Our Fathers, Our Companies : Thoughts on Father's Day and Entrepreneurship

On this father’s day, I have been thinking about my own dad and his influence on my life and career as an entrepreneur.   In fact, the dedication I put onto the new edition of Zen Entrepreneurship, launched just last week, was:  “For my Dad, who brought us from the East, into the West”

My father was an immigrant from Pakistan, who packed up the family and brought us, back in the 1970’s, to the auto capital of the world, Detroit, where he hoped to put his economics background to good use.  From that time, he subtly and not-so-subtly encouraged us to think big, be ambitious, and even steered us towards tech entrepreneurship.

One Saturday in the early 1980’s, in the cold landscape of North Dakota, where we’d moved to because he couldn't find a decent job in Detroit during the recession,  he brought both us into his office. They had just bought an Apple II computer, and he wanted to show us that this would be the “next big thing”.  I still remember the first BASIC program that he taught us to write:

10 Print “Hello”

20 Goto 10

Well, after that I was hooked.  My brother and I competed to see who could build the better Tic Tac Toe games on the Apple II at my Dad's office after school.  Eventually we got our own Commodore 64 to program in.  The graphics were terrible – blocky lines that we used to draw X’s and O’s, but I remember my excitement when I figured out that I could have the computer play against a person (It didn’t occur to me until I saw WarGames with Mathew Broderick that you could have the computer play itself!).

My dad also brought out a copy of Time magazine that had a very young Steve Jobs on the cover with an apple on his head and showed it to us.  This was the only cover of Time that I remember him ever showing us (I just looked up the date – it was February 15, 1982), and the only cover of any magazine other than Mad that I remember from when I was kid.

Though my father wasn’t an entrepreneur himself, he always had an entrepreneurial mindset, and I think this had a lot to do with both my brother and I becoming entrepreneurs.   There was another side to this encouragement, of course - like most Asian parents that immigrated back then --  there were only a few “acceptable” professions for their kids: an engineer, lawyer, doctor, or entrepreneur. 

When I proudly announced that I was thinking of becoming an actor in high school, I remember him reprimanding me with some practical advice - if you want to be an actor, that's fine, but get an engineering degree so you can have a "real job" and make a living.  I listened (it turns out I was much better at computer programming than I was at acting!).  The funny thing is that my tech entrepreneurship eventually led me to be an angel investor in startups, which eventually led me to becoming a producer of independent films,  so it's call come back full circle.  

On this father’s day, I wonder what role encouragement from one’s dad (or mom, but we’ll talk about that on mother’s day!) plays in the (unconscious) decision to become an entrepreneur?

My co-founder in my very first (and most recent) company, Mitch Liu, had grown up with his dad running a small business in Seattle.  I also recall in my book that Mitch’s father had given us the funding so that we could afford to go to our first trade show, which launched our first product.

Years later, when I was at Stanford Business School, Steve Ballmer came to speak to to us.  He told us that Bill Gates had wanted Steve to leave business school to join Microsoft full-time. Steve’s own father wasn’t so sure since the company was just a fledliging startup at the time.  When Steve hesitated, Bill brought out the big guns to convince him that Microsoft was an opportunity that Steve couldn't pass up: Bill’s father.  According to Steve, whenever there was a serious negotiation in those early days and someone needed convincing, Bill would make them have dinner with his father, which would usually do the trick!

One of Bill Gates' neighbors, Naveen Jain, whom I met recently, co founder of Intellius and Moon Express, wrote a nice piece about his children becoming entrepreneurs at a very young age on Forbes:   http://www.forbes.com/sites/naveenjain/2012/06/17/the-source-of-my-greatest-happiness-have-always-been-our-children/

If their father hadn’t been such a successful entrepreneur and such an influence on them, I wonder if would they have become so entrepreneurial at such an early age?

Scott Walker, himself founder of Walker Law Group, tells us a cautionary taleabout his own father, who had started and took a telecommunications company public, making milions, and then losing them in a great read on this father's day: “3 Lessons for entrepreneurs on Father’s day”: http://blog.asmartbear.com/three-entrepreneur-lessons.html

As I think about it today, while I don’t believe that genetics has anything to do with it, I can say that most of the people that I know who’ve become entrepreneurs had some serious influence come down from their fathers.  So, on this Father’s day, as we appreciate our Dad’s, let’s also think about the influence we are having on the next generation - it could be a key factor in what direction they end up going down in their own path in life.

Zen and the Entrepreneur: The Startup Files

I just celebrated my birthday last weekend and as always, I found it a good time to reflect on the past year and the upcoming year. (Perhaps this is a good idea for all of us, since December 17 was also the day the war in Iraq was finally, finally over, and also the same day that Kim Jong Il, the leader of North Korea, keeled over).

A birthday seems to me like a more natural time to make resolutions for the next year, so that's what I did. One of mine was to write more. Which brings me here.

When I started this blog years ago, my plan was to write mostly about startups, along with some occasional tidbits about zen, meditation, science fiction, or anything else which popped into my head since the last entry, as long as I could somehow relate it back to the experience of starting and growing a company.

Like most things in life, it’s pretty easy to get dragged off track!

Two obvious examples: when I spent at year at Stanford Business School, this blog became about what life was like at the GSB (which led my classmates to have a running joke - whenever anyone said anything really funny or controversial, they’d to turn to me and blurt out: “Don’t put that in the blog!!”).

And, just last week, when I’d restarted the blog after a 1.5 year hiatus, I felt compelled to write about the Daily Show’s (wildly inaccurate) portrayal of my interview with them (See The Top 10 Things that the Daily Show with John Stewart Got Wrong About Tap Fish).

Of course, I'm sure there will be plenty of controversial and off-topic posts in the year to come (I promise!), but for now I want to shift the blog back to where I started. In this spirit, I thought I’d re-link to some of my favorite posts about… you guessed it… entrepreneurship (this is, after all, called the Zen Entrepreneur blog).

I’d like to dedicate these posts to those fearless individuals who, in the past year or in the upcoming year, despite the terrible economy, are willing to leave their well paying jobs, work long hard hours for little (if any) immediate reward, to take a risk and start a new company. In the process you will literally be creating something out of nothing, hopefully creating lots of jobs in the process.

I won't deny it can be stressful (if you've never had employees depending on you for their paychecks, month after month, or a mortgage of your own to pay without any paycheck coming in, or had investors and/or customers literally yelling at you ... well, welcome to the everyday world of a startup founder). But it can also be very rewarding on the days when things go right. And there are definitely some of those days too!

Here's to you:

• The Curious Case of Steve Jobs: Intuition and the Entrepreneur

  one-liner: “Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. ”

• Social Entrepreneur: From a Wacky Idea to the Nobel Prize

  one-liner : “Even the wackiest idea can make a huge difference. This happened when most of us had no idea what micro-loans were.”

• The Bootstrapper’s Dilemma

  One-liner: “When you got no cash, the real question is: To Focus or Not To Focus??"

• Build it Fast, But Make it Last

  0ne-liner: “Is your Agile really better than his Waterfall for a new software product? Is there really any good methodology for building software in a startup?”

• Poetry for Entrepreneurs: Love My Startup More Than You.

  one-liner: "Silly poem I wrote to the tune of an old jimmy when I was kicking around unemployed in Silicon Valley."

Here's to an interesting year ahead for all of you who are already on, or about to jump onto, your own entrepreneurial journey!

The Curious Case of Steve Jobs: Intuition and the Entrepreneur

“Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

- Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement, 2005

Wow it’s been a long time since I’ve written an entry (the last once was written just before I sold my iPhone gaming company, Gameview Studios, to DeNA) in 2010. I’d like to re-start my blog with two topics that are dear and near to my heart: following your intuition and the death of Steve jobs.

Steve’s death on October 5, 2011 caused a literal outflowing of emotion, analysis and opining: hundreds, perhaps thousands of pages have been written in the last month alone since his death. And that’s not counting Walter Isaacson’s 600 plus page biography.

Some of these focused on his achievements at Apple and Pixar, some on his tumultuous personality, some on his “insanely great” products like the Mac and the iPhone, some on how he ran Apple after his comeback, some on the impact he’s had on (count them) at least five different industries, some comparing him to Walt Disney and Henry Ford combined.

So...what’s left to say?

For me one of the most inspiring (and overlooked) aspects of Jobs’ career and philosophy was his reliance on his own intuition even in the face of the “noise of others’ opinions”. I haven’t seen much written on it, so using his own words as much as possible, here goes:

Most writers about successful business persons like to try to reduce what they did to a set of pithy “principles” you can follow to be just “like Mike”. With Jobs, I think that’s pretty much impossible. It’s like asking for the “step-by-step formula” for how to “think different”! If it could be reduced to a formula…well you get the point.

Intuition vs. Analysis

Jobs attributed much of his success to his ability to follow his own “inner knowing”, even when analysts and the “experts” disagreed. He was quoted as saying he hated focus groups because consumers “don’t know what they want until we show it to them”. Instead, he insisted on having an “intuitive” feel for when a product was “just right” and when it felt “wrong”.

This is pretty much the opposite of what you will learn from business schools (even more progressive west coast ones like Stanford) about building products and companies. It’s even different from what most venture capitalists and startup gurus here in the valley will tell you - which is to analyze a market, make sure the analysis confirms that the market is “big enough”, then interview the people in that market to find out their needs. It’s kind of ironic that one of the biggest icons of Silicon Valley would disagree with the way business is being done here.

Tim Cook, who replaced Jobs as the CEO at Apple, talks about following his own intuition when he decided to join Apple after meeting with Jobs. “Engineers are taught to make a decision analytically but there are times when relying on gut or intuition are indispensable.”

Where did Jobs get this mindset from? A big part of his reliance on intuition vs. analysis came as a result of his own search for truth. When he was young, he dropped out of Reed College (again the opposite of what logic would tell you to do if you want to be a successful entrepreneur) and followed his own intuition down several notable paths.

The first path, his quest for enlightenment, led him first on a trip to India chasing some guru, and later transformed into his study of Zen meditation here in the Bay area. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, “ said Jobs. “They use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world.”

He concluded with: “Intuition is a very powerful thing.” (src: Isaacson's biography).

Continuing his search for enlightenment when he came back to the US in the 1970’s he experimented with Zen meditation (an interest he kept up for the rest of his life) and mind-altering drugs (which as far as I know, he did not keep up for the rest of his life). Now I can’t speak for LSD (since I’ve never taken it), but I can vouch that meditation can be indispensible for learning about different states of mind and teaching you how to follow your own intuition.

Steve Jobs said: “If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time, it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things- that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment.”

According to his longtime friend, Daniel Kottke, who’d known him since his college days: “Steve is very much Zen. It was a deep influence. You see it in his whole approach of stark, minimalist aesthetics, intense focus.”

Zen influenced Steve Jobs in other ways too – including his appreciation of a minimalist ethic that rubbed off on his insistence that user interfaces and products be as simple as possible. When creating great products like the Macintosh and the original iPod, Jobs talked about having this intuitive knowing when something had met this ethic of simplicity and when it could be improved. Although he wasn't always right, he was right way more often than he was wrong.

Connecting the Dots: One thing leads to another

Of course, it’s not always easy to follow your intuition when it’s telling you something that’s different from what others tell you should “logically” be done. Jobs own life is a good example – ranging from his decision to drop out of Reed to what looked like a very poor investment decision to fund Pixar, a money-losing operation that he bought from George Lucas for $10 million in the eighties, and then continued to fund for years (to the tune of $50 million of his own personal money), until they came out with Toy Story in the nineties and became the landmark success story we know about today.

I think it only happens if you can have confidence in yourself and your own ability to find what’s right for you. Following your intuition often means follow your own path, even if you can’t see exactly where it’s taking you.

Jobs often gave an example from the time when he dropped out of college. He said that once he’d officially dropped out, he could take the classes that he “wanted to take” rather than the ones that “they were requiring him to take”, showing a streak of his habitual disrespect for authority.

He saw a flyers on campus for a calligraphy class, and decided to follow his intuition and take this class, where he learned about proportional fonts, serif vs. non-serif fonts. Jobs would say about this time: “It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.”

Later, when it came time to design the Mac, he insisted that there be “fonts” of different types, rather than the usual stale green fonts that were popular at the time. Again in his own words:

“And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.”

This was perhaps the most important example of what Jobs referred to as “connecting the dots” – when something in your life unexpectedly connects to something at a far later date, but you are completely unaware of the influence it’ll have at the time.

I think that most successful entrepreneurs benefit from “connecting the dots” – bringing together seemingly unconnected experiences into a single whole that somehow is more than the sum of the parts. How do you know? You don’t – you have to have the courage though to follow your intuition.

I’ll end, as I began, with Steve Jobs in his own words from the now famous Stanford speech:

“Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Stanford Business, #9, I Have a Dream... of Approaching Midterms and Dysfunctional Study Groups

Time is flying fast, and we are almost to our midterms – only two weeks to go. This is no doubt raising some concerns and fears within the business school in general, and the Sloan program in particular (more on some of the rising tensions later).

So, what’s our week like?

Monday is our Excel day (we have two class-dose of financial modeling with Microsoft Excel). Tuesday is our “hard science day” – with Finance in the morning and Economics in the afternoon. I say hard science, but honestly I personally have some concerns about whether economics is such a hard science and not really a social science disguised as a hard science. Sometimes, when i'm not sure what direction the supply and demand curves should go, it kindof seems like a social science ("anthropology?") that's basically concerned with an imaginary tribe of people called “rational” people (rumored to exist?), an imaginary group of producers, called "profit-maximizing firms" (also rumored to exist) , and what these two groups might do in an imaginary place called "the free market".


On Wednesday we usually don’t have any official “classes”. You might think we have the “day off” – but not really. Usually there is a dizzying array of activities planned for us on Wednesdays – some of it by the Sloan GSB program itself, and some of it by our study groups (speaking of study groups, I think we are starting to see some real drama in the study group realm– see later in this post). Last Wednesday we had the lunch with the CEO of Skype. There is usually a Career Development Workshop on Wednesdays for self-funded Sloans, and those of us in study groups usually work on our finance assignments, which are due on Thursday. Next week we have our Silicon Valley Study trip on Wednesday.

On Thursday, it’s Finance and Economics again. And on Friday we have what I like to think of as our touchy feely day. On Friday, we have two doses of our OB class. I’m not even sure what the class is called in reality; we just refer to it as OB.

So, what is OB, really??

OB stands for Organizational Behavior. At Stanford, this seems to be the “discipline” (or rather, the umbrella) under which all so-called soft stuff – leadership, interpersonal dynamics, communication skills, teambuilding, HR – gets dumped. It's just OB.

I like to think of it as a way for academia to talk respectably about interpersonal dynamics and touchy-feely stuff without actually calling it that. By calling it “Organizational Behavior” instead, it lets Stanford GSB still maintain that everything is being researched rigorously and thoroughly as a “field of study” rather than a bunch of interesting ideas about how people behave in groups.

In some ways this has been the most “fun” class thus far. Last week, we watched video clips from the movie, 12 Angry Men (the old one, with Henry Fonda). We were discussing influence and how, in the movie, the jury starts out as 11-1 for a guilty verdict. He gets them, through many techniques, one by one to reconsider, and by the end it is 11-1 on his side for a non-guilty verdict. I won’t tell you what happens at the end (If you haven’t seen this movie, it’s a great one to watch). Basically the whole movie takes place in the jury deliberation room. Henry Fonda’s character is masterful in how he unfolds his doubts about the case to the rest of the group.

I Have a Dream … of an iMac?
This week our OB class sessions were about goal-setting and effective communication. On this second point, we watched the complete video of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech from 1963. It is interesting, says Professor F., who teaches the class, that many of us know the last few minutes of this speech, but few, if any of us, have watched the speech in its entirety. I don’t think there was anyone in the room who had read or seen the whole speech.

He gave us a transcript of the speech and we watched Martin Luther King deliver it. I don’t have to tell you that it was a masterful speech; but afterwards we analyzed it to see what techniques he used in his speech that made it very effective. Here’s some of what we found:

· Analogies. MLK used analogies and metaphors very effectively, talking about the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. He also spoke extensively about the metaphor of a check being given to the African American community when the Emancipation proclamation was issues in 1860’s by Abraham Lincoln, and how that check was bouncing. There were many, many more.

· Integrating the Setting. The speech was given in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC at a very large rally. MLK did a very good job of integrating this setting, starting by talking about Lincoln, alluding to the famous Gettysburg Address, and mentioning the Emancipation Proclamation (for our international readers, this was the proclamation at the end of the US Civil War made by President Lincoln which freed the slaves in the south). He also brought in the US Declaration of Independence and Constitution indirectly, quoting “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, and “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”, all the while with Washington DC as his backdrop.

· Identifying a Common Purpose. One of the things that MLK did in his speech was to talk about racism as not a problem just of the “south” (technically, southeast) but of all Americans. There were lots of references to the North and states which were not part of the south (California, Colorado, New Hampshire) in an effort to cast light on the speech as affecting an American issue and not just a regional issue.

· Repeating Key Concepts. MLK repeated certain phrases over and over again, which made them stick. In fact, Professor F. pointed out, that a few of his repeated lines basically captured the whole speech, including the progression of the speech: “100 years later”, “Now is the time”, “Never be satisfied until”, “I have a dream”, “Let Freedom Ring”.

· Building Momentum and Creating a Sense of Urgency. The speech started out very logically, and with MLK speaking softly and slowly. As the speech went on, as the metaphors became more colorful, we saw him speed up and start raising his voice.

After watching the MLK speech, we watched another example of effective communication, this time of Steve Jobs when he rejoined Apple computer. It was a precarious time for Apple, and as usual, Jobs did a masterful job of presenting the iMac as being better than most, if not all, computers out there.

He focused on the issue of speed. First he showed a chart comparing the speed of iMac vs. a Compaq PC. Then he presented a slide showing the speed of iMac in relation to other Pentium computers out there. Finally, to hammer the point home – he showed a demo of an animation running head to head on a Compaq PC and on an iMac. Let’s just say that the demonstration was pretty effective -- the Compaq computer was limping along with the animation barely moving, while on the iMac, the animation was blazing along.

Now as I said the demo was pretty effective communication, though perhaps a bit contrived. As a software guy, there could have been any number of reasons why a particular animation ran slowly on the PC rather than the Mac. If some of those conditions had been reversed, it could have been the Mac that was running painfully slow compared to the PC. That’s what marketing is all about, I guess.

Those of you NOT in business school will probably see right away the irony of showing and evaluating these two pieces of effective communication one after the other. One was about a social issue of staggering importance, while the other was pretty much only of staggering importance to the shareholders of a given corporation, albeit an iconic one. One was about social justice, while the other was about technological prowess.

Don’t worry, those of us in Business School see this irony too (at least I hope some of us do!) Or maybe we don’t. Maybe to b-school students, these are both, well, simply good examples of OB.

Midterms are Approaching

As the midterms are approaching very quickly, I can sense a general level of nervousness in the class rising, particularly as we struggle with finance, modeling, and even economics – have we learned enough to pass the midterms? Are our study groups being effective? What is a Net Present Value, anyways, and why do I care?

We’ve started having “Modeling for Poets” sessions (aka remedial modeling) and “Finance for Poets” (aka basic finance) sessions each week. The finance sessions are scheduled very conveniently at 8 am in the morning.

Inspired by our discussion of goal-setting in our OB class, I think I’ll set a goal related to these early morning sessions. I will set a goal to make it to at least one of these “Finance for Poets” sessions (yes, the 8 am ones) sometime this term.

Speaking of OB, my goal is what Professor F. would label as a SMART goal, a popular acronym for goals which are set in a “good” way. S is for Specific: one session of Finance for Poets is specific enough– nothing vague about it; M is for Measurable: Well, so far I’ve made it to zero sessions so this is easy to measure; A is for Achievable: Yes I have occasionally gotten out that early so it is possible; R is for Realistic: well, not sure about this one- we’ll see; T is for Timetable: I have a clear timetable in this goal, by the end of this term.

Study Group Drama

Yes, I think as mid-terms approach, tensions are definitely heating up, and not only in our study group, but others as well. Tensions between morning and evening, all of whom have to agree on a time to meet. Between married, married with kids, and single Sloans, all of whom have to pay the same class dues, and who often have radically different schedules trying to coordinate a time to meet. Between those who think finance (or economics, or modeling) is easy and those who think it (they) is black magic and extremely difficult. Even between those who think certain classes are not being well taught and those who don't.

I have also heard from several people that their study groups are not working well. I originally posted the specifics of an incident from my own study group.


-----Incident Transcript and Interpretation Deleted-------


I've taken it out because it proved too controversial since it involved my taking serious offense at comments directed to me personally from a member of my study group about why our study group wasn't functioning so well.

The reactions from my classmates to this blog entry were perhaps even more interesting than the incident itself - ranging from:


· encouragement ("a little dirty laundry can go a long way", "thanks for saying what some are thinking but not saying", RESPONSE: thanks)

· genuine concern about our relationship ("Hope you and this other guy are going to get along", RESPONSE: we're going to get along fine; we had a very heated discussion today that did a lot of good for us both and will hopefully lead to a productive relationship over the next eight months of the school year)

· logical admonishments ("you really should have discussed it with your classmate before putting it in your blog", RESPONSE: thanks, a very good point in general)

· offense ("I'm shocked. can't believe someone would say that to you!", RESPONSE: neither could I at the time)

· censorship ("Please don't put anything in your blog that might make the GSB look bad or hurt recruiting for the Sloan program or that those recruiting from the Sloan program might read online"), RESPONSE: Call me crazy, but I think Stanford GSB's reputation is strong enough to be able to handle it; if it can survive a book called "Snapshots from Hell", my little blog isn't certainly going to tip the scales...

· a serious case of cold-shouldering from some of my previously very friendly and warm GSB Sloan classmates ("If I don't look at Riz today and don't say hello to him, maybe he'll know that I don't approve of him putting stuff that happens between him and his classmates into the blog"). WARNING TO FUTURE BLOGGERS: yes, this is part of the joy of personal blogging, especially if, like me, you don't always follow the party-line that everything is always hunky dory... I read one blog that took place at a prominent business school (!) from a few years ago; the blogger quit in October, because "it was just too controversial" to continue. We'll see how long this one lasts - even this revised entry is likely to generate its share of controversy!

Interestingly, the most encouraging and helpful reaction was from our study group. The incident and our subsequent discussion led us to one of the more open and most productive study group sessions we've had in a while, with broad agreement about how to move forward.

So, ironically, our study group at least, is likely to be well prepared for the approaching mid-terms!