Why Philosophy and Entrepreneurship?

Since the release of my latest book The Entrepreneur's Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors, I continually get the questions "Why Philosophy and Entrepreneurship?" and "Why Nietzsche?"

Dave and I cover this upfront in the book, so I thought I'd throw in a snippet that answers the question with some of my own origin story with Dave. He follows.

Nietzsche? For contractors?

It was late January 1988, about nine months since we set out to turn Brad's one-man consulting shop, Feld Technologies, into a full-fledged business. We were fraternity brothers and close friends and opened our first office directly across from our fraternity chapter house in Cambridge. We planned to use smart but inexpensive software developers to create business application software. We employed half a dozen programmers, most of whom were undergraduates from our fraternity working part-time. We had no financing except for Brad's credit card and the $10 with which we purchased our common stock.

Dave walked into Brad's office after calculating the preliminary financial results for January. So far we had mostly broken even, but the news was grim: we had lost $10,000 in a month. We didn't see it coming, and it took some effort to sort out what was wrong. Dave had spent most of his time managing part-time developers, who mostly worked on future products, instead of billing clients for hours. Brad was selling computer hardware, which had low gross profit margins, instead of charging customers for hours. Much of our revenue for the month came from a very productive but erratic undergraduate developer, Mike, who was working on a billable client project.

Before we had a chance to figure out what to do, Mike quit, citing the need to focus on his studies. Now we had no choice: we laid off everyone, closed our monthly office, sold all office furniture, and moved the business to our downtown Boston apartments. It was heartbreaking. Brad wondered if we failed when we started. Dave was worried about paying the rent. We had long discussions about the future of the business, including whether or not to sue.

But we had billable projects. We no longer had to spend our time managing people and understood where our bread was buttered. The results were good enough in February to calm our nerves and even better in March. Equally important, we had learned some crucial lessons and agreed on a very different idea of ​​how we were going to move the business forward. The experience of hitting rock bottom and the lessons we learned became deeply embedded in our brains and corporate culture as we built the business more methodically and incrementally.

Fast forward thirty years, while we were writing this book, and Dave was reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He came across a passage which said that the highest mountains rose from the sea, and this fact is "inscribed...on the walls of their summits." Through our experience at Feld Technologies - and many times since - we immediately knew this had to be a chapter in the book. We imagined the comfort and instruction it might have given us to have seen (and understood) this quote, to have read a short essay like the one in our chapter Hit Bottom, where the austerity and promise of the situation are presented in black and white, or having heard Walter Knapp's story of the crash and rebirth of Sovrn, a truly disruptive company.

That's how we wrote most of the chapters and how this project started. As we read Nietzsche, we noticed insights that reminded us of situations, questions, and concerns that frequently arose in our experience of entrepreneurship and venture capital investing. Nietzsche had a sense of the words, and we found that some ideas were well summarized and formulated. We started playing by developing his concise aphorisms and collecting stories from entrepreneurs, and it worked.

Feld Technologies has never become a disruptive company, despite our ambitions. It maxed out at around $2 million in revenue before it was sold in 1993. Because we had built a solid foundation for some type of success, we never hit a deep low point again, and therefore never never again had the painful opportunity to redesign our premises. . This point is also covered in Hit Bottom and illustrates why we didn't just skip Nietzsche, write a few essays, and collect a few entrepreneurial stories. Nietzsche - sitting or walking alone, in pain, almost blind - thought deeply and managed to share those thoughts with the world. We tried to follow his lead, thinking hard and thinking about other angles and situations the quote might apply to. We want you to do the same, because you keep in mind that Nietzsche's works were very influential...