First, a confession: I am a big Steve Blank fan. His book, his blog and his recommendations were like a North Star, when I took a leap of faith, in jumping from a corporate setup to a startup. In many ways, the writings of all the current product management gurus are a remix of what Steve has been preaching for more than a decade.
When Steve Blank was on the new podcast by Mike Maples Jr., it was a must-listen for me. Here are some of the highlights and my impressions.
Entrepreneur as an Artist
Founders are closer to artists than any other profession. Artists see things that other people don't. Artists hear things that other people don't. You and I will look at a blank canvas, but Van Gogh painted Starry Night. You and I look at a blank score but for a deaf Beethoven, there was the Ninth Symphony.
Artists are crazy people, right? I mean, they do not live normal lives. Art is not a job. It's a calling. You hear a voice. You can't imagine doing anything at any price other than painting or writing or music. The valley was built on artists as entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs as artists. They were driven by a passion for creating something that never existed before it was.
Hey, we thought it was this way. But now it's that way. And the founder makes that distinction. It's a different form of sensitivity. It's about noticing, right? And noticing is one of my favourite verbs when it comes to zero to one, because most people think it's about selling, right? But it's really about noticing.
This is a very nice observation about the verb, noticing. Leonardo da Vinci's genius was not in the painting, sketching or modelling. He was extremely good at noticing. Rob Walker has written a book on creativity and it is no brainer that he named, "The Art of Noticing".
Things that are said less about entrepreneurship
One of the things we never talk about: is about your personal life and the sacrifices you make. Startups cost me a marriage, and they cost me a marriage because I didn't understand that my interest and my wife and his interest were not aligned. The life of an artist, whether it's a physical artist, or an entrepreneur, as a career is a very painful career. And most entrepreneurs fail. And so you better be thinking about are you doing this for the joy of doing this? And is your partner signed up for that artist's career? And if not, don't do this. It ought to be done for the Joy of Creation of something, not because you think you're going to be a rich and famous artist.
It is so easy to get glamorous about being a hoodie-wearing startup founder. But it is damn hard. In Elon Musk's words: "Running a start-up is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss. After a while, you stop staring, but the glass chewing never ends."
Despite all these warnings, people are really interested in starting up. That's a good thing. But by reading tons of hustle-porn Medium articles and watching Social Network like movies, can have a different impact. You have a warped-rose-tinted-notion of startups. It is hard but people do it because there is joy in building things. The joy of creation is a high similar to a psychedelic experience, that cannot be explained in words. Needs to be felt and experienced.
The Entrepreneur's high
The upside is I have never had a moment of coulda/shoulda/woulda, I've done everything I wanted to do. I could look back and go, I wanted to do X, I did X. I wanted to start something and change the nature of entrepreneurial education or change the semiconductor business or change whatever. I took a look at that and some of them worked, and some of them didn't, and whatever. But again, you know, I understood the cost of doing that and try to figure out how to do it right. Most of the great founders I've seen would have felt worse not knowing what would have happened then they would have felt if they'd failed, right?
Jeff Bezos started Amazon and preached us the regret-minimization-framework in taking leaps of faith. What Steve frames as coulda/shoulda/woulda is quite similar to that. The high of an entrepreneur is in the act of creation or act of building. But the more important reason for jumping into this is to have no regrets in the future.
Kids and Anti-Role Models
Luckily, I had kids later in life. Some of my role models, I watched them be geniuses at work. But have feet of clay at home meeting and their kids hated. And that was a real lesson for me is that I didn't want to have that happen. My kids were my most important product. I'm not sure I would have had that perspective in my 20s. I was lucky enough to have it now.
This is the most important lesson from Steve for me. I resonate fully with this view because I feel the same way. I jokingly say I am the co-founder of my son. But viewing my son as my most important product is very crucial. My job as a parent and as a product manager is quite similar. There are lessons in both the worlds that help each other. Many lessons learnt as a parent makes me a better PM and vice versa. (This is a nice topic to riff off in a future post)
Thanks a lot, Steve for inspiring a generation of entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs.