Steve Jobs “Got it”... Will You?

“Authentic”. “Relentless Passion”. These are some words the panelists used to describe Steve Jobs during the iKC session “The Communication Secrets of Steve Jobs: Mastering the Message”. The four panelists (speakers from Trozzolo Communications, KEM studios, Meers Advertising and Fleishman-Hillard) gave their ideas about why Steve Jobs was so successful in captivating his audience.

The moderator, Chris Olsen (FinditKC), brought up Apple’s innovative marketing strategy. Steve Jobs knew it wasn’t just about targeting the consumer. It was much deeper. You have to find out what drives the consumer to make these decisions and target these motives. One panelist gave an excellent example of how Apple targets consumer motives. When the iPhone 4 came out, Apple ran a commercial that promoted a new feature without talking about it, but it highlighted a relationship. This is an example of how Steve Jobs “got it”.

The panelists gave great insight to Steve Jobs’ success and how we, the entrepreneurs, can achieve our own success. Here are some things the iKC discussion left me with:

• You have to find what you're deeply passionate about. Steve Jobs found it and changed the world.
• Get to know your user. What motivates your user? Why does he or she do the things they do? It's necessary to find the answers to these questions so you can market them successfully. 
• Become an evangelist for your product. People say, "the product will speak for itself", but if you're not willing to speak for your product, why should anyone else?
• Be consistent with your brand. Apple changed up their products but they kept the same core values since the start

Silicon Valley Knows a Secret: It's Okay to Fail!

WRITTEN BY TYLER PROCHNOW, CO-FOUNDER OF THINK BIG PARTNERS


Right or wrong, there is a perception in the entrepreneurial/startup space that when looking for a place to start a technology business, there is Silicon Valley and then the rest of the country.  There is a commonly held belief, that most, if not all of the innovative and disruptive technologies being developed today come from roughly 1,500 square miles of northern California.  Perhaps the biggest question from the rest of the country is “Why?”  Sure, the Valley has a number of built-in advantages, including (in no specific order (i) a concentration of incredible research institutions; (ii) a robust job market; (iii) a highly skilled labor force; (iv) a well-established capital community; and (v) a pretty decent climate.  But other cities have many of these elements as well.  So the questions remains:  What makes Silicon Valley the hub of innovation and more importantly, how can the startup environment that has been built there be replicated in other cities?

In my role with Think Big Partners, I am fortunate enough to meet almost daily with incredibly sharp, incredibly talented and incredibly motivated entrepreneurs who are sure they are on track for building the next big thing.  Their enthusiasm and commitment to their idea/business is inspiring and one of the best things about being a part of an organization like Think Big.  While most of the entrepreneurs and a majority of the meetings are here in the Heartland, we have developed a very solid strategic partnership with several key players in Silicon Valley.  As such, I have had reason to interact on a relatively steady basis with some of the power players in the Valley over the past eighteen months.  In that time, I’ve noticed one very important aspect of the culture in the Bay area that does not exist here in Kansas City or in any of the other cities we work in.  It’s an attitude that is born out of entrepreneurial activity and one that is difficult to develop on your own.  The key ingredient:  IT’S OKAY TO FAIL!!

No one likes to fail.  No one sets out to fail.  For most of us, we are taught at a very early age that failure is bad.  Failure in school, failure in relationships, failure in sports.  All of it is terrible and something to be ashamed of.  In Kansas City and the rest of the country, the vast majority of business failures quietly fade away and the founders are doomed to years of humiliation and rejection.  No one wants to associate with a failure.  Yet somehow, that early life lesson seems to be nonexistent in the Valley.  

Some of today’s most powerful business leaders in Silicon Valley have also been the stewards of some spectacular failures.  Perhaps the most revered and famous failure of all, Steve Jobs, set the stage for today’s acceptance.  When Jobs was in his first go-around with Apple, he was very publicly and unceremoniously dumped by the Board of Directors.  Very few people who were paying attention to the tech world at that time were unaware of the humiliation heaped upon Jobs when he was sent packing.  But according to Jobs, it was a blessing.  At a commencement speech at Stanford in 2005, Jobs said, “I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”

Jerry Kaplan and GO Corp., Marc Andreessen and Loudcloud, Bill Coleman and DEST Systems--the list goes on and on. These entrepreneurs wear their failures like a badge of honor.   We’ve met with a number of VC groups in Silicon Valley who will not invest in entrepreneurs who have not failed at least once.  It is often repeated mantra that if four out of five of your startups don’t fail, you are not being bold enough.

Now let’s be clear about the concept.  Failure by itself is not a predictor of future success.  Thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs have failed because they didn’t understand their business, they didn’t understand their market and/or they were simply not capable of launching a business.  What appears to be pervasive in Silicon Valley is the attitude that it is only a failure if you don’t learn from it.  Many of these spectacular failures provided the necessary learning curve that was essential for the future successes achieved by such entrepreneurs. While discussing a very accomplished business , a well-respected Valley entrepreneur recently said to me, “During their startup phase, [the company] did everything wrong, but they didn’t do it wrong for very long.”  They learned from their failures and after many years of struggling to break even, they are now a publicly traded behemoth.

The most important aspect of all of these examples is that the entrepreneurs didn’t read failure as an indication of their inability to succeed.  It was what it was; a failure of that product or service, in that market, at that particular time in history.  These entrepreneurs did not fold up their tents and go home, but rather, took the lessons learned in their failure and applied them to become better in the next go-round.

This is clearly something that can’t change overnight.  The fear of failure is a deeply-rooted attitude and one that will take years to change in both individuals and communities.  But it is obviously something that can be changed.  The advantage Silicon Valley has is not geographic or climatic (and thus unable to be replicated).  It is in large part, attitudinal and capable of evolving.  If our institutions, government, business, media and family can all begin to understand that failure is not a dirty word, and can come to embrace the educational aspects of failure, then the rest of the world can begin the process of emulating the startup culture of Silicon Valley.

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Maybe Janis Joplin was Right...

WRITTEN BY TYLER PROCHNOW, CO-FOUNDER & SENIOR PARTNER

While I’m sure Janis Joplin was not thinking about small business and entrepreneurs when she sang “Take another little piece of my heart now baby”, the refrain has served me and many other entrepreneurs well as we focus on finding customers for our businesses.  When we launched the Arena Football franchise in Kansas City in 2006, the Commissioner of the League, David Baker, was kind enough to share some advice with us.  Of course, I almost always welcome advice from successful leaders and try and incorporate their suggestions the best I can.  But this time, it was different.  Baker stands 6’ 8” and is a self-described “couple of twinkies short of 400 pounds.”  When a man of that size speaks, you listen.

The Commissioner told me that the League was asking us for four things.  They were going to ask us for our time. They were going to ask us for our effort.  They were going to ask us for our money (the most important item).  But they were also going to ask us for “a piece of my heart,” because that is what our fans, our players and our community deserved.  Every week, our fans would come out and give a piece of their heart to the team and regardless of how many games we won or lost, we failed if we did not give a piece of our heart back to them.

Now I am not a touchy, feely, emotion-rules-the-day kind of guy.  I’m not into any of that new age; it’s all about feelings philosophy.  But I can tell you that we took the Commissioner’s advice to heart (no pun intended) and I believe that was a huge reason we were so successful in connecting with our fans and selling tickets.  Nearly every decision we made as an organization was with the fan’s heart in mind.  We put ourselves in their shoes (which was not difficult because at the end of the day, that’s what were: fans) and developed a product that spoke to their hearts.   Since that day, whether consciously or subconsciously, we’ve tried to incorporate that attitude into every business venture we have launched.  This is obviously easier in some industries as there are many businesses that would find it difficult to establish an emotional connection with their customer.  Yet I honestly believe that no industry and no business and no customer engages in a transaction without some emotion.  How often have we worked harder on a deal because you “like” the other side?  How often have you killed a project simply because you didn’t “like” the people you were dealing with?

Steve Jobs arguably built one of the most dynamic companies in history by combining cutting-edge technology with emotional appeal.  The outpouring of emotion when Jobs passed away was not because people loved Steve.  Most people had never met him.  But his products spoke to people’s hearts in a way that they became part of the company.  If you owned an Apple product, you were part of Apple.  That is a lofty goal for all of us.

I know one of the first lessons they try and teach you in business is to leave emotion at the door.  Look at the opportunity purely through an economic lens and decide whether the opportunity has merit.  But is that really possible?  Establishing an emotional connection and reaching out to your customers or your partners is the very essence of building brand loyalty and more importantly, customer loyalty.

So whether you are a first time startup with a golden idea, or a serial entrepreneur with another new business, I would urge you to fire up your iPod, put a little Janis Joplin on your playlist and look into your customer’s heart to find the magic ingredient for success.

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When Others Said "It Can't Be Done", These 11 People Said "Just Watch Me."

Last night, as I was skimming through Joseph Sugarman’s book The Adweek Copywriting Handbook (sounds like a thriller, doesn’t it?), I came upon a section on page 56 called Assumed Constraints.

And believe it or not, this section of the book truly captivated me.  This section proved that no matter how crazy, stupid, whacky, ridiculous, unheard of, or out-of-this-world your idea may be—it can be great.

Sugarman writes:

“Have you ever looked at a circus elephant anchored to the ground?  If you have, you might notice that the elephant has a metal collar around its leg to which it is attached a small chain.  And the chain is attached to a wooden peg driven into the ground.  Pretty good protection?

Pretty lousy, if you ask me.  That 12,000-pound elephant could very easily pick up its foot and with one fell swoop yank the peg out of the ground and walk away.  But the elephant doesn’t.  Why?  I’ll explain.

When that elephant was still a baby, that same collar and chain and peg were used to hold the elephant in place.  The restraint was sufficient to hold the baby elephant in place even if it wanted to break way.  And break away is indeed what the baby elephant tried to do.

So every day while the baby was chained up, it would pull at the chain and pull and pull and pull until finally a cut appeared on its leg exposing the sore sensitive layers of deep skin tissue.  It hurt to pull like that and soon the baby elephant, realizing the effort was both futile and painful, stopping trying to escape.

As the baby elephant grew older, it never forgot that bad experience with the chain and the peg.  And so whenever it was anchored down in a sport, it would think, ‘Hey, it’s impossible to break away and besides, it hurts.’

The adult elephant had what I call an ‘assumed constraint.’  And all of us have the same problem to one degree or another.”

In my option, this is especially the case for entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs: Today, I challenge you to break free of your chain and peg and collar and cause a circus of your own.  When people tell you “it can’t be done”, then it’s time to show them that it can.  Here are a few examples of individuals who broke free of their own assumed constraints to take on the world:

• “Consumers will rip you off if you let them buy using their credit cards over a toll-free line without having them sign anything.” – What people said to Sugarman himself.  He then launched toll-free order taking in the US.
• “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” – Ken Olsen, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977.
• “Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.” – Popular Mechanics magazine, 1949.
•  “The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C’, the idea must be feasible.  – Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith’s paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service.  Smith later founded FedEx.
• “Drill for oil?  You mean drill into the ground to try to find oil?  You’re crazy.” – Drillers whom wildcatter Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist in his project to drill for oil in 1859.
• “Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.” – Ferdinand Foch, professor of military strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre, later commander of Allied Armies in World War I. 
• “Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” – Irving Fisher, professor of economics, Yale University, 1929.
• “I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers,” –Thomas Watson Sr., president of IBM, 1943.
• “So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us?  Or we’ll give it back to you.  We just want to do it.  Pay our salary; we’ll come work for you.’ And they said ‘No.’  So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you.  You haven’t got through college yet.’” – This was related to Steve Jobs, Apple Computer co-founder, on his attempts in the mid 70s to get Atari and Hewlett-Packard interested in his and Steve Wozniaks personal computer.
• “A cookie store is a bad idea.  Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make.” — Response in the mid-70s to Debbi Fields’ idea of starting Mrs. Fields Cookies.
• “640K ought to be enough for anybody.” Bill Gates, Microsoft founder, 1981.

So when people tell you that you can’t, my solution is this:  Think Big.  Get out there.  Prove ‘em wrong.

Written by Allison Way.  Allison is a writer and videographer for Think Big Partners and bizperc, two of Kansas City's newest entrepreneurial resources.  To read more of Allison's work, check out the Kansas City Entrepreneurship Examiner.