Ev Williams – “Any big idea is going to take a while to get there… by definition if it’s big and no one has done it before it’s not going to be 1, 2, 3 – we got it. There is going to be a dark period in there because you don’t know what the key to get in there is”. – (Foundation 31)
Product development can be seen as an optimization problem. We search for a set of product features that will deliver the most value to customers. Viewed as a chart we are aiming for the highest value point in the product space.
With Lean Startup products are rapidly iterated based on decisions validated using customer metrics. Using the chart metaphor the minimal viable product is typically a low-lying value point but it allows the terrain to surveyed. Iterations allow us to move across the chart in an upwards direction but they may lead us quickly to a local-maximum.
The local-maximum product is one that delivers more value than previous iterations of the product but is not the best product in the space (the global maximum). A local-maximum product is also not able to be rapidly iterated into something better – instead more fundamental changes are required.
Lean startups often rapidly reach a local-maximum product which does not deliver product/market fit. They give up on their original idea and pivot – missing out on a massive opportunity. Pivoting will allow the startup to explore a different space, but they’re just as likely to produce a local-maximum product there and repeat the process.
If we believe in our ideas we should be prepared to properly explore the spaces they inhabit before giving up on them.
“A founder who can just do “sales” in the traditional sense isn’t going to cut it anymore. So much of the “selling” these days is in the design and the user experience of the product that the full-stack marketer must be able to push pixels with the best of them. The “seller” founder who can design is able to elimate the gap between product and marketing and narrow the wait time between generating ideas and executing on them.”
Rise of the full-stack marketer
A shifting consensus around what a “seller” founder looks like
It is often said that there is an engineering bias in Silicon Valley, but in reality, it’s a bias towards doers over talkers, of execution over ideas.
This is why you’ll frequently hear the refrain that MBAs make bad startup founders, because MBAs are oriented towards administration and management (talking) over designing, programming and growth hacking (doing).
That doesn’t, however, mean that engineers always make the best startup founders either. While it’s next to impossible to imagine a great founding team that doesn’t have at least one engineer, increasingly, it’s becoming just as hard to imagine a great founding team that is comprised solely of engineers.
You can visualize the requisite skill set for a founding team as a pendulum that swings over time depending on the macro-circumstances. Twenty years ago, the technical costs of building a product were so enormous, that it made sense to stack your team with engineers and figure out your business later after you’d raised your $20 million A round; to load up on business guys prematurely would have been putting the cart before the horse. When Silicon Valley got overheated in the late 90s, VCs were writing checks for business plans with no product, so all the business guys wanted to start companies too—and we all know how that worked out.
Over the last decade however, the cost of building a product has asymptotically drifted towards zero. Your main cost is time and the certainty that comes with a steady paycheck. With the ascendancy of the full-stack developer, you can switch between web, mobile and native without necessarily having to switch people. With technical costs going down, one of the biggest challenges a modern-day founding team will face isn’t getting the product built—although that is and always will be hard—it’s getting distribution once you’ve built a minimum viable product, nailing the killer user experience and putting your product into the hands of real people quickly.
Maybe this explains why the greatest founding teams of all time have almost always included a builder and a seller.
Think Jobs and Wozniak, Allen and Gates, Ellison and Lane, Hewlett and Packard, Larry and Sergei, Yang and Filo, Omidyar and Skoll. –@Naval
Naval Ravikant’s post from four years ago remains the single most clear articulation of why the best founding teams require a builder and a seller, and why two founders is the magic number. But if two is the magic number (and I think it is), then what do these two ideal founders look like in 2013? What attributes do Founder A and Founder B have that make their odds of success higher than average?
Founder A is a full-stack developer. I’m not going to spend a lot of time describing the “builder founder” because you know what he looks like—he’s Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network hacking away furiously at 3AM. It’s the killer combination of engineering genius, passion and natural curiosity that get’s channeled into building great products. And what he doesn’t know, he can learn. Boom.
The sea change that has taken place in the Valley over the last few years is a shifting consensus around what the “seller” founder looks like.
The Full-Stack Marketer
Up until fairly recently, Founder B looked like a mini-me of Founder A—an engineer who could help build the product, but was less socially awkward enough to handle conversations with potential customers and investors and who could hopefully learn to sell over time.
This almost myopic obsession with product development at the expense of product distribution has lead to two epidemic problems in the Valley: too many startups building bad products people don’t want and too many startups building great products that people never find out about.
Earlier this month, Dave McClure lamented on the lack of focus on distribution in a series of rants on Twitter, and I think he is right on.
@DaveMcClure on marketing illiteracy of startups
Enter the new ideal cofounder for the full-stack developer, the full-stack marketer (a term coined by Marcelo Calbucci here), who spends long, ramen-fueled days switching between editing .PSDs in Photoshop, wirefaming UI/UX iterations, building marketing pages with product positioning, setting up newsletters in MailChimp, answering support emails and showing real people your product everywhere he goes (the store, the bar etc.)
A founder who can just do “sales” in the traditional sense isn’t going to cut it anymore. So much of the “selling” these days is in the design and the user experience of the product that the full-stack marketer must be able to push pixels with the best of them. The “seller” founder who can design is able to elimate the gap between product and marketing and narrow the wait time between generating ideas and executing on them.
Over the next few years, I expect that we will see a greater degree of consolidation around this new consensus as it’s empiracally put to the test. I believe this natural marriage between the Full-Stack Developer and the Full-Stack Marketer will work because it combines two complimentary and necessary skill sets and anchors it around the product by making each a stakeholder in the product’s creation. The developer owns the building aspect (the code) and the marketer owns the selling aspect (the design). Like the beginning of any great family, this product-oriented union sets a standard that becomes embedded in the culture of the company, a culture that will attract like-minded doers and repel the talkers that will just be dead-weight— and a culture that ultimately will have the best chance of winning.
(Active Ownership VS. Minimalism) X Why I Buy Amazing Kit + Support Artisan & Artist Brands
“Active ownership, which differs from minimalism, is about investing your limited attention, money, space, and time to what you value so that those things will thrive. Being vested in something makes you care more about it. You can’t do or have everything, so when you choose to take active ownership, it becomes a commitment to it and decisions and compromise have to be made about what commands your limited attention. As a result of the explicit choice you make in how you spend your attention, you reduce the things around you to what’s most valuable. What’s not valuable gets cut from your attention budget. You end up with less around you and are more focused on the basic forms of things, like with minimalism.”
The goal for me in desiring and seeking out great gear is about making commitments to myself, to continue a trend in supporting the things I do with tools that I can trust and removing things from my life that can’t live up to those standards. Whether it’s strictly about gear or not, you’ll find yourself happier in the micro and macro of your daily life by committing to understanding the pieces of your day-to-day, deciding what to and how much to care about certain things, and gain a greater grasp how the process is cyclical an applicable to your life in a greater context.
Minimalism is attractive. Clean lines, clean desks, and universal simplicity can be calming and the systematic removal of all but complete necessities can reduce distraction. A core goal of minimalism is that by removing everything ‘extra’, you may become freed by the constraints, dogmas, and physical implications they impose. Minimalism works to display the essence of something by removing anything but the purest basic form. Dependence is only placed on the base form of a concept, desire, or product. The output of this is less clutter in your apartment and your brain which demands less attention, less maintenance, and creates less of a cognitive deficit.
Cognitive deficit is caused by an overwhelming amount of stressors, open loops, and plain stuffon your mind and will reduce clarity of thought and impact mental capacity. The Wikipedia explanation gives examples of learning disabilities and drug-induced states as situations where a cognitive deficit exists but I think that everything in our lives—when not controlled—can combine to create a deficit. A cognitive deficit is caused when the cost of attention is greater than the returned value of something. Simplified, it’s when a thing costs you more in brain power by having it around than having it improves your life. Relevant to minimalism, reducing the amount of belongings to your name can diminish the amount of time you spending thinking about, caring for, and paying attention to them. That pile of stuff you don’t use under your bed is an open loop and commands more cognitive power than you realize. Minimalists recognize this and got rid of that pile.
Active ownership, which differs from minimalism, is about investing your limited attention, money, space, and time to what you value so that those things will thrive. Being vested in something makes you care more about it. You can’t do or have everything, so when you choose to take active ownership, it becomes a commitment to it and decisions and compromise have to be made about what commands your limited attention. As a result of the explicit choice you make in how you spend your attention, you reduce the things around you to what’s most valuable. What’s not valuable gets cut from your attention budget. You end up with less around you and are more focused on the basic forms of things, like with minimalism.
Active ownership and minimalism share values but are rooted in different theories. In minimalism, the focus is on removal, where having less leads to gaining more. Active ownership is about having the things that matter most to you and leaving behind everything that doesn’t. It’s not about having less because less stuff will simplify your path to enlightenment, but about taking an active role in what is around you, what you take in, what you believe and say, what you do and who you are. Active ownership assumes active responsibility where minimalism is dependent on the absence of everything extra—even what’s out of your control—to be effective. Having less of something doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll appreciate and value what remains but when you are making active decisions about where you invest your limited attention, you choose what to love rather than being forced to love only what you have left.
This process of actively owning, continuously editing what you do, and explicitly choosing what’s around you results in a deeper passion for those things and is worth investing in.
// Full-disclosure: I actively own. Practicing before I could ever afford the pieces of gear or apparel or technology that moved me.
It’s a bittersweet bar of chocolate with bits of pride, embarrassment, excitement, geekiness, fandom and outright obsession (for aren’t those the ingredients of love?).
While I admire the focus and perceived purity of minimalist active ownership, the reality of my worldview leads me down, over, around and through multiple parallel and Gordian pretzel paths. There are so many fascinations that it wasn’t…right… to choose just one. No more than I could ever ignore all other colours and eat only brown food.
And so I magpie, with purpose, and passion. Trying to be kind and not pass [too much] self-judgement or teeter into self-flagellation. Back in the day, why choose between trail-running, mountain biking, street hockey, skateboarding, climbing mountain passes on a road bike, snowboarding on paid trails or car-shuttling up Loveland Pass to cut lines between trees? House VS Techno VS Jungle VS Drum and Bass VS Future Bass VS Dubstep VS Burial VS Marco Carola VS Rich VS Marky VS Actress VS Mala VS Sneak VS…? ACRONYM or Margiela or ma+ or Julius or CdG or Veilance or CCP or Rick or Visvim or Sruli or Undercover or Boris? 993 or 4.6 SE? Leica or… well, it’s always been Leica, even when what was actually in hand was a used and beat up Nikon (but it started w/ their passable but buyable point-n-shoot until an M6 was within reach, and never looked back once digital became a reality with the 8.2, and now suffering the waiting list for the 240).
I don’t wish this condition on anyone. Nor would advise its pursuit. Luck, and rationalization, are comfortingly beside me, that these, and a multiplicity of other interests, passions and obsessions, serve me well in a time when a creative director or someone paying attention to experience and product design (whatever that title might morph to…) must now be good at so many evolving design disciplines. One week, it’s a massive omnichannel campaign, blink, shift roles, and the next is an exploration of the future of mobile phones (give us a complete, coherent idea tomorrow, please). Even my hyperactive imagination fails to level-up to a suspension of disbelief that I’ll ever be THE best at a single one, but I’m at peace with being pretty good, to potentially quite good, at many.
Freed from a static hula-hoop orbit, a wobbly Atomic Ant elliptical feels and functions better: allowing for many, many more passes and POV’s around ideas and problems.
“Beware the altar of science: We are more than data and chemicals”
Here, for example, is the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin describing in his book This Is Your Brain On Music how our brains can extract audio information from the chaotic collection of air molecules bouncing against our eardrum:
Imagine that you stretch a pillowcase tightly across the opening of a bucket, and different people throw ping-pong balls at it from different distances. Each person can throw as many ping-pong balls as he likes, and as often as he likes. Your job is to figure out — just by looking at how the pillowcase moves up and down — how many people there are, who they are, and whether they are walking toward you, walking away from you, or are standing still. This is analogous to what the auditory system has to contend with in making identifications of auditory objects in the world, using only the movement of the eardrum as a guide.”
And here, in contrast, is the author and poet Diane Ackerman on the human experience of music:
‘Amazing Grace’ is a good example of that lighter-than-air sort of hymn, full of musical striving and stretching, as if one’s spirit itself were being elongated. Think lofty thoughts and sing that elevating tune, and soon enough you will feel uplifted (even despite having to sing such unmelodious words as ‘wretch’)… Like pure emotions, music surges and sighs, rampages or grows quiet, and, in that sense, it behaves so much like our emotions that it seems often to symbolize them, to mirror them, to communicate them to others, and thus free us from the elaborate nuisance and inaccuracy of words.”
Levitin does give us fascinating insight into the mechanics of how we hear music. But Ackerman gives us insight into what that’s like.
We may well be living in an age where our daily lives are mediated by technology, by the outputs of code, by the fruits of science.
And we may well be living in an age where the fruits of science and technology are helping to make our efforts as marketers more efficient, better directed, more useful, more timely, more interactive, more responsive, and so on.
We are right to be entranced and fascinated by what all this offers up.
But we would be well advised not to worship at the altar of science and technology too much, too slavishly, or too uncritically. Or to reduce human nature to the jiggling and wiggling of atoms.
“Just move me, dude”, exhorts Dan Wieden.
If we wish to do that – and the evidence clearly demonstrates that this is the cornerstone of effective advertising – then we must think like artists, not just scientists.
“Well-placed complexity has a place. If only to encourage us to think more deeply and globally about simplicity.”
“What complexity does is it acts as a cognitive roadblock. …. If you have a communication that last 30 seconds or a minute or even five minutes, if you know there’s a particular point that you really want people to pay attention to — you’ve already hooked them in, they’re interested and they’re motivated — if you introduce complexity even briefly, that changes the way people think. They go from thinking in this very shallow, very superficial way … to thinking much more deeply about whatever you say next.
You still want to keep the message simple, but if you pick that moment of complexity carefully and appropriately, you can lead people to believe whatever you say after that moment of complexity very deeply. If the message is a complicated one … that’s a really effective technique.” – Adam Alter
“The Piracy Paradox says that copying starts a process called induced obsolescence, that is, making things unfashionable so people feel the need to go out and buy more.”
The Piracy Paradox
In a paper titled The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design, professors at the University of Virginia and UCLA, Chris Sprigman and Kal Raustiaula, explored the so-called paradox of endless creativity in fashion despite the lack of intellectual property protection, and a culture of constant borrowing.
“The fashion industry itself is surprisingly quiescent on the subject of copying,” they wrote in their paper, published in 2006. “Fashion firms take steps to protect the value of their trademarked brands, but appear to accept appropriation of their original designs as a fact of life. Design copying is widely accepted, occasionally complained about, but more often celebrated as ‘homage’ rather than attacked as ‘piracy.’”
Sprigman and Raustiaula’s argument is that copying—while frustrating—isn’t just good for creativity, it’s surprisingly good for business.
Copyright (Or The Lack Thereof) In Fashion
It’s been over 70 years since the design of a garment could be protected under copyright laws in North America. It comes from the rule that denies copyright protection to so-called “useful articles … in which creative expression is compounded with practical utility (Sprigman and Raustiaula, 2006).”
The subject has been revisited recently thanks to the lawsuit brought against French fashion house, Louis Vuitton, regarding a pair of heels featuring a bright red sole—shorthand in the fashion world for the designer shoe brand, Louboutin to any fashionista worth her salt. The judge in the case ruled against Louboutin however, saying that, “because in the fashion industry colour serves ornamental and aesthetic functions vital to robust competition, the court finds that Louboutin is unlikely to be able to prove that its red outsole brand is entitled to trademark protection.”
Compared to music, movies, and publishing, copyright in the fashion industry is almost non-existent* because it applies to a class of items that serve a basic, utilitarian function. Every person needs clothes for very practical reasons, and yet we all own far more than we’ll ever wear. Many times we’ll send a shirt to Goodwill for the simple reason that we don’t think it looks good anymore. Why is this? Sprigman and Raustiaula say it’s because of copying.
Copying Is Great For Business
The Piracy Paradox says that copying starts a process called induced obsolescence, that is, making things unfashionable so people feel the need to go out and buy more.
The designs sent down the runways by high fashion brands each season are drafted by the best in the world, and are deliberately priced to be affordable only for an elite group. With no copyright to protect them however, these designs can be legally borrowed or replicated by mainstream retailers like H&M, who take these looks and produce a more affordable version for the average consumer.
What happens next is “anathema to the fashion conscious,” according to Sprigman and Raustiaula. Once these trends hit the mainstream, fashion-savvy early adopters promptly drop the current look to move on to something new and more exclusive, kicking off a new cycle of innovation in the process.
Technically, there’s nothing wrong with the old style, but it’s abandoned, Sprigson and Raustiaula say, because most clothes are purchased for what they call their “positional value.” This is their ability to send a message about the wearer’s status. So apart from loving clothes for their aesthetic value, it could be argued that what fashionistas really want at the end of the day is to establish their position at the front of the pack.
“The fashion cycle is driven faster … by widespread design copying, because copying erodes the positional qualities of fashion goods. Designers in turn respond to this obsolescence with new designs. In short, piracy paradoxically benefits designers by inducing more rapid turnover and additional sales (Sprigson and Raustiaula, 2006).”
Copying And What You Do
Induced obsolescence and the free-for-all in fashion may have some implications for other creative fields, in which copying is considerably less tolerated. We’re more likely to say ideas were “stolen” rather than copied, and that’s because we do feel robbed, thinking that somebody else is enjoying the fruits of our labour, minus the mental expenditure it took us to get there. Perhaps it’s time to consider though whether our work has in fact been stolen, or whether it has a role to play in a larger trend cycle, as in fashion.
Copying As Status
If, like a fashion brand, you have built a name for yourself with an extremely distinctive look or feel—think Yayoi Kusama, The Weeknd or Aerosyn-Lex—and you see your Doppelgänger doing their best imitation of you, before reaching for your lawyer’s phone number, consider the article cited by Sprigman and Raustiala called Shopping For Gucci on Canal Street, by Jonathan Barnett.
“The introduction of copies, provided they are visibly imperfect, may increase the snob premium that elite consumers are willing to pay for a luxury fashion good. Second, the introduction of copies may lead non-elite consumers to adjust upward their estimate of the status benefits to be gained by acquiring the relevant good, thereby possibly translating into purchases of the original.” (Barnett, 2005, cited by Sprigman and Raustiaula, 2006).
If your style is clearly recognizable in the work of somebody else, it can give your work a kind of prestige rather than taking away from it. Imitation—although irritating—is the sincerest form of flattery, and if anything, validates how good your creative choices are. And although it may feel that way, rather than steal your thunder, being copied just tends to make the admiring plagiarist seem a little lost in comparison.
People selling exact reproductions of your work should be stopped in their tracks, but drafting a cease-and-desist letter to a college kid who idolizes you just looks miserly.
Whose Idea Is It Anyway?
There’s a chance that elements of your work feel fresh and new because, like the fashionista, you’re an early adopter. So you see similar themes starting to appear in the work of other people. Problem is, it’s not quite distinctive enough or you’re not well enough established to have people trace it back to you. Ego check: perhaps it’s time to consider whether this really is just yours, or whether you’re in tune with a brand new fashion trend.
It’s a common occurrence in fields like advertising or street art to see similar themes crop up around the same time, in the work of people who’ve never even heard of each other. A prime example is Banksy, who was an early adopter of the stencil art form, and among other things is known for his quirky stencilled rats. He claims he had no idea when he started doing them of the existence of Blek Le Rat, the French stencil artist whose motif is also the city rodent, but who pre-dates Banksy by a decade.
Rather than get worked up about it, seeing people copy your work is your sign to make like a fashionista and move on to the next fresh thing. Those who consistently abandon that which has become in style gain a reputation as leaders and tastemakers, and that, for a creative artist, is always good for business.
“…if you had a client that let you do great work, then you could always find a way to pull it off. If they were so blind they didn’t get your idea after hours of argument and pleading, you simply went back to the boards. But you didn’t compromise. You always would come back with something as good, or better. Because you knew you could.”
// A few days from starting a new adventure. Thinking, again, about chaos as component of the creative process. We’ve all seen its effect as an exponentially negative multiplier. The ear-popping whooooosh of passionate ideas sucked into a black hole, followed soon by spirit, heart and motivation.
And, yet, there have also been times where after the Nth or Pth round of creative reviews during a pitch, when a corner was turned inside that dark maze and a sliver gradient glimpse of James-Turrell-worthy light appears. On the Qth round, the work is less… slippery… we can hold and mold. The Rth allows us to hold our heads a couple of notches higher. And then, a tired comment triggers a weary joke bounced off a relaxed sigh and the idea shimmers for a moment then snaps into focus. No anthemic music swells in the background. It’s just… better. From that point, the supporting ideas magnetize into orbit. We didn’t realize it but we accelerated down the gravity well of the concept, then slingshot out to the void, gathering *stardust* for the return trip back. //
“We started as a ship of fools. And that, I firmly believe, is why we have succeeded. We were struggling to figure out what an advertising agency actually was. And our one and only client, Nike, was trying to get a grip on what a client was supposed to do with one. We were both incredibly stupid. That was the key. See, when you don’t know, you try desperately to find out. But the minute you think you know, the minute you go – oh, yeah, we’ve been here before, no sense reinventing the wheel – you stop learning, stop questioning, and start believing in your own wisdom, you’re dead. You’re not stupid anymore, you are fucking dead.
Well, in 23 days, we are going to leave home. And in 36 days, when we land in the Pearl (new building), much of what we thought we knew – like where the bathrooms are – we won’t for sure. Good luck with the phones, the Xerox, the ability to ship and receive, to get your shirts laundered, to find a pool hall, a pencil, a friend, that approved script, or a moment of peace and quiet. What used to come easy will take work. All the little shit that you weren’t even aware of, but that made your life comfortable, will have vanished. Life will become a little less routine, our actions a little less unconscious. I can’t wait.
See I have this addiction to chaos. I love it when I’m a bit anxious. It’s a sickness, okay. But it works for me. And the older I get, the more I need what upsets me, shocks me, makes me squirm, or get angry. The older I get, the more I value what forces me to take a second look. The more I respect people who don’t automatically respect me. I love this agency the most, when it’s off balance. Moving at 7,000 miles an hour, trying to take a sharp left turn, everybody holding their breath, laughing like hell, occasionally throwing up but smiling, and leaning right to make sure the fucking thing doesn’t trip over.
Chaos does this amazing thing that order can’t: it engages you. It gets right in your face and with freakish breath issues a challenge. It asks stuff of you, order never will. And it shows you stuff, all the weird shit, that order tries to hide.
Chaos is the only thing that honestly wants you to grow. The only friend who really helps you be creative. Demands that you be creative. Now, clearly, there are some disciplines in this organisation that don’t really need to have chaos as their operating policy. I’m thinking finance. I’m thinking traffic. But even in those departments that need to operate with Germanic precision, even there, we need enough uncertainty that we are forced to question how we do what we do so efficiently. And maybe, why we do it all.
…
The point was for Dan and Dave to create a place where people could come and live up to their full potential. Where they could do the best work of their career. Because that place relished freedom, diversity, and unpredictability. A place with very few rules. In case you haven’t heard ours, here they are. These rules David actually found in an empty file drawer when we were exiting our previous place of employment.
Don’t act big. No sharp stuff. Follow directions. And shut up when someone is talking.
The only other thing essential to know is our priorities. They were arrived at after a fifth of Cutty Sark (we couldn’t afford the good stuff):
1. The work
2. The client/agency relationship
3. Yourself
This has been summarised into: The work comes first. And while it served as a great compass for many years, it has become the focus of much discussion and dissent of late. Well, it ain’t the holy writ. If you want to junk it, we can junk it. But here’s what insight the thing is based on.
In big agencies, the client/agency relationship is the most sacred thing. The difficulty seems to be that the work then serves the relationship, and everything becomes political. And when things get political, the work suffers. And when the work suffers, the business suffers, then the client agency relationship suffers, and you suffer.
In creative boutiques, the ego is supreme. The work is there to enhance personal reputations. If I said the work is wonderful, the work is wonderful. Shut up and sell it.
Problem here: again, the work slip is, the client agency relationship goes south. When we say the work comes first, we are saying that things work best when everyone – client and agency alike – are focussed on whether or not this is great damn work. Politics aside. Egos aside. Is this hot shit, or not?
There is this revisionist history that says in the old days, Wieden + Kennedy didn’t compromise on the work. If the client didn’t buy it, we’d say goodbye account exec or goodbye client.
Oh, really?
Actually, the idea was that if you had a client that let you do great work, then you could always find a way to pull it off. If they were so blind they didn’t get your idea after hours of argument and pleading, you simply went back to the boards. But you didn’t compromise. You always would come back with something as good, or better. Because you knew you could. Even when you didn’t know, you knew. Or someone knew.
And when we say the client/agency relationship is second to the work, that doesn’t mean it isn’t important. Because the work is a direct reflection of the quality of that relationship. If it is strained, the work shows it. If people are having fun, it shows. If people are bleeding, it shows. If people are just trying to turn other people on, it shows. And that’s when it’s most effective. And when we put the individual last, it’s simply because of that weird old paradox in life that you serve yourself best when you serve others first.
You might note, that while we say the work comes first, we don’t put it up in our lobby. And we don’t showcase our awards. What we honour are the individuals, in all their wackiness…”
What is Burial’s music ‘about’? What does it ‘do’? Come to think of it, what is his music? What does it mean? Of course, all of this is up to the listener’s imagination, but for a while now there’s been a certain degree of consensus on the answers to these questions: Burial ‘mourns the death of rave’, his music is (to paraphrase a handful of commentators) a ‘plaintive echo from a bygone era of collective energy’, ‘a melancholy, ghostly memory of the faded promise of rave, drenched in weathering and mired in urban decay’.
It’s difficult, not to mention pointless, to argue that this reading of Burial, derived from ‘hauntology’, is invalid. Its validity seems confirmed by interviews with the guy, even if the interviewers sometimes do come across as a bit leading. To dispute this reading would be intolerant, even mean-spirited – it’s as a pallbearer for rave that Burial takes on a powerful meaning for many of his fans, and why argue with that? Of course to see Burial in this way you’d first have to agree that rave is in some sense dead, and that’s a hotly disputed point. It’s a question I won’t try and answer here, largely because at the time rave was in its generally accepted heyday I was just getting into solid foods, but being reluctant to sit down and accept that I’ve arrived at a time when musical culture has declined almost to worthlessness, the ‘death of rave’ angle on Burial doesn’t really have any definitive meaning for me per se.
It’s a reading that’s solidifying into a naturalised collective interpretation of Burial though – his image within culture and history is being covered in six feet of earth. But this fresh, living and newborn voice still has a lot more to offer than the corpse of rave. There’s Burial the Pallbearer, but there are other Burials too…
// It just keeps going… all the way to Whistler’s “Nocturne in Grey and Gold: Westminster Bridge”. Epic. And deserving a bridge to the future. (Whether or not Four Tet = Burial).
So, for now, we loop Jamie’s rmx of “Reconsider”… //
“Some people will disagree, but for me if I’ve written a meaty, delightful, wonderful bunch of scenes and now I have to do the hard, connective, dog’s body work of writing, when I finish the dog’s body work, I’ll have a screenplay that I already love.
I used to write chronologically when I started, from beginning to end. Eventually I went, that’s absurd; my heart is in this one scene, therefore I must follow it.
Obviously, if you know you have a bunch of stuff to do, I have to lay out this, all this dull stuff, and I feel very uncreative but the clock is ticking. Then you do that and you choose to do that.
But I always believe in just have as much fun as you can so that when you’re in the part that you hate there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, that you’re close to finished.”
– Joss Whedon, on getting the fun stuff done first…
Refinement + Reduction + Relief : when you start to take away things and concentrate on the essentials.
Yeah, ok, so Achim’s ‘81 SC is a cyborg of kevlar, plastic and the ghosts of missing parts, insulation and trim. And I feel guilty and somewhat disappointed because of my automatic patellar reflex cringe and frown at the effort of erasing images of the questionable attitude auras of SF fixie riders when he mentions the word. But there’s also another reflexive motion, a subtle head nod, at the recognition of, and desire for, a different approach away from high-tech performance and values and [relative] cost.
@DaveMcClure on marketing illiteracy of startups
Wandering Wandering Star 