What if you managed yourself like a company?

The genesis of a model to become who you are

When I think about the people I really look up to in my network, at least two distinct categories of people emerge:

1. Crazy operators: these are my friends who are just gifted to get endless amounts of shit done in an incredibly effective manner. They are somewhat agnostic to the kind of tasks that they’ve got to deal with and don’t so much care for needing to enjoy the specific task, they enjoy the overall job, environment and the idea that once they’re done after 3,5 or 10 years, they’ll have helped create a new paradigm in some way shape or form. They also often have a laser sharp focus in their line of work but do all kinds of tasks that are simply required to get to the goal. They tend to work as consultants or VC backed startup CEOs.
2. The one man shows: these are my friends who’ve built a personal brand around themselves and the passion they have for their work. Some of them work for themselves, some are employed by an organisation. But all of them are almost 100% of the time in their element/flowing and have created an environment for themselves where they get to do what they love doing anyway. In many cases they can’t help themselves, they “need” to do this work, paid or unpaid, 4 or 14 hours a day, with or without external help. Examples are my mum and dad, my grandpa, my friends Hillel, Alaa, Sunnie, Adrian, Christian, Samantha, Hassan, Tom, Brad, Paul, Olaf, Cecile, Shlomi Amar, Enkelejeda, Charles, Cesar, Francisco, Christine, Peter, Ray, basically almost all my teachers from Singularity University and generally a lot of Silicon Valley folk.

Today, I want to examine the second group and why I find them so interesting.

First of all, from what I know almost all of them had to create their own job in the first place. There was no job opening.

Secondly, they were doing what they felt they needed to do long before anyone offered to pay them for it.

Thirdly, they never stop. They go on like a high speed train without a terminal station, pounding their messages out into the world. They speak at every conferences that fits their work, they are super active online, they give interviews, work on projects related to their cause etc etc. Encountering some critics but much more so, finding supporters in the most unlikely places.

All of this has the effect that they create their own opportunities and what my friend Chris so perfectly called “engineer serendipity”.

When they say they got lucky, the saying that the harder you work, the luckier you get is just so true. But they don’t just work on anything. They’re driven by a deep conviction that the world needs what they have to offer and it needs it urgently more than ever. They primarily (70–80% of their working time) work in some way, shape or form on advancing their specific agenda. Such people just cannot be stopped, they’re like a force of nature. When you speak to them you get blown away by their enthusiasm and you just want to join the ship, in the direction they steer it in.

Lastly, and as all the rest this is up for debate, I am observing that their interests and activities evolve over time but within their line of passion. Similar to a company, they’ve built a vested interested and equity in a certain area that the “products” they sell (mostly their participation in something) and whom they’re selling to become more impactful and more valuable over time.

In order to achieve the highest impact they often use platforms such as taking on a prestigious mandate to put them into a position where they can share their work in an even more impactful way, find new opportunities, brand themselves, etc etc.

Type 1 and type 2 seem to me to be quite different personality types and it seems to me that as the years go by, while a 1 can become a 2 (see Elon Musk), once someone is a 2 they cannot become a 1 again.

Given these observations and my knowledge of myself, I believe I am not a 1 by almost any means and fall squarely into the need to be in category 2.

I’m a lousy operator in that I refuse to do all kinds of things that I don’t enjoy.

I don’t pay my bills until they’re overdue and I have to pay a fine since I hate logging into my ebanking. My employees at NoTube didn’t have work contracts for almost five years since I couldn’t be bothered to make the effort. I don’t really ever agree to complete a task if I don’t see the clear value it has for a party I want to help. I slack on administrative emails. I think you get the picture.

I’m also a lousy operator in that I’m no good or just average at so many important tasks needed for exceeding as an operator (finance, research, deep interest in primarily one area for an extensive period of time). The list goes on.

If I am right about this, this is hugely painful for me since so many theoretically highly interesting jobs require type 1 to succeed.

On the other hand, it means I now have clarity about a huge segment of jobs (most jobs really) I’ll never need to apply for or otherwise try to force onto myself.

Moreover, since I’m inept for 1 anyway and in the absence of dying or discovering 3, I can now squarely focus 100% of my energy on becoming the best version of 2 I can manage.

The more I think about it, this also has some advantages: while it is much harder to get 2 going for you and it to some degree limits the work you’ll be doing, once you’ve successfully created sufficient momentum in this scenario for you, you’ve become a unicorn. You cannot be replaced if you keep doing more of what you’ve been doing. In scenario 1, you’re exchangeable. Better CEO, worse CEO etc, the differences are often minor since primarily the skills matter, not the person. We see this all the time in consulting and to a lesser degree in quickly growing VC backed companies where all or part of the leadership team is replaced.

Which brings me to the big question: if I want to play in category 2, I’m basically building a company of one around myself. If it’s a company, then like just like any good old company, it consists of several building blocks (happy for any more additions):

1. Vision aka passion

2. P-USP (personality unique selling proposition)

3. Assets

Vision

Lets start with the vision: what’s my big passion that I need to tell the whole world about and will keep me running for years to come?

While I understand that some people realize their passion early on or something, for me I believe the answer is rapid experimentation.

So I’m trying to get as much data as I can on things I could see myself doing and see if they’re actually as much of a fit as I initially thought. If they’re not, no problem. I start asking what part doesn’t work for me and see if I can find someone who agrees with my terms. When I say data and someone, it just means I read up, but mainly I go out and talk to a ton of people who could have an interest in what it is that I want to do and care about.

This constant game of differential comparison has led to many great insights and led me to currently focus on connecting the Swiss & Israeli ecosystems and checking whether and under which conditions I’d want to work in startup investing.

P-USP (personality unique selling proposition)

Given I find my passion topic wise, what are the superpowers that are going to help me share my talent with the world and that I cannot turn off anyway (all the bad stuff has to come with some good stuff after all)?

These are some of the observations my friends, colleagues and others have mentioned to me frequently over the years paired with my own deductions:

• I am unstoppably curious about the future and have ideas non stop. As a result I foresee organizational problems & opportunities long before they’re visible in the financials of the business.
• I ask the right questions at the right time making me an excellent sparring partner for startup CEOs, consultants and senior level decision makers.
• I extremely quickly understand where someone really knows his stuff and where he doesn’t, enabling me to calibrate where I can trust a person’s opinion.
• I am an always-on super connector & culturally sensitive diplomat, able to relate to almost anyone at anytime.
• I am positive and optimistic while at the same time being down to earth that I manage to continuously inspire people around me and beyond.
• I have been gifted with an analytical and creative mind, identifying logic mistakes clearly where others don’t.
• I have an eye for visual design and am able to share my thoughts coherently through writing, public speaking and otherwise.

Assets

Given my passion and my USPs, what are the assets I can add to the mix? These are things I have built over the past few years, similar to how a company that’s been in existence for some years (28 currently in my case) can build on its strengths and capabilities to produce new, more competitive products no one else could (think Apple launching their iPod or basically any product successfully because of their deep institutional knowledge of consumer taste).

• My network: I have an incredibly strong & wide network of friends & colleagues across the world (with deeper ties in my hot spots like German-speaking countries, Silicon Valley, Israel), enabling me to get in touch and be taken seriously by almost anyone. As a result, I am currently pulling off complex high profile international multi stakeholder deals.
• My place of living: having lived in the US, South Africa, China and having done extensive traveling to many other places, I know and appreciate the nuances in culture. I currently live and breathe within two very different cultures in the deep tech ecosystems of Zurich and Tel Aviv on a daily basis and am connected to the others via my network. This also means I’m capable of relating to people and getting projects done successfully across borders of language or culture.
• My work experience: having built a decently successful business and several failed ones, I have a credible entrepreneurial story and even know a thing or two in the fields I workedin (healthcare, mobility, B2B sales & marketing tools, e-commerce, relationship & social influence tech, early stage deep tech). I can also relate to family owned businesses and their challenges as well as their often unique opportunities very well now.
• My family background: having grown up in a jewish family of doctors, scientists and artists, I appreciate the complexity of the world. Having been brought up with 10 siblings has taught me a thing or two about so many things.
• My studies: military taught me how to work as a group and sensitized me to how privileged I am. Studying business at a top 10 business university taught me how to think. Studying at Singularity University inspired me to think exponentially bigger and demand more from myself.
• My languages: I currently speak German, English and Hebrew fluently and my french is decent, understanding most and speaking I’ll have to practice again. You won’t believe how much language still plays a role in international business.

These are my vision, P-USP & assets. What’s yours? You can use the above guide to find out, let me know what you discover!

What’s next

Now that I have these building blocks down, the next challenge is to find out so much about my passions that I can then find the right level of abstraction and type of engagement. What I mean by that is basically a three step process:

1. Discover all my urgent passions by working on them
2. See which ones have more promise for now and what’s shared between them
3. Explore at what level I would like to be involved in and how others would like me to engage

If I have all of that, I’m pretty sure I can use this machine to help me achieve the change I’ll want to see in the world.

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