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At Burning Man While Your Startup Burns (techcrunch.com)
There's a difference between clearing your head, and ditching your dying startup to do drugs in the desert. From a report: Whether you're going to Burning Man, Ibiza, SXSW, or some big international tech conference, the message you send is the same. If your startup isn't succeeding, you're skipping out on the dirty work while hoping some miracle revelation or networking connection will save you. And it probably won't. For those less familiar, Burning Man is when 70,000 people build a temporary city of tents and RVs in the Nevada desert where no money is exchanged, and instead everyone seeks to gift strangers with giant art installations, workshops, food, drinks, and celebrations. But I get a sinking feeling when I notice or hear about the leaders of a struggling startup trying to dance or dose away their troubles. Being out of a contact for several days to a week since there's no reliable cellular connection and a stigma against phone use creates a decision-making bottleneck that can slow down your company. Ex-Oculus founder Palmer Luckey here points out how juice presser startup Juicero's founder Doug Evans took off to Burning Man for week. That's despite the company recently admitting it needed to lower prices after Bloomberg reporters revealed you could simply squeeze Juicero juice packs by hand without the $400 machine. In the middle of that week Evans was at Burning Man, Juicero announced it would suspend sales of its juicer and juice packs as it desperately tries to find an acquirer. While Evans handed over the CEO title to former Coca-Cola exec Jeff Dunn late last year, the company told TechCrunch "Evans is Juicero's full time Founder and Chairman of the Board and very active within the company."
Shouldn't people be allowed to take vacations? I have no problem with this.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Was clever and original enough when is started, for a few years, back in the 90s. Now? An over-priced Disneyland for Marketing Execs going through their second childhood or third divorce...
Poor Juicero -- fell into the trap that so many people who think highly of their own talents and desires fall into:
As with so many areas where people work on something that is their passion (whether food, music, art, coffee, wine) is that they start to forget that the effort (or depth of intention) they put into it does not necessarily translate into how much other people value it, or how much people are willing to pay for it.
You get people who think that because they slaved away for hours on a painting, essay, cup of coffee or artisinal x,y,z, etc, or that they did it with such depth of feeling means that they can charge big $$ for it.
If that were true, history / philosophy / library science majors would be pulling in huge bucks for all the time they spent studying esoteric things that no one cares about, while people who scrape the internet for cute cat videos would be sitting in poverty. And arc welders who do a job on site, leave, and never have to think about it again would be barely getting by instead of being paid $70 / hour.
The other thing they start to forget is that few people care about the extra details that they care about, because they've been immersed in the topic for years and lost an absolute sense of proportion, such as:
- the ability to remotely cancel juice bags on expiration
- having a squeezing mechanism that saves you 10 seconds of effort but costs $400...
People who go to Burning Man (in my stereotyped way of thinking) tend to have a mindset that belief and values and ideology will carry the day -- and this resonates in my mind with what happened at Juicero. They tend not to be the people who put their nose to the grindstone and do a dirty job that has no glory or isn't "humanity-changing", but pays well and is reliable.
At this point, it doesn't really matter if the CEO is on vacation -- it's just a symptom of what was happening all along. 3 days absence isn't going to change the company's future...
"success is 10% sweat, 30% connection, and 60% luck."
That attitude explains why a lot of people fail and then bemoan failing but won't take ownership of their own failure.
My success is 80% sweat, 1% connection and 19% luck.
Luck comes in two varieties: good and bad. You need to be prepared to take advantage of the good luck and resilient enough to keep pushing through the bad luck.
Stop thinking that other people are succeeding because of their connections and luck. Your attitude is just excuse making. Start putting in the sweat to make things happen and stick with it. Good things take a lot of time and work.
A fundamental rule about businesses is: you should never have anyone who is actually indispensable. If that person gets hit by a bus, the business is toast -- so a company with one of more indispensable people in it is a company in a weak or precarious position.
If the company really can't do without an exec for a week or so, I take that as a big red flag that the company is, at best, teetering. So let them have their vacation, it's probably not making anything worse.
I'm a startup founder, I've never been to Burning Man, or any similar events, and probably never will be. I agree that those are not actually networking events, but I don't think it's ok to dictate the type of vacation someone should take. If raving in the desert is what someone needs to clear their head and make better decisions, they should do it. Not everyone gets the same thing from meditation and solitary introspection. Sometimes you just need something different. There are times I need to go take a peaceful hike by myself to reflect, and there are times I need to go to Vegas with an old friend to make bad decisions on purpose.
For a startup founder, your company is ALWAYS in crisis. Every week you're burning cash to keep things going. If you wait for the perfect time to take a vacation, you'll be waiting for a very long time. Whether you can bear to leave your co-workers working while you go is highly personal and unique to every situation... it's impossible to generalize.
Now, I've seen people who do take way too much time off, and do expect to come up with a miracle on the fly to replace the work they should have put in. But that's a different thing.
My success is 80% sweat, 1% connection and 19% luck.
While I agree with this, I'd like to make two observations:
First, the difference between someone who succeeds and someone who fails is that the one who succeeds doesn't give up after each failure. I've known quite a lot of very successful people, but I've never met a single one who hasn't left a string of failures behind them on the way.
Second, what people call "luck" isn't. One thing that stands out to me about people who are "lucky" is that they have a skill that can be somewhat subtle. All of us are surrounded by opportunities of all sorts, every day. We don't notice or recognize the majority of them (and, truthfully, most of them aren't of interest to us).
People who are "lucky" are people who are better at noticing these opportunities and taking advantage of them.
First, the difference between someone who succeeds and someone who fails is that the one who succeeds doesn't give up after each failure.
The determining factor between someone succeeding and failing is their definition of "success".
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
If, at any point in my life, I somehow managed by any possible means to get people to purchase a $400 bag squeezer... I really wouldn't give a shit.
He's already won. Will his empire persist throughout all time and dominate the consumer-grade fruit-bag squeezing market? No? Maybe? Is that even a real market? Who gives a fuck, he managed to dupe a non-insignificant number of people into actually giving him money. This IS the victory scenario. Of course he's going to try and have an exit strategy. This is NOT a long-term company. If anyone for a moment really thought that fruit-bag-squeezer was a legit product, then you deserve to watch your investment burn down in flames. Are you upset your investment isn't pay off? Too bad, you invested in a BAG SQUEEZER.
There's a TON of really stupid startups. There's also a few good ones. If your little baby business can't survive a weekend without someone in constant phone contact, that's a sign that it's fucked. If it's a shitty startup, all it takes is one investor to get their head on straight and realize it's shit. If the founder needs to be in constant contact to maintain that suspension of disbelief, then the company is fucked. If the startup has a legit idea that will make millions, but is working paycheck to paycheck and has the organization of a season of Lost, and every employee has no clue what to do without you there, and it can't survive one weekend without the founder there manually holding together the duck tape and twine contraption, then the company is fucked.
If the company has a real idea. And has some semblance of people knowing what to do. And there isn't some hard contractual obligation deadline. Then the world will continue to turn for a few days without you getting that email. "Hey Bob, you're in charge this weekend, I'm out" That's all that's needed.
And the sad fact is that this message will put an unnerving number of startup types into a cold sweat.
The thing was always a scam (or at least a terrible idea). AvE did a great video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Best definition of "luck" I have seen: "When Preparation Meets Opportunity"
Like you said, opportunity happens all the time, all around us. The problem is, we are unprepared for it, don't recognize it, and can't actually capitalize on it.
Missing opportunities is as easy as going home after 8 hours of work, getting drunk and playing the latest Skyrim DLC for the next six hours. Finding opportunities is hard work, consistent behaviors to improve one's skills, connections, sweating, and practice. I would suggest to you, that there is very little in the actual way of "luck". People don't see the toil, sweat, agony, brokenheart of failures that lead to success, and call everything they miss "luck".
"Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect." Ralph Waldo Emerson
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
He has a ... net worth of a couple of million
HE'S WON BABY!
With a $2 million dollars of stocks you can have an income of (around and averaged to) $200,000/year from stock market gains alone. You can live anywhere in the world and that money still comes in. You don't have to put in a single hour of work. It just happens.
Considering the typical person in the world lives on ~$10,000/year and you'd be making 20x that, for doing nothing other than breathing, I think you've got a VERY strange definition of "paltry". Hell, even in first-world top-dog USA where everyone is rich and the median income is $51,939, you'd still be doing REAL fine just living on the gains from your stocks.
Let me make this abundantly clear: Most people still have to work for a living because they cannot simply choose to get out of the SanFran housing clusterfuck and retire with a big-ass pile of a "paltry" $2,000,000. If I were handed even $1 mil, I'd stop working for someone else and start making the things I WANT to make (or fuck around all day like the unmotivated slob I am, but regardless). If you think having a net worth of $2 mil makes this guy a loser, then you need to go travel the world a little. The parts which don't have a cabana boy with mimosas on hand. You need some perspective. It'll do you good.