Introduction - A Journey of Meaning
To read:
Man’s Search for Meaning: Viktor Frankl’s description of the emotional, spiritual, and social dynamics of his experience is humbling and beautiful, writes Sharath Patil in this review of Frankl’s masterpiece.
The world is awash in data: But data.world makes it discoverable, interoperable, and social – meaning an explosion of data-driven insights is at hand, technology journalism sage John Battelle wrote on the company’s launch in 2016.
Introduction
A Journey of Meaning
As with any entrepreneurial endeavor, The Entrepreneur’s Essentials is a book of many dimensions. Readers, I hope, will find inspiration in my struggles and successes, along with those of others shared here. I have sought to be as practical and prescriptive as possible; in a sense, this is in part a “how-to” manual. You will find tactical advice on everything from naming, to fundraising, to hiring, to communicating with your customers and team. This is balanced with strategic counsel, from how to choose early on whether you want to be rich or “king,” to how you should align with the dynamics of natural networks, to the true nature of risk and how to cope with it. I’ve also tried to be historical, placing the 60-odd-year-old model of venture-backed innovation both in the context of the two-century-old story of modern capitalism, as well as in the emerging future of commerce. This is a future of “Conscious Capitalism” and the “public benefit corporation” that places social and public good as responsibilities alongside profitability.
But more broadly, all of this, while critical, is mere background.
The real goal of entrepreneurship is, and must be, to live a journey of meaning. No matter what religion you follow, what meditative practice you engage in, and which philosopher or role model you admire, success is borne on the realization that the secret to life is to live one of meaning. That meaning is defined by you, and it is often very elusive to find your core truth. So when I boil it all down, this is not a book about business and commerce. Rather, The Entrepreneur’s Essentials is a book about meaning, through the prism of business and commerce. And just as Sir Isaac Newton discovered the prism in 1672, breaking light into its component colors and learning how to recombine the Sun’s rays, the entrepreneur is the discoverer of this prism of meaning. Entrepreneurialism is about innovation. A journey where you're combining not the rays of the Sun but instead new ideas, concepts, and technologies into products and services that you then refract into the marketplace in ways before unseen. And just as Sir Isaac is remembered for his remark about “standing on the shoulders of giants,” this quest for meaning is not one you can take alone.
Sure, with boosts from the media and Hollywood we often celebrate the “hero entrepreneur”... Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Bill Gates. But entrepreneurship isn’t an individual journey — you absolutely need great people to join the journey with you. Entrepreneurship is a team sport. And those who answer your call will need to identify with the meaning that you pursue for you to have a very meaningful journey together.
In this book, we’ll discuss the “sages” of business and business literature, from Clayton Christiansen, who wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma, to John Doerr who authored Measure What Matters, to Scott Galloway, who wrote The Four, and many more. To do that, and as entrepreneurialism is about innovation, this book carries a bit of innovation of its own, which is what I’ve dubbed the “Digital Companion.” This is located at the website TheEntrepreneursEssentials.com, where some will choose to read the book free online, while others will use it to support the new conventional, paper-bound edition. In a sense, it is a digital bibliography and there you will find — to bolster the learning from this book — further work of these and other giants, to read, to listen to, and to watch.
But the foundation of them all, the broad-shouldered “giant” to carry my Newtonian metaphor, is Viktor Frankl.
Frankl was a physician and psychiatrist in World War II Vienna. As he was a Jew during that fateful time, he and his family were swept up by the Nazis and he lost his parents and wife to the horrors of the Holocaust. Frankl was to survive three years in four concentration camps, including Auschwitz, a miracle he attributed to his deep commitment to finish a manuscript, an irrelevancy in the desperate hopelessness of Auschwitz. But this was the beginning of his search for meaning.
We all strive for meaning in our lives as Frankl eloquently described in his most important book, Man’s Search for Meaning. We will discuss Frankl further in this book, and I will include him and many others who have informed my own search for meaning. But Frankl’s basic message is that there are three ways to discover meaning. The first is by launching an endeavor, however, remote its success may seem at the outset. The second is by experiencing something or someone larger than yourself, by experiencing love in the sense of striving for true understanding. And the third stage is triumph, overcoming the once-seemingly impossible, which in his case was to simply survive. These three lessons, learned amid indescribable horror, were to yield the fruit of Frankl’s later life and successful career as a therapist, author, speaker, founder of logotherapy, and inspiration to millions.
Drawing on this, I have discovered my own morphology of meaning that applies to the creative process of entrepreneurship. It is a quest summarized in three stages: the first, irrelevancy; the second, relevance; and the third, must-have.
In my career, I have founded six firms, three of which became large companies, one of which, Bazaarvoice, went on to a public offering with a unicorn valuation, and another, my current company data.world, which is still quite successfully evolving through this conceptualization of commercial meaning and relevancy.
The irrelevancy stage is the hardest. At the outset, you have an idea that is a kind of free atom, not affected by others nor significantly affecting others in the marketplace. Your family and friends may think you are nuts to put your ego out there in a way that you could fail. Entrepreneurship is celebrated, yes, but most cheering know deep down that they will never be brave enough to take the journey. When founding Coremetrics in 1999, we embraced what came to be known as “Software as a Service,” or “SaaS,” before the concept really existed. The phrase, “the end of software” had yet to be coined, and we struggled to explain to customers just what our model of web analytics was and how it worked. Luck plays a big role in entrepreneurship and we were at the right place at the right time with our pioneering business model. The towering success of Salesforce.com, founded about the same time and as of this writing with a market cap of $187 billion, really validated that model. And soon we won Walmart.com, the world’s largest retailer as a customer. And, with that monumental milestone, we became relevant.
This made us appealing to the many retailers newly online who were flying blind as the existing solutions to provide the core metrics to run their business were not keeping up. Our delivery model was superior to our competitors and eventually, we disrupted them and became one of the global market leaders. We moved to the third stage, becoming a must-have in the industry. Even though the dot-com bust almost killed us, putting 97 of our 100 customers at the time out of business, we recovered well and were eventually bought by IBM for almost $300 million.
The journey for Bazaarvoice was similar. It was completely irrelevant at the beginning as Brant Barton, my co-founder, and I left Coremetrics in 2005 to together build the “voice of the marketplace.” Most everyone thought we were crazy with the then nearly-unknown idea of enabling customer reviews at retail sites. In particular, our insistence that negative reviews would not be censored struck many as suicidal. But we quickly proved that this made the reviews credible, and customers reading credible online reviews were found to convert at rates 90 percent higher than those who did not. As we became the hot new movement in online retailing, we became relevant with a vengeance. After Facebook opened to the public, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram were founded. The tsunami of social media, along with the 2007 advent of the iPhone, hit the marketplace. And we became a must-have as Facebook partnered with us and keynoted one of our Client Summits and Google invited us in to do an early integration for product reviews embedded in Google Search, to help launch a new form of advertising. Ultimately we went to an IPO with an over $1 billion market cap, and we were named one of the top five IPOs of 2012 by the Wall Street Journal.
And now, since 2016 after a brief attempt at “retirement,” I am working on data.world as my sixth startup. Just the same as before, data.world started out as irrelevant. Many of my longest-time friends, even successful entrepreneurs, were skeptical about the idea. Our initial idea at data.world was to be kind of a “GitHub for data”, and early press captured that as we worked hard to become relevant. With a lot of hard work building functionality and attracting hundreds of thousands and then eventually millions of community members, data.world began to grow. We became the world’s largest collaborative data community. Universities started to use us to help teach their data science and analytics courses. Governments began to sign up. Over 90 percent of the Fortune 500 made their way to data.world and joined to access the world’s largest collaborative public data catalog. We grew as fast as GitHub did during its early years. Attention from the media helped, including an essay by Industry Standard founder John Battelle, which I also share on the Digital Companion mentioned above. We became relevant for public data work. And then the big challenge — we needed to commercialize to become relevant for private data work.
At data.world, we have actively moved through the struggle from irrelevancy to relevancy and are working our way toward the must-have stage right now. You’ll learn more about how we are doing that in the coming pages. But it’s certainly led by the fact that just weeks before the publication of this book’s second edition, we concluded a $50 million growth fundraising round led by Goldman Sachs.
As you embark on reading The Entrepreneur’s Essentials, I’ve done my best to help you on your journey from the identification of your big idea to the movement from irrelevancy to relevancy to the must-have. As you read ahead, I hope that you will learn that all businesses ever created, no matter how small or great, followed this same path. Many entrepreneurs never make it beyond the irrelevancy stage but for those who do, the challenging endeavor will be the most psychically rewarding journey you can take. And don’t discount that when it does, luck and a lot of help from others will have helped you, and your team, make it so.
It is all about the pursuit of meaning. It is perhaps counter-intuitive that for an enterprise to be maximally profitable, it must have a purpose beyond profit. For some, this is an uncomfortable duality, even a conundrum. Quite the contrary, the embrace of this duality, of meaning, is the essential point of The Entrepreneur’s Essentials.
Yours in the entrepreneurial arena,
Brett A. Hurt