Entrepreneurs – think like this guy
In a great article discussing how to demo a product to investors, Jason Calacanis says the following under the heading “The best products take less than five minutes to demo”…
Steve Jobs does take the demo details to a fairly detailed level, but you and I are not Steve Jobs. There is only one Steve Jobs and there is only one Apple. You’re never going to build something as cool as Steve, and as such there is no need for you to talk about your product for five or ten minutes.
In the comments, I found this response from user “COP”:
WTF????? WHY NOT?
My thoughts exactly. There’s exactly zero rules, official or unofficial, that say you can’t be as cool as Steve Jobs and build products with equivalent coolness.
This type of rhetoric happens a lot — presenting a major player in a given market as an insurmountable behemoth. We as entrepreneurs do it in our heads all the time. It’s never helpful, but more importantly it’s never true.
Take Calacanis’ example in this article. You don’t have to go back too far to find a time when Apple wasn’t the epitome of cool. In my opinion, Apple machines after the IIe were out-and-out crap until they hit another stride with OSX, which came out in 1999. I don’t recall seeing any Apple’s in school prior to that. I should know, I graduated high school in ‘99! Did you know the first iPod was released in 2001, less than 10 years ago? That’s a helluva lotta time where we can’t account for any Steve Job coolness.
The correct attitude is that of our friend COP, “Why not?” In fact I’m willing to bet that ol’ Steve said that a few times along the way as well.
To think any less, to see your competition as insurmountable, is surely a road to failure.
P.S. Note: Jobs is one of the most epic geeks in history, no question. Apple has been a successful company since its founding, but definitely wandered the wilderness through the late 80’s and 90’s, which does not fit Calacanis’ rhetoric. My goal here is to topple Calacanis’ logic, not Jobs. Mac cultists, be at ease.
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“… with OSX, which came out in 1999. I don’t recall seeing any Apple’s in school prior to that. I should know, I graduated high school in ‘99!”
I wonder how many schools you visited to know that no Apples existed in any schools?
I graduated in 1986. My school out in the sticks had a classroom filled with Apple computers.
AC, in 1986, Apple was still building and distributing the Apple II line. If your school was staying up to date, you were using the Apple IIGS. You’ll get no argument from me about Apple’s effectiveness during that time period (See: the “PS” at the end of my post).
However, Apple really did fall off the radar in the late 80’s and 90’s, when Microsoft started hitting it’s stride with Windows 3.1 and then Windows 95. At that time, Apple’s use in the classroom had fallen way off.
I’m also not going by just what I saw in my own school. Throughout high school and college I worked summers and off-hours for the IT Dept of a New Jersey school district, which consistently ranked in the top 5 for technology in the state.
The district has seven elementary schools and two middle schools with approximately 4,900 students and 1,000 employees. It’s a decent sample, and backed up by knowledge from people who really know their stuff.