Three Questions You Should Ask at Parties

Three Questions You Should Ask at Parties

When you are at a party, ask people how we measure time.  I'll bet you they'll say by the stars.  Wrong answer of course, it is no longer fixed by astronomical reference points.  We have shifted from stars to atomic beams in vaults.  Particles are steadier than planets.  We are in the epoch of the nanosecond and during a nanosecond everything is motionless: bullets, droplets, everything.  That is how I feel sometimes: things appear to slow down while they speed up.  Pajamanation is motionless in the nanosecond.

But then I think back to my other companies.  They have all taken a long time in suspended animation.  With a long time, I mean more than 5 years before they actually became interesting.  Time is linked to destination (where you want to be) and destination is often linked to place, as in GPS technology.  An error of a billionth of a second means an error of a foot, the distance light travels in that time.  So if Pajamanation is an economic bomb, let it drop where we want it to be and cause no collateral damage. 

Patience, I am not very good at it, but I force myself.  We started Pajamanation in 2002, we are now practically 2008, the date I projected for us to fly above the radar and capture the imagination of other people like us.  Some tell me that is a long time for preparations. 

They forget the big successes out there.  When do you think Google started?  That is the second question you should ask at parties.  Most people will say after 2000.  The right answer however is January 1996.  In 1998 they got their first capital injection: 100,000$.  In two years' time they had 10,000 queries a day (which is not a lot at all).   Once the first money was in, they moved into an office (now the Googolplex) and were able to get multiples of queries of 50 (500,000 queries/day). Google's initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising $1.67 billion, making it worth $23 billion.  Google is 12 years already.  There is an interesting article on them in Wired on the date, September 7, for Google, when they got their first check.

When I started my first company in 1989 (Riverland sold to VNU in 1996), people asked me how I was going to go from one subscription to Computer Magazine (myself) to 10,000 subscriptions in a year's time?  Well, it is easy I learned that from the big masters of viral marketing and subscription management: the politicians. 

You do it one vote at a time and you are everywhere, and everyone who works with you should do as you.  In the company we had a scoreboard showing how many subscriptions and who brought them in.  We all spent one hour a day just phone people in for trial subscriptions.  That is how you make pyramids, one block at a time.  No miracles, just a clean and straight marathon where you know you will suffer and you try to keep reserve strengths for the downtimes and the dignity at the end of the line.  And afterwards you say, that it was easier than you thought, because we are all optimists (a survival bias).

And the final question you should ask at parties is obvious of course?  Do you want to try out Pajamanation and help us change the world?

It is a no-brainer, I assure you.