Disrupting Complacency - It Only Works Until It Doesn't
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Slides (and audio, if I can make it work) of my keynote presentation at UnGagged London, 2015. It's all about my story of disruption, and being disrupted, and dealing with it. You can, too!
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Disrupting Complacency - It Only Works Until It Doesn't
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Notas do Editor
- I'm Evo Terra, and I used to be just like you.
- I got my start on the web in 1994, when I convinced some bigwigs that I knew more about the internet than anyone else in the company. And I did. It was 1994. The <blink> tag was still hot. I eventually led the team that built the first ecommerce platform in our vertical. Yeah. I'm old.
- I made the jump to advertising after getting my ass chewed out by the CEO for not spending the half a million dollars allocated to my ad budget. Wait, you can ADVERTISE? On the internet? That sounds like fun. So I did, and in a couple of years, I'd left the company to join the advertising agency as their VP and Managing Director.
- I stumbled into the world of new media, won a few awards in the early days of podcasting, wrote a few books, drank a lot of beer, and was paid quite handsomely to tell clients what not to do. I called it "digital strategy". Killer!
- But then a little something I like to call "2008" happened, and the party was coming to an end. So joined a large ad firm, running large teams doing digital ad buys, strategy, social content marketing, enterprise SEO. Five years there as the VP of Media and Innovation.
- But after 20 years -- jesus -- in the digital space, I started noticing a few things. Not just the rampant, never ending change that was digital... but something deeper.
- Google, as Marcus brought up in the kickoff keynote spot, was no longer a search engine.
- Seriously. They made $17.3B in revenue Q1 2015. You don't need $17.3 B dollars to run a fucking search engine. When you make that kind of money, you use that kind of money to do something else entirely. The revenue from ad dollars is simple the means to and end.
- Google will make self-driving cars a reality by summer. Laws have been passed. And if you live in Mountain View -- or rather along a handful of routes in Mountain View -- you'll see cars driving themselves right along side you.
- Google's space elevator plans are very real. They're on hold right now because they need material sciences to catchup. But the engineering and physics? They work.
- Right now, they're spending a goodly sum fixing a problem I really, *really* care about: death. Seriously. Not just life extension of the shitty years, either. Literally slowing down the aging process, so we live not just longer, but better. Hurry up?
- And it's not just Google. Paypal lets us do something stupidly trivial yet genius -- send money via email. They're changing the way we see economic models world wide.
- But that's not the amazing part. The money from Paypal helped build an electric car that not only works, but is the hallmark of luxury and success. An electric car.
- It's had enough of the bullshit surrounding solar power and is putting roof tops to work in cities all over the globe.
- And I'm pretty damned sure that Elon wants to be Captain Kirk. But Elon doesn't have a Federation of Planets. So he's building his own. Because he really, REALLY wants to go to Mars.
- Amazon is the dominate player in online commerce.
- And they're still not profitable? Yep. They lost $57M Q1 2015. Seriously. Look it up. And no one cares
- Their founder doesn't. Instead, he's focused on creating a shipping company to outerspace.
- Finally, I noticed a huge amount of money and an entirely new concept of "incubation" and "acceleration" on high-growth / high-value startups...
- Where even the top "schools" like Y Combinator boasted a 90% failure rate. Yet people couldn't wait to get inside, and investors couldn't wait to make the next big risky bet.
- It was pretty clear that the future was in startups. Over the prior decade, I'd founded five different startups. Three were in publishing, one was in media, and another in financial services.
- But to me, it looked like the metric for success was broken. To be considered a success -- which simply means more access to more money -- a startup has to grow fast. What grew didn't matter. Number of users. Downloads. Revenue. Didn't matter. 10% monthly growth doesn't sound all that aggressive, until you realize that in a year, you've grown 3x. And in two years, 10x. That's what gets investors excited.
- So I, the VP of Media and Innovation at the agency, along with the President and the CFO, decided to make our own startup... focused on startups.
- We had two unique angles. First, rather than focus on a specific vertical, like manufacturing, bio medical, or tech, we'd instead look for disruptive startups. Space Elevator Nintendo Wii That's what we wanted to replicate. Not at the same scale, necessarily.
- Because for every startup landing multi-million dollar VC raises, there were hundreds more bootstrapping or getting by with $10-50K injections from angels. That's would be our market, our underserviced minority, if you will.
- And then shit happened. Six months after we opened our doors, we were told by my wife's doctors on no uncertain terms that she could not live in Phoenix. It wasn't quite killing her, but was certainly lowering her quality of life.
- So we began to look for our new home, with visits to potential cities, scoping out the job market, and working the network. A few exploratory phone calls made it clear that neither of us would have trouble. My skills were perfect the C-Suite, and Sheila was a college professor and an instructional designer.
- Or we could choose none of the above! If we really were as desirable as it seemed, with skills that weren't going out of date anytime soon, maybe a sabbatical was in order.
- I’m not a billionaire! Hell, I'm not even rich, I didn't have a huge nest egg, with houses or stocks i can liquidate into cash. And I certainly didn't want to start dipping into 401K or retirement funds.
- So we sold everything. Literally. Save a few baby books and other items that simply can't be replaced, the entire sum of our possessions is upstairs in our room. We sold everything to give us the cash -- about $20K -- to travel for a year.
- On January 16th, we boarded a one-way flight to France. It wasn't quite Mars, and it looked like I'd have to wait a while before picking my new Tesla Model S, but it would certainly be an adventure.
- Only my sabbatical wasn't quite a sabbatical. Just before we left, my prior partners offered to keep me on retainer -- albeit at a much reduced rate -- to keep writing and producing content for the company.
- A small number of people I'd worked with previously became clients for small projects here and there.
- And offers to keynote at conferences were extended in London (Thanks, Craig!) & Thailand.
- So wait a minute. Maybe I was on to something here. We were absolutely loving this new digital nomad lifestyle. Maybe, just maybe, we could turn this into an ongoing thing, and not just a sabbatical.
- We have saying back in the states: eat your own dogfood. Of course as agencies, we typically don't do that, with atrocious websites. So looked at my new world through the lens of the tenets of disruption: $2T Serial (and other shows) are surfacing an untapped audience who want something more than just top 10 lists and ratings/reviews. They want stories, and I'm a damned good story teller. But the game is still to produce more content than the next guy. No sweat. I write really fucking fast, so I can fund myself that way. Scale? Well...
- So we're bootstrapping it, paying as we go.
- We have enough runway for at least 2015... and probably a good bit of 2016 now. But we're NOT focused on revenue. Some is good, but we're still proving out our business model by testing hypothesis. Startups that focus on revenue too quickly fail to thrive and miss larger opportunities, and we don't want to fall into that trap.
- What we care about most of all is momentum. That 10% monthly growth rate. Which, I'm happy to say, we're exceeding.
- Most importantly -- WE'RE NOT FREAKING OUT! Even if we're wrong, and we're completely broke at the end of 2015... I have valuable, marketable skills. A year of global travel experimenting with a new style of content creation improves adds to my resume. My wife has valuable, marketable skills. A year of global travel with exposure to different countries and cultures makes her very attractive to universities and multinational corporations.
- The worst thing that could happen? We have to go back and get jobs. WE WILL NOT WIND UP LIVING IN A VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER. This, I have come to realize, is an unjustified fear.
- I want to leave you with five thoughts.
- Shit. Will. Happen. Markets will change. Tactics will stop working. Partners will quit. Competitors will come in... whatever. No amount of planning and preparation will prevent fundamental disruptive change from happening. But...
- YOU ARE JUST LIKE ME. Seriously. In fact, you're probably even better than me. The tactics you know are one thing, but it's the strategy of how you came up with those that's really powerful. Your brain is your greatest asset, even if the world shifts underneath you. You can -- and always do -- adapt.
- It takes a lot less money than you think to try something brand new. You don't have to sell off everything you own.
- You'll be amazed how much support you have, from your existing network of friends AND the friends you meet along the way. And if nothing else, they're there when you need to come back to reality.
- And fuck that ladder, man. Kick open a window and go explore a few floors.
- Because that's what we did. Our complacency was disrupted, and we kinda don’t care!