z on life

The most useful thing I have learned in my whole process of startups, and maybe even life for that matter, is the importance of the phrase “know what you don’t know”.

It is crucial to learn everything you can from everyone in your life, be it friends, family, engineers, venture capitalists, or complete strangers. Being able to learn means you know what you need to look for from each these interactions. Knowing what you need to look for means knowing what you don’t know. You should go into every interaction knowing exactly what new information you can extract. This isn’t selfish, it is merely efficient learning. Besides, you probably have lots of cool stuff to offer in return.

When people don’t know what they don’t know, they are bound to fail again and again. Unfortunately, this happens all the time, especially to those who are young or inexperienced. I have been definitely been guilty of it too, so I’m no exception. Knowing what you don’t know keeps you searching with tunnel vision, and if that great idea or strategy isn’t directly in front of you, you’re never going to hit it. From the perspective of success over a long period of time (let’s say, a career), this is so dangerous. It’s a recipe for having a long, tough, excruciating string of failures.

Not knowing what you don’t know is like tweaking variables in an equation to find the local maximum. Knowing what you don’t know means you are going to throw that whole notion away and find new variables you can to use to find the global maximum. Think outside the box, and throw away all of the artificial constraints you’ve put on your thought processes.

When planning, strategizing, or thinking, here’s some questions to think about:

1. What concepts have I previously written off as ‘not-relevant’ to me?

2. Who would have a new outlook on this and why?
3. What about me or my experience is limiting how I look at things?
4. Are there any tangential skill-sets or knowledge that I can acquire?
5. Can I draw intuition from whole other areas, industries, genres?

If you adopt the “know what you don’t know” mindset, you go through extremely fast cycles of self-revision, become a wider/deeper thinker, and convey to others that you have put ego or image aside in exchange for great self-advancement. That’s the mark of someone who wants to win.

I can’t help but quote a great book written by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner called “Teaching as a Subversive Activity”, recommended by the wise Jared Kopf. Knowing what you don’t know is all about maximizing your ability to learn, and in this book they talk about the characteristics of learners. They say that good learners:

1. Have confidence in their ability to learn

2. Enjoy solving problems
3. Know exactly what is relevant to their survival
4. Rely on their own judgement to spot good and bad advice
5. Do not fear being wrong
6. Are not fast answerers
7. Are flexible
8. Have a profound respect for data and information
9. Do not need to have one irrevocable solution to a problem

It’s clear that many if not all of these things are drivers for or can be driven by knowing what you don’t know. Nice! I can rest easy knowing that someone who actually knows what they are talking about agrees with me.

So I am thinking about writing a series on what I’ve learned over the past 3 years of doing startups. That said, I wanted to give you guys a bit of an idea of what I’ve done in case you’re curious where I got this perspective, or if you’re deciding whether or not to listen to me.

Alright, here we go. Rewind to 2005. I am in school at Carnegie Mellon, 17 years old, finishing up my CS degree, and about to start my MBA the coming year. Even with the MBA, I thought it was pretty likely I would go to some sort of CS grad school, that is, until the entrepreneurial bug bit. It all started when a friend from CMU, Kyle Langworthy, approached me with an idea. We took it, ran with it, and I have never looked back. It’s been startups ever since.

Really quickly, in the 3 years since, I’ve done the following:

• Envivial - 3D virtual retail stores for interactive online shopping
• Eivod - P2P click-to-play on-demand video in the browser
• SlapVid - an innovative online video previewing experience
• Cloudant - super-fast multi-streaming home routers
• My Current Gig - going big in consumer internet (company TBA)

Envivial was my entry point with Kyle and Joe Damato where we learned the ropes, won some business plan competitions, and really ground out our first real startup experience. After that, Joe and I continued on to found Eivod with Wei An Wang and Bob DiMaggio where we built our first really technically hard product, one that got us into Y-Combinator. SlapVid was our product we launched in YC as a test platform for this P2P stuff and a great user experience on top of YouTube. When that didn’t quite work out, we turned P2P on its head, and used our networking expertise to make multi-streaming routers in Cloudant and pitched this at the YC demo day. After demo day, we decided it was best not to continue and it was back to the MBA, but only for a short time. Only 2 months later, I was swept out to the west coast into the current gig with Andrew Chen, Matt Rubens, and very soon thereafter Aman Gupta. Now we’re just cranking away.

Anyway, it’s been a dense few years of learning. In this time, I finished my CS degree and will get my MBA in a few weeks (assuming I pass, knock on wood). I’ve iterated on the startup experience, and learned an enormous amount about technology, building companies, and life in general. In the posts to come, I will discuss some of that learning.

PS: In hindsight, I realize the need to give mad props to Kyle for getting this ball rolling.

Hey everyone this is Matt. I just wanted to say hi and introduce myself. More to come, but for now, here’s a short bio blurb that I was asked to write up for something recently.

“Matt Humphrey is an internet entrepreneur new to the bay area from the east coast. Over the past 4 years, Matt has founded startups in the spaces of peer-to-peer, online video, and virtual worlds and is now focused on consumer internet and specifically user acquisition. He is a recent graduate of Carnegie Mellon’s computer science program, where he matriculated at age 13, and will receive his MBA in May of this year from the Tepper School of Business at CMU. Matt has developed a unique blend of technology roots and business interests, and is voraciously seeking a large-scale startup success.”