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Why Philosophy and Entrepreneurship?

by Valet
This post is by Valet from Feld Thoughts

Since releasing my newest book The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors I’ve been continually getting the questions “Why Philosophy and Entrepreneurship?” and “Why Nietzsche?”

Dave and I cover this right off the bat in the book, so I thought I’d toss up an excerpt that addresses the question with part of my own origin story with Dave. It follows.

Nietzsche? For entrepreneurs?

It was the end of January 1988, about nine months since we had embarked on turning Brad’s solo consulting shop, Feld Technologies, into a real business. We were fraternity brothers and close friends and opened our first office directly across the street from our fraternity chapter house in Cambridge. We planned to use smart yet inexpensive software developers to build business application software. We employed half a dozen programmers, most of whom were undergraduates from our fraternity working part-time. We didn’t have any financing except for Brad’s credit card and the $10 with which we had purchased our common stock.

Dave walked into Brad’s office after calculating preliminary financial results for January. Up to this point, we had mostly broken even, but the news was grim: we had lost $10,000 in one month. We had not seen it coming, and it took some effort for us to untangle what had gone wrong. Dave had been spending most of his time managing the part-time developers, who were primarily working on future products, instead of billing hours to clients. Brad had been selling computer equipment, which had low (Read more...)

Twitter Spaces and Nietzsche

by Valet
This post is by Valet from Feld Thoughts

Last week I was scheduled to do a live interview with Eliot Peper about The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche. He opted to use Twitter Spaces and diligently tested it out a couple of days beforehand to confirm that it would work. Nevertheless, we immediately ran into difficulties, and after ten minutes, we decided to bail on the interview and reschedule.

This reminded both me and Dave about our chapter in the book, “Play to the Audience.” Nietzsche says:

It is not sufficient to know how to play well; one must also know how to secure a good hearing. A violin in the hand of the greatest master gives only a little squeak when the place where it is heard is too large; the master may then be mistaken for any bungler.

Our translation to contemporary English is:

In other words: Performing well is not enough; the audience must experience the performance well. If the venue has bad acoustics, even a great violinist sounds terrible. A virtuoso can be mistaken for a novice.

Our essay in the book discusses the importance of a speaker having empathy for the audience, not just in terms of the content but also in the communication medium. For example, is the phone connection clear? If you have an accent, are you speaking slowly enough for your audience to understand? Ben Casnocha’s excellent narrative emphasizes audience engagement and interaction, which is crucial in our era of short attention spans.

This was one of the first chapters we (Read more...)

Monsters

by Valet
This post is by Valet from Feld Thoughts

Most of the quotes we discuss in The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche we found by reading his work, but a few are well-known lines that you may have heard before. This is one, used in our chapter “Monsters”:

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.

The quote leads quickly to questions of ethics. In the chapter, we discuss the fact that we each have our own views of what constitutes ethical or unethical behavior in business. It is a line-drawing game – there is no reference that everyone agrees on. The choices have both short- and long-term consequences for both the success of your business and for your own reputation. Further, once you choose an ethical approach, it becomes entrenched in your organization and is difficult to change.

These questions arise pretty much every day in business. It came up for us today with our own book promotion. Our publisher was excited that we had achieved “#1 Amazon Best Seller” status in a couple of categories and produced the graphic below for promotion. The thing is, the categories were things like “Existentialism” and “Philosophy Reference” where overall sales are lower – they are applicable to the book as categories, but not really our target market (for the record, the book is selling nicely in “Entrepreneurial Management”, where it was briefly #2.)

The question is, should we use it, or (Read more...)

Shipped! The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche

by Brad Feld
This post is by Brad Feld from Feld Thoughts

My newest book, The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors, shipped today. It’s available on Amazon in Kindle, Paperback, and Hardcover. If you are so inclined, go buy a copy today!

I’m particularly proud of this book, as it is a more philosophical approach to entrepreneurship than my other books. I wrote it with Dave Jilk, the co-founder of our first company (Feld Technologies, 1987) and one of my closest friends for 38 years.

The book contains 52 individual chapters (hence the “Weekly” in the title) and is divided into five major sections (Strategy, Culture, Free Spirits, Leadership, and Tactics). Each chapter begins with a quote from one of Nietzsche’s works, using a public domain translation, followed by our own adaptation of the quote to 21st-century English. Next is a brief essay applying the quote to entrepreneurship. About two-thirds of the chapters include a narrative by or about an entrepreneur we know (or know of), telling a concrete story from their personal experience as it applies to the quote, the essay, or both.

Our goal with this book is to make you think, rather than try to tell you the answers. For example, here’s the Nietzsche quote from a chapter titled “Obsession” from the section on “Free Spirits”.

“The passion which seizes the noble man is a peculiarity, without his knowing that it is so: the use of a rare and singular measuring-rod, almost a frenzy: the feeling of heat in things that feel cold to all (Read more...)

New Book: The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche

by Brad Feld
This post is by Brad Feld from Feld Thoughts

My newest book, The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors, comes out next Tuesday, May 25th.

This has been an on-again, off-again project with Dave Jilk that began in 2013. We were spending the weekend in Keystone with our wives (Amy and Maureen), which generally involved a lot of sitting around reading. Dave was reading On Nietzsche by Eric Steinhart. He read a quote to me and asked if I thought it sounded like an entrepreneur. Dave remembers me saying, “Hmmm, it sure does.” Then we both went back to our books. 

At the time, I knew nothing about Nietzsche. Actually, I knew less than nothing since everything I knew about him was wrong.

Dave is one of my best friends. We met over 38 years ago, on my first day at MIT, right after the freshman picnic, when I ended up in a van that took me to ADP, the fraternity I ended up joining and living at for four years. Dave was a senior, and we became best friends. We started a company that year with Sameer Gandhi and Andy Sack called Martingale Software that failed pretty quickly. Several years later, we started Feld Technologies, which we ran together from 1987 to 1993 when we sold it to Sage Alerting Systems, which later renamed itself to AmeriData Technologies. We kept working together – him as an entrepreneur, me as an investor.

But “business” is only a small part of our relationship. For any close friendship that (Read more...)

Are You A Camel, A Lion, or A Child?

by Brad Feld
This post is by Brad Feld from Feld Thoughts

I’m working on a new book with Dave Jilk, my first business partner. It is titled The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors. We are in the home stretch (it’ll be published sometime in the second quarter), and I’m adding a little connecting tissue to the major sections this morning.

The third major section (of five) is called Free Spirits. Dave had already written the section introduction, which meant that I had 20% less writing to do this morning than I expected.

As I read through what he had written, I remembered the story of Nietzsche’s “The Three Metamorphoses,” which I’ve been using a lot lately to think about my own life. Following is an appetizer from the upcoming book.

For Nietzsche, the best human beings are what he calls free spirits. Early in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a section called “The Three Metamorphoses” describes three stages a free spirit must pass through in its full development: the camel, the lion, and the child.

The camel is a dutiful beast of burden, in a humble but not humiliating way. It is virtuous and willing to bear any difficulty to accomplish what is needed. But the camel is isolated from those who choose the comfortable and easy, leaving its spirit in a “desert.” In this desert, the camel transforms into the lion, which actively opposes tradition, taboos, and the status quo. In particular, the lion responds to the “Thou Shalt” of the world with a “Holy No.” The lion (Read more...)