Disparate

What I like in blogging is it doesn’t take so much time to write a post, but your blog is never too far. Anything can inspire your next post. An anecdote. An idea. A rant. Then, this little thing evolves into a bigger idea, and you realize that everything is connected. Your life is much more consistent than you think.

I wanted to write a two lines post about a clever answer I got for a super smart guy. The other day I was discussing with this World-class investor and I had a question, a simple but kind of hard to ask — who wants to show its doubts?

Here is the deal, I love to build products that you could use everyday. I truly believe that it’s one of the reasons why I’m on Earth. On purpose or not, I’m a serial entrepreneur. For some reasons being a CEO has always scared me, there is millions of little, unfocused tasks to do every single morning. So I asked him how to manage my time between my passion and everything else. And he got this clever answer: “You have two jobs: don’t run out of money, hire good”. Accountancy? Not your job. Legal? Not your job. Money and team? Your job! What he means is off-course that I’ve have three jobs, the product, the money, and the team. If you’re a designer, design. If you’re a hacker, code. If you’re a sales guy, sell. Plus money. Plus team.

Back to my point, a startup journey is all about the asks. First colleagues, then probably engineers, friends, girlfriend, parents, idols. Are you in the early days of building a product? Please, oh please consider an advisor. It’s exactly what you need, it’s the smartest way to get honest feedback, to redefine your product, and to get answers that will allow you to go to the next level and, I wish you, to access world-class investors. Ask!

He also recommended me to read High Output Management. Apparently it’s the CEO Bible, they all read it, from Dell to Google to names I forgot, sorry dude.

Mobile first. Team first. Product first. User first. Acquisition first. Experience first. Design first. And so on. So, who’s not first? Friends, not first. Family, not first. Sport, not first. Shopping, never first.

The other day I realized that for the last three months I haven’t sleep three nights in a row at home. The other day I had a call around four in the morning, with a lawyer. The other day I was sleeping at Jeremy’s place and we wake up talking UX, first thing in the morning, before our first coffee.

And guess what? I love that, it’s my new life. Work is important. The feeling of working is horrible. I urge you to find a way of being passionated about what you do. Thus, the conclusion is simple, passion second. Yeah, cliché blogposts always come first, after ninjas and sex.

A couple of month ago I made one of the hardest choice of my career, but let’s first approach this another way.

After 10 years of hard working, I finally got what I wanted since I was kid: the legendary and beautiful Porsche 993. Cliché? It wasn’t, there is no other way than fixing goals to achieve things. Some want to be rich, some famous, I just wanted my Porsche.

Off course I was to young to understand that things never come alone, a Porsche is great — I mean, it’s fucking incredible, but it has to fit with everything else, including you. Surprise! It wasn’t a good timing, so I left it together with nearly everything else I built the past 10 years, including my advertising agency and my lovely city.

Last week I came across this article wrote by Saatchi & Saatchi CEO, Mr. Kevin Roberts, including a legendary “Martin Luther King did not say ‘I have a vision statement’ did he?”. Off-course he didn’t, he wasn’t working for Visa.

Here is my point. I don’t believe in brands telling stories, we simply don’t care about these stories. What we need is a friendly relationships with products, these products that understand our behaviors and, at the end, make us spending our money and buying products. Food. Clothes. Whatever.

During the past 10 years I was trying to tell stories for brands that just don’t care about what you do when you leave their bling-bling digital campaigns. I love humans, and that’s exactly why I left everything, I can now spend 24 hours a day building and talking about products that people use, helping them to tell their stories.

Now that I’m here, I would like to thank you Jérôme, my dear good old friend and business partner who understood how important it was for me to reach my goal, and now letting me setting up new goals. Miss you my mate.