Do you create, or do you loot? Are you a hunter of opportunities, or a farmer of someone else's find?
When I was in my 20s, I was for a short while in sales. I noticed over time that there were two kinds of sales people.....the sales reps who had 'hustle' (in a non-pejorative way)...went out and hunted new customers, and were all-around hungry. The yang to their yin were the wizened 'Account Managers' who did just that...manage accounts. They would sit back and wait for the young guns to come in and land new accounts, flame out, and leave, at which point these account managers would swoop in and take over the accounts and farm them until they dried up, then move on to the next carrion.
This is true all over industry. I've run into people who came to my current employer to make the company great, and other people who came to ride the wave of the great people in the hopes of getting rich. I've worked with people who hunt up new businesses and customers, and people who are content farming big parts of the business ('crop rotation', to put it nicely). In this example, the company needs both....people who start businesses and the differently-skilled people who are able to grow them from $1B to $2B and on.
In the broader industry sense, however, this is not true. There are those who create, or try to create. There are those who destroy, tax, or loot.
Who are the creators? They are the ones that have the idea, execute and build on it. They take satisfaction in creating new technologies, products, services and industries. The world is an abundance, and they add to it by their creations.
Who are the looters? Those that leech the energy from the creators. To them, the world is about scarcity, and there are a finite amount of scraps to fight over. They are the 'organizational antibodies' that attack any new ideas. They are the 'iguanas' that sun themselves on the rocks of the company, destroying anyone or anything that comes within tongue's reach, but otherwise doing nothing. They are the people who anticipate the paths of the creators, and attempt to extort a toll during execution (think patent and domain squatters). They are the venture capitalists who are the modern day carpet-baggers and strip-miners of startups. They are not people creating value, they are remora eating the scraps from the shark's mouth.
There was an old Henry Ford quote that I have temporarily misplaced that went something to the effect that great organizations are rarely killed from outside competition. They are killed from the people who got into a company, had early successes, rose to a position of responsibility, and then proceeded to destroy any threats to their legacy...rendering the company inert from the inside out.
It is tempting to scheme like Ayn Rand's character Francisco d'Anconia and create something deliberately bad just to sabotage the looting remoras that inevitably attach themselves to any new venture.
Ask yourself...are you creating something, or are you extorting value from someone else's creation? Are you producing, or are you a tax? Have you become inert, as with Henry Ford's quote....have you become an organizational iguana? Do you view the world as abundance that you can add to, or scarcity that you need to fight over? Are you a hunter or a farmer?
Postscripts: (1) this is most-assuredly not a spontaneous rant about some issue I am having with my employer, just a general observation I had this AM that I've seen all over industry. (2) the 'iguana' phrase comes from Neal Stephenson's book Cobweb, which is hilarious. (3) In the future, entirely-contract virtual workforce, with dynamic team creation based on a job to be done, there will be no tolerance for the ballast of looters. Bring on the future, I'm ready.
ONE ADDITIONAL POSTSCRIPT: I've received emails from people who were asking if I was referring to ALL Venture firms as looters, and this is certainly not the case. As with all areas, there are great VC's out there who are valuable, and help naive startups achieve success. There are also firms who provide capital to companies in crisis with business practices that would put Tony Soprano to shame. Not all VCs are nasty, just as all sales people are not nasty. Be sure you team with a creator, and not a looter.
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