Preface to the Second Edition

As I write this, I’m on the way back from the main TED conference in Vancouver, sitting next to my good friend Dr. Peniel Joseph on a United Airlines flight. Peniel is a terrific leader and founded the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School at the University of Texas at Austin. He also serves as an Advisory Board member at data.world. It was an incredible TED, with all of the goodness of being back together in person as the pandemic becomes more endemic. I believe this was my 12th TED, and it did not disappoint, with one of my favorite entrepreneurs, Elon Musk, closing it out today. I named Elon the entrepreneur of the decade in a 2013 Lucky7 blog post, and that’s still true for this decade with his and his team’s amazing achievements at SpaceX, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and, yes, Tesla. I’m not saying I love everything about Elon, but no one touches him and his team in terms of raw output in getting truly “impossible” things done. Once his TED talks go live, I’ll share them with you on the Digital Companion - you’ll want to watch them. 

It was Peniel’s first TED, and it was special to share it with such a good friend. It is appropriate that I’m sitting next to him too as I write this. Peniel helped me more than any other friend with the open letter I wrote on the importance of diversity in tech companies, which I originally shared on Medium.com at the end of 2020. It was the most important piece I wrote that year, and it has now been adapted into Chapter 23 of this book to give it a proper conclusion. Thank you, Peniel — you are a real mensch.

This pandemic has had a very long arc, and I sometimes chuckle to myself at my naivety at the beginning of it. I sent a message to our team that we would be going home for two weeks to protect ourselves, our families, and our hospital systems. I had no idea at the time that it would be nearly two years until we started to get comfortable enough to get back into the office on a regular basis. The pandemic was a time of transformation for our nation and ourselves. It has also proven to be a time of extraordinary suffering and loss for so many, with over a million Americans dead and many businesses shuttered. We are in the midst of the Great Resignation, or the Great Realization, as my good friend Chris Hyams, the CEO of Indeed and also an Advisory Board member of data.world, put it at the Culturati conference on April 4, 2022.

I had my own realizations during the pandemic. Some of the practices that I believed so strongly in, like working together in an office every weekday to get stuff done together, faded away as I saw the level of productivity we could have working from home, with modern tools like Slack, Zoom, Google Docs, and our own data.world. I believed that everyone needed to be based in Austin while I was the CEO of Bazaarvoice. We only hired someone outside of Austin when we absolutely had to, and that was once we grew internationally to the point where Bazaarvoice needed a London office. I felt like I had made the right call in doing so - our culture was incredibly strong and Bazaarvoice was named the #1 place to work in Austin when it was small, medium, and then large. But I have to be honest that the culture at my current company, data.world, is just as strong, and as of this writing, we have around 30 percent of our 123 people located outside of Austin, across 21 states. And we’ve won a Best Place to Work award in Austin every year since our inception! Sure, we had no choice — we were doing our part to protect ourselves and society by bending the curve and all. But, as they say, necessity is the mother of invention. 

I remember when my good friend Josh Baer, CEO of Capital Factory and investor in data.world, tweeted: “Be a butterfly, not a turtle. Use this reset as an opportunity for growth and transformation — don’t just retreat into your shell and come out looking exactly the same” (@JoshuaBaer, April 18, 2020). I realize as I write this it may come off as privileged, and indeed it is. The reality is that the pandemic has been good for the knowledge economy workforce. The level of flexibility that we have now is unprecedented. Now that the vaccines are here and so well proven, you can easily blend the best of working in-person with working at-home, while being able to enjoy a guilt-free workout during the day or drop off or pick up your kids from school. I’m not saying it’s all been easy for people in the knowledge economy during this time — mental health has been a real challenge and people have worked to nearly the point of burnout in some cases. And I also worry about young people just starting out in their careers and who may really need that high-fidelity, in-person learning that occurs at the office. But I believe that we are learning to take the forced-by-necessity lessons of the pandemic to build back better than we did before. And it is clear that tech was the biggest winner during the pandemic, from the incredible impact of tech during this critical period to valuations that tech companies, including data.world, have enjoyed.

Another realization I had during the pandemic is that my online book, The Entrepreneur’s Essentials, should also be transformed. It became so natural to see speakers over videoconferencing, so why not make my book more accessible instead of only offering it in text on Medium? And then, serendipitously, Technion, the oldest university in Israel, came along and asked me to do just that. They wanted to leverage my book as the foundation for their entrepreneurial leadership course. As a proud Jewish American, I felt honored and humbled by the opportunity. Challenge accepted! To reach students most effectively, I recorded myself reading each chapter, so that they could either watch it on YouTube or listen to it on SoundCloud. Technion loved it and it was a success with their students. Now there is a long waiting list for the course. Tikkun olam!

The first edition of The Entrepreneur’s Essentials evolved from my blog, Lucky7.io, named in honor of my mom. I had helped many entrepreneurs (still do, and always will) and had codified the lessons I was teaching them in Lucky7 blog post after post. Then I compiled the best of those into the book in a very organic way, publishing as I went and finally finishing it in August of 2019. It was good, but not great. I worked with David Judson, the Co-founder and Editor of Urbānitūs on a series about leadership during the pandemic. He wanted to feature data.world and how I was leading during this trying time (dare I say, “unprecedented time,” for the last time). I collaborated with him on it, and the series turned into a product that I was more proud of than anything I had written to date. That led to the idea that David and I could work on the second edition of my book together. I knew that if I wrote for another ten years, I wouldn’t write as well as him. David enthusiastically agreed and it became a real partnership, with us regularly working on it every weekend with the goal to turn the second edition into my first print book. And that is what you are holding in your hand right now, and I really hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed working on it together. It’s a product that I’m proud to have in print and also give away for free online at TheEntrepreneursEssentials.com, to honor the spirit of the first edition.

— Brett A. Hurt, written on Thursday, April 14, 2022, the day before Passover