Thomas Prescott: Technology Benefits from Operations

The second thing is I'm a failed entrepreneur. The only company I ever started up failed. And remember, they always fire the sales and marketing guy first. That was me. So we did a company back in 1985, 86, for early optical disk storage and applications on a factory floor. I had come out of factory automation and it was a great idea until we had one customer doing a pilot project. They were called gm. And if you ever do your history, that was the end of Roger Smith. So GM got a cold, all their suppliers got pneumonia or died. Yes, the answer is yes, we died. We didn't go. So as I look out at potential entrepreneurs and tip my hat to entrepreneurs, many of them failed in many things. And so I don't know whether you read Thomas Edison or somebody else, whether it's experiments or anything else, there's more failure than there is success. But failure is an outcome and you learn a lot from it. So with that kind of full disclosure, about me personally, I've had the pleasure of coming in and working with, coming in behind and working alongside multiple founders, and in most every case have had enduring great relationships with founders. And Steve and I were talking briefly and what's the difference between an operating hack like me and a true entrepreneur? And the answer is a few things. One, it's life experience and skills. And then two, it's. I would probably, I might pursue a big bet as an operating type and I would have plans and a rationale for doing that, but I'm not as likely to go after a wild, crazy idea that's totally disruptive. And so once somebody does that, maybe they can't scale that business or it's not growing fast enough, or there's some other problems. And somebody like me can be a good compliment to that. It's not often that a great entrepreneur can be a great operating person. There are exceptions. But I have the greatest admiration for the true entrepreneurs that have figured out a way to create something truly disruptive. The challenge is how many of those companies that create this new thing, this new segment, whether it's in social media, how many of the early movers there really got to gain that? Facebook certainly won. But in looking any new space where somebody has come out with a disruptive new idea or new technology, how many of those early movers really get a chance to capture most of the profit from that new space? So how many have iPhones or, or let's call it a fancy MP3? How many had MP3 players before you had your iPhone or itunes or anything like that? What happened to all those guys. So, see, Apple thought of something completely better, bigger, more complete. We never knew we needed that until they did. We never knew we needed the iPhone and all the apps ecosystem before we did that. But the original players in many spaces don't get to capture all of the profit. And so young companies that go through startups have great opportunities to go not only innovate, but then you got a race to try and continue that innovation cycle and start to scale your business so you have a chance of actually creating business success.