I had a drink with a friend of mine at Soho House today.<\/p>\n
It’s the office for those without one. People who travel the world and need a place to hang. And right now there are too many thirtysomething wannabes populating the establishment in L.A., but we first got together at the Soho House in New York City, I know he’s not using the club to get ahead, but because he needs a place to meet people like me. Because he seems to be in a different country every damn day.<\/p>\n
Not that he wears expensive suits, not that he advertises it. As a matter of fact, I had no idea exactly what he did for a living, other than act as the consigliere for this Internet company.<\/p>\n
Actually, his mother thinks he flies around the world fixing powerful people’s computers. But she’s illiterate.<\/p>\n
Yes, born in a faraway land, she doesn’t know how to read or write. And despite his father working three jobs to send him and his two brothers to private school in a different country, where he worked as a manual laborer, my friend dropped out of school, it wasn’t for him, he lived on the streets, was homeless at times, even begged for food money.<\/p>\n
But then his dad died and he had to buck up.<\/p>\n
So he went into the cell phone business. Well, an angle thereof. He purchased used handsets in London and stayed up at night polishing them and flew once a week to Dublin to sell them on the street for double the price, in cash.<\/p>\n
And when he saw Carphone Warehouse and the big boys come in, he jumped ship. That’s when you’ve got to go, when you’re riding the train and you see the robbers coming, get off.<\/p>\n
And with all his accumulated cash, my friend doubled down in the domain name business and lost everything. Everything.<\/p>\n
But then he got an idea. For an Internet business. Selling something online before anybody else did. He was Google’s first AdWords customer in the U.K. And the cash came fast and furious.<\/p>\n
And he sold his company for $120 million.<\/p>\n
Not that he got all of that, he only owned 90%.<\/p>\n
That’s a lot of money! A hundred million dollars! Where do you keep it?<\/p>\n
His brothers are in banking, people are looking after it.<\/p>\n
And is my friend, in his mid-thirties, married? Does he have any of the accoutrements of the good life? No. It’s not about things, but experiences. And he hasn’t got time to own stuff, he’s moving too fast.<\/p>\n
And he just brokered this big deal. You know about it. And he traced the connections that made it happen back in excess of a decade, when he was living in Shanghai, paying a tutor to teach him Mandarin for three hours a day.<\/p>\n
Do you have this kind of dedication? Are you willing to take these kinds of risks?<\/p>\n
If not, don’t be an entrepreneur.<\/p>\n
And don’t invest with anybody who’s using daddy’s money. If he goes broke, he’s still got the lifestyle. If an entrepreneur like my buddy goes broke, he’s on the streets. He can’t tolerate failure, he’s got to work incessantly to make it. Of course, he’s going to lose a few times along the way, and coping with that is hell, but you get back on the horse and do it. Because you must.<\/p>\n
People have no idea how hard it is to make it, what sacrifices are involved. They think if they just get enough degrees, they’re set.<\/p>\n
But what do David Geffen, Irving Azoff and Jimmy Iovine have in common?<\/p>\n
No college degree.<\/p>\n
And you can put Barry Diller in that camp. As well as Jeffrey Katzenberg. Not that a college degree will doom you, but what you need to know to become incredibly rich and successful they don’t teach in school, it’s something innate, inside, something that cannot be taught but only learned through experience.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, all these tech guys know each other. Instead of protecting what they own, they’re changing the world. You only see the two-dimensional version, the depiction in films and magazines. But they never capture the essence, the hunger, the drive, the charm…<\/p>\n
They’re all charming in one way or another. You want to hang with them, they know everybody. Whether they’re to be trusted…well, not in the music business.<\/p>\n
But if I were twentysomething today I can’t imagine going into the music business, where innovation is abhorred and old guys insist on running the fief. It’s the rights that hold everybody back. The fat cats have them and they’re ultra-choosy what they do with them.<\/p>\n
And everybody’s cheap. Looking to get someone else to pay.<\/p>\n
But these tech guys, they pay in cash, gladly. Because they see the big picture, an incredible upside. They can’t help themselves, that’s how they’re born.<\/p>\n
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