Welcome to the Ice Cream Factory

When I worked for Pitney Bowes in Connecticut, one weekend the family took a trip to nearby Vermont. No trip to Vermont is complete without visiting Ben and Jerry's -- the world-famous place where they make all the yummy ice-cream.

We saw the strangest thing.

You could walk right in on the workers. I kind of expected an overview of the way ice-cream was made, perhaps a free cone (which, in all honesty, was one of the big reasons we visited), but a big part of the plant had glass walls. We could walk right up and watch everything they were doing in there. There were no secrets at all!

I didn't understand how they could do this. Didn't they have trade secrets? Things they had learned over the years to make their ice cream the best? If people could just walk around and watch everything they did, how could they run a business? Hell, how could they concentrate enough to run a business? Having all these clowns hanging around everyday would drive me bonkers.

A couple of years later I was working for the Federal Reserve. Great gig in downtown Washington, D.C. Right on the national mall. We could sit in the lunch room and watch buses pull up and thousands of tourists get off and start taking pictures. I would be checking in at my hotel and suddenly 300 Koreans would walk in the door -- all with that "Wow! Take a look at that!" look on their faces. Whatever I was doing, wherever I was, there would be tourists.

At work the tours weren't too bad -- after all, it was only every now and then, and it wasn't as bad as the Ben and Jerry's deal. It was actually kind of flattering. But still, I didn't see how anybody could run a business with tourists underfoot all of the time. I could deal with seeing these folks from time-to-time, but hell if I could put up with them in my office where I was programming.

Many years later in the startup world, I look around and it's not unusual for people to share everything they are doing. Popular blogs show how ideas were found, markets discovered. There are even lots of guys who publish weekly sales and profit numbers. Ideas are cheap, they say, information has to be free! The more eyeballs the better.

I'm still struggling with this -- something about this seems a bit too facile -- but I'm getting better. One of the things I've learned is nobody much cares about anything you are doing anyway. No matter how level-headed you are, you always consistently overestimate the degree to which anybody actually gives a hoot about your startup idea.

In a world of apathy, the best you can hope for is to write an interesting blog article. Then, if you're lucky, some smart people may drop by and offer you some advice that you really need. This is a key element of the startup experience -- serendipity. It can't be planned and it can't be forced. It's what makes a Silicon Valley work -- lots of politely-interested strangers providing bits of advice and informally seeing what combinations they can make to the community in general. Because people don't care personally about what you are doing, but they do feel part of a larger community that likes to help folks. This is the thing that is so hard to replicate about SV. You can dump a ton of money and build a hundred incubators, but you're nowhere near having an environment where you can walk a block to Starbucks, ask the first ten people in line what they think of your app, and end up with half-a-dozen great pieces of advice. The culture just isn't there. It has to grow.

And sorry, I still don't think people share as much as they make out to be sharing, at least publicly. Yes, every day I will see dozens of articles titled something like "How I got 100 thousand subscribers in one week!" These articles will tell me all sorts of generalities about getting celebrity endorsements and such. But most of the time I leave the blog just as ignorant as when I arrived. The critical details are always missing. Big ideas are always worthless, but a very small number of tiny ideas are priceless -- and perishable. You'll very rarely ever see these tiny ideas being published. If so, it's always a mistake.

For instance, if you knew that famous reporter X was a big photography fan and loved to chat and write about pictures, and then you pitched a story about your business which had a photography angle, would you be blabbing about it on your blog? Or would you file that piece of information away until the next time you needed a story? The reason why we keep reading all of these overnight success stories without actually learning anything is that the authors skate over the tiny details that make the entire thing work. Most of the time the readers don't know enough to realize what the authors are doing to them -- painting some broad attractive picture of amazing fame and fortune while ignoring the key tiny little tidbits that went into making it happen. So you get the general feeling that you're seeing something, but there's nothing really there. In a lot of ways it's like a magic trick: look over here while I do something over there. Interestingly, these tiny tidbits are exactly the kind of thing that you might share with somebody over coffee -- but you'd be an idiot to publish them.

Even Ben and Jerry's probably was this way, I was just too ignorant at the time to notice. After all, making ice cream isn't much of a secret -- no more than "How to speed up your website" or "Unknown magic of C#" -- all that stuff, while appearing to be important is just mundane technical details. The real secret is business relationships, marketing plans, how to approach new distributors, strategic plans, all the little detail work that goes into making and popularizing a company logo such as the one shown above. This is the good stuff, and no matter how intently you stare at them making ice cream, you're not going to see it.

So lately when I'm doing something like setting up a landing page for my new e-book on being a ScrumMaster, I go ahead and blab about it even though -- gasp! -- i'm actually still working on the page. Here I am making the ice cream. Here you are staring through the glass. Who knows? Maybe somebody will take a look and offhandedly suggest a great improvement to what I'm doing. Maybe you'll see something that will help you dramatically improve what you're doing. We'll never know unless we try.

So welcome to the ice cream factory! Just don't peak under the office door over there.