The Cheat Code

by Brian Wong

  We’re all pressured to stay wired, but bending over and taking whatever information people throw at us is not the way to deal with it. Stand up for your right to some peace, quiet, alone time, family time, fun time, and creative time.

  Ask people to give you some space. The people you really want to have in your life will be fine with that. The people you don’t want in your life will get the message, and to them I say good riddance.

  When you show respect for yourself and your time, other people will start showing respect for it as well.

  As we learned in a Mary Poppins song, in ev’ry job that must be done / there is an element of fun / You find the fun and SNAP! / The job’s a game. Or something like that.

  That’s one more reason to be your own boss in the golden age of entrepreneurship: You get to make your own fun.

  Sure, some people are lucky enough to have a boss who knows that work and fun can coexist. If you’re not, you need to find a new boss, and maybe that boss is you.

  Some people think fun is incompatible with a work ethic. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. After all, it’s called a work ethic, not a suffering ethic.

  The ability to have fun is one of those classic cheats that I talk about all the time. Remember the old saying “Fun is fundamental”? Well, it’s true. Why do you think the writers of the Declaration of Independence ranked the pursuit of happiness right up there with life and liberty? Because they knew that the deep-seated, primal need to enjoy what you do, without some tyrant—petty or otherwise—stomping on your soul, is a fundamental human right.

  I have fun at my job, and I make sure that the people I work with are having fun too. If they’re not, they’ll lose their interest and energy. It goes without saying that not every aspect of a job is fun; but if you’ve even thought the phrase “My job is no fun,” then you need a new job. If you’re doing it right, having a job shouldn’t feel like having just “a job.” Life is too short, and careers are even shorter.

  The single best way to have fun with your job is to take it upon yourself, regardless of your job description, to find something new in it every day. Kiip learning, kiip trying different tactics, kiip growing, and kiip moving.

  When you do things too mechanically or repetitively, you take the fun out of them. Every time I do a presentation or even have a meeting, I always explore ways to do something that’s different, just to give people the feeling of: I wasn’t expecting that! Not only does it make things more interesting for me, they like that feeling, and they appreciate me for offering them something new.

  We are all, at heart, explorers. Old gets old. New is fun.

  We’re also survivors, and we know that if we come to somebody with the same old thing so often that they know what’s coming, we’ll be instantly boring and eminently disposable.

  If you’re having fun at your job, you won’t pay much attention to things like long hours or even low earnings. You’ll do amazing work. Your fun will be contagious, and your workday will be the main event, instead of another boring opening act to suffer through before the weekend.

  Here’s a one-step mini-cheat to having fun: Let go and be yourself. If you do, you won’t be looking over your shoulder for trouble, the way people are when they’re putting on an act, so you probably won’t find any. You’ll be loose, funny, open, and free. Ideas will come naturally. Friends will flock to you. Your superiors will see you as an equal.

  Part of being yourself, though, is being in a job that welcomes that attitude. Not every boss is enlightened—as I’m sure you’ve noticed.

  Don’t let yourself get shoved into a job where you can’t be yourself, just because of money or status.

  When you’re working at the job you should be working at, it feels right. It feels natural. Your days will have a buzz to them.

  I can’t tell you what that job is. It might even be hard for you to predict what it is.

  When you’re in it, though, you’ll know it.

  That will be the job that will take you to your peak moments of opportunity. And that will be fun.

  I have some good news for you. If you want to win in this world, you don’t have to be better than everybody. You just have to be better than your immediate competitor.

  Funny parable: Two guys are in the woods. Out of nowhere comes a grizzly bear! He’s mean! He’s hungry! He lumbers toward them. One guy sits down to put on his sneakers. Other guy says, “Shit, dude, you can’t outrun that bear.” First guy replies, “I don’t have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you.”

  It works the same in business. If you happen to be hanging out with high achievers and meet somebody who’s inordinately successful but not remotely the brightest, most driven person in the room, it tells you one thing: He’s at least a little smarter and more tenacious than his closest competitors.

  That’s all it takes.

  A lot of people get caught up in the hero worship of super-amazing people—Musk, Page, Bezos, Jobs—and try to compare themselves with them. Don’t. It’s irrelevant.

  It’s a waste of time to compare yourself to the upper echelon of the whole world. The world is too big and you’re too small. You’ll always lose, and when you do, you’ll feel like a loser.

  If you work at a major corporation, don’t even compare yourself to the CEO or COO, because it’s generally an exercise in futility. Compare yourself to the person in the office or the cubicle next to yours, or to the person a level or two above you. That’s your real competition.

  That said, oftentimes, even your closest competitors are irrelevant. Because ultimately, you’re only competing against one person: yourself.

  It’s like my parents told me a long time ago: You’re competing with yourself more than you’re competing with anyone else. So as long as you’re a better version of yourself every day, you’re fine.

  For creative people—like me, and probably like you—there’s more than enough success to go around. Creative people don’t play a zero-sum game. We try to help other people get what we have, and if we need more, we create more: as a team, with the people we’ve helped. If you can be a better you every day, you can win the race.

  Here’s an example of serendipity—aka luck with your eyes open: I was walking down the street with a few guys and we bumped into some mutual friends. One of my buddies said, “Adam, this is Brian Wong—he just got laid off at Digg, and he’s starting his own company.”

  Adam D’Augelli stuck out his hand and said, “What are you starting?”

  Adam was then an associate at the five-year-old venture capital firm True Ventures, which focused on finding tech start-ups in their earliest stages.

  “Well, I can’t really say,” I said, “because we’re still forming it, but let’s meet up sometime.”

  Adam is one of those people who you can tell are smart just from the clarity and focus they project, and he seemed like a good guy, friendly and fit. I knew I’d at least get some good advice from him.

  A week later we had coffee and I told him about my idea for a mobile advertising company that rewards consumers with free products during moments of achievements in gaming. My reasoning was that almost everybody hates ads, but they love achievement and reward, so it would create a consumer-product bond.

  Shortly after that he brought me to his partners, from whom I hoped to find out even more about how to get investors, and they’re like: “How much are you raising?” I had no idea. But I said, “I don’t know—$300,000 or $400,000.”

  A week later I came back and they gave me a term sheet for $300,000. I was so blown away that I said about the dumbest thing I could—which was also probably the smartest, because it was honest: “This is ridiculous. You’re actually giving me $300,000, and I don’t even have a company yet?”

  So that’s the easy way to find investors. Just walk down the street.

  It helps, though, to walk down the street with an insanely good idea, experience in a business similar to the one you want to start, a friend who
se friend is an investor, a ton of ambition, honesty—and pure (Cheat Code–worthy) luck, augmented by the ability to keep your eyes open and know a good opportunity when you see it.

  I thought about it, and told True Ventures that I wanted to make room for some individual investors, or angel investors: wealthy people who would put in their own money. It was a tricky proposition, because making room for more angel investors meant that the True Ventures ownership position would be reduced.

  I was lucky, and they said okay. They put in $200,000, and we began to seek another $100,000 from some angel investors.

  Adam and his partners realized that was good for everyone. Adam’s investment, of course, fed confidence to the venerable boys’ club of investors in the Valley, including the angels.

  I skipped a common source of initial investment: seed money from friends and family. That wasn’t something I felt good about, because I knew I’d have too much remorse if things didn’t work out. A friends-and-family phase of investment is a more practical approach if your friends or family are wealthy. It’s also reasonable if they completely understand the risks and absolutely insist on getting in on the ground floor, as refusing someone’s rational desire to share risk and reward can cause hard feelings.

  When I started approaching angels, we already had a few customers, and we were expecting more. We established some early goals for ourselves, and—as planned—we reached them. That impressed the angels, even though we’d set the goals ourselves. So that’s a mini-cheat: Set realistic goals, meet and beat them, and let the world know you did.

  Our key angels, along with entrepreneur-turned-investor Paige Craig, included Rohan Oza, the former CMO of Vitaminwater; Keith Belling, the founder of Popchips; Joe Stump, the lead architect of Digg, who made sure it would scale properly; and Ryan Swagar, a cofounder of Venture51. They were all super-smart, young guys who saw the potential in a company that could change advertising into something people like.

  Our second set of investors—still in the A round—came after we were rolling, but still quite early in Kiip’s evolution. One of the most important meetings happened at a gathering of my fellow Canadians who’d moved to California. Believe it or not, there are about 350,000 Canadians in California, making us about 1 percent of the population. The event, C100, was for Canadian entrepreneurs, and there I met Lars Leckie, of the venture capital firm Hummer Winblad. They invested $4 million.

  Lars is equally adept at business and technology, holds several patents, started as a computer game hacker, and founded Novariant, a company that focuses on GPS and robotics.

  By the time I was nineteen, we’d raised almost $5 million—a record for a teenager. That record, in and of itself, represented about a million dollars’ worth of credibility and publicity.

  You’re smart enough to see Cheat Code themes emerging from this narrative without me spelling them out. The big ones are:

  • Find people you don’t want to just make money with but be closely linked with for a long time.

  • Get your ass out into the world, where you’ll know people and be known.

  • Be yourself to such a degree that it’s hard not to trust you.

  • Always stay more full of fun than of fear.

  • Look for great ideas and grab them by the throat when they appear.

  • Don’t let a job layoff or any other problem undermine you.

  • Know serendipity when you see it.

  • And, of course, walk down the street.

  The overarching Cheat Code mega-theme: There is no one way. There are lots of ways.

  I did it my way. You do it yours.

  If we learned anything from the classic Stanley Kubrick film The Shining, it was “All work and no play makes Johnny a maniacal ax murderer.”

  As those who have seen the film will recall, Jack Nicholson’s workaholic mind-set was ultimately of no value to him—nor to his family.

  That’s why I believe in regularly having a splurge day.

  The most successful people know that taking time to recharge is the only way to stay on your A-game for an extended period of time. I don’t have the time or desire at this stage of my career to take extended vacations, so I pick at least one day every month for a mini-vacation of cramming in as many of my favorite things as possible.

  It’s a cheat that’s kept me almost completely free from homicidal tendencies. I strongly recommend it to people with high-intensity careers, and even to anyone with a moderately stressful job.

  So what do I do on my splurge day? I unplug all my devices, hang out at my favorite spot in the park, go eat brunch at my favorite restaurant, and eat ice cream at my favorite place. I just do everything as my favorite everything, and it’s awesome.

  If you don’t have these splurge days, or your own version of them, you will inevitably burn out.

  Best of all, even an occasional splurge day gives you something to look forward to every day as you’re working long hours at the office or getting all too acquainted with the business travel lounge at your local airport. As Jane Austen said, the anticipation of happiness is happiness itself.

  Every once in a while, instead of sitting in the park and eating ice cream, I use my splurge day to simply catch up on sleep. This is equally important. As you read in Cheat 3, even Energizer bunnies like me can’t go go go go forever without occasionally recharging the battery.

  My most recent splurge day was when I came back from one of my body-hammering trips—you know, the kind where the time zones all merged into Brian Daylight Time. As soon as I hit home, I slept thirty hours. I wish I could remember it. It must have been great. Doesn’t matter. My body remembers. That’s good enough.

  The body will tell you when it needs a break. Listen to it!

  For you to achieve phenomenal, enduring success, you should inspire so much faith in the people you work with that you become a legend among them.

  It may be easier than you think.

  You don’t need to be legendary at everything—that’s impossible, and not even productive, because it creates the onus of being a one-man team.

  Instead, pick one of your superpowers, and be the person who is always done ahead of schedule, or always cool under pressure, or always coming up with novel solutions, or always the most tenacious, or always nicest to everybody.

  It doesn’t matter what your superpower is, as long as you’re so amazing at it that it’s the stuff of legends.

  The same attribute should apply to your company. Think about how the most successful companies are legendary for being one of the most (take your pick): innovative (Apple, as one example), trusted (Disney), stable (Berkshire Hathaway), futuristic (Google), or patient (Amazon).

  Let’s consider for the moment Amazon, for its legendary patience:

  Amazon is so damn patient—placing so little emphasis on current profitability—that some people call it the “Dangerous Dynasty.” In an era when CEOs live and die on their quarterly reports, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is legendary for practically ignoring them.

  Amazon isn’t even very interested in the profit margins that it reaps on individual products. That’s because Bezos created a culture that focuses on one thing: long-range domination of global, retail e-commerce.

  Year after year, profits are regarded as almost an afterthought. This is why, even though Amazon ran in the red for its first seven years and endured a losing year as recently as 2012, its stock is now running in the range of $500 per share—because people are absolutely convinced that Bezos, with his eye on the horizon, sees things that the rest of us don’t. Investors are sure that Bezos’s long-term vision will solve pesky little problems, like not making a profit.

  That’s the stuff of legends.

  Bezos’s fabled modus operandi almost borders, for some, on religious faith—or at least fervor. People view it as a way to explain life and establish values.

  Legend spawns legend, and one of the great urban legends of Jeff Bezos is that he’s building a Millennium Clock in
the desert that will last for ten thousand years. Bezos believes that the quixotic, chaotic pace of technology has created a false sense of time, compressing it with a power akin to that of a black hole, where the increasing acceleration eventually makes everything literally happen at once. Therefore, Bezos says, “It’s going to be increasingly important, over time, for humanity to take a longer-term view of its future.”

  The legend about him building the Millennium Clock is true. Sort of. In actuality, the clock is being built by a nonprofit called the Long Now Foundation, which has about 3,300 members. It’s being built five hundred feet down in a Texas mountain, under the direction of a supercomputer developer (and Milton Bradley toymaker) named Danny Hillis, the cofounder of Thinking Machines, Inc., who created the foundation and conceived of the clock. Bezos just chipped in—to the tune of $40 million, though, making him the biggest donor.

  But it doesn’t matter if that’s his real message or if he’s not really the driving force behind the clock’s creation. What matters is that Jeff Bezos has become a legend and carried his company with him. Whatever he does at this point will make him even more legendary on many levels.

  Bezos is larger than life as we know it. His company, by extension, is larger than business as we know it. Bezos plus Amazon is more like a movement, a moral code, or, to some, a religion. No matter what happens to Amazon over the next hundred years, the legend of Jeff Bezos and his company will live long, and large.

  You too can be legendary, no matter what industry you’re in or what kind of work you do. But as they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day.