I have spent my life either as an entrepreneur or helping entrepreneurs.
I first landed a job in the mid 90s as “Webmaster” at Harper Collins Interactive. I could code, do perl scripting, HTML layout, etc. so I was a one man marching band building websites single handedly and deploying them for various imprints under the Harper Collins brand.
Then one day a star author, Barry Sears, author of The Zone diet series, came into my office with a knock on the door and asked “How much do you make”? I said “30,000 per year.” He said, “I ́ll pay you 30k to build me a website but you must promise me to quit this gig, get out and start your own thing.” And so I did.
Bottle Rocket was born. Quickly morphing from building websites into building games to drive marketing objectives (enter your email, basically, in those early days). All of the clever business advisors told us we had to have a product and recurring revenue, but actually if we had stuck to “just building websites” we might well have had an earlier, less painful, more lucrative exit because of the rollups of agencies taking place towards the end of the 90s.
Ah well, long story short - we built up to 30 people. $4m in topline. Grungy slave labor offices in the shadow of the Flatiron. Landed Disney, NHL, Budweiser, etc. as clients. Bing Gordon, cofounder of Electronic Arts, now a partner at Kleiner Perkins, stood up once when I was giving a presentation at EA HQ in Redwood City and said “These guys get it. Invest.” So EA came in with $1.5m in equity and a $1m games building contract. But EA was also like doing a deal with the devil in hindsight. That´s for another post.
Sold the company to NASDAQ traded ACTV Inc. (which then became Open TV) to drive R & D for their interactive tv efforts.
Throughout the process I remember friends and family morphing through states of both shock at the risk as well as grudging admiration.
Fast forward through another good success, a few decent wins and a number of big and small failures in London, Dublin and now Bergen, Norway.
I find myself cringing at reading blog posts and opening up publications that focus on making money, period. That´s the headline and that´s the story. How much they earned last year. What the latest funding round size was. What the size of the exit was. Money, money, money. It reinforces this idea over and over again that the reason for starting your company is to “knock it out of the park” and make a boatload of money. And that is how you judge yourself and your relative success - by comparing your equity stake to others, your last around pricing, your exit (should you be so lucky). It´s a disease I call “equity itis.”
So as an antidote to this spiritual malaise, I have launched this publication called Bold Moves. I want to profile people and teams who just have it in their DNA to take risk. I want to understand why they take risks, often over and over again, and I want to highlight their journeys, their stories for the sake of understanding the process rather than the results, per se.
Love the messaging and I totally agree. People focus to much on the goal, not the Journey. And that is a shame, because most people end up not liking the goal and the forget about the fact that they might have had an amazing journey still.
Do you want to look back and realize that you took the safe route? I look forward to reading more inspiring stories. Thanks Kelly.