The Cheat Code

by Brian Wong

  When I first went looking for investors, shortly after the crash of 2008, I was only marginally aware that everybody was scared shitless and didn’t want to risk what they had left—and certainly not on a nineteen-year-old boy who thought he could make people love advertising.

  I’m not saying that my naiveté was the only reason I landed my first investor, but it helped.

  Ironically, ignorance can breed confidence. When you’re ignorant of your idea’s flaws and potential pitfalls, you can look people in the eye and convince them that you know what you’re doing. “The market crashed? People are defaulting? Banks are teetering? Never mind that! I’ve got the cure! Yes, our company is completely different—but that’s good! Are you in or out?”

  Sometimes it helps to be just ignorant enough to have more faith in yourself than in the people who don’t think you’re worth the risk. After all, I knew me far better than I knew them. So it made perfect sense at the time. Call me ignorant, but…strangely, it still does.

  A longtime Silicon Valley executive once took me aside and told me something I’d never forget.

  “Brian,” he said, “how long have you been in the Valley?”

  “About a year and a half,” I said.

  “How long do you think the investors have been here?”

  “I don’t know. Twenty, thirty years?”

  “Exactly. And how long have the lawyers and bankers been around? Same time—twenty or thirty years. Everybody that you’re talking to about investing has been here longer than you. So what makes you think you are unique?”

  I didn’t have an immediate answer.

  “The entrepreneurs,” he said, “get shuffled through this conveyor belt, and as they come and go, the fixtures of the Valley—the investors, bankers, and lawyers—all remain.”

  He was absolutely right. Entrepreneurs like me are a vital part of the start-up economy, but we’re just one part, and for that economy to thrive, we need to work with the people who built it, and respect their authority.

  You need to know whom you’re working for.

  At the end of the day, everybody has to report to somebody. If you’re an entrepreneur who wants to stay in the game, you essentially report to your investors. Even though I’m the CEO of Kiip, I still have several bosses: my investors, some of whom are on our board of directors. They expect some kind of return on their money, and it’s my job to satisfy them.

  At about the same time I had the aforementioned conversation with the executive, somebody else who knew the Valley well asked me another powerful rhetorical question: “Brian, do you serve your investors, or do your investors serve you?”

  He got to his point quickly. “They should serve you. They didn’t bring you in. You brought them in. They don’t run the company. You do. They didn’t have the idea. You did.”

  It sounded like two opposite perspectives.

  Now I know they’re both right.

  You are working for your investors, and your investors are working for you.

  The moment you accept that both of these ideas are true, you’re ready to make money.

  You won’t need to be nervous about losing any particular investor, because you’ll know that your investors need you as much as you need them.

  You won’t need to feel alone, because your investor wants you to succeed as much as you do.

  You won’t need to feel in over your head, because you always have immediate access to experienced, smart people.

  You won’t need to feel controlled or constrained, because they gave you their money to be the boss, not just a figurehead or conduit to their own agenda.

  You won’t need to feel insecure within your industry, because your investors gave you the most meaningful token of legitimacy: their money.

  Each of these advantages is monumental, and they’re not oppositional at all, but completely symbiotic.

  One of our first investors, Paige Craig, is somebody who can tell you more about real-life, real-time business over lunch than some business professors or McKinsey consultants could tell you in a year. He’s an ex-Marine who maxed out his credit cards and went to the war zones of Iraq, posing as a reporter, in order to meet the officials who would let him launch a company with the goal of trying to win over the Iraqi people with positive TV ads instead of force. He landed contracts, scaled his company, and was so successful that he retired in his mid-thirties and became an angel investor. Now he’s known in L.A. as the “Mayor of Silicon Beach.”

  Shortly after I met Paige, he literally wrote me a blank check and told me we’d work out the details later.

  What do you learn from that? The power of trust. Instinct. Balls.

  As one of our earliest investors, he should be pretty happy about his return so far. So to come back to the original question, who is the boss in the relationship?

  Answer: We both are.

  Even some of the most impressive people on the planet have no idea what they are doing half the time. They are proof that if you want to be successful, you don’t need to always know what you’re doing: You just need to look like you know what you’re doing.

  We all land in situations, sometimes every day, in which we wish we had a slightly better handle on exactly what we are doing. Just today I had a meeting with a guy who’s doing a company based around beacon technology—sort of like GPS, only with extremely pinpoint locating abilities, like knowing when you’re in a mall and just passed the Ralph Lauren store. It’s super-cool. It’s super-sophisticated. It’s also not very easy to understand.

  I got the nuts and bolts of it, but not the details—but I didn’t want to look like I was in the kindergarten phase of it. So instead of asking really basic questions or admitting that I didn’t fully get it, I asked him intelligent, generic questions about the industry, like: What’s the hierarchy of the companies in it? How does he think beacon technology will play out in the future?

  We had an interesting conversation. I kept his respect, and I ended up learning some of the things he probably thought I already knew.

  You may have seen this technique in action if a manager or exec has ever come into your meeting and said, “You all know what you’re doing—I’m just here to learn.” It’s a pretty clever way of learning what you don’t know without having to admit to what you don’t know. But it has to be done with genuine sincerity, because if there’s any hint that you’re being condescending—like, mingling with the little people—they’ll think you’re full of shit and start letting you know how much you really do have to learn. I’ve seen managers do that with a sort of smug look on their face, and they got eaten alive.

  The point is you don’t need to know the answers, just the right questions to push the boundaries, learn what you don’t know, and get the information you need to move the idea forward.

  If you show that you want to know what you’re doing, people will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you do know, or soon will. Be overtly willing to learn and everything will fall into place.

  Ever wondered why dictators have fancy haircuts? They have them so that you’ll remember them. Or, more precisely, so that you’ll remember them for their cool hair—rather than, for example, for being tyrants or monsters. In other words, it’s their branding.

  Even if you don’t aspire to world domination, in business it’s very valuable to have a little trademark that will make you memorable, particularly in our information-saturated society. In fact, a trademark is one of the most memorable—and cost-free—ways to stand out and get noticed in a noisy world.

  At Kiip, our trademark is that we constantly invoke our own brand signature with tag lines like “Kiip it real,” “Kiip going,” and “Kiip it up” (as I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’ve also done this throughout this book).

  Even in emails, I always say something like “Kiip up the good work,” and 90 percent of the recipients respond positively to it. (The other 10 percent just tease me about being a nerd.)

  The mini-cheat is to tradem
ark your brand by creating your own language-within-a-language. At Kiip, we don’t create ads; we offer rewards. We don’t reach consumers when they’re impressionable; we create moments of serendipity. This isn’t just how we happen to talk. It’s a vocabulary we’ve strategically adopted, that we’ve made our own.

  The point of creating your own language is to present yourself as unique, as completely differentiated from your competitors. It signals to people, “Those guys are in one business, and we’re in a better one. We’re in our own category.”

  Another version of creating a signature language that I use is choosing a new, relatively uncommon word every month, and using it repeatedly. I use it with my own team, with customers, in speeches, in print, and on the air. For example, I did that with “serendipity,” and as often happens, I soon started hearing people parrot the word back to me, as if it were their own. When that happens, you know you’ve tapped a powerful force for subliminal bonding.

  Those same people might even start repeating the phrase, sending it into the culture in waves of concentric circles, because it sounds so addictingly smart and cool.

  You too can create a language for your company, or even for your own personal brand. Religions do it. Celebrities do it. Smart businesses do it. Even dictators do it.

  By the way, for the record, I am not a fan of dictators, and never will be—unless someday I become one myself. And even then, I promise to be a really nice one. That’s my pledge to the people of Earth, and I intend to kiip it.

  Jakarta, the jewel of Java, sits in a bay on the Java Sea where wooden schooners still dock. In this, the sixth-largest city in the world, you’ll find a head-spinning kaleidoscope of cultures, flowers, mountains, and architecture designed to take your breath away.

  I compiled so many vivid impressions of it from my last trip there that they dwarfed even the importance of the business I was there to do. I just wish I could remember them.

  Jakarta’s vast swirl of action is a black hole for the mind’s storage of memories. It trapped impressions that probably won’t revive until I revisit the city again. Jakarta gives new meaning to the phrase “too much.”

  Here’s an example: When I told my driver how many meetings I had scheduled that day, he cried, “Mr. Wong, you have six meetings today? That is not quite possible!” Turns out in Jakarta you can have only one meeting per day, because you’ll spend the rest of the day going to it and from it. Jakarta’s traffic is the stuff of legend. Its streets make Manhattan’s look like the empty alleys of a ghost town.

  But I did have six meetings scheduled, with six of the most important groups of people in my industry in that part of the world. How did I get those meetings? I got them largely through the grace of my abilities to send cold emails, and I’d be damned if I was going to miss any of them.

  Emailing is one of the great powers of the new business culture, and it can make or break a career. Its ultimate power is the ability to unlock the doors to the world’s most significant people before you’ve ever even shaken their hands.

  First, you’ve got to have their email address, right? But nobody does. That’s how they want it. But in truth, even the most elusive of important people aren’t that hard to find. The quick and cheaty way is through sheer trial and error; write your letter to them, then address it to their most likely email address (i.e., JackSprat@VISA.com) with a blind CC (BCC) to as many possible permutations of the most likely address as possible: (i.e., Jack@VISA.com, Sprat@VISA.com, Jack.S@VISA.com, JS@VISA.com, JSCEO@VISA.com, etc.). Develop your own plug-in system to generate as many possible addresses as you can. Of course, only one will land, and that’s the one you want. You’ll know the ones that aren’t working if they bounce back. Once you have the winning combo, most likely it’ll work for a large portion of the employees for that company as well. You’ll be shocked at how often this method works.

  There are other methods of obtaining addresses, and they invariably require more guts than brains. They include simply calling their office and asking for it, reaching out to one of your journalist friends who might have it, going through the company’s public relations office, buttonholing the important person him- or herself at some industry event, and so on. Use your imagination.

  Here’s another tip: Once you get the address, email that person on the weekend. That’s when important people deal with their emails. Still, chances are good that he or she won’t open it…the first time. By the third or even fifth time, your name will sound familiar. Or maybe they’ll just be curious. Or maybe they’ll open it looking for a way to unsubscribe from whoever or whatever you are. Either way, be shameless and persistent, but be respectful.

  Try to put something in the subject line that they can’t resist. Dropping a name (i.e., “Jack Sprat from VISA suggested I contact you, re: X”) is a safe bet. It’s often good to mention someone they want to learn more about, such as a competitor.

  Another smart tactic takes a page from the military playbook: Attack from all sides. Send the email from different accounts. Surround them: Get to their VP, their COO, or their golf caddy—anybody.

  Above all, remember that connections beget connections. When you know enough people in their industry, you will get through. If you don’t know enough people in their industry to get through, maybe you don’t deserve to. Be worthy of their attention before you ask for it.

  If you can’t get in the person’s face, at least get in their universe. Make your name visible in as many places as possible that might be within their sphere. The more your name pops up on their Twitter feed, in Instagram comments, in LinkedIn likes and comments, and in general areas like a trade journal, a magazine article, or a list of speakers, the more brand recognition you’ll have, and the more successful you’ll be. They’ll think, “I know that name from somewhere,” and will be more likely to respond.

  Also make sure that your email offers them something. If you want to get the attention of important people, always be offering. Never be asking. Nobody wants to give. Everybody wants to get. That’s human nature. Finally, if your goal is to get in front of them, face-to-face, create a deadline for a time to meet. One of the best is “I’ll be in your city, in your building, on this exact date—give me five minutes and I’ll solve a specific problem that I know you have.”

  Every time I go to another city—which is practically every week—I send out ten to fifteen cold emails. The more I do it, the less need I have for cold emails, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to see people just because you’ve already met. Sometimes that makes it harder, because they may think they’ve already gotten all you can offer.

  But more often than not, if you’ve followed the tips in this cheat, at least a few of those people will be curious, or at least courteous enough to meet with you for a few minutes.

  Which brings us back to Jakarta. Cold emailing is how I got an 8:30 a.m. meeting with the Indonesian head of digital marketing for the global conglomerate Interpublic Group, Rachna Sharma. We arrived at 10:00 a.m.—hence my driver’s panic. Rachna graciously thanked me for my punctuality.

  Over the course of that day, I met—to my shock—some of the most influential people in Southeast Asia. Another of my cold emails had led me to someone as important as Rachna in another company, a third led to another major player, and the rest of my meetings sprouted from those.

  It’s not like I’m part of the family now, but today these folks answer my emails, respond to my WhatsApp messages, and take me seriously—all thanks to a couple of cold emails.

  This is the power of the new communication tools that we all have at our fingertips. We are in an era of unprecedented social mobility and connectedness—for those of us bold enough to use it.

  Your access to this world is probably within fifty feet of you right now.

  Say hello to this world. Send some emails.

  Hell yes, use exclamation points! They get people’s attention!

  If you’re trying to stand out and get noticed, there’s no such thi
ng as being too emphatic or energetic. I’ve recently started using the word “really” a lot. And when I say a lot, I mean that I’ve been using it a lot! I really, really like the word “really.” Exclamation points add the same emphasis with just one character.

  Maybe you grew up thinking exclamation points were gauche. Maybe you’re basically a laid-back person. Maybe you’re usually understated or sarcastic. Maybe sometimes you’re tired. None of that has to show in your emails.

  The beauty of emails is that with the combination of two magical keys, you can transform yourself into an energetic, enthusiastic, credulous, well-rested, and well-hydrated dynamo. SHIFT+1 spins your morning grogginess into entrepreneurial gold.

  Sometimes you really, really need to be a walking, talking exclamation point. That applies when you’re talking to users, the press, and your partners. They need your energy, and feed off it. You especially need to offer this energy to your investors—even if it’s just by using exclamation points in your emails to them. Remember, they’ve given you money because they want you to burn brighter than they do, love what you’re doing, and want to be the best in the world. If you could communicate all this with just a click on your keyboard, why wouldn’t you do it?!?!

  In the same way that a smile, a firm handshake, or a commanding “Hi!” can light up a halo over your head and affect how people see you, exclamation points carry outsize loads of information. In an instant, they can signal success, enthusiasm, confidence, and ability.

  Don’t worry about it not being cool. There are no style points deducted for enthusiasm. And no one gets ahead by being disaffected or aloof. Be cheesy. Gush.