Briefly noted: If you’re interested in entrepreneurship and marketing, you’ve likely encountered Seth Godin and his ever popular blog. Or perhaps you’ve read some of his bestselling books? But maybe you’ve never come across this: the “Startup School” where Godin guides 30 entrepreneurs through “how to build and run their dream business.” On his blog, Godin wrote back in 2012:
I love startups. Not only do they bring the promise of rapid growth and real change, but everything is up for grabs. Organizations that start with a clean sheet of paper have the difficult task of paying the bills, but they also have the luxury of ignoring yesterday in order to focus exclusively on tomorrow.
Through the years, I’ve started a bunch of companies and enjoyed brainstorming with the people who have launched companies big and small, from AOL when they only had a dozen employees to some of the very cool organizations that come through the doors of NY Techstars.
Next month, I’m going to be running a small school–a few days for a few dozen startup founders… For those that won’t be able to make it, I’ll be recording the session and editing it down into something I can share here on the blog for free a few months later.
Below, you can stream those 15 free recordings, each of which runs 18–25 minutes. We’ve embedded the first segment, “Freelancer or Entrepreneur?.” Further down you’ll find links to the remaining ones, or you can get them on SoundCloud and iTunes. Godin’s “Startup School” will be added to our collection of Free Online Business Courses, where you’ll also find the useful YCombinator course, How to Start a Startup.
If you have any entrepreneurial aspirations, you’ve likely heard of Y Combinator (YC), an accelerator based in Silicon Valley that’s been called “the world’s most powerful start-up incubator” (Fast Company) or “a spawning ground for emerging tech giants” (Fortune). Twice a year, YC carefully selects a batch of start-ups, gives them $120,000 of seed funding each (in exchange for some equity), and then helps nurture the fledgling ventures to the next stage of development. YC hosts dinners where prominent entrepreneurs come to speak and offer advice. They hold “Demo Days,” where the start-ups can pitch their concepts and products to investors, and they have “Office Hours,” where budding entrepreneurs can work through problems with the seasoned entrepreneurs who run YC. Then, with a little luck, these new start-ups will experience the same success as previous YC companies, Dropbox and Airbnb.
Given Y Combinator’s mission, it makes perfect sense that YC has ties with Stanford University, another institution that has hatched giant tech companies–Google, Cisco, Yahoo and more. Back in 2014, Sam Altman (the president of Y Combinator) put together a course at Stanford called “How to Start a Start-Up,” which essentially offers students an introduction to the key lessons taught to YC companies. Altman presents the first two lectures. Then some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley take over. Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook co-founder), Peter Thiel (PayPal co-founder), Marc Andreessen (Netscape creator/general partner of Andreessen Horowitz), Marissa Mayer (Yahoo CEO, prominent Googler), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn co-founder), Ron Conway (Silicon Valley super angel), Paul Graham (YC founder)–they all make an appearance in the course.
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When one first encounters the surreal sensibilities of David Lynch on film, it’s hard to know what to expect of the man behind them. Is he a tortured recluse, working out his demons onscreen? A demented auteur with issues? But Lynch’s explorations of the violence and sadism lurking beneath America’s shiny veneer come to us too leavened by absurdist humor to be the product of a man who takes himself too seriously.
And when you first encounter Lynch—in interviews or his own cameo role, say, on Twin Peaks—you find exactly that: he’s an affable, seemingly well-adjusted-if-eccentric gentleman from Missoula, Montana who doesn’t at all seem beset by dark forces in the way that many of his memorable characters have been over many decades of filmmaking. Lynch seems instead remarkably free from anxiety, as his work is free from the pernicious influences of a venal Hollywood studio culture he eviscerates in Mulholland Drive.
Lynch would credit his psychological and creative good health to meditation, but there are other reasons that his body of work feels so consistently elevated to the level of purist high art: the filmmaker himself is a purist when it comes to film—perhaps one of the last few high-profile directors to remain almost fully independent of the dictates of commercialism. Witness his attitude toward such crude, invasive compromises as product placement in the interview clip at the top of the post (Lynch’s verdict in a word: “bullshit”).
Or, just above, see him opine on the phenomenon of the iPhone, or smartphone equivalent, as media platform. “If you’re playing the movie on a telephone,” says Lynch, “you will never in a million years experience the film. You may think you have experienced it. But you’ll be cheated…. Get real.” Like the interview clip at the top, the iPhone mini-rant—an extra from the Inland Empire DVD, Lynch’s last feature film—shows us the director at his crankiest, a side that of him that seems to emerge only when the subject of artistic compromise for commerce’s sake arises.
But should we consider Lynch a Luddite, an opponent of the digital revolution in filmmaking? Far from it. Lynch shot Inland Empire on a small digital camera, as you can hear him discuss above in another clip from the film’s DVD. And if we were to assume that he hates Hollywood and the studio system, we’d be wrong there as well. He goes on to explain what he loves about L.A.: the dream, the light, the smell, the feel of the “golden age of Hollywood,” the sound stages (“factories for making cinema”), and even the star system. Keep watching for more of Lynch’s idiosyncratic opinions—on his favorite actress Laura Dern, on “making films for a particular audience,” and on a subject very dear to him: “dreams influencing thoughts.”
In 1969, Laurence J. Peters, a professor at the University of Southern California, published the bestselling book, The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong, where he advanced this theory: “In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence … in time every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties.” Meanwhile, the real work gets “accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.”
Above, Adam Westbrook offers a short introduction to “The Peter Principle” and its corollary, the concept of “creative incompetence.” If you take “The Peter Principle” seriously, you’ll know that not all promotions are good ones. As you move upward, you might find that you’re dealing with more headaches .… and less work that you truly enjoy. To preempt the bad promotion, Peters suggested (somewhat light-heartedly) engaging in some “creative incompetence”–that is, creating “the impression that you have already reached your level of incompetence. Creative incompetence will achieve the best results if you choose an area of incompetence which does not directly hinder you in carrying out the main duties of your present position.” In short, find the job you really like, do it well, but give your boss the occasional oddball reason not to mess with a good thing.
Got examples of your own creative incompetence to recommend? Feel free to add them in the comments below.
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“According to a study published Monday by researchers at Duke University’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, humans experience the most intense feelings of happiness when pressing the ‘skip ad’ button before watching a video on the internet.” That comes fromTheOnion, whose satirical reporting hits the mark as usual. If we know one thing about advertising for sure, we know that we don’t like it — or at least we don’t like many of its current manifestations, so much so that we willingly engage in the arms race of downloading special programs to block them, which advertisers soon find a way to defeat, requiring us to find new evasive tactics, which forces advertises to cut another path to us, and so on.
How has it come to this? You can learn exactly how from Sell & Spin, the 1999 television documentary above. “From ancient phrases etched in stone to today’s cutting-edge multimedia commercials, selling has always meant grabbing attention,” says its narrator, the respected talk-show host Dick Cavett. “The point? Moving the product. The means? Tapping into desire — creating need.” From the first known advertisement, a wine shop’s sign from ancient Babylon, to the eve of the high-tech 21st century, Cavett and a host of advertising experts tell the story of not just how advertising became an industry in the first place, but how it became the huge, shape-shifting industry we regard today as both wildly creative yet somehow sinister.
Even the most ad-loathing viewer will recognize many of the iconic examples of this ultra-commercial art form of the thousands this documentary includes: Burma-Shave roadsigns, the smoke-blowing Camel cigarettes billboard in Times Square, the Volkswagen Beetle touting itself as a “lemon” on a whole magazine page, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”; mascots from Tony the Tiger to the Marlboro Man (a symbol of freedom, we hear, for postwar office workers shackled to their desks) to the Taco Bell chihuahua; and of course Coca-Cola’s “I’d like to teach the world to sing,” whose conception the final episode of Mad Men fictionalized by putting into the mind of its protagonist, 1960s Madison Avenue “creative” Don Draper.
That acclaimed recent television drama both glamorized and criticized the culture of the 20th-century advertising industry, which may have operated as cynically and opportunistically as the businesses it worked for, but which nevertheless crafted some of the most enduring words and images in our modern culture. But what of the “mad men” of today, charged with the thankless (if often remunerative) task of coming up with those videos we get such a kick out of clicking past? Sell & Spin shows us the very beginning of their work, taking place on a now-quaint-looking cyberspace that had only just moved beyond Burma Shave-simple banner ads.
“Nobody quite knows how to use it effectively,” says Jay Chiat of the internet toward the documentary’s end. As the co-founder of Los Angeles’ formidable Chiat/Day advertising industry, he knew the mechanics of the craft well indeed, more than thoroughly enough to recognize both the medium’s potential and the extent to which nobody had yet tapped it. How we all use the internet has changed dramatically since Chiat died in 2002, but his words still ring true. It’s still early days for internet advertising, and its maddest men (and women) — the ones who fully reject the old industry commandment to “irritate your way into peoples’ consciousness — have yet to arrive on the scene.
“Jam” Handy (1886–1983) was known for two things: 1.) participating in the 1904 and 1924 Olympics (quite a feat if you think about the gap in time), and 2.) making thousands of educational training films for American corporations, schools and the US armed forces. A guru of cinematic advertising, he shot films for General Motors, DuPont, Chevrolet, Coca-Cola and U.S. Steel, from the 1930s through the 1960s.
Above you can watch Back of the Mike, a film shot for Chevrolet in 1938. Like other films in this genre, this piece of cinematic advertising offers us an entertaining, if not educational, look at how old-time radio shows created their sound effects–all while helping market a product, the Chevrolet that helps the good guys win in the end. If the film makes you want to buy a Chevy, we can’t help you there. But if Back of the Mikegives you a hankering to listen to old time radio plays, then you’ve come to the right place. We’ve got a few good items listed for you in the Relateds below.
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For years Marc Andreessen–the entrepreneur best known for launching Mosaic and later Netscape–ran a popular blog called “Pmarca” (apparently short for “Private Marc Andreessen”) where he dispensed wisdom on startups, business, investing and beyond. If you’ve worked in startups, especially in Silicon Valley, you probably followed “Pmarca” fairly religiously.
Like so many others, Andreessen eventually took down his blog and began “tweetstorming” on Twitter–all while serving on the boards of Facebook,eBay, and HP, and running his now influential VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz. Before “Pmarca” could fade completely into oblivion, fans asked Andreessen to preserve the blog for posterity. And that he did. You can now download an archive of “Pmarca” as a free ebook. Available in three formats (ePub, Mobi, and PDF), the archived version can be read in pretty much the blog’s original format. Start your downloads here.
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In his essay “The Relativity of Wrong,” Isaac Asimov argues persuasively against the common belief that “’right’ and ‘wrong’ are absolute; that everything that isn’t perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.” Instead, he says, “it seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts,” and that certain ideas can be true in a sense, but still in need of further correction with new information. I can’t testify as to the strength of his argument when it comes to theoretical physics, but as far as basic inductive reasoning goes it seems perfectly sound to me, and a point worth making frequently. We don’t experience a world of binaries, but one full of “fuzziness” and near misses of all kinds.
As in science—argues former Monty Python member, comedy writer, and intellectual gadfly John Cleese—so in business. Cleese gave a motivational speech called “The Importance of Mistakes” in 1988 to an audience of 500 businessman at the British-American Chamber of Commerce, a demographic he has addressed remotely since 1972 with a series of business training videos made by his company, Video Arts. (“Better job training through entertainment,” as Kate Callen at UPI describes the company’s mission. Videos have titles like “Meetings, Bloody Meetings,” and “If Looks Could Kill.”)
In “The Importance of Mistakes,” Cleese explains that we do not veer wildly off course into total wrongness every time we make an error. Instead, our mistakes provide us with opportunities for feedback, which enables us to make course corrections, where we will inevitably make another mistake, receive more feedback, etc., until we hit the mark. These metaphors are not mine; Cleese uses a story called Gordon the Guided Missile as his primary example—which he dubiously claims was “the first nursery story I ever remember my mother reading to me”:
Gordon the guided missile sets off in pursuit of its target. It immediately sends out signals to discover if it is on the right course to hit that target. Signals come back: “No, you are not on course. So change it. Up a bit and slightly to the left.” And Gordon changes course as instructed and then, rational little fellow that he is, sends out another signal. “Am I on course now?” Back comes the answer, “No, but if you adjust your present course a bit further up and a bit further to the left, you will be.” He adjusts his course again and sends out another request for information. Back comes the answer, “No, Gordon, you’ve still got it wrong. Now you must come down a bit and a foot to the right.” And the guided missile goes on and on making mistakes, and on and on listening to feedback and on and on correcting its behavior until it blows up the nasty enemy thing. And we applaud the missile for its skill. If, however some critic says, “Well, it certainly made a lot of mistakes on the way”, we reply, “Yes, but that didn’t matter, did it? It got there in the end.” All its mistakes were little ones, in the sense that they could be immediately corrected. And as a results of making many hundreds of mistakes, eventually the missile succeeded in avoiding the one mistake which really would have mattered: missing the target.
The story illustrates, Cleese says, the importance of a “tolerant attitude towards mistakes”—even, a “positive attitude.” To take any other view would be to behave “irrationally, unscientifically, and unsuccessfully.” Cleese more or less recommends his audience adopt Asimov’s scientific perspective on error: mistakes are not disastrously irrecoverable missteps, but ways of learning how to get things “less wrong.”
Some clarification: Cleese means to validate only “those mistakes which, at the time they were committed, did have a chance.” A reasonably good try, in other words. There are some absolutes in the world, after all, and there are “true copper bottomed mistakes, like spelling the word ‘rabbit with three m’s or … starting a land war in Asia.” But the point stands. We’re usually in the realm of in-between, and instead of letting the anxiety of indeterminacy overwhelm us, Cleese recommends we take risks and “gain the confidence to contribute spontaneously to what’s happening,” thus overcoming inhibitions and the fear of looking ridiculous.
Cleese delivered this speech to a body of people not typically known for acting spontaneously. And while it seems to me that these days top executives can make egregious errors (or commit egregious fraud) and land squarely on their feet, I wonder if those on the tiers below have the privilege of daring to make errors in most industries. In any case, whether an assembly of corporate managers can afford to loosen up, the rest of us probably can, if we’re willing to adopt a “positive attitude” toward mistakes and consistently—scientifically, even—view them as opportunities to learn.
All of this requires a fine balance of the confidence to screw up and the humility to take constructive feedback when you do. “Healthy behavior actually arises out of confidence,” Cleese observed in an interview after his speech, and yet, “the worst problem in management—in fact, the worst problem in life—is the ego.”
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