How to build an interesting company:
1. Address a large market,
2. in an industry where most of the companies are either well behind the times or simply run by stupid people,
3. where well-tested ideas and best practices from other industries can be freshly applied,
4. to create both ROI and a positive impact on the world.
Huge congratulations to the team at Higher One, the first portfolio company in the Silicon Ivy Venture Fund, where I was a founder and managing partner a decade back.
As of today, they’ve IPO’ed and are publicly trading on the New York Stock Exchange, under the symbol ONE.
Nice work.
After a swirling mess of 2009, 2010 seems to be off to a solid start for Cyan. Things are, as mentioned, calming down a bit, though mainly because our projects are for once happily moving forward, rather than all simultaneously coming off the rails. One of our films was just acquired, another is in the final throes of post-production, and a third gears up for pre-production at the end of next month.
Still, most of my day is spent fundraising and then fundraising some more. Movies ain’t cheap.
This morning, however, I had the brainstorm of all brainstorms, and I’ve been feverishly drafting documents since.
The idea itself – a tax-arbitrage structure leveraging Federal and state subsidies for film – is complicated, but the effect is simple: it reduces risk on a film investment to 15 cents on the dollar. In other words, invest $100, see potential upside from that full $100, but face a maximum loss of $15.
Which, I think, should make fundraising a fair bit easier. Those Goldman boys got nothing on me.
According to Men’s Health, being the head trainer at CrossFit NYC’s Brooklyn location is one of “The Coolest Jobs in America“.
Of course, they’re leaving out the part where you have to work for me.
One step forward, two steps back.
Newman’s First Law of Entrepreneurship:
Whatever you think your job is as CEO, your job is actually fundraising.
Back when I used to fight competitively, I discovered that I rarely went into the ring with more determination than my opponent. “Hey,” I’d think, “it’s just a sport.”
Then I’d get punched in the face. And all of a sudden, I’d start to get serious.
Sometimes, I’d break a tooth, or fracture a knuckle. And it was in those moments that I’d think to myself, “one of us is leaving here in an ambulance, and it isn’t going to be me.”
Vince Lombardi observed that it’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get back up. But, in my experience, the truth is a step further yet: if you get knocked down, make sure you get back up twice as determined, twice as sure of what you need to do, than you were before.
As Bruce Lee advised, “forget about winning and losing; forget about pride and pain. Let your opponent graze your skin and you smash into his flesh; let him smash into your flesh and you fracture his bones; let him fracture your bones and you take his life.”
On Friday, Yelling to the Sky, one of Cyan’s two current productions, starring Don Cheadle, Zoe Kravitz, and The Roots’ Tariq Trotter, started shooting.
Yesterday, the President of Estonia, with a cadre of Secret Service in tow, worked out at CrossFit NYC.
Speaking of next phases: it appears the last two years of re-structuring Cyan has paid off, as we’re now profitable.
[And it still definitely beats having a real job.]
For the past few years, Cyan has been working solely behind the scenes – putting together financial structures, building our infrastructure, and generally missing out on all of the fun parts of indie film in favor of more ulcer-inducing fare.
But, now, all that work is finally paying off, as we’re shifting back to actively making and releasing movies.
To kick off the shift, we’re counting down to pre-production on two new films, Keeper of the Pinstripes, and Yelling to the Sky.
In some ways, the two movies couldn’t be more different – the first a big-budget family film built around the New York Yankees, the second a small, gritty, race-complicated indie drama. But, in other ways, they’re quite similar – both coming-of-age stories, both driven by scripts strong enough to have garnered amazing casts.
We’re hoping to add three more films to our 2009 slate, all of which, ideally, we’ll be releasing in theaters throughout 2010. We have a number of strong contenteders for those three slots, but, at this point, we’re also focusing nearly all of our attention on simply surviving these first two.
As they’ll be consuming much of my life for the next couple of months, they’ll likely also be taking up a lot of this site. Stay tuned.
CrossFit NYC’s first location was on the fourth floor of a building in the Garment District. The building was old, with rickety construction, so perhaps it shouldn’t have been surprising when, after months of our jumping around and dropping weights and generally pounding the floor, the ceiling fell down onto our downstairs neighbors.
I don’t mean the entire ceiling, and – fortunately – I don’t mean that we actually knocked a hole through our floor and fell down to the level below. Instead, it was just a piece of the ceiling, a six by ten foot chunk of plaster that had shaken loose as much due to age and poor construction as from reverberation.
Still, from our downstairs neighbors’ perspective, we had knocked down their ceiling, and they weren’t thrilled about it. And they made that pretty clear.
Despite the death threats and the law suits, when we eventually moved out it had more to do with running out of space than with them. Still, we certainly weren’t sad to leave them behind.
Because it wasn’t just the ceiling. These guys came up to yell at us several times a day, saying they could hear every step we took across our thickly rubberized floor, saying we made it impossible for them to hold meetings.
Which I always found to be slightly funny. The guys downstairs were a messenger company. And I could never quite imagine what sort of critical meetings they might be holding, in our shithole of a building, all morning and afternoon long.
CrossFit NYC’s latest location is only ten blocks down from that first home, but it’s a world apart. The space is five times as large, clean, with showers and changing rooms, in a much newer, much nicer building. And, this time, when we moved in to the third floor, the second was still unoccupied. Which meant that whoever moved in below us would have a chance to hear whatever noise we might make beforehand, would know exactly what they were getting themselves into.
And, in this economy, with New York’s commercial real estate market collapsing, we reasoned, we might go neighborless for months or years before the space was filled.
Or not. We were in our new digs for less than a month before we discovered that a company had just leased the second floor.
It turns out, they’re a messenger company. And they’ve already visited us a few times about the noise.
Let’s hope their ceilings are screwed in tight.