John B Petersen III

I am finally in a position where I am truly happy with my professional life. That doesn’t mean that everything is perfect or that I’m even remotely satisfied — far from it. Shit is more complicated and difficult now than ever, but I love it. I love what we are building, I’m incredibly fortunate to work with super smart people, and I walk into work every day fired up and ready for world domination. This makes me truly happy. I had no grand plan to be building MVPs at the NYC Dev Shop. It certainly wasn’t a direct path, but it’s been a fun ride so far. So here is my unabridged 4 Part answer to how it all came to be:

• Career Path 1.0: Make Uniformed Decisions
• Career Path 2.0: Learn to Hate
• Career Path 3.0: Don’t Listen to Your Mother
• Career Path 4.0: Learn. Improve. Adapt.

Career Path 2.0: Learn to Hate

Through my history of making uninformed, life altering decisions, I had stumbled upon Engineering Management as a major in college. This major was going to allow me to become a swiss army knife — I’d be able to identify problems and come up with creative solutions because of the engineering discipline, AND I’d be able to understand and evaluate the business implications and financial impact of those solutions. At least that’s what they told me.

Aside from choosing the EM major, I made one other amazing decision during my time at Stevens Institute — I decided to join their Cooperative Education program. As a Co-Op student, I would spend 5 full semesters working at some of the best companies in the world instead of taking classes. As a result, I’d graduate in 5 years instead of 4, but I would have all this crazy stuff on my resume that I could flaunt around.

Here was my thought process around Co-Op:

“You’re telling me, I can stay in college for an extra year without having to pay extra tuition, I’m going to make bank working at legit companies, and when I graduate my resume is going to look better than 98% of my graduating peers… Sign me up for 5 years of college life please!

What I didn’t realize going into the Co-Op program was that it was going to teach me to hate.

Hate is a strong word, and I probably don’t mean it, but I learned to hate career paths that weren’t a perfect fit for me. I can’t overstate how important this was for me as a wandering college student trying to find my way in the world. With a major that was going to allow me to succeed at any job in the world, I had to start eliminating stuff quickly.

Hatred #1: Taking a dump in public

My first Co-Op assignment was at Turner Construction Company, a behemoth of a company, and they hired me for my 1st Co-Op assignment. Makes sense — I had been climbing roofs and pouring foundations with my father since I could walk and I knew how to read blueprints.

Hard hats, jeans, boots, Friday beers at lunch with the crew, telling dudes what to do who have been doing this stuff since before I was born — I was ready for all of that. Nothing could prepare me for the time that I had to use the portable bathroom on the unfinished 27th floor of the tower that we were building. But when it’s an emergency, you gotta do what you gotta do. So I sat down in this thing which had no roof and your feet hung out the bottom. I felt like I was wearing a tube top while going to the bathroom. Of course, my crew sees this going down and proceeds to start heckling me. Needless to say, it wasn’t a very enjoyable experience.

And right then I knew, I had bigger ambitions then dumping in a portable tube top bathroom on the 27th floor of an unfinished building.

Hatred #2: Building things that I don’t understand

Now armed with an awkward bathroom story and some great project management experience, I was able to walk into my next interviews like I was king of the world. I led a team of 10 carpenters on a $3 million renovation project, I did this, I did that. They ate it up. Interviewed for 5 positions and got 4.5 offers (one was bullshit so I don’t count that as a full offer).

I decided it was time to take my talents to pharmaceuticals — another no-brainer: my mother is a pharmacist so when I wasn’t swinging a hammer as a child I was counting pills with mom. I took a position at Ethicon (a Division of Johnson & Johnson), and I was going to do product development. Sweet. I could use my project management to help roll out new products to save peoples lives. The only problems were that (1) it was a 45 minute drive each way to work with no traffic (but there was always traffic) and (2) I had no clue what the hell my group actually built. Totally f’ing clueless about why this white paste was going to help heal wounds faster after surgery. I became the go-to guy for setting up the label printer.

From that day forward, I made a decision to never live far away from work and that passion was incredibly important to me.

Hatred #3: Rotting away at a soulless environment

For my final Co-Op assignment, I went chasing after the money. I landed a sweet internship at an international bank. In my mind, it seemed like the right thing to do:

• I could work my ass off and achieve eternal glory
• I could become some hotshot banker and be ready to retire by 40
• I could chase the American Dream

The only problem, my company wasn’t American and they seemingly didn’t give a shit about us US folks once the financial markets started crashing. The environment was in a downward, death spiral and it was reflected in the attitudes of all the employees at every level of the company — nine-to-five with no accountability. Just survive long enough to get another paycheck before the next round of layoffs occur.

It wasn’t always that way. In fact, it was amazing in the beginning. I used to be incredibly passionate about work. I used to get promoted every six months. By the time I was done there, I outperformed everything that could possibly be measured. But I was being constrained by the bounds of a bullshit system that was designed to keep people in check instead of rewarding outperformance. I felt like I was trapped in the Matrix.

After almost 4 years at the bank and feeling that I learned all that I could without succumbing to the role of a mindless drone, it was time for a move.

I want to be clear. I would never trade my experiences for anything in the world, and I love my “hatred” for where it has lead me. I find myself using so much of what I learned in those early days every single day at the Dev Shop. The most difficult part about it was that each time I had to leave a seemingly good opportunity that other people would have died for.

And that is how we get to Career Path 3.0: Don’t Listen to Your Mother.

I am finally in a position where I am truly happy with my professional life. That doesn’t mean that everything is perfect or that I’m even remotely satisfied — far from it. Shit is more complicated and difficult now than ever, but I love it. I love what we are building, I’m incredibly fortunate to work with super smart people, and I walk into work every day fired up and ready for world domination. This makes me truly happy. I had no grand plan to be building MVPs at the NYC Dev Shop. It certainly wasn’t a direct path, but it’s been a fun ride so far. So here is my unabridged 4 Part answer to how it all came to be:

• Career Path 1.0: Make Uniformed Decisions
• Career Path 2.0: Learn to Hate
• Career Path 3.0: Don’t Listen to Your Mother
• Career Path 4.0: Learn. Improve. Adapt.

Career Path 1.0: Make Uninformed Decisions

Some of my earliest childhood memories involve building things — playing with legos on Christmas morning, building forts in the woods, and climbing up unfinished 2nd story additions to “help” my dad build houses. And when you play with legos as a child, people tell you that you’re going to be an engineer. After hearing it enough times as a child (and finally realizing that they didn’t mean operating a train), you start to believe it.

Eventually, the self-fulfilling prophecy became true. I was very good at math and science and generally didn’t appreciate reading, so more people kept telling me that I should be an engineer. As a 15 year old kid who was just trying to get drunk and make bad decisions, I now had to pick a career path that would determine the course for the rest of my life.

Uninformed Decision #1: I want to be an engineer

I had absolutely no clue what an engineer actually did on a day to day basis and I could barely spell the word correctly, but that’s what I wanted to be. Supposedly, you *build* things and you get paid decent money. It was like they plugged in my SAT scores and spit out a tiny piece of paper that said ENGINEER. Ok, good enough. Count me in.

Now that the Sorting Hat told me I had to be an engineer, I next had to figure out where I wanted to go to school. This seemed like more of a headache than I wanted to deal with. My friends were stressing out about how they had to write so many essays and schedule campus visits. Again, 15 year old me had more important things to do.

My college search process was methodical. Step 1: find colleges that had an engineering program. Step 2: Throw out all the ones that required an essay. And just like that I had a very short list. One pre-frosh weekend later (which involved cutting all my classes to play basketball and an all-time great performance on the beer pong table as a high school senior), and I no longer had to search for colleges.

Uninformed Decision #2: Stevens Institute accepted me early admissions with no essay. My search was over.

Sweetness. Now I got to watch my friends stress out about college acceptances and writing all those essays, and I could focus on the important stuff — whatever that happened to be at the time. I was really able to enjoy my senior year, but Stevens started bothering me to pick a major.

How the hell could I possibly pick a major? I barely knew what engineering meant, and I had no clue what an engineer actually did. So I looked over the choice of majors and the answer revealed itself.

Uninformed Decision #3: I like computers and I want to be an engineer. Therefore, by transient property, I want to be a Computer Engineer!

I can’t even try to put a spin on this decision. I took one “Intro to C++” class, and I immediately found the Change of Major form. Having to spend an entire 3 hour lab class trying to have a computer tell me that something is False when I already logically knew the answer 2 hours and 59 minutes ago. No thanks.

So I finally smartened up a bit and made a somewhat informed decision. By this time, I fully recognized I had no clue what I was doing and my track record of making decisions was comical at best. So I did what made the most sense to me at the time: I picked a major that would basically allow me to do whatever I want. They called it “Engineering Management” and described it as core engineering with a focus on business.

Jackpot — with a combination of business and engineering I no longer had to worry about making uninformed decisions that would determine the rest of my life. I just left the window wide open so that I could literally take this new found knowledge wherever I wanted to go.

And that’s how we arrive Career Path 2.0: Learn to Hate.

It’s crazy to think that’s it been one year since we first rolled up on the scene of the TechStars Boulder office for Day 1 of the program. I still remember that first day very well. Actually I remember most of my time Boulder rather well — The Uretsky Conflict Resolution Video, rap battles with the SalesLoft boys, so many late nights of Werewolf, and learning so much from everyone each and every day.

Now that some time has passed, I want to write more about my experience at TechStars, my time with DigitalOcean and all the fun things that were packed into a summer in Boulder.

This may be the funniest video I have from my time out there, but there are certainly some good stories and experiences worth writing about. Good luck to the new class that is just getting started — you are in for a wild ride!

Now that we are PTD (Post Tech Day), it’s time to get back into a routine. That means adding some structure, changing some things up, and trying new things in both my personal life and in business. Change for the sake of change is a waste — it should be focused on improving or learning. That’s why it’s time to start experimenting.

These experiments are going to cover a wide range: some things I’m just curious about, other things I want to try or experience. I don’t have a full list yet of what these experiments are going to be, but I have a few ideas and will be sharing this growing list very soon.

The structure of these experiments is simple — try something new or different for an entire month. The ultimate goal is improvement. Hopefully some of these experiments produce positive results, and hopefully some of them stick with me after the month is over. That said, I am well aware that these are experiments and some of them just aren’t going to work out long term. Regardless, it’s going to be a fun test of will power and determination.

Now, onto the good stuff…

My first experiment actually started a week ago, and it wasn’t a result of any big plan or intended to be part of an experiment. It just worked out that way :)

For the month of May, I’ll be stepping up my work attire — business casual for this guy.

I know it doesn’t sound like much, and many of the future experiments are going to be quite different. When you’ve been wearing jeans, startup t-shirts, hoodies, backwards hats and sandals for the last year, it’s actually a lot tougher than you think.

We’re one week into the first experiment, and the results are quite interesting thus far. I’ll be writing a detailed post about the results of each experiment as well as what the future experiments are going to be. In the mean time, it’s time to dust off the old wardrobe from my financial life.

Tech Day was amazing: Facebook Photo Album

Now that I am starting to get my life back, I’m going to start blogging regularly again. And I’ve got a lot of fun stuff to talk about :)

We have exactly one month left until NY Tech Day 2013.

I’m super excited because we have so much cool stuff planned already. We tripled the size of the venue (now 77,000 sq ft) and we are doubling the number of exhibiting startups and attendees (450+ startups and 10,000 attendees). It’s going to be ridiculous!

That also means that it’s time to step up my game. Time to go into Beast Mode — working more hours than I’d publicly admit and than anyone else will ever know, no more drinking and partying (not that it was ever really all that much to begin with), working harder, smarter, being laser-focused, 6am workouts to keep me sane and 10pm jump rope sessions at the office to keep the energy up.

What that ultimately means is that you probably won’t see or hear from me until after April 25th. I apologize in advance to family and friends, but it’s what I have to do to ensure that this event is an ultimate success for all of our exhibitors, attendees and sponsors. Gotta leave it all on the field…

See you in May!

This is a common question we hear when meeting entrepreneurs, and on that I came across on Quora this weekend. The question asked “How long is too long to release a minimum viable product?” and specifically referred to how Blekko was in development for over three years before launching. Naturally, I felt the need to chime in and then subsequently turn this into a blog post.

I think we need to defer to Gandalf on this one:

“A wizard is never late. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.”

And so it should be with a Minimum Viable Product. Every startup is different and only the founders know precisely when is the right time to release their MVP upon the world.

To give a more actionable answer: a MVP by definition should require theminimum (really putting some extra emphasis on minimum here) amount of effort required to gain the maximum amount of validated learning to test the core assumptions.

That’s too many buzz words for me in one sentence, but I think it’s required to properly answer this question. The entire purpose of the MVP is to test the crazy assumptions that the founders have been dreaming up. Most of the people that approach us at NYC Dev Shop never explicitly identify the main assumption that they are trying to validate. That’s a problem.

Without knowing exactly what your core assumption is, how do you know what your MVP should do functionally let alone how long it should take to build before you release it? You are basically saying, “I want to build this solution even though I’m not really sure that I’m solving a problem for anyone but myself (sometimes not even for yourself).”

Once you have your core assumption identified, your decision making process is easy:

• Will my MVP in its current state allow me to test my core assumption? If no —> keep building
• Will this new shiny feature provide me with more validated learning? If no —>  defer to Phase 2
• Will spending countless hours on design and branding truly help me understand what people think about my MVP? If no —> be proud that you are embarrassed by your design

I had someone approach me with the idea of building a new MVP every single week for 10 weeks. I initially thought that the idea of throwing a bunch of stuff on the wall to see what sticks was a clever way to go about finding something amazing. After thinking through it a little more, I decided that I was very much against this. Putting an arbitrary time limit on an idea isn’t the correct approach at all. A week might be too long for a bad idea and certainly might not be long enough for a good one.

At the Dev Shop, our sweet spot is 3 weeks to 3 months of development, but of course it is entirely dependent on the project. Sometimes you can get it done in a weekend at a hackathon. Other times if you’re building a search engine or a Tesla, it could take a bit longer.

Last night, I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel at the first ever #BizDevNYC meetup (amazing that there wasn’t already a Biz Dev meetup here). There were some really great questions, and I actually have quite a few takeaways of things I want to implement myself.

One thing that came up that I think warrants further discussion is this:

Is Biz Dev all out warfare? Is there a line that shouldn’t be crossed or is everything fair game?

I completely agree that it is your responsibility to feed your family — make sure there is enough food on the table for everyone to eat their fill. I am all about doing what has to be done in order to accomplish this goal, but I draw the line where one panelist forges ahead.

Is it ok to “lie, steal and cheat” in the name of the biz dev as this one panelist put it? Is it ok to do anything and everything “short of a restraining order” to try to make it happen? Should you tell white lies and make up stories of potential partnerships and customers to make your company look better?

I’d love to hear all of your thoughts on this, but for me the answer is clear. I’m going to do whatever it takes to succeed at business development, but I am going to do so in a moral and ethical way. I’ve gone as far as being called a marketing d-bag and I’ve certainly showed up places I don’t belong in order to make things happen, but never at the harm of anyone or anything else.

Our reputation is much more important that any individual sale or partnership. I plan on being in this industry for a long time and avoiding the route of a one-hit wonder, so for me the answer is clear. But to each his own…

Despite my general dislike for the Baltimore Ravens (and some of their players who may or may not have been involved in murder and are now portrayed as a positive God-praising, role model), I am currently infatuated with the Joe Flacco story.

Let’s rewind to the preseason. The Ravens front office and Joe Flacco were in serious discussions for a long-term deal. Beginning his rookie year, Flacco lead his team to the playoffs each of his first 5 seasons including his rookie year. Since 2008, Flacco has the second highest winning percentage as a starting QB. in 2012, he was one play away from beating the Patriots in the AFC championship and leading the Ravens to the Super Bowl. Despite all of that, it seemed like he never got any respect — even from the front office of his own team.

So instead of publicly complaining about his situation, he took the ultimate entrepreneurial position and rolled the dice with millions and millions of dollars at stake. He was faced with a giant risk and massive uncertainty and let his belief in himself and his abilities guide his actions. He could have been angry with the team, but he repeatedly took the approach that he would not let the lack of a long-term deal affect his performance or attitude.

He basically said (and I’m paraphrasing here because I can’t find the actual quote):

“I’m not worried about a long-term deal because the longer they wait, the more they will have to pay me.”

Everyone laughed at this statement. He was ridiculed by sports analysts and his own fans alike who claimed he was just a middle-of-the-pack quarterback.

Fast forward to today. After leading the team to playoffs yet again, Joe Flacco has had an incredible run this post-season with 8 TDs and 0 INTs, beating the Colts and then the heavily-favored Broncos and Patriots lead eliminating 2 of the best quarterbacks of all-time in Manning and Brady. =

In the face of all this uncertainty, Flacco has lead his team to the Super Bowl with a chance to become champions this Sunday. His gamble has paid off nicely, and that’s why I’m rooting for Joe Flacco: the entrepreneurial quarterback.

[UPDATED on 2/4/13]

Despite the best efforts of a momentum-shifting, post-Beyonce blackout, Joe Flacco has lead the Baltimore Ravens to a 34-31 Super Bowl victory and earned himself the Most Valuable Player award. He went 22-33 with 287 yards and 3 TDs and 0 interceptions. He had an incredible post season run throwing for 11 TDs and 0 interceptions in 4 games.

Way to go, Joe!