I Choose to Begin.

If I have earned a pleasure or a reward, or if I wish that something had not happened; if I doubt the worth of an experience and remain in my past — then I choose to begin at this very second. -- Rainer Maria Rilke

For the last 20 years, I’ve never worked a day in my life for a company that I didn’t start. I started and sold three companies in that time. As a college student, I predicted in an article in WIRED magazine in March, 2000 that I would be a millionaire by age 24, and I made it so, a number of times over. My second company I sold for $100 million in 2011. Then, I took it back over, changed its business model, and just recently signed an agreement to sell it for $500 million in 2020.

It was the last announced sale of a $500+ million publicly listed US company before the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic. Prior to the signing, there had been an acquisition of such a company every 3 days. It took another 60 days for another one to sell. Our deal is set to close in the second half of this year. 

So how did I manage to build three companies of scale over the last 20 years?

The secret ingredient to a successful career is never discussed in business books: an entrepreneur is as strong as her inwardness is rich. Every decision is a manifestation of her state of mind. Company-building is not about team, technology, ideas, culture, consensus, or mission. A business lives or dies based on the character of the entrepreneur’s inwardness. 

“Only what is within you is near; all else is far,” says the poet Rilke. This simple and unappreciated fact is a truism. You are only as good as that which you have internalized. Everything else is far. 

But this internalization, this handful of inwardness, can transform the world and be transformed by it. It can dance with changing circumstance. Its inhalations contain the exhalations of everything, from the people to the places to the stars. This inwardness is the reflection of every other thing’s outwardness, filtered for one lifetime through the mystical quantum-computer of a human brain. 

The answer, then, you company builders and fortune seekers, is to nourish your inwardness, to enrich it with breadth and beauty, to refuse to contain it to narrow business-school classes and get-rich-quick schemes. 

This inwardness can lead you to an idea. It can develop it. It can recruit a team to mind it. It can inspire culture. And it can survive the desperation of the dark times. Luck, that misunderstood intuition, is the friend to a well-developed inwardness, and so is failure, that mother of every future happiness.

Poetic Business begins with inwardness. It begins with you. It seeks its lessons under rocks in far off corners and through the veil of what is big and weighty right in front of you. Through the lens of the poets, my hope for this blog is to connect poetic thinking to practical business advice, not so you can get rich quick, but so you can enrich your professional and personal life, which, if you are a company builder, is the same thing. 

My hope is that other businesspeople and other poets, and sometimes both, will contribute pieces of their own and that each one will quote at least one poet and provide at least one bit of related practical business advice. So, if you are so inspired, write a piece for us!

When I write, I will often use Rainer Maria Rilke as my poet. I have been reading Rilke for at least a decade, often returning to the same books and poems over and over again. Business is so often on the knife’s edge of success and failure. Rilke understood dread and bliss as "two faces of the same divinity.” He understood that beauty and ephemerality are intertwined. Anyone managing change in a competitive environment would be wise to heed him. I suggest anyone interested in Rilke start with A Year with Rilke, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy.

I will aim to write at least weekly, and hope others join me. I will tag and organize the content by what I see as the various stages of a business. I will delve into the beginnings, fostering inwardness, the creative journey, managing ambiguity and change, surviving crisis, transforming dragons into princesses, maintaining sanity, selling your Frankenstein, and the societal implications of entrepreneurship as unchecked accumulation. But not necessarily in that order. 

My hope is Poetic Business will help you bring something worthy into the world and then defend it from the many who would take it from you. My hope as well is to get your feedback on the posts and to incorporate your comments for eventual inclusion in a book by the same name: Poetic Business. Any frequent commenters will get a call out in the published book!

Join me for the next installment by adding your email address now, and I’ll send you a new piece of Poetic Business to your email every week.

Thanks for visiting!