ribbonfarm

The drive from Memphis to St. Louis promised to be extremely dull, and then there was the section of the road with some flooding.  Now I have a story for this leg.

The paradox of creative destruction is that some of the most vibrant environments — like raw nature and the startup scene — are also the ones that best showcase those Darwinian dynamics. I mean, just look at the smiling faces here at the Seed Hatchery, a Memphis startup incubator co-founded by Eric Mathews, the guy in the blue t-shirt at the head of the table in the back.  I cadged an invitation to their regular Founders Dinner via Daniel Pritchett. These guys — about a half-dozen entrepreneurial teams — have just had a round of grilling from an experienced entrepreneur (Tom Federico, the other guy at the head of the table, founder of TeamRankings.com — he was surprisingly gentle, compared to some of the bloodier such scenes I’ve witnessed) and are still all smiles. I rarely find such all-around smiling in bigger companies. Okay, I provoked that by saying “Everybody say ‘Series A’,” but I bet you they’d still be smiling if I’d yelled “9 out of 10 of you will fail!” Heck, they’d probably be laughing.

What’s more, they are aware of grim realities like that. They even put up cues to remind them of the fact. Here’s their countdown clock till their investor day.

They already know that for some of them, this will be the end of the road. At least for whatever idea they are pursuing right now. Between infant mortality right out of places like Seed Hatchery, and death by old age as a large company with an obsolete business, every one of the business ideas in the picture above is going to eventually die. Contrary to the popular image of the entrepreneur as a delusionally optimistic breed, I find that among the ones I meet, the ones with the clearest perception of this stark reality tend to have the soundest strategic thinking in their business plans. Based on anecdotal evidence, I’d say they are also the most successful ones. There is a sense of intrinsic, organic urgency to their thinking that exists quite independently of such extrinsic urgency drivers as countdown clocks. It is an energizing, Sisyphean kind of fatalism.

Now that I’ve shifted over from the gold-miner side to the selling-pickaxes side in the entrepreneurship game via writing on themes relevant to entrepreneurship and product marketing/launch consulting, I find a grim sort of solace in contemplating truly intense creative destruction close up (not that writing/consulting careers are immune to the creative destruction cycle; they just have a less intense cycle).

Maybe that’s why I like to go around taking pictures of both rusting infrastructure and things bursting with youthful vigor. For those of you who have gotten through most of Tempo, you know that the book is based at a very fundamental level around mortality-driven (as opposed to immortality-driven) thinking and creative destruction. I think the reason mortality-driven narrative frames work to guide decision-making well is that they lend the right emotional tones to your actions. The right kind of tempo begets the right kind of sense of urgency appropriate for each phase of a birth-to-death story, and catalyzes the right kind of energy.

I am in Memphis, where I plan to meet up with Daniel Pritchett, some local entrepreneurs at a startup incubator, and anyone else who might be around. Next stop, St. Louis on Tuesday. As far as I know, I have no readers there, but I wanted to check out the Billy Goat chip company, maker of my favorite chips. If anybody is out there, it’d be great to meet up. From St. Louis I head to Omaha and after that, the road-trip basically goes into a sights-over-people mode, since my destinations in Nebraska and South Dakota (North Platte for a second visit to Bailey Yard, Alliance for Carhenge and Rapid City for Deadwood) aren’t places I am likely to find any readers. I’d be shocked to find somebody beyond Omaha. After South Dakota, I head to Jackson Hole in the heart of Yellowstone, where oddly enough I do have someone to stay with. After that, depending on how much time I have left, I might dawdle or dash my way to Vegas, the end point for this leg.

Posts from Week 2

• Strategies, Counter-examples and the UnAha! Experience
• On Ritual Time
• The Author’s Journey and the Blogger’s Journey
• Functional Fixedness and Kata Learning
• Freytag Staircases in Nashville
• The Car/Truck Ratio

I stopped for coffee and a chat with Peter Lambert-Cole at Highland Coffee in Baton Rouge. Peter is a mathematics graduate student at LSU and works on low-dimensional topology problems (knots, doughnuts and such). So naturally our conversation took a mathematical turn.

It is funny how a conversation with the right person will sometimes help me connect dots in my own thinking. Talking with Peter helped me figure out something about anti-strategies.

[Read more…]

When was the last time you coordinated a rendezvous with someone saying “I’ll meet you before sunset?” I did that with my New Orleans host, Dimitry Lukashov because he keeps Shabbat, and I wanted to make sure I got to his place before he turned off his phone, in case I got lost.

You should try a sunrise or sunset based  rendezvous sometime. It is interesting to look at the sun as an actual practical time signal instead of just a maker of beautiful sunrises and sunsets. Very calming. Scheduling around natural times tends to add a natural fuzziness which can be relaxing or anxiety-provoking depending on your relationship to clock time.

Post-Shabbat on Saturday, we went downtown, wandered past Bourbon street and the touristy French Quarter to a nightlife block preferred by the locals (I forget the name). I felt my age I guess. It was still too chaotically “happening” for me.  We wrapped up the evening with a 1:00 AM breakfast at a famous local diner.

I am starting to feel my age. One of Dimitry’s housemates (he’s a graduating Tulane senior) said to me, “you’re staying with Dimitry, right?…. and are you kinda older?” That cracked me up. “Yup, much older,” I said. It is curious how blogging gets you connected to people in age-agnostic ways. The ribbonfarm/Tempo readership seems to span the age range 18-70. In almost any other context, I’d find it very weird, as a 36-year old, staying with a college senior. The blog/book road-trip context reduces it to “only slightly weird.”

Hard Takeoffs and Landings

This morning, I left New Orleans after a creole-inspired brunch. The restaurant had the biggest selection of hangover drinks I’ve ever seen, including a very complicated DIY Bloody Mary bar. I am afraid mine wasn’t very creative. Dimitry’s (on the right) was a work of art. I can’t do okra in a drink though.

I’ve been mulling Alain de Botton’s evocative description, in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, of the tempo of industrial age workdays: “the hard takeoffs and landings of coffee and alcohol.”

In New Orleans, where the day seems to start around noon and end around 4:00 AM (the town allows you to walk around with alcohol containers on the streets and there is no legal last-call time), Alain de Botton’s description must be modified for New Orleans to “the hard takeoffs and landings of alcohol. Period.”

Though the city has great coffee, overall it is a far more relaxed place than any similar-sized city in America I’ve been. The locals have a curious self-perception of the city as actually being part of the Carribbean. An embassy for island time in the middle of mainland time perhaps.

I am also surprised by the number of people I am meeting on my travels who have quit coffee. Maybe we are heading towards a softer tempo age.