On I Quit - #37
Hello Maiyah (and friends)!
Hope y’all are doing dandy on this fine August morning. I’m in Los Angeles now, so feel free to hit me up.
Also, format alert: I’m going to stay biweekly, except one key difference. I want to alternate between two writings: 1) an essay, and 2) a silly fiction. Essays will be longer (1000-1800 words) while silly fiction will be shorter (400-700 words). I’m also chucking the “News&Video” section since nobody clicks on it.
On my last post about Deep Work, some of you reached out… and said it looked like a lot of work to figure out when’s lunch.
(source of gif from here)
That said, I understand. And my response is… whatever. That was 2 weeks ago, we’re onto some new shit. Let’s get into this week’s essay lol
On I Quit
1,898 words | 07min 01sec reading time
I was perusing through the typical crud in my email this past Thursday - spam, fun newsletters, people you haven’t seen for 6 or so months – and I stumbled upon the Variety Insight newsletter that me and other college mates apparently still get. “Aaah!” I proclaimed with no pants on. “Variety Insight! The last true bastion of data and knowledge in Hollywood, second to reading the actual magazine itself.”
Now, full disclaimer: I’m not on top of “the industry”. I honestly don’t keep up with things. And industry-types, who browse justjared.com, will say with fingersnaps between words, “What! Don, you need to keep up! You need to know box office winners, TV ratings, who’s hot right now, you gotta keep up with the business 😎🌟🌴🎬.” Well, when the answers are always Marvel movies, Fox News, and Timothée Chalamet (which, let’s be real: fucking great actor, I can’t wait for Dune), I stop caring. I don’t bother reading the “features”. I just read the daily newsletter headlines that roll into my inbox. And if something’s really interesting, then I click on it.
Anyways, it was an email of what TV shows got greenlit or renewed recently in town, and this was the first thing that popped up:
A press release from Discovery goes into more (hysterical) detail…
They say in Hollywood, “All you got in this town is your opinion, that’s it.” So fuck it, here’s what I think:
This show is way more than just a bad idea. It perpetuates the toxic, stupid myth in this country of what it takes to be entrepreneurial.
In Adam Grant’s book Originals, he tests the idea of the entrepreneur that goes “all in” on their business idea. In Chapter 1, he writes:
In a fascinating study, management researchers Joseph Raffiee and Jie Feng asked a simple question: When people start a business, are they better off keeping or quitting their day jobs? From 1994 until 2008, they tracked a nationally representative group of over five thousand Americans in their twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties who became entrepreneurs. Whether these founders kept or left their day jobs wasn’t influenced by financial need; individuals with high family income or high salaries weren’t any more or less likely to quit and become full-time entrepreneurs. A survey showed that the ones who took the full plunge were risk takers with spades of confidence. The entrepreneurs who hedged their bets by starting their companies while still working were far more risk averse and unsure of themselves.
If you think like most people, you’ll predict a clear advantage for the risk takers. Yet the study showed the exact opposite: Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit.
If you’re risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it’s likely that your business will be built to last. If you’re a freewheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile. — Originals
(image ripped from this article)
This is Sara. In 1998, Sara, 27, sold fax machines door to door in the dead heat of Clearwater, Florida. She soon realized she wasn’t in the right business. Because of a work occasion, Sara had the idea of cutting the feet off her pantyhose – it was cool. A few thoughts later (and a crazy patent search), she realized that this could be the business she’s been searching for. Sara threw her $5k in savings into her footless pantyhose business. Even though she clearly saw it had market value and soon saw money rolling in, _she didn’t leave her fax machine sales job till 2 years after starting it._ Today, Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx, is worth $1 billion. (from How I Built This with Guy Raz on NPR)
Daymond John, an investor on the ABC show “Shark Tank”, was the founder of FUBU, the hip hop apparel company that was the hottest fashion brand in the late 1990s/early 2000s. During the 2017 iConic Conference in New York City, Daymond said:
“I was working at Red Lobster for five years as a waiter as I was running this business. […] it was 40 hours at Red Lobster and six hours at FUBU. Then it was 30 hours at Red Lobster and 20 hours at FUBU, because money started to come in.” Even after FUBU started to take off, John continued waiting tables. He wouldn’t do things any differently if he could, he told the audience on Wednesday: “Don’t quit your day job.” – CNBC article
“Well the entertainment industry is different. You either make it or you don’t,” you may think.
Zach Galifianakis worked at a few restaurants, one of them being his uncle’s Mexican restaurant in Times Square as a busboy for almost a decade till he made it to SNL. He was let go only 2 weeks after getting the gig. We can safely assume he went back to the restaurant even after his career started to ramp up with Reno 911, Adult Swim, and more. (from Off Camera with Sam Jones) (and here)
Olivia Wilde started pursuing acting professionally at 18. Did she pack her bags and say, “I’m gonna give myself $30K and 1 year and try to make it as an actor”? No. She didn’t know one thing about how the industry worked, so she immediately got a job through a family friend working for a casting agency. And she learned all the ins and outs of getting the job while holding a day job. (from Off Camera with Sam Jones)
David Baldacci, the thriller writer of 40 novels, was a lawyer and had a wife and kids to tend to. After he put his kids to bed at 10pm, he went to his study and wrote between 10pm and 2am. He did that for years. He didn’t just bail out on his lawyer money – he kept the day job. (from his Masterclass trailer)
Suroosh Alvi, who was a recovering heroin addict, pulled off Vice magazine in Montreal while he and his team were all on welfare. They worked their butts off to get advertising in and stories out. They were holding out on government funding, trying to keep personal costs low. The magazine was picked up locally and it eventually made its way to the desk of an investor. Once bankrolled, they moved to New York City. (from NPR’s How I Built This with Guy Raz)
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak didn’t risk everything on Apple. It was a mix of working out of Jobs’s parents’ garage and keeping their day gigs.
After inventing the original Apple I computer, Steve Wozniak started the company with Steve Jobs in 1976 but continued working full time in his engineering job at Hewlett-Packard until 1977. – Originals
Through their business connections and friends made in Menlo Park, they were then able to secure funding for Apple. (from Wikipedia)
And what about Bill Gates, famous for dropping out of Harvard to start Microsoft? When Gates sold a new software program as a sophomore, he waited an entire year before leaving school. Even then he didn’t drop out, but balanced his risk portfolio by applying for a leave of absence that was formally approved by the university—and by having his parents bankroll him. “Far from being one of the world’s great risk takers,” entrepreneur Rick Smith notes, “Bill Gates might more accurately be thought of as one of the world’s great risk mitigators.” – Originals, Adam Grant
Zuckerberg stumbled into making “thefacebook” during his free time one semester while at Harvard, and it spread like wildfire. After getting funding through Peter Thiel and guidance by Sean Parker, he took a semester off, set up shop in Silicon Valley, and worked on it. He didn’t formally drop out of Harvard till Facebook got steam. (from Wikipedia)
Michael Dell, 18, was a pre-med major at UT Austin. While living in Dobie Mall condominium, he had a side hustle of buying brand new computers, writing some software, and selling “hard drive disk kits” — basically upgrade kits for personal computers. Starting with $1000 of his own money, he sold these out of the condominium and made $50k to $80k a month. After scoring some contracts and realizing it’s cheaper to make the computer itself and sell that, it became Dell. In late 1983, his parents became worried that he was neglecting his studies, so he promised them that if Dell hit the fan by the end of his freshman year, he would go back to UT Austin and finish his pre-med work. (from NPR’s How I Built This with Guy Raz)
We hear about visionaries going all in on their idea and dropping college, but the reality is that they were extremely risk-averse. In the recesses of their mind, they thought, “If this doesn’t work out, at least I’m still enrolled.”
And last but not least, Tobias Lutke is the founder of Shopify…
… which is the company that is funding this show. Let’s think about this: Did Tobi think of revolutionizing e-commerce, renting a bunch of offices, hiring employees, getting VCs, and the whole enchilada, right off the bat? No. Far from it.
He never intended to start Shopify. He originally intended to sell snowboards. Upon arriving in Canada, he tried to get a job, but couldn’t. His visa was a whole mess, and a lawyer friend said, “Look, you can’t work for a local business – some Canadian law thingy… but you can form your own business.” So he took his coding skills and all his savings and thought of selling snowboards over the internet with his friend Scott. However, he couldn’t find a practical e-commerce platform (this was 2004) to start “Snow Devil”. Seeing he had no reasonable options, he said, “Screw it, I’m going to write the whole software to get this snowboard business off the ground.” Using Ruby on Rails, a programming language nobody used at the time (the manual was in Japanese), he lived with his girlfriend’s parents, wiping out his personal cost of rent. His “office” was various coffee shops. He and Scott made a killing off selling snowboards. Tobi kept tweaking the software and soon got emails from people saying, “Hey I was wondering if I could buy the software that you used to make Snow Devil?” Tobi and his partners pivoted from snowboards to software. He raised $200,000 from friends, family, family-friends, everybody he knew. He snagged a small office above the coffee shop he worked at, _built_ desks, and started Shopify. A year into Shopify, and married, he still lived with his in-laws, and soon ran out of money till an angel investor threw in $400k. He moved Shopify to Silicon Valley, aaaannnd 2008 hit. Money was depleting again. “This is it,” Tobi thought, “that’s it, it’s over.” Counter-intuitively, he saw the largest uptick in new users because of the 2008 crash. Because when you’re unemployed, you think, “I can start a business!” Shopify bounced back — a $1 million annual revenue was met. Shopify then established itself as a profitable venture for VCs.
The company received $7 million from an initial [series A round](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_A_round "Series A round") of [venture capital financing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_capital_financing "Venture capital financing") in December 2010.[\[15\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopify#cite_note-techvibes-15)[\[16\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopify#cite_note-16) Its Series B round raised $15 million in October 2011.[17} – Wikipedia
He raised $100 million in 2013. At this time, he “was basically making minimum wage,” Tobi stated to NPR_._ In 2014, he received “CEO of the Year” by Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail.
He moved out of his in-laws in 2014.
(from NPR’s How I Built This with Guy Raz)
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Tobi wouldn’t agree with Shopify’s new TV show for Discovery.
Don’t be like the people on “I Quit”. Don’t go guns-blazing on risk. If you have an idea, remember:
Don’t quit your day job.
Keep your costs low.
Work your ass off.
… oh, and most importantly:
Mitigate risk.
—
Originals by Adam Grant was one of the reasons why this newsletter started. If you want to read more of Adam Grant’s book_,_ go buy it here:
And yes, I make a dollar if you buy it. You’ll help pay for my lights lol
Also, I’m a huge fan of the How I Built This with Guy Raz podcast from NPR. He talks to founders on how they built their businesses. Check out the show where you get your podcasts.
Silly Sh*t
I saw Nocturnal Animals (2016). That ending was immensely unsatisfying.
I carved in about 30 hours of writing recently in the last week. I’m currently clocked at 57.3 pages, in prose, of preliminary work for my feature film script.
Making ground on my friend’s startup. Need to put in more hours.
I bought one of those mesh things for my front door. Sunday tonight is chilly! (yes, I wrote this Sunday night)
I did movie trivia today. I don’t know enough Hot Rod quotes I guess.
I bought a nice ass cheap rug. And brought some sculptures from the family business. And got some cheap plants at Home Depot. Seriously if you guys get a chance, totally check out my pad, we can watch a movie and eat a bucket of KFC.
I’m still unemployed, so if you know anyone needing an assistant, wellllll hit me up lol… please…
Thanks for reading!
Best,
Don