by Frank Gruber
Uber, the mobile marketplace for on-demand transportation, has done an extraordinary job using celebration as a tool to unify its communities. For example, on Valentine's Day, Uber drivers delivered roses to customers. Right before Christmas, the drivers delivered Christmas trees, specifically ordered from their site in certain markets. The company has also done similar promotions with ice cream on those hot summer days; burrito deliveries down in Austin, Texas; and even kittens!
What these celebratory moments do is create joy for their growing communities—and in doing so, Uber is creating allies. When Uber launches in new cities, it's not always warmly welcomed from local officials. In fact, some cities have long-standing, rigid laws in place to regulate the transportation industry. Some of these laws block Uber from operating—the company has received a few cease-and-desist orders. And instead of fighting them alone or giving up, Uber looks to its loyal community of allies. The allies sign petitions and speak out against the officials who are trying to shut Uber out. Call this brilliant strategy, marketing, or whatever you will, but leveraging the tool of celebration publicly to unite its community to fight for the right to Uber has been quite effective. Including customers or partners in your celebrations is key to building relationships and affinity.
Tech Cocktail uses celebration as the fabric of what we do as a news and events company. Our mission is to help entrepreneurs enjoy the startup life journey by providing resources, connections, and community. How do we do it? We shine a light on and celebrate the accomplishments of startup communities. We leverage celebratory moments to bring together thousands of entrepreneurs, startup founders, developers, designers, investors, and media at hundreds of events through the years. We also share those accomplishments through our online media coverage so other communities around the world can see what each market is achieving.
In a model similar to the TV show American Idol, Tech Cocktail tours the country to host events in various cities, rallying together the community and offering startups a chance to showcase their products. Startups can participate in their local pitch event, and the community votes on the best startup. The local winners are further narrowed down by a group of judges, with the best ones advancing to our national startup competition and conference called Tech Cocktail Celebrate. At that point, community support is behind the winners as they represent various regions at the finals, with a chance at national exposure to media and investors—not to mention bragging rights with the rest of the country.
Personal Celebration
Celebration can help you personally, too. As you achieve different milestones, you can have little celebrations for yourself and even for your family and friends, who support your startup journey.
Tom Nardone is the president of PriveCo, a company based in Troy, Michigan, that helps keep your purchases private. When a sale is made, Nardone sometimes shares this with his eight-year-old son. “He likes to hear about the business and he smiles when it goes well,” explains Nardone.
Detroit-based Savorfull founder Stacy Goldberg celebrates by traveling. “I take myself out of my office setting and work from a beautiful location to both reward myself and foster creativity!” she says.
I give myself breaks, too. Whether it be a walk outside or a chance to catch up on movies I haven't seen, I celebrate little daily milestones. The larger personal milestones are celebrated with special dinners or travel. After our first year running Tech Cocktail full-time, Jen and I celebrated our survival and licked our wounds by taking a two-week workation in Kauai. We would get up early every day to watch the sunrise, eat breakfast, and then work until about noon or a little afterward. After 5 or 6 hours of work, we would hit the road for some Kauai adventures, including hiking and exploring beaches. It was a celebration that was good for our mental and physical health and well-being. We came back to take on the new year with just as much vigor and intensity as the year before.
Moments of Celebration
Celebratory moments don't have to be huge. High fives, Friday afternoon drinks, lunch or dinner out, a break to chat with your team about nonwork stuff, or a walk all count. As a fun example, Chicago-based WeDeliver celebrates by making things together, from bow ties to hot sauce called AwesomeSauce.
Entrepreneur and consultant Tony Rappa once struggled for 3 hours to edit a video, then finally got it and decided to treat himself to a donut and coffee. “I sat in my car for a few minutes enjoying my treat and thinking about the fact that I hadn't given up on my task. I actually spent time thinking about what this little triumph could mean in the overall journey. I realized that it's these little moments, these little wins that will define how I handle myself in the next challenge and ultimately my level of success.”
As a company, consider creating systems to make celebration systematic. This will ensure it's not just random, but built into the culture and tied back to your core values.
RevTrax, a promotional platform for online-to-offline sales using digital coupons and offers, has a committee of employees called FunTrax. They plan team events such as happy hours, lunches, and sporting events. Jonathan Treiber, cofounder and CEO, says, “We have a fantastic group of smart, dedicated employees, so we like to celebrate RevTrax's success by rewarding the team for the hard work they put in day in and day out.”
Famigo, an Austin-based company helping developers and the next generation of educators reach families, has a Mandatory Fun Day on the last Friday of every month. The team bonds over activities that include laser tag, wakeboarding, and barbecues. “We find it more important to celebrate the little victories on a regular basis and get everybody out of the office regularly,” says Q Beck, cofounder and CEO.
Celebrate in Moderation
Celebration is a great tool, but like any tool it can be used too much or the wrong way. When this happens, moments of celebration aren't special anymore, so they don't have the desired effect of motivation and team building. Excessive celebration can detract from working time—not to mention, it can be bad for your startup's reputation. Too much partying and drinking is not the reputation you want out on the streets—and especially not what you want reaching investors or press.
There has already been some criticism of the tech scene for this. For example, Start-Ups: Silicon Valley, a reality show following entrepreneurs in the Valley, was criticized for portraying too much drinking and partying and not enough working. The same thing was said about The Social Network movie.
In the Washington Post article “Tech Community: Are We MTV or TED?” Francisco Dao explains that, “Anyone who spends more than a week making the rounds of tech industry parties in San Francisco will quickly notice a whole group of people who seem far more concerned with ‘making the scene’ than they are with actual entrepreneurship.”
You might call excessive celebration self-congratulation. Here's how to avoid being self-congratulatory:
Size: Celebration is in proportion to the accomplishment; self-congratulation is excessive.
Purpose: Celebration is meant to recognize past work and motivate future work; self-congratulation is simply to reflect on how awesome you are and how much you're crushing it.
Venue: Celebration can be private or public; self-congratulation often has a deliberately public aspect meant to impress others or brag.
Final Thoughts
Celebration is a tool. It can be used internally and externally to keep your outlook positive through the ups and downs of your startup journey, motivate your team, and also connect you with your community. As a company, you need to determine how much is too much. You don't want to rely on celebrations for everything, but it can be that secret sauce that gets you over various humps and keeps you and your team motivated. Your culture, led by your core values, can be a guide to keep your celebrations in balance and tied back to your overall goals. So use this tool for good, and let the celebrations begin!
Chapter 11
Relationships
In my experience, there is no such thing as luck.
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—Obi-Wan Kenobi
Attending a tech conference in Paris, Laura Fitton (known to many as @pistachio on Twitter) desperately wanted to meet Doc Searls, the blogger and coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto. But Fitton knew a thing or two about relationships—namely, rushing up to him after his talk wasn't the right approach.
So Fitton was patient. She started by chatting with Searls's wife. A few times during the conference, she made eye contact with him. And finally, she approached Searls after his talk and said humbly, “I hope I haven't crossed into the borderline of being rude, because I know I've seen you and we've been at events together a bunch of times and we've made eye contact, but I really don't like approaching people who are in demand as much as you are because I feel like I'm just adding to that weight.”
To her delight, Searls didn't find her rude. In fact, he grabbed his coauthor David Weinberger and they all spent the night dining and hanging out—and have been great friends since. Fitton asks, “Had I bum-rushed him the first three times we were in the same room, would I have gotten that much trust and kindness and openness to just explore and see where it goes?”
She likens this to the story of the fox in The Little Prince. The fox tells the Little Prince he can't just hang out with him, he has to tame him first. So he advises the Little Prince to come every day and sit nearby but not to try to play with him yet. Developing patience is the lesson here, and something we can all take away. So many people need to cultivate more patience when meeting new people. It's an exchange, a conversation, not a one-way opportunity to talk at someone.
Fitton credits her relationship-building skills with helping her transition from a completely unknown, isolated mom of two kids to someone who was quoted in a Seth Godin book, convinced Guy Kawasaki that Twitter was interesting, wrote her own book, became the chief executive officer (CEO) of a venture-funded company called OneForty, and sold to HubSpot.
Social Media
When I was blogging on Somewhat Frank, it was the relationships that I cultivated across the tight-knit blogosphere that made it so important to my everyday routine. I met fellow bloggers Michael Arrington, who had just started TechCrunch; Richard MacManus, who had been writing ReadWriteWeb; Pete Cashmore, who started a site for the latest trends, the future, and fast news for early adopters called Mashable; and Brian Solis, who was creating his own personal brand at PR2.0, which eventually turned into BrianSolis.com. We all met each other and started linking to and commenting on one another's blogs. I didn't know these people would turn into industry leaders in the tech and startup space; we just shared a common interest and enjoyed exchanging ideas.
Brian Solis
Brian Solis was another early Web pioneer, specializing in social media. In 2011, he joined as a principal at Altimeter Group, a research and advisory firm that helps companies with disruption. Solis is the author of several books, including The End of Business as Usual, Engage, and What's the Future of Business? He speaks frequently about social media, disruptive technology, and the consumer landscape. Based in San Francisco, Solis is also the host and curator of the Pivot Conference on new media.
By 2006, my blog was growing, I was traveling more for my blogging efforts, and I started to guest write on TechCrunch. Having met Arrington in 2005, I reached out to give him a hand on writing some longer-format industry comparison pieces on topics such as RSS feed readers, maps, and music. They were the most popular posts on TechCrunch in 2006, and startup founders, investors, entrepreneurs, and companies were using my research and articles for research and development (R&D). And they opened up relationships to readers who appreciated my insights and perspective and sent me feedback by e-mail. For example, Dick Costolo, then-CEO of FeedBurner, wrote, “Very cool guest post in TechCrunch. That was awesome.” It was simple e-mail messages like this that kept me going with my daily routine and clawing to get out of my day job, looking to jump to freedom. Little did I know that just four years later, Costolo would take over for Evan Williams as the CEO of Twitter and would lead them to a successful initial public offering (IPO). You never know where people are going to end up.
Evan Williams
Evan Williams was CEO of Twitter from 2008 to 2010 and is credited as the inventor of the term blogger. He is the cofounder of Pyra Labs (which created Blogger, acquired by Google), Twitter, and the Obvious Corporation (which created Medium). Medium is a publishing platform designed to make it easy to share ideas and enable ideas from anywhere to be heard. Medium raised $25 million in January 2014. Williams is based in San Francisco.
Every person you meet or interact with could be the next great entrepreneur, big supporter, long-term customer, investor, or maybe a friend. You never know. Although this may seem like common sense, some of us simply don't put relationship building into practice. Putting it into practice means treating everyone with respect and giving them your full attention and interest if you happen to be chatting with them.
The most important lesson I've learned over the years regarding building relationships may seem pretty trivial, yet it is very powerful:
People care about themselves and the things they care about.
It's inspired by Dale Carnegie's granddaddy of all relationship management books, How to Win Friends & Influence People (first published in 1937). I have managed my relationships from that premise for years, and it has been extremely helpful. I've even given it to friends and relatives.
Rather than looking for people who can help you, why not look for ways to help the people you want to connect with? It's much more likely to create a lasting relationship, and it feels a lot better, too. If you start by helping people—both those you want to meet and those you don't—good things will happen. You'll be racking up karma points while also meeting new people. It's the best way to grow your network of relationships. Some of those relationships will turn into lasting connections and friendships.
How Relationships Can Help You
Relationships are often neglected by entrepreneurs because networking has a bad reputation. But Priceline's former chief technology officer (CTO) Scott Case believes that founders of successful companies tend to have a strong network and use it to solve problems, such as finding funding, engineers, partnerships, and distribution. This is exactly why relationships matter—you can make yourself, your company, and your life based on the people with whom you have relationships. He says, “Founders tend to spend an enormous amount of time doing product development…The thing that I see as I travel across the country over and over again is a lack of network development—a lack of founders building a community around their idea at the very beginning.”
Scott Case
Scott Case was the cofounding CTO of Priceline, the name-your-own-price travel-booking site. Recently, he was CEO of the Startup America Partnership, which supported startups to help create jobs and fuel the American economy. In 2013, Startup America partnered with Startup Weekend to launch UP Global, a network that connects entrepreneurs with communities and resources. Based in DC, Case is now a board member of UP Global and launched his own venture: Main Street Genome, which builds software to model the main street economy. Case has also worked with nonprofits such as Malaria No More and Network for Good.
The expression “luck surface area” was coined by Jason Roberts, a serial entrepreneur and cohost of the podcast TechZing. He believes luck surface area or serendipity “is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you're passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated.” So in his mind, luck is equated with doing multiplied by telling. If you increase your luck surface area, you are increasing your odds that your story will get out, thus offering more potential opportunities.
Zvi Band is a Washington, DC–based founder who now believes in Roberts' luck surface area—although that wasn't always the case. Band is a developer and, like many developers, is an admittedly introverted guy. A few years ago, he thought networking was, in his own words, “
total f***ing bullshit.”
Band was working at a consulting firm and eventually became interested in startups. He soon realized that he needed to meet others who knew more about startups than he did. So out he went and started to meet people at different local events.
As he continued to get out and attend events, Band's network grew bigger and bigger. Band attributes much of his consulting and startup success to his network. “Not only did I have myself looking out for my venture, I had other people looking out for me, too,” he says. Thanks to them and their word-of-mouth publicity, he was able to run a successful consultancy for four years without much pitching or marketing.
But he also knew he was not great at managing his relationships. So his life came full circle when he, an introverted developer who had seen no value in networks or meeting people, decided to build a startup focused on helping people manage their relationships. He threw together a prototype that scratched his own itch and solved a problem. This prototype turned into a startup called Contactually, a platform that helps you keep track of all your contacts with ease. When Contactually was first funded, 13 of 15 investors came from Band's network.
Besides introducing you to customers and investors, relationships can help you in a number of other ways, not least of which is emotional support. Starting up is really hard work, and it helps to have people who know what you're going through. If your network includes seasoned startup founders, you can turn to them on those days when you feel like you're running out of steam. They can help you brainstorm solutions to overcome your problems.