Three ways starting a company is like creating a song

I am at an interesting point in my career journey--having spent several years at One Medical, where part of my responsibility included hatching and growing new service lines, I left recently to start a company. While I have spent several hundreds of thousands of dollars (wince) on my business training, and well over 10,000 hours practicing this training, I am struck by how much my current work actually draws from my lifelong passion of making music. 

As a (sort of) professional song-writer and producer in my twenties, and now enthusiastic hobbyist, I have produced and recorded over 35 songs, most of which I wrote. Here are three things songwriting and entrepreneurship have in common:

The concept must be addictive. 

For every song I have ever written, there are 5 song ideas that never got recorded. The idea may have caught me for a minute, but the inspiration passed before pen got to paper and now it is gone forever (wiping tear). The ones that make it to recording are the ones that seem to keep playing in my ears. I record those songs just to hear quiet again. 

I think company ideas are the same. I have had many ideas to start companies, some of which may not have been complete trash. But this particular one feels like it will remain an unanswered question in my life if I don't try to build it. Curiosity about the possibility of something transformative at a massive scale is a powerful force. 

...but quality product is really about getting the best people to make this concept a reality with you.

At this point you may complain that this sounds like every listicle on business ever written. Hear me out. 

  While I am a vocalist, I cannot play any instruments well enough to record. So that means recording a song requires tracking down whoever plays whatever random instrument part I am hearing in the song-if I am lucky it's a guitar. Once it was a bamboo flute (took me three years to find a musician and I had to make an excuse to fly to India for the session. Totally worth it, it was a gift for my sister on her wedding day.)

When you work with a really expert musician, they learn the parts you wrote for them quickly. It's funny how the sound of a song can change from cardboard to crystal when one part is executed better. 

And no matter how specific my song idea is, I always let musicians I work with record their own take on the part I've written. Sometimes, I end up using their improvisation. I think great collaboration is about being cohesive in a vision so that people can react to it, but then giving your collaborators enough degrees of freedom to add their own unique perspective to it. 

I have found that this is what my best team members have required. They need to trust my authenticity, but by definition they should know more than me about their given expertise. Novices are threatened by this. Great collaboration is about celebrating that expertise by drawing it out, and then being a great editor to hone it into product. 

The product is never finished. 

One interesting paradox about recorded songs is that listeners get used to an exact version of a song. Every nuance of a popular song is part of the product, like a vocal flourish or even a breath. But for the writer of the song, the recorded version is sometimes the arbitrary choice of lots of versions that existed. There may be things on a recorded copy that he or she doesn't even like. Ironically, sometimes it is only after touring a recorded song that artists get really expert at performing them. 

Great companies are the same. The launch is a starting point. It indicates a vector but by no means is it the end. Looking forward to beginning the journey and yes, this is me managing down expectations of perfection at launch. 

Any other musician entrepreneurs? Would love your take!

PS-You can hear a couple of songs I wrote for my daughters recently under the artist name Sependa on Spotify. Just make sure to remember the phrase "enthusiastic hobbyist" before listening. 

PPS-If you are an engineer and want to learn more, how come you have not emailed or messaged me yet??