Jess (& co.) have now knocked out the indoor Dobbin shoot, and just in time; if the production schedule holds, their Spring ’13 line should launch next week. Just-in-time fashion: excellent for incorporating trend and customer feedback; terrible for a startup company’s mental health.
[Ed. note: yes, friends and family who wrote in to correct, I know that the phrase is 'compliments to the chef' with an 'i'. This was an attempt at cleverness - entrepreneurship being a complement to cheffing - that apparently wasn't so clever after all. Tough crowd.]
Recently, I’ve started to notice how many entrepreneurs are interested in both cooking and photography. Which makes a lot of sense.
Entrepreneurship is basically the art of slogging daily through nebulous victories and vague defeats, for years and years at a time. Successful startups are those where the victories at least slightly outpace the defeats, consistently enough for the edge to compound gradually. Even in today’s world of lean startups, of building minimal viable products and iterating fast and always shipping, the process of slogging and compounding moves excruciatingly slowly. It takes a long time to see anything happen, and an even longer time to see anything incontrovertibly significant – anything big enough to impress your mom or your non-entrepreneur friends.
Like entrepreneurship, cooking and photography are about making something from scratch, and about sharing it with others. Unlike entrepreneurship, they also let you do so exceedingly quickly. Over the course of an afternoon, you can create something that never existed before, yet that’s still good enough to be appreciated by family, friends or the broader world. And it’s not just the immediate validation – that appreciation (or lack thereof) also provides fast and clear feedback to quickly guide iterative improvement.
After a long day of slow slog, it’s hard to explain how very gratifying that can be.
About a year back, I joined One Medical, a startup-esque medical practice that’s quickly spread from San Francisco to New York, Washington D.C., Boston and Chicago. Recently, Jess joined too. This past week, both of us went in for flu shots.
The experience at One Medical is so good that I actually find it slightly confusing each time I’m there. How can they be making money doing this? Why aren’t other medical practices like this, too? But, at some level, I don’t really care. For a fairly low fee ($199 a year), I can make doctors appointments online, often for the same day; I can email with my doctor about medical questions; appointments start on time (and I mean really on time – Jess’ doctor was twelve minutes late for her 5:00pm appointment, and gave her a Starbucks gift certificate by way of apology for being ‘so behind’); and the doctors (at least the three I’ve seen so far) are knowledgable, friendly, and extremely competent. They happily take insurance. And because they collect information when you make the appointment online, I breeze in and out without even stopping to fill out the standard clipboards full of forms.
They’re not an Outlier portfolio company. But they are, to me, exactly the kind of company that’s exciting to me and Outlier. They take a common experience – going to the doctor – that’s clearly broken, and improve it so much that, as Jess did to me after her first appointment, you want to text someone just to say wow.
Apparently in need of glasses, the staff of DuJour Magazine describes me as “5-foot-6, with a lean, athletic build developed from years of working out regularly — picture Bruce Lee”.
Apparently very short on content, the CrossFit Journal recently interviewed me about the growth of CFNYC:
As an owner and board member of several companies, I find a lot of the political rhetoric around ‘job creation’ very confusing.
When I’m thinking about whether we need to hire more people at a company, here are the things I consider:
And here’s one that thing that I’ve never even remotely considered:
Fellow business owners, are you honestly telling me your marginal income tax rate is what drives your hiring decisions?
The New York Times: ‘A Military Regimen: Bring the Pain’
In 2005, though, there were no CrossFit gyms in the state. Joshua Newman recalled doing CrossFit workouts with friends at the Arthur Ross Pinetum Playground in Central Park while children and their parents stared in bewilderment.
“We got kicked out of Equinox, New York Underground Fitness, Peak Performance, Trainer’s Place,” said Mr. Newman, 32, a former mixed martial arts competitor who runs a venture capital firm in Manhattan. “The owners complained that we were too loud and crazy.”
When Mr. Newman founded CrossFit NYC in 2007, with a paltry 22 members, their informal motto was “They can’t kick us out of here.”
Today, the business is one of the largest affiliates in the world, with more than 1,100 members and two sprawling spaces in the Flatiron district totaling around 24,000 square feet. (The rent is $60,000.) It is seeking a third space in Manhattan to accommodate its growing clientele.
How to tell you’ve been working with your business partner too long:
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Joshua Newman
Date: Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 10:25 AM
Subject: Re: Cash flow through 31 May 2012
To: Hari Singh
Just updated the report. I assume we want to simply track “the number”, “the other number” and the actual members report number, yes?
j
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Hari Singh
Date: Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 10:28 AM
Subject: Re: Cash flow through 31 May 2012
To: Joshua Newman
Frighteningly, I think I actually understand what you’re asking here.
There’s been a lot written recently about ‘startup hubs’ – places like Silicon Valley and New York City, where the critical mass of investors and entrepreneurs create a positive feedback loop: the startups attract dollars, the dollars attract more startups, which in turn attract even more dollars, back and forth and back until a whole ecosystem of entrepreneurs and investors and employees and supporters crop up in one place, in a way that makes all of the players more likely to succeed.
Obviously, there’s a lot about that startup hub model that’s excellent, which is why most of the discussions have centered around how to create startup hubs in other places, or how to bolster them in places where they already exist.
But there are downsides to hubs, too. Chief among them the insular, almost provincial mindset that people tend to develop when they deal all day and night only with other people just like themselves.
Consider Hollywood, another sort of hub, which makes a disproportionate number of movies about making movies. If you’re in LA, every single person you talk with is somehow involved in the film industry, so movies about making movies start to seem like they’d have nearly universal appeal. (Mea culpa: Back at Cyan, I actually exec produced a totally indulgent, inward-focused, movie-making movie. It sucked.) Turns out, most people in the real world have only a passing interest in the business of the movie business, as the lackluster box office performances of film-focused films like What Just Happened and The TV Set demonstrated, despite their star-studded casts.
Similarly, in the tech world, a distressingly high percentage of the startups cropping up these days seem to solve problems and address pain points that only exist within that tech startup world. Consider the much-buzzed-about Klout, which simply ranks users’ power and influence by analyzing their social media habits. Outside the tech world, the vast majority of internet users could give two shits about how much of a ‘power player’ they are on Twitter. And even those who do might question the accuracy of a power and influence ranking system that puts a slew of bloggers ahead of President Obama. Still, inside the bubble, that seems reasonable enough to have driven a $30m funding round for Klout last fall – at a $200m valuation, and led by venerable VC Kleiner Perkins, nonetheless.
On balance, the advantages of startup hubs still clearly win out. But there’s real value in regularly traveling, socializing, and thinking outside of the confines of that hub. Facebook may now be a prime driver of the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem, but it started in a lonely freshman dorm room, three thousands miles away.