Steven Baker

What Would You Attempt If You Knew You Could Not Fail?

We’ve all heard this question before. Heck, it’s even printed on magnets. When your quote gets to magnets, you must have a good one.

There are a million silly answers to this question — “Go rob a bank! Duh! You’d be rich!” Right, right. But let’s set those aside for now.

Instead, here are the two answers that I just keep coming back to:

1. Create the leading online resource for electronic dance music addicts.

This one is near and dear to my heart. Pop music fans have it easy: want to hear Rihanna’s new music? Just check iTunes. Do you like Jason Mraz? Just listen to your local FM station. He’ll be on there. It’s all nice and easy for you.

But the world of electronic dance music (EDM) is a completely different ballgame. The genre is so ridiculously fragmented. Incredible new electronic dance music pours out at a phenomenal pace from all over the globe, from labels you’ve never heard of, from artists you’ve never heard of. And it doesn’t first show up on the Billboard charts or on your car radio; no, it shows up on obscure music blogs, or in streaming online radio shows from Europe, or – in the case of bootlegs – maybe even just in clubs.

And if that weren’t enough, to make things even more interesting, artists will often release new music not from just a single name, but under a variety of aliases. “Gaia”, “Perpetuous Dreamer”, “Rising Star”? Those are all just … Armin van Buuren. It’s bananas.

There are thousands upon thousands of flashy, one-off sites that concentrate on artists, or appearance info, or festivals, or clubs, or video interviews, or some other narrow slice. But there really isn’t a place that aggregates it all into a single stream. Without that, being a fan of this genre can be a lot of work. Every addict of electronic dance music has at least one story about how they fell off the wagon and “couldn’t keep up for awhile”, but that they still love it.

We really need something like an IMDB for EDM, but all completely realtime. An electronic dance music database. I am 100% certain that with a few committed running partners who were ready to hit this fulltime, we would absolutely dominate and destroy this.

2. Spend time completely mastering Ableton Live, with the goal of creating at least one track that gets played on a popular EDM radio show.

This one is just for straight up fun, nothing more. The nerdy online thing above is cool, but I also want to simply make other people happy through music that I produce. Electronic dance music has been the soundtrack to many of the best moments of my life for the past decade and I desperately want to turn that back around and try to return the favor.

For now, I really dig creating my own mixes, but hell, anybody can be a DJ. It takes technical ability, but not necessarily a ton of artistry. The true magic happens in the creation of new music.

I’ve been playing the piano since I was six years old, so I think I got what I need there to put something together. The missing link for me at this point is in the tools and software. I need more practice with Ableton Live — my software of choice — in order to be able to quickly translate the grooves and basslines in my head over to the screen and speakers sitting in front of me.

Music and technology are my original two loves going way back to my childhood. I guess electronic music, then, is simply the natural child of that pairing. *shrug* If I knew I could not fail, I’d give up everything else and spend my days creating it, just to get one little smile out of somebody listening to it.

Here’s The Fun Part

With the exception of my wife, my friends, and my family, pretty much everything else is going to melt away soon to concentrate on these two goals.

I know who I need to know. I know what needs to be done. The homework here is complete. Now, the job is simply to shift gears a bit and be able to work on these tasks more and more. But I know that it’s going to be very hard to stop this train once it really gets rolling.

Words of Wisdom From Garyvee

Gary Vaynerchuk absolutely nailed it during his keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo NY keynote in 2008:

“There is no reason to do s%#t that you hate. None. Promise me you won’t. Because you can lose just as much money being happy as hell.”

Exactly. And again a few minutes later:

“Look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself ‘what do I want to do every day for the rest of my life.’ Do that. I promise you can monetize that s%#t.”

Every day for the rest of my life, I want to work with electronic dance music. I want the entire world to try it out. And I know I can monetize that s%#t.

What are your answers? Post a comment!

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Marc Andreessen & Charlie Rose

While in school at the University of Illinois from 1995-2000, I spent some time working at NCSA. This was just a few short years after Marc Andreessen had worked there, but even by then, the stories about the development of Mosaic were starting to become legend.

His work on Mosaic with Eric Bina changed the world forever, and he’s clearly a brilliant guy, so I’ve always enjoyed hearing his thoughts on things.

His talk with Charlie Rose on the February 19 episode of The Charlie Rose Show is a great one. There are few conversations I enjoy watching more than when these two hook it up. You will, too. Give it a look.

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Process Can Never Replace Passion

Without fail, if you work at any small software company long enough, you will one day end up in a meeting where someone is introducing new ideas or new tools to “keep Engineering on track.”

“It seems like we’re slipping deadlines a lot lately.  With this tool, we’ll be better able to communicate the current status of Project XYZ and keep that from happening.”

This will undoubtedly have followed weeks of rumblings about how “the Engineering team is talented, but just seems to be a little off track.”

In my experience, when this happens, you can almost always bet that the Engineering team isn’t lacking process, it’s lacking passion.   And if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that process can never replace passion.  Never.

This S%!t Is Gonna Be Huge, Man

Small, agile, talented engineering teams can change the world, but it can only happen when they passionately believe that this is in fact what they are doing.

That’s why hackathons are such a beautiful thing to watch.  That’s why startups in their first 6 to 12 months are such a beautiful thing to watch. 

Super-talented engineers often love both, because while some traditional rules of software development get broken, you’re completely engrossed in a blissful state of Flow.  Simply put, you’re passionate about what you’re doing and, because of it, you’re at the top of your game.

Fix The Right Problem

My advice for any Engineering organization that feels like there’s a process breakdown occurring is to investigate whether the real problem is that their engineers simply aren’t passionate about their current projects. Diagnose this incorrectly at your own peril, because introducing new formal processes when passion is low does nothing but bring the failboat into harbor more quickly.

How do you tell the difference? It’s fairly simple. If the general sense is that productivity is too low, and you’re attempting to introduce a process to raise it, you’re solving the wrong problem. On the flip side, if productivity and the rate of activity is so manically high that you need a tool to herd the cats and keep track of it all, you’re probably solving the right problem. Nicely done.

That’s More Like It

If there’s a passion problem, and you fix it, you won’t have an organizational problem with keeping them on task for 8 hours a day, you’ll have a problem of angry significant others asking where your employees are at and why they’re not making it home for dinner like they promised they would.

Passionate engineers won’t bitch about not having mockups for the latest design; they’ll get into Photoshop themselves and hack some up.  They won’t complain about not having completed specs; they’ll write up some user stories themselves and pitch you on them.  They won’t complain about having to write status reports; they’ll be excited and anxious to proactively show you what they’ve completed.

Before you know it, the urgent issue of “needing a better process” to “keep Engineering on track” will melt away, because in this environment your developers will do the extra work to fill the gaps and keep things moving. Count on it.

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