JetSet Life Interview

An amazing example of what creating a successful muse allows.  The most impressive and inspiring thing to me from this interview was Melissa’s answer to the question: What do you have coming up next year?  This is not your typical 20-something year old’s response:

I plan to find a contract job in London for 6 months or so to learn how to live independently and get to know the city better as someone who lives here rather than a tourist. After that, I would like to learn Italian and perhaps get an outdoors job there during summer. I will probably go back to Australia to work on the next growth stages of the business and after that, possibly move to New York.

Simply awesome.  I would love to be able to have a similar answer to an open ended question like this.  The full interview is here:

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This month’s 20 questions is a case study in Jet Set Living. This girl is the real deal. Kim and I met Melissa in a random chance meeting outside a club in Mykonos at 7am. She said “I think I follow you guys on Twitter“. What has evolved since then is a fantastic case study of how you can have a muse in place, abandon the deferred living concept and live a life of total excitement.

Background: Melissa was born Melissa O’Young in Australia and lived in Sydney until she was 23. When in Sydney, she got a degree in Commerce (Finance and Marketing). Afterward, she worked in marketing for 2 years at Unilever.

Feeling suffocated following the conventional path of buying a place, accumulating a mortgage and focusing on the next promotion. She opted instead to abandon comfortability and complacency. She quit her job, bought a one-way ticket to London and threw her self out of her comfort zone to see how she would react.

So many questions…….

1. Why does a girl with a perfectly good life in Sydney suddenly quit her job and buy a one way ticket to London?

I wasn’t inspired by anything anymore and every day that went past seemed to be the same. I didn’t want to use my savings to buy a place and accumulate a mortgage, as I knew I would trap myself in Sydney for awhile. You’re only young once and it was the perfect time to do something like this. I have been influenced my whole life by the society that has shaped me and I admit that I was a bit sheltered. So, I thought it would be interesting to see what I’m like without the influence of those taking care of me.

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Tim Ferriss and the 4-Hour Work Week

I have heard of this guys book before, but I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to it because I had read some reviews that his views were somewhat unrealistic.  But after digesting his interview on about.com, I think he makes a lot of great points, and there are many things that we can do to streamline our lives and be more productive.  It may be a challenge to apply all of the concepts to a business, but these points should definitely be considered as we brainstorm and put together a business model.  Here are my notes on the interview:

• The main premise of this book is how to avoid the “Deferred Life Plan“.

When you really sit down and calculate it, there is no reason to put these things off. And there is every reason not to. It also makes it very clear that some fantasies are only interesting for three to seven days. And so sitting on a beach in the Caribbean, for example, gets boring very quickly. It’s nice. Once you recover, though, it’s extremely boring and you need an alternate activity. And if that’s only interesting for a few days and your retirement life for last thirty years, that leaves a lot of thinking to be done and I encourage people to do that now as opposed to when they retire.

• 3 Major Realizations Tim made:

1. 1. most business models are entirely unscalable
   2. most entrepreneurs are business managers and not business owners
   3. income has really no practical value if you don’t have control and possess time

• I interviewed people who were finding their own life hacks and realized that if you recognize that there isn’t just one currency — income — that, in a digital world, you have three currencies (in descending order):

1. time
2. income
3. mobility

And if you really master the time and mobility components, it’s possible to live like a $500,000 investment banker of ten years ago, worth $50,000 today…Branson is a good example to someone who proactively designs a life. He seeks out the creation of these once-in-a-lifetime experiences over and over again and the latter portion of the book, called “Liberation”, really talks about that.

• One of the most valuable exercises an entrepreneur can perform is to take a step back, not looking at what’s popular, not consider what everyone is doing or what people are expected to do, and really ask what rules you need to set for your own business, from a process standpoint and a cash flow standpoint, so that it can be successful.

• I recognized that certain rules like offering every large customer net 30, net 60, net 120 — it was expected, but if you set a rule, which in my case was prepayment for all orders, if you are able to create the demand for that product, people would follow your rules…The ability for someone to get a 4-hour workweek requires some difficult and emotional decisions and doing what is unpopular. The extent to which you can do that depends on a number of factors. But for example, it’s infinitely easier to create, in my opinion, a scalable business model that requires minimal management, if you have a product versus a service.Service businesses are more challenging to scale because it involves management and more personnel. And there is a host of variables that come along with that. They require actual human supervision and that is a very taxing resource.

• One other point I want to make is that the extent to which you have to scale your business is entirely dependent, in this book, on what’s called the TMI, target monthly income. So if you want to have a Lamborghini Gallardo race car, you want to go to Fiji, or you want to take two trips throughout the domestic U.S. per month and you define what you want to do, what you want to have and then calculate the average monthly cost, that’s your TMI and it’s surprisingly low. When you actually create time, the question of what to do becomes much more interesting and much more important than what you have and it’s surprisingly less expensive than people realize. But most people never calculated it.

• What I realized also very quickly is that it’s much better to be the first or the only person doing what you do as opposed to the best person doing what you do. So, if you create a new product category, or a new service for yourself, it’s much easier to distinguish yourself and the value proposition is faster to convey and therefore you won’t get more customers…It’s the first-mover advantage that establishes you as the leader in mindshare.

• The easiest way to find virtual assistants is to use a company, for example, Get Friday, an Indian-based company that’s also in the U.S., which enables them to handle tasks not only during your business day, but you can assign a task at 5 p.m. and then it will done and in your inbox at 9 a.m., which is nice. Elance.com is also a very good site for finding virtual assistants and you can have this type of help for $5 to $15 an hour. It saved me thousands of hours. It may have cost me a small amount of money, but millions of dollars of additional revenue has been booked as a result of the time that I can apply to high-yield activities as a result of this type of outsourcing.

• How do you get to the 4-hour work week?

1. Definition, which involves determining your target monthly income and defining certain other variables and parameters that determine your ideal lifestyle.
2. Elimination which is, the batching, Parkinson’s Law, everything that can be done to remove unimportant, minimally important tasks and time-consuming activities, in addition to interruptions and managing other people.
3. Automation, which is the outsourcing component and also the automation of income. How do you restructure your business that is process-driven as opposed to owner-driven and what does the virtual architecture look like, where can you find any service providers, all that’s in that section.
4. Liberation, which is the mobility piece. So let’s say you have a supervisor, how do you negotiate a remote work agreement, what is the sample negotiating script look like for that. Also, once you create time, how do you design a life, how do you create those alternative activities and those alternative realities that most people never have to make decisions about, because they don’t have the time.

Tools that Tim uses to be successful:

• GoToMyPC.com– remote desktop access
• Skype – VOIP
• Gmail– remote data storage
• Sony Vaio mini laptop, model# VGNTXN27N – 13 hours battery life
• Phillips Noise cancelling headset
• Uses a simple PDA, not a smart phone
• Avoid impulse areas completely instead of relying on discipline (i.e chocolate, email, etc)
• No RSS reader – too time consuming – checks a few blogs several times a week
• Follows a “low information diet”, only looks at front pages of most newspapers
• Blogs Tim likes:
  • Lifehacker.com– getting the most of things
  • 43 Folders – efficiency (site not being updated anymore?)
  • Duct Tape Marketing – small business marketing
  • How to Change the World – Guy Kawasaki blog on entrepreneurship

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Sources:
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/
http://entrepreneurs.about.com/od/interviews/a/timferriss_2.htm

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What an inspiration

Incredible.  I still can’t get over this guy Scott Banister.  He is only about 6-7 years older than us and has accomplished so much!  

Following taken from wikipedia:

Scott Banister started his career as a pioneer in the email business. He was Founder and VP of Technology at ListBot, the largest ASP for business email list hosting. ListBot was acquired by Microsoft. After ListBot, Scott spent his time working with other start-ups as board member and investor. These start-ups include eVoice, creator of the first email-enabled home voicemailservice, which was acquired by AOL in 2001. He served as VP of Ideas at idealab!, where he contributed numerous innovations, including the unique bid-for-placement search engine model that powers Overture. In December 2000, with Scott Weiss, Banister co-founded IronPort, an email appliance provider that was acquired in 2007 by Cisco for US$830 million. ^[1] [2][3]

Scott Banister is co-founder and Chairman of Zivity, a social networking site co-founded with his wife, Cyan Banister, and Jeffrey Wescott.^[4] [5] He was an early investor in Powerset, a startup building a natural language search engine, and sits on the company’s Board of Directors. He also sits on the Board of Directors for Slide, a start-up founded by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin. Other private equity investments include Zappos.com, LiveOps, Facebook, Hi5.com, Tagged.com, iLike, and Causes.com.

Banister attended University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, from which he dropped out in 1996 to move to Silicon Valley. He currently lives in Half Moon Bay, California with his wife Cyan.

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A few to study (like idea flite)

http://www.startupnation.com/

http://www.youngentrepreneur.com/forum/

http://www.startupjunkies.org/index.html

http://www.veteranscorp.org/

http://www.softwareceo.com/default.aspx

Just a few to look through. They are not really what we are thinking, but perhaps a good quick study.  We will also need to look at the new additional features that Linkdn is adding and see if there is a way to partner/leverage that.  Hell, maybe we become the source for startups and get bought out as a subsidiary of them!

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Mark Cuban – What a great example of an entrepreneur

“when I die, I want to come back as me” – Mark Cuban

Great interview with the legend.  It seems like Mark can’t go wrong in anything he does.

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Chris’s comments:

Great interview, I have an infinite amount more respect for this guy after seeing him speak and get interviewed at TC50.  Here are some notable quotes from his interview with Jason Calacanis.

On his past goals:

I “retired” when I was 30. My goal was to drink with as many people in as many countries as possible. I sold a company and all I wanted was a lifetime pass for American Airlines. They had them for $125,000 for two people. I used to go into bars and ask women if they wanted to go on trips.

On ideas:

In the past people used to tell me to shut up a bit. But what I believe is to put out your opinion and let everyone else react. If I’m wrong I’m wrong. People are afraid to put our their opinions and get push back.

On entrepreneurial advice:

Ill tell you what I learned from Bobby Knight: everybody’s got the will to win but when it comes time to doing something, it’s always about someone else. Not many people have the will to prepare. You got to be willing to know your product and environment better than anybody. No matter what you do there is someone out there trying to kick your ass. You got to be the smartest guy in the room about your product. Then you need to have a revenue source. You need a company with a revenue to make money. Concept, competition, and where the money is — plus something you love doing. I’ve never had a day of work. When I die I want to come back as me.

On educating himself:

Pre-internet: stacks of books and magazines. I have PCweek magazines going back 10 years. I would read 2-3 hours per day of regular stuff.

Now online: I need a break because I spend so much time reading. If theres something I get into, I won’t stop. I read a lot of industry trade publications for cable now.

On reaching out to him:

Send me an email and in three paragraphs or less, tell me about your business. Dont say you need an NDA or want a call. Just tell me how youre going to make money and how I’m going to add value. Give me a URL if you have a website, I’ll figure it out. 5% of the people will hear back from me.

On assembling a startup team:

I’ve always been a driver from a tech perspective so it’s been easy to find people who complement me. Finding someone who you trust and who complements you is important. It’s easier to find people you trust who are cheap and can be trained. Believing in the business is important too. The worst place to hire is the Silicon valley because everyone’s a hero in their own mind. There are great people everywhere you can find. The poeple I dont like to work with are people like me. I need people who can compliment my skill set, people who can do the nitty gritty with me. People who will be good verse look good.

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Frank Addante Profile and video on building companies in Los Angeles Vs. Silicon Valley

Frank Addante on startup location

Life and Work

Frank Addante (born 1976) is a serial entrepreneur, early Internet pioneer and well-known blogger. Addante has a successful entrepreneurial track record, having started 5 companies, resulting in one IPO and two acquisitions.

[edit] Entrepreneurial career

Addante founded the Rubicon Project in early 2007. As the founding CEO, he set a mission for the company to automate the massive, yet highly inefficient online advertising market.

Prior to the Rubicon Project Addante served as the Founding CEO of StrongMail Systems, the leading email and digital messaging infrastructure provider for thousands of companies worldwide, including Fox Sports/MSN, Ticketmaster, Williams Sonoma, FTD, Real Networks, Netflix, AAA and Stanford University.

StrongMail Systems was incubated by Addante and Associates, LLC, a technology incubator company created by Addante in 2001 during the dot-com fallout, a time when many were reluctant to start new companies. Addante incubated and then lead StrongMail from inception, to an initial cash-flow positive business, to becoming the market leader in less than 4 years, raising over $30 million in venture capital from top-tier investors including Sequoia Capital (investors behind Google, Yahoo, Oracle, Cisco and Apple).

Addante was formerly Chief Technology Officer and technology Founder of L90, Inc., a publicly-held Internet advertising company. Addante was actively involved in sales, marketing and corporate development efforts leading to a $112 million IPO led by SG Cowen. Addante invented adMonitor, one of the Internet’s top Internet advertising applications for the Global 2000. adMonitor delivered over 8 billion ad transactions per month for over 3,000 customers, reached 65% of the worldwide Internet population and produced over $75M in revenues. adMonitor was acquired by DoubleClick in October, 2001.

Shortly after L90’s IPO, Addante left the company and was the Founding CEO of Zondigo, a wireless and voice software company partnered with Intel. Addante successfully raised a second round of financing for Zondigo in 2001 and shortly thereafter, he returned the money to the company’s investors, realizing that the wireless market opportunity was quickly declining at the time. Zondigo was later acquired by Voxicom. As an early pioneer of the Internet, Addante developed Starting Point, a search engine portal that became the 7th most popular Internet site from 1995–1997 and was acquired by CMGI/YesMail.

In addition to starting his own companies, Addante helped Ticketmaster gain entry into the $10 Billion ticketing resale market by leading the creation and development of a very high profile ticketing auction platform called TicketExchange. TicketExchange now services millions of consumers at Ticketmaster.com.

Addante received his education in electrical and computer engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology and serves on various boards of innovative technology and marketing companies including StrongMail Systems, mobileStorm, AnswerU, Neovision, Webtigo, Flukiest.com, Whizler.com and the Rubicon Project.

A Chicago native, Frank lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Rita, and spends his free time mentoring young entrepreneurs, surfing, practicing martial arts and running.

[edit] Companies

• Starting Point Directory – Internet search engine and directory
• ReaXions – Web development & marketing technology company
• L90, Inc. – Publicly-held Internet advertising company (LNTY)
• Zondigo, Inc. – Wireless and voice application software company
• StrongMail Systems, Inc. – Email and digital messaging infrastructure software company

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