Luke Ollett, co-founder of Shiva Media and blogger at Our Thursday
I was fortunate enough to track down Luke Ollett, co-founder of Shiva Media, a mobile application firm which releases upwards of 30,000 apps each month. He is also a blogger at and founder of Our Thursday. He’s a location independent entrepreneur who I met in London, but is now living in Santiago, Chile.
A few excerpts:
On jumping into entrepreneurship:
About four years ago, I was in middle of a very good and very cushy job at IBM, where I was a consultant for IBM for about three years. After two years at IBM, I was making loads of money. I was traveling a lot. I had all the toys I wanted. At one point, I was thinking, “I could buy a house right now.” Or at least go severely in debt to have a house, but manage the mortgages. Get a car, find my wife and settle down.
At that point I realized, “Wow, I’m 23 years old and that is the last thing I should be thinking of.” I decided, “Now is the time to really, really fuck up.”
On who he looks to for investments:
The answer is: anybody and everybody. We begin with a sound and a strong business plan ‑ more importantly, sound and strong numbers. If the numbers makes sense, and you can logically start from the beginning to the end and with numbers throughout that process. And then, ultimately, show a table to somebody who has no clue about mobile applications, but now after reading an eight page PowerPoint, they suddenly think, “Wow, this seems like there might be some potential,” we are able to get ourselves at least in front of investors. Whether they’re going to invest, becomes another matter.
And it becomes almost a sales pitch, because there’s a typical sort of investor who, their rule of thumb, “I will never be the first.” And, we found quite a number of people that will never be the first. So I don’t whose starting in…
You run into a good option with family members, because everybody has always got the rich relative overseas or something. Sometimes it’s better to propose to multiple family members, and you can say, “The four of you invest ten grand.” But, through the way our CFO is able to make the numbers look, that, they each have invested maybe more.
So there are ways to make it nicer to investors, and really, ultimately, they’re investing to make their money back. How do you show them that? Simply numbers. Show them what you’ve done in the past. And you show them, “Here’s our forecast, and here’s what we expect you to make in x, y and z time periods.”
On the most important aspect of entrepreneurship:
As an entrepreneur, I cannot stress enough the importance of networking. There’s no reason you should not have your hands in any sort of pot, pan and cup of wine that you can find to try and spread your name, your business, your reputation, your word, because it will pay off dividends in the end.
On getting out of your comfort zone:
And for any entrepreneur, it’s always, “How do I do something novel? How do I put myself out of the box?” And sometimes it’s as easy as just doing what you do with your friends but don’t invite your friends, because you’ve already got the connections with them.
Recommended Books: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Recommended Blogs: TechCrunch & Lifehacker
Want more Luke?
Twitter: twitter.com/l0c0luke
Blog: ourthursday.com
Company: shivamediagroup.com
Radio: roachclipradio.com
Full Interview Audio:
Interview with Ollett of Shiva Media – Lifestyle-Y
Full Interview Transcript (click below):
Lifestyle-Y: This is Brian Smith with LifestyleY.com. I am on Skype right now with Luke Ollett, who is in Santiago, Chile, right now. He is the co‑founder and Chief Technology Officer of Shiva Media, which can be found at ShivaMedia.com. He also started up the blog OurThursday.com. Luke, how are you doing today?
Luke Ollett: Doing very good, Brian. Thank you for having me.
LS-Y: Yeah, absolutely. Just to give the listeners a little background, you and I actually met in London, where you had been living for seven months, pursuing the location independent lifestyle, as I was at the time. You were there for seven months, and now you’ve been in Santiago for six. Am I correct?
Luke: That is correct.
LS-Y: Alright, how do you like it down there?
Luke: It’s a hell of a lot better than England, I’ve found, although maybe colder.
LS-Y: It might be colder in Santiago?
Luke: What they haven’t learned here is how to build insulation into their buildings. So, as we speak right now, I actually have three sweaters on, jeans, and a small blanket over my feet.
LS-Y: Wow, well I guess it is spring there?
Luke: It is just finishing up winter. The mountainsides around us, which peak at almost 5,000 meters around here, are capped with some lovely snow if you can see them through the smog, which Santiago is quite famous for.
LS-Y: Yikes. Well, I’m sweating to death up here in Denver, but I’ll be covered in snow before you know it. Alright, let’s get into what the meat of this is about. You’re an entrepreneur. I know when we met seven… I guess it’s been longer than that now. It’s been, what…?
Luke: Almost a year?
LS-Y: Almost a year, yes, since we saw each other in London. We were both pursuing our own businesses. You’re definitely an entrepreneur. Can you explain to us what Shiva Media does, and how you got into the business?
Luke: Shiva Media is a brainchild of one of my partners named Julian Bassan, who basically wants to bring information and pleasure to the lives of many. His initial venture into that effort was to build snow information guides. So, for all the local mountains in California, and including many snow resorts in the United States, he wanted to build a lifestyle specific magazine for all of these that was focused to the mobile market ‑‑ iPhones, Androids. So he called upon me to help him build the system that would create this. At that time, I wasn’t part of Shiva Media. However, throughout the process of building this system, we realized that our efforts combined could be very powerful. We decided to join forces and take both our entrepreneurial dreams and make them into one grandiose dream. And thus, Shiva Media was created.
Now, Shiva Media releases upwards of 30,000 apps per month across all the applications that we create using our unique system that we have that allows us to deploy mobile applications for a variety of verticals, from campaigns, to conference centers, to yoga centers, to a snow resort, and hopefully to many, many more as the business plan proceeds, as it is right now.
LS-Y: So you’re one of the reasons that Apple can claim that they’ve got such an ungodly number of apps in their app store.
Luke: That is very true, and I am definitely the reason why they take up to two weeks for them to approve our apps.
LS-Y: You’re not referring to the quality of the apps, I hope.
Luke: No, no, no. They have no problem. They think our quality is top notch. They commend us on our quality.
LS-Y: What was the first business that you started? What kind of got you into entrepreneurship? Is Shiva Media the first thing that you’ve done? Is Shiva Media sort of a long time coming in the long‑term entrepreneurial dream?
Luke: It is. It is the culmination of… Now, I’m at the end of about four years of deciding. About four years ago, I was in middle of a very good and very cushy job at IBM, where I was a consultant for IBM for about three years. After two years at IBM, I was making loads of money. I was traveling a lot. I had all the toys I wanted. At one point, I was thinking, “I could buy a house right now.” Or at least go severely in debt to have a house, but manage the mortgages. Get a car, find my wife and settle down.
At that point I realized, “Wow, I’m 23 years old and that is the last thing I should be thinking of.” I decided, “Now is the time to really, really fuck up.” Can I say that?
LS-Y: [laughs] You can say whatever you want.
Luke: It’s time to mess up, so I decided, “Now is the time to go for a risk.” So I decided, actually while I was working with my voice over IP company that I started, which is an offshoot of what my dad was doing. He knows voice over IP top to bottom, and I saw that it appeared to be extremely easy to make money. For about eight months, it was extremely easy to make money. However, due to me working a full time job at IBM with travel included, as well as maintaining about half a dozen clients with the side business, I almost had an emotional breakdown and decided, “Now is not the time.”
But, however, that was the seed planted. I decided to quit my job at IBM, and pursue my entrepreneurial dream further with a full body and soul commitment. And thus Varuno, the technical services company came out where I offered my brain knowledge of computers and computer nerddom that I learned at the University of California Irvine to build websites to set up change management processes in your company, to set up a SugarCRM to manage your contacts.
I really whored myself out to anybody I could find who needed some sort of technical nerd in their life. In that process, I found Julian while I was in England. That’s when Shiva Media began.
LS-Y: And so once you started up Shiva Media, from the time of conceiving the idea to… How long did it take from the idea’s conception to the opening of the business, to the time that you made your first sale?
Luke: The business with Shiva Media was slightly more complicated than my previous business, because my previous business was a partnership in the United States and a limited liability company in England. In the United States, it is extremely easy to set up a partnership. I suggest anybody Google it and you can get it done in less than a week. In England, it’s slightly more complicated, as there are tax ID numbers required, and you do need to show that you actually are an English citizen, which I happen to be. And the processes there are a little more, let’s just say, in‑depth, and a lot more paper involved, with many more people involved. However, it can be done. It took me about a month to get my business set up in England.
With Shiva, it’s been a lot more complicated. Mainly because we’re dealing with stocks and splitting up the company and making sure that we are a corporation. That, we are thinking in the long term, and the original partners are going to be taken care of, as well as incentivizing our investors, that, they still enough, as well as paying people on delivery.
When it comes to things like creating a business plan, we offer somebody with stocks possibly to pay. Or, to create some over applications, we can incentivize with stocks. So it’s been a lot more complicated and a lot longer of a learning process, with many hours spent on lawyers and people that are supposed to be smarter than us.
LS-Y: [laughs] Yeah, attorneys can really rack up bills and put you in debt long before you ever start your business.
Luke: Yeah. I mean, LegalZoom is a great option. And I think many of us would know that LegalZoom is good, and you get started. But we found that with this LegalZoom in this sort of complicated matter ‑ what we felt was complicated ‑ wasn’t what we needed, and we wanted to be able to have somebody to talk to. So we were ready to pay a bit more.
LS-Y: So you mentioned investors. How is your business structured with investors just generally, and where did you find your investors? Are these friends and family, or did you go out and actually find angel investors? What type of investors are these?
Luke: The answer is: anybody and everybody. We begin with a sound and a strong business plan ‑ more importantly, sound and strong numbers. If the numbers makes sense, and you can logically start from the beginning to the end and with numbers throughout that process. And then, ultimately, show a table to somebody who has no clue about mobile applications, but now after reading an eight page PowerPoint, they suddenly think, “Wow, this seems like there might be some potential,” we are able to get ourselves at least in front of investors. Whether they’re going to invest, becomes another matter.
And it becomes almost a sales pitch, because there’s a typical sort of investor who, their rule of thumb, “I will never be the first.” And, we found quite a number of people that will never be the first. So I don’t whose starting in…
You run into a good option with family members, because everybody has always got the rich relative overseas or something. Sometimes it’s better to propose to multiple family members, and you can say, “The four of you invest ten grand.” But, through the way our CFO is able to make the numbers look, that, they each have invested maybe more.
So there are ways to make it nicer to investors, and really, ultimately, they’re investing to make their money back. How do you show them that? Simply numbers. Show them what you’ve done in the past. And you show them, “Here’s our forecast, and here’s what we expect you to make in x, y and z time periods.”
LS-Y: You know I come out of the financial world. It’s a lot of just showing people what they want to see as far as numbers go.
Luke: It really is. And especially when you’re talking with a old guy, who has no idea that an Android app can do this, and people really are loving the fact that I can upload a picture into my Twitter account ‑ and then you have explain what’s Twitter. And, to them, it becomes these boring bar graphs. But a boring bar graph can convince somebody with a 40K check in his hand.
LS-Y: So is it friends and family that you go to initially, or did you just put it out there through various other avenues?
Luke: We found a guy who specializes in helping startups. Any small companies that have a good idea, they can go to him and say, “Hey, we’re looking for help.” And in our initial request for help, we found that we were having trouble completing the business plan, having not really ever done a full blown business by ourselves. So, we looked for somebody to do it. And we found somebody who was willing to do it for a stock option. And him, coming from his industry helping startups, had a rolodex of contacts. What you’ll find is they are going to ask for financing fees and finance percentages. And the sheer fact they gave you an email, and you called that guy, and you get an investor, they’re going to try to claim a part of that investment.
And ultimately, if everybody is happy, I’m happy. So it’s not a problem. There are angel networks. But we found really just through our initial guy that was helping us with the business plan, we had found our contacts that are basically being our investors.
LS-Y: So you enlisted outside help and got someone who’s a specialist in raising money for this. And so, you’re able to really focus on what you guys know, which is the building of mobile applications, and let this individual go out there and raise the funds for you.
Luke: Yeah. Brian, what I learned when I was in my previous company, which was called Veruno, was that you need to wear many hats as an entrepreneur ‑ many, many hats. And when it comes down to building a technology platform and then selling that platform and then finding investors, you could spent two years doing that yourself. Or, what else to do? You got to find help. And I mean, you could say we were forced in that position, but we were happily walking in that direction. The trick we found is that: you need to find people that are good, that believe in what you’re doing. And, if they believe in what you’re doing, you can pay on delivery.
So to help the startups that don’t have a lot of money initially, and you don’t have these investors, or you need to spend money to get these investors, or I need to spend money to get this guy to develop our business plan, and the CFO to develop our numbers.
First of all, you need to have the product that everybody can believe in. And if they believe in it, and they’re willing to work on delivery, meaning they’ll get paid when everybody gets paid, then everybody is better off in the end.
LS-Y: So they’re really invested in the success of the business. They’re not just merely providing a service and running.
Luke: Exactly.
LS-Y: That’s a great way to look at it. But those people, I would imagine, are tough to find?
Luke: Yeah, not easy. And really, it comes down to networking. We had an adviser who’s really just a contact, who, in his life of many, many years, has experience. And, we called upon him just to sit down, have coffee and just chat. And through him, we were introduced to one guy, who then ‑ it sort of snowballed. As an entrepreneur, I cannot stress enough the importance of networking. There’s no reason you should not have your hands in any sort of pot, pan and cup of wine that you can find to try and spread your name, your business, your reputation, your word, because it will pay off dividends in the end.
LS-Y: And I’m assuming that you mean both face‑to‑face, going to network events, meeting people over the Internet, and then, ultimately, if you connect to someone on a blog, much like you and I did. You and I were actually put in touch through a mutual friend, but we connected through our blogs. The ultimate goal is to meet face‑to‑face, but use the Internet to your advantage, correct?
Luke: Yeah. And for people like us in our generation, Generation Y, the Internet is so much easier, and we don’t have any problem to stare at a screen, but I feel like I can talk to you face‑to‑face. But as far as finding how you can network yourself, there are numerous ways. In England, there is a small business program there that is fantastic (http://www.businesslink.gov.uk). They will come to your house free of charge, give you a list of meetings that you can go to, and you literary go down that list and sign up for each one. You may have to pay for some of them, as many of these networking groups do. But many are free.
But also, it could be as easy as going on Craigslist and having a dinner. For myself, who likes to put myself in unknown places on earth, many times I don’t really have a friend network to call upon to find a friend of a friend.
So you have to do things a bit ‑ something just out there. So if you want to invite three couples to dinner and just see what happens, you cook something cheap and easy, few bottles of wine, and you never know what can come from that. If nothing, great, you made friends. If you make some business out of it, then you made friends and you’re making money.
LS-Y: Well, that is a novel approach to kind of developing a network when you go into a new location. And I think a lot of us… I live here in Denver, and that’s something that I should be doing more often. Do you find that it’s easier to do that kind of thing when putting yourself in a new location living a location independent lifestyle? Or would you do the same things if you were back in California?
Luke: I find it becomes a mental block when you’re somewhere for your whole life. You sort of neglect some of the beautiful and great things that you have around you. The Chileans here have no idea how beautiful their country is, and how great it is to travel one hour and see the beach, when all they can do is complain how cold it is and how bad the air quality is. I’m not saying anything of that. In fact, my experience in Colorado was absolutely amazing. I thought that the place was absolutely beautiful. But because you’ve been there forever, you don’t think to do something random and put yourself in the shoes of an expatriate that just came from Israel, who has no friends, but in his effort to do it, he tries something novel.
And for any entrepreneur, it’s always, “How do I do something novel? How do I put myself out of the box?” And sometimes it’s as easy as just doing what you do with your friends but don’t invite your friends, because you’ve already got the connections with them.
And your goal is for networking… It does become as easy hosting a dinner. Do a mystery dinner. I did this one recently. It worked out great ‑ where you just invite three mystery couples. And you call it a mystery dinner, because it brings in a sense allure and mystery, however you want to define it. And then, say, the food, you don’t know what you’re going to get for food. You don’t know the people that are going to be there. And it’s a great night.
Or you can host think tanks. I found is even better, because you don’t have to buy the food and cook it. You just invite people over and just have a structured discussion. You’ll be surprised how many people would love to do that.
How many people have found themselves two years into their very good but maybe sort mundane corporate job that I found myself in. And, I would have loved and jumped on the opportunity to take the bus, metro, ride the bike to a random person’s house and talk about whatever the theme might be for that week. Of course, my theme would be mobile applications. That’s the first one I’m doing next week. But that’s, you know, to be said.
LS-Y: Well, you’re actually inspiring me here, sitting in Denver, which is a really comfort zone for me. But to get out there and do something like that, I mean I can only imagine the dividends that stepping outside your comfortable zone in that manner could really pay. I’m sure that some of those events end up being flops. But if one out ten provides you with somebody that you can develop a business with or becomes a great customer, it’s entirely worth it. I mean, it’s just a fantastic insight.
Luke: Yeah. And if anybody who’s listening to this would like some templates for some of these to develop some of these mystery dinners, sort of exchange evenings, where its speed dating ‑ but you’re not dating, you’re talking about structured subjects ‑ I have all these materials. So, please, I invite anybody to contact me.
LS-Y: That material I’ll be getting from you as well. [laughter] So in your experience with starting businesses ‑‑ I mean, you obviously had quite a bit of experience for someone your age ‑‑ what would you say is, particularly for somebody starting out for the first time, what’s the biggest time suck? What’s something that somebody can spend hours, days, months or even years on and receive little or no dividends from?
Luke: Well, I guess there could many. But personally I found I was getting hung up on defining processes and the structures around them. I came from IBM as a change management consultant. I would go into a company and say, “Your process is wrong. You don’t need this guy. Let’s redo this.” So when I wanted to start my company, I was too busy saying, “OK, I need this invoice system that’s going deliver something to here that’s going email me at this time.” And all these systems are absolutely fantastic, and there are online solutions to portions of the end product.
But ultimately, when you’re just starting up, you need to sell. Whatever you’ve decided on selling… And I hope when you go into this, you have the idea and the motivation and the direction that you’re going.
Because if you don’t have that, that is my answer. That will be your time suck. If you don’t know exactly what you want to do, then you’re going to spend all your time tweaking this idea as you talk to one person who gives you an idea, or you talk to one potential client, who asks for something slightly different, so you modify what you’re selling. That will suck your time.
If you got your idea defined and you’re still wasting time creating a CRM system when you only have one client, it’s not worth it. You’re better off getting the clients first and then working about the structure of the internal processes of your business.
LS-Y: Yeah, that’s a fantastic point. I mean, I meet with fellow entrepreneurs here in Denver all the time, and I’m amazed by the people that just anticipate the wild success of their business. And, CRM is a great example. They spend months perfecting their CRM system before they even get one customer. You know, the processes ‑ and you speak of it much as I would expect an engineer to speak of processes. I think it’s something that can very, very quickly waste a lot of time. But I think at least a quick thought to it and writing a few notes to yourself is enough to suffice to get yourself really kick‑started. Would you agree?
Luke: I would agree. And don’t think you are doing wrong if you got Post-It notes on your desk or you have a messy desk. I do encourage organization in the grand scheme of things but you need to make sure you are moving in a direction. And if that direction when you are first starting out is basically make sure you are earning that paycheck. Because you’ll find that is the most important thing. After a few months of not receiving one you will be wishing you had not spent so much time on your CRM system.
LS-Y: Yeah. Time is money and all of those online apps typically start to cost you money at some point as well. So the 30 days on a 37Signals app runs out pretty quick.
Luke: Yeah.
LS-Y: So on the flip side what have you found in starting up businesses, what is the best invested time? What is something that, if somebody is going to put their efforts towards one thing and one thing only, what is the absolute, “must do” thing? You had mentioned figuring out what it is that you are going to sell. So let’s assume that somebody has come up with the idea. What is the one absolute must do if nothing else?
Luke: Well, as you say, coming up with the idea is very important. If you haven’t done it, make sure to write it down. A business plan is terribly important. It will always change and you just have to accept that. But just make sure the vision and the goal is clear. Beyond that, as I briefly mentioned that I couldn’t stress more, just spend a day, spend two days, whether it is on the phones or doing a network meeting. Somehow get yourself in front of people because you can spend all the money you want on Google Ads, you can do all the “SEO work” you want, but in the end it doesn’t translate as well as you talking to somebody in the grocery store, in a retirement home, and wherever you end up finding yourself to do the business that you want to do.
Of course, per your industry, it will always be different. If it is door to door, great, do the door to door. If it is on the phones, great. If you are in an online world – for myself, all my projects are technical projects, it doesn’t matter. Your clients end up being people that don’t live in the technical world. You need to find them outside in their world. And you need to be flexible.
As an entrepreneur you need to be ready to invade any world that is willing and ready to take your business. So that is all the time. If you have five days of work in a week to do one thing, take two days out of that and go out and pass cards around. Wait in the mall. It can be stupid or seem tedious like that, but it will help you.
LS-Y: Yeah, and that’s something we can all find excuses why not to do that. My product is too specific, my product doesn’t apply to the average person in the mall, my product is yada, yada. But you are right. You never know. If you stand in the middle of the mall and hand out cards to everybody, one of the people that might pick it up might be the CEO or the wife of a CEO of a company that would be your number one customer.
I think it is too easy, particularly for people who have, like you had mentioned, they’re used to doing Google, or Google AdWords or they Twitter or they blog, just getting out there and taking that leap to jump in front of people is, it’s scary, but it can pay dividends beyond your wildest dreams.
Luke: And it is a good word you used there: leap. I like that one because right now our generation is creating this very solid foundation base to do something quite easily. It is very easy to go on my Facebook right now and post and I have got 700 friends and they are all going to see something on there. It is quite easy for me to automate that and my Twitter account using ping.fm. These are all really cool things you can do. However, you need to make that leap to other worlds, other ways, out of the things that you haven’t thought about that, I haven’t thought about that, Brian hasn’t thought about that. All us entrepreneurs, I think you need to get yourself that competitive advantage. And there is no better way than you being face to face with somebody and selling your product, because it becomes extremely difficult to close a window when that window is actually a person in front of your face.
LS-Y: And that leads me almost ironically to my next question which is what technological tools have helped you the most? I am told that you have been living a location independent lifestyle. You have been on two different continents living alone in the last 12 months. So as far as I would say from a business perspective in general and then also from a location independent perspective, what are the most beneficial technological tools that you use?
Luke: Well, number one, Skype. Starting my entrepreneurial career with Voice Over IP, I initially hated Skype. I detested Skype because it was obviously my competition. But I found being in South America, Europe, and North America, the one common tool that works well, I am not going to say perfectly, but well in all of them has been Skype. In any business transaction, communication is of the utmost importance. And I find with Skype it is easier. My efforts of making sure that all my clients can get a hold of me whether it be a support request which Skype tends to breakdown on, or just my family trying to get a hold of me, there are more pieces to the puzzle whether you use Google Voice or a bespoke Voice Over IP system, there are ways around that.
But ultimately Skype as we are using right now is going to link wherever you are in the world to the business that you can find wherever it may be in the world.
LS-Y: So for somebody that may be firmly planted in North America dealing with North American clients, what would you recommend as far as something that is absolutely necessary from your perspective, to run a successful business?
Luke: Well, in one night’s effort you can promote yourself as well as any of these SEO optimization companies can, using a site called ping.fm. Go to ping.fm, sign up for every one of those networks that it says it talks to, and put your company and make a standardized company profile on every one of those and make sure you use ping.fm to do all your external communication to the world. It seems like you are doing all these wasted work, but for one night’s worth of effort, you can present yourself online with a reputation far more than most people ever do. How many people do you know who have done Twitter, who have done Facebook, who have done MySpace and maybe even went to the extent to have a blog about it. OK. That’s pretty cool. But if you’re also on 30 other networks, Google’s indexing, Yahoo!’s indexing will consider you far greater and your efforts in the advertising world online ‑‑ I know I talked down on it earlier ‑‑ but it’s an easy thing to do in one night and ping.fm is your answer.
LS-Y: Excellent. That’s also a great site that I’ve personally underutilized and not given credit to, but with your recommendation there, I will be jumping on that and going after Ping.fm, as well. Although you did mention MySpace. Isn’t that just for bands now?
Luke: It seems to be. It is. I would definitely agree. One of my blogs that one of my writers has written is about closing his MySpace account and how obfuscated MySpace makes that process because MySpace is realizing so many people are trying to close it. And, on my blog, it’s a popular way to find my blog on “How to close your MySpace account.”
LS-Y: Well, sometimes those “how to” posts are the most read posts on your blog. But yours just happens to be how to kill your MySpace page.
Luke: It’s funny how that works out. I would like to mention, Brian ‑‑ let me interrupt you ‑‑ you told me about a site, SocialOomph.com, which is a fantastic site, as well. You can link that with Ping.fm and then the power gets a little out of control. I suggest all of our listeners try that out.
LS-Y: I’ve actually moved from using SocialOomph to using HootSuite quite a bit, because that automates posts to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. But I’m going to have to get back into Ping.fm and see what I’ve been missing.
Luke: I haven’t heard of HootSuite, but I’m glad we’re bouncing ideas off as we do this great interview.
LS-Y: Absolutely. Let’s move on to a couple other questions. A lot of the people that read my blog are actually still in college. What aspects of your education have really helped you the most as an entrepreneur? What would you tell someone in college to really focus on, whether it’s a particular subject, or an activity, or just some idea about collegiate education in general?
Luke: I went to a university called the University of California Irvine, and the UC system, which includes Berkeley and UCLA ‑‑ infamous for never doing anything practical. They only teach the theory. I think in their logo or somewhere that is easily found, it says, “We are all about the theory.” I hated that while I was in school. I absolutely detested the fact that everybody I talked to was building all these cool PHP applications while I’m sitting here learning some ancient programming language, about how the first guy who came up with artificial intelligence could write a chess program.
But, having said that, when I graduated I went into IBM, I was using a programming language I had never used before. However, I felt my university education prepared me for a situation that I wasn’t trained whatsoever about. But, you can think with a clear mind, and you can think with an open mind and prepare yourself to adapt because again, being an entrepreneur, you’re going to feel that there’s a million different situations, technologies, concepts, terms thrown your way and you can’t say, “Oh, no, no. I don’t know that.”
You can never say that. You need to be prepared to learn. So I suggest, while you’re in school, you avoid just doing what you’re told, or at least ‑‑ I hate to say it ‑‑ but you’ve just got to understand the grand concept, because ultimately when you go to a job and somebody asks you to do something and you’ve never even heard of this thing before, you can’t use the excuse that you’ve never done this.
The people I’ve hired recently, I’ve found that it is really, really hard to find somebody who can take some vague instructions and do well with them. Unfortunately, I’ve learned, I need to detail these instructions really, really well. Unfortunately, that is probably because they came from an education where they just followed the one, two, three bullet points and weren’t thinking about the grand concept of what they were learning.
LS-Y: That’s an experience I’ve found myself in the midst of recently, as well. It’s got to be one of the most frustrating aspects, particularly when you’re dealing with some of your first hires, realizing that not everybody is quite as motivated as you may be.
Luke: Yeah, and it’s a very good point in general, as advice. You do, I suppose, need to understand that you’re working a 14 hour day. When you hire somebody for $10 an hour, an intern out of college, can you expect them to have the passion that you have? No. However, there are ways for you to understand they’re not going to have that passion and cut them off at the pass, if you will, to help them. So, having said that, maybe you do encounter that guy who’s great, and hopefully you do, and hopefully everything works out great with them. However, unfortunately, it’s not the case most of the time, and the solution for me has been overly instructive instructions.
LS-Y: Putting that effort in on the front end is somewhat counterintuitive. You expect to hire people to reduce the amount of workload, but you’ve got to put a lot of work into hiring those people in the first place.
Luke: And then you get into the science and math of, OK, so if that’s the case, why don’t I just initially pay $25 an hour instead and hopefully that line of a graph is a lot less inclined.
LS-Y: It’s always trial and error and tweaking the model. It’s never easy as an entrepreneur. It would be nice if someone would just walk us through this stuff, right?
Luke: Yeah. I think I read a book, “The Four Hour Work Week.” It told me how to do that. Fuck that book.
LS-Y: [laughs] But now you’re working, what? 14 hour days instead of four hour weeks?
Luke: Yeah, thanks. I read that book right when I quit my job, and it gave me this sort of false sense of hope and aspirations. My entrepreneurial spirit was going to pay off in weeks, and really I would suggest to any entrepreneur, unless you have a completely new science in your hand, likely it’s going to take months, even years.
LS-Y: However, it’s, as one of the blog posts I most recently put up on my blog… Tim Ferriss does serve a purpose. He inspired you to take the leap.
Luke: That’s a good point. That’s a good point. Tim Ferriss, thank you for that one. I wish you were a bit more clear about your $80,000 a month you made while you were working four hours a week, but that’s OK.
LS-Y: That’s a great point. We’ve all faced frustrations with that. That actually leads quite well into my next question, which is how has your perception of entrepreneurship changed from the time you first started your journey as an entrepreneur until today?
Luke: I suppose I just said my answer, in that the time frames are always much longer. I learned that quickly at IBM, that as a consultant, everybody’s always asking, “How long is that going to take? How long is this going to take?” The rule of thumb is always double it and some. It’s true, if not longer. Especially when you have an idea that you believe to be really good. You will learn in the process of developing that idea that that process of developing it is actually an immense, immense project. So although the passion remains, you do need to not be discouraged when you realize, “Man, I thought I was going to make $50,000 in a month,” when it’s maybe going to take you two years to do that.
LS-Y: To make your first $50,000, not $50,000 a month.
The rule of thumb that I was told, actually by my father, when I was starting out on my adventure as an entrepreneur was it takes five times as long and costs five times as much money to get the result that you’re expecting.
Luke: Does he have a military background?
LS-Y: Yes, he does.
Luke: I’ll bet.
LS-Y: I guess lastly, let’s just touch on your goals. How have your goals changed between when you started and now? Have you become more realistic? Less idealistic? More idealistic in what your ultimate goal is as an entrepreneur?
Luke: I will go back to Tim Ferriss again here and thank him for whether he was the innovator of this idea. The automated lifestyle has always been my goal. I am seeking a lifestyle to make X amount of money per month that I have determined is sufficient for me to live basically anywhere I want in the world, have a family, have comfort, have security, have health, have a bicycle because I’m a severely competitive cyclist, and make money at the same time. So, that has always been my goal and my drive and my determination. I have become more serious, is really the way it goes. When you start, you are very serious. I’m not discounting that. However, after time and after putting loads and loads of effort into something, you do realize, “This is not my dream anymore. This is not this great idea that I had anymore. This is now something I’ve built. It’s my baby.”
You can touch it. You can feel it. And at that point, you’ve become a lot more attached to this thing. I don’t know if I can ever leave that, and maybe it’s not what I anticipated it to be, so close and attached to my entrepreneurial dream.
I know it seems abstract to say that. However, it’s true. It really is.
LS-Y: You also, in terms of seriousness, it starts to deplete your savings, and you realize that the business that you started is the way that you eat every day. You become much more serious much quicker.
Luke: Yeah, it’s a great point. You hit another point I would like to mention, is that I worked at IBM for three years. After two years, I’d saved nothing, and although I’d still consider my life perfect and I could do anything I wanted, but at that point I decided, “OK, I’m going to start saving,” for the explicit purpose of starting a lifestyle where you may not see money coming in on a regular basis. Two weeks, one month. It wasn’t regular. It still isn’t regular. So, any entrepreneur should be prepared, and I would suggest savings are a very, very, important thing.
LS-Y: Absolutely. In my opinion, it shouldn’t be something that necessarily holds you back, but it’s also something that you can’t do too much of at the beginning. Saving will make your life much, much less stressful as you go forward.
Luke: That’s very true. I find that the one inhibitor of my ultimate success that I find is the fact that I can’t spend $30,000 tomorrow to hire seven developers and start working on all these ideas that I have in my head that I want to do that I know everybody would love. It’s just not the way it works. So, of course, my goal is to have the capacity to spend $30k in a day and see what happens. But, a lot of work to get there, of course.
LS-Y: I think anybody that’s going into any sort of entrepreneurial venture, they know it’s not going to be easy. It’s just… You can’t quite expect how hard it’s going to be, either. So, I guess the very final question is just a short, two part one. If you could recommend one book that you think is great book for either a budding entrepreneur or a current entrepreneur to read, and then also one blog site.
Luke: Considering the book I’m reading now is called “The Little Prince” because it’s in Spanish and it’s a child’s book and I still find it complicated to read, I don’t think I’ll suggest that one. The books that I would recommend are the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” books. There’s five of them. They’re an absolutely fantastic series written by Douglas Adams. And why they’re so great? I find them so great because in a fantastic world, out in outer space, meeting new people and all these great crazy ideas, things seem to work out and they work out for a reason.
It’s not to say that it gives you hope, that what you’re doing is going to work out, but as things progress, there is a certain linkage between everything. Your actions there in Colorado may effect me in England, and they sure did when I met you, one year ago.
And sure enough, as you work on your projects there, it might touch Justin in Orange County, and then it touches me again. The book really gets on it, as well as it describes England and England’s nuances, I suppose. Which, I can’t remember when he wrote it. I think he wrote it in the ’70s. I’m sure somebody might call me out on that.
As far as blogs, I’m not the best one for that. You actually have given me a load of links. I love checking them out. For me, being the tech nerd, I check out TechCrunch, Lifehacker, and go to Google News, which I know is not a blog, but I have it dialed in where it tells me all the stuff I like to read and think about.
LS-Y: Those are great ideas, at least, for books for people to read. And then, as far as TechCrunch and Lifehacker go, I also read those. But they are geared towards a certain type of entrepreneur. And Google News, obviously you’ve got to get your news from somewhere. I appreciate your time, Luke. Once again, it’s Luke Ollett with Shiva Media. It’s S‑H‑I‑V‑A Media.com, and he also writes his blog at OurThursday.com. Thank you very much, Luke.
Luke: Thank you, Brian. A fantastic time with you.
LS-Y: Absolutely. Talk to you soon.
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Wonderful interview!
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