God Was a Social Entrepreneur

Of course, God was a social entrepreneur - it's not so hard to work full-tilt at something you care about.



Staffing and work/life balance: Entrepreneurs need breaks from their small business

If god rested on the seventh day, should the entrepreneur?

Prevailing opinion suggests the answer is “no,” mainly because the term ‘work week’ doesn’t apply to self-starters and entrepreneurs looking to grow their business.

It’s more like “work life,” says Mark Surrette, President of Knightsbridge Robertson Surrette and an entrepreneur of more than 30 years.

“As an entrepreneur, it never goes away,” says Surette, who has run businesses ranging from retail to traffic control to property management. “24/7 is a strong phrase, but my black berry never gets turned off.”

Surrette, like many others, believes mobile communication technology is the double edged sword that carves out a work-centered lifestyle for many successful business people.

On one hand, his mobile device has freed him from marriage to the office, which is where you would’ve found him on evenings and weekends in the 1980s and1990s.

In today’s digital age, he can now get work done from home, on the road, watching football or even “stepping out at a dinner party.”

On the other hand, being connected means there’s no such thing as a day off anymore.

“You don’t think of it as working a lot of hours, because there’s no real delineation between work and the other things you do,” he says. “It’s part of life. It never goes away.”

Dwayne Kennedy, the 26-year-old cofounder of THE COLLECTIONS, a Toronto-based fashion production and promotions company, says working six to seven days a week, 60-70 hour per week is the standard in his business.

When he’s not doing day-to-day tasks, he’s out networking, a must-do in the fashion industry.

“What we do does take up most of our time, and it’s ongoing,” says Kennedy, who, along with partner Brian Richards, operates the Disconnect Fashion Film Festival. “We generally don’t have days off...it’s hard to turn it off when your work is something you’re so passionate about.”

Michael Leiter, an expert on workplace burnout and the Canada Research Chair of Occupational Health and Well being at Acadia University, says that while overworking oneself can lead to exhaustion and reduced productivity, when someone loves what they do, they can better cope with working longer periods.

“That is a solid finding from our work on ‘burnout,’” says Leiter, a psychologist and author who’s written extensively on workplace health. “When you love what you do, share the work with the people you care about, recieve fulfillment from the enjoyable activities and have control over your domain, you can sustain energy much more than you could when lacking these qualities.”

He says overextension is so common among entrepreneurs because so few start with the financial backing to hire support staff.

“There is not usually enough activity to constitute multiple jobs for others at the beginning,” he says. “The entrepreneur covers all elements.”

Sam Witwer on the Art of Personal Branding

Trying to sell yourself for a gig, be it a job, a promotion, political office?  You could do worse that to look at how Sam Witwer presents himself.  The Why comes first, which is why he does his homework, meaning you can have complete faith in whatever product you task him for.

It works.

 

IGN: Obviously, you've run the gamut in terms of Star Wars: TV, video games and now this animated special. With the potential for these new standalone Star Wars movies and, like you said, Episodes VII, VIII and IX, would you jump at the chance to make a possible live-action appearance in some form or another?

 

Witwer: No, I'm just too busy, man. I just can't see it happening. Oh, wait a second -- Sure! Absolutely. Totally! Are you kidding? I would kill for the opportunity to just be in the room and audition, honestly. I really feel like, in a weird way, I've put my time in and I'm ready for that type of opportunity. I've portrayed a lot of Star Wars characters, and they've been very different from each other. It wasn't just me being a fan and feeling like, "Okay, I'm ready to do this role!" No, that wasn't good enough. I had to go and watch 1940s movies and Casablanca and Double Indemnity and The Killing and all this stuff that George Lucas would have watched when he was younger. You know, even the 1930s serials like Flash Gordon. It's all stuff where Star Wars came from -- the Kurosawa films, all these things. All of that research informed how I approached these roles, and fans seem to think that it feels right. If it does, it's because I feel like I've made an effort to try to understand George Lucas and where this stuff comes from. I wouldn't feel comfortable just shooting from the hip because Star Wars is too important to me, so I did my homework. I feel like if J.J. Abrams was like, "Yeah, let's call in Sam Witwer for an audition," I'd feel like I could do a pretty good job in that audition room, because I think I understand this stuff. I think I know how you'd perform it, whether it's a big bad evil guy or one of the protagonists. So that's my personal opinion. [Laughs] I don't know if that holds any weight in terms of the people that are in the room right now, but yeah. I feel that I could do a decent job with it.

What We Should Have Said to PG

What ever you're trying to sell, never forget the importance of internalizing the vision and being able to put it into a narrative.

What we should have said to PG

Jul 09

“So it’s like a wiki?” he says, moving his fingers in circles against his temples. His eyes are closed. He’s concentrating. He has 10 minutes to understand me.

This is the story of how we interviewed at, and were turned down by, Y Combinator. I decided to write about the experience because storytelling is one function where we startups tend to shit the bed. Hopefully this post helps kick that ball forward a bit.

---

This past May, it cost $2,428.13 to have three of us spend 10 minutes with Paul Graham. Being from out of town (Toronto) this included flights, taxis, and accommodation for 3 nights. In hindsight, spending three nights in sleepy Mountain View was a great decision. There’s nothing to do but talk about your business from morning to night. The extra time also meant we were extremely well prepared for the interview. Or so I had myself believe.


Only now, having been tested by the pressures of a ticking clock and the questions of an impatient (and widely respected) mind, do I have the courage to say that the reason we didn’t get into YC was because I didn’t know my business well enough.


Sounds crazy, right? I mean, as far as titles go, I’m the guy who’s primary role is to know what the hell business we’re in. I’m not asked to write the code that brings it to life, or define the user experience that sets the tone – I’m asked to tell our story clearly, effectively, and when needed, very f*cking quickly. So maybe this post should have been titled, ‘What I should have said to PG’ – because this one was on me.

The following is a rough outline of my conversation with PG.

“So what is Rocketr?” he opened. To which I replied…

“Rocketr is a bottom-up approach to knowledge management. We connect people through their notepads. Basically, people take notes and decide how to share them. The primary mechanism by which they share them is through co-authored notebooks.”

“So people can all write to the same place. So it’s like a wiki?” he asked.

“Not really, no. A wiki is more like a google doc – it has one true version at any given time. Sure, there’s a revision history, but nobody lives in the revision history. Rocketr is about having one author for a given note, and a threaded conversation around it.”

It may not be immediately obvious what’s wrong with this picture, but if you picked up on it, kudos to you. There are 2 things wrong with how the interview opened:

1. PG drove and I quickly found myself back on my heels.
2. I stripped out so much of the marketing jargon (a YC rule), that I skipped right over the customer’s pain and the value of solving it. I gave the “features” pitch, not the “benefits” pitch.

I came into the interview ready to react. I had an answer for everything, but no real story that I was going to tell. In hindsight, I should have opened like this:

“Rocketr bridges two worlds that could not be further apart right now – how we capture information (using personal tools), and how we get work done (using team-based tools). We’re betting that these worlds will converge, because if they don’t, it will get harder and harder for teams if they can’t collaborate at the speed that information is changing around them. Oh… and the medium we use to facilitate all this, is note-taking – something we all know how to do.”

Yes – it’s a little longer, but that shouldn’t matter if I’m the one driving for those 10 minutes. Even if I was interrupted, I could pick the story up where it left off. In this version, I’m illustrating the pain, the trends, and only at the end do I mention the vehicle by which we go about it.


The missteps continued when he asked, “Who needs what you’re making?” I reacted with something like the following:

“There are two sides to the market. Organizations need this to drive innovation and individuals needs this to satisfy both use cases – personal note-taking and sharing those notes for the purpose of getting feedback. Currently, they’re resorting to email for the latter which is a terrible environment for notes to grow up in.”

Just reading that now makes me shudder. So far I’ve communicated that we are “another note-taking app” with some social features AND that every entity on Earth needs us. Kill me.


What I should have said was:

“Paul, we think Y Combinator needs this in a big way. You’re managing 460+ companies. I’m guessing you send them articles, competitive intel, potential customer leads, and a wealth of other ideas. You’re probably using email to do it. And while you might use labels or folders to keep all this information organized on your end, your startups don’t have access to that. You’re effectively relying on them to either a) action every idea immediately, or b) do multiple queries of their inbox every time they want to revisit an idea you guys discussed.”

Not perfect, but much better. It becomes obvious that the pain increases the more “teams” or “topics” you’re managing. Furthermore, by putting YC in the middle of the story, I am making it easy for him to stand in the customer’s shoes. This all but guarantees his next question will move the conversation forward – not sideways.


And if you don’t have the lucky fortune of being able to use YC as an example customer, then use someone close to them – like one of their companies. And be sure to use peoples’ names. It will make it easier for them to empathize with the plight.


No matter which way you look at it, 10 minutes goes fast. It’s incredibly easy to get flustered and not have enough time left on the clock to recover. And despite all the wonderful resources that point to the questions you’ll be asked, I promise you, you will be asked many more that aren’t listed.


My recommendation for any startup reading this, is to shift your mindset ever so slightly. Prepare like you would, but when you walk in that door, have a 4 or 5 minute story to tell, instead of 25 answers to 25 commonly asked questions. In fact, take this approach on every occasion where you get to pitch your business.


The next time someone asks you, “So what does your startup do?”, lay it on thick. Tell a story. Get them to empathize.


And most importantly, drive.