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| Democratizing Talent Part 2: To Claire; From Sonny | Top |
| This guest post was submitted by SGN founder and Executive Chairman, Shervin Pishevar . The entrepreneur and angel investor was founding president of Webs.com, a co-founder of Hotprints and Hyperoffice and has made several investments, including Nowmov , Aardvark , Thread.com, Gowalla , and Qwiki . So I just logged into my email tonight and I see this email titled: Super Talent. The writer is a casting director from Romania who now lives in London. She’s worked on a number of movies with great directors like Spike Jonze. The email reads: I’ve found you through this TechCrunch article “Democratizing Talent: Guy Oseary, Greyson Chance, NowMov, IndieGoGo and the Future of Talent.” Thank you very much, it was an inspiration for me . I wrote about it on my blog too. Following your story, I’ve discovered this brilliant filmmaker and composer: Josh Beattie. He has 17 years and I think he is GENIUS. If someone would invest a small amount of money in this kid he would be the next big Hollywood film director. If you can recommend Josh to your super agent friends, it would be fantastic. Thank you very much for reading this email. Kind regards, Andreea Tanasescu I click on the short film, To Clair; From Sonny , half expecting not to be impressed. Instead, I am floored by this 17-year-old director, Josh Beattie. Working with a few friends, Josh uses regular equipment, like an SLR camera and even composes his own music . Josh and his friends posted this video in September 2010 and now the world is starting to notice. They have done amazing work and are an inspiration to so many others. Democratizing talent is fueled by wider and cheaper access to technology, information and the ability to broadcast and distribute human innovation and creativity to the whole world with optimal efficiency. Let all the walls fall down and we all rise up. In my essay, Democratizing Talent , I concluded: There are countless others in so many fields who are waiting to be discovered. He might be coding away in a tiny apartment in Moscow. She might be writing the next great novel in Buenos Aires. He's composing the next great classical sonata in Karachi. He might be designing the next great wave of architecture in Tehran. She might be painting her way to the next Picasso. He's discovering a cure for a cancer in Kenya. The better we can incubate the world's talent and the better we can broadcast those talents to each other the faster we can progress and inspire each other forward. Or as the lyrics to the Paparazzi song say: We are the crowd We're a co-coming Ready for those flashing lights Baby, there's no other superstar… I obviously left out the boy in Australia who will be the next great director. I’m excited to discover all the other amazing talents I left out around the world. CrunchBase Information Shervin Pishevar Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Are You A Pirate? | Top |
| I read blog posts by Don Dodge and Glenn Kelman today about people jumping from Google to Facebook and it got me thinking about entrepreneurs. Most people have an aversion to risk, my college economics professor told me. Which means they have to be rewarded to take on that risk. The higher the risk, the higher the possible payout has to be for people to jump. We make risk/reward decisions every day, all day. Do I go skiing, and enjoy the rush of flying downhill even though there’s a small chance I’ll blow out a knee? Should I go to college or just get a job and start earning money now? Should I eat the high fiber and generally healthy thing on the menu, or go for the cheeseburger? Should I hit the restroom before the movie starts? Etc. Every time we do something, or don’t do something, there’s a risk/reward algorithm being calculated in our brain. Entrepreneurs, though, are all screwed up. They don’t need to be rewarded for risk, because they actually get utility out of risk itself. In other words, they like adventure. The payouts for starting a business are just terrible when you account for risk. A tiny minority of entrepreneurs ever get rich. And the majority of entrepreneurs would probably make far more money, and have more stable personal relationships, if they just worked for someone else. In my youth I was a corporate lawyer, making a very nice salary for representing technology startups in Silicon Valley. There was a good chance I’d make partner after 7-8 years and could be earning maybe a million dollars a year by the time I was 40. All I had to do was work hard, and bring in clients. I was good at both. But I left the law after just three years to join a startup. And the reason I did it was adventure . I wanted to be in the game , not just watching it. My parents thought I was crazy. They still have no real idea of what I do for a living, and they were, frankly, pissed off that I spent their money getting a law degree, only to throw it away before I was 30. But I did it anyway. And then I left that company after a year to start my own company. And I’ve never looked back since then. That first company I started made a lot of money for the venture capitalists – nearly $30 million – but next to nothing for the founders. The companies I started after that varied between failures and mediocre successes. But at no point did I ever consider getting a “real job.” That felt like a black and white world, and I wanted technicolor. Also, I hate working for other people because I’m really bad at it. When I talk to non-entrepreneurs about the startup world I often use a pirate analogy. Not because I know that much about pirates, but the general stereotypes work well as an analogy. Why did some people way back in the 17th century, or whenever, become pirates? The likely payoff was abysmal, I imagine. There’s a very small chance you’d make a fortune from some prize, and a very large chance you’d drown, or be hung, or shot, or whatever. And living on a small ship with a hundred other guys must have sucked, even for the captain. But in my fantasy pirate world these guys just had really screwed up risk aversion algorithms. Unlike most of the other people they actually lusted after that risk. The potential for riches was just an argument for the venture. But the real payoff was the pirate life itself. Also, it was nearly impossible to be an entrepreneur back then. Now it turns out that most people in Silicon Valley are actually normal risk averse types. They carefully calculate the potential rewards of a startup before they join, taking into account stock options as well as salary. And also the resume value of a company. Some of the richest people I know aren’t really entrepreneurs. They worked at HP and then moved to Netscape when it got hot. They made a fortune and then jumped to Google and made another fortune. And now they’re jumping to Facebook. They may be very good engineers, or sales people, or marketing, or execs. But they ain’t entrepreneurs. They’re just resume gardening and they’re really no different from everyone else. I don’t care if you’re a billionaire. If you haven’t started a company, really gambled your resume and your money and maybe even your marriage to just go crazy and try something on your own, you’re no pirate and you aren’t in the club. That thrill of your first hire, when you’ve convinced some other crazy soul to join you in your almost certainly doomed project. The high from raising venture capital and starting to see your name mentioned in the press. The excitement of launch and…gulp…customers! and the feeling of truly learning something useful, you’re just not sure what it is, when the company almost inevitably crashes and burns. Now that person is interesting. That person has stories to tell. That person is a man who has been in the arena . There are lots of things that I will probably never experience in this life. Military combat. Being dictator of a small central American country. Dunking a basketball. Being a famous rocks star. Or walking on the Mars. But one thing I have been, and will always be, is an entrepreneur. And damnit that feels pretty good. Because if I was a lawyer right now, even a rich lawyer, I’d always have wondered if I had what it takes to do something a little more adventurous with my life than work for someone else. | |
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