LA Unconfidential #9

L.A. Unconfidential, Number 9 June 12, 2000 A short one tonight. I feel like I’ve got no new stories to tell. Perhaps I’ve just become increasingly numb to the oddity of southern California in the midst of being totally consumed by work. You always hear about folks in start-ups being so into what they’re doing that they don’t notice life passing by as they burn up the hours and their bodies and their social skills. It’s ironic that I’ve come to do this in sunny southern California. This is a place that makes it hard not to notice when the sun is out. When you’re sitting in the office on a Saturday afternoon, you know just how lithe the beach volleyballers are only blocks from you. You know they’re frivolous. You know they aren’t learning as much as you. You know they’re challenge of punching a ball over a net isn’t contributing anything more meaningful than a moment of adrenalin rush and a maintenance schedule for their rippling abs. But, even though I’m obsessive about achievement, there is at least one beach volleyball point that is not lost on me. I look less and less like a beach volleyballer every day, and more and more like the ball. I’m working for a natural health company, and I’m inside with the fluorescent lights burning up my vitamins. I’m ten weeks into this adventure. And it is definitely worth it, but I’m looking forward to the time when it doesn’t feel like boot camp anymore. You don’t take this on—growing an unproven business model from scratch, working in chaos, and living under uncertainty—without knowing what you’re getting in to. But, as I’ve said previously, there’s no way you really know what you’re getting into before you’re there. Allow me the following paternalistic observation from the seat of my once comfortable but fast-disappearing naivete. Ten weeks wiser, now, I know exactly what I’d do differently if I had the last couple months to do over. I would do almost none of the things I have done—not because they were wrong. They weren’t. They’ve all been useful: competitive analysis, content strategy, costing the development pipeline, redesigning the look and feel of the site, re-branding the company, doing a few deals. But none of them was the thing I should have done. If I could have done only one thing in the first two months on the job, it would have been this: hire. I would have spent as long as I could stand bearing the business in its ugly embryonic state, and I would have scoured every contact in my network to find passionate, smart, bored people. I would have hired them at whatever was their going rate, imbued them with the founder’s vision, and put them to work figuring out some piece of what we were going to do next. I always thought the difference between intense consulting and intense business building was in the “active doing”. It’s not; it’s in the building. And you build companies with people, not with your own activity, no matter how exalted. You want to know why people are commanding obscene salaries? Show me a truly talented person, I’ll show you my willingness to be obscene. Thanks, by the way, for all the generous offers of willingness to have an all-expenses-paid winter vacation in southern California. Our HR person will get back to you. Really. We’ll do lunch.