Hey everyone! This week I’m slightly changing up the format of my post. I want to position my writing to be more relatable and applicable to my readers. I hope you find this week’s edition useful and feel free to let me know what you think! I’m always up for feedback 😀
What is surface area?
Everyone knows or has heard of the popular saying, “you make your own luck”. There’s an element of truth here, people don’t randomly succeed. But if we trace back the steps, there is typically a path we can follow that leads from one point to another. It is easy to view successes and deem them as an overnight success. But we almost never know the true story of what it took to get there—the years of hard work, changing course, or starting over. We just see the result. There is really no overnight successes, they are years in the making.
A serial entrepreneur, Jason Roberts, blogged about this concept “Luck Surface Area”.
The amount of serendipity that will occur in your life, your Luck Surface Area, is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you’re passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated.
This is the model Jason uses to describe and illustrate this concept: Luck = Telling x Doing. Basically, if you increase the time “telling” and the time “doing” you will increase your luck surface area.
Why it matters
There is an important lesson here—we can’t control when or how lucky we get, but we can control our outputs, which are all of the actions we take to reach our goal. We often don’t exactly reach our goal but that path leads to unexpected twists and turns in our journey (and that is what makes it fun!). Many of those actions might be a waste of time, but we don't know which ones could unsuspectedly be the game-changers.
When my company VoiceHero was on the brink of bankruptcy, I had to let go of three members (60%) of our team. We had less than $2000 in the bank—we cut all expenses and even our pay to 0, which was only a $1,000 stipend just to get by during that time. For five months, my co-founder and I were interviewing for every startup incubator and speaking to any investor who would talk to us. We were also in the middle of a pivot so any investment would still mean we would need to change our idea (and disappoint the investor after the funding). Throughout the process, we were denied by over 30+ investors. But then there was this one meeting I almost didn’t take because it was a 90-minute bus to get to Toronto—it was to meet the managing director of Techstars, Aviel, and the Amazon Alexa Fund Portfolio Manager, Brian. Despite hating my idea, which I poured 8 months of work into, they were willing to invest in me to do something else. I would have never thought about this as a potential option when I was looking for funding—an investor(s) that would support the scrapping of an idea and starting from scratch. I thought this was going to be like every other investor and incubator interview I had prior, terrible. But I was damn wrong.
There are many famous startups in history that had these types of stories:
After 51 games, and on the verge of bankruptcy, Rovio set out to make one last game before calling it quits. That game was Angry Birds.
Stewart Butterfield wanted to return his investors’ money when his game wasn’t gaining traction. His investor rejected the refund, and the company went on to release Slack, which went public at a $16 billion valuation.
The founders started Twitter while looking for ideas when their podcasting platform, Odeo, wasn’t taking off.
The massive multiplayer online game, Glitch, which became Slack.
How do we maximize our surface area?
Communicate often
Share your successes and more importantly, share your failures. Everyone knows it is part of the journey and failure is inevitable, but people seldom do the latter. Be honest and transparent (to everyone), there is value created by the sheer number of people who are made aware—the power in numbers. Don’t assume people already know or don’t care to know, the ones who care will reach out and help, and the ones who don’t care will continue not to. Doing this will help capture value in ways you never would have predicted.
Say Yes a lot
This is contrary to the belief where the typical advice is to get better at saying “no”. But that is to those things that eat away at our time and have no clear benefit. If there isn’t a clear benefit or altruistic motives like helping out a friend or someone in your network, just say no. If you are unsure how something may benefit you but it could have some sort of impact on the future, do it anyways—say yes. Things come full circle in more ways than you think.
Offer to help
I think karma is real. I’ve gotten so much help for everything that I’ve ever done—from school, work, startups, even getting on a reality show (I literally messaged everyone from past seasons and surprisingly, most replied). People help, you just need to ask. And when you are asked, you should repay the favor. Giving back is important and is built in your own values system—you will realize people will want to help you more and it becomes virtuous.
That wraps this week’s edition of the Crossroads Newsletter, thanks everyone for the continued support in reading my posts :) If you found this week’s edition useful, please subscribe to the newsletter if you haven’t already and share it with your friends! Really appreciate it; stay safe!