In preparation for Wednesday’s Lean Startup meeting for my OK Music project, the organizer of the event asked us newbies to watch a lecture on the current state of entrepreneurship in the United States, presented by a long time businessman and entrepreneur Steve Blank. I found the presentation to be enlightening and inspirational enough that I decided to do a riff on the title of the original lecture – Customer Development 2.0: “Why Accountants Don’t Run Startups”.
So far my interactions with people from the entrepreneurial world have been relatively brief, but I can see myself fitting in pretty nicely — the groups I’ve looked at seem to be full of intelligent, hard-working, and forward-looking people who have a passion for what they do or are about to do. It’s also surprisingly diverse, spanning various age groups, socioeconomic backgrounds, genders, nationalities and ethnicities. It seems that the interest in each other’s work tends to override the types of judgments and projections that come with living in today’s identity-driven world, which has been a pretty refreshing change of pace.
Excerpt from the Lecture — full version here.
In the last few weeks I’ve corresponded with a young woman who wanted to start a social enterprise job board, a librarian (who had run for the Pasadena City council in the past) who pitched an idea for a game show to me, a CEO of an internet company who seems to be doing pretty well, and a website owner who specializes in online artwork sales. Not sure if anything will come out of these leads, but it’s already been very interesting so far and I can see things getting better once I start going to these meetings. What’s reassuring is that all of them seem to think that I have the personality to be an entrepreneur — it’s kind of hard to wrap my head around that idea since a lot of people know me as the guy who’s been doodling around on the keyboard for the last couple of years, mostly for fun. But after watching this video, the connections between the two things have finally been made clear!
Blank’s lecture utilized very simple diagrams, explaining how startups are mainly divided into two groups:
Scalable Startup -> Transition -> Large Company
With the former group comprising of 99.7% of the American economy, while the latter are the large, multinational corporations we may be familiar with through the media and our daily interactions with their products and services. What does this have to do with improvisation, though?
In hearing Blank talk about the kinds of tasks that are necessary in order to survive in various stages of a company’s development, I noticed that the chart showed a striking similarity to some of the graphs I’ve seen written about musical improvisation — mainly the spectrum that can be drawn from the practices between improvisation and composition. You might expect to see something like this sketched out in a few articles:
Corporations and startups, like composed musics and improvised musics, share an intrinsic relationship, although in many cases it tends to be an antithetical one. Startups require spontaneity, lack of planning and order, adaptability, and an agile workforce in the quest for finding new and sustainable business models. Large corporations, on the other hand, rely on bureaucracy, execution, and repeatability of the tried-and-true in order for it to grow as an enterprise. In both charts there is a progression from the left to the right in terms of how much order and planning is required to pull off a “performance”. Blank mentions that there are often cultural clashes between the two types of approaches to business, and that putting one type of person into an environment they’re not suited for generally turns out for the worse. These clashes are eerily similar to the types of arguments that I’ve seen happen between classical musicians and musicians interested in improvisation — for every person there is usually a level of order that they’re comfortable with, and conflicts can emerge when people don’t see things eye to eye.
Entrepreneurs, who always exist at the beginning of any given enterprise, are the “artists” of the business world — creative, agile, and free-thinkers. They have the ability to create something out of nothing, move from one idea to the next, and control their output in such a way that allows them to capitalize on their creativity. Hence it seems to make sense to argue that improvisers ought to think of themselves as the entrepreneurs of the music world, embarking into new and unknown territory. In the long run, this type of understanding may help musicians figure out where they need to be in order to be successful in their endeavors as well, since they would have a better idea of where they might fit within the bigger scheme of things. According to Blank, universities are also slowly but gradually warming up to the idea of teaching entrepreneurship in the classroom, and this trend shares a similarity with what is happening with improvisation in music schools as well — there may be a point where entrepreneurship and improvisation will become the rule, rather than exception, of American culture.
On a less optimistic note, entrepreneur William Durant — the founder of General Motors and Chevrolet, spent the latter years of his life managing a bowling alley, died penniless, and remains largely unremembered. Compare this to Alfred P. Sloan, who managed GM for many years, has been honored and remembered by history. They’re both equally dead at this point so it’s hard to say who “won” in the end, but in this case it’s clear that there are certain benefits that come with being the accountant rather than the founder/inventor. Even looking at music history, the lives of improvisers (Miles Davis, John Coltrane, etc.) tend to be marred with hardship and tragedies, so maybe there’s a historical parallel between them as well.
Blank’s lecture seemed to have implied that the way for entrepreneurs to “not die penniless” is to be realistic and strive for small business models rather than attempting to become the next McDonalds or Facebook. (Durant’s downfall was, in a lot of ways, a result of his own over-ambition and inability to let go of the “thrill” of starting new ventures, which many entrepreneurial types often get addicted to.) Thanks to technological advances, however, the costs of startups have dramatically decreased and the balance is now tipping in favor of small businesses — we are currently living in a brave new world where such things have been made possible, and success stories in favor of entrepreneurs have become much more common than they were in the 20th century. It may be that since things are changing very rapidly now, agility, innovation, and adaptability are becoming more a necessity for businesses to survive within the new economic environment.
So with these things in mind, OK Music takes a plunge into the unknown, with lots of interesting things to come.
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