Hot Koehls

The more you know, the more you don’t know

This content is a little crusty, having been with me through 3 separate platform changes. Formatting may be rough, and I am slightly less stupid today than when I wrote it.
16 Jun 2009

Entrepreneurs - think like this guy

In a great article discussing how to demo a product to investors, Jason Calacanis says the following under the heading “The best products take less than five minutes to demo”…

Steve Jobs does take the demo details to a fairly detailed level, but you and I are not Steve Jobs. There is only one Steve Jobs and there is only one Apple. You’re never going to build something as cool as Steve, and as such there is no need for you to talk about your product for five or ten minutes.
In the comments, I found this response from user "COP":
WTF????? WHY NOT?
My thoughts exactly. There's exactly zero rules, official or unofficial, that say you can't be as cool as Steve Jobs and build products with equivalent coolness. This type of rhetoric happens a lot — presenting a major player in a given market as an insurmountable behemoth. We as entrepreneurs do it in our heads all the time. It's never helpful, but more importantly it's never **true**. Take Calacanis' example in this article. You don't have to go back too far to find a time when Apple wasn't the epitome of cool. In my opinion, Apple machines after the IIe were out-and-out crap until they hit another stride with OSX, which came out in **1999**. I don't recall seeing any Apple's in school prior to that. I should know, I graduated high school in '99! Did you know the first iPod was released in 2001, less than 10 years ago? That's a helluva lotta time where we can't account for any Steve Job coolness. The correct attitude is that of our friend COP, "Why not?" In fact I'm willing to bet that ol' Steve said that a few times along the way as well. To think any less, to see your competition as insurmountable, is surely a road to failure. **P.S.** Note: Jobs is one of the most epic geeks in history, no question. Apple has been a successful company since its founding, but definitely wandered the wilderness through the late 80's and 90's, which does not fit Calacanis' rhetoric. My goal here is to topple Calacanis' logic, not Jobs. Mac cultists, be at ease.

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