Intel, The Alps and UK’s late 80ies.
Loosely coupled highlights.
Recently I have been interviewed for a blog featuring Austrian startups. One of the concluding questions was to give some book recommendations for new founders. Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty came to my mind. In the late 80ies Drummond and Cauty were known as The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu or The Timelords or most famously: The KLF. If they were a startup today, disruptive would describe them best. They disrupted pretty every aspect in the music industry of the late 80ies: creating music, promoting music and dealing with the press: they were ruthless and yet funny while hacking their way to the top.
Success proved them right. They landed a UK #1 hit with Doctorin’ the Tardis, a song with more than one Doctor Who reference.
As if this wasn’t enough, they open-sourced their music industry hack in their seminal book The Manual, a step-by-step guide to have a #1 hit the easy way — without money and without musical skills. Included was a money-back guarantee to achieve a #1 hit if one only is willing to follow every step meticulously.
As a firm believer of “execution is everything”, for me The Manual is the mother of all execution guides. Moreover, you can learn a lot about disruptive innovation from those late-80ies nerds.
Meanwhile in Austria Martin Gletschermayer, Matthias Schweger and Walter Werzowa might have read a copy of The Manual. They formed the Eurotrash band Edelweiss and obviously they followed KLF’s instructions meticulously: they had a #1 hit with Bring me Edelweiss, a song which served every international image Austria might have in the most blatant way. Some years later, they topped themselves with Starship Edelweiss — which is probably the best thing you will see on the internet today:
Schwegerer later did some consulting for Red Bull but more interestingly, a couple of years after Edelweiss, Walter Werzowa was commissioned by Intel in 1999 to compose the famous Intel Sound which he “patterned after the syllables in Intel’s slogan: In-tel In-side”. Sure.
Fast forward to Winter 2012. Gregor set up a video conferencing system for our office and ordered one of those Intel mini PCs. To our surprise, the box played the Intel sound when it was opened.
Around this time, we set up our first payable version of Usersnap. Since we wanted to know when the first customer would subscribe to our service, we connected a small web server with a LED indicating a payment. Then we “connected” the LED and the light sensor which triggers the Intel Sound with Duck Tape and voilà: we had our very own payment notification machine:
This little setup is still in operation and everytime the Intel sound is triggered, at least one of the team starts applauding our unknown customer. This applause generates good vibes automatically, sufficient for the whole team.
Epilog
There’s no morale here, in case you expected one and you probably didn’t learn anything useful. If you enjoyed this little story anyways, let me know on twitter.
