Lucky or Smart. A Hello to Bo Peabody. - 09/29/2008 - 5:25 PM:

I just read a book by Bo Peabody called, "Lucky or Smart?: Secrets to an Entrepreneurial Life". It's simply excellent. So excellent, in fact, that I decided that this particular blog post won't be directed at the general public. Instead... :)

Dear Bo,

CanGoogleHearMe (one of my sites) was founded largely on the idea that if you address someone on the Internet - in this day and age - they're likely to get it. We've become very good at seeking out and gathering information that is relevant to us, so hopefully this one crosses your radar at some point. After all, I think you deserve to know that your book was both encouraging and reassuring. I read a few reviews around the internet, including Brad Feld's comments, and every one of them seemed to generally focus on the objective lessons of the book. And while every one of the objective points is worthwhile, I just wanted to throw my own perspective in, as well....

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Pixar Animation and Broken Legs. - 09/08/2008 - 8:44 PM:

Pixar Animation and broken legs are not things you expect to see together in titles. One is, after all, the maker of computer animated movies that are fun for the whole family, and the other is generally not considered as much fun. Or any fun, really, aside from the sympathy factor you get while limping around on crutches. But today's update hits on both of these.

First, after my last post about Hollywood and the importance of taking chances and following dreams, we've been invited to take a tour of Pixar Animation. An old friend of mine - and when I say old friend, I mean one of the people I originally met through the blog early on - saw the post and sent me an e-mail to tell me how true it was. His dream, apparently, was to work for Pixar Animation. And when he e-mailed me the other day, it was on the last day of his summer internship at Pixar. He'd just been offered a full time position to start in a few weeks. The dude's got some things to be proud of - and I'm hoping that maybe someday I'll be able to catch his name in the credits on some feature film (which will, I'm sure, receive excellent reviews).

It's good to hear the stories from people when they achieve a particular stage of their dreams. Largely, that's because there are more than a few counter-stories about how dark the world can be, and it's good to be reminded of the successes. And also partly because that success somehow managed to land me a tour of Pixar Animation. :) Which I'm more than a little stoked about.

What I'm curious about is the evolving nature of dreams. Because people don't achieve dreams - they achieve stages of dreams. Reid didn't really achieve his dream of working at Pixar so much as he achieved the first stage of his dream - yes, he's working there, but I assume that by this time next year he'll have figured out new dreams that build on his first. In many ways, dreaming is the fundamentals of creative thinking, and creative thinkers rarely stay satisfied with a finished design. I'd hate to think that dreaming stops with the achievement of your goals; if that were the case, I think you'd quickly get trapped by the "highlight of your life" - that point in your life where you say, "Alright, this is the best moment. It'll never get better than this."

I personally enjoy the absolute confidence of believing that no matter how much I've enjoyed life to date, my most exciting days are still on the horizon.

Which brings me to my bit of a downer. About three weeks ago I fell down and sprained my ankle. It was painful, but no big deal. It was healing fine and feeling good - or so I thought - on Tuesday of last week when I went in to my doctor after the MRI. Which is why I was so surprised to find myself is surgery by Wednesday morning to have bone fragments removed.

Skip to a few days later, where I'm level headed but unable to drive a car for 6 weeks. Great. But here's the amusing part - you know those stories you hear about the great entrepreneurs, about how they worked late hours in a chicken coup with no heat for months at a time to get things going? The stories that demonstrate their grit, and determination, and ability to "work through it". You always see these stories in the documentaries years later, where someone that knew the entrepreneur back in the day looks at the camera and tells the story about how they used to help the guy collect coke bottles to keep things afloat.

I mean, you have grit if you collect coke bottles for funding - true determination, after all. :)

I had an opportunity for one of those stories about two days after my surgery, when I was still on a lot of pain pills. I had a 2:00 phone introduction to someone I take seriously. And I was determined to make it. I call Paul at 1:00 to see if he thinks I sound too drunk to talk, and he... seemed dubious. So I decide I'll make the introduction at 2:00 and get to know the people at the other end; my job was not to talk details about the project, but to get a feel for the character of those I was talking to. I figured if I explained, it'd all work out.

If pulled off right, I reasoned somewhat foggily, it would be one of those stories for down the road, where the guy looks at the camera and says, "When I first met Aaron, he'd just had surgery on his leg, but he didn't let it slow him down. He soldiered on. He had grit. Real determination."

Sadly, it didn't work out that way. Instead it was a 30 second conversation where I said hello, you'll have to excuse me because of my leg, and they offered to reschedule, and that was that.

No grit. No determination. No classic documentary moment. *sigh*

In retrospect, now that my thinking is much clearer, it's probably good that it was rescheduled. First, other people's time is valuable, and you don't want to waste it. Second, if I was that easily distracted from my agenda by an act of kindness as simple as, "Do you want to reschedule?", then it's likely I wouldn't have been very impressive, anyway. :)

Oh, and I asked for some photos from Pixar, so here they are. :)...

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What are the Odds of Succeeding at Outlandish Dreams? Like, Making It in Hollywood? - 08/28/2008 - 10:46 AM:

What are your odds of becoming famous? It's not a rhetorical question - I'm very serious, and there's a point to this.

I get a fair number of e-mails from people that go something like:
"Hey Aaron, love your project. I'm working hard on my own project, so wish me luck, too."

And I do wish them luck, very sincerely - but I tend to think they'll do fine, regardless. Partly because they're the small percentage of the population that's out there DOING THINGS. As far as I'm concerned, if you just keep DOING THINGS, over and over, eventually you'll make it.

I came across a study by the National Endowment for the Arts that I thought was interesting. It was a study on how many people in the U.S. work in artistic fields. How many actors, how many artists, writers, etc.

This all connects back to why you shouldn't be afraid of taking a risk from time to time - 1.4% of the population in the United States works in an artistic field as their primary job. That equates to about 2 million people in a country of about 305 million, with an additional 300,000 that work in the arts, but make a living some other way. Almost half of those are designers and architects, which means the remaining 1 million people account for the vast majority of everything you read in a book, magazine, or watch on TV.

I find that fascinating, because it means that very few people are effecting great change.

But this is a post about the risks of failure when you take a chance. So here's what struck me from the article the most. Of all the artists working in the U.S., about 2% of them were actors, or 39,717 people.

Half live in California, with New York claiming about 20%. So let's take a look at a historically risky thing to do - moving to Hollywood to become an actor. Try telling your parents that your plan is to become famous in Hollywood, and see how they react. Everyone knows that making it in acting - becoming famous - is... well, insane. No one really does it, right?

The question is, what does it take for you to be at the top? If you're an actor, and want to become famous, who do you have to beat in order to do it? Let's define famous as having one of the top 200 acting jobs in Hollywood - after all, I can think of 20 top name actors off the top of my head, and I'm not really up on those things. 200 seems a fairly good number.

Sitting at home thinking about becoming an actor, you're competing against all the millions of others that would like to be rich and famous, just like you. Your odds are hugely against you being successful, because millions of people want those top 200 spots. Haven't you ever SEEN the turn out for American Idol? The line stretches for miles and miles (or so it seems).

But the truth is, as soon as you make the decision to become a full time actor, you're no longer competing against the millions that want to become rich and famous, you're competing against those that are actually doing something about it. And according to the NEA, that's about 40,000 people. If you take yourself very seriously and move to California to act as your primary occupation, you take a step that most would-be actors never take, and now you're competing against the other 20,000 actors living locally.

Half of the roles will be for one gender or another, cutting your competition in half again.

We're now at 10,000 to 15,000 or so competitors who are in town to really do this full time. To really give acting a go as their dream.

But now we look at you, and your skills. Let's say you're a good actor, and a good networker. In fact, at these two skills - which is what you need to get off the ground - let's say you're in the 80th percentile; you're better than 80% of the actors out there.

So, really, in auditions, you're up against the other 20% who are as good or better than you, and the 10% who are worse, but have the right characteristics for the role. 30% of 15,000 is 4,500 people competing for those top 200 roles.

4,500/200=23 people.

There's a lot in there that we can't account for, like luck, and those top 200 roles only being for beautiful people and you and I look like lumps of coal... those are problems.

But if you're good at what you do, and you look at yourself and say, "Yes, I have the characteristics needed as qualifiers to the industry," then your odds of being successful, of being one of the 200 most successful actors in Hollywood, is about 1 in 23.

Which means that right now, sitting in your room reading this, wherever you are in the world, the chances of you becoming famous is about 1 in 23. Great odds? Not really. But as bad as you would expect? To become the next Julia Roberts or George Clooney?

I don't think so. After all, if I put your name in a hat along with 22 other people, and told you I'd give you 1 million dollars if I picked your name... you'd be pretty excited.

But here's the point of this entire post: It's all a chain. It's a chain that starts with you sitting in your living room thinking about how cool it would be to be rich and famous. And the action items in that chain are what separate you from the world; the things that you do that most of the others don't are what knock out your competition. Thinking about becoming an actor makes you like millions of others, but becoming an actor makes you like only 2% of the population. Taking a chance and going to where acting is happening knocks out all but about 1% of the population.

If you're talented and good, your odds of becoming a famous actor right now are 1 in 23. But no one will ever really pull your name from a hat and declare it so. They won't come to your house and pull you out on their own.

Your odds are 1 in 23 because you're one of the few people in the world that stood up and walked out your door, and really, honestly tried to follow your dreams.

And so few people really do that. And if you actually get done reading this post, stand up, and become an actor - or whatever your dream is - then you really are on your way to success. But if you just nod after reading this, think it's interesting, and then close the browser and go make yourself lunch and that's it - then welcome to the millions.

Your odds are entirely determined by your own next moves.

Aaron

P.S. I should also add that the biggest problem in acting, really, is that not hitting that top 200 spots is impossible or outside aiming for, but that hitting lower doesn't make much money. According to the survey, most actors are better educated than the rest of the world (strong competition) and earn less than their peers at about $23,400 annually. When people say that acting is a hard business, they don't really mean that getting to the top is impossible, just that getting to the middle is far easier. And the middle in this industry is not as lucrative as in other industries....

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An Interesting Chat With Venture Capital (and a bit of an update) - 08/19/2008 - 9:25 AM:

NOTE: This post was supposed to have gone up a week ago, but the site updates that Dustin made (shortened posts, next buttons) got in the way. So it's going up now, a bit delayed.

My job, it has been determined, is to fund us. Smiley It's the role I'd have chosen for myself (in fact, did choose for myself). A medical emergency with Paul's wife last weekend - that ultimately turned out ok - reminded me that I need to get things moving.

Everything is in place, all the parts are moving well and momentum is excellent... except for all the research, time, energy and effort that has to go into preparing to ask someone if you can spend their money. The VC pitch. It can't be avoided, no matter how much people already know about you before you walk into the room, and you can't waste people's time once you're there.

So we've been researching, heads buried in books, at libraries, reading research reports, old library of congress presentations, everything we can get our hands on in terms of "our market". It's extremely interesting stuff, and at the same time depressingly slow.

But we're almost done, now, and we've had a number of encouraging conversations along the way.

One such conversation took place last week at Highway 12 Ventures, the largest VC firm in Idaho. I met Mark, the firm's managing partner, at a gathering, and he invited Paul and I down to their office. When I objected that we were still a week or two away from being ready for that, he held his hands up.

"Aaron," he said. "You misunderstand. I just want to sit for a few hours and hear your story. It's great. We want to get to know you."

And so it was that Paul and I ended up at their office a few days later telling our story from the start. It was Mark and the rest of the partners of Highway 12, sitting around the table for 3 hours talking about the history and the adventure, everything. At some point, despite trying not to, the conversation began drifting to business models and the industry, and we started digging into the numbers I had been going over for some time. Man, was it fun. I'm rarely in my element as much as when I'm talking about something I'm passionate about.

Not that I'm good at it - I blunder and stutter and misspeak, and slur my words. I talk far too fast, and sometimes rearrange the syllables in words so that they lose normal meaning. But I have a good time doing it, and it was really fun to be able to finally shine some light on the work we've been doing. I had a really good time. And I think Highway 12 did, too.

I think Paul and I have picked up a knack for making friends; not just people that can help you, but people that actually want to help you. You're not supposed to feel like you can go back to the VCs - the enemy, to some - and ask for their advice on how you should finish your business plan. They are, after all, the ones you're putting it together for.

But, I think I'd feel fairly comfortable asking most of the people we've connected with for their help. And I'd expect to get it, honestly. Not because of us, but because we keep discovering genuinely good people.

I don't think it's anything we're doing, exactly, to connect with these people. I think we've just been lucky enough to find good spirits; or they seem to find us. Or other good spirits that know us go out of their way to introduce us around. Every industry seems to have them. Someone asked me recently when I'd consider my project successful, and I have to say that I already consider it successful. I've connected too well with too many good people to think otherwise.

Everything from this point on is just a question of how much more successful we can make it. Smiley

Anyway, this is a long post. I should get in the habit of posting more often, so the posts individually can be shorter.

Hopefully a press release will be going out soon with some interesting news.

Best,

Aaron...

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Ajax Front End Rollout, a Feedbock Tool, and a Big Welcome to Dan. - 07/18/2008 - 10:54 AM:

Two interesting things happened this week - many things, actually, but two I'll mention here. First, yesterday we rolled out the Ajax based front end, and replaced the Flash based interface. For nearly all purposes, the change should be hard to notice - aside from adding a loading bar, and tweaking a few other little things, we attempted to emulate the Flash system entirely.

The upside is that this system will be able to run on the iPhone, and we'll be able to start rolling out improvements to the system as we go along. The downside is that - unlike flash - there's a lot more things that can go wrong between browsers. We've tested it on nearly every major browser (and a few not major browsers) in existence, but there's likely going to be things we can't catch. So, if and when you run across errors, let us know so that we can fix them.

Second, our little office crew has grown by one member. Dan Bowen, a graduate student at Florida State University, flew out to Idaho for the summer in order to work with us/be part of the team/play hackysack with us during lunch breaks. :) (that's a total lie... we actually don't have "lunch breaks"... we just tend to eat at our desks and play hacky after it gets dark and everyone else has left the building, but you get the idea).

You can see a picture of him below this post. So our office is actually rather full at the moment, with four of us crowded in and gathered at our own work stations, each with our own tasks. It's fun. There's camaraderie. Not to mention the possibility of a Diablo II LAN party in preparation for Diablo III, and its far off release.

Next week we'll be rolling out a feedback tool for algorithm improvement, but I'll talk about that when we get there.

Cheers, and have a great weekend.

Aaron...

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Slashdot.org and the Wonders of the Flood (not the Halo kind). - 07/07/2008 - 1:23 PM:

Sometime over the weekend, BookLamp was submitted to Slashdot.org, and we were picked up for front page coverage. That's great, in large part because it's one of the first times that we've been picked up by social networking sites like Digg or Slashdot without us knowing about it in advance. Normally when someone submits our link, they send us an update to tell us they're going to - this time, it just showed up with no warning, just a call from Paul last night before going to bed.

"Did you see we're on Slashdot?" he asked.
"What?" I responded, always quick on my feet. "Huh?"
Luckily the server was already optimized from earlier Diggs, or it could have been a problem.

The resulting traffic is always fun, as are the tons e-mails, interview requests, friendly greetings, good luck wishes, and additional Viagra ads that always seem to follow. Smiley All of those - minus the Viagra ads - are very much appreciated.

Between BookLamp and CanGoogleHearMe.com's original trip, we've been hit by Digg several times - probably 5 or 6 times in the last year - but this is the first time we've hit Slashdot, oddly enough. I'm glad to see we've finally breached that wall, because I've always found the Slashdot crowd to be slightly more... objective... in their response to ideas. Smiley

It's a bit earlier than I'd have hoped, though. I'd have preferred that we had the next iteration of the software on the site before this flood came. Part of the reason we've held back from announcing any major motion in the site is that we want to have those tools out front before we open the doors and start attracting additional traffic. Sometimes the Internet does not work on your schedule, though. Smiley

Either way, if this is your first time to the site, welcome, and let us know your thoughts. If you're an old hand at this site, welcome back and feel free to reacquaint yourself with forums. Add us to your RSS feed, check back over the next weeks. Hopefully you'll have something worth playing with soon enough.

Best,

Aaron
Comment on the forums...

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How Time Flies. Feedback Tools and Funding. - 06/30/2008 - 1:09 PM:

It's amazing how time flies. You put your head down to do some work, and the next thing you know it's two weeks later and you're just bringing your head up for air. :)

Most of my work at the moment involves a great deal of writing - proposal writing, e-mail writing, guideline writing, these sorts of things. I still marvel at the fact that - even though we're now working full time on this project - it's almost as if I have less time to do everything. I suppose it's probably to be expected - the more movement you have on a project, the faster new items develop that need your attention.

The 4th of July weekend will be a few welcome days off - my parents will be in town, we'll be visiting my grandfather for the fireworks, and I'll be able to put my feet up without feeling like I'm delaying something by not working.

And honestly, it's a good time for it, too. Just the other week we managed to finalize the details of "that elusive contract" that we've been moving towards for the last two months, and others are in the pipeline. Yes, it's vague, I'm sorry - but we're probably a week or three away from being ready to announce anything regarding that. Still, it's a tremendous sigh of relief to have something like that finished and out of the way, and it frees us up to really work on what we really want to work on - changes to the site itself.

Dustin is putting together a feedback tool that allows people to give us feedback on what scenes do and don't have certain characteristics. This will help us fine tune our system a little. Also, about two weeks ago we rolled out a Ajax based interface for testing - after getting some feedback we're about ready to replace the Flash version.

Both of those will probably go up the week after the 4th.

The issue of funding is an interesting one. Despite funding being an important element of keeping this project going (obviously), so far pursuing funding has been a fairly small part of what's been occupying our time. Simply standing up and declaring, "Show me the money!" is probably a poor way of seeking it - before we followed up on the contacts that we've made in the industry regarding funding, we've been exploring our possibilities and establishing relationships. We needed to know how the publishing industry would respond to our approach - would publishers be scared of us, find us interesting, ignore us, etc. Well, now we know the answer to all of those things.

The completion of the mysterious contract that I mentioned earlier not only gives us a great deal of potential data to work with, it also frees us up to shift our attention away from content and towards approaching funders. This is a huge shift in approach - it fundamentally means I now feel we have enough of an opportunity to offer that we're in a good position to open communications a bit more with the VC and angel communities.

Up until now, the delays in this area have been our own strategic choices. This adventure will start getting interesting again when a few things start happening, mainly when the site starts seeing the results of a larger database of books, and second when we start taking this to investors and getting feedback from that.

It'll be interesting to see how it goes as we start down that road in earnest.

But, now it's back to work. Dustin is waiting for my input on the feedback system, and Paul... well, Paul is doing his thing. :)

Cheers, and have a good 4th of July (for those of you that celebrate it).

Aaron...

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