Learning to Love Reading

I hated reading for most of my life. From 5th grade until the summer after freshman year of college I barely read a single book for pleasure. My mom was a huge reader and loved nothing more than spending time in a library or a local bookstore. When I was growing up she would take me to the library and I’d have to check out a handful of books of my choosing. To her great, unspoken disappointment I found a loophole in her requirement to check out books and would always go for Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, and other comic books.

This all changed the summer of 2005. I landed an internship at Universal Records, in the Motown Sales Division, in New York City. I moved in with my aunt Caren in Weston, Connecticut. I had a 20 minute drive to the train station, an hour on the Metro North, and then a 10 minute subway ride. Each way. Keep in mind this was before smartphones existed so I could either A) start to read or B) stare at the back of a train seat and bore myself to tears. I chose the former.

The first book I read that summer for pleasure was Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. It was on my aunt’s shelf and, like everyone, I’d heard a lot about it. Turns out it was the perfect gateway drug for non-readers. I devoured it. I then went to Amazon and looked at all the other recommended books on that page. There was so much to learn!! I proceeded to order and read almost all of them that summer. I’ve never looked back. I had too much reading for class during the semesters but each break I would line up 3-5 books that I would tear through. My suitcases for trips and vacations became half-packed with hardcover and paperback books. Not surprisingly I bought one of the first kindles in 2007 and an early iPad as well (where I do most of my reading today).

I continue to read 20+ books a year. You can see my current wish list on Amazon that I call “The Pile.” These are recommended books from a variety of sources that I’ve researched a bit and look like ones I should read at some point. “My Nightstand” list is the ones that I’m planning on reading next. You can check out my Goodreads page here and follow along if we’re friends.

The last five books I’ve read:

1. The Wright Brothers by David McCollough

2. Born to Run (yes, I know I’m late to this)

3. The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly

4. Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff

5. Sapiens by Yuval Harari

Any recommendations in this vein I should check out?

Request for Startup: Renaissance Man

A renaissance man: the romantic idea of a person who is skilled in a wide variety of areas.

Becoming a polymath was possible in the Middle Ages and Enlightenment when the entirety of disciplines consisted of a few books and a handful of expert scholars. There is far too much information and expertise out there nowadays to have a true grasp of the cutting edge thought of many fields but I still love the idea of an individual that is knowledgeable and well-versed in lots of different arenas.

A startup idea I’ve had in this vein, that I have zero interest in actually starting myself, is called Renaissance Man. Every few months we would ship a box containing all the essentials of a specific area or category for an individual to immerse themselves in until the next box comes in the mail. By the end of a year, or over a number of years, one would have accumulated conversational and practical knowledge of lots of different arenas such as:

• Chess
• Wine
• Cooking
• Meditation
• Personal wealth management
• Wood-carving
• Jazz
• Poker
• Philosophy
• Espresso
• Whiskey
• Guitar
• Stereos
• Coffee
• Classic literature
• Beer
• Civil War
• China
• Military History
• Poetry
• Theater
• Classical Music
• Running
• Exercise
• Rugby
• Cricket
• Bar tending
• Grilling
• Non-fiction reading
• Movies

There can be a continuum of price points from inexpensive to unlimited. The goal would be to include 1) something physical representing the area that you can keep on a shelf and use continuously 2) resources to read, watch, and learn more about the topic and 3) a series of objectives to complete.

Take Chess, for instance. We would include books about the history of the game, related movies to watch, classic matches, and objectives for the session: find an opponent to play 3 games with you, find a game of speed chess against a stranger (SW corner of Washington Square Park if you’re in NYC), start a game online against a relative. At the low end of the price spectrum we would provide resources to online chess games, stores or a cheap board. At the high end we would include a really gorgeous stone chess set.

If I had unlimited money I would do a very high-end version of the following idea. I’d fly in my private jet to the Middle East, to the birthplace of chess (remember I have unlimited money). I’d want to interview grandmasters, join a local chess club, and attend large tournaments at the college level and above.

Now that the box-of-the-month club trend has come and gone, does a real business like Renaissance Man exist already? I’d like to subscribe.

A New Requirement for College Graduates

As an undergraduate at Northwestern I tried to create my own music industry major. Because the courses I needed to complete would cross the music, business, and arts and sciences colleges I was prohibited from doing this. What the hell is the point of a University under one umbrella if you can’t combine majors across the schools?!?

I’ll take it a step further: I think that all students should be encouraged or required to combine two majors of their choosing as a graduation requirement.

• Biology + Architecture.
• Economics + Philosophy.
• Electrical Engineering + Art History.
• Physics + Religion.
• Chemical Engineering + Communication.
• English + Math.

Literally any combination makes the student more interesting, marketable, and forced to cross-pollinate ideas from different disciplines. I have seen a few instances where faculty from different departments do joint research together, launch joint scholarships, or offer some co-taught courses; they always seem fascinating. Even if I’m not wildly interested in either discipline on their own, the combination always makes me curious to learn more.

I understand that this combination-degree proposal would make university staffing, job fairs, and graduate placements more confusing. The biggest change, however, would be reserved for academic advisors - instead of preventing students from weaving across colleges and combining their interests they’d be tasked with ensuring they can connect students to other departments, professors, and courses to explore what that other field might be.

I believe pre-med, economics, and traditional tracks will still be emphasized but that the combination major will add additional color and talking points to any graduate. As someone who has looked at hundreds of resumes and hired dozens of people I’m always looking for unique backgrounds that could add value for my business.

This is one application of the theory of intersections I’ve been thinking about this year, the idea that the most interesting things happen at the intersection of previously separate fields.

Learning, Building Value, Fun, Thoughtfulness

I’d heard over and over again how important culture is to the success of a startup. But how do you take a handful of founders and co-workers and start to codify what cultural traits are shared amongst the group? As a founder and CEO it’s inherently an awkward process, especially introducing it.

Imagine your parents come to dinner one night and announce that the family’s core tenants are now X, Y, and Z. You and your siblings will likely have several sequential reactions, including wanting to be at any other dinner table on the planet.

First: That’s stupid, why do we need to do this? Everything was fine in our family without them.

Second: Why did you choose those ones? Our family doesn’t stand for X, here are three examples of things you’ve done counter to X in the past week.

Third: If these are our whole family values, why did you not talk to us about them before rolling them out?

I imagine that rolling out “values” to any group of people would elicit a similar series of reactions. So where do you begin?

At Next Big Sound we were probably 7 or 8 people, and starting to plan our next financing round where I knew we would at least be doubling the size of the team, when I began trying to codify what NBS stood for.

I wrote out a bunch of values that I believed were shared amongst the team:

• Learning - learning as much as possible from each other, our customers, from the market and on our own every day.
• Building Value - creating real value for our customers, investors, and ourselves (everyone at Next Big Sound was granted stock options).
• Fun - excited to get to work each day and spend time with the rest of the team.
• Thoughtfulness - being thoughtful towards everyone in our ecosystem (data partners, customers, industry, press, investors, advisors, competitors) with each decision that we make.

I shared these with David and Samir and the team and asked everyone for feedback and thoughts before sharing with our investors. Initially Thoughtfulness was “Respect” but Jason Mendelson smartly pointed out that you can’t force someone to respect other people.

Once the initial awkwardness of the introduction passes, the actual work begins. Weaving these values through everything that the company does is the true test. From promoting and praising, to firing and highlighting when these values are upheld or violated. It’s not an air campaign, with a PowerPoint presentation and poster, but ground combat drilled on a daily, weekly, and opportune basis.

Here are a few examples of how we brought this to life from the employee's first day through the length of their tenure at the company:

[A] Every Friday we have a full team meeting at 10am, we call it “Friday Bagels.” I take that occasion to talk about what’s been learned that week, things we’ve built and released, feedback from clients, shoutout to thoughtful actions and decisions, and fun things we’ve done as a team.

[B] We started saying in our regular 1:1 checkins with the individuals on the team - you might not always be learning, but you’ll be building a ton of value. Or you might not always be having fun, but you’ll be learning a tremendous amount. If you go more than 2 days where you feel like you are not learning, building value or having fun, we have a big problem and you should come talk to me or anyone else on the executive team.

[C] I wrote a welcome letter to each new employee to read on their first day, which hopefully set the tone for their time at Next Big Sound.

It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to Next Big Sound!

Let me tell you how I honestly want the next couple of years of your life to unfold. I want you to learn more each week than you learned in a month at your previous job. I want you to create more value in a shorter period of time than you ever thought possible. I want you to earn the respect of everyone at the company, and be thoughtful towards every person on the team, all our investors, customers and every member of the Next Big Sound music and technology ecosystem. Finally, I want you to have more fun at work than you ever expected.

Learning. Building value. Thoughtfulness. Fun.

The only way for a company to grow successfully and sustainably is to find other people who believe in the mission you are on, people who understand the way we work, and people who are aligned with our core values. My advice to first-time entrepreneurs is to get over the awkwardness and set down the values as early and concretely as you can. Then you can begin the real work of infusing that through the whole employee lifecycle and anchor yourself to a set of unique and inspiring principles.

10 Year Planning Exercise

In my experience, a lot of management is helping your team figure out where they themselves want to go in their careers. One way we try to help Next Big Sound employees figure this out is through a 10-year planning exercise that Dave Zwieback brought to our team that I’ll share here today.

The setup: Imagine it is 10 years from now and there is a huge party thrown in your honor and we are in attendance. Where are we? What are we celebrating? Who else is there? What are we wearing?  

By transporting ourselves away from present day and far into the future the hope is that we avoid extrapolating from our current situation (“well, in 10 years I’ll probably have gotten two promotions and a bigger office”) and into the realm of anything-is-possible.

With a rough 10 year plan in hand it is possible to walk backwards to five year plan, three year plan, and one year milestones. This is where Next Big Sound or any people-first organization can really accelerate. If we know your 10 year goal is to open your own design studio we might help make sure you get plenty of customer and account facing projects. If we know you want to write a book we might be able to help distribute or publicize your writing to build your credibility. Or if we know that you want to be seen as the expert in a particular language or part of the stack we might encourage courses or relevant conferences. The point being, we can pro-actively look out for ways to cross your long-term plans with what Next Big Sound is doing, what NBS needs, and where NBS is headed.

This is a scary exercise for both sides and there needs to be a high-level of trust in order for it to work. What if people’s 1, 3, 5 or 10 year plans take them away from NBS? What if there are no opportunities at NBS for people to take steps towards where they are ultimately going?

There are people that fully embrace this exercise and those who reject it. We don’t have too many data points but the people that don’t embrace this exercise and don’t take the thought exercise seriously generally aren’t as strong a fit on the Next Big Sound team as someone with a strong sense of this high-level direction, or at least with a positive attitude about how they can make their career legendary over the next ten years.

Board Meetings

The first board meeting I ever went to was just after our seed financing in 2009 and I was leading it. I’ve actually never been to a formal board meeting I wasn’t running so what follows is simply my limited perspective.

Next Big Sound had 6-8 board meetings per year until our acquisition in July 0f 2015. We had five official board members but usually we had 2-3 other people in the room from the NBS management team. We had great some board meetings and some terrible ones. We had hilarious board meetings and really serious ones. Most sessions were a mix of great discussion, humor, and serious questions and decisions.

After 6+ years of running board meetings I finally landed on my preferred meeting format: whatever format gets the exact mix of people in the room talking about the most important topics for the business in a way that is constructive for management.

At the beginning I got really wrapped up in board format, slides, and a lot of busywork-preparation that was more of a distraction for me and my team than anything else. As I became more confident, talked with our investors and other CEOs, and realized that the board was there to support me, I was able to evolve the format to fit the people in the room and topics at hand.

In the weeks before a board meeting I would start to think about the topic. I really liked Paul Berberian’s advice: "What is the one sentence I want them to hear at this meeting? Is it all systems go? Are we on target or we need help? I try to summarize the meeting in three minutes and then build it up from there.”

If you don’t know the one thing you want them to hear you can start with your brainstorm list of everything you are worried or anxious about or the big hypotheses you are currently trying to prove. I usually would turn my thinking into a pre-board meeting letter. 1-2 pages to share with my management team and then with the board so everyone could see where my head was at. It was my collected thoughts that would frame the dinner and actual meeting.  Google docs was really helpful because that board letter could then include updates, metrics, and other key information and anyone could comment with questions or things they wanted to dive into in advance of getting together.

Additional resources that I found helpful over the years:

1. http://www.startuprev.com/what-should-your-startup-board-package-look-like/

2. http://nextviewventures.com/blog/seed-stage-startup-board-decks/

3. http://firstround.com/review/The-Secret-to-Making-Board-Meetings-Suck-Less/

Parents' Weekend

Universities have parents' weekends, what about startups?

Starting Next Big Sound out of college, with minimal prior work experience, it just seemed to make sense to invite all our parents out to Boulder to see the house where we were all living, the office, and meet some of the important people that were helping us get NBS off the ground.

I thought it was particularly important for a few of the more skeptical parents that they come see that we weren’t just goofing around in Colorado but had serious, sophisticated investors backing the business.

We settled on a weekend in April of 2010, 7 months after closing our seed financing, and I asked Jason Mendelson if he would make a cameo with the parents when they were in town.

“Cameo?! I’m going to host dinner at my house!”

Saturday night Jason hosted dinner at his beautiful home with the four total Next Big Sounders (including the three founders) and each of our parents, David Cohen and his wife Jill, Mike Platt (our partner at Cooley) and his wife Allison, Brad Feld and his wife Amy, Raj, my aunt Caren and uncle Rod and one of our investors and his girlfriend flew in from San Francisco. Sunday Caren and Rod hosted brunch before a hike.

It was a wonderful weekend and went a long way towards legitimizing NBS with our families for the long years ahead.

“I’ve been investing in companies for 30 years and I’ve never been to a parents' weekend” Brad told me. While it seemed completely normal to me at the time, looking back I can see it was an unusual plan and love that Jason, David, Mike, Brad and everyone there embraced it with such open arms!

Living With Your Co-Workers

You mean to tell me that you don’t live with your co-workers? How do you get anything done?!?

In 2008 when we were starting Next Big Sound, David, Samir, and I would have moved to Timbuktu to get it off the ground. Our first stop was Champaign, IL that first summer to be near investors who had just put in $25k for 10% of the business as part of iVentures10. We lived in a four-bedroom house that we rented all summer for $900 TOTAL. That came out to a few dollars per person per day.

The following summer we got into Techstars and moved to Boulder, Colorado. Other than my aunt who had recently moved there, David, Samir, and I had no real connection to the town. Like the summer before, we moved into a four bedroom house. This time on College Ave.

Both summers we got in a great routine of grilling and eating dinner together almost every night. We were able to share stories, catch up on all parts of the business, and check in daily with each other. After Techstars, but before we closed our Seed financing, we moved in with my aunt Caren and her now-husband Rod for a few months until we closed our round and hired our first employee. Eric Czech was a recent Brown graduate and left his job at Bridgewater and moved across the country to join us in Boulder on our mission to transform the music industry through data. He didn’t know anyone in Colorado and so the four of us found a four-bedroom place and moved in together.

We hired a fifth employee who moved to Boulder from Michigan and didn’t know anyone. He took my bedroom and I moved back in with my aunt. We hired a sixth employee who moved to Boulder and wanted to live with us so we got a six bedroom house that the three co-founders and first three employees of Next Big Sound lived in for ~2 years. Not a lot of work-life balance when you live with the people you work with! This was well before The Social Network came out so we were doing it because it was right for us. We were seven days a week in those years and couldn’t have been happier at that stage in our lives and that point in the business.

So You Want To Be In The Music Industry?

Great! The artist on stage, the manager in the green room, the facilities team at Pandora, and the tax accountant at a music publisher are all “in the music industry.” One helpful way to figure out where in the music industry you want to be is by deciding how close you want to be to the artist.

Think of a spectrum with an artist on the far left. As you move to the right you get further and further away. Just to the right of the artist is the band manager. Then those folks working at a recording studio. Further right: at a record label. At a publisher. Concert production and promotion. At a performing rights organization. At a radio station. Further right: working at a music tech startup or more established company like Pandora, Spotify, Deezer, Soundcloud. Working at a technology company that also does music (Google/Youtube, or Apple). Or a brand or agency that uses music (Pepsi, American Express, Jeep).

When people tell me they want to be in the music industry I always ask them to narrow that down for me on this spectrum so I can make introductions or suggest good starting points to learn more about what a career in the music industry might look like, for them.

Seeing Around The Corner with Pre-Mortems

In crime, forensics, and on systems/infrastructure development teams you’ll often hear a call for post-mortems. After a burglary, death, or system-wide site outage - a post-mortem in a healthy organization is called to identify the underlying root cause of the problem and remediation steps are taken to prevent a similar failure in the future. In the army this is called an After-Action Report (AAR). In some organizations they are called retrospectives or learning reviews.

Most people have heard of post-mortems in the morbid, literal use of the term: an examination done on a body to determine the cause of death. Most people have never heard of the concept of a pre-mortem. This is a technique that has saved Next Big Sound hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless man-hours over the years.

At the beginning of a large, complex project a pre-mortem is called with everyone involved.

• The meeting should include everyone involved with the project, from sales and executives, to the engineers actually building the software.
• A future-state is painted in which the project that is about to begin is completed but it is an unmitigated disaster. We’re talking about a front-page WSJ-size failure.
• Everyone takes 5 minutes on their own and writes down the reasons that this project will have blown up in such a disastrous way. The solitary writing is done to prevent groupthink.
• One-by-one around the room everyone takes turns reading their reasons and suggesting any remediation steps if they have them.
• If someone says one of your reasons you add the sticky notes together.
• The person leading the project organizes all the notes together and makes sure that the biggest risk factors are prioritized, addressed, and tackled early in the project plan.

A few quick notes. I cannot overstate how terrifying an exercise this is to conduct as it's goal is to list out everything that could possibly go wrong with an important project. As CEO of Next Big Sound I would sit in these rooms and hear worst-case scenarios that I didn’t even dream up in the middle of those nights when all my worst fears were playing out.

There needs to be a tremendous amount of trust in the room in order for this to be done effectively. If people don’t feel safe talking about their work or potential issues then some of the riskiest parts of the project might not be exposed, defeating the entire purpose of the exercise. This is one part of a toolkit that project leads at Next Big Sound use, we try not to prescribe this too often but remind our team leads to lean on this for large, critical projects or if they are anxious about any part of the upcoming initiative.

Here is an HBR article on project pre-mortems if you want to read more about it: https://hbr.org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem