The Errant Idea

Many wise people have and will continue to provide, gratis, rules and advice to govern almost every aspect of a startup’s behaviour, from how much money to raise to how to market to potential customers. You must not follow all of these rules. If you’re doing the same thing everybody else is doing, you’re doing something wrong. The entire point of a startup is to do something new, something different, and while much of the sage advice from experienced individuals may be true and worth following, a vital trait of a founder is to know precisely when to ignore the status quo.

Nevertheless, when you do so, you will inevitably be told — repeatedly — that you’re doing it wrong, that you are following The Rules*, that you’ll fail. The central refrain of this track reflects that (from the perspective of someone who knows his brand of Different happens to be Good — Roni Size is, after all, the king of breakbeat). The track may not be the best on this mostly deservedly classic album, but if you listen to it a few times through, you’ll quickly grow numb to the doubters. You can then feel free to rebel at will.

Hey! Who told you could do that?
Who told you you could do it like this?
You can’t do it like this!

*Note that we’re not talking about laws here. Those you should follow. Even the ones you don’t really like.

Strikes, apart from their usefulness as negotiating tactics, tend to hurt all parties involved. Writers will have to live without pay, on what is already a pretty marginal income for the vast majority. Studios, obviously, will be hit hard as scripts are used up — TV studios in the short term, and possibly even film studios in the long term, if the strike lasts more than a couple months. Viewers, too: it will be a long season of reruns and reality shows if the strike drags on, and a dearth of good new stuff next season as this year’s “pilot season” — the annual round of writing and producing pilots for consideration for the Fall 2008 season — is quashed by the strike.

Everybody loses, right? Well, not exactly. The web wins.

If the TV season sucks, that will mean that viewers spend less time in front of the set, and instead hit the other glowing box in the house to spend their time. More significantly, though, TV advertising will be less effective as it reaches fewer viewers. All those huge advertising budgets won’t go to waste, of course — they’ll be redirected to other outlets. E.g., the web.

We’re not even just talking commercials. Consider film studios. A huge venue for advertising new releases is the talk-show circuit, as the stars hit one after the other to promote their new films. Well, you’ll notice that talk shows, with their day-long write/shoot/air schedules, will be the first to disappear from the airwaves. So how to promote new movies? That’s right: the web, again.

Advertising dollars are going to get a nice little shot in the arm. Buy GOOG.

All this, of course, is the short and medium term. In the long term, this could hurt the entire TV and film industry enough to help topple what’s already a threatened distribution mechanism under fire from digital distribution technology. Once again, the web wins.

Good thing there isn’t a software engineers’ or HTML designers’ union, eh?

(This post is the sixth in a series; see also Track 1, Track 2, Track 3, Track 4, Track 5)

We’ve cheated on this track by creating an ad-hoc medley, but it was necessary in order to allow the great Tom Waits to provide bookends for the startup experience in one tidy package.

What’s He Building? provides a spoken-word narrative of a startup in stealth mode (work with me, here), from the perspective of a curious and apprehensive world which fears anything different — and definitely anything new. We hope neither your competitors nor your customers are quite as creepy as the narrator, though.

(Excerpt)

What’s he building in there?
What the hell is he building in there?
He has subscriptions to those magazines
He never waves when he goes by
He’s hiding something from the rest of us
He’s all to himself
I think I know why…

On the other hand, How’s It Gonna End, from the masterpiece Real Gone, speaks of any startup’s natural obsession with the exit strategy (again, work with me).

(Chorus)

I want to know the same thing
Everyone wants to know
How’s it going to end?

These two pieces describe the arc of a startup’s life, from creation to liquidation. However, we wouldn’t really recommend patterning the middle of the story after any Tom Waits songs, as that’s not likely to work out so well.