The Entrepreneur’s Essentials: Introduction
Note: On Mother’s Day 2022 to honor my mom, Brenda, and also my wife, Debra, and after 13 months of work alongside David Judson (a true partner), I came out with the second, expanded edition of this book in print on Amazon Prime. Like the first edition, it is also available for free (on TheEntrepreneursEssentials.com). It is a much better product than the first edition below, taking into account lessons from the pandemic and data.world, as my team and I have built it into a successful company after six years of work.
What follows is the original, first edition, which was only published here on Medium.
I’ve thought a lot about writing a book over the years. My daughter, Rachel, didn’t just think about it — she acted on it (at age 13). You can buy her book at her website, Guardians of the Forest, and it is the perfect gift for children ages 4 to 12. But I have put in hundreds of hours writing my blog, Lucky7, since 2012. My purpose since the beginning has been to help entrepreneurs, especially those based in Austin, as well as to clarify and solidify my own learnings. Lucky7 is named after my mom, who was an amazing woman and entrepreneur herself.
Over the years, I’ve noticed that I tend to frequently share certain Lucky7 posts with entrepreneurs we’ve backed, team members at data.world, or other startup investors I know. In totality, these posts are at least as long as most business books. So I’ve packaged them all up for you here in my first book, The Entrepreneur’s Essentials, publishing it live on Medium as I went. I also repurposed some other posts I wrote along the way, thinking that they fit very well within the theme and framework of the book. The Entrepreneur’s Essentials ended up being 22 lessons/chapters long, and I’ve added some commentary on how I’ve personally applied the lessons on my sixth startup, data.world, to bring them “up to date” with my latest experience and reflection.
The process took me about a year and the net result is a book that, according to Medium, will take you exactly 207 minutes to read (including this Introduction and the Acknowledgments). Each lesson/chapter is an average 8.6 minute read, and I encourage you to jump around as much as you want. Any time you see The Entrepreneur’s Essentials logo, you’ll see “Back to Contents” underneath it, which will allow you to easily navigate back to the Contents of the book. The Contents/lessons/chapters are separated in three sections: Founding, Building, and Helping, as I view those three as the phases of the entrepreneurial journey. Medium allows you to easily comment and highlight, and I encourage you to do so — it will help other readers as well as me. I would love for The Entrepreneur’s Essentials to be an interactive dialogue rather than a monologue.
As I boil down what the real goal of entrepreneurship is, it is to live a journey of meaning. No matter what religion you follow, meditative practice you engage in, or philosopher or role model you subscribe to, you’ll learn that the secret to life is to live a life of meaning. Meaning is defined by you, and it is often very elusive to find your core truth. And although we often celebrate the “hero” entrepreneur (e.g., Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, etc.), entrepreneurship isn’t an individual journey — you absolutely need great people to go on the journey with you. Entrepreneurship is a team sport. And those people will need to identify with your meaning in order for you to have a very meaningful journey together.
As we all strive for meaning in our lives, as Viktor Frankl so eloquently described in his most important book, Man’s Search for Meaning, we are on a quest when engaged in entrepreneurship. That quest can best be summarized in three stages: 1) irrelevancy, 2) relevancy, and 3) the must-have.
The irrelevancy stage is the hardest. Your family and friends may think you are nuts to put your ego out there in a way that you could fail. Entrepreneurship is celebrated, yes, but most know deep down that they will never be brave enough to take that journey. The fear of failure is just too high, as I write about in #2: The paralyzing fear of getting started and #21: On failure and resilience. I’ve lived this journey over and over again, and helped many on theirs. I’ve seen it since the beginning of my childhood, with my parents being entrepreneurs from the time I was born. And I remember like it was yesterday the irrelevancy stages of Coremetrics, Bazaarvoice, and data.world.
At the beginning of Coremetrics, there was no such thing as “the end of software” (a term that Salesforce.com popularized and now they are the largest Software as a Service company in the history of the world, with a market cap as of this writing of $132.7 billion — and I don’t forget how Siebel and Oracle shrugged them off, and their movement, as a fad at the beginning). At Coremetrics, I had to use mainframes and dumb terminals, clients and servers, the credit card industry, and any other analogy we could think of when explaining our idea to prospective investors, customers, and partners. Eventually the term ASP came along — Application Service Provider. Then SaaS — Software as a Service. Luck plays a big role in entrepreneurship and we were at the right place at the right time with our pioneering business model. ASP and SaaS created the “tribal language” to allow us to become more relevant. Winning Walmart.com, the world’s largest retailer, allowed us to become more relevant. And then eventually, as we built the business retail customer win by retail customer win, we became known for the company we kept. We were asked to speak at conferences. Our customers would rave about us on stage. We held very popular Client Summits and customers would talk about Coremetrics as a must-have to be a viable online business.
It is important to note that we didn’t design Coremetrics to attach to a new fad or movement of ASP or SaaS — again, those movements didn’t even exist at the beginning of our company. We did it because we believed in our hearts that it was what the customer needed to be successful. Retailers online were flying blind and the existing solutions to provide the core metrics to run their business just weren’t keeping up. We could upgrade our software whenever we wanted, as compared to on-premise enterprise competitors like NetGenesis and Accrue. We could install in weeks, as compared to NetGenesis and Accrue taking 9–12 months to do so (often with failed implementations). We knew their customers were unhappy because we talked to them. We could control the format of the data streaming in and proactively monitor for any occurrences of it breaking. We could be very consultative with our customers — teaching them how to become proficient in using analytics to run their online business. We leveraged the Software as a Service business model to stress that last S — Service. The delivery model was superior to our competitors and eventually we disrupted them and became one of the global market leaders. We became a must-have in the industry and even though the dot-com bust almost killed us, we recovered well and were eventually bought by IBM for almost $300m.
The journey for Bazaarvoice was similar — it was completely irrelevant at the beginning. Brant Barton, my co-founder, and I had left Coremetrics to start it together. We would build the “voice of the marketplace” (Bazaarvoice was named after Chapter 4 of The Cluetrain Manifesto, the most important marketing chapter of any book I’ve read, as I discussed in #7: What’s in a name?). We would leverage the voice of the customer, starting with customer reviews, all over the Web, starting with retailers. Many of our colleagues at Coremetrics thought we were crazy to leave. Many of my industry friends, serving as VPs of eCommerce at large retailers, thought we were crazy. “You mean we are going to allow negative reviews about the products we carry on our own website, and then get stuck with all of this inventory?!” Believe it or not, there were only three retailers in 2005 that offered customer reviews, the most popular of them being Amazon. But Amazon was just a small fraction of eCommerce at that time, and was dismissed by many retailers (how things have changed since then). No Coremetrics customer even offered customer reviews. But then there was one that launched — just weeks after we left Coremetrics (how lucky)! And we found that customers who read reviews in their online store converted at a 90% higher rate than those that didn’t. Brant, as my skeptical co-founder (a trait that I really valued as his business partner), asked, “But what if this is a biased population?” To which I replied, “We’ve never seen anything in the history of Coremetrics convert like that, even if we halve the results they are extraordinary.” Timing was again on our side. We were the right people at the right moment in history to found Bazaarvoice. And speaking of luck, remember — this was 2005. Facebook was closed to the public. Twitter didn’t exist, nor did Snapchat or Instagram. The iPhone wasn’t out yet (that was 2007). A tsunami of social media was about to hit society and commerce would never be the same. All of this would help fuel our growth to come. We won CompUSA, Golfsmith, and Petco as our early clients and our results with them were extraordinary. We were the hot new movement in the industry and led to better sales results for our customers than any prior eCommerce plug-in we had measured during our Coremetrics’ years (and we had measured them all). Facebook partnered with us and keynoted one of our Client Summits. Google invited us in to do an early integration for product reviews embedded in Google Search, to help launch a new form of advertising. All of the big eCommerce platforms hosted parties with us at the industry tradeshows. We grew very quickly from $0 to over $100m in sales in just six years, culminating in an IPO with a billion-dollar market cap. We were rated the #1 company to work for in Austin when we were small, then medium, then large. It was an entrepreneurial dream come true! And we gave a lot of power to the people — it is hard to imagine shopping without customer reviews these days. And that power is global — Bazaarvoice is in 40 international languages, embedded in businesses all over the world. Yes, we quickly went through that journey of irrelevancy to relevancy to the must-have.
And now here I am working on data.world as my sixth startup, alongside my co-founders Bryon Jacob, Jon Loyens, and Matt Laessig and an incredible team overall. And just the same as the others, data.world started out as irrelevant. Many of my longest time friends, even as successful entrepreneurs, were skeptical about the idea. I don’t fault them for that, or for the people that didn’t believe at the beginning of Coremetrics or Bazaarvoice — this is the natural human condition. Irrelevancy is the default mental mode when you look at a brand-new idea and business, no matter how successful the entrepreneurs behind it were before. Our initial idea at data.world was to be kind of a “GitHub for data”, and early press captured that as we worked hard to become relevant. John Battelle said it best in his Newco article, “As We May Think: Data.world Lays the Traceroutes For A Data Revolution”. With a lot of hard work building functionality and attracting community members, data.world began to grow. We became the world’s largest collaborative data community. Universities started to use us to help teach their data science and analytics courses. Governments began to sign up. Almost two-thirds of the Fortune 500 made their way to data.world and joined to access the world’s largest collaborative public data catalog. We grew as fast as GitHub did during their early years. We became relevant for public data work. And then the big challenge — we needed to commercialize to become relevant for private data work. We read the book Play Bigger and found our category — data catalogs. At an especially memorable Board meeting, we debated and discovered that we had been building a data catalog the entire time. We were actually the world’s largest collaborative public data catalog. Now we needed to become the most relevant and essential private data catalog for the Fortune 500 and other large organizations. And that is where we currently are at in our journey, and our goal is to become an industry must-have. To walk into large companies and see them have the internal dialogue of, “I can’t believe that I don’t already have a data catalog of this power, built on top of a Knowledge Graph, and most of my competitors do already!” We are actively in the struggle from irrelevancy to relevancy to the must-have right now.
We also helped pioneer a new form of incorporation at data.world — that of the Certified B Corporation and Public Benefit Corporation. I’ve written about that on our website, so I’ll keep this short and you can read about why there. That whole movement is on the journey from irrelevancy to relevancy to the must-have. I’ve seen it first hand in conferences with Jay Coen Gilbert, the co-founder and CEO of B Lab, who is pioneering the movement and created the Public Benefit Corporation and Certified B Corporation structure — and measurement. And this was a very telling week on that front with a group of top Fortune 500 CEOs (the Business Roundtable) saying that maximizing shareholder profits can no longer be the primary goal of corporations. As Jay and his co-founders wrote in Fast Company this week, the B Corporation structure is an actual operating system upgrade that will help ensure the Business Roundtable’s actions match their words). I’m proud that in tomorrow’s The New York Times, we’ll be mentioned alongside other pioneering and prominent Certified B Corporations in a full page ad to mark this historic week. You can read the latest on living our B Corporation mission in my letter, Three years in pursuit of a mission that really matters.
As you embark on reading The Entrepreneur’s Essentials, I’ve done my best to help you on your journey from irrelevancy to relevancy to the must-have. You can think of all businesses ever created in this way, no matter how serious or trivial they are. Many never make it beyond the irrelevancy stage. The journey is seriously hard but it is the most psychically rewarding journey you can take when it works. And don’t discount that when it does, luck and a lot of help from others made it work. As I write in #1: The soul of entrepreneurs— you change the world, it is a beautiful struggle and society needs more people like you to take that brave journey. The Entrepreneur’s Essentials is my best attempt to share the most essential advice I’ve ever given, to help you as so many others have helped me.
Yours in the entrepreneurial arena,
Brett A. Hurt
Other formats:
Outside of this print format on Medium, you can also watch me read The Entrepreneur’s Essentials on YouTube or listen on SoundCloud (part one and part two). The only missing parts in these audio/video formats are the Foreword by John Mackey, the Afterword by Bob Campbell, and my Acknowledgments. Also, both the YouTube and SoundCloud formats are embedded at the bottom of each chapter here on Medium.
