How entrepreneurs can turn what they love doing into successful businesses.
Eileen Gittins
About 10 years ago when I was fundraising for my second startup, I came across a former entrepreneur-turned-VC who had decided to return to the trenches. It was clear she was more than happy running her new company--she was unabashedly delighted. I remember thinking, "Really?," because her company was developing back-end technology that, honestly, was lost on me.
Most people think about their jobs as the thing they do, instead of the thing they get to do. When you can build a culture where people feel privileged instead of entitled, that's magic. And that's what the best Silicon Valley companies do: They tap into the power of personal passion.
Entrepreneur Lesson One: Do Something You Love
This is the first lesson in my own entrepreneurial playbook: Do something you love. Life will throw a lot of pies in your face, and there will be days when you can't get out of your own way--so there better be something big that sustains you. Big as in "you just can't not do this" big. Like when artists say they paint because they have to, or writers say they write because they can't not. It has to be way more than a paycheck.
Entrepreneur Lesson Two: Don't Be Afraid To Show It
Being a female CEO in a male-dominated business, the natural tendency is to be "more like Mike." That typically implies a non-emotional, fact-driven communication style. For the women out there reading this, please fight that feeling. Wear your passion on your sleeve. Men too. It's infectious. Everybody--whether a prospective investor, customer, employee or partner--wants to team up with people who love what they are doing and aren't afraid to say so.
When I was raising money for Blurb, a book publishing company, in late 2004 it was a very contrarian play. Everything was going online. Yet here I was pitching a business that would take the digital back to analog. Crazy, I know.
While there were many reasons Blurb ultimately got funded, I believe that principal among them was not only how passionate we were about the business, but how willing we were to communicate that passion. In addition to being a great business, it would be so much fun to enable everyone with a broadband connection and 10 bucks to be globally published. How could we not do this?
Entrepreneur Lesson Three: Hire For Passion And Curiosity
Skill is actually not the most important thing we look for as we build our team. We look for people who are passionate about something, anything. It's actually a great interview conversation; I learn more about candidates in the interstices, in the "not business" moments, than when we are talking about SEM conversion or agile software development. As a result of asking the passion question, we (a) don't hire the people who can't answer the question and (b) have hired people who are competitive boxers, BMW driving school instructors, part-time DJs, theater stage managers, 5 a.m. San Francisco Bay rowers and aspiring screenplay writers.
No matter how our employees' creative juices manifest, these are people who will "get" our customers. They understand how intense the creative process is, how much it means and how special it is when the outcome is even better than imagined. At our core, that's the promise of Blurb. Employees who understand this will create great experiences for our customers--whether in software, on our site, in the quality of book they receive or the service they get along the way.
Our folks' natural curiosity will cause them to discover new opportunities, not because it's their job, but because it's their DNA.
Entrepreneur Lesson Four: The Power of Story
We recently hosted a meeting with our worldwide market development folks. When asked how they talked about Blurb, to my astonishment, each of them told the same story--how the company was founded by a CEO who was a photographer (and serial entrepreneur), who had been photographing folks she had built companies with and wanted to share the images and stories as a gift back to them. Since you couldn't "gift" a website, she decided to make a book. And she found out how impossibly difficult and expensive a proposition that was. The result: Blurb was founded out of a real need by someone who had something to say, who had a design sensibility, who cared deeply about image quality and who wanted to share with her community.
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By Eileen Gittins is chief executive officer of Blurb.
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