I loved talking to the skankiest prostitutes at three in the morning with a camera crew around me, fires burning in the street, sad, abused people clinging to scraps of life for their pleasures, bailed out prisoners and the drug dealers waiting for them to be released, homeless addicts with nowhere to go and they only weren’t freaks if you saw them at three in the morning .
In short, I loved my job.
Entrepreneurship ruined it. I’m not like how Mark Zuckerberg describes himself: “a builder”. My guess is, I’m not like most of the smart people who read this blog who go out there and build things to improve the lives of others. And yet, I kept doing it to myself over and over again. Once you enter the world of “eat what you kill” you can’t go back to being spoon-fed by the pencil factory anymore. Sadly. I write about my first job here (and the prostitutes).
I had a regular job at HBO. My title: Junior Programmer Analyst in the IT department. I told HBO, “you do original TV programming so why not do original web programming.” And magically, from 1996-98, they let me do whatever I wanted to do at three in the morning and then put it on their website. My original job was to do some Unix/ Oracle thing that I was totally unqualified for and didn’t know how to do. So I figured out a more fun idea for myself and persuaded them to let me do it.
Someone in the marketing department at HBO told me, “You CAN’T DO THAT.” But, as the readers of this blog already know, that’s the call to action to anyone who is going to do anything. For John D. Rockefeller it was to roll up all the oil companies in America. Nobody thought he could do it. For Andrew Carnegie, it was to buy all of the steel companies in America. For Larry Page, it was to build the 100th search engine without any ideas about a business model. They became billionaires. For James Altucher, it was to interview all of the prostitutes at three in the morning in NYC for almost no money. We each have the built-in predilections given to us by genes, upbringing, and whatever black magic you call god.
Then other entertainment companies started asking me to do the same thing for them. “Can you make our web presence entertaining and fun?” We want fun, they all said. So I jumped ship. Entered the world of the wild. Suddenly I was an “entrepreneur”. I didn’t even know what that meant. I got to the office. I had nobody to call. And nobody would return my calls anymore. I was no longer at HBO. I would cry every day. I wasn’t a natural businessman. But I tried to learn from the 5,000 or so mistakes I made that first year.
All I’m saying is, thank god you first-timers have me to now tell you exactly what you should do in your first year of being an entrepreneur. Do everything I say below or you’ll probably fail. I’m dead serious.
– Don’t hire anyone. Only hire people when you are absolutely desperate for more hands. And then start with freelancers. So you can fire them right away. When people raise money from VCs I notice the first thing they do is hire people. After my first company, which was profitable from day one and never raised a dollar, I started a second company where I raised $30 million from VCs and then hired $30 million worth of people, was fired as CEO and from the board, they then raised another $50 million or so and sold a year or so ago for about $1.
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