“The entrepreneur takes risks but does not see himself as a risk-taker, because he operates under the useful delusion that what he’s attempting is not risky. Then, trapped in mid-mountain, people discover the truth—and, because it is too late to turn back, they’re forced to finish the job.”
– [Malcolm Gladwell](http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2013/06/24/130624crbo_books_gladwell?currentPage=all)
Shoot Me, Redux
Jess (& co.) have now knocked out the indoor [Dobbin](http://www.dobbinclothing.com) shoot, and just in time; if the production schedule holds, their Spring ’13 line should launch next week. Just-in-time fashion: excellent for incorporating trend and customer feedback; terrible for a startup company’s mental health.
Complements to the Chef
[Ed. note: yes, friends and family who wrote in to correct, I know that the phrase is ‘compliments to the chef’ with an ‘i’. This was an attempt at cleverness – entrepreneurship being a complement to cheffing – that apparently wasn’t so clever after all. Tough crowd.]
Recently, I’ve started to notice how many entrepreneurs are interested in both cooking and photography. Which makes a lot of sense.
Entrepreneurship is basically the art of slogging daily through nebulous victories and vague defeats, for years and years at a time. Successful startups are those where the victories at least slightly outpace the defeats, consistently enough for the edge to compound gradually. Even in today’s world of lean startups, of building minimal viable products and iterating fast and always shipping, the process of slogging and compounding moves excruciatingly slowly. It takes a long time to see anything happen, and an even longer time to see anything incontrovertibly significant – anything big enough to impress your mom or your non-entrepreneur friends.
Like entrepreneurship, cooking and photography are about making something from scratch, and about sharing it with others. Unlike entrepreneurship, they also let you do so exceedingly quickly. Over the course of an afternoon, you can create something that never existed before, yet that’s still good enough to be appreciated by family, friends or the broader world. And it’s not just the immediate validation – that appreciation (or lack thereof) also provides fast and clear feedback to quickly guide iterative improvement.
After a long day of slow slog, it’s hard to explain how very gratifying that can be.
Shoot Me
Spent yesterday helping Jess wrangle a last-chance photo shoot at the [Morgan Libary](http://www.themorgan.org/home.asp), as [Dobbin](http://www.dobbinclothing.com) counts down to releasing their Spring ’13 line:
“EMPLOYEES of Neverware, a small tech start-up company in Manhattan, agree that CrossFit reinforces workplace cooperation. “When we were spotting each other on squats, we literally had each other’s backs,” said Daniel Ryan, 22, a software developer and Princeton student who was an intern at the company last year.
Until recently, the Neverware team worked out three times a week at CrossFit NYC. The workouts took place around 3 p.m. — the hour when employees had begun to nod off — and offered a much-needed interruption in 12- to 15-hour workdays. Jonathan Hefter, 27, the C.E.O., said he expected his staff members, then all men, to participate.”
\-[“We’re One Big Team, So Run Those Stairs”, *The New York Times*](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/business/crossfit-offers-an-exercise-in-corporate-teamwork-too.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)
A great photo shoot of Outlier portfolio company Kings County Distillery in the Selby:
Practiced
About a year back, I joined One Medical, a startup-esque medical practice that’s quickly spread from San Francisco to New York, Washington D.C., Boston and Chicago. Recently, Jess joined too. This past week, both of us went in for flu shots.
The experience at One Medical is so good that I actually find it slightly confusing each time I’m there. How can they be making money doing this? Why aren’t other medical practices like this, too? But, at some level, I don’t really care. For a fairly low fee ($199 a year), I can make doctors appointments online, often for the same day; I can email with my doctor about medical questions; appointments start on time (and I mean really on time – Jess’ doctor was twelve minutes late for her 5:00pm appointment, and gave her a Starbucks gift certificate by way of apology for being ‘so behind’); and the doctors (at least the three I’ve seen so far) are knowledgable, friendly, and extremely competent. They happily take insurance. And because they collect information when you make the appointment online, I breeze in and out without even stopping to fill out the standard clipboards full of forms.
They’re not an Outlier portfolio company. But they are, to me, exactly the kind of company that’s exciting to me and Outlier. They take a common experience – going to the doctor – that’s clearly broken, and improve it so much that, as Jess did to me after her first appointment, you want to text someone just to say wow.
Wiry
A former colleague was engaged in an ugly and contentious negotiation. The counter-party started making personal attacks, but my old colleague needed to close the deal nonetheless; he couldn’t walk away.
So he inked the contract. And he wired the contractually stipulated $100,000. But, in the memo field for the wire, he wrote: “Declare the diamonds at the port.”
For the next year, the recipient was hounded and audited by essentially every finance, banking and customs body in the US government.
Touché.
Apparently in need of glasses, the staff of DuJour Magazine describes me as [“5-foot-6, with a lean, athletic build developed from years of working out regularly — picture Bruce Lee”](http://www.dujour.com/2012-12/728/crossfit-the-wall-street-workout).
I did [a Q&A with Finnish CrossFit software company WODConnect about lessons learned running CFNYC](http://blog.wodconnect.com/post/38141285911/affiliate-lessons-learned-part-2-joshua-newman).