Don’t Be Stubborn [clip]
This is a story that people told me stuck with them and helped them rethink a stubborn resistance to change. It’s from my interview with startup investor Brad Feld. To get more ideas from Brad, read his blog and check out the complete interview.
(If you prefer reading, the transcript is below the video.)
What do you think?
The clip
The transcript
(Note: The interview & transcript are lightly edited.)
A company I was an investor in, called “BeMANY,” the entrepreneur, a fellow named George Jankovich, had been a very successful entrepreneur….He was very, very talented, built an interesting business sort of in and around the Internet bubble, but got to the point where the business simply wasn’t working.
He had about a million dollars left, he’d cut the business down to about ten people, and he sort of felt like he could sort of go for about a year and maybe try to make something work. I think he’d raised about $10 million.
My conversation, as the biggest investor, with him is, “Is it worth a year of your life to keep working on this business just to get back to a place where, maybe, if you reinvent yourself, it’ll be successful? Or, is that opportunity cost — a year of your life — worthwhile?”
I actually told him, “Look, turn off your cellphone,” – he had just recently gotten married – “take your new wife out to dinner, go and just be calm and be mellow, and think about that.” He came back the next day and decided it did make sense to spend a year of his life.
We shut the business down gracefully, we sent some money back to the investors including me.
He went on and then basically co-founded or recreated a company called NutriSystems with a partner, which ended up being a spectacular success. If he hadn’t had that year of his life, if he’d spent that year on beMANY, he probably would not have ended up doing what he did with NutriSystems and creating a huge success.
So a lot of times, I think, entrepreneurs get stuck in – and certainly investors get stuck in – the moment of the thing they’re working on versus looking at their life as a continuum and exploring other things.
