Teaching Entrepreneurs to ‘Hop Over the Rabbit Hole’
I don’t know any human being who has led a perfect life — or any successful entrepreneur who hasn’t experienced at least one major setback on the road to the top. Even iconic businessmen like Michael Dell, Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs ran into roadblocks along their journeys, as I remind listeners on the latest TMI (The Motivation Inside) podcast.
Many successful people try to sugarcoat their journeys, but I believe we should all be honest about the challenges we’ve faced. The only way to get better is to learn from our mistakes. That’s why I wrote my third book, Hopping over the Rabbit Hole: How Entrepreneurs Turn Failure into Success (published by John Wiley & Sons).
As an entrepreneur, it’s not a question of if you’ll encounter a rabbit hole to hop over, but when. My career may look great on paper, but this book shares what life is really like as an entrepreneur — the desperation, the insecurity, the depression. I’ve lived through all of that, and so has every other entrepreneur.
As I recount in the book, my partners and I started SkyBridge Capital (the second business I’ve built from scratch) as a hedge fund incubation business. The problem, as we soon discovered, was we weren’t equipped to succeed with that business model. In order to survive we had to pivot into a different business, and do so while the world was mired in the worst financial crisis in 81 years. During the crisis, our portfolio at SkyBridge dwindled and we were literally days away from closing up shop.
I had to muster reserves of grit and perseverance I never knew I had to keep the company afloat. As I write in the book, the stress related to running SkyBridge in the early days caused me to develop a nasty habit — grinding my teeth in my sleep, for which I wear a Lucite mouth guard.
An idea I initially thought was insane — holding an alternative investing conference in Las Vegas in the middle of the financial crisis — ended up saving us. When my partner Victor Oviedo first approached me with this opportunity, I wasn’t sure it would be a good fit. Aside from the volatile economic climate, I wasn’t sure whether SkyBridge, as a hedge fund incubation business, would benefit in any way from hosting a conference. When Victor and I brought the idea to the rest of the management team, the vote was 5–2 opposed — we were the only two “yes” votes.
But with our backs against the wall, I chose to make a unilateral decision. In the first week of May 2009, 350 people — hedge fund managers, institutional investors, politicians, professional athletes and entertainers — converged on the Bellagio in Las Vegas for the first annual SALT (SkyBridge Alternatives) Conference.
The first SALT was such a vote of confidence for the city of Las Vegas, which hit a serious snag after the financial crisis hit, that then-Mayor Oscar Goodman presented SkyBridge with the key to the city.
But when discussing and planning the event, we weren’t sure if the conference would be a success or a farewell party. Only after it went over so well did we start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. As I write in Hopping over the Rabbit Hole, entrepreneurs have to not only quickly adapt to changing circumstances, but sometimes they have to go against the consensus (as Victor and I did with SALT) in order to bring an innovation to market.
To hear more lessons from Hopping over the Rabbit Hole, as well as anecdotes from the book that feature Ben Bernanke, Mark Cuban, Leon Panetta, and many others, you can listen to the entire TMI podcast: https://soundcloud.com/anthonyscaramucci/26-hopping-over-the-rabbit-hole
You can also buy a copy of Hopping over the Rabbit Hole through Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Hopping-over-Rabbit-Hole-Entrepreneurs/dp/1119116333/).
