What’s Your “Falafel Shop”?
Make your money, but don’t get burned doing work you’ll resent
In 1997 I joined a small, publicly traded company called Zoran. A seemingly unimportant decision for an 18 year old. However, it later defined my entire career path, through which I’ve met many of my closest friends, including my wife.
Back then, I was working on a yet unborn project named COACH — Camera On A CHip. The novel idea where you have a single chip solution to operate the entire hardware of a digital camera (remember those?). I even remember my very first task — write the quickest log2 function in assembler on a 16-bit microprocessor.
Our CEO, Levy Gerzberg, believed in the idea and poured enormous amount of resources and trust into the team. He believed that COACH will eventually be used by every camera brand out there. And Levy was right — we made it into almost every brand, with the notable exception of Canon. Zoran was the Intel of digital cameras.
However, as you can imagine, the first several years were painful and slow in terms of customer acquisition, revenue and profits. So one day, circa 2000, our COO sent an email to the team, asking for ideas, where else COACH can be used.
Remember, this was before smartphones, before Skype, before backup cameras in cars, it was webcams early days and the security world was still entirely prewired in analog.
So I thought through a few ideas and potential revenue streams, put myself together and went to knock on the COO’s door.
The Big Day
He smiled and welcomed me to his office. I sat down and outlined my best idea. I honestly don’t remember what it was now, but I do remember his verbatim response. With a perplexingly innate Israeli frankness, he said:
— Alex, that’s a stupid idea. Zoran also can make falafel and make money, but we don’t!
His swift response was as effective as stubbing my toe against the bed — painful at first, but quickly teaches a valuable lesson:
Is whatever you’re considering more satisfying than running a falafel shop?
If not, then it’s a stupid idea.
Don’t get me wrong. Not that there is anything wrong with running a falafel shop. If that’s what you want to do and enjoy doing — running a falafel shop will be very satisfying. So it’s not an absolute measurement everyone needs to compare all their ideas against.
The point is that each one should have their own “falafel shop” to compare to. There’re many legitimate ways to make money, some are less and some are more efficient when it comes to ROI. Yet passion, experience, core competency and overall goals should be always considered when deciding to embark on a new venture.
As for running a falafel shop, it’s actually easier than you think. All you need to have a packed falafel shop is a solid recipe and more importantly, to remember to change the cooking oil every day. As proof for it, go stand in a long line at Falafel Stop in Sunnyvale. (I’m not getting paid for this, I’m just a fan.)
Alex Fishman is Founder/CEO of Bugsee, a bug and crash reporting tool for mobile app developers. Follow him on Twitter: @fishmanalex.
