Hole-in-shoe idea to Billion Dollars – The Geox Story

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May 082012
 

Geox PictureWhile there are so many established shoe companies, can someone start a “Hole-in-a-shoe company and survive.

Mario Polegato did it with Geox and also made it a billion dollar company.

Holy Moly, How did he do it?. Let us check out his journey.

Mario was a wine maker by training and was overseeing his family’s third-generation wine making business in Italy.

One time he was attending a wine convention in Reno, Nevada in the united states. (conventions always happen near casinos. isn’t it cool) .

As it happens always(mostly), the conference halls got stuffy and he wanted to take a whiff of fresh air. He stepped out of the convention center and took a walk.

Reno is in the desert and Unfortunately for him, the sun too was not kind to him and he couldn’t escape the scorching heat and he could feel the heat in his shoes too.

He says “”As soon as I stepped out in the desert heat, my feet started to suffer as the rubber sole did not let the heat escape from my shoes”.

He did something wired.  He took out his Swiss Army knife and cut holes in the soles of both shoes. He says “I could immediately feel a difference,”

He thought of bringing this new found happiness to the world.

Back in Italy, he started to figure out how to make this idea real.

He wanted to create shoes that kept water out and  also bring in ventilated air.  He looked around and found that  no one had ever created this kind of shoe  before.

So, he decided to find his own answer and engaged local academic institutions..   He says”"As soon as I returned to Italy, I started to work with local universities, and after years of research we created the Geox technology,”

While most shoes hold sweat in, Geox shoes let the foot breathe via a perforated sole and a porous membrane

Mario designed the shoes with the goal of keeping dirt and water out. “When we sweat inside our shoes, we produce vapor, which can be released through the membrane and the outsole,” he explains.

The idea is to keep feet dry and at the right temperature.

His shoes challenged the historical perception of holes in shoes, Everyone believed that shoes should not have holes.
When the first prototype was ready, He took it to a lot of big established companies like Nike, Puma and Adidas. They all rejected him.

Unfazed and not getting discouraged, he decided to start his own company.

He named his company Geox, the name coming from “Geo”(earth) and “x” standing for technology. (Pretty Neat!).

Not wanting to use his family money.he founded the company with a bank loan.

He wanted to design, manufacture and market a new kind of shoe – the shoe that breathes.

He says “Geox is the answer to the main issue when you buy a pair of shoes: perspiration.”

He started small and slowly the shoe gained traction. He later opened his own retail boutiques.

Geox  counts Pope Benedict XVI and Paul McCartney as customers. And both President Barack Obama and Angelina Jolie have bought Geox shoes for their children. Othere celebrities include Spain’s royal family , Kate Winslet and Prince Albert of Monaco.

He says “Once the customers try Geox, they keep buying them and speaking well about them.”

Today, Geox produces more than 20 million pairs of shoes each year and they are sold in 100 countries. Sales exceeded $1.3 billion.

GEOX became Italy’s leading shoe manufacturer and their shoes are now distributed in 68 countries – in a total of 10,000 independent sales outlets and 481 exclusive GEOX boutiques. Mario Polegato was named “Best Italian Businessman of 2003″ by Ernst & Young.

Mario continuous to come up with new ideas for GEOX like the waterproof leather sole, breathable apparel, and a cooling system designed for golf and other athletic shoes.

About his plans, he says “I’m a very ambitious man and I enjoy working hard. I’m not content to be Italy’s biggest shoe manufacturer. I want to be No. 1 in the world (smiles). And what’s to stop us? ”

He says “When you really believe in a project, you will do it, even if you have to do it alone.”

Steve Jobs – How to be Extra-ordinary

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May 032012
 


[L:1m]

In this brief talk, Steve Jobs, founder of apple, talks about 3 qualities to being amazing in anything,

1. Learn from the best minds:  He says “It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you are doing”

2. Have passion in lots of things : He says “I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians, who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”

3. Transform Things: He says “Picasso had a saying – Good artists copy great artists steal and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

This is one of the most misunderstood quote of Steve jobs. Many think that he swiped other people’s ideas. they say this because they do not understand how creativity works.

What this really means is… you learn from the greatest minds and then add you own personality and knowledge and transform it into something unique.  All the major inventions like Henry Ford’s Mass-manufactured car or the Wright Brothers invention of flight came into reality in this way.

Just like When you want to cook a new dish, you watch a recipe but then modify it to suit your tastes.

Steve was a master at this .. He learnt from the brilliant minds and added a lot of his own unique twist into it.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a brilliant article titled “The Tweaker-The real genius of Steve Jobs” explaining this characteristic of Steve Jobs.

How Noel Lee went from broke to starting the multimillion dollar Monster cable

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May 012012
 

Noel Lee - Founder Monster CableCan a person born to Chinese immigrants who was broke and no job build a 100million-plus business with his passion for music.

Monster Cables’s Noel Lee made monster a resounding business success.

Here is how he did it.

Immigrating to America…

Just before china was changing over to communist rule, a Chinese couple took the last boat to America.

The young lady who boarded the boat was pregnant and after the couple landed in America they gave birth to a baby boy and they named him Noel Lee.

Noel grew up and studied engineering at cal poly near San Fransisco. Like every immigrant Asian, He joined as a trainee engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a government nuclear research center near San Francisco. He married, got a house and a kid.

Should he quit his job to pursue his passion…

But his passion was always music and he was a good drum player. One day, he decided to pursue his passion, so he left his job, leased his house and went to Hawaii with a band called “Asian Wood”.

He took his family with him too.

Problems being with the music band.

They faced lot of problems there, His son had to sleep inside the drum set. His son Kevin says “The bass drum, that’s what I used as a pillow.”

Noel  learnt a lot of business lessons there. The band was almost kicked off the tour during their first stop in Hawaii when the promoter hated their music. But luckily they got a second chance and  they could continue their tour.

They used to play at music clubs and sometimes the sleazy night club owners wouldn’t pay them. One weekend they had work and the next week no work.

Noel says “it was different going from a steady predictable job as an engineer to an unpredictable life”

Eventually the band broke up and Noel came back to his home to the San Francisco bay area.

Broke and looking for something to do.

He was not much interested in a job anymore. He says “I just couldn’t cut the 8-5 anymore. but I always had a passion for audio equipment”

Noel was an audiophile too. Audiophiles try to get the purest music possible as close to the original recording from their audio equipment.

He says “I wanted to improve my sound system but I was broke”. He thought “What can I improve in my system that won’t cost me any money”

Got an idea right at his home.

He was looking at his equipment and noticed the big amplifier and big speakers but saw the little wires connecting them.

He thought everything looks big and the wires looked tiny and he wondered..why can’t the the wires be bigger too.

He says “it occurred to me that the wires people used to connect their speakers to their home stereo systems were not constructed in a way that provided the best listening experience. In those days speaker wire was an afterthought. ”

He started testing different wire options at home, varying the thickness, composition and braiding pattern, and listening to Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture again and again through each test cord, until he found the best possible construct.

He says “Listening to wire is a learned process, like wine tasting. You must listen for many things at once – dynamics, loudness, bass response, high frequencies – so you need a piece of music that contains all those elements”

He would go back and forth between one wire structure and another, listening to the same song thousands of times. Then it was time to show off to the world what he had learned.

How to get money to start and expand.

Now he needed a loan to build the products. He went to several banks and all of them turned him down. For two years he couldn’t get a loan, even though he had a great business plan and his mom’s house as collateral.

Finally he got a little money but it was not enough to keep him moving forward. About two years into the business, one Canadian distributor wanted to buy about 35,000 units of his product – the biggest order to that point – but the caveat was, he would pay only once the wires had been shipped.

Creative idea to convince the banker

The problem is Noel needed money to actually make the product. he went to the bank and when then banker wanted to see the products. He did something out-of-the-ordinary..

He stacked a bunch of boxes and put boxes full of packaged wire on the top boxes and empty boxes at the bottom. The bankers saw the large stack and said, “Okay, you’re good to go.”

He says “Thank goodness they didn’t open the bottom boxes. ”

Educate first or sell first?

He started pitching one store at a time. An early customer, Pacific Stereo in Emeryville, Calif., told him that Monster was a bad name and would hurt sales. The retailer had a presence in California and was planning to expand in the East coast, and he knew that this would be a good partner to grow sales.

But when he went to the buyers,they basically had the door slammed in his face.

He says “Maybe if I were starting out today, with blogs and online customer interaction, I wouldn’t have to knock on so many physical doors. But I would still need to be an educator first and a salesman second. ”

Finally he got an appointment with Richard Strand, Pacific’s vice president of merchandising and a true audiophile, to present his product. He finally agreed to carry his product.

Joel says about Richard Strand “He had no idea if it would sell, but he said, “Since you’re such a believer, Noel, I want to give it a shot.”

Slowly he pitched to many other stores one at a time. He says  “I had to create a market where none existed. In the beginning we called it a cure without a disease. ”

He adds “So we set out to do a marketing program that was educational”

The challenge with these stores was to educate hi-fi experts so they understood that they were missing one of the most important elements in providing the best audio experience to their customers.

He would demonstrate the difference between his wire and theirs, right there on the sales floor.

When they first started out, every Monster dealer had a little switcher and they switched back and forth between 18-gauge wire and Monster Cable.  Of course everyone heard a big difference.

Nowadays we don’t need that. Everybody knows there’s a difference in cables so it doesn’t take that kind of convincing.

He says “It was a real rigorous education program and we spent a lot of time at it with the intent of bringing audiophile cables to a broader audience”

He adds “We were very successful and carved out our own market niche in the cable business. People really recognized the sound quality of the products. ”

Expansion troubles

He wanted to grow it bigger, So he bought space at half a table in a 10-by-10 booth at the 1977 Summer Consumer Electronics Show.

He drove to Chicago from San Francisco with a load of wires for that show. He made my first boxes by hand, and used rub-on letters and photocopied labels for the packaging and signs.

But the labels came out too light, so he bought black felt markers and darkened each by hand.

He says “Still, people at the show said they liked the packaging, the idea and our name.”

At this time, they were still working out of his family’s garage.

He says “The first production table was a four-by-eight piece of plywood and two sawhorses. I bought a pneumatic pump to wind up the cable, cut it, terminate it and put it in boxes. And that was the Monster Cable factory. ”

Monster Headphones PictureSuccess

After that they started to pick up steam. By the end of 1977 they moved from the garage to a location at 101 Townsend St in San Francisco. He also hired his first employees outside his family: Tai Min and Shang Yu.

The product feels authentic and genuine cause they feel the same way when they create the products. They genuinely love the quality of the music and wanted anyone who buys the product to experience the same.

He says “Not only do you need to have a product that is well-engineered, it must also be well-marketed. In fact, initially the marketing has to be 80% and the product 20%.”

He adds “Of course, if the product is no good, it won’t be validated in the marketplace and you can’t expect a long lifetime out of it. But if the product is good, and the marketing is good, you  can sustain a position. ”

I’m an engineer, not a businessman. I think that if I’d had more business knowledge and sense in the beginning, I might not have even tried to introduce Monster Cable to the market.

Noel was approached by people who thought they had great plans for partnerships or who wanted to take it public. But Noel turned them down.

He says “I knew it was important to stick to my mission for Monster, and I fended them off. Staying independent has been very good for us.”

Being Stupid is genius…

Noel says “Being stupid is good, being stupid is being different, being stupid is finding a new way of designing things that nobody else has thought of, because when you first think of it, the outside world  might say “wow,that’s stupid. Selling a speaker cable that makes better sound , well that’s stupid”

He adds “So, Stupid people do extraordinary things and accomplish extraordinary things”

He continues .. “Steve jobs did in designing an mp3 player or the founder of Sony designed the first Walkman… those were stupid ideas, in fact, when they did consumer surveys , the survey said nobody needs a portable music player.”

Maintaining the Startup spirit…

Monster is still privately owned and maintains a Startup culture even though it has been started more that three decades ago.
Noel says “we have been able to maintain the essence of what a startup is”. The essence of a Startup is everyone working passionately towards a single shared vision and having fun.

How to get Startup ideas – Ebay and Intuit founders share how they got theirs

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Apr 262012
 


[L:4m]

In this talk, two super-great entrepreneurs Pierre Omidyar founder of ebay and Scott Cook founder of intuit talk about how they got the idea for their Startups(Ok,they were startups when they started).

Pierre says…

“I saw on the Internet the opportunity to create a level playing field where individuals could compete with big companies and get the benefit of participating in an efficient market.” Oh..what this means in English is..

Before the internet if you want to become an actor you cannot get to the great directors directly.  You have to find a good agent who has connections and convince him you are good enough.  The agent then connects you to the studios.(I know kids don’t believe this, but this is true).

But Now… You can became an actor this instant, by flipping open your iPhone , recording a remarkable video and posting it to YouTube.  Two great examples are Justin Bieber( he posted songs in YouTube, got discovered by an agent and now he is a top celebrity) and..

Charlie Todd of Improv Everywhere ( creates his own chaos and pranks like the famous “New York-Frozen-Grand-central” prank).

Pierre Omidyar talks about how he, like many other Entrepreneurs, worked nights and weekends while performing his regular developer job during the day.

He concedes that  the seed for ebay’s idea developed from his wife.

He says “I saw the passion that my wife had for collecting, and I saw the passion that individuals brought when they could connect with other people that shared those interests, connect around their shared area of interests do business with each other and it was a very inspiring thing.”

Scott Cook…

talks about how he got the idea for intuit from his wife’s problem. He says “My wife complained about doing the bills.”

and then he found that “Nobody had made stuff that regular people could use”. So he created the user friendly Quicken.

Incidentally like all great founders. they got their ideas while watching their own problems or watching someone close to them experiencing a problem. Pretty inspiring to see how they took a normal every day problem and make it into a huge company.

How Wufoo bootstrapped a simple Form-creation idea to $35million

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Apr 242012
 

Image of Wufoo foundersWufoo was started by three founders Chris, Kevin and Ryan with about $18k and they turned profitable within 9 months.

They built online html form-builders to create contact forms, online surveys and event registrations.

SurveyMonkey came calling and bought them for $35million.

How did the three founders do it.. Let us check out…

How they got the idea:

Chris Campbell and Kevin Hale were working at the research department at a state-run university in Florida.

They were constantly getting requests to build forms from their users at the university.

It was a little tedious and boring to  build a form and database for each new request.They thought “There’s got to be a way to set this up, that people can help themselves.”

Chris’ brother Ryan was very good at coding and loved databases and he was working at another Startup.

They all liked this idea for a “content-Management” product. The initial idea was that this tool could be used for both backend management and Web-based forms.

How they turned their idea into reality

Together all three came up with all these different ideas and designs for their “content-Management” tool. The problem was they they didn’t have money saved up to build the software.

One time, they all attended South by Southwest conference and they saw Jason fried of 37Signals speak.

Jason Fried talked about how the first thing he did was build an audience and then once he had an audience, he launched his web app was able to tap that audience to convert them into customers of his web app.

Jason also spoke about how to do big things with small team staff. They thought “Wow. There’s no reason we can’t do what they’ve done. Or what anybody else in this room is doing. We’re just as good as everyone else.”

Should they build product first or Audience first?

So they were like, “Let’s do what they do. We’ll start building an audience, and from that audience something will be born from that.”

Kevin had a background in publishing, writing and journalism during his college days.

So, they started a blog called ParticleTree. ParticleTree had tutorials and articles about design, business, and the programming aspects of running a web startup. They named their company Infinity Box.

It would take them three to ten hours per article and they were heavily researched and edited carefully.

They also wrote about their learning’s when trying to build a web-startup. The articles did very well. They tried to publish regularly, as soon as they got off work.

Should they quit their jobs.

Over time, two of their articles ended up on Slashdot.. About 100,000 people visited and read the article in one day. This convinced them that they should be able to convert this into money somehow.

So, Kevin and Chris quit their jobs and decided to make a online magazine.

The magazine would focus on the programming, code, design aspects and the business side of web startups. They would also do interviews with other people and do book reviews.

They named the magazine Tree House. They built the first issue and gave it for free.

Chris kept his job and he shared his paycheck with Ryan and Kevin.

Chris was actually extremely cranky during that period. He would actually come home from work and would say “I’ve just been working in a cubicle all day. Show me what you got. And it better be good”.

About the magazine, Kevin says “It was like, 60 pages of content you couldn’t get anywhere else. It was tutorials: one tutorial on design, one tutorial on programming, one nice article from someone in the business field. We had really nice interviews with lots of different people that were really generous. Book reviews. We had a cartoon, actually. We had a marketplace for ads for people to put up job listings and such.”

Slowly they accumulated about 1,000 paying subscribers.

At the same time, they also started working on Wufoo too. They were planning on bootstrapping by getting money from their Treehouse magazine.

Will they get Y-Combinator interview?

After the first issue was out they heard about Y Combinator(YC), They applied and got selected for the YC interview.

Kevin says “When we applied, we had two different ideas. And they told us to prepare for both.”

So they spent all this time preparing for two different ideas. And then it turned out, when they got there, Y Combinator was not interested in the second one. The second one was like some kind of affiliate link program kind of idea. And the other one was Wufoo. Wufoo was about “reversible forms” i.e it was used to collect data from the web site(front-end) and there was also a backend where additional data could be entered.

Tussle with Paul Graham of Y Combinator

Paul Graham of Y Combinator suggested changes but the three founders did not like the changes.

Kevin says “During that interview, Paul Graham actually said, “You mean just, like, a form builder?” And we were like, “No, no, no. We want to be in Content Management!”

Paul insisted “No. I think you should do form building”

Kevin says “We had looked at other form builders, and we were like, “All these people are crappy. And we don’t want to be in that space.” Not realizing that’s the opportunity”

He adds “The three of us were in there and we actually felt like we had done really badly cause we actually are arguing because we don’t like the idea that they’re trying to convert us to. We’re giving our points out.”

During the interview Jessica Livingston said “Don’t forget to let me take a picture of your group. So that when we make the decision… we’ll have your faces and stuff.”

The interview was over and the picture was also not taken.

Will they get answer from Y-Combinator?

YC was supposed to call them by a certain time and they did not receive the call. They resigned to the fact that they were not selected.

So Chris started flying back to go back to his job, cause he had to work the next day. And then Ryan and Kevin were finishing up an issue of Treehouse.

And then surprisingly, they got the call. They were ecstatic.

Kevin says “it completely surprised us. We thought we had the worst interview ever”

Kevin adds “The reason Paul picked us out , was because he had been an avid reader of Particletree, for a while.”

YC also saw their determination.

Kevin says “We were determined we’re going to build this thing whether they’re going to be a part of it or not. So that was a really exciting thing for them[YC].”

They got a seed funding of $18,000. They could have just taken a loan for this amount, But Kevin says..

“Here’s the thing, They have connections like you’ll never believe. You have a different sort of experience with investors than other people that you will talk with. It’s an amazing opportunity,You will not get for $18,000″

Kevin adds “In addition to that, you meet with other startups within that Y Combinator session that you would have merit. I’m now lifelong friends with those people because we went through the same things. To have that kind of camaraderie, an outlet, and opportunity to show up is just invaluable.”

They took the money , rented out a townhouse, and holed up, and didn’t do anything else except work on building wufoo. They cooked Easy Mac and Ramen for three months.

After this , Paul Graham and Paul Buchheit both pitched in another $100,000.

Kevin says “During Y Combinator we worked really hard because we knew what we were fighting for; we knew that we never wanted to work in a cubicle ever again and, as a result, you try to make decisions that prevent you from going back to that—it makes you a lot ‘hungrier’ to do things.”

Wufoo Logo ImageIn the meantime, ParticleTree..their blog was hitting about 100k RSS subscribers. They developed Wufoo and when they had the beta, they announced it on their blog and got 5,000 beta users right away willing to try out their product.

They released the User interface first and got good feedback and so, they started developing the product. They developed it in 3 months and by the time they launched they had 15,000 interested users.

Can TechCrunch Negative Feedback be stopped.

When they launched , they got a Techcrunch mention, Unfortunately, they had some misconfiguration with the servers and servers were crashing. Immediately, negative comments started in Techcrunch.

Fortunately, Their customers from Particletree came to their rescue.

Kevin says “our users who had known us, immediately said, ‘We know these guys from Particle Tree. I was with them with the beta program. They know what they’re doing. They’re really good guys. They’re going to overcome this.”.

The tide turned and the negative comments tapered off.

Kevin says “That’s not something we did. That was our own audience and sort of fans.”

He adds “You cannot buy it. And you can’t fake it. People see it from a mile away and we have just always tried to remember that.”

All the other form-building tools out there were boring, but Wufoo was designed with fun in mind.

They had some fun stuff on the website like…

When users open a new account and sign in, they are presented with a blank screen and at the top it says..
“Holy tabula rasa! You don’t have any forms! Start creating one now.”

Users immediately knew that this is way different than any other service out there and felt the fun.
Kevin says “we’re very careful about, it’s not about being funny. It’s about being friendly”.

Their design was simple and very easy to use.

Kevin says “Our attention to detail is very meticulous. We’re very, very patient and meticulous. We actually think our software creation is, I think the verb that we use is, “We craft our code.”

They also fanatically focused on customer support. in fact on the support screen, they added a button called “emotional state” to capture how the user was currently feeling. Surprisingly a majority of the users updated their emotional state when they filled up the support form.

Everyone in the company does customer support for half a day every week.

Their philosophy was to build Trust with their users first and then release a product which is really helpful to their audience

Kevin says ”
So I can give a very interesting kind of fun talk about this we call it relationship marketing but almost in a literal sense. So our approach as if you’re trying to date someone. So we approach new users as if we were on like a first date. We approach existing users as if we’re in a marriage. And then we looked at all kinds of science and research to see what are the best things to do in those situations.

So on a first date, it’s all about first impressions. Right? It’s all those first moments. It’s storytelling. And everyone remembers… If I was to ask you, ‘Tell me the story of how you met your wife, or your first date with someone’ everyone remembers that in detail. Like they’re looking for those moments. You can’t get anything wrong because you don’t have the value of an established relationship to get benefit of the doubt. So for example, if you are on a first date with someone and he starts picking your nose right in front of you, it’s over. You’re not continuing that relationship. But if you’re in a 30 year marriage with someone and you see your husband sitting on the Bark-a-lounger picking his nose, you kind of shrug it off and go, ‘Uh. He’s got a heart of gold at least,’ right? You don’t have that forgiveness.

And our goal is to be meticulous in all those first moments. And we look at everywhere that a user might experience us for the first time. So it’s not just like landing pages, which is where most people focus on. Or the home page. The very first email we ever sent out. The first time you come to an empty screen. The first time you create a form. The first time you create a report. Like all the first times. The first time you have trouble with the service, customer support, every single one of those moments are crafted by us to make sure that it is memorable.”

Their Success

The word spread and within six months of the release they started making money and turned a profit.
They did not do any advertising. It was all word of mouth.

Chris says “It’s important to realize that there was no major turning point or “aha” moment for Wufoo. We focused on a niche, listened to our customers, and worked hard for five years. Although there is nothing sexy about our approach to business, that slow but steady attitude is what created the product”

SurveyMonkey came along and saw a good fit in wufoo and agreed to buy them for $35 million. Wufoo then became part of the surveymonkey family.

Kevin says “it’s making forms easy, fast, and fun. It’s about fun. It’s about the colors, it’s about customization, it’s about ease of use, it’s about personality. That’s what we focus on and we don’t think you can replicate that with any other software team.

He adds “our users are our greatest fanatics”.

 Posted by on April 24, 2012

Will you succeed with your startup idea? – find out with One simple technique from Jim Collins

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Apr 192012
 


[L:6m]
You have a Startup idea or already have a Startup (even if it is a tiny blog ) and you are not sure if this will succeed or not.

In this brilliant talk given at Stanford university by Tom Kelley, General Manager at Ideo(founded by his brother David Kelley), Tom talks about..

..a simple yet highly effective “three circles” technique he learned from Jim Collins, the author of New York Times bestsellers and highly acclaimed “Good to Great” and “Built to Last” (non-affiliate links).

By the way, Ideo was the company which designed the first computer mouse for apple in the 1980′s.

Here is the “three circles” technique from Jim Collins to find out if your idea is good for you.

It is called “three circles” because Jim Collins draws 3 circles to illustrate this technique.  if you are in a hurry, you can scroll down and see the 3 circles picture.

Circle 1. What are you good at?

By the time you reach a certain age, you have a sense of what you are good at. Should your Startup be in something you are good at.

Jim says “Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you should do it.”

He adds “If you look around your school or your office you might discover you’re the fastest person you ever met at the keyboard.” “Does that mean you should be a data entry operator? Probably not”

Jim Collins was really good at math, and everybody said to him “Jim, you should be a math major!” And so he listened to that advice, and he got to school, and he continued to be good at math, but he ran into people living in the second circle and that is when he realized that his choice was wrong.

and the second circle is…

Circle 2. What were you born to do?:

Are you the happiest.. are you in a state of flow… when you do what you love(1st circle).

Flow is a state of mind where you completely get immersed in an activity and forget yourself. If you have not experienced this, try this.. get into a peaceful state and listen to your favorite music or just try gazing at a beautiful scenery.

Jim met people who were so happy when they were solving math equations and doing proofs and he knew he was not. Even though he liked math, it was not a extreme-pleasure-inducing activity for him and he couldn’t immerse himself fully.

He says “You know, I realized that as good as I was at math, this is not my true calling”.

How did he find his true calling. We will visit that in a moment after we finish talking about the third circle.

Circle 3. What will people pay you to do?

Once you find what you are good at and your true calling, you have to figure out if people will pay you for this.

Jim says “They say do what you love and the money will follow, It’s not literally true.”

He says his favorite thing is to listen to Brahms’s symphonies. He adds “There are Brahms’s symphonies I’ve listened to 100 times and I’ve yet to find anybody who will pay me a nickel to listen to Brahms’s symphonies.”

So he says, Think about the combination of these three circles..

Image-Jim collins 3 Circles1.What you’re good at and..
2.What you’re born to do and..
3. How much will people pay you to do this

How to find answers for all three

The stuff you’re good at – Should be easy to figure out. You can just take a pen and paper and start writing, you could come up with the list of things you are good at. The magazines you read, the TV shows you watch and the blogs you love can all give you clues.

The stuff that people pay you to do -  Easy to find by Googling. There’s a pretty efficient market telling you what people will pay you to do.

Stuff you’re born to do – This is a little bit hard to figure out. Fortunately Jim helps us with this too.

Jim says “Well, I can’t answer that question for you, but I can answer it for me.”

He says, “I was kind of a nerdy kid. When I was a kid I’d get out my magnifying glass, and I would watch a bug, and I would get one of these old style laboratory notebooks and I’d write down my observations. Everyday I’d watch that bug and how does he eat, and does he sleep, and what’s the bug doing all day.”

And so he said he found himself at this point in life, he was working for Hewlett Packard, a great company which he openly acknowledges, but he wasn’t happy.

And so he said he got out one of those laboratory notebooks, and he wrote on it “A Bug” at the top, and then he wrote “A Bug Called Jim,” and then for two years he kept a laboratory notebook on himself.

It wasn’t a journal; he wasn’t writing down the occurrences of the day, he wrote down during the day, during each day for two years, “When did I feel at my best? When was I in a state of flow? When did I feel the happiest?”

It took him two years of discovery but he eventually figured out he was happiest when he was teaching, and when he was working on systems, you know, things with lots of little complexities and moving parts.

And he said “I figured out I should be teaching about systems,” and so for a while he taught about systems at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992 , until he found another calling.

But he kept a lab notebook on himself to continuously discover “when he is happiest”.

Of course, we all know Jim Collins produced two of the greatest business books  “Built to Last”(considered a business classic) and “Good to Great”. Jim has authored or co-authored six books that have sold in total more than ten million copies worldwide and he also founded a management laboratory in Boulder, Colorado

If you can figure out the three things “What are you good at” , “What were you born to do” and “What will people pay you to do” and then if your Startup idea matches that, then you have a tremendously high chances of succeeding. if the initial idea does not seem to work, if you continue to probe for the answers to these 3 questions, you will definitely discover something which will eventually work.

 Posted by on April 19, 2012

Sucide-attempting Restauranter to Celebrity Restauranter – How Chef Nobu did it

 Inspiring-Stories  No Responses »
Apr 172012
 

Chef Nobu's PictureAs a young boy, Nobu Matsuhisa dreamed of opening his own sushi restaurant.

He started out as a dishwasher in Tokyo, failed at his first attempt as a restaurant owner, opened a second one only to be destroyed by fire.

He contemplated suicide yet he changed his mind and…

started a third one which was a smashing success and he started the fourth one with the Hollywood Oscar-winning actor Robert De Niro.

Now he has 24 restaurants around the world.

What led him to keep moving ahead with all these failures and emerge successfully… Let us see…

His Dream

When he was about 11 or 12yrs old…a young boy in Japan, his elder brother took him to a sushi restaurant. He had never been to a sushi restaurant before and this was a memorable experience for him.

This was a time when sushi was not as widespread as is it today, There were very few restaurants because the food was very expensive. As soon as he entered the restaurant he fell in love with this place.

He says “I recall walking through the sliding glass doors into this tiny restaurant and immediately feeling the energy of the place as the sushi chef yelled out, “Irasshai! Welcome!” It was a very open, brightly lit place that smelled like vinegar and soy, and I remember the chef calling the names of fish and food – “toro! gyoku!” – for each order.

You know how kids dream of being soccer players or actors? Well, my dream was to be a sushi chef. ”

How he made his dream into a reality

After finishing high school he moved to Tokyo and took a full-time job at Matsuei,a sushi restaurant. He didn’t get the job of a cook, but as a dishwasher.

For three years he washed and cleared dishes and cleaned the entire restaurant. He also went to the fish market every morning with his mentor the master of the restaurant, bought fish back to the restaurant and cleaned it.

He says “The days were long. There were times I wondered when I would be able to move behind the counter and start making sushi.

But whenever I got fed up, I would remember why I chose the job in the first place: I wanted to prepare sushi for customers and make them happy.”

After three years, one of the sushi chef left the restaurant and the master promoted him to chef.

During this time, there was a customer from Peru who used to visit this restaurant twice a year when he visited Japan. At one of this visits,he asked Nobu if he wants to open a sushi restaurant in Peru.

It was a dream come true for Nobu and he agreed immediately.

They setup a restaurant in lima, Peru. He had a 49% stake but he had to do everything. He opened,cooked, cleaned and managed the restaurant himself. Slowly the restaurant picked up and did very well. He attracted loyalists from the Japanese embassy and lots of major trading firms.

Things were great, except that he and his business partner couldn’t agree on how to run the restaurant. While Nobu wanted to buy high-quality and fresh ingredients to make tasty food, his partner wanted to buy cheap ingredients and increase the profit.

Nobu says “I wanted to make people happy with my food”

But his partner was more concerned with profit. This fight went on for three years and after this Nobu had to quit the business entirely.

He says “Chefs are artists, and I couldn’t be happy with my art if I was forced to use cheap ingredients.”

For the next four years , he floundered from job to job. He moved to Buenos aires, Argentina where a friend found him a job as a sushi chef at a local restaurant.

He says “Having been a partner in my last restaurant, it was tough to work as an employee “.

The wages were low and his savings began to disappear. He moved back to japan after an year. There he worked in his brother’s factory and then got a job as a sushi chef . but he wanted another shot at working overseas.

He started asking acquaintances if anyone was looking for a good sushi chef. A Japanese actor who frequented the place where he was working recommended Alaska. The actor had friends in Anchorage, which was starting to boom because of the oil pipeline and because so many airlines had mini-hubs there.

The Japanese actor suggested they open up a sushi restaurant together in Anchorage, and Nobu agreed.

He says “At that time I didn’t really care where I was going. I just wanted to get out of Japan.”

Once in Alaska, Nobu started work immediately. For months he and his crew worked without taking any time off. He helped with the construction, helped getting good supply of ingredients and create the menu.

He plunged into debt to launch the restaurant and finally when it was opened, it was well received.

He and his staff had worked for 50 straight days.

On a thanksgiving day, he closed the restaurant and visited a friend’s place for dinner, They were having a great time when the phone rang, It was his partner on the phone and he yelled saying that “The restaurant is on fire”.

Nobu couldn’t believe it and he still thought it was a joke until he heard the sound of sirens on the phone.

He borrowed his friends car and drove to his restaurant. He thought by the time he reached his restaurant, the fire would have been doused completely, but…

he was dumbstuck when he reached there. the whole place was in smoke and the restaurant has burnt down completely.

Contemplating Suicide

He couldn’t believe it. The restaurant was finished, He did not have insurance and was deeply in debt.

After two weeks he returned to japan . He fell into depression.

He had nothing to do and no way to work off his debt. Alaska had felt like his last chance to make something of himself.

Due to his depression and debt, he contemplated killing himself.

He says ” It was as if all my hopes and ambitions had gone up in smoke with the restaurant. I fell into depression and started to think that the only way to get out of it was to kill myself. ”

But,he thought about his wife and two kids and he knew they depended on him. He determined to try one more time. He says “I decided to try one more time. If not for myself, I had to do it for them.”

His friend had opened a restaurant in Los Angeles and asked Nobu to be a chef in this restaurant, Nobu took the opportunity and moved to America. He started with no money and lots of debt.

He worked in his friends restaurant until he got his Green card(Legal Permanent resident status). His friend wanting a better future kicked him out. Nobu says “that was a good thing, a little push to help me get on with my life. “.

He took a sushi chef position in another restaurant with a bigger salary and more responsibility.

He worked there for six and half years and kept saving whatever he can. When the owner put up the place for sale. Nobu knew it was time to take another plunge.

Success at last

He didn’t have all the money, but luckily one of his friend loaned him the money to buy the restaurant.

He bought the restaurant and named it Matsuhisa. His wife was his only business partner. Since he had complete control of the restaurant,he was finally able to create my ideal cuisine.

He got fresh and the finest produce, so food costs were always high.

He did not make any profit for a couple of years. He says “For the first two years we accepted only cash – we couldn’t afford a credit card machine.

We didn’t make a profit; at the end of each month we were able to pay rent, our vendors and our bills at work and at home, but that was it.”

Nobu Restaurant Dessert Picture

Chef Nobu's Yummy Dessert

He adds “I didn’t mind as long as the customers enjoyed the food.”

Customer loved the food and word spread. He says “I didn’t do much advertising, but we started to build up a reputation for great quality and service.

Repeat customers brought in their friends. Our prices were reasonable, the food was interesting, and was featured in Food & Wine magazine.”

Food and wine magazine named him America’s 10 best New chefs.

New york times also chose Matsuhisa as one of the Top 10 restaurant destinations of the world.

Because of the Beverly Hills location, soon after he opened,Hollywood stars started visiting the restaurant.

Robert De Niro(The Oscar winning actor from Godfather: Part II ) was one of them. A year later Robert de Niro asked him to open up a restaurant with him in New York City.

Nobu agonized for a few days but finally declined since he had problems with partners before. He says “after all my bad experiences, I wasn’t quite ready to take on another business partner.”

Robert de Niro said he understood. And each time he visited L.A., he would stop by Matsuhisa and ask Nobu how he was doing.

Four years later one night Robert De Niro called Nobu again and asked if he wants to open the restaurant in New york. Nobu said no, not yet, maybe someday.

But the next day when Robert visted Nobu at this restaurant, Nobu finally agreed.

Nobu says “he came into the restaurant the next day, and I realized that he was waiting for me. I started to think, If he believes in me this much to wait for me all these years, then maybe he would be a good business partner. ”

The restaurant opened in New york with the name “NOBU”. The concept was the same as Matsuhisa, and the food had a big impact.

Nobu says “It was always lively inside. We were able to serve delicious food without worrying about the cost.”

New york times praised Nobu Saying “This is sushi as it has not been served before in New york city. These flavors are edgy,unexpected ,often exciting.”

Now, He operates 24 restaurants around the world.

Nobu says “cooking is my life”

He adds “Food is imbued with the feelings and personality of the cook. Even if you were to follow my instructions faithfully, using precise amounts of identical ingredients, I am quite sure that you would never be able to perfectly recreate the same flavors and textures that I make. For I always put something special in my food-my heart,or kokoro as we say in Japanese and you, of course must put your own heart into your own cooking.

“For me cooking is most about giving my customers little surprises that will lead them to make discoveries about their own latent tastes. It’s about communicating my kokoro (my heart)through every single dish I make.”

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