Internships vs. Starting a Small Business

***This is an article that I wrote for {Branded} Online Magazine. Feel free to cruise on over and check out the great writers contributing to the publication (there will be another link at the bottom of this post).

Today’s job market is fierce and in order to be competitive I find a lot of people my age are looking into internships as an experience-based stepping stone into their post-college job. Adding some “real world” experience to your resume as you are exiting college is great – which is why I am suggesting that you take that same six months and start a small business instead.

Most people initially get soft about this kind of possibility because they have some notion of entrepreneurs as swashbuckling risk-takers. Not only is this gravely inaccurate, it also prevents a lot of capable people from exploring the beauty of creating and being at risk to learn something about themselves. Starting and running a small business poses no more risk than an internship while delivering an experience that is an order of magnitude greater than working for free at CorporateAmerica.com.

Internship	Small Business
Conduct an internet search to find companies that might want to hire your skill set.	Conduct an internet search to find people/businesses that might want your product or service (coffee, cupcakes, car-detailing, etc.)
Reach to your personal network to find connections within potential companies that you want to intern at. Often you are cold-calling companies, asking for interviews.	Reach out to your personal network to find connections with potential customers that would find your product valuable. Often you are cold-calling sales leads out of the phone book, asking for meetings.
Face a lot of rejection, get a couple of interviews, face more rejection – maybe you get some offers.	Face a lot of rejection, get a couple of sales meetings, face more rejection – maybe you get offers for a second meeting.
Land a position (maybe).	Get a sale (eventually).
Work long hours for minimal or no pay.	Work long hours for minimal or no pay…at first.
You are the office bitch. No one cares about your feelings, just your ability to get coffee and bagels and occasionally be a spreadsheet jockey.	You are your customers’ bitch. No one cares about your feelings, just your ability to deliver a quality product on time and make things right when mistakes happen.
Build skills necessary to be a peon in a corporate machine and that the only way to be successful is to be politically astute enough to place your name on winning projects and subtly shift blame when things go wrong.	Build skills necessary to be a manager by applying all your “boring” undergrad classes that are now critical components to make the whole business work. If you don’t you will run out of money...fast.
Learn to appeal to authority and pull a lever.	Learn that you are more self-reliant than you originally thought. You experience ownership, working smart and creative problem solving on-demand.
Maybe you get offered a position at the end of the internship.	Maybe your company shuts down, maybe it succeeds, or maybe it sits somewhere in the middle. – the cool part is that you have much more say about the enterprise’s outcome.
Repeat. Try to explain to new employers why you didn’t get offered a position at the end of the internship.	Repeat. This time it’s easier because you avoid all the mistakes you made last time.

See? There’s not much difference in the effort required to start and run a small business over interning at a company. From a learning perspective they are the same except that they are on opposite ends of the continuum. Both put you at risk to learn something about yourself. What you want to be at risk to learn is entirely up to you.

If you plan on getting a job in Corporate America, there is (seriously) nothing wrong with that. In fact, I recommend that you still start a small business instead of interning. The reasoning behind this suggestion is rather simple: everyone you are competing with has been interning at or has been laid off from Corporate America. Think of how easy it will be to stand out from the bland crowd and get a job when you roll in with some hard-earned entrepreneurial experience.

If you want to create your own internship and want some tips for the next steps, feel free to check out my other article on {Branded}: Start Up in a Box.

Business Planning v. Business Discovery

He never risked sh#!,

He hoped and he wished it,

But it didn't fall in his lap,

So he ain't even here, he pretends

That airplanes in the night sky

Are like shooting stars.

- Eminem

For a majority of my undergrad career, I've turned in some pretty stellar plans. Marketing plans, operations plans, accounting plans.. name any part of the business and I've made a plan for it. I thought that this made me equipped to start a business so I ventured out into the elements, equipped with faux-optimism and faux-fearlessness, to start my first company, Dash & Cooper.

Let me just say that I was not equipped. The root cause for failure were twofold: I was scared out of my mind and all the plan development trickery I learned in my classes didn't help - in fact, it might have hurt me.

This is not to say that my education was useless; these classes laid a foundational understanding of basic business management concepts - many of which I use to optimize my metrics and provide the form of tracking my progress as I find product-market fit. What was useless was thinking that I was smart enough to know how the business was going to work and then take actions to accomplish that.

Unfortunately, common literature teaches this exact thing to nascent entrepreneurs.

To me, I see the following problem with writing plans: 1) they discount the value of customer feedback (rather than put a premium on it) 2) they typically assume that resources are not constrained or easily obtained 3) they assume that the business has already been running (as opposed to creating from scratch).

Thankfully I took Business Development this semester and it's not about writing a plan as an artifact to execute (erroneously) from. The class assumes that the plan is a catalytic byproduct of the pivoting that occurs as you race to find what your market wants - something that's called business discovery.

The big insight from the class last night is that business plans are mythical post-hoc documents that make logic out of the thrashing that occurs in the early days. It's a convenient narrative for founders and managers to say after the fact that they had a 'vision' and just 'got it done' when in reality, they happened to discover (often by accident) something new that was valued by others. Most human beings aren't that smart enough to have a 'vision' for Amazon.com, Groupon or Coca-Cola. These companies, as we know them today, began as something else and they pivoted back and forth until they found something that worked. THEN they scaled. They couldn't write a plan about what would happen, because no one knows how the market is going to respond to anything that you introduce to it.

There's nothing wrong with "Business Plans", they are a great byproduct that documents the experiments you are making to discover what's actually going to work. But to assume that you can write one and actually execute well is like driving backwards down the freeway and using your rear-view mirror to direct your actions: it's possible but increases the likelihood of crashing and burning.

To further my point, I recommend that you watch the following video about how the Groupon founder thrashed for 3 years before focusing on a small portion of his initial idea that would eventually become Groupon.

La Professionale

The amount of resources, time and money that go into solving a small problem is pretty comparable to the amount of resources that go into solving a big problem.

Why not solve a large problem?

-Randy Komisar, General Partner, Kleiner-Perkins

Every morning I take the bus up 3rd Avenue to the David Eccles School of Business. A colleague and I get on the first bus that comes out of SL Central Station: 5:55 am and stroll into the student-run Template Cafe at the school of business to manage the coffee service.

The nice thing about taking the bus is that it, in large part, adds some structure to my life. I have to wake up at 5am every weekday, which means that I have to go to be no later than 10pm, which means that I have to be on task with everything. Overall, more is getting done because I sleep in no later than 7am on weekends and waking up early is getting easier and easier.

Of course, there are some frustrations and variability dealing with late busses but it's not unmanageable.

Anyone who has taken public transportation semi-regularly knows that after a while it becomes routinized because you've experienced it enough to account for any event that occurs within two standard deviations of what "normally" happens.

And then there is the people who take the same routes that you do. Though you never actually talk to them, you get to know them by being around them in the context of taking a bus. These are what I call 'perfect strangers'. They know a certain aspect about you that few others in your life do simply because the experience of taking public transportation imparts a certain discipline.

One such perfect stranger fascinates me in particular. My colleague and I have aptly named him 'La Professionale'. La Professionale is a gentleman who stands about 50m away from the bus stop, down on the corner of South Temple and E St. smoking his cigarette and watching for the bus to come down the street. He does this because the bus stop is in poor line of sight for the approaching bus and makes it difficult to maximize the full potential of a cigarette when waiting for the bus to come. it's evident that this method was discovered and born out of a long period of trial and error wasting cigarettes waiting for the bus.

We call him 'La Professionale' because he has taken a simple task like waiting for the bus, maximized it's potential utility (keeping yourself entertained during the 'standard 7 minute waiting for the bus window' by smoking a cigarette) and optimized the process to be repeatable every time it happens.

What's professional about it is that he has found the activity that delivers the highest possible value for him and has made it trivial. He just does it, no thinking, no effort.

Entrepreneurs, myself included (especially), could take a lesson from La Professionale in regards to building their companies. A recent lecture I heard by Dr. Robert Wuebker is that entrepreneurship is about business discovery, not business planning. In the process of developing the potential of an idea, there is a lot of trial and error until you find out which configuration works: wide customer acceptance/satisfaction, high profit.

What determines whether or not the business has long term success is a function of the entrepreneur's ability to get that configuration to run, generate repeatable results and do so automatically.

Like La Professionale

My Plans for 2011

It's not how you start, it's how you finish,

And it's not where you're from, it's where you're at.

- The Hours

About a month ago, I wrote about putting a 2011 Action Plan together with the caveat that I'd share what I'd be up to this year. Below is my list for this year. I plan to accomplish everything, though if this year is anything like last year, it's likely to dish up a lot more than I could have planned. I share it because I am learning that it takes a village to make a warrior and in the spirit of what I learned at The Foundry and my last blog post, I am opening up the details of my strategy so that you can assist in creating the life that is possible for me. If you have experience or connections in any of the areas that I lay out below, feel free to email me (travis.corrigan@gmail.com).

Objectives:

1. High leverage employment - Generate the best possible experience-based learning from my work. Be intentional about the choices I make at Discover, The Foundry and the companies that I am starting. Be a contribution in my various positions and add value to the institutions that I am in service of. Build a community that imprints me with precision-execution management practices while coaching in me in the learning process of growing, developing and interacting with colleagues, subordinates and superiors so that I can begin to distinguish the contexts that enable me to act and lead powerfully and transformatively.

2. Own the stewardship of my financial house - Learn and implement new technology to manage my finances such that I have knowledge and control over my spending and saving. Create and establish a context that accelerates getting out of credit card and student loan debt, allows me to fully contribute to my retirement accounts without impacting monthly cash flow and teaches me financial discipline.

3. Become a finely tune piece of fitness machinery - Generate and follow a training regimen that tracks my gains in strength, endurance and flexibility to achieve new levels of performance in events and competitions.

4. Expand the breadth and depth of my relationships - Make time to have meaningful relationships with the people in my life in order to learn more about them, learn from them and reap the benefits of having relationships founded on resonant bonds.

Key Results:

1. Financial Fitness

• Utilize Quicken to create and live from a realistic budget.
• Reduce revolving debt by at least 25%.
• Complete "Your Money or Your Life", including all the exercises.
• Currate wish list for big ticket items and set savings plans for them.
• Be in a position to max out 401(k) in 2012.

2. Fitness Machine

• Establish Vo2 Max and Lactate Threshold metrics as a baseline for 2011.
• Complete the "300" workout in less than 41 minutes
• Win 2 Cyclocross races
• Move up a criterium class.
• Complete the Wasatch Death Ride.
• Complete LOTOJA.
• 40 mile average ride by July

3. Expand relationships

• Reach out and create the possibility of regularly occurring "dates".
• Schedule and complete dates that have workable contexts for both parties.
• Track insights and learning in journal.

Reading List:

• How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work
• High Output Management
• Why You Do The Things You Do
• How To Write A Lot
• Your Money or Your Life
• When the Game is Over It All Goes Back in the Box
• Decoded
• The Great Reset
• This Time It's Different
• Where Good Ideas Come From
• Mind Wide Open
• The Mind's Past
• The Wave
• The Devil's Teeth
• The Great Divergence
• Dumbing Down America
• Future Shock
• Science of The Brain (research paper)
• The Lesson of Entrepreneurial Experience (research paper)
• The Entrepreneur Next Door (research paper)
• The Nature of Man (research paper)
• The Role of Team Composition (research paper)
• Web 2.0 - Design Patterns for Business Models (research paper)
• Creating Leaders - An Ontological Model (research paper)
• A Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation (research paper)
• Integrity, Without it Nothing Works (research paper)
• Introductory Reading for Being an Effective Leader (research paper)
• Procrastination and Impatience (research paper)

Movie Queue:

• How I Met Your Mother -Season 5
• The Big Lebowski
• Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
• The Fighter
• The Hurt Locker
• Memento
• The Social Network

Course Queue:

• MIT OpenCourseware 21F.301 - French I
• MIT OpenCourseware 21F.301 - French II
• MIT OpenCourseware 15.615 - Law for the Entrepreneur and Manager
• MIT OpenCourseware 15.301 - Managerial Psychology
• MIT OpenCourseware 15.316 - Building and Leading Effective Teams
• MIT OpenCourseware 6.090 - Building Programming Experience
• MIT OpenCourseware 6.00 - Introduction to Computer Science and Programming
• MIT OpenCourseware 6.001 - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
• MIT OpenCourseware 15.975 - Special Seminar in Management - Business Plans
• MIT OpenCourseware 15.060 - Data, Models and Decisions

So there you are. That's my entire year. Again if you have any insight as to how I could be doing something easier, quicker or cheaper, I'd love to hear from you. If you want to get together for the sake of getting together, let me know and we can schedule something. Looking forward to hearing from you.

-Travis

Work Hard and Be Nice To People

Well there's always time

On the telephone line

To talk about things to come

Sweet dreams and fine machines

In pieces on the ground.

- James Taylor

I've been talking a lot about living intentionally. Like anything in life, it's pretty easy to talk about. It's a lot harder to actually do. The thing about life is that no plan survives reality. In the first few weeks of the year, my time has been taken up by a lot of unforeseen, but important and joyous, work. Some progress has been made on the goals, but there are some things that I find are dropping off.

I have found that having a theme for the year helps me fixate on the ultimately important thing that you want to be accomplishing this year in the face of everything that comes up in your life. My theme for 2011 is the title of this post: Work Hard and Be Nice to People.

I plan on acquiring and framing this poster and placing it above the head board of my bed. In the meantime I have it on my DAYTUM tracker, along with everything else that I'm tracking for my life this year.

This is not an original theme and it is borrowed from one of my mentors but I find it highly impactful for me this year. Why? Because it's hard to do. Working hard requires focus and lots of calories to keep up with the mental and physical pace. Being nice requires that you be emotionally and mentally flexible in the face of approaching deadlines that competing demands that run counter to your plans.

I'm fairly decent at working hard. I'm fairly decent at being a decent human (I haven't always been) with the caveat that I'm well rested and not focused on fulfilling the sometimes complex web of my commitments. It's no secret that I have a lot of opportunity to improve my ability to have both of those present in the same space.

As this will be another year of transition, renewal, hard work and growth I must remember that anyone can work hard and that it doesn't take much work to be a rigid personality. The goal is to have fun, build beautiful things and contribute positively to the people and institutions around me. People aren't seemingly bureaucratic, opaque or difficult for the sake of being those things but rather simply they are being humans in the face of what's going on in their lives.

No one is perfect at this and I am not implying that this new commitment is some unrealistic notion of a perfect behavior around this commitment. Sometimes I'm not going to as work hard as I could or should. I'm also not going to be as nice I'd hope to be. But it would be a direct contradiction if I stated a commitment to contributing to others and go off working hard without being nice to people. It's my opinion that working hard and neglecting being generative in my engagement with others would be akin to riding a cycling criterium race and never moving out of my granny gear: I'm definitely working hard but I'm also not getting to the finish line any time soon.

The point is this: no amount of working hard can overcome being a constantly unpleasant person.

I know people who are missing out on some very beneficial personal and professional relationships because they are unaware that they occur as cruel individuals. The sad thing is that people get confused about why their efforts don't yield the results they expect. It'd be like me riding in my granny gear and making up some story about how the rest of the cyclists are dropping me from the peloton because they are bureaucratic, opaque, difficult or stupid. Even sadder is that sometimes some people are more committed to being right about the story they make up rather than come to grips that they are a jackass. It sucks, but it happens.

So in closing: I'm committed to working hard in service of building beautiful, durable institutions that, by definition, leave people inspired and enlivened and keep in mind that everyone is fighting their own uphill battle, not trying to prevent me from accomplishing the possibilities that I see in the world. Easier said than done. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth committing to. Also, feel free to tell me when I'm dropping down to my granny gear - I don't want to get dropped.

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it:

The Man in the Arena

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

- Theodore Roosevelt

What I've Learned about Entrepreneurship in the Last 12 months.

Below is a "mash-up" of collective learnings from Dr. Robert Wuebker, Eric Ries, Dr. Taylor Randall and others during my experience at The David Eccles School of Business about the space of validating a new business idea and leading in an ambiguous environment. This is a rough paraphrase with a lot of my own interpretation of what's been passed on to me, not just in lecture halls but in live-round field drills at The Foundry, Dash & Cooper and recently Template Cafe.

The thing about entrepreneurship is that most people think that it is a smaller version of running a large, corporate company. The space of starting a company is nothing like that - it's completely different. It's not about writing a plan and executing the plan. It's about getting your ass to the tarmac, selling your face off, taking customer feedback, pivoting the direction of the company and repeating.

This is what it means by no plan survives reality. You must keep setting up experiments that test your stated assumptions about the space you are operating in and simultaneously reveal the assumptions that you didn't know you had. Eventually, the experiments get so large that you can no longer fund them yourself -it is THEN and ONLY THEN that you start having conversations with investors. Even then, you aren't convincing them that you have a business that's going to work, you present a series of case studies (your experiments) and the logic of taking the next step.

How you actually make this happen through the conduit of a team is management science that is not researched very much and, despite numerous attempts is not taught very well.

How do you become a good leader? You lead. You get on the court and practice enrolling others to put their heart and soul into a possibility for little or no immediate compensation. Every time you lead, it costs you the person that you thought you were. You will make mistakes and bad decisions and you will have to live with the fact that those things affected people's jobs and the livelihood of their families. It is the messiest, slimiest profession in the world - which is why there are so few of them and even fewer who get to be called "great" leaders.

Do not read business books about leadership. Read biographies about great leaders. Gaining insight about how George Washington finally figured out how to start winning battles will be more valuable than a whole library of New York Times Bestsellers.

Cash Money.

In a follow up to my blog post yesterday, Gary the Snowman gives us the low down on the cush life of a Venture Capitalist.

Enjoy.

Innovations in the Venture Capital Industry

Somebody bring me back some money please, hey

I got a million ways to get it, choose one

Hey, bring it back, bring it back

Now double your money and make a stack

I'm on to the next one.

- Jay-Z

I don't know a lot of about the nitty gritty of the Venture Capital industry but I presume that a majority of the decisions are made around optimizing returns for limited partners like large banks and pensions. This is appropriate - it's called a fiduciary duty - because these institutions have to manage the deposits of the customers and have fixed timelines of when they need to have the cash returned, depending on their balance sheets.

Unfortunately, this mechanizes behavior incentives to make investments in companies that would make a lot of money but don't really doing anything because they can easily attract and retain users (Twitter, for example). Because most venture capital funds have a hard deadline of returning the funds within 10 years, a firm must be VERY focussed in its ability to make good investments. Most firms specialize (appropriately) in a particular stage of company growth (seed stage vs late stage) and do not deviate. This forces them to pass up opportunities that are objectively good ones but don't fit into their investment strategy because they have to answer to their LPs and worry about having a good track record so that they can easily raise money for a new fund.

But there are some people innovating in this area:

Union Square Ventures just announced that they raised a new Opportunity Fund to keep capital in reserve for investments that are good opportunities but don't fit within their investment strategy.

Additionally, Andreesen-Horowitz announced a few weeks ago that they raised an astronomical $650M for an all-stage fund. Ben Horowitz, GP for the fund stated on his blog the reason for this:

"As a matter of core philosophy, we invest in companies, not stages. We want to be in business with the best entrepreneurs going after the biggest markets and we do not care whether they need seed money, venture money or growth money. We believe in great entrepreneurs and the products and companies they build. We do not focus on special return profiles for various stages of investment. As a result, our fund is stage agnostic... we are excited about investing $50,000 in new seed deals and we are excited about investing $50,000,000 in companies like Skype."

Specifically with the new Union Square Ventures Opportunity Fund, it is an interesting fund model: non-commitment of the entire fund, pay-for-play fees only on the money that's invested and a loosely defined investment strategy (opportunistic).

It might be interesting to align LPs, VCs, and the ever growing demand/need from entrepeneurs and early-stage companies to have on-demand investment as they pivot their direction towards reaching market validation AND be poised to make an investment to ride the upside once (if) the companies get on rails.

Of course, it's easy to talk about. Much harder to raise. Even harder to manage. USV and Andreesen-Horowitz are rock stars with great track records in building companies and good investment decisions - they have the clout to convince people that they can pull this stuff off. It will be interesting to see if the rest of the industry follows suit and tries to convince the LP community to engage in this type of risk profile in an attempt to align investment incentives with the reality of the entrepreneur.

Simply put: it seems like institutional investment is like traditional education in that they both understand that learning and growth is non-linear but seem to invest and teach in batches (investment round, classes of students) as if it was linear. *Why* we invest in rounds is something that I know nothing about (hopefully someone can tell me). Maybe because on opportunistic investment strategy provides less certainty for GPs as well as LPs and humans naturally opt for structure and the "known" even it is not optimal (ex: investing in bonds vs stocks).

One thing that might be interesting to examine is the relationship between firm performance (revenue/profit growth, probability of an exit, value at exit) and how close to on-demand investment the company receives (smaller round size, frequency of rounds and frequency and size of bridge loans in between rounds).

We have schools of thought around running lean: just-in-time inventory management, on-demand production and lean startup strategy. Why don't we have lean investment?

Maybe it's possible only in certain industries (both the firms mentioned here invest in hi-tech companies). Maybe it's possible only in certain investment stages. Maybe it's not possible at all or it's so hard that it might as well be considered impossible. But it seems like the logical move for the at least part of the industry and I imagine that we'll be seeing some retooling with the business model in the medium term.

Now I'm just a kid and I don't talk to investors and I don't have the professional experience or track record as these guys. So I wouldn't say that I'm the first to ask this question but I think it's an interesting possibility to drill down on and then build up from.

The question for me personally is whether or not anyone could do this. Could anyone follow the template model that Union Square is leading with to build regional micro-VCs? Could I help contribute to this? Anyone else interested in this?

The Foundry - A Graduate's View

It’s a good idea to be yourself, not only because everybody else is taken, but because trying to be anything else doesn’t usually get you very far. - Chris Guillebeau

What is The Foundry?

It's a question that is easy to ask but hard to answer. What's amazing is how glib and cheesy it sounds when you try to describe its state of being its state of being. Foundry is not so much an organization as it is an experience; it focuses more on "doing" rather than "being."

So what is The Foundry? How about I start with what we do:

Participants are trained in the form and function of high-end, lightweight management technology. A high-leverage, precision-execution oriented set of documents that are easy to manage from, communicate the weekly snapshot of the company and allow managers to document their process as they push the frontier of their company forward. We use two documents, each are no longer than two pages. The quarterly planning document is called a MOKR (Mission, Objectives, Key Results) and a weekly planning Management Report that progresses the company to accomplish the quarterly objectives it sets for itself.

CEOs (and Foundry admins) are required to prepare a Management Report each week and upload it to their file within the Foundry Dropbox Folder by 6pm SHARP each Saturday. These documents reviewed by each CEO within a cohort. Each participant views the document with "revision marks" turned on and holds each other accountable for spelling, grammar and format defects. They also review each company's progress, plans and problems, keeping in mind that they are looking to contribute to assisting in any way possible.

On Monday morning they meet at 7:30am SHARP ready to add value to each other by providing insight, solutions or introductions within the their respective networks over the course of an hour so that the group progresses and learns faster together than any one individual would otherwise.

Foundry's role in that meeting is cultivate and batch together commons problems or challenges the cohort is facing ans solve them collectively - often leveraging a group discount or small sponsorship if the solution must be purchased.

The last requirement is to conduct a project review every 4 weeks which serves to model a board meeting. CEOs are encouraged to invite mentors, advisors, potential investors and other participants to engage in a dialoge about the monthly progress (things that are DONE and NOT DONE), personal and organizational learning, forward thinking plans and problems. It's typically a proverbial ass-kicking about your efforts to manage and guide your growing baby.. er, startup. It's an exhausting hour and a half but it provides clarity.

That's it. That's what we do. No fancy pants stratitegery. No superlative "crush it" dialogue. It's that simple. And it's effective.

Here's proof: 7 out 10 startups fail within the first year. 7 out of 10 Foundry companies survive.

So how do we generate the results that we do? The participants do everything. By participating in the Foundry, the act of contributing to each other creates their ownership in its existence. When participants no longer decide that the mechanics laid out above work for them, then we cease to exist. So far it's working.

That's why you can't talk about what it is unless you've been in it. To read and conceptualize what it's like is an order of magnitude different than to actually DO it - just like building a rocket ship out of legos doesn't qualify you to work for NASA.

Yes, we are a cult. Yes, we have rolling enrollment. So with these results and open-source management technology, why doesn't everyone join? The Foundry experience augments the startup experience which, like Fight Club, is confronting. Our management techniques aren't glitzy fancy pants Web 2.0 apps. They are 8x11 pieces of paper and they force you to publicly call yourself out to execute and announce to everyone when you don't. This alone confronts a lot of people who think that "getting the right answer" or "checking off a list" or " appearing to do complicated things with ease" makes them a good person.

For example I have seen experienced entrepreneurs get their asses handed to them in a Project Review or Monday Meeting by a 20-something student founder. And vice versa. This is a culture in which you learn, from everyone - ESPECIALLY when the message is packaged poorly. No one does that naturally, some stick around long enough to be transformed into someone that eventually welcomes this. Which is why most Foundry graduates are seemingly carved out of wood.

All of your inner demons, the thing that you have resistance around, will show up and be present in front of you and everyone else. Those uncomfortable and slimy "realities" that you do a good job of pretending aren't there, start announcing themselves loudly. What you decide to do at that point is what it means to be at risk to learn: you learn something, not about management or your company, but about yourself.

You will do this constantly, day in and day out.

We make a claim about forging entrepreneurs for life. On the surface it looks like company building but it's really the things that one learns when he or she is engages in the trench warfare of starting a company.

This is why Foundry accepts PEOPLE starting companies, NOT companies.

The Man Behind the Myth

This is a funny email conversation that I had late last night with fellow Foundry brother, David Oldham, CEO of O-Codes.

Dave: Would be cool to have a Dropbox folder for resumes/bios where people who wanted to join a startup could post their background and skillset for teams to review and then follow up with the individual if it's a good fit.

Me: Noted. I'll talk to Matt and Rob about that possibility and see if we can get something done formally.

Dave: You are the man behind the myth.

Me: Ha ha, indeed. What is the myth?

Dave: The myth: that a brilliant, ambitious young entrepreneur wander the dimly lit, cubicled halls of the Foundry late at night scheming up the world's next great invention; and if you happen to see him, touch his North Face jacket sleeve and you too will be imbued with magical entrepreneurial powers.

***

The funny thing about this is that I was wearing the exact North Face jacket he was referring to when I read the email this morning.

Let it be known though, that the character I play in life: the ambitious young entrepreneur, is in fact a myth. I am not out to create a world-shifting invention for the sake of personal accolades and bragging rights at cocktail parties. In fact, I'm not out to create a world-shifting invention at all. I just like building things that I find fascinating.

I am just a guy, who likes tinkering with machines that look like entrepreneurial endeavors. The ambition is often misinterpreted as "nerd-fervor" for seeing things come together on a spreadsheet. And young is often misinterpreted as... well actually I am young so there's nothing to say about that. As far as the North Face jacket, it probably won't imbue magical entrepreneurial powers, but it will help protect you against the cold.

So feel free to engage with the man (boy). Because that's who I am.. with a few foibles and flaws. Just like every other human being.

The Theory of Competition

You never know who is going to flip the script,
And take a pass on saying 'Uncle' - Unknown

I had a friend post this video on Facebook a few days ago. I've been hooked on it ever since. I tend to be a suckker for these videos because my experience in sports has always been that as the underdog or longshot comeback. None is more true than the "glory days" of my senior season of football at Skyline High School. After going 5-5 in the regular season, we somehow pulled off miraculous upsets week after week in the playoffs to eventually emerge as the 2005 State Champions. This experience taught me a lot of lessons that I draw from today:

• Crucibles - if you survive them, form bonds within teams that are unbreakable.
• The odds and the newscaster commentary mean nothing - when one team shows up to play and the other doesn't, all bets are off.
• Battles are won not on the field in front of a crowd but in practice and preparation.
• You reap what you sow, just in a a different season - squats in January and running track in March means the difference when you're in man-to-man coverage in November.
• Your strategy must evolve - just because you shut down a running offense one week doesn't mean you should do the same prep for the upcoming passing offense.
• Don't rest on your accolades - no one knows (or cares) about what I did in high school 5 years ago, they care about what I'm doing right now to contribute.

So without further ado, here's the video. Enjoy.