From Code Monkey to Boss Man
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NDC Oslo 2014128 / 170
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00:00
Machine codeBoss CorporationSoftwareSoftwareMusical ensembleInformationRight angleFamilyWeb pageDegree (graph theory)Web 2.0Computer scienceOpen setEmailBuildingBitComputer programmingMereologyPlanningSoftware developerCASE <Informatik>Queue (abstract data type)Computer animation
02:42
MereologyMachine codePhysical systemRight angleDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Computer programmingSoftware testingDivisorProgrammer (hardware)Electronic signatureComa BerenicesDomain nameComputer animation
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Electronic signatureDomain nameProgrammer (hardware)QuicksortProjective planeDomain nameGame controllerElectronic signatureComa BerenicesMultiplication signComputer animation
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BuildingPoint (geometry)Mobile WebCurveFamilyDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Multiplication signFormal languageWeb browserSmartphoneNumberProjective planeRight anglePower (physics)SpacetimeMarkup languageSoftwareDomain nameElectronic signatureNeuroinformatikDot productComputer animation
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Design by contractProjective planeMetropolitan area network
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SpacetimeProcess (computing)BitPoint (geometry)Multiplication signSoftware testingBuildingProduct (business)DataflowVector potential
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Multiplication signDesign by contractMereologyProgrammer (hardware)Point (geometry)FamilySoftwareSoftware developerVideo gamePhysical systemJava appletComputer animation
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Software developerSoftwareProduct (business)Data managementService (economics)Strategy gameOperations researchWater vaporMultiplication signDisk read-and-write headTerm (mathematics)BitService (economics)Physical systemProjective planeDesign by contractTwitterData managementAlgebraic closureSoftware developerGreatest elementProduct (business)Business modelContext awarenessLine (geometry)RoutingQuicksortProcess (computing)Arithmetic meanSoftware2 (number)Right anglePoint (geometry)Cellular automatonStrategy gameComputer animation
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Strategy gameProduct (business)Data managementService (economics)Operations researchSoftwareCellular automatonOrder (biology)Physical systemWeb pageTwitterSoftware developerOperator (mathematics)Multiplication signBuildingPhysicalismMereologyCycle (graph theory)Service (economics)Rule of inferenceProduct (business)Machine visionGoodness of fitCoefficient of determinationMessage passingCASE <Informatik>DataflowVideo gameSoftwareImage registrationType theoryDomain nameReading (process)Computer hardwareStrategy gameNP-hardAdditionComplex (psychology)Right angleComputer animation
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SoftwareFrequencyProduct (business)Data managementSoftware developerMultiplication signPhysical systemComputer animation
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System programmingAnalytic setLevel (video gaming)Multiplication signComplex (psychology)Bounded variationPersonal digital assistantBitDependent and independent variablesMachine codePhysical systemFlow separationSoftware developerTerm (mathematics)Power (physics)Branch (computer science)Bootstrap aggregatingVirtual machineMathematicsMereologySoftwareConnectivity (graph theory)DivisorTask (computing)1 (number)Product (business)Limit (category theory)Computer animation
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Software developerVirtual machineMultiplication signDependent and independent variablesGame controllerDivisorPoint (geometry)Product (business)Task (computing)Software developerSoftwareGroup action1 (number)Limit (category theory)Physical systemRight angleBitBeat (acoustics)Factory (trading post)Process (computing)Computer animation
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Formal verificationSoftware testingProcess (computing)Information technology consultingBuildingPlanningLimit (category theory)Multiplication signChemical equationPhysical systemFormal verificationKey (cryptography)TheoryQueue (abstract data type)Right angleFamilyVideo gameState of matterSlide ruleHydraulic jumpSoftwareComputer animation
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BuildingPoint (geometry)Type theoryMultiplication signVideo gameProcess (computing)Projective planePhysical systemFamilyProduct (business)Data management
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BuildingNeuroinformatikProduct (business)Term (mathematics)Video gameBuildingComputer programmingPower (physics)Physical system
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Video gameVideo gameElectronic mailing listMetropolitan area networkHydraulic jump
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Boss CorporationMachine codeFlickrComputer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:03
Hey, there we are. We have sound. Come on in. Come on. We're going to make it here. So first of all, just in case you're worried, I probably won't go the whole hour so you'll be able to get in the beer queue early. I plan my talk this way because I think of you when I prepare my talks. So what we'll do is I'll go through my material
00:25
and then we can take the discussion out into the main hall, get a drink if anybody wants to talk further. I am an open book today around this topic. So first of all, my name is Anthony Eden. For those who don't know me, I run a little company called DN Simple and it really is a little company. And today I want to talk
00:42
to you a bit about the voyage that I've had from being a software developer to running my own company and what I've learned along the way and some of the things that you might want to, if you're interested in becoming an entrepreneur and starting your own company, you might want to look into. And hopefully I'll give some of you who are on the fence,
01:02
ooh, do I really want to run my own company, some excitement that says, you know what, I'm ready for this. I'm ready to take the step into entrepreneurship. I'm totally down with that. And hopefully it will encourage you. So first some history. I've been building software since 1995 when my brother came to me and said, I've got to show you this really cool new thing. It's called the World
01:24
Wide Web and I think it's going to be big. And he came to me and told me this and I looked at it and I was like, oh, this is pretty cool. I can put up pages with pictures. And so I started doing that and very quickly got bored with just these static pages and said I need some way to take some information down and send it via email. And thus I started
01:43
reading 21 days of Perl and that was my introduction into programming. Prior to that I had played around a little bit with basic programming on VAX VMSs. You know, I was at the house. Everybody had a VAX at their home back in those days. Anyways, so played around with Perl, started building things with Perl. Never actually got into computer
02:05
science. My degree is in music composition. But I was always really intrigued about building stuff. I'm a creator. All right. And this is going to come back and it's going to make sense later on how this all plays together. If you all want to come in, you're welcome to. There's still more seats in here. You don't have to stand.
02:21
So building software since 1995 and very early on was thrust into the role of CTO. Which is really silly because I was not CTO material. I was CTO by title but I absolutely had no idea what I was doing. So what I learned along the way is that I would have
02:44
the opportunity to help screw up many, many companies and play my part in it. And oh, I did. There were lots of companies out there that I took part in that messed up in one way or another. And this is actually an important part of the voyage because when
03:02
you start running a business, you don't have all the answers. In fact, you'll never have all the answers. You will make mistakes. And that's okay. It's the same as with programming. You take missteps while you're trying to solve a problem in programming when you're trying to actually build a system. And then you step back and you think about it and you refactor. And then you have tests that say, okay, this is what we want to prove
03:24
is working. You have some code that's running. You refactor. This is a constant exercise. And the same applies to business. You don't have everything right in the beginning. So I learned along the way lots of different things, lots of different ways to fail. One example of this was the first company where I was really involved in as a programmer
03:42
was Signature Domains. This was back in 1999 during the deregulation of the dot com TLD. This is the first TLD that went from having a monopoly, controlling it, to having multiple companies control it. And we made a lot of money in the first two months of business. We made probably a million and a half in the first two months of business. And this was
04:01
like two guys sitting in an art studio, all right? And it was crazy. It was crazy times, crazy times. And so this had, we could have been a major company now. We could have succeeded in wild and spectacular ways. And I could have a house in Hawaii and be driving a Ferrari.
04:21
But alas, that is rare. So what happened was is that we didn't know how to take that money we made in the beginning and turn it into more money. We didn't know how to invest back in the company and make it grow. And over the next couple of years, I watched as the founder, who was the one who had control of the money, put it into projects
04:40
that actually didn't do much for anyone. And so we slowly went away. And this, that we were going through, this was 1999, 2000. And as you probably are well aware, we had the big dot com, the big bubble burst, if you will. And everything went to hell. We all, basically I worked for three or four years just sort of sliding by. And we lost
05:01
all of the goodwill that we had and all of the money. The second failure that I contributed to came after leaving Signature Domains. And I went to a company, to work on a company called Dot MP. Again, a startup. And in this sense, not a startup like you think, like a funded startup, what you see today. It was essentially a company that was self-funded
05:23
and trying to grow really fast. Like we were thinking, oh, we were going to be the next thing. You guys can come and sit down if you want to. There's more seats. So we had a really, the one thing that was cool about what we did is we had an early understanding that mobile was going to be big. This was back at a time when we were using, what was that markup language called? WML? No, what was it? It was like a, no,
05:46
no, before that, it was like a markup language for mobile devices, for like actually controlling Nokios. Yeah, it was one of these, something like that. It was like we had this sense that mobile was going to be big. And this was a long time ago. This
06:03
was back in, well, before the invention, before the iPhone came out, before smartphones were really taking off. It was just at the early days of smartphones. Nobody thought you would be running a full-blown web browser with the same kind of processing power that you might have in a normal computer. So we were ahead of the curve. But the problem is we were too far ahead of the curve. So that was another thing that I learned
06:23
really quickly. It's one thing to have a great idea, but great ideas have to collide with great timing to actually build something, especially something that's going to hit the consumer space, which is where we were targeting. So failure number two was that. And then the other thing was we didn't have the ability to stay the course.
06:40
So if you're going to come into a technology early with your business, you're going to have to stay the course until the rest of the world starts catching up with you. And then you can be a leader, and then you can be established. But we couldn't stay the course. Now, there are lots of reasons we couldn't stay the course, including some very serious issues with one of the founder and his family. But the point was is that we had not set up a company that would survive beyond the founder going away and
07:04
having to do something else. We had not built a company. We had built a piece of software and a project. And there's a big difference between the two of them. After this, I said, screw this startup stuff. I'm going to go work for the biggest company in the United States, which is essentially what the US government is. When you start
07:20
working for them, you're working for the largest, one of the, like, the largest entity in the US. And that actually taught me a lot as well. My role had a moderate success. I was PMing projects that, you know, were $5 million projects. In government, that's pretty tiny. But for me, I was like, man, look at the, this is amazing. And I hated
07:43
everything about it. Like, I hated what I was doing. I hated this idea of taking more money from the public and then trying to create something and just trying to make sure that I kept getting the next contract for the company I was working for. So I did learn an important part, though, during that. And I learned how to sell,
08:03
how to propose ideas, how to stick with a potential customer until we got them to buy. So another good lesson that came out of it. Went back and tried to do .mp again. Take two. We actually got money this time. We had some angel investors who gave us, like, a million and a half dollars. We went back and said, oh, man, this is going to be awesome.
08:23
We have so much money. We're going to hire a team. It's going to be the best thing ever. And we started building and building and we focused on building this product that did everything for no one. And that was another great lesson to learn. All right. I learned at that point that we should have built something simple just
08:42
to test, put it out with some of our potential customers, said, what do you think of this thing? Do you like it? Is it useful? Does it solve your problems? Again, this was in the consumer space, so it was even more important because there was going to be a race, at least so we thought. Turns out they were actually in a space that nobody ever did very well in. A couple companies got bought out.
09:03
And the other thing that I learned during this process was that you have to start charging money early on in the process. Otherwise, your company dies. Companies live and breathe on cash flow. That's what makes a company go. You put money in. You get cool stuff out. You don't have money coming in. No cool stuff comes out. Everybody goes broke.
09:22
That point I said, okay, I've done the government thing. I've done the startup thing. I'm just going to freelance for a while, be a gun for hire. Now, at this point, I had been programming the entire time. I had used pearl. I had used Java. I had developed systems in Ruby at that point. I had written things in Python. So I had enjoyed being
09:41
a programmer. I love building stuff. I love being a programmer. But I also love being able to support my family and have money coming in. So I said, okay, I'm going to do this for a while and see what freelance contracting looks like. When you start freelancing, there's a couple things you learn early on. One, you have
10:02
to get good at managing your own time. Because it's very easy to say, oh, I'm billing by the hour, so I'll make up my hours near the end of the week. Instead, I'm going to go watch some TV or a movie or play some video games or maybe go out or whatever it is. And in reality, when you're charging by the hour, if you don't work those hours, you don't get paid. And so it was important to learn to manage my own time. And that's
10:23
a really good thing to know how to do as well. So during that freelancing part, I learned to manage myself and I also learned to go out and find new customers. Sometimes they would drop in my lap. Oftentimes I'd have to use my network. But the point was is that I started to learn to build out this network of customers that I could come back to. So that lasted for a little while. Then I went to work for this tiny little company,
10:43
Living Social, which at the time was sucking up all these developers in Ruby land. And I did that because I was kind of tired of the rat race of trying to find more money and more contracts and things like that. As a freelancer, I was tired of working by myself. I was tired of getting crappy projects and having to pick up after other
11:00
people's mistakes. I said, okay, I'm just going to go do this for a while. So Living Social was at the time like a startup but not. It was an absurdly funded startup. So it had all the problems of a startup as well as all the problems of a big company. Thousands of employees, lots of investment money, but not necessarily doing very well in terms
11:22
of profit, say. And maybe a less than successful business model. But it did give me the chance to work with a larger team and to see some people that I really respect and learn from them how they build teams, how you deal with quickly growing teams, these rapid teams, things like that. So that takes us up till today. At this point, I had been
11:43
doing some closure there, some more Ruby, things like that. It was great. And in 2010, I had actually, it was before I joined Living Social, I said I'm going to start my own thing. And my approach was going to be I'm going to take the safe route. I'm going to have my thing on the side and then I'm going to do the other work. So I was
12:04
going to balance the two of them. And it's actually a really good approach for building a company because you have the safety of your day job or your contracting and then you have the pleasure and the time to build this thing on the side. Now I'd also already learned to try not to build something that had everything for everyone. So that
12:21
was a lesson already learned. Had I not learned that, and I've seen people do this before, I could have very easily just spent all my time building something instead of launching. But I'd already learned that lesson, so I launched the product in July of 2010 and just started building up a customer base. And one of the best ways to start building
12:40
up a customer base when you have a small company like this is to talk to your tribe. The idea is that you probably have people around you that have similar needs to you, or have needs that you're aware of, acute needs, problems that need to be solved today. And so I spoke to my tribe through Twitter and things like that. I said,
13:01
hey, what do you think about what we're doing here? Is it interesting? Is it something, would you like to pay money for it? I already started charging money from day one. And I slowly, slowly, slowly started building up a little bit of money coming in and all the while working, so everything was good. So as I started doing this, I said, this is what I think that I'm going to do. I'm pretty certain I'm going to spend all my
13:22
time writing software. That was what I figured would happen. As you can imagine, what I actually do and what I have actually done for a long time is much different than that. I have to generally manage the financing and accounting. Granted, I have people that help do taxes at the end of the year. I have contractors.
13:42
But as the owner of the business, as anybody in the business, if you don't know how the money flows, you don't know how your business is, whether it's doing well or it's not doing well. So you have to understand both, do I need to get money from somewhere alone or some sort of cash coming in or a line of credit or whatever it might be? And then once I have that,
14:03
I need to track all the money coming in and out to figure out, am I going to be able to keep my head above water and pay back the loan or whatever it may take? So finance and accounting. Second thing with sales, I had to get out there and keep finding new customers, keep finding people. Now, eventually you create a flywheel in any successful business where your
14:21
customers refer other customers, you have things that bring in additional customers, but you still have to understand how to sell. Selling is a huge, huge skill that's important. You have to understand marketing. You have to understand product management. You have to understand customer service. You have to do strategy. So you have to figure out where you're going in the long run, not just this month, not just this year,
14:44
but what's the big goal of the company. Where do we see ourselves in three years, five years, things like this. And I use us, and it really was only two of us for a long time. But that's how I had to think. I had to imagine I'm building a company here that I want to last. And notice I've never said I'm building a startup, because that's not what this
15:03
was. This was a company that was going to last. That was my goal. I want to build a company that survives, that is a good company that I can have people come work for. I also had to do what is, I was looking for a better term for this, how to build teams and how to help make sure that your employees and your teammates are happy
15:24
and motivated. How to run the systems. And then finally at the bottom I was writing software. So all of these things are pieces of what you have to do, and they're the skills that you need in order to actually build a successful business. Like I said, finance and accounting, you have to understand where the money
15:44
flows. Sales, you have to be willing to sell. Marketing, you have to understand how to deliver the message of what your product fixes, because a good product fixes a problem that people have. A really good product is like an aspirin to a product.
16:01
You want to actually fix a pain that somebody's having right now. You find those pains and people will give you money to fix them for them in an efficient fashion. And you have to know how to message people to tell them that's what we do. In addition, you have to learn how to take your product and make it better.
16:21
One of the goals that we've always had at DNSimple that I've always had is how can I do the simplest thing possible in a world that's driven by complexity, which in the case of domain registrations tends to be there's all these rules of things you have to do and ways that it's always been done. And so the goal was how can I keep
16:41
that as simple as possible. And that's all about developing a product and understanding the product life cycle and understanding how to make the product just good enough so that we could launch it, but at the same time knowing that we weren't going to overdo it and spend all of our time just trying to add these features, these useless features. And I'm not to say that we didn't add some useless features along the way,
17:01
but we've also removed features along the way. So you have to understand how to develop the product. You have to understand how to help people. You have to know how to defuse the bombs of customer service because there's nothing quite as scathing as somebody who is not happy with your product and they have a Twitter account. These two things combined together, it's got a really short fuse on it.
17:21
So you have to understand how to empathize with your customers, how to realize, put yourself in their shoes and imagine if they just click through seven pages and they still haven't accomplished what they've done. The easiest way, of course, is to dog food your own product, to use it, and we are able to do that. You can't always do that,
17:41
but usually that's the best way to do it. Strategy, having a vision in something that not only you can believe in because you have to motivate yourself day after day when things aren't great in the very beginning and you have one person buying something and in a couple days where nobody buys something and another person, you have to have a vision and a dream, something that you can look forward to and say this is what I'm aiming for
18:04
and this is why I'm going to suffer through these hard times. And there's going to be more hard times along the way, but you have to create that and then that same vision has to eventually be given out to your employees and the people that work with you, your partners, your employees, whatever how it is. They have to share that vision and it won't always work.
18:23
Sometimes you'll think you've gotten the vision across only to realize that someone else on your team has a completely different idea about what the business is all about. So that's another thing you have to do. You have to entice people to come work with you, how to share that vision and then how to keep them happy.
18:40
That's an important part and a very, very hard part of what you have to do. In fact, maybe the hardest part of building a company is the day when you hire your first employee and you realize that they don't have any financial vested interest in your company's success. So what is it that motivates them to be there every day?
19:00
And so you'll start thinking about these types of things and it's an important part of what you have to go through. You have to learn to adapt with your team. As your team grows, there's going to have new opinions and that's good, you want those opinions in there but you have to be willing to adapt. So a successful leader in a business is one who's going to adapt to the team around them
19:21
and build up a great team over time. It also means that you have to be willing to fire people sometimes. This is really hard. If you've never managed a team, the first time that you have to tell somebody that they're fired is probably going to be one of the hardest days you're going to have in a year. Because sometimes you have to fire somebody because they're underperforming
19:42
but they're going to take it bad pretty much no matter what because they may be thinking that they're performing very well even if you've warned them multiple times and that's a very, very hard thing to deal with. You may just have people that also just leave and that can also, especially if it's in the early days of building a company and somebody just decides they don't want to be part of your company anymore
20:02
you have to shoulder that burden and you have to talk to your team about it as well. So these are all aspects of working with people. You have to be willing to understand how your systems work and this is the systems of software, of hardware, of whatever it is that you are actually running out there and building. I'm focused largely on companies that make software or services
20:25
because that's what's interesting to me but even if you, or maybe even more so if you're building a physical product you have to deal with all of the operations of getting that physical product from design to delivery. And these are all things that you have to the operations of the company and of the systems
20:42
are really, really hard as well. So these are all skills that you'll need and of course you can finally touch in on your software development skills since I know that everybody, well most people here at the conference are probably pretty good developers. But I'll tell you this is actually a really good thing. This is something I want to get back to you now.
21:01
So I minimize the need for focusing on software development and the reason is because you're good at it already. What you have to get is get good at all those other things. But the skills that you've learned as a software developer or as an engineer or as a product manager that's your secret weapon.
21:22
There are multiple secret weapons I think. So I'm going to go through them really quick. And these are the strengths that I think that anybody who develops software over a significant period of time will learn as they learn their craft. The first one is you have an ability to construct systems.
21:41
So this is, you can look at a problem and not just look at one piece of the solution. You can look at the system as a whole with data coming in and data flowing out and multiple components along the way and maybe variations in paths where you have branching. And many people don't think in this way
22:01
until they are trained to do it or if they're really passionate about it and learn. But every time that you're inside of a piece of software and you write a little if-else branch this is the change in the system. This is complexity in the system. And software developers who over time learn to control this complexity in the system
22:20
have a sense for building these systems. And in fact all the businesses are systems that work well together to ensure that money comes in and not more money goes in. More money coming in than going out to pay for stuff. That's essentially what it is. So being able to put together systems like this is one of your superpowers if you will.
22:41
The second one, your creators. You have a skill. You have an ability to control the machines to tell them what to do. And with this you have the power to automate things very early on. If you were not a software developer a lot of entrepreneurs would do a lot by hand
23:01
for a long time. Or they'd hire people to do it and they'd start bringing on people whether it's contractors and you're going to have to do this as well. Or they might hire virtual assistants or they might hire actual employees that are low level and have them doing tasks that are manual but you have a power that is a superpower where you can have the machines do that work for you.
23:22
And that's something that's a very, very, very important part of being able to build a successful business in a bootstrap fashion. The third thing that you have most of you probably have is you have an analytic mind. So you have the ability to look at a problem and analyze it and think about the various outcomes
23:41
and what you want. You have a goal. You say, okay, I'm going to look and I know the path to get from here to there. So from A to B. All right, so you have this mind. That's powerful as well because it ties back into the ability to build those systems. So not only do you know how to create those systems and operate those systems but you have the ability to actually think through them in advance.
24:03
And then finally you may not think that you have this but more and more developers are being called on to be responsible for the systems they put into production. You've probably heard the whole DevOps movement. There's several talks here about it. What that really is about is every software developer taking responsibility
24:21
for every bit of code that they put into production from the day it goes in to the day that it dies and is turned off. All right? That's a big responsibility. That means being responsible and not writing buggy code. It means being there when you have outside factors that come crashing in and fight to take down your systems.
24:40
So this responsibility is something that is extremely valuable in the terms of building a business because when you're at the helm of a business you're responsible for all those things I talked about earlier. All right? And as long as you're willing to take that responsibility you have a power to actually build that into a successful business. The worst thing you can do is say
25:00
that's not my problem. Well, if it's your business it damn sure is your problem because it'll stop the money coming in and it'll have more money going out. So those are the four things that I think and there are probably more but these are ones that I feel are important that software developers have this ability these special abilities, these powers
25:21
that not everybody has. All right? So use those special abilities. Take them and apply them to your business. There is a problem. There are a few issues that you have as well. I'm going to go over two of them right now and I suffer from this as well and it's something I focus hard on trying to be better at. The first one is because we spend our time with the machines
25:40
many of us have a limited amount of empathy for the people around us. All right? We forget how to take into the factor what you're thinking and what you're thinking and when you're using the product how am I feeling when I'm using the product? How does the product make me feel? Does it make me happy? That's awesome. That means you have more customers. Does it make me angry? That means you're probably going to have customers
26:01
that are going to be there for a little while and then they're going to go away and they're going to talk bad about you. Does it just make you sad? All right? Then they just might give up altogether and go, okay, I'm going to be a beet farmer somewhere in the Midwest. So we have a problem with empathy and that's one of the things that I think that is starting to come around that maybe software developers or we as a group
26:21
are starting to understand that we need to be better at. I definitely know I am. I'm working on this every day to try to identify and understand the feelings of others around me because I can be a very, very harsh person. So the other one that I think that we sometimes have trouble with
26:40
is the ability to just let go and delegate a task or a subsystem to somebody else. We want to be in control. That desire to be in control is a very powerful desire. You want to tap into that in the beginning when you're creating the company because it's going to be the driving factor. When you're having it in one of those times, you're like, why the hell am I doing this?
27:00
I could just go work for somebody else. When you come back to it, you're going to remember, oh yes, it's because I want to own this thing. I want to be the responsible person for this. You just have to know there comes a point where you can't do all of it. So you're going to have to hand off. And it doesn't have to be a fast thing. You can grow organically and delegate over time, but you do have to be willing to let go.
27:22
And before you let go, you have to put things in place to guarantee the success of the people that you're letting go to because they're your team. They're going to be the ones that you depend on to do a great job. So this comes back to setting up systems, to preparing for the inevitable time when you have to hand something off, be it software development, be it marketing,
27:41
be it sales, whatever it is. And I have a problem with that. A lot of people that I know that write software have a problem with that. We like the control factor, and there's a point where you have to give it up. So the keys to success in all of this. The first is, and I talked about this in the beginning with lots of slides, that I failed a lot.
28:02
And I'm okay with that. Failure is the time where we learn how to do better. And if you're not failing, it's because you're not trying hard enough, is what it comes out. You're not pushing yourself beyond your limits. If you're always a success in your mind, then what are you not doing to actually push yourself beyond those limits?
28:23
So I've come to embrace failure. I'd prefer that once I've failed once, I don't repeat that. And I think that's the mark of someone who's successful, is they fail once, maybe twice. But they learn from it, and they don't make that mistake again. The second thing is you have to know when to move on.
28:43
One of the hardest things to do is when you have those golden handcuffs of that great job or that consultancy that you're building stuff for other people and it keeps the money rolling in, and it's like, but you're not thrilled about doing it, but wow, look at the cash rolling in. And that's one of those things where you have to know,
29:02
all right, if I really want to do this thing, I have to know when it's time to move on. And I'm not suggesting you just jump ship with no plan. On the contrary, do it methodically. Do it just like you were building software. Test your theories. Say this is my goal, and then start building out these systems that let you reach that goal. You have to take calculated risks.
29:21
Not just risks, not just any old type of risk. You have to calculate the possibilities that are around these risks. And you have to ask yourself, is it worth this risk? Is the potential outcome, the problems that could occur from it, the damage that it can cause, is it less than the benefits that I can gain from taking this risk?
29:40
So any entrepreneur has to be willing to take those risks. And there's cultures, I live in France now, and in France for a long time, risk was, especially starting your own business, was looked down upon. It's a culture that does not believe that you can fail, and so therefore people take less risks.
30:00
Fortunately, in the United States, the opposite is true. People take stupid risks all the time. I mean, just throwing money away, just doing crazy stuff. So there's a balance in between there. And the balance is about knowing those risks you're gonna take, calculating what the potential outcomes are, and then going for it when you say this generally will probably be a good thing.
30:21
Trust but verify. If you've heard this, this is important as you start to hand off to your team. You have to be able to trust your team, but somebody's gonna screw you. That's what it comes down to. Somebody's going to eventually do something, whether it's on purpose or not, that will cause you a lot of trouble. So you need to learn to verify as well.
30:40
Trust that they're gonna do a good job, but verify that they did a good job through the process, through whatever processes you build. And then finally, understand what people need. This comes back to the empathy. When I say people, I mean your customers. Get out there, and if you think that you're gonna solve a problem, get out there and talk to them and say,
31:01
am I solving your problem? And if not, listen to what they're telling you. Why are you not solving their problem? But it's not just your customers. You also need to listen to your team. All right? Make sure that they're happy. Your business partners, your partners in life, your husbands, your wives, your girlfriends, your boyfriends, your significant others, it doesn't matter.
31:21
You need to listen, because this is a stressful thing. Building a company is very hard, and you need to listen what the people around you need as well. Because if you can deliver what they need, then you'll be very happy. And that's the final person that counts in here. You have to listen to yourself. You have to say to yourself, what am I really looking for when I'm doing this? Right? What are my needs in all of this?
31:41
Because it's also very easy to get so deep into solving everybody else's problems that you let yourself go. All right? You stop exercising. You eat unhealthy. These are all the symptoms, essentially, of focusing so much on everything else that's going around that you forget about your own needs as well.
32:01
So to finish up here, I have a couple more things, and then I'll let you guys go queue up, and we can go talk about this outside. Why build a business in the first place? If you have a great job that you really love, why? Why even take the time and the risk to go out there and build a business? And the answer is very simple,
32:20
that if you want the freedom to do what you want to do, which may be charitable projects, it may be spend more time with your family, it may be go travel around the world, whatever it may be, then only you, you're the only person that can control your life and get those things that you want.
32:42
All right? And by having, and I'm not knocking, I was employed for a long time, and I worked for many, many great companies, but there comes a time when you have to look and say, I'm investing my time, and they're getting the benefits out of it. Yes, I'm getting a paycheck, but in the long run, what do I really get? And building a business of any type is about building something
33:01
that is going to return over the long run. There will become a point in time where you can hand off as much of this as possible, and you realize you've created a business that sustains you without you having to spend all your time doing it. And that's the goal. That's the goal of building these systems. It's the goal of finding great teams. It's the goal of making sure
33:22
there's more cash coming in than going out. All of this is designed to let you control your life. If you don't ever want to run a business, fine. It's not for everybody. But all those skills that I talked about, finance and accounting, marketing and sales,
33:43
product management, don't just turn your back on them. Because if you can own those things as well in the terms of whether it's inside your business or your personal life or whatever it is, you are extremely valuable because most people will not look at that. They're not going to look at the big picture. They're not going to think,
34:01
how does my company that I've been working for actually operate? Where are their customers, and why do they come and give us money, and why do they leave? And the minute that you know that is the minute that you actually have power over your destiny, even inside of a company. So don't just turn your back on these things and just spend all day programming.
34:20
Programming is a lot of fun. Building systems is a lot of fun. But you know what? Having the knowledge to actually build systems that go beyond computers and involve people as well, that's really powerful. Ultimately, though, you have to craft your life. All the pictures that I've been showing along the way are pictures from places where I've had the fortunate ability to live there.
34:42
I've had the pleasure of living out in Hawaii. I've lived in Florida. I've lived in Paris. Now I live in the south of France. And that was only possible because I was willing to take a chance and look at the paths that were out there, take calculated risks, and essentially craft a life that I wanted.
35:01
So I hope that this gives you a taste if you're sitting there on the fence and wondering, should I take the jump and actually start building my own business? If I do it, is this going to suck? Is it going to be great? I hope this gives you the incentive to give it a shot if you're on the fence. And if you're not on the fence,
35:21
just think of the things I've talked about. What can you do? What's the one thing that you can take from that list, that one skill that you don't know right now that you're not very comfortable with, sales maybe, and get better at it? Just go try to sell something. Just go try to pitch and write some copy and get somebody to actually go, man, that's pretty good.
35:41
Just do that one thing, and all of a sudden you'll realize, man, that opens up a whole bunch of doors and lets me craft the life that I want to craft. And with that, I am done. These are the pictures that I took off Flickr. My name's Anthony Eden, and if you have any questions, we can take it out there or right here, whatever.
36:01
Thanks very much.