www.iThinkubator.com You know the saying, 'Its not WHAT you know, its WHO you know'. Well, that's not entirely true, to be successful today in any business venture where there is some form of technology involved with the business functions, whether its sales, service or administrative. I would think that WHAT in statement would come in handy. Here is the scenario which backs up my claim that the WHAT is just as important and sometimes more important based on the business situation at hand. In 1997, I turned 21 years old and I was given a terrific opportunity to do something that I loved to do, which I was great at and got paid a lot of money for a 21 year old with no bachelor degree to get paid to do. I was offered a job as a general manager at nightclub with a long history of success there, with Rolling Stones, Aerosmith and many more well known national acts performing there over a 40 year period. One of my responsibilities as the general manager was to generate more business and retain the current clientele we already had. I, alongside of everyone else at the time knew that the internet was the medium of the future for instant contact and to gather detailed information quickly. I took it upon myself to learn web design and development, so I could build the nightclub a website which would keep the nightlife scene in Worcester and the surrounding areas informed on what was happening at the club. This was 1999 and needless to say the stock market for companies in the technology sector were through the roof and if you added a dot com to the end of a non-existent business name with no real revenue model, venture capitalist were throwing money at you hoping to beat there counterparts to acquiring the next big pets.com. I loved programming and developing anything that had to do with the internet. I was pretty good at it too, if I do say so myself. I quit my night job as the general manager for a day job as a Web Application Developer for ZEFER. This was an amazing and exciting time in my life. I was paid handsomely with a hefty signing bonus, foosball 24/7, beer filled coolers on the premises, I worked with 500 employees between the ages of 18 to 35 with a great level of intelligence and experience in technology to share with me and to top it all off I was offered 5000 shares of the company at .01 on the dollar, which they were planning there initial public offering within 3 months of my start date. I was going be rich, every tech company on the NASDAQ was hitting highs of $200 to $300 a share the first day on the market. Life was great! Well, we know how that story ended, ZEFER, MarchFIRST, Scient, Viant and even Razorfish all went down without a fight and my employer burned through 100 million dollars of some rich guy in Chicago cash and closed its doors. I moved on and had many good positions with strong successful companies since then, I learned a lot about technology and what worked in the IT world and what didn't. Now back to the initial reason for this article and to prove my point, 'It is WHAT you know'. Today I have an internet business on the rise only 6 months young and I've already accomplished a lot with little to no capital, but to do this I took all of the failures that I was exposed to as an internet developer and used it to my favor. ShipIQ, 3Plex, ZEFER and too many more IT busts to mention, all of these were great ideas and had business needs to be filled, but they lacked experienced leadership, had bad execution or spent too much money on company infrastructure and not enough on testing the market and prototypes. With the bad comes the good, I took the experiences of successful ventures which I worked on and incorporated the successful touch points into my own business model with today's current technology to help me enter the internet industry quickly and with minimum capital. I saved time and money on business and product development which I did by myself. My brainstorm and think tank, www.neEvent.com which supplies New England nightlife event listings, event promotions and city living guide is appraised at $150,000 of business development man hours which I would have never been able to come up with if I had not been experienced with the WHAT I needed to complete this project and launch it in a timely manner. So having experience and understanding in the market that you are attempting to penetrate at a high and competitive level is very important in order be successful economically. There is a reason why you see so many articles on 'Do What You Know', its because its true to form. P.S.
Not to discount 'It's WHO you know', if I did not have the nightlife connections from my days as a nightclub manager I would have not been able to make the partnerships needed to make neEvent.com a success. |
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