Selling a company is easy

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👉 These are the crazy things I learned last week.

1/ After the last "V as in MetaVerse", I did something I hadn't done for more than 10 years: I took a break (tam tam taaaaaaam 😱).

Not because I was tired - the advantage of doing what you love is that you never get tired - but because I am planning my next project and I wanted to clean my "thinking palette".

I traveled a lot, and I had NO idea that many of you are scattered all over the world (I should have guessed!).

That means I met some interesting people - like Athina, that lives in Dubai and she is a subscriber to my newsletter and saw on my social media that I am in Dubai too!) and Konstantinos, that works in Crypto and recognized me from YouTube while I was waiting at the airport to fly to Athens and said hi! 👋

If you see me, please come and say hi. I freaking love it!

Edit: I met Konstantinos literally 10 minutes ago, and I am editing this post on the plane. How funny life is sometimes.

Now I am thinking about my next project, which will take 12 years to complete, and how I should try not to have my life consumed 100% by it.

Fingers crossed, I plan to announce this new project on my birthday (4th of April - yes, if you read this, I expect a gift! 🎁) and hope I have figured out all the details by then.

Have you ever decided to start a project that will take SO much time? I would love to hear your thoughts. 💭

2/ People keep asking me how I build and sell companies THAT fast. And it is actually pretty easy.

There are the three (yes, three) steps you need.

1. Big market
2. Network
3. Fail fast

Let me elaborate.

1️⃣ -- Big Market --

I am a big fan of companies that try managing demand instead of creating demand. This is a characteristic of a booming space that is on the rise, and you have to move FAST. 🚀

In these markets, customers are knocking on your door, wanting to pay for your services, and VCs want to fund your company. If everything goes as planned, you'll have an exit in a couple of years.

A great example is the NFT space, but NOT the ChatGPT/A.I. space (I'll tell you more in another post).

If you are not in a big market, you can build a cool company but expect pain.

2️⃣ -– Network --

The network is important, more important than the idea or even the quality of the product. I know; it sucks. 🤐

A great example is the amazing entrepreneur LevelsIO.

This guy nails the Big Market requirement but sometimes is handicapped by not having a big network in that space. For example, how many NFTs of his book LevelsIO sold (he did a drop a couple of years ago to experiment with the space):

Zero.

If you follow LevelsIO, this number seems unimaginable as his products make thousands of dollars per month, but if he had a bigger and more active network, I am sure he would have 30x his returns.

3️⃣ –- Fail fast --

If you are not new here, you'll know I love building things that fail.

I've met many super-smart entrepreneurs who build products that no one wants. And they build these products for months or even years. Or even worse, products with some traction but in a zombie state - never managing to bring significant revenue. 😕

Kill your ego, kill your Startup, and move on. The world is full of interesting problems, and you are wasting your talent.

Do you have any similar experiences❓

3/ Nothing, Forever is a non-stop stream of "Seinfeld", generated by A.I. and is hilarious - as hilarious as an A.I. can be.

Netflix also experimented with using A.I. in a 3-minute animated movie, but the audience response was catastrophic for many reasons.

It seems that it might take some time until we start enjoying A.I. generated movies. 👀

4/ California DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) is planning to digitize the car title management system via NFTs.

The motivation is to "modernize" their current systems and bring greater transparency to car title transfers. Imagine searching in the blockchain to find all the previous owners of the car 🚗 you are about to buy. How cool is that?

They have already built a prototype in Tezos, but I don't think they are yet close to a working production system.

5/ Have you ever felt that you lose too much time in pointless recurring meetings and have no way out?

Let me introduce you to "Chaos Monkey". 🙊

This term is well-known in software engineering.

It's a practice of intentionally breaking parts of a system to test its overall resilience.

For instance, Netflix has created a program that randomly turns off its production servers. The idea is to expose the company's engineers to failure more often, encouraging them to build more robust systems.

Recently, Shopify (the e-commerce giant) applied the same principle to free their employees from these meetings to increase productivity.

Here is how they did it (and you can do it yourself)

1. Cancel all recurring meetings with more than 2 people
2. Encourage staff to decline invitations
3. Detach from big internal groups

This "calendar purge" freed over 76.500 hours across the employees.

Of course, this approach has some risks for employees to lose track of critical meetings. Still, as Kaz Nejatian (COO of Shopify explained), "we can either go slow and deliberate or go fast and chaotic. We are going fast and chaotic.", showing the culture of the company to be able to adjust fast to change and recover from any "monkeys".

What are your thoughts on this? Would you consider trying "chaos monkey" in your organization? 🤔

That's all for now. See you next week! 🚀

-- Jon V (as in Victory)

- Fri 03 February 2023