Think – Page 3 – DAN REICH

How Instagram Helped Him Quit His Job To Become A Full Time Artist

My favorite stories are all about hustle and Jeremy’s story is precisely that. In the fall of 2014, Jeremy Wolff quit his nine to five day job doing marketing and sales in the pharmaceutical industry. He did this while living in New York City of all places and took a huge leap of faith to pursue his dreams: being an artist.

I spoke with Jeremy to get his story of how he went from a corporate slave to becoming a full time artist, and flipping the term “starving artist” on it’s head by making many, thousands of dollars for his paintings and selling them to artists, celebrities and athletes.

screenshot-2017-03-01-21-37-48 — Instagram “jwolffstudios: Getting there. Not too much left to do. Hope everyone has enjoyed the progress pictures. Also a nice glimpse at my work station.”

Dan Reich: What was the decision of quitting your job like?

Wolff: Quitting my job was probably the biggest and hardest decision I have ever made. It was not something I just did randomly one day. It was a thoughtful process and a decision I had thought about for years before actually doing so. It is my opinion that hundreds and thousands of people go through life never knowing exactly what they want to do with their career. They end up jumping from job to job, chasing that higher title and salary down a path through standard and monotonous corporate America. I often questioned what it was I wanted to end up doing. I knew I had a diverse and creative skill set, but I never was given an opportunity to show that at any of the jobs that I had during my corporate stint.

It wasn’t until I took a 10-day vacation on a trip to Israel for my birthright where I got to reflect on my career and think deeply about what I wanted my life to be. We were in a very artsy town and I had noticed a lot of street art and vendors selling their artwork for hundreds of dollars and I looked at my friends and said, “I can absolutely do that.” My friends looked at me like I was crazy at first but it was that day that I knew I was eventually going to give it a go.

Reich: What were some of the first steps you took to changing your career and becoming an artist?

Wolff: The first thing I thought about was whether it was realistic or not. I thought about my immediate network of family, friends, and past co-workers. I knew my strongest asset in the beginning would be word of mouth. In fact, I still think that is my strongest asset as I continue to grow and build my network. I have always prided myself as someone who never burns bridges. I have always made an effort to be the best I can at staying in touch with people. I figured if I could get one or two people from that core network to commission me for a painting in the beginning months it would be a great start. After all, I didn’t even have a portfolio of work to show off in order to gain any exposure. I knew I had to work diligently to have something to show in order to gain clients. Sure enough I did get a couple commissions from some friends and family and thus my art career had begun.

Reich: It must have been tough in the beginning not knowing when your next paycheck was going to come in. How did you manage to pay your bills?

Wolff: Tough is an understatement. It was always a grind. 20-hour days. Not all of those hours were spent doing tangible work, but more so brainstorming my next steps and figuring out my path. I knew I needed a way to make some quick cash any time I needed it. Gotta eat right? So, it was the beginning of September, nearing the end of the baseball season and September 25th, 2014 was Derek Jeter’s last home game. I thought this would be a great opportunity by doing a Derek Jeter portrait and having some prints made up to sell in front of the stadium. I painted an oil painting close up of Jeter taking an at bat, had 150 prints made, along with some business cards that featured the painting on it. I packed up the prints in a bag, borrowed my friends Jeter jersey, and stood out side Yankees Stadium selling prints from anywhere between 5 to 20 dollars each. Each time I sold a print I made sure to give the buyer a business card and told them I also work on commission. I ended up selling around 100 or so of those prints during that series and made right around $1200 cash. Not only that, but a dozen of those people that bought a print contacted me and commissioned me to do an original piece for them later on.

So I had figured out a way to make some quick cash while also getting my name out there. I continued with the New York sports theme for a little while and knew that whenever I needed some emergency money, I could go out to Madison Square Garden or Metlife Stadium to sell some Rangers or Giants prints. It was a large portion of my initial income when some would say I was a “starving artist”.

Reich: But you’re not starving anymore. I know social media has played a huge role in your success. Can you elaborate on your use of Instagram and other social media?

Wolff: There is so much to tell about social media so I will do my best to give everyone as much insight as I can. Instagram has changed my life and social media has given the term “over night success story” a new meaning. Instagram alone has over 600 million active monthly users. As a visual artist this was my obvious choice in terms of which outlet I focused most on. I told myself that I am not only an artist, but I must become an expert in social media as well. I consider Instagram half my job. In two years I have gained 16K followers and that number grows each and every day.

Reich: Tell us more about your Instagram activity. What are some tips you can give to other entrepreneurs?

Wolff: One great thing about social media is that everyone of importance is represented on social media and if they aren’t then they are way behind the eight ball. Because of that, it is so important to be as active as possible. The more activity you have the more you will align with the algorithm of Facebook/Instagram.

The first thing I recommend when it comes to Instagram is to have role models. There has got to be one person or business that you look at and say to yourself, “I want to be like that.” For me, there were several artists that I chose to use as role models for my career. I used well known artists like Alec Monopoly, Retna, King Saladeen, BK The Artist, Bradley Theodore, and Mr. Brainwash just to name a few. I made it a purpose of my life to study these individuals. What connections have they made? What people are they talking to? Not only that, but I have taken it further and gone out and met a lot of those artists and have become friends and acquaintances. I think it is fair to say that I have piggy backed off some of those artists success.

Every night before I go to sleep I will go to one of the aforementioned artists page, take their most recent photo and begin following the accounts that have liked the picture. I also unfollow accounts to maintain a comfortable followers ratio. Then I ‘like’ over 1000 random pictures using hashtags that align with what I am working on. I am sure many people are aware that there are plenty of computer robots that can do this automatically for you, and there are. You can pay for this service, but why pay to have something completely automated when you can do it yourself but smarter? I focus in on my target market. I am coming in contact with people who I know are already interested in art because I am finding them through other artist’s accounts. This gives me better odds that I will one day come in contact with one of there collectors who may be spending thousands of dollars and investing in emerging artists like myself.

Reich: Tell me more about the business side of art.

Wolff: I think I am learning it as I go. I think there is a whole side of the art world I haven’t even come close to divulging into yet. The gallery scene is something I have every intention of breaking into one day when the right opportunity comes along. One thing I do know is that it is changing. Artists are beginning to realize they don’t necessarily need the galleries. I like to think about Chance The Rapper and how he became who he was with out a record label. We have the tools to do everything on our own these days.

Reich: What are some of your best experiences so far on this journey?

Wolff: Oh wow, there are some pretty surreal moments, I can’t lie. That’s a tough question. I have met some of my child hood sports hero’s who have personally signed my original pieces. Kim Kardashian posted one of my paintings on her website, that was a wild morning. I got to live body paint a model during this past Art Basel in Miami. I have met some amazing people that inspire me to be great, people you wouldn’t normally get to meet. But, I think the best experiences are when I get to see people admiring my work. Putting smiles on faces from a painting is so powerful. Being able to inspire other people to chase their dream. Being able to spread a message through imagery that I created. It’s just a special feeling and one that is hard to describe.

screenshot-2017-03-01-21-44-41 — Jeremy’s Art Basel Show with the Kim Kardashian painting

Reich: What do you have on your horizon?

Wolff: I have some really cool projects coming up. I am currently working on my “Cartoon Money Team” series, which as you know features a Forbes Magazine cover with “Cartoon’s Richest Characters”. I have around 12 ideas in which I am going to include the 5 characters I deemed to be the Money Team. So you can be on the look out for that theme to continue. I also have a few murals planned to happen in 2017 and have already begun working out details on painting my first exotic car during Art Basel week 2017 down in Miami.

Reich: Give one piece of advice to other entrepreneurs and artists.

Wolff: My one piece of advice is the cliché that Rome wasn’t built in one day. While it is possible to get a viral hit in today’s day and age, being an entrepreneur is about gaining a reputation and that seldom happens over night. Just as in the corporate world you need a resume to get a job, it works the same way for yourself. I look at my career as an artist and entrepreneur the same way I looked at it while I had the normal 9 to 5. I told myself I am at the entry level of being an artist and I need to work my way up. For some it happens quicker than others as it does with corporate jobs as well. But, you need to crawl before you walk and walk before you run. Take it step by step. Small goals first and make them bigger and bigger each year.

Future Of Work Predictions For The Year Ahead

This post originally appeared on Forbes.

We’re unofficially past the “Happy New Year” stage of 2017; that new year smell has almost entirely worn off, people are back from their sunny vacations in the Caribbean, and many are hard at work.

A lot of enterprise tech trends have been predicted to establish themselves this year, but none is as buzzy as artificial intelligence. It has been on the horizon for some time, but 2017 is poised to be the first time that bots at work are natural parts of our everyday workflow.

Don’t be mistaken, AI has a ways to go, and could accelerate at an unpredictable pace as bots gather more data. But people’s hesitancy about committing to bots at work, and questions around the effectiveness of these tools, will gradually melt away.

With this theme in mind, let’s take a look at what some B2B leaders predict for the future of work in 2017:

Matthew King, Customer Engagement Consultant at Microsoft
“Artificial intelligence breakthroughs are occurring at a rate which will certainly result in significant swaths of both blue and white collar workers across the globe facing the risk of automation. Even professions like sales, which tout the importance of human-to-human connection, are facing the prospect of first being assisted by, and eventually completely replaced by machine intelligence. As a society we must fundamentally re-imagine what work means to us, what our purpose on this planet is, and how to provide for people in an increasingly stratified world. The gains of efficiency improvements mean greater profits for the owners of capital and greater poverty for those who lose their ability to trade labor and skills for wages. We owe it to ourselves to think through how we should adapt as individuals and as a society to the ascendance of hyper-efficient, hyper-intelligent machines.”

Dennis R. Mortensen, CEO and Founder of x.ai
“We will see less hype around virtual personal assistants in 2017, but also, and this is the important part, less stigma! People will begin to get a sense of the real world applications of intelligent agents and the AI that powers them. Given these agents will look and feel mundane compared to the AI’s and robots depicted by Hollywood, we’ll see fewer silly and cartoonish accounts of robots taking over the world and eliminating humanity.”

Ceci Stallsmith, Platform Marketing at Slack
“You’ll have a small army of bots to help you do your job. As businesses move from email to messaging, all of the software you use for work will connect with the most pervasive for-work messaging products. As every business and startup went mobile in 2011, bots are the next major trend. As Mailbox, Sunrise Calendar, and other mobile-first productivity apps rose up, there will be a trend in hot bot for-work companies rising up in 2017. The big question lies in how intelligent these little helpers need to be: do bots need to understand your every request? Will they be able to intelligently gather your needs, or will we be happy with their existence to fulfill a specific function? If intelligence is required for success, the major players—Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Facebook—have a significant advantage over smaller developers.”

Aaref Hilaly, Partner at Sequoia Capital
“It becomes normal to talk to computers at work. Natural language understanding catches up with image recognition. Home devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home train people on how they can interact. Application vendors start to build in voice and messaging interfaces into their products, leveraging research from Google, Microsoft and others.”

Andrew Berger, Head of Sales Development, Square
“Customers and buyers demand information at their fingertips, and technology is facilitating the speed of information. Collaboration across multiple teams, departments, offices, and organizations is much more efficient with streamlined communication tools, such as Slack, enabling rapid response and answers to customers. The ability to sync CRM data into these communication tools, with smart bots and agents facilitating the workflow in an automated fashion, ensures all stakeholders are aware of customer needs and provides a much-improved customer experience.”

Jake Schwartz, CEO and Co-Founder at General Assembly
“Just as with the telegraph, the telephone, the mainframe, the database, the fax machine, email, and the PDA, etc etc, there are always new technologies changing how we work. The deeper change is what that work will look like. The demand for people with skills in data, software development, UX, is growing at an accelerated rate YoY. This acceleration will continue as companies make their transition to the future, which will involve a constantly evolving set of trends around communication, automation, and the pace of change. In the year ahead we are seeing more companies face their own challenges around staffing these roles, and how to upskill their previous generations of workers. Here at GA, we’re trying to make an impact by enabling the sourcing and the training of this next generation of skilled talent.

There were more than 250,000 positions open last year for what are called hybrid technical roles. These jobs don’t only pay well – with annual salaries ranging from $65k-110k – but their required skillsets are actually trainable and do not require an advanced degree. Roles are growing in skillsets that don’t exist (or are just starting to) and there’s a limited talent pool from which to fill that seat. I think in the year ahead we’ll see challenges tied to that skills gap become a painfully obvious opportunity for non-degree programs to make an even larger impact. Here at GA, we’re trying to make an impact by training people to be the producers of the future. We’re working to create efficient programs that fill the need for people versus solely focusing on the need for jobs.”

Ray Carroll, VP Sales at Engagio
“In 2017, the industry will start to realize that Account Based Marketing is NOT a technology category, it’s a strategic business initiative. Just like demand gen and inbound marketing are ways of running your marketing machine, ABM is a way of running your revenue machine. And, just like demand gen, ABM breaks down into many categories – including account selection, account research, account-based analytics, account-based advertising, automated sales plays, and more. If you want to succeed in 2017, you must align your entire organization around this strategy, put the foundation in place with lead-to-account matching and account-based analytics, and focus on quality engagement with your target accounts.”

There will always be a fine line between AI that enhances our skill versus replaces us entirely, and unfortunately, some of us will wake up and find ourselves in the latter situation.

These questions will only begun to be answered in the year ahead, but in 2017 we will continue the march towards another step forward in automation and intelligent systems.

Disclosure: Slack is an investor in Troops.ai

Retooling AI For The Workplace

This post originally appeared on TechCrunch.

One of the first computers required punch cards. I repeat, punch cards. Yes, you would take a piece of paper with tiny holes and use it to interact with the device.

Now we have computers the size of soda cans that sit in your house and control your lights, provide weather updates, solve math equations and tell jokes, all by simply speaking to them… and some of them have better jokes than my actual friends.

In many ways, we all should have seen this coming — we can thank our Hollywood friends for that.

We had C-3PO and R2-D2 running around the galaxy with Luke trying to help him save the universe from his dad.

“Artoo says that the chances of survival are 725 to 1. Actually Artoo has been known to make mistakes… from time to time… Oh dear…”

giphy r2d2

More recently, we’ve had others as full-fledged assistants that are smarter than most humans, like TARS from Interstellar and Jarvis from Iron Man.

As you’re reading this, you’re probably doing some kind of work. It’s a thing we spend one-third of our lives doing, after all. (Sleep and Netflix supposedly make up the other two-thirds.)

Given the massive chunk of our lives spent at work, shouldn’t we enjoy the tools we need to use for our jobs? Shouldn’t they feel more human and delightful, like Amazon’s Alexa or some of the other consumer-facing applications we rely on daily?

I think so.

And how much more effective and productive could you be if you had something like TARS or Jarvis helping you with your job?

I think the answer is… a lot!

How do we get there?

Many of the consumer-facing AI solutions we see today are built on the backs of generic APIs.

Let’s take something like Siri, for example. If you wanted to know the weather, you would simply ask: “Siri, what’s the weather?”

Siri could then transcribe your question and reach out to weather.com or another weather service for the answer using your location as a proxy.

Based on the answer, you’d have the immediate information you need to determine whether you should take an umbrella to work or not.

However, introducing a similar, frictionless AI assistant in the enterprise is a bit more challenging. Things are a bit more complex because each organization uses varying degrees of tools and workflows to run their business.

Borrowing from the weather example above, let’s say you wanted to know how much revenue was booked for the business in the first quarter. You might ask: “Siri, how much revenue did we book in Q1?”

If this “Siri for work” existed, it might give you an answer along the lines of “$100mm.”

From here you might want to drill deeper into revenue generated from each product line. If you were the Chief Revenue Officer of Microsoft, you might want to know how that revenue breaks out between Office 365, Windows and Xbox… and you might want the answer to be in top-line revenue because that’s how you like looking at the forecast.

Shouldn’t we enjoy the tools we need to use for our jobs?
Do you see how nuanced this can become? As we start to account for organizational preferences, things get complicated very quickly.

It’s easy to see how replicating “Siri for work” is a much heavier problem to solve because of the variance amongst organizational processes, systems and preferences. For consumer applications, there isn’t nearly as much divergence in the answers users expect (see above); this does not hold true for businesses.

This same issue applies in the context of scheduling. There are companies like x.ai and Clara Labs trying to take the simplicity of Alexa or Siri and apply it to the tedious task of scheduling meetings.

It’s one thing to say: “Siri, book me a meeting with Jon for some time next week.”

But all of a sudden you realize there are a handful of non-trivial variables this “scheduling Siri” would need to take into account. Things like the location of the meeting, preferences of the person taking the meeting, the availability and coordination of both parties instead of just one and so on.

And let’s take one more vertical application similar to “Jarvis for Work.” Within the legal industry, an AI-powered lawyer called ROSS has emerged. Firms can ask ROSS questions like they would their colleagues on important data, like citation resources, and it returns an answer. Their secret sauce is based on using natural language processing (NLP) to query publicly available law documents.

But can ROSS adopt to the style of the firm and specificity of a given case? Maybe some firms have found that very recent court rulings tend to be the best support, while others rank searches based on credibility and prominence.

In all the instances, there is nuance, which means some level of unique configuration and intelligence is required. This should comfort those fearful of waking up one day and having their job completely replaced by a robot. More realistically, the robot will allow them to be 10x more productive and allocate more time to higher-leverage tasks.

We’ve seen this story before; each time we experience new technological breakthroughs, we learn that people’s jobs are changed but not altogether replaced.

From a 1928 issue of The New York Times:

March of The Machines 1928

Different, yet the same

In all these different instances, the end result and goal for a user remains the same.

A perfect “Siri for work” would help reduce complexity and guide the end user to more quickly arrive at the information they need to make a decision or take an action. In the enterprise, even slight improvements can mean huge revenue increases and significant cost savings.

But, let’s take it a step further and explore how this artificially intelligent assistant at work evolves and becomes more intelligent over time.

The previous example highlighted the ability to look up information. What about having the AI suggest and take actions for you?

As we start to account for organizational preferences, things get complicated very quickly.

Say the VP of Sales at Microsoft needs to forecast her revenue for the quarter. We’ll call her Samantha. To do that, Samantha would need to have accurate close dates of when she thinks her deals will close. In this hypothetical example, she has five deals that are supposed to close in one week, but the AI knows there has been no communication with those accounts for more than four months because it understands your email, social media and phone communications.

Is it likely those deals will close? Probably not.

Therefore, the AI would know to automatically change the close dates for forecasting purposes, or make a suggestion like, “Hey Samantha, I noticed a discrepancy between your sales activity and your proposed close dates. Would you like me to change the close date for you?”

Voilà. The dates are closed and Samantha doesn’t look like a slouch at the next forecast meeting.

It’s easy to see how facilitating this level of workflow is entirely too complex for an out-of-the-box plug-and-play solution like Amazon’s Echo or Apple’s Siri. It requires a greater degree of configuration that is specific to the organization and which becomes smarter over time based on user input and data.

To facilitate this there needs to be a middle layer or conversational run-time between the various systems and data sets in an organization so an end user can quickly and easily do their job without having to open a new app or piece of software.

As Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft puts it: “In software development terms A.I. is becoming a third ‘run time ’— the next platform.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Toward the future

So what does this all mean?

The next frontier of software development and technological breakthrough will happen in a conversational run-time. I call it “conversational CRM.” It is the inevitable evolution of the technology stack for the enterprise.

This next era will occur on top of conversational interfaces because it is where work is already getting done and everyone already knows how to use them. This is why we are building on messaging platforms like Slack, which will serve as the conduit to facilitate enhanced intelligence at work.

Moreover, there will be even more companies, big and small, that crop up to help power some of the underlying technology that makes this intelligence and conversational workflow happen.

For example, Google recently unveiled TensorFlow, which is an “open source software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs.” To break that down in English, this sort of technology enables computers to do computations that more closely mirror the way human brains think and make decisions. Some people call this “deep neural networks.”

There’s also IBM Watson, which provided the backbone for ROSS mentioned above.

Within the realm of smaller startups, you have companies like API.ai and Wit.ai, which was recently acquired by Facebook, that have built a simple natural language processing API that helps developers turn speech and text into actionable data. This sort of technology will help bring that “Siri-like” experience to many other applications and experiences.

So as computers continue to shrink, and eventually shift from robots the size of soda cans to no interface at all, the next area of innovation will live in the messaging context (voice, text, email). Interactions between humans and machines will occur in the same place, side by side, all working toward a common goal of driving businesses forward.

The lines will get blurry, and, just like the movies, we, too, will have our own R2-D2 or Jarvis at work — no matter where “work” may be.

There was once a vision to put a personal computer in every home. Many companies today have a similar vision, which is putting a personal AI assistant for work in everyone’s hands. Think of it as a “Jarvis for Work” of sorts, except Jarvis will have cousins that each specialize in their own, unique vertical.

jarvisgiph

7 Lessons I Learned From Jeff Bezos

It’s not often that I summarize other people’s work or talks, but this one was too good to pass up.

This video is 80 minutes and 27 seconds well spent but below are some of the takeaways for me. Maybe they are important to you too?

Make your building blocks public and reusable (API’s first). Who would have thought that an online book store would be one of the largest providers of cloud hosting services in the world? It happened because one day around 2002, Jeff Bezos decided “All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.” The mandate, among others, closed with “Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired. Thank you; have a nice day!”

When you think about building a business, you quickly realize how many moving pieces there are and how interconnected everything is. If one part of the machine breaks, the other parts are surely affected. This is especially true in technology. If the button on my website doesn’t work, then it can’t perform the function it was supposed to. Conversely, if the button on my website does work and the supporting function does not, well then I have a clickable button that does nothing. By instilling an API-first culture, Jeff was able to create incredible efficiencies within the organization ensuring that there was a universal language to communicate between different parts of the Amazon machine. Some of those parts were so good, that they were able to be exposed to the broader public as standalone parts, and we now have AWS which is one of the three pillars or business units of their company.

Work backward from customer needs. Business is simple when you realize the core essence of what it’s about: Find a problem, solve it, make money to solve it. In the case of Amazon, the problems they are fixing are customer selection, price, speed and accuracy of delivery. That’s it. Those the are core problems that they set out to fix. It seems this is the best and easiest way to align a business. Figure out the needs and work backwards.

Make a little amount of money on a lot of people instead of making a lot of money on a few number of people. The internet has redefined the impact and importance of geography. The old world: one store could serve a few. The new world: one store could serve everyone. As a result, smart companies are taking advantage of this new paradigm with both technological innovation that sits on top of the internet, but also, financial innovation. In Amazon’s case, their financial innovation is to race towards the bottom with prices and with margins.

There are still plenty of other industries where this financial innovation can be applied such as legal services, financial services, and any other high-priced, big-ticketed item. These are all ripe for financial disruption because of the scale of the internet. In my world, I believe the same thing is happening in enterprise software. We call it, the “consumerization of the enterprise.” Long gone are the days of a bag-carrying, quota-carrying, sales guy that needs to hop on a plane to shovel a 20-page agreement across a table to a CEO for a few million dollars. If not long gone, they are surely moving in that direction. Instead, we’ll see the broader adoption of enterprise software which, like Amazon, will win on selection, price and speed.

The only way to give people happy experiences is with happy people. Depressing and pessimistic people are energy vampires. Positive and optimistic people are encouraging and motivating. You will not win unless you surround yourself with smart, motivated and positive people. “Positive”, is the key operating word. In fact, it is one of the 4 company values at Troops.

You don’t choose your passions, your passions choose you. There was a young kid growing up in Seattle in the 70’s and he was obsessed with computers. He would spend hours upon hours on his school’s first computer and tried to figure out every possible way to break the machine and outsmart it. He became obsessed to the point where his parents had to force him to take a break and not use a computer for a whole year. So he did take a break and engulfed himself in books for a full year which also meant no computers during that time. But sure enough, he made it back to his obsession and started a company we now know as Microsoft. Could Microsoft be the company it is today if someone was first and foremost motivated by money? Could Facebook be Facebook without a Harvard dropout chasing some crazy and passionate idea for an online social network? The answer to me seems fairly obvious and yet, most people still try to rationalize and justify the decisions they make in their career. Jeff is successful with Amazon because a passion called him out and he listened. Most people don’t do this and never will. He did, and so am I.

There will be a bunch of artificially intelligent agents. I could not agree more and it is what we are building at Troops. More on that here.

Be stubborn on the vision, but flexible on the details. When Intel Israel’s back was against the wall and it’s facility was at risk of shutting down, it needed to prove that it was an essential part of Intel’s future. To do this, the CEO of Intel Israel said, “$0.66 or die.” He meant we figure out how to make the cost of our chips $0.66 to be the leader in costs and price, or we will go out of business, lose our jobs, and professionally speaking, die. Without the faintest idea of how they would get there, they set out a mandate and just figured it out. Sure enough, they achieved a cost of $0.66 for one of their chips and it proved to be the model for every other Intel Fab factory in the world.

Were there any other takeaways for you?

My Grandfather’s Last Birthday

My grandfather recently turned 96ish…and that will be the last birthday he ever has.

This morning he passed away.

But the days leading up to this morning he was able to spend time with his 3 children, 8 grandkids, cousins, oldest friends from Europe and newer friends from America.

That’s what mattered most to him. Family and friends.

And he worked hard for it.

After the Holocaust and before his immigration to America, he moved back to Munich, Germany and opened a textile store. He sourced fabrics from all over the world and sold them to people looking to make dresses and suits.

He hung out with a couple of guys over there who were also hustling trying to make a buck and rebuild their life. Eventually, they decided to come to America and leave the dark memories from Europe behind. They landed on the Jersey shores. In Toms River to be exact.

He started a farm because my grandmother thought that producing food and raising chickens was a good endeavor. After all, they just escaped Nazi brutality and had to steal, beg and borrow to survive. So food made sense. So did eggs. He would get up at four in the morning to drive his egg route to NYC all the way from Toms River… which is easily a two-hour drive each way.

He did that every day.

Exhausted, every day.

Startup life in the 50’s I suppose.

But he did it for his family.

Shortly thereafter, his pals from Munich told him to join them in the building industry. Given the way the farming and building industries were going, it was an easy decision.

And so build he did.

He built his house and the homes of many others. If you live in NJ, chances are you’ve driven by something he’s been a part of.

And so when I say he came here after the war to “rebuild” his life, I mean it. He literally built.

And the thing he is most proud of is the family he built.

“Make sure the family stays together,” he said.

He might have lost everything as a kid. But in the end, he gained more than most could ever hope for.

And that was my grandfather, Sam.

He was a survivor.

He was a builder.

A 96ish year old builder who built the best home of all.

His home.

My grandfather recently turned 96ish.

My grandfather recently turned 96ish. I say 96ish because he doesn’t really remember his age.

When he was a teenager he had to flee Poland from the German invasion. That was only after he narrowly escaped a Nazi firing squad.

He did escape and obtained a fake identity to fight on the Russian front. That was his only way to survive and survive he did.

But shortly thereafter he was captured by German allies, held as a POW and forced to take on a fake identity. He lied about his name and his age while struggling to stay alive under impossible conditions. That was his only way to survive and once again, survive he did.

He came to America with very little but he rebuilt his life and started a family. A family that is able to celebrate his birthdays with him even if he doesn’t remember his age.

So ya, my grandfather recently turned 96ish.

His 5 or so brothers never made it past 20 years old.

6 million others didn’t make it all.

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day.

For me, that is every day.

I’m sure for my grandparents, and many others, that is every day too.

‪#‎neverforget‬

How To Make Slack Work For Your Business

There is a tidal wave coming and it’s changing the way we do work. We caught a glimpse of it in 2014 when Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion. Forget for a moment that the company only had 30 engineers. The fact that Facebook was willing to pay such a high price for this asset was a window into the world to come. That window showed us how important and scalable messaging can be. That window of messaging is only getting bigger.

Less than two weeks ago, Slack completed a $200 million round of financing at a $3.8 billion valuation. This is largely due to the fact that they were able to grow from about 15,000 daily users to over 500,000 daily active users in less than a year. That’s over 33x growth in just 12 months. They could be the fastest growing software company of all time.

People now are beginning to ask why? Why are companies rapidly adopting conversational platforms like Slack? Why do we need it when we already have things like email? And more importantly, how can we use it in our organization when it seems like just another tool to add to the mess of tools? As one CEO of a large technology company told me, “we already have email, Gchat, Facebook messenger, text messaging and WhatsApp. What do I need one more tool for?”

Perhaps the best way to answer this question is to look at one of the most successful CEO’s of all time, Andy Grove from Intel. In the 1980’s he also saw a tidal wave coming and he used it to his advantage to outperform his competitors, namely the Japanese DRAM manufacturers. The Japanese would work in the same rooms, side by side, in order to foster the most efficient means of team communication. However, the tidal wave that would help shift things in Intel’s favor, was their rapid adoption of electronic email, especially as the business became more global. From Andy Grove’s, High Output Management:

The informed use of e-mail— short for computer-to-computer electronic messaging— results in two fundamentally simple but startling implications. It turns days into minutes, and the originator of a message can reach dozens or more of his or her co-workers with the same effort it takes to reach just one. As a result, if your organization uses e-mail, a lot more people know what’s going on in your business than did before, and they know it a lot faster than they used to.

Now we have electronic conversation and thanks to companies like Slack, which have matured and polished this form of communication, it is now easier than ever to collaborate and work. It doesn’t turn “days into minutes” but minutes into seconds.

So how can you create “high output management” process and organization on top of Slack to accelerate your business and productivity? Here are five tips to best utilize Slack to organize your teams for optimal efficiency.

Organize around key objectives. You have a sales team, a customer success team, an account management team, and maybe 5 other teams that touch the customer. Do you create one channel or group for each team? Do you create one channel for each customer? Do you create a generic sales channel? This answer will largely depend on the size and scope of the company. Consider the following scenario, which could be taken from an ordinary day at a large enterprise software company. You have an account executive working on large multi-million dollar deal. That deal represents one customer but requires the help of at least 10 people from various parts of the company including management, product and engineering. We’ll call that deal the “IBM” deal. In this example, it probably makes sense to create one dedicated channel for IBM, however it probably does not make sense to create channels for each and every account. Understanding the most pressing key objectives at your company is a good guiding light to how your team should organize in Slack.
Real-time leading indicators. One of Slack’s innovations is their ability to integrate with third party systems and services. For example, every time our engineering team pushes out an update or fix, I can see the real time update and context around that update in a stream. Our engineering team uses this to gauge the pulse and health of our company’s engineering output. Before slack, this data was more obfuscated living in different silos. Now the entire team can optionally check in to gauge velocity on product. This concept of real time leading indicators can work in a sales situation too. Consider the scenario where a sales rep has five meetings but forgets to follow up with all five customers. Wouldn’t it be helpful to automatically and in real-time notify the sales rep that they forgot to follow up? This is the power of Slack. We can now seamlessly integrate with third party data sets and make those leading indicators available in real time for all, or just some, to see.
Workflow. At Troops, when someone signs up for our newsletter, we get a real time alert that someone signed up. Moreover, we append third party data in real time so we can give the team greater context of who exactly the person is. For example, if john@smith.com signs up, we can quickly determine who he works for, what the company size looks like, where it’s located, what he’s been talking about, all in a fraction of a second simply by looking at just his email address. If we think the person is a VIP of sorts and needs immediate attention, we can quickly start a dialogue around the alert. The team can quickly give an emoji thumbs up or thumbs down on how valuable that person is, and if enough ‘thumbs ups’ are accumulated, a sales rep can reach out in real time. There are all sorts ways the messaging stream can be adapted to custom workflow but this is just one example.
Cultural Development. If you ask someone about Slack that has any familiarity with it, you might hear them mention the word “giphie” within the first five seconds. Many people recognize that Slack itself just makes work more fun. But fun, has a very real implication on culture and productivity. If left unchecked, it can erode productivity. However, if embraced correctly, it can enhance culture and subsequently drive happiness and efficiency. At Troops, we are automatically surfacing client wins in real time in Slack. This happens automatically and ties in unique content to drive a stronger, sales-oriented culture. Before Slack, companies would resort to things like trophies, sales gongs, and bonuses, which is especially hard if teams are spread out across multiple geographies or time zones. Now, there is a greater ability to increase culture through “digital gongs” and celebration, across large teams or sub-sets of teams.
Speed. As you are reading this article, it’s likely that you have over ten web browser tabs open. Each tab represents entirely different context, modes of thinking and ways of working. When you consolidate systems and services into one stream or one messaging interface, you can begin to increase the speed at which you do work. For example, at Troops we are able to execute commands in third party systems like Salesforce, Gmail, Calendar, and GitHub all from within one command line. This is very analogous to the google search box. Instead of having to click through a set of listings to find information, you can simply type a request and have Google spit back the information to you. Slack represents a similar opportunity, only this time, you can get more creative with what type of information you search for, what is returned, how it is returned, and who it is returned to.

This is just a short, high-level list of ways you should be thinking about maximizing the use of Slack and the other conversational platforms to come within your organization. If you think this trend is fleeting or that these messaging tools are just a fad, consider this. WeChat, another messaging platform in China, already has 20 million companies selling and marketing products through a messaging interface. This change in user behavior is so profound that it has driven Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella, to orient the company around this paradigm shift, and it seems this is his first major product decision that deviates from Microsoft’s legacy product lines. It’s still early days and we’re going to see the next wave of enterprise solutions being created through messaging interfaces like Slack.

What questions or comments do you have about Slack?

This Startup Failed In Year One And Is Now Doing Over $6M In Sales Per Year

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.

On January 19th Kyle Porter, CEO of SalesLoft, a sales technology startup out of Atlanta came to chat with the Building The Sales Machine community here in New York City about the challenges of building company as it relates to culture, values and building the sales organization. Kyle and the SalesLoft story is compelling because the business was pretty much a failure in the first year. But now, they are an 80 person company and grew sales by 1000% in 2015. Moreover, they went from $1M to $6M run rate in the past 5 quarters and was rated the #1 Best Place to Work in Atlanta.

As someone who is building a sales-facing technology startup myself, this story is especially compelling to me.

So how did they do it? Here is what Kyle had to say.

Dan Reich: How did you get started with Salesloft?

Kyle Porter: When we started this company, we flat out failed in the first 12 months. In 2011 I started the company and had no idea what I was getting into. I was a really good salesperson but had no idea had to start a company.

A sales person is the closest job to an entrepreneur. It’s the role where you control your own destiny the most. And you have to have this relentless pursuit to make it happen. I had that gene inside of me. But I didn’t understand software development. I didn’t understand the culture of an Engineering Org, the prioritization of product management philosophy. I didn’t understand that you can only do so many thing at once. I had these guys build, build, build and ultimately I scattered them too thinly.

The other big thing that I was missing was the people’s culture. Think to yourself right now about how you think people should behave… If you start a company you HAVE to inject those things into your business. I didn’t make that happen. I had people that I hired that I thought might be good, but the culture spun out of control.

On the reboot: I’m going to start over from scratch but do 2 things wildly different. 1 I’m going to put thought into product management 2. Pay a ton of attention to culture.

Reich: What has become of the modern sales organization?

Porter: You either have a modern sales organization or you don’t. Are you striving to do things better? Are you using the processes and tools that are available today to drive your team forward? What I keep learning is that there’s stages inside these sales organizations.

When I started sales loft we had this hot thing that a lot of people wanted. So we could reach out to anyone with a “soft touch” and were able to kind of “carpet blast” the universe and get some really good numbers. Eventually, you need to go deeper and build real relationships with people.

If you’re out there and have a sales process that’s working but doesn’t require significant sales skills, you should be skeptical.

If you’re sending emails and people are responding, but you’re not actually diving in and solving problems and going deep, building relationships, connecting with people… those sales are going to eventually dry up.

That’s what I’ve learned about the modern sales organization. The good ones aren’t taking anything for granted. They’re going deep to build true problem-solving relationships with their buyers. They figure out ways to get really personal and interactive with their customers over time.

Reich: What should the SDR and Account Management interaction look like?

Porter: Two years ago this was shocking stuff, but now we’ve all seen the SDR [Sales Development Movement]. We’ve seen the specialization in sales between the people who prospect and bring in the business, and those that nurture the relationships and close it down. Now with the specialization, you’re seeing both disciplines get better at their craft. But now those two roles are coming together a bit more. They have empathy for the role of the other person.

Reich: What are your core values and why are they important to SalesLoft?

Porter: As an executive at your company, work hard to inject your personal core values into your business. What are the 3 things that matter most to me? 1. Positive 2. Self Starting 3. Supportive. The first person I hired: are they positive, are they self-starting are they supportive. This ran down to everything we’ve done. The difference has been night and day.

Now as you grow, it get’s harder and harder to control this at a company level, but you can definitely control it at a team level. So hiring the right people to start, then putting your best people into leadership positions, that embody and understand your values, then having them hire their teams to those values and letting them run with it; eventually you have a solid team, built around your culture.

We went from 3 core values, then my team came to me and said, hey I see a few other things we’d like to talk to you about. “We see people who are positive, supportive and self-starting at this company but they leave a bit to be desired. We also see people that are doing things that are not 1, 2, & 3 but we love it. So we went out to dinner and I asked my team to write down: Who are the top 7 people at this organization, that if we cloned them it would lead us to market domination? Write out the top 5 traits of those people and put them in the middle. Sure enough, 1. Positive. 2. Self Starting 3. Supportive. rose to the top, from that we mined out 3 additional core values. 4. Empathetic 5. Transparent 6. Exceptional.

Reich: How can you use your core values to measure a team (hire, fire, train)?

Porter: I’m a super broken record when it comes to core values. I’m sure people say “Kyle’s an idiot, he says the same things over and over and over again.” Well, I might be. But you better believe everyone at SalesLoft remembers those 6 core values. No matter how long they’ve been there, they can walk you through them. That’s important. That means they run deep.

I’m a parent. I have an 18 month-old baby girl, Brooklyn. Every night before I put her to bed I tell her the rules of the house: be nice to Mommy and Daddy, be nice to others, be nice to yourself. I say that to her over and over until she gets it. If she does something dishonest or not fair. I’m going to tell her, “share, share share”. People think that the job of the CEO is to be some mad scientist and write these elaborate equations locked up in a whiteboard somewhere… The job of the CEO is to ingrain the vision and the values into your team. That simply takes repetition.
I’m the chief reminding officer.

Then I’m injecting it into the hiring process. We have a matrix. Anyone hiring at SalesLoft score candidates on a Matrix according to our core values. By the time I see a candidate in the 3rd round, “I’ll walk right in and ask what are the SalesLoft core values?”. If that person doesn’t know it, they’re out.

Then we work it into management. If I’ve seen that Alex has shown a ton of empathy to a vendor. I’m going to pull her aside, look her in the eye and tell her “thank you”, and explicitly call out what she did, how it tied back to our values and how great it was. All of our managers are trained to do that as well. It makes a difference.

I’ll do the same thing if with negative responses to the values. If I notice that Alex wasn’t attentive to a note that was sent around the office. I’m going to pull her aside again and say hey, you need to be up on this, it’s part of being successful. When you’re not up on this, it hurts our company and here’s why… and “I know you’re better than that”. That matters.

Now, the reprimands are like 1:6 on the compliments. Go heavy on the positive. But stick to your cultures. That’s how you inject that shit right into the business!

Promote on culture values, hire on culture values, fire on culture values.

The Captain Of You

I feel like I’m a passenger of my own life.

I’m not afraid of going on welfare. I’m afraid of being ordinary.

As I heard him say the things I saw my life flash before my eyes. I recalled the decisions I’ve made, the places I’ve traveled to, the friendships I’ve made, the speeches I’ve heard.

But most importantly…

The things I’ve done.

Right or wrong, good or bad life is all about the choices we make and the choices we follow through with.

It’s about doing.

It’s about being the driver and captain of our own life and not being a passenger that’s merely along for the ride.

The irony here is that what holds us back to start, becomes the thing that drives us forward in the end. It’s what rips us out of apathy and tells us that something is wrong.

That thing is called fear.

Being afraid to fail leads us down a path of passiveness. And as we walk down that path we begin to realize just how bleak the path is.

Most of us have seen it before.

It’s a straight line and the roads are smooth from all of those that went before. The speed limit signs of society tell you to that you’re a million miles and decades away from your goal.

Your goal.

You forgot what that was because you were busy thinking about the next pit stop as you stare at the clock of life counting down the seconds and days until you reach a checkpoint.

Marriage. Kids. Buying a house. Paying off a mortgage. College tuition. Switching jobs.

Each pit stop you look back and wonder if you got on the right path.

Each pit stop you look forward and wonder if you can get off.

Where would that exit take me? Am I even capable of getting off?

You realize that the other path, the path of uncertainty and maybe even failure, is a lot less scary than this path of passiveness of ordinary.

You wonder what if you just got on that windy, uncertain road to begin with? And then regret starts to settle in. What if I did those things I was afraid of doing? What if I didn’t settle and do what was expected of me? What if I followed my dreams and put myself out of my comfort zone?

I read a quote somewhere once that said most people overestimate the cost of doing something and underestimate the cost of doing nothing.

Truth.

That person is a smart guy.

And right or wrong, the smartest thing we can do as people is to live life to the fullest. To be the captains of our own lives and to embrace fear head on.

The best thing we can do is to do.

Something..

Something that is extraordinary, scary and defines who you are and who you were meant to be.

It’s not too late.

It’s never too late to look fear head on and say it’s my turn to drive. It’s my time and I got it from here.

And in that moment, you realize you can do anything and that you are in control. You’re the driver again and the captain of your own life.

The captain of you.

How These 20-Year-Olds Raised $13M And Built A Massive Food Tech Company

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.

Being a young, first time entrepreneur is hard. Without a stunning success story or years of applicable experience, a new founder can face significant challenges starting and growing a company. A study by the University of California indicated that the average venture backed founder is 38 years old with 16 years of work experience. That’s quite a gap when it seems today that every new startup founder is in their early 20s.

What challenges differentiate a veteran entrepreneur and a newcomer’s experiences? What are strategies a first time business owner can employ to maximize the chances of success?

Eat Street's Office in Madison, WI — Eat Street’s Office in Madison, WI

Eric Martell started EatStreet, the largest independent food ordering company in the United States, when he was 20 years old with two classmates at the University of Wisconsin. EatStreet has raised $13 million and powers the online ordering of 15,000 restaurants nationwide. The startup, founded in 2010, exists in a cohort of foodtech and delivery companies that have some impressive deal flow: Instacart raised $220 million at a $1 billion valuation, Postmates has raised $138 million.

I recently chatted with Eric about starting a business in college and about the explosive growth of the food and delivery tech sectors.

Dan Reich: Speak to the challenges of starting a company at 20 years old.

Eric Martell: Early on, and to this day, we’ve had to convince others to take a risk on us, because we’re young and don’t have any pre-EatStreet experience running a tech company. In 2010, we had to convince the restaurants to take a chance on us. Matt was walking into every restaurant in Madison, WI with a simple pitch that our service would bring the restaurants more orders from new diners. Restaurants were wary of the entire idea, because if we took an order online and didn’t properly ensure that the restaurant received the order and could fulfill it, the diners would blame the restaurant for the poor experience. Additionally, we accepted payments online, which meant that we had to pay the restaurant every week, so they had to trust us with their money. Matt looked young for a 20 year old, and he heard more than once that the restaurant “just didn’t feel comfortable doing business with a kid.” Matt was able to sign up five restaurants when we launched February 1, 2010. With some results under our belt, we were able to expand that list to over 100 Madison restaurants within a year.

Additionally, in order to process online payments, we needed the trust of a credit card processor. We applied for six processors before getting approved… there was a lot of inherent risk to accepting online payments and transferring out the payments to restaurants on a weekly basis. It took over two months of searching before someone took the risk on us.

If it weren’t for those five restaurants and the credit card processor taking a risk on us, EatStreet would not exist.

Dan Reich: Do you still face challenges similar to these?

Eric Martell: Although the nature of the challenges has changed over the years, we still face obstacles from being first time entrepreneurs. We’ve raised over $13 million from venture capitalists, and every single one of them has taken a risk in betting on our drive. We also form strategic partnerships with companies like Yelp, Google, Single Platform, and Hotel Communications Network. These businesses need justification to take risks on a company like ours. I’m glad to say that we’ve always been able to put up results, and the company is the strongest it’s ever been.

Dan Reich: Do you think the current trajectory of food and delivery business funding and acquisitions will continue?

Eric Martell: We stand by what we’re seeing. GrubHub IPO’d a little over a year ago, and has consistently held its value as a multibillion dollar company. Over in Europe, DeliveryHero has raised over $1.5 billion, and Just-Eat also had a very strong IPO. With even Amazon and Uber eyeing the food delivery space, we’re happy to be where we are, with strong relationships with thousands of restaurants.

Dan Reich: Do you have any advice for first time entrepreneurs facing challenges regarding their experience levels?

Eric Martell: Persistence and results. Matt went to over 100 restaurants and only signed up five for our business’ launch. We could have called it quits after five credit card processor rejections. Our investment pitch historically has had less than a fifty percent success rate. Accept the failure as inevitable, and push forward. We’ve had restaurants that initially refused to sign up with us tell us today that when they finally did sign up with us, the additional orders we drove saved their business from going under.

Results might not always be present, but they speak louder than the best sales pitch. Focus on the aspects of your business you have control over, and grow like crazy. We didn’t raise a dollar until we had over $1 million in food sales, and that first million was the product of thousands of hours of promotion and hard work. It’s much easier to convince someone to believe in your vision if you have a track record of growth and hard work to back it up.