Drew Yates

This is somewhat rambly; I’ll have to edit this down later. But I do have that rule about releasing early…

One of my entrepreneur friends, after reading about my little incident at OSU and my statements regarding my entrepreneurial ambitions, expressed surprise that I would be applying “for a job after what you’ve written.”

It’s not a job.

I’m amused by the incompleteness of “entrepreneurial mythology.” Some genius or two goes off, builds something interesting for nothing, ???, profit! I’m not so naive.

You might read on MSN or USA Today about how a “prestigious education isn’t that valuable” or how “why it may be wiser to attend community college.” That’s because you’re reading the press, and its opinions are published exclusively to be sold. Doesn’t this sound like a suspiciously palatable conclusion? That you, the paying majority, live in the best of all possible worlds?

Here’s the real secret to success:

Already be successful.

Consider this: most “investment advice” describes how you, too, can be a millionaire from nothing in “a mere 20 years.” Haven’t you ever considered starting with a million dollars and saving yourself twenty years? Now, haven’t you considered that there are already people with a million dollars to invest right now? Where will they be in twenty years? Do you think you can compete? You can’t.

What about technical expertise? Capital infrastructure? Social and cultural institutions? You can’t compete. Not in a way that means anything within the scope of an individual life.

The good news is that everyone technically starts with nothing at birth. Everything beyond that, you are given —beyond the comparatively very little which you achieve for yourself within the framework which you are given. So if you’re not already successful, the next best way to be successful is:

Be made successful by the successful.

This may seem cynical, but it’s not. It’s every book you read. It’s every idea you learn. It’s your country, your culture, your family, your technology, and your language. Whatever the successes of these institutions, you inherit them. Which leads me to my final and most useful “success secret:”

Belong to successful institutions.

But don’t be fooled. You may be as “equally an employee” as your CEO, but do you belong to the same institutions? That is, if you chose, could you be the CEO? If not, then you are not members of the same institutions. You just happen to share a few. Remember, the official name of North Korea is “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” If you want to know where you are really expected to belong, stop listening and look.

Look, indeed. Stop listening and look at the biographies of the successful: successful families, successful companies, successful schools and universities, successful metropolitan areas, successful friends and mentors, successful investors, etc. etc. Sure, they may have dropped out of Harvard or Stanford or Hewlett-Packard or wherever… but, to leave a prestigious institution, you must be a member of it first! And entrepreneurs rarely leave successful institutions empty-handed; what about all the networking, confidence, ideas, experience, and knowledge they must have had to join and must have acquired while a full institutional member?

And only exceptional stories are worth reporting, so your sample is of successful people skewed. Look around next time you drive through the city. Who owns those towers? Who owns those companies? Do all the “success stories” that you’ve ever heard about account for all that success? Who are these people? To what institutions do they belong?

Back to Something Labs.

Let’s face some cold, hard facts. Some things are too late for me. I’m not going back to finish my undergrad by myself. I’m already 22. That time is over. I may as well re-enter high school (oh shit, hell no.) Yes, I understand that some people go back to school. What am I supposed to do until then? Kill time until I go back to school? Fuck that. I’m living life now. Fuck school.

But that leaves me without a good institution. So of what institution can I be a member that is intellectually rigorous, committed to nurturing and developing its members as people, fosters life-long personal and professional relationships, and acts as a surrogate tribe amid an increasingly disjoint yet homogenized society?

Since I come from a very middle-class background, I know shit about finances (beyond the obvious, like don’t run up credit cards on stupid crap when you can only afford to pay the minimums.)

So I’ve started the Morningstar Investing Classroom curriculum. There are four subjects: stocks, funds, portfolio, and bonds. Each subject has 100 level through 500 level course levels with about ten lessons each. Each lesson covers enough material for about one short college lecture followed by a 5 question quiz worth 5 points. If you earn 790 points, you are awarded with 60 days of Premium Morningstar.com for free. So far, I have 40 credits after completing “Stocks: 100 Level.”

I found the link to the Morningstar Classroom from Tucker Max: I want to get smart. Where do I start?. This forum is the gift that keeps on giving…

Dear Andrew,

We would love to have you come out to our San Francisco office either later this week , or next week for a round of interviews and meet a few Lindens.

Please let me know what your availability looks like and I will go ahead and get this scheduled on our end.

Please also send me an electronic copy of your resume.

We look forward to meeting you!

Thank you,
Divya

Edit: This Friday, 2 to 5. I’ll have to run through some Knuth to review, I suppose!

So I’ve spent the last few days trying to promote The Idiot Startup. So far, the reactions have been “I’m amused, but I want more.”

Dina says it best:

Though your idiot startup stories were indeed amusing, you need to fill this up a bit more before it can go viral. Maybe go behind the scenes and instead of forwarding the link, just ask for the stories first. Leave your cheerful call to action on blogs across the world, I don’t know. I just know that my initial impression was, “Hey, funny stuff… oh, there’s nothing else here.”

Some other reactions:

Ramit Sethi writes:

Would love to see more once you’ve written some more. It looks very interesting.

Guy Kawasaki writes:

I think you’ll have plenty to write about. The problem is that some of the dumbest ideas will turn into the next Google…then what?

So people, if you like The Idiot Startup, submit stories! I, er, somebody only has so many stories, and I want to keep everything honest. So submit your startup stories to Idiot Startup! If you include your name and address, I’ll even email you some cool IdiotStartup swag. You will be the envy of all your friends because that is a badass logo.

Regular readers know that I have some animosity with music. (Radio Music or Tasty Snackcake?, Pandora Music, Red Hot Chili Peppers, A Confession)

This was for two reasons:

• I hated the voice, violin, and piano that I took as a kid, but I was terrified of a poor performance, and that eventually gave me bad nerves under stress (my legs will shake uncontrollably. It might be very bad news if you notice this happening and I’m not freaking out, because it means that I’m on “manual override.” It’s actually pretty cool, it feels like I’m floating.)
• I was sick of all the crap piped into me by ClearChannel and MTV, and I didn’t have any alternative, so I assumed that all music sucked.

Well, thanks to the magic of the Internet and Pandora, I’ve started to open to music again.

Here’s my Pandora profile. What do my tastes in music say about me? Hum.

Favorite Songs

Traditional: Sometime in my youth I heard these songs and they’ve suck with me since.

• Orbital: Halcyon on & on: I love this song more than I could ever love another human being.
• E Nomine: Das Testament: For reference, this was the flavor of Christian that I was in high school. I wore (cheap) preppy clothes, though. The original version of this album is better.
• The Crystal Method: Vegas: This was my first electronic album. I’ve probably listened to “High Roller” for a total solid week of playing time, if not more.
• Apocalyptica: Cult: I thought that classical was trite, mechanical, and pretentious and that metal boring, simplistic, and white trash. But I liked the fusion…
• Tool: Aenima: Oohh… yah, I’m the reason that you shouldn’t let your smart but otherwise well-behaved and obedient children listen to Tool.
• Rammstein: Reise Reise: This is the song I looped when I did my morning cramming for afternoon exams in school.
• Prodigy: Fat of the Land: The only Prodigy album that I like, and I like a lot.
• Underworld: Cowgirl: Epic. The most epic of all epic hacking songs.

New: Pandora has introduced me to this music within the last few months.

• Orbital: My most favorite, surely. Some of their songs I don’t quite like at first, but the more I hear them, the more I like them. In particular, the opening of P.E.T.R.O.L. and the middle of Are We Here trip me out
• A Perfect Circle: In particular: Passive, Outsider, Pet, Sheep, Noose, Blue
• B12: In particular: Void/Comm
• Solvent
• Scannerfunk, Lights Turned Down, this one also trips me out, and is mandatory headphones listening. I don’t like most of Scannerfunk’s other work, though.
• Junkie XL
• Radiohead: Idioteque: I don’t like any other of Radiohead’s songs, but this one in particular has special meaning to me. I just realized it’s a long story, so I’ll save it for later.
• Ghost in the Shell (selective): I can’t find a good sample of this, but if you know, then you know.
• (edit: these songs now bore me, and so now have been removed)

The Idiot Startup

because sharing the mistakes of entrepreneurship makes us wiser —and it’s pretty funny

I may or may not be associated with this site….

The Idiot Startup is a light-hearted community where we can share our war stories about entrepreneurship, have a good laugh, and perhaps even learn a thing or two. Users are encouraged to submit their “less-than-ideal” startups stories and comment on the the stories of others. As the site grows, forums and additional features may be added. It’s like the The Daily WTF, but for entrepreneurs rather than programmers.

I think that sometimes I try to attack too many too big projects at once. The result? Too much thrash, not enough results.

I hereby declare the remainder of February to be “push old projects” month.

I’ll be posting these pushed projects here to this blog as I make progress. I’d like to get a few complete projects that I can point to before I dedicate my time to something that may risk several months with nothing to show.

Too bad my layout is too narrow to embed these… didn’t think about that.

Adventure Time —This actually played on Nickelodeon

Intermission in the 3rd Dimension —Don Hertzfeld

Rabbit —This is a serious one…

Oh sweet, I totally believe you! I sure can’t for this new and exciting clusterfuck!

Everyone has those stupid, cruel, yet entirely innocent things that they wish they could take back. Over fifth and sixth grade summers, my parents dropped me off at community youth group called “Summer Theater.” Basically, the college students running the program would host rehearsals for plays all afternoon at the Junior High auditorium, and when not in rehearsal, we’d play Magic the Gathering cards or hang out in the basement under the stage. Sure, there was a big performance day at the end of the summer when we’d perform for the parents, but we didn’t care too much about that. What we cared about was hanging out in our basement clubhouse, “The Bungalow.”

So for several hours a day, we got to chill in this concrete basement almost entirely unsupervised. We replaced the “exit” sign lightbulb with a black light. There were “secret passageways” (crawlspaces) that ran from a hole in the wall. These were never a problem because there were all these “legends” about these crawlspace rooms, and we were too afraid to explore. Well, that was until I decided to start bringing a flashlight, and we discovered that these tunnels ran all across the school… and that since we were all a bunch of lanky little kids, we could disappear and reappear in different rooms all over the school… The crawlspace was boarded up the next summer.

Anyways, one kid brought a Red Hot Chili Peppers CD one day to listen to, “Blood Sugar Sex Magik.” Being the little douchebag fundie tool child that I was raised to be, naturally, this was a Bad Thing.

So I tried to explain to this kid that this CD was wrong. He refused to believe me. So after failing to convince him all afternoon of his sinful ways, I stole his CD and ground it into the cement floor. He was really upset. He demanded that I pay for a new CD. I refused, because the CD was wrong and he shouldn’t have brought it. He tried appealing to the college students who were “supervising us,” but they didn’t really care. So, this poor kid who just wanted to listen to one of the most popular album in the early 1990s just like everyone else had been foiled by a fundie kid: me. I remember feeling kind of bad because this kid was so upset, but mostly, I was satisfied that The Right Thing had ultimately Been Done. In fact, since I had never even heard the CD, I thought it was some sort of creepy R&B black people music (because of the words “Sugar” and “Magik” in the title.) Good thing the world had little me to help keep it shiny, white, and pure!

Years later, I had gotten a new CD that I bought burned from entrepreneurial friend in 10th grade. It was Californication, by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I was pretty excited, because we really didn’t listen to music at home, and I didn’t own any CDs. In fact, I even encouraged my dad to listen. He wasn’t too enthusiastic to bother, of course, just like how he didn’t really care about much of anything. So one night, after picking me up from some after-school activity, he confronted me angrily. Why, I had left my CD in the car, and he had been listening to it while he was waiting. And, low and behold, there was A SWEAR! I was pretty sure that there wasn’t, so I made him play it again. He did. Yep, there was a swear, right there on my new CD. Well, screw that. It was my CD, and it wasn’t a “big deal.” I did get to keep the CD after making a protest the ride home.

God, I hate Ohio.