Fulfillment

Building a company can simultaneously fulfill your intellectual desire for educational growth, emotional desire for positive impact on the world, and physical desire for material possessions. It's not right for everyone, but neither is graduate school, college or any of the other expectations to which you may feel bounded. If you're worried about your current path not fulfilling your desires or motivating your passion, I am happy to discuss what some of the other paths in life look like.

Beware the passive voice

"It was decided the victims would not be compensated." "Your claim was rejected." "The funds for that program were cut during the last budget meeting."

The wordsmiths of these sentences often intend to create the feeling that underlying decision was beyond human control. Just like, "It rained on Saturday", they would have us believe their decisions that we do not like make themselves, and precipitate down upon us by the caprice of the gods.

On Life and Entropy

A passage from Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson:

"Common as the air" meant something worthless, but Hackworth knew that every breath of air that Fiona drew, lying in her little bed at night, just a silver glow in the moonlight, was used by her body to make skin and hair and bones. The air became Fiona, and deserving--no, demanding--of love. Ordering matter was the sole endeavor of Life, whether it was a jumble of self-replicating molecules in the primordial ocean, or a steam-powered English mill turning weeds into clothing, or Fiona lying in her bed turning air into Fiona.

Services as a Product

If you aren't familiar with "as a Service" revenue models, it refers to selling something as one would a service, with a recurring charge often based on usage. For example, SalesForce.com is a "Software as a Service", or SaaS, model. You pay a fixed amount per user per year. This can apply to platforms or infrastructure as well as software.

However, products can be easy to buy. When you purchase AppleCare for your laptop, you get an empty paper box. But there is a SKU for it. In some cases, products have less abandonment than services and are subject to less scrutiny before flippantly tossed in the cart before checkout. It's a Service as a Product.

The First Time I Saw the Internet

I remember very distinctively the first time I saw the Internet.

I was ten or eleven years old, in the sixth grade, the year was 1997. These were certainly not the early days; this was two years after the Netscape IPO. Accordingly, the <frame> had been set in the <blink> of an eye. "Internet" was household term and venture capitalists had long since mobilized. Still, at this time, if you went to AltaVista and searched for "Google", you would have gotten zero results. Like myself, the Internet was beginning an explosive phase of awkward growth, which prove to be highly formative, as well as full of embarrassments.

It was at the community college in the town where I grew up. My mother worked there, and my brothers, sisters, and I would go nearly every day after school. One day, the library on the second floor got six public use computers that were connected to the Internet.

My brother Gunnar had at least one inkling of knowledge about the Internet, making him, by comparison, an expert. The first time I saw the Internet, he using it on one of those computers. When I walked up, he was staring at a page of black text on a white background. There was a centered image at top. I was fearful and excited, but remember the exchange of words verbatim.

"Is that the Internet?"

"Yes." He answered pridefully, and highlighted the portion of the text he was currently reading with the mouse to indicate his focus. He still does that to this day.

The highlighting, to me, was of tremendous importance. That was associated with one thing in my mind: the hours I had spent watching my father write letters in WordPerfect 5. On considering the gravity of the erroneous conclusions I made next, my voice quivered when I asked faintly:

"You... can highlight it?"

"Yeah... but it's not like you can edit it." He, too, was disappointed. Having had similar experiences, he correctly guessed what I had assumed.

This shattered a portion of my imagination as quickly as it had been created. I had only seen highlighting in the context of word processors, so to me, it meant I could press a key, and magically replace the current text with my own content.

Just imagine that. In that instance, without know the words for it, I had imagined every page on the Internet was a Wiki. I was heartbroken to learn otherwise, but from that moment on, I still spent innumerable hours in that library on that computer, exploring everything I could find there. It was not until a year or two later that I discovered it was possible for me to create content after all, not just consume it. This is still the one thing that motivates me most: creating something that people all over the world might find useful.

The Hiring Multiplier

One of the great skills of a person who effectively executes an idea is the ability to identify and attract people more skilled than himself. No doubt, many big challenges require significant human resources; and ability to acquire that resource makes the short list of necessary skills for the Executive Übermensch.

In other words, knowing how to get really good people to work on your project is really important.

Getting really good people is done in two steps. You have to find and identify them, and you have to convince and incentivize them to work with you. The better you are or the more you know about the role to be filled, the better you can do all these things.

This is fairly obvious for the identification process. If you do not know the first thing about marketing, for example, you will not be able to tell which person can actually help when you are at the networking event full of social media experts who will all fill your ear with wondrous promises. Unless you are lucky, you will pick up someone worse than useless: someone who will drag you down.

It's only slightly less apparent for convincing them to join you. Past a certain point, monetary incentives lose effectiveness. Smart, good people want to work with people who understand their value, whom they respect, and who have some knowledge or experience to offer in return. The more you show capacity to understand the technical requirements of your project, the more comfortable a technical person will feel working with you. A good developer, for example, will often value the assurance that their concerns will be understood and considered more highly than the specifics of monetary incentives.

This is The Hiring Multiplier, and is one reason why a breadth of knowledge is so beneficial. Know the basics of as many areas of your business as you can, not so you can do them yourself, but so you can get the most out of the multiplier.

Being Concise and the Value of Criticism

Growing up, I never had a need to be concise.

In fact, being concise just meant running out of things to say sooner. Circumstances were such that there was rarely any sort of time limit when it came to communicating ideas.

Then, starting in college, I started to receive criticisms about my tendency to drag on and on. At first, I blamed it on TV culture -- no one seemed to be able to have an attention span to focus on a thought or story that can't be made or told in a 30 second spot.

Even if that were true, it did not really help. What helped was when I started actively trying to change that, to be concise, and I still push to improve every time I sense people's attention begin to drift. I realized that if I could find ways to be clear and concise, I could increase the effectiveness and impact of the things I say tenfold. I could command an audience and have people open their ears to things I say.

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Being concise is great, but I would not realize that value if not for criticism from those around me. The criticisms you receive are the finest gifts you'll ever get. You should treasure and study them, and repeat them to yourself more often than any of the compliments, until you start to improve.

Base your ego and confidence on your ability to adapt and change, not to the specifics of your current status. This way, you'll never have hesitancy in seeking and devouring criticisms of your character, getting at the root of the problem, and fixing it.