Millennials: 10 Things Old Farts Won’t Tell You About Entrepreneurship (Fifth in the series)

March 7, 2016May 10, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

5. You Can’t Win, If You Can’t Walk

Bert was one of the most successful people I’ve ever known. He was the co-owner of a construction company I worked for in my twenties. His whole life would change when he had a chance meeting with the creator of TV Guide, Walter Annenberg, on a bike ride in Rancho Mirage. From that fateful meeting, he went on to become fast friends with Ronald Reagan and a behind the scenes power broker in the California Republican party.

But before that time he was a roughneck that made good. He was always helping people regardless of their color, religion or political beliefs. He used to take me along to deal negotiations. On these long trips we would discuss and sometimes debate politics, unions or the general state of the nation. He was older, rich and on his way to becoming wealthy and conservative. I was young, broke and very liberal. There were things we didn’t see eye to eye about, but I never felt judged by him. He always treated me with respect even if he thought my opinion was less than smart.

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Millennials: 10 Things Old Farts Won’t Tell You About Entrepreneurship ( Fourth in the Series) | Peter Mehit

February 22, 2016March 7, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

4. Minimum Viable Products Can Be Missing Valuable Pieces

Fail fast. Fail forward. Nice, glib encouragements that old farts will give you from the security of their wealth and comfort. Use lean start up techniques to consolidate your ideas into a minimum viable product (MVP) that you can get in front of the market to see if there’s interest. Use the least amount of effort and treasure to see if there are buyers. Once you get a spark, pivot toward a business model that you can monetize by adding costly but more unique aspects to your product or app.

It makes sense. Think of your start-up effort as more of a lab than a business. You’re experimenting more than launching and using the results to fine tune the next moves toward the market. If you’ve done everything properly, even your failures will teach you something as you assemble the information you need to identify your ideal customers and build the product they want to buy.

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Millennials: 10 Things Old Farts Won’t Tell You About Entrepreneurship (Third in a series) | Peter Mehit

February 3, 2016February 22, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

3.You can’t succeed without the ‘f’ word

I know what you’re thinking. Either a.) he can’t possibility mean that ‘f’ word or b.) the ‘f’ word is focus. Focus would be a good ‘f’ word. Nothing truly gets done without it. People who think they are multitaskers are really deluding themselves. Not even computers multitask. Designers just add more cores, but each one of them is only processing one instruction at a time, really, really fast.

We teach people how to visualize businesses and focus is an important part of it. I can tell you I get my best results when I can eliminate distractions. But that’s not the ‘f’ word we’re talking about.

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Millennials: 10 Things Old Farts Won’t Tell You About Entrepreneurship (Second in a series) | Peter Mehit

January 25, 2016February 3, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

2. Nobody With A Job Can Help You Become An Entrepreneur

If you spend two seconds thinking about that statement, the truth of it becomes evident. Unfortunately, if you want to become an entrepreneur, the most visible sources of help are the least helpful.

It doesn’t matter how much information you have about how businesses are launched, the missing element is the courage to actually take risks. The entrepreneur, while reducing risk, must embrace it to make their goal a reality. If you need a steady paycheck, you are not an entrepreneur. So why would you get direction from someone who does?

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Millennials: 10 Things Old Farts Won’t Tell You About Entrepreneurship (First of a series) | Peter Mehit

January 18, 2016February 22, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

1. You’re not going to win the pitch contest – even if you win it

Shark Tank is great entertainment. It’s the perfect reality TV format. Entrepreneurs, fresh with enthusiasm and ideas vs. hostile moneyed elites tearing their dreams asunder for the entertainment of the viewing audience. America loves a good fight, and Shark Tank delivers the humiliation and put downs that make great television. But the link between it and actual reality is tenuous at best.

“But there are winners,” you protest, “Checks get written.”

Do they? We had the privilege of participating in an event where some of the contestants of Shark Tank came out to meet the faithful who were dreaming of following in their footsteps.

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Wikipedia Has Won | Peter Mehit

January 4, 2016January 11, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

“These statistics,” I said, “Where did you get them?” The writing was solid and everything made sense, but there was no source attribution.

It was 2005. We’ve just gotten serious staff for the first time. The writer was a fresh faced woman from Texas, who, by the way, possessed serious brains and a dangerous wit. She answers me confidently.

“Wikipedia.”

“The open source online encyclopedia?,” I asked. Wikipedia was only four years old and notoriously inaccurate. I wanted sources as close to the information as we could get.

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Internet Slander Machine | Peter Mehit

November 9, 2015November 17, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

I admit it. I was under a rock. I hadn’t heard about Peeple until I watched John Oliver’s hysterical send up of it on Last Week Tonight. Touted as Yelp for people, the application would have allowed you to create a profile for someone you wanted to rate (without their consent) and then rate them using 1 to 5 stars along with comments. If you posted something negative, the subject had 48 hours to talk you out of posting it. If negotiations didn’t work, the posting went up and you could engage in rebuttal on the site. And all of those comments would stay up forever because you couldn’t delete your account.

What could possibly go wrong in this scenario?

The Washington Post saw the possibilities for abuse and slammed the site as it was coming out in its beta launch to a limited number of opted-in users. Julia Cordray and Nicole McCullough pitched Peeple as a ‘positivity app’ designed to ‘lift up people’. To be fair, they also limited profanity, sexism and discussion of private health conditions. But the fundamental premise, that others have the right to rate you on a public platform without your permission and that you are reduced to a star rating was what the Post found most disturbing.

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10 Things I Learned from ‘We Are Anonymous’ | Peter Mehit

November 2, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

I read Parmy Olsen’s ‘We Are Anonymous’ over the weekend. It is the story of the infamous hacker collective that brought down the Church of Scientology, Pay Pal, Master Card, Visa, Sony, the FBI and CIA among their numerous conquests. It’s a fascinating read about a culture based on a contradiction: A few very talented, capable, creative people performed truly heinous acts because of their belief that their lives were pointless. Their nihilistic perspective drove them until they were caught.

The participants were young. The oldest was 28, the youngest 16. Uniformly, they were the socially awkward. They were bullied and marginalized for most of their lives. Most left the education system in middle school because they were bored or mistreated. All of them lived with parents or relatives, reeking havoc on some of the largest organizations in the world from their bedrooms.

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Bright Angel Within | Peter Mehit

September 28, 2015September 28, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

It doesn’t matter the time of day; the view from Bright Angel point on the Grand Canyon’s north rim is breathtaking. From rust, to red, to pink and metallic green, the weathered rock presents history itself at the boundary of each color. Millions of years laid bare for the eye to see, for the mind to imagine, the timelessness of the earth. The insignificance and interconnectedness of a single person is instantly apparent.

I’ve had this same experience walking the streets of New York among the massive buildings and crowded streets. The insane energy of that place, always in motion, penetrates my psyche. In both places I am awake and connected. I hear everything clearly. My eyes are open and receiving. Most importantly, my mind is quiet.

That is what inspiration is. It is simultaneous connection from deep within our selves to the world that makes us awake and aware. When we are inspired, we are present and invested this moment, the only place we actually live. This connection shuts down the nearly non-stop self talk we engage in. It opens us up to messages from our environment and the thoughts of others. That is why inspiration is so important, because it gives us a way to get outside of our own boundaries, if only for an instant.

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