Nasty, Brutish and Short
Boomers say that life is a bowl of cherries. We’ve never fully understood that one, but it calls to mind a scene from a 1950’s thriller in which Kirk Douglass’s character, the eponymous Ulysses, leads a team of warriors into the cave of a giant, ravenous cyclops. What could possibly have gone wrong did.
We don’t think that Boomers who use the metaphor have that in mind. Though, to be fair, it only took but a brief google to appreciate that its original meaning has been lost to time. Likely, it’s that the sweetness of anything and everything is as ephemeral as life itself, as the lyric of the original 1930’s tune by Ray Henderson and Lew Brown suggests. The Boomers take a less cynical view inherited from the Greatest Generation, no doubt. And, what a generation that was. You gotta be thankful for what they did in Europe. Hopefully, our isolationist friends in Washington won’t give it all away.
Speaking of Ukraine, we’ve also heard it said that life is “nasty, brutish and short.” That one was coined in the seventeenth-century, but who among us doesn’t throw it in from time to time at the water cooler. It’s eternally fresh. Thanks, Thomas Hobbes. He had in mind life outside of society and espoused absolute monarchy as the fix. We’d guess that Hobbes had a penchant for subservience: perhaps The Donald could dust him off and prop him up for Veep.
Catch them on a good day, and we suspect that many an entrepreneur would say that bootstrapping a business is also like a bowl of cherries, pits and all. Leaving aside the independently wealthy, that more traditional approach may destine the enterprise to slower, bounded growth. A lifestyle business. One that’s likely to yield more pits than flesh early on, but that with the right mix of hard work, pivots and luck can be fruitful in the long run.
Want a political analogy? We do. Take a small town mayor who’s received nary a penny in campaign contributions but stayed in office for decades. There are a lot of them: Margaret Doud, Mackinac Island, Michigan (50 years); Robert Heidenescher, Dupont, Ohio (49 years); William Tate, Grapevine, Texas (48 years). Wikipedia goes on, and so could we.
Nasty, brutish and short might be what you hear of startup life from founders who took outside investment. Not all of them. Not all of the time. But, we bet they skew more that way on the spectrum than do the lifestyle-istas. What would you expect? Take on an angel investor and there’s one more mouth to feed. Take on venture capital and it can be a vicious, gaping one. (Remember the cyclops?) Now, you’ve got to navigate not only the vagaries of the marketplace, staffing and the supply chain but, also, the crushing ROI expectations of professional investors. If we were turning to another political analogy, we’d mention RFK, Jr., the CNN debate that wasn’t, and Nicole Shanahan. Don’t worry. We won’t.
Speaking of turns, let’s give Thomas Collet, the guest of today’s episode, a moment in the spotlight. After all, it’s not all about us. Thomas is a serial entrepreneur. We lost track, but we think he’s on his seventh successful startup — and, that’s only counting since we recorded with him two weeks ago.
Would Thomas (Collet, not Hobbes … though, we’ll get back to him) have described his startup experiences as bowls of cherries or nasty, brutish and short? We don’t know. We didn’t ask. You don’t think we prepare in advance for these podcasts, do you? Perhaps when our sponsors start looking for ROI, we will. But, for now, we are all cherries. We have yet to be visited upon by Thomas Hobbes’ brutish ghost. That day will come, surely.
In the meanwhile, have a listen to Thomas Collet. We can help you with that. Click below. If you’d prefer Hobbes, we’d suggest a seance or, perhaps, mushrooms.
