nice talk but the problem with this insight, like most on this site, is that it is largely in-applicable and I bet nobody would actually act on it if presented with the opportunity in real life.

Hey, Mr. Graham - I have the absolute best business idea in the world bar none and I'm so dead serious about it I'd sign a blood contract with you that I will commit Seppuku with a dirty, rusty, blunt sword if it doesn't radically alter the world in 4 years of its launch.

According to this essay, my "dead seriousness" about the quality of this idea should translate into a surefire success. Couple that with the notion that you won't need a weekly update as to what we're up to because you'll wind up a daily user.

Surely if this is the leading indicator of the next multi-billion dollar thing, a measly little NDA would be a small obstacle to have unfettered access to this. Care to sign a measly NDA to hear it?

Thought so. But why not - if I'm dead serious and you wind up a daily user and so you know what we're up to every day, then according to this article it's a surefire success story in the making.

Care to test the premise of this article? Thought so.

Same with that article on "outside the box ideas need to come more from outside the box people."

Outside the box people have good ideas all the time because they have a more strategic, top-down perspective and can see adjacent markets / fields of study where good ideas can be cross-polinated.

How many times have you looked at a product and thought to yourself, "I could do better than that."

11 years ago I thought, "What someone made a palm-pilot case ... with a flexible rubber keyboard on the inside which folded three ways to a full size, but flexible keyboard?" A friend and I made a working but ugly model out of parts from stuff we bought at Staples/Office Depot.

We were "dead serious" about making it work but after a year of college where we dedicated every spare minute to "making it work" nobody at palm would even listen to us because they found it impossible that anybody outside of palm could think of any useful ideas for a palm product. No investors wanted to talk to us because we didn't work for palm. And we couldn't afford the tens of thousands of dollars for the many patents it would require. BUT - WE WERE "DEAD SERIOUS." For a year.

This summer Sony just patented a "flexible, material-embedded data input device" ie, the same idea we had over a decade ago. But we were very serious so why didn't it work? The only difference between us and sony is $$$$$$ and connections - the real critical variables. Wake up people.

Try being one of those people with no connections in the industry and getting anybody in the field or investors or whatever to get you seriously enough to work with you.

In my experience, if by some far-out chance you ever get a credible party in an industry to sit down and take you seriously enough to listen to you, they still won't work with you out of sheer spite for for being an outsider and coming up with something insiders haven't thought of.

Most VCs will think you're stupid if you don't have an MBA, most programmers will whine on their blogs about how come nobody in the business world respects them just because they don't have an MBA, yet they in turn think anybody who didn't major in computer science is stupid, and so on and so forth.

The whole world is full of theorizing hypocrites and the sooner people wake up to this reality the better.

Many of these articles are taken from a top-down, "Wouldn't the world be better/nicer/more efficient if only ..." perspective.

I'm sure there are many brilliant programmers in china, bulgaria, romania, russia, etc. who would gladly hack off their legs for an opportunity to "do their thing."

But unless they live in California or, increasingly, Boston ... well tough luck.

So the CRITICAL VARIABLE is not "Dead seriousness" or even good ideas or even intelligence, resiliance, ability to ride out the storms, ability to motivate yourself when it appears like nothing is going right, etc. It's physical proximity to and connections with someone with the cash and connections to get stuff rolling.

How good idea is and how serious you are and how many times you call to tell people, "this is what we're up to today/this week/this month/this hour/next 5 minutes" would have no relevance if you lived in, say, Japan or Italy or Australia and you can argue all you want but you all know I'm right.

Example - all of our successful startup founders admitted to smoking pot, therefore pot makes you successful at starting a startup.

Then the mind comes up with all sorts of sophistry to explain a possible relationship with a tentative link at best.

Example - all of our startup founders smoked pot ... must be some chemical thing that stimulates "creative thinking." And their "in the face of the man and his system" attitudes probably subconciously registered and gave them some sort of extra confidence. Yeh - that's it.

Just be careful when you follow the pied piper guys. Ever wonder what happens to guys who try and never make it? What happens to their careers? Do they go back to "Big Corp." and explain that they were "on their own" for 2 years? Most people will be jealous and snicker at them inside, thinking, "Who did you think you were, some genius or something?"

What happens to those guys. Obviously there are a lot of them. But you never hear about them. They're kept hidden. On purpose.

A professor I had once told me that the only reason people don't want socialism is because deep down inside they secretly expect that they're gonna hit the jackpot and dammit, nobody will come between them and their ferrari parked in front of their mansion full of sexy ladies.

And so we all labor on under similar secret personal delusions, each thinking that "somehow, someway ... in the end we'll prevail - because we're special that way."

And that's how the system works. Once in a while we get discouraged and read some financial porn-o-graphy about some new multi-billionaire success story to keep us sweating more and trying harder.

Only they don't tell you the part about how most of such success stories are usually deep, well-developed scams that serve other purposes.

Oracle had deep connections to intelligence agencies.

A recent (1year ago?) report by some french intelligence agency examined microsoft and concluded that it more than likely received quite a bit of help from the nsa.

Look at the charges about the connections that facebook's investors have with big brother.

And google? the "let's not be evil" company - what does it do the second it makes big money? Start offering lucrative retirement packages to attract intelligence guys to come on board.

You think all this is a coincidence? You don't think those peope have colleagues who call them up and say, "Hey - what do you think about so and so's search habits?"

Donald Trump, as fans of Rosie know, made his first "deal" at age 30 only because his billionaire father co-signed the bank loan. Then he died and left him most of his money.

His counterpart in vegas, Steve Winn, is now, as people are finding out, the "legit" clean face for the mob, which still controls vegas, though only more corporate and proper like.

Famed investing "genius" George Soros is now, as it turns out, less of a lucky genius than he is a front for a european faction of investors with very close, personal ties to the folks who decide financial policies for nations.

What do you think they discuss when these people all vacation together, the weather and whether Brad Pit and Angelina are getting back together?

No they discuss whether interest rates will rise or fall ... weeks ahead of official announcements.

THE POINT OF ALL THIS IS in the final analysis, you never know why a tech company became a big success.

Suppose you start a company where people catalogue their deepest fears and share them with each other.

You think it would be difficult to find funding for that from some VC firm with intelligence connections? If you could get people to trust you and sign up, you'd find tens of millions in first round funding over night.

Learn to think for yourselves and stop mindlessly following every pundit with a slick blog.

Just because somebody writes well doesn't mean that the info is useful. Just because they were successful 10 years ago when people were raising $100 million first round financing for a website that sells scissors to cut your dog's butt hair, doesn't mean they can do it now.

True story - some of you may remember this: 6 months before the 2000 market crash, 2 extacy potheads with rich parents raised $300 million seed financing for a site which imported sneakers and watches from europe that people who frequented nightclubs wanted but couldn't find in the U.s.

Soon they were all over FastCompany, Business 2.0, Wired, etc., blabbering for 50 page articles about "how to raise money" and "the new economy paradigm shift" this and that.

you think anybody would give those fools 50 cents these days? Don't think so.

Guy Kawasaki is very derisive and flippant about all the silly plans he gets from entrepreneurs. But what exactly has he done except become an expert at being an expert at makign every body feel he's an expert?

When you think deeply, most of these pundit blogs are nothng more then a clever, well-connected mutual admiration society where pundits all write about each other and how smart they are and link to each other's blogs and interview each other wherey they proclaim their own friends genius, etc. - As cools as giving your own forum comments props on the next forum.

Go ahead. Drop out. Look with big gleaming eyes at that facebook guy and think, "Maybe, someday, if I work hard enough and don't quit ..."

But make sure you realize that in today's world, where you'd be lucky to find a job at all that isn't on it's way to india or china or where-ever the next hot place to send US jobs is, if you don't make it ... well then what?

Try and try again.

Right. Easy for people like Bill Gates who came from a wealthy and unbelievably well-connected family (his mommy sat on the board of directors of the american cancer society, alongside the then IBM CEO --- wonder if that had something to do with his getting a meeting with them when he had no product to speak of yet?).

Easy to try and fail when you got financial backup, rich families, well-connected uncles who can help you get a job if you mess up.

But what if you don't? What if you're not one of the 1 in a thousand ... or 5 thousand who has any measurable success?

"Oh, you'll learn a lot and that will be valuable."

Try putting that on your resume and see who will care.

All I'm saying is think clearly before chasing pipe dreams and if you do it, do it because there is something really there and there's a better than average chance - not because some guy on the internet puts up glossy, emotional propoganda to give it another go.

Look at the housing market. Just a year ago you could still walk into a bank and find all these glossy, emotional posters - "Refinance now - NOW's the right time - You can afford it and we can help you afford it! Ask a representative today."

Now look what happens when euphoria hits reality.

Most of these pleas are from folks who believe that some "next big wave" is coming because Google and YouTube happened.

Google is, if you think about it, Total Information Awareness program - except its voluntary.

YouTube was a fluke.

Think carefully if your own impression of your chance of success is based on your own impression ... or one that was carefully crafted via slick PR firms and well-worded blogs.