By Manuel “Bobby” Orig, Consultant, Apo Agua
BACKABLE
The Surprising truth Behind What Makes People Take A Chance On You
By Suneel Gupta with Carlyle Adler
A groundbreaking book that boldly claims the key to success is not talent, connections, or ideas, but the ability to persuade people to take a chance on your potential.
No one makes it alone. But there’s a reason some people can get investors or bosses to believe in them while others cannot. And the reason has little to do with experience, pedigree, or a polished business plan. Backable people seem to have a hidden quality that inspires others to take action. We often chalk this up to natural talent or charisma … either you have “it” or you don’t.
After getting rejected by every investor he pitched, Suneel Gupta had a burning question: Could “it” be learned?
Drawing lessons from hundreds of the world’s biggest thinkers, Gupta discovered how to pitch new ideas in a way that has raised millions of dollars and influenced large-scale change inside massive corporations.
Backable reveals how the key to success is not charisma, connections, or even your resume, but rather your ability to persuade others to take a chance on you. This original book will show you how.
Praise for the book
The most exceptional people aren’t just brilliant … they’re backable. This remarkable book can be your secret weapon for bringing your ideas to life.
—DANIEL PINK, #1 New York Times bestselling author ofWhen, Drive, and To Sell Is Human
Backable provide super-readable and actionable look at how to make your ideas take flight. Whether you’re pitching a brand-new startup or an idea for your company’s next product, you’ll find a wealth of insights and stories throughout.
—MIKE KRIEGER, co-founder of Instagram
About the authors
SUNEEL GUPTA is on the faculty at Harvard University, where he teaches students how to be backable. He went from being the face of failure for the New York Times to being the “New Face of Innovation” for the New York Stock Exchange. His ideas have been backed by firms like Greylock and Google Ventures, and he has invested in startups including Airbnb, Calm, and Space X. Gupta also serves as an emissary for Gross National Happiness between the United States and the Kingdom of Bhutan.
CARLYE ADLER is an award-winning journalist and coauthor of many books, including four New York Times bestsellers. Her writing has been published in Businessweek, FastCompany, Fortune, Forbes, Newsweek, Time, and Wired.
INTRODUCTION
The author wanted to bailout but it was too late. In a few moments, he’d be telling a story to a packed house of Silicon Valley overachievers. It was a cautionary tale of a career that had gone off the rails through canceled projects, missed promotions, and near-bankrupt startups. So why was he having second thoughts? Because this story was his own.
A few weeks earlier he’d received a call from a restricted number. He answered it, hoping it was one of the many investors who hadn’t gotten back to him. But instead the person introduced herself as the organizer of an event called FailCon, which stands for Failure Conference. “It’s funny,” she said. “You’ve been nominated twice to speak at our conference.” Funny to her maybe, but he wasn’t laughing. He deepened his voice and tried to express his credibility as a professional and an entrepreneur.
He told her about his startup idea Rise. Rise was a telehealth service that matched you with a personal nutritionist right over your mobile phone. What he didn’t tell her is that it wasn’t going very well. He hadn’t been able to recruit people to join him or find investors to fund the idea. She seemed to intuitively picked up his desperation and mentioned that there might be investors in the audience. That’s all he needed to hear. He agreed right then and there to be the keynote speaker for FailCon.
Standing stage left at FailCon, he felt his phone vibrate. It was his brother, Sunjay. His brother is an Emmy Award-winning television reporter, a New York Times bestselling author, and a neurosurgeon to boot. “Call you back,” he texted. He was about to keynote a conference on failure.
He got through his speech as quickly as possible. Scanning the crowd opportunistically for investors, he somehow missed the reporter scribbling notes. More than a year passed, and he had completely forgotten about FailCon. By that point, he had recruited a small team to work with him on Rise, but the idea still hadn’t gained traction. He and his co-founder needed to raise funding so that they could expand their team, and build a fruitful partnership. And if they didn’t find that money soon, his startup dream was over.
Then something happened that changed everything. It was a Saturday morning, and he overheard his wife, Leena, on the phone with her mother. When he walked into the room, Leena was holding that day’s New York Times open to a full-length story on failure, with his face at the top.
The piece went viral. If you googled “failure” at the time, one of your top results would be a full-length Times article featuring him. He had spent an entire career trying to craft an image of success. Now he was the poster child for defeat. His inbox was jammed with consolation messages. His parents offered to pay that month’s rent. Old law school professors reached out to help find him a real job.
Realizing he could no longer hide behind a fake-it-till-you-make-it attitude of success, he began emailing highly successful people using the Times article to break the ice. He’d write things like, “As you can see from the article below, I don’t know what I’m doing. Would you be willing to grab coffee and give me some advice?”
It worked. The article pave the way to hundreds of open, honest conversations with fascinating people. Founders of unicorn-status startups; producers of Oscar-winning films; culinary icons, members of Congress, executives at iconic companies like Lego and Pixar, even military leaders.
In the end, he was left with a life-altering discovery. People who change the world around them aren’t just brilliant … they’re backable.” They have a seemingly mysterious superpower that lies at the intersection of “creativity” and “persuasion.” When backable people express themselves, we feel moved. When they share an idea, we take action.
You probably know someone who seems naturally backable. For the record, the author states that he is not one of those people. He’s an introvert by nature, look comically young for his age, and he’s prone to caving under pressure – like the time he tanked an interview with Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter.
He was interviewing for a product development role with the Twitter funder’s newest company, Square. By the time they sat down together, he had spent years leading product teams. Yet he couldn’t give a coherent answer to any of Dorsey’s questions. He was anxious, sweaty, and tonque-tied. He was qualified for the role, but he didn’t get the job.
We’ve all had our share of Dorsey moments – when something sounded exciting inside your head but uninspiring when it left your mouth. It can feel like trying to insert a crumpled dollar into a vending machine.
But your dollar is worth the same as a crisp, clean bill. We are all within striking range of becoming backable. We just need to make some adjustments to our style, without losing our edge – without sacrificing what makes us who we are.
Inside this book are those adjustments – seven surprising changes that course-corrected his life and career. By taking these steps, he went from feeling embarrassed to speak inside team meetings to confidently pitching ideas inside the offices of people like Michelle Obama and Tim Cook. He went from being the face of failure for the New York Times to being named the New Face of Innovation by the New York Stock Exchange magazine.
He went from being rejected by every investor he pitched to raising millions of dollars. The Today show featured Rise, and Apple named them us the Best New App of the Year. The Obama White House chose them to be its partner for tackling obesity. And ultimately, One Medical, a thriving company en route to an IPO, acquired Rise for multiple times its original value.
Once he realized the power of these adjustments, he couldn’t keep to himself. He had to share it with the world. And not just entrepreneurs, but people from all walks of life – from physicians to musicians, educators to fashion designers. Today, he teaches the seven steps to becoming backable in hospitals, companies, charities, and studios. He joined the faculty at Harvard University to teach students how to launch backable careers.
Because he’s convinced that we all have a brilliant idea tucked away somewhere. Yet most of us are afraid to share it and have it be dismissed. We all know how it feels to be unseen or ignored. To feel like we don’t have what it takes.
Untapped genius is not just inside you; it’s everywhere. And it comes at a huge cost – to our well-being, to our society, and even to human life.
STEP 1: CONVINCE YOURSELF FIRST
It was 1969 and President Richard Nixon was slashing budgets to pay for the Vietnam War. The Public Broadcasting Service was at the top of his list. Nixon viewed PBS as artsy and unnecessary. His cut required approval from the Senate, which seemed all but a formality because the chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, was a proponent of the war.
The only thing standing in the way was a mild-mannered man who was on a television show that Senator Pastore had never heard of. As the TV host quietly waited to give his testimony, Pastore found it hard to hide his aggression. “All right, Rogers,” he said grumpily. “You have the floor.”
“Rogers” was none other than Fred Rogers of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Rogers secured PBS’s future with a seven-minute speech that has been the subject of articles, books, and viral videos. He is described as “captivating” and “compelling.” Iconic shows like Sesame Street and Cosmos may never have come to be had it not been for that single speech.
And yet, if you go back and watch Roger’s speech, you might get a different impression. He nervously shifts in his seat and fumbles with his papers. He speaks with a flat, monotone voice and doesn’t make use of hand gestures. In many ways, his mannerisms are the opposite of what you’d learn from public speaking courses like Toastmasters or Dale Carnegie. So what was it about his speech that made it so influential?
When the author began writing this book, he assumed he’d find a certain style to how backable people communicate their ideas – a way of utilizing eye contact, hand gestures, and pacing – to charm their audience. However, after digging deeper, he came to realize that this is not the case at all.
Watch the number one TED Talk of all time and you might be surprised to see Sir Ken Robinson stand with a slight slouch and a hand in his pocket while he explores whether schools kill creativity. View Elon Musk’s unveiling the future of SpaceX and you might agree with Inc. magazine’s headline that he “Fails Public Speaking 101. Search the transcript of the original iPhone Launch and you might be surprised that Steve Jobs said “uh” at least eighty times.
Yet Robinson has held the top TED spot for years. Musk’s forty-minute presentation has about 2 million views, and Job’s iPhone launch is one of the most widely discussed product announcements of all time.
What moves people isn’t charisma, but conviction. Backable people earnestly believe in what they’re saying, and they simply let that belief shine through whatever style feels most natural. If you don’t truly believe in what you’re saying, there is no slide fancy enough, no hand gesture compelling enough, to save you. if you want to convince others, you must convince yourself first.
Preparing his pitch for Rise, the author spent a lot of time focusing on the bells and whistles of the presentation. He pulled together an impressive-looking slide deck with beautiful visuals. He came up with attention-grabbing taglines. He practiced hand gestures in front of a mirror.
But pitches aren’t monologues. They’re a back-and-forth, typically with people who know how to ask tough questions. And while his initial fifteen-minute presentation typically went fine, things tended to unravel in the next forty-five minutes of Q&A.
Now he understand why. Peter Chernin is a legendary media executive who has produced Oscar-nominated films like Hidden Figures, The Greatest Showman, and Ford v Ferrari. Chernin told him that when he’s undecided on whether to back an idea, he’ll sometimes look at the filmmaker or entrepreneur and say, “That the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.” Then he’ll wait to see if they back down or show conviction.
Had that happened to him when he was first pitching Rise, he would have dropped into the fetal position. He may have had fancy slides, but he didn’t have high conviction. He was trying to convince others without convincing himself first. When he realized how important that was to being backable, he set out to learn how backable people build conviction in a new idea.
STEP 2: CAST A CENTRAL CHARACTER
In the startup world, Kristen Green is known as a kingmaker. She launched Forerunner Ventures in 2010 and has since invested in more than eighty companies and led efforts to raise more than $650 million. She has been named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, and Venture Capitalist of the Year by TechCrunch.
Early in her career, Green was told about a new razor-blade startup but decided she had “zero interest” in investing. Green’s background as an analyst informed her thinking: razor blades were a low-margin offering and not a clear fit for e-commerce. Besides, even if the startup get off the ground, they’d had to compete head-to-head with marketing giants like Gillette.
But just two days after hearing about the razor-blades concept, she wound up at a dinner party with the company’s founder, Michael Dubin. And within ten minutes of hearing Dubin’s pitch in person, Green decided she had to write him a check. Green told the author that she left that chance conversation thinking, “I have to be in business with him.”
Dubin didn’t change her mind saying “We want to disrupt a multibillion dollar market with a better, cheaper razor blade sold online.” Instead, he introduced Green to his central character – a twenty-something male who takes an active interest in his own health – including what he puts in his body, and what he puts on his body. He also values convenience and privacy more than his father or grandfather did. Then, after setting up his central character, Dubin went through his character’s frustrating and cumbersome step-by-step experience of buying razor blades inside a pharmacy. He searches outdated shelves looking for the shaving section. When he finally finds the razor blades, he realizes they are behind a locked security case. He pushes a button for help, alerting everyone in the store that he needs to get behind the glass case. He stands idle in the aisle being judged by others, but not able to move because he doesn’t want to miss the employee with the key. That employee finally shows up, annoyed to be pulled away from another task, and then literally watches over his shoulder as he makes his purchase decision.
He gave such vivid detail that it became obvious why the entire experience needed to be disrupted. Rather than saying something general like “The experience is inconvenient and outdated,” he gave Green a highly visual walk-through, then let her draw that conclusion for herself. And with that, Dubin made razor blades sexy to an investor whose mission is to “rewrite the rules of culture.”
As individuals, we’re wired to care about the stories of individuals. This goes back to life around the campfire – it’s in our DNA. When a movie makes us emotional, it’s typically because we connected to a specific character – rather than the ensemble. Or, imagine two news reports. The first is that a plane went down in the Andes carrying fifty passengers, all presumably alive. The second is that a plane went down in the Andes carrying one passenger, who is presumably alive. All of a sudden, we want to know who this one person is, where they’re from, and why were they travelling to the Andes in the first place.
This is why a reporter will cover a trend through the eyes of one person. Trish Hall, a former op-ed at the New York Times says, “You don’t go into journalism without feeling like facts change the world.” And yet, Hall says, “facts alone will not change people’s minds. Emotions and feelings are just as important.”
Not long after that dinner, Green became the lead backer in Dollar Shave Club’s first investment round and joined Dubin’s board. Four years later the company was sold to Unilever for $1 billion.
CHOOSE THE PERSON
Bill Gates once showed his daughter a video of a young girl with polio. The girl was holding a pair of dilapidated wooden crutches and trying to walk down the dirt road. After watching the video, his daughter turned to her father and said, “Well, what did you do?” Gates told his daughter his foundation was eradicating polio. He shared the numbers with her – the hundreds of millions of dollars they were deploying, the goal’s they’d set, and the metrics they’d already hit, including shrinking the number of cases in Nigeria from seven hundred per year to fewer than fifty. “No, no, no,” interrupted Gate’s daughter. She pointed back to the video and asked, “What did you do for her?”
Great storytellers don’t just focus on a central character, but also a central reader. Instead of addressing millions of people, they’ll imagine sharing the story with one specific person. Tim Ferris, who wrote The 4-Hour Workweek, really helped the author understand this.
By the time they met, Ferris had invested in dozens of startups including Facebook, Shopify, and Twitter. The author thought Ferris would be the perfect backer for Rise, but he didn’t quite agree. But during their conversation Ferris shared a story that changed the way he pitched an idea. He didn’t realize at the time, but The 4-Hour Workweek, which had spent nearly five years as a New York Times bestseller, was rejected by 26 publishers in a row.
Ferris told him that his first attempt to write the book had completely failed. “I was trying to write for as many people as possible,” he said. As a result, the storytelling fell flat and impersonal. That’s when Ferris shifted his approach. Instead of writing for a broad audience, he decided to write for two specific friends – one an entrepreneur, the other working at a bank. Both felt trapped in their jobs. Ferris sat down at his laptop and composed an email to them.
Writing with a specific person in mind made the storytelling sharper and more compelling. And the punchline was that even though Ferries wrote the book for two friends, one of the common pieces of feedback he receives is “I felt like you were writing it just for me.”
STEP 3: FIND AN EARNED SECRET
Years ago, the author interviewed for a role with a fast-growing tech startup that had recently started making activity trackers to compete with the company Fitbit. His interview was with the CEO, and to prepare, he searched for information online. He read articles, watched videos, and jotted his thoughts down in a document. But the day before their sit-down, something struck him – everything he was about to share in the interview the CEO obviously already know.
So he decided to try something else. He went to UserTesting.com, which lets you hire real human beings to test your product and give you feedback. He filled out a form asking people to try out the startup’s website, and within a few hours he received three separate feedback videos. Combing through the footage, he noticed a pattern – while each of the testers seemed excited about the activity tracker’s features, they all seemed to be confused on how to add the device to their shopping cart. It wasn’t clear how to actually purchase the product.
The next morning, the author walked into the interview not just with his standard research, but with a fresh insight he couldn’t have found through Google search. About halfway through the interview, he mentioned the website-navigation issue to the CEO. He listened at first but seemed to brush off the suggestion. So he asked him if he could show him something on his phone. The CEO nodded, and he awkwardly walked around the conference table.
Then he pulled up the first clip. There was confusion in this customer’s voice: “I’m not exactly sure how to get from here to checkout.” In the second clip, the customer seemed slightly more irritated. With a heavy sigh, she said, “Do I just need to reload the site and start again?” By the time they got to the last clip, the CEO was no longer staring at his screen, but rather at him.
“Where did you get these videos?” the CEO asked. “I gathered them myself,” the author answered. The CEO took a moment, then said, “I’ve interviewed hundreds of people – and no one’s ever prepared something like this.”
The insights the author gathered weren’t necessarily earth-shattering, but they showed that he put the effort to find something non-obvious. Hours after the interview, he stared at a generous job offer along with a kind of note from the CEO, and felt like he might have finally cracked the code on job interviews. He reflected on the many he had blown and how simple one act could have changed things – going beyond basic research and finding an insight he could genuinely called his own.
He didn’t end up taking the job launching his own startup instead, but the lesson stuck with him. It wasn’t until years later that he heard venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreesen Horowitz, articulate this concept in a much clearer way than he could. During a discussion with a group of interns, someone raised the question: as an entrepreneur, how do you get an idea?
Horowitz responded that great ideas typically stem from an “earned secret” – discovered by going out into the world and “learning something that not a lot of people know.” He used Airbnb, a company he’d backed nearly ten years earlier, as an example.
It wasn’t from online research, but rather from personal experience that led to a surprise insight. Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, recent graduates from the Rhode Island School of Design, had just moved to San Francisco without jobs. When their landlord raised their rent, they needed a way to raise some cash fast. That’s when they heard all the hotels in the city were booked for an industrial design conference that was coming to town. So they bought a few mattresses and charged guests $80 to crash on their floor. It worked – not only did people people pay to sleep on air mattress, but when Chesky advertised the offer nearly five hundred people responded. When Chesky pitched his idea to investors, he wasn’t simply sketching out a high-level market analysis. He was sharing a non-obvious insight that sparked his idea and pulled him to go deeper.
When the author was preparing for his interview with the activity tracker CEO, watching user tests he had personally collected, he felt a little like Chesky renting mattresses on his own living room. Since then, he’d learned specific things you can do to earn your own secret.
MAKE IT FEEL INEVITABLE
Adam Lowry and his business partner, Eric Ryan, had $300,000 in credit card debt and only $16 in their startup’s bank account. Vendors refused to give them any more support until they paid their bills. They needed a backer for their new designer soap company, but the economy was in a hole, consumer products were out of vogue, and the founders had zero track record in this space. Lowry’s most recent professional pursuit included trying out for, and not making, the Olympic sailing team. All this made his pitch close to impossible.
So the author thought it was strange when Lowry told him he didn’t take a pitch deck to his first pitching meeting. Instead, he presented his first investor trend book.
Inside were clipped photos from Restoration Hardware, Williams-Sonoma, and Waterworks – all brands that had emerged as unlikely winners since the economy had hit a downturn. With the burst of the bubble came a return to the nest. People who previously bought furniture from department stores were looking to a new crop of exclusive home stores to curate their living spaces. This trend in consumer behavior was so pronounced it gave rise to a new segment of media publications focused on the home, including magazines like Wallpaper, Dwell, and Real Simple.
A typical pitch communicates that an idea is new. Lowry’s pitch communicated that his idea was inevitable. People were already choosing to style their living rooms and bedrooms – it was only a matter of time before this trend reached bathrooms and kitchens. To get ahead of the curve, Lowry was designing a cleaning product that you’d be proud to leave on the kitchen counter when guests were around. Lowry’s designer soap would come in bright, candy-paint colors that smelled like cucumber and mandarin orange. They were packaged in a clear and cool-looking bottle dreamed up by Karim Rashid, a top-notch industrial designer.
Lowry’s message to investors was simple – the market is already moving in this direction. Join me and we’ll ride this wave together. It worked; Lowry raised money from reputable investors who believed in the inevitability of a soap called Method.
BE AN ARMCHAIR ANTHROPOLOGIST
Tina Sharkey has spent the past twenty-five years creating and selling backable ideas. Early in her career, she built the consumer brand iVillage, which caught the attention of the executives who recruited her to launch the digital division inside Sesame Workshop. She later worked at AOL and headed up BabyCenter. When the author asked Sharkey how she successfully wore so many hats in her career, she pointed to the one that mattered most, what she refers to as her “cultural anthropologist.”
Sharky says this role starts with the question: “What is the shift in the world that is making your ideas matter?” Before jumping to the description of her solution, she puts on her anthropologist hat to figure out how the world is changing. Then she fits her idea into this larger shift.
Backable people seem to always be acting as anthropologists, looking for trends and changes.
—Suneel Gupta
At first it seemed a little backward for the author. If his goal was to pitch a specific idea, then why would he waste a backer’s time with such a macro perspective? But as he interviewed backable people from all walks of life – inside big companies and small – he realized how everyone of them took the role of an “armchair anthropologist” and first showed investors where the world was headed. To expand BabyCenter from a web service to a robust mobile product, Sharkey first showed how moms had already made the shift – even if advertising dollars hadn’t. To pitch Method, Lowry showed how people were beginning to style every aspect of their home, even the parts that were out of sight. To pitch Airbnb, the founders shared how the idea of “sharing your home with a stranger” had changed from creepy to widely accepted. Slide 4 of Airbnb’s original pitch read:
- 630,000 listings on couchsurfing.com
- 17,000 temporary housing listings on SF and NYC Craiglist
Backable people seem to always be acting as anthropologists, looking for trends and changes.
STEP 5: FLIP OUTSIDERS TO INSIDERS
We’ve been told that creativity is a two-step formula: a great idea plus great execution. But there is a “secret step” in between. This is where you turn outsiders into insiders so that when your idea reaches the execution stage you arrive together. Nearly every great movement, organization, and campaign can be traced to this secret step.
In the 1940s, “instant cake mixes” were unveiled at grocery stores across the United States with lots of marketing and hype. All you need to prepare a tasty dessert was to add water, pour the butter in the pan, and bake. It took less than half the time and effort of making a cake from scratch. So marketers were stunned to find that their product wasn’t selling.
It took a psychologist named Ernest Ditcher to figure out why. After cross-examining homemakers across the country, Ditcher came to a shocking conclusion: the mixes made cooking too easy. They all but removed the consumer from the creative process. So manufacturers tried something new – they removed the egg from the mix, requiring you to crack and mix one yourself. Sales took off.
In the coming decades, researchers would see this pattern over and over again. Michael Norton from Harvard Business School, along with two colleagues, eventually named it “the IKEA effect” and demonstrated that we place nearly five times more value on a product we help build than on a product we simply buy. “Time spent touching objects” leads to “feelings of ownership and value.”
Could a backer feel that sense of ownership for someone else’s idea? At first, the author didn’t see the connection, which is why he’d walk into pitches trying his best to show he had a thorough plan, with every major and minor detail figured out. He believed his ideas needed to be bulletproof in order to be backable.
But as he continued to bring the ideas to the backers, he realized something – the more pinned down his plan, the less enthusiasm he was able to generate. His best pitches tend to be the ones with at least one open question, which he posed to the room. Those meetings would begin with the backers on the opposite side of the table and typically end with them huddled around a laptop or phone, working through something together. Through these experiences, he stumbled into a somewhat hidden lesson for being backable: we tend to fight the hardest for ideas for which we feel some ownership.
Why does that matter? Because even if a backer likes your startup, they almost have to still to convince someone else. If a venture capitalist likes your startup, they will likely need to sell it with their board. If an editor likes your book concept, they still need to convince a committee to make an offer.
That’s why when we pitch, we’re not looking just for a backer, we’re looking for an advocate. Someone who can represent your idea with the same enthusiasm as you. Salman Rushdie once wrote, “Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.” While we’re present for the pitch, we’re most likely absent for the hallway huddles, backroom meetings, and email threads that decide the fate of our ideas. Backers become fierce advocates when they are on the inside of an idea. They crack their own egg and add it to the mix.
After wrapping An Inconvenient Truth, documentary filmmaker Davis Guggenheim decided to shift his focus from climate change to a personal passion – the electric guitar. His idea was to create a film profiling the biggest guitarists of them all – Led Zeppilin’s Jimmy Page.
Guggenheim pressed on, eventually finding his way to Page’s business manager, who confirmed everyone’s doubts. When Guggenheim asked for an opportunity to personally share the idea with Page, the manager said, “I’ll give you an hour,” not expecting that Guggenheim would take a ten-hour flight from Los Angeles to London for a short meeting. But Guggenheim booked one of the first flights he could find in Heathrow.
He met Page in the lobby of a London hotel where the two talked over an English tea. From the moment they sat down, the pressure was on Guggenheim to convince the rock and roll icon to do something he’d never done before. Perhaps Page might have been expecting a hard sell. But it never came.
“Jimmy, I don’t know what the film is going to be … but let’s tell this story together. Why don’t we start with a casual conversation? No cameras. Just a microphone and no commitments. We’ll just talk and see where it goes from there. At any minute, you can get up and leave.” Guggenheim describes that moment as the turning point of the film. “I get it,” Page responded. “It will be organic.”
Guggenheim and Page rented a space at a small, local hotel and ended up talking for three days. As promised, there was no agenda or camera crew – just two human beings openly sharing ideas, reflections, and anecdotes. What emerged was the start of a film called It Might Get Loud, which was nominated for awards and hailed as a “triumphant and truly absorbing 90-minute spectacle.”
For the author, Guggenheim’s story represented a career-defining lesson. Bring the people you are counting on into your creative process so that they feel like co-owners of the idea. Even if it feels uncomfortable, don’t be afraid to let people put their fingerprints on your projects. Make them an insider and they’ll feel invested in your success. Tommy Harper, who has produced big-budget films like Star Wars: The Force Awakens, put it to him like this: “If they feel like it’s their idea, we all win.”
STEP 6: PLAY EXHIBITION MATCHES
When Oren Jacob was an intern at a computer graphics startup called Pixar, Steve Jobs, the CEO, decided the company would change direction from hardware and software to animation and laid off more than half of the employees. Everyone was laid off in an instant, and Jacob assumed that he was as well over. Over the weekend, Jacob was trying to figure out what to do next. That’s when his Dad asked him, “What would happen if you just went back on Monday as if nothing has changed?” Jacob figured he had nothing to lose, so he gave it a shot.
99% of genius comes from hard practice; the remaining 1% comes from innate talent.
—Thomas Edison
On Monday morning, he showed up to the weekly all-hands meeting, which had been reduced to fewer than fifty people. The layoffs had happened so swiftly that everyone was scanning the room to figure out who made it through. Jacob got a couple of bland stares and even a raised eyebrow or two, but no one asked the obvious question: “Why did they keep the intern?”
After the meeting, Jacob tried to make himself look busy by seeking out a task – anything to be productive. He did it the next day and the next day after that. It was the beginning of what turned into a twenty-year career where he climbed from intern to technical director of A Bug’s Life to supervising the technical director of Finding Nemo and finally chief technology officer for all of Pixar.
Those two decades put Jacob in the nexus of the backable universe. From Toy Story to Brave, Jacob played a key role in pivoting Pixar from a graphics company to Hollywood’s premier animation studio. Along the way, he heard thousands of pitches from every corner of the company – from screenplays to technical proposals to business plans. He personally pitched ideas to Steve Jobs and to Ed Catmull, the co-founder of Pixar. So you can imagine how excited the author was to sit down with Jacob to understand what he’d learned about being backable behind the walls of Pixar.
At first, Jacob’s answers felt disappointing. After twenty years at the studio, Jacob says your likelihood of success inside a pitch room depends on one thing: practice. Whether you’re interviewing for a job, sharing a new idea with your team, or raising money from an investor, “a pitch is like a live performance.” Not practicing beforehand is like an actor not rehearsing before the main show.
The author felt Jacob was oversimplifying, so he challenged him to walk him through a real-life scenario – an interview he had completely blown with Jack Dorsey. Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, had just started his newest company, Square, where he was interviewing for a product management role. In the first two minutes of his interview with Dorsey, he threw him a softball: “How do you think about product development?”
He remembers wrapping up his answer like a nervous spelling bee contestant, and seeing Dorsey’s demeanor fade from full attention to full-on confusion. Needless to say, he didn’t get the job.
After a few laughs, Dorsey asked him a simple question: “Did you practice before that interview?” Yes, he responded. He did his research, wrote down notes, and prepped questions – all the things we prepare for an interview.
“But did you practice?” Jacob asked again. “You mean did I actually rehearse what I was going to say? No.”
Dorsey asked, “When you were studying for a test in law school, would you take practice tests?” the author nodded – without those practice exams, he wouldn’t have gotten through law school. Jacob leaned in. “So, for a law school exam you would spend hours practicing, but for a meeting that could have changed your career, you didn’t practice at all?”
Dorsey was not trying to make him feel but, but his words landed like a punch in the gut. The author began to reflect on every meaningful interaction in his career. All the presentations, interviews – really any situation where he had an opportunity to shine. He couldn’t think of a time he actually practiced before the meeting.
Having now coached founders and creators, the author have seen first-hand how exceedingly rare it is for someone to practice before their pitch. We’ll spend hours researching, outlining, pulling together slides – but very little time practicing what we’re going to share. The feeling seems to be that if we have the right content and we know it well enough, then there’s no need for practice.
But the author found that backable people tend to practice their pitch extensively before walking into the room. They practice with friends, family, and colleagues. They prepare themselves for high-stakes pitches through lots of low-stakes practice sessions – which he now call exhibition matches.
For backable people, no venue is too small for an exhibition match. The only requirement is the ability to practice in front of someone other than yourself. Simply having a human staring at you is enough to put you in real practice mode. He has now played plenty of exhibition matches in front of his eight-year-old daughter. The key is to treat each of these exhibition matches as if you were in front of a real backer.
STEP 7: LET GO OF YOUR EGO
When ego is lost, limit is lost. You become infinite, kind, beautiful.
—Yogi Bhajan
In 1959, a young biologist named Dr. George Schaller went to Central Africa to study mountain gorillas. At the time, the perception was that these were vicious, dangerous beasts. Something to fear. But after living among them for two years, Schaller discovered that Gorillas were in fact gentle, compassionate, and extremely intelligent, with complex social structures. When he returned to present his groundbreaking findings, a biologist in the audience asked, “Dr. Schaller, we’ve been studying these creatures for centuries and we didn’t know any of this. How did you get such detailed information?”
“It’s simple,” Schaller replied. “I didn’t carry a gun.”
While it was common practice for researchers to stash a weapon in their backpacks in case something went wrong, Schaller never did. He believed you could hide a gun, but you could never hide your attitude when you carried a gun. No smile or gentleness could fully cover your unease, and the gorillas could always pick up on that.
After many years of struggling to become backable, the author came to realize that the gun inside his backpack was his ego. That his extreme desire to impress people in the room had created distance, not connection.
The other techniques in this book got him comfortable with content, but he still had to learn to get truly comfortable with himself. He had to let go of his ego – to express, rather than impress.
CONCLUSION
THE GAME OF NOW
When he was in his early twenties, the author took his first trip to Silicon Valley. It was the start of the 2000s and the hot companies were Yahoo!, eBay, and Hotmail. He was fascinated by that world but, unfortunately, didn’t know anyone there. So he naively started cold-calling all the household names in tech – including prominent investors like Vinod Khosla and John Doerr. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t get through. But while searching for their contact information, he stumbled upon an article about a restaurant called Buck’s of Woodside where valley insiders ate their power breakfasts. The article featured a photo of the owner, Jamis MacNiven, dressed in a bowling shirt with glasses, a warm and inviting smile on his face.
With nothing to lose, he reached out cold to MacNiven, asking if he could swing by his restaurant and introduce himself. “Come on by,” MacNiven said.
When he walked through the door at Buck’s, he took a step back out and double-checked the address. This was the elite meeting place of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs? One of the first things you see is a giant Statue of Liberty wearing a sombrero and holding an ice cream cone. It felt like a place where kids celebrate their birthdays, not a hot spot for industry titans.
As MacNiven and the author scarfed down pumpkin pancakes, he gave him a sit-down tour of the place. “That’s where Marc Andreesen got his funding for Netscape,” he said, pointing to the left. “Hotmail was founded at that table,” he added, nodding straight ahead. “PayPal was funded over there.”
What the author saw in that moment, twenty years ago, surprised and inspired him. What he saw ultimately drove him to write this book.
Nearly every table had a similar pattern: On one side, a professionally dressed man with graying hair. On the other side, someone who looked a lot like … him. his age, his level of experience – wearing the same kind of hoodie he’d be wearing if it were a Saturday.
He wanted to know what the hoodies were saying to the suits. Lost in thought, he was startled when MacNiven said, “They’re pitching their ideas.” He wondered whether to say what he wanted to say. Finally, he forced it out . “But they’re so young. I mean … they’re my age.” MacNiven took a sip from his coffee mug and looked out the window. It seemed like he was debating whether or not to tell him the truth. Would it be too much for a twenty-one-year-old to handle?
In that moment, he was reminded of the scene in The Matrix where Morpheus holds out a red pill and a blue pill. MacNiven leaned across the table, looked him directly in the eyes, and pointed out the window: “The people who run this place … they’re all your age.” He felt a lump on his throat.
His mind raced the entire flight to Detroit. He kept thinking back to the hoodies at the dinner who seemed to understand something he didn’t. Something he wouldn’t comprehend until years later. That there are two types of people in this world. There are those who play the Game of Someday and those who play the Game of Now.
Every backable person he’d met, at some point in their career, learns to play the Game of Now. When Brian Grazer was trying to break into Hollywood, he convinced Lew Wasserman, one of the industry’s most influential rainmakers, to give him some career advice. Two minutes into the meeting, while Grazer was sharing his background, Wasserman interrupted and said, “All right, enough! Pull out a piece of paper.” Then Wasserman told him to start writing – to stop talking about writing, and just write. That piece of paper led to Splash, starring Tom Hanks, and Grazer soon after formed Imagine Entertainment with Rod Howard. Grazer looked back at that single act – writing down his idea – as a moment that would define his career. The moment he began to play the Game of Now.
When the author speak to audiences, he like to start with a quick exercise. He’ll say, “Stand up if you have a creative idea. Anything new – it can be simple or groundbreaking. It can be an idea for a new product, a new process … anything you think might make a meaningful difference.”
Within a few moments, almost everyone is standing.
Then he’ll ask people to remain standing “if you have not shared that idea.” More than half of the audience continues to stand.
He’d been doing this exercise for years, and the result is almost always the same. Meanwhile companies spend billions of dollars hiring outside consultants and high-priced think tanks to come up with ideas that already exist in the minds of their own employees. Their genius remains hidden in plain sight.
Mahatma Gandhi said, “The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.” Now, more than ever, we need good people to stop playing the Game of Someday and start playing the Game of Now. That begins with you.
The craziest ideas – the ones that are most likely to change the world – are often the hardest ones to sell. But that doesn’t mean we stop trying. We build the skills and invest the energy to make ourselves backable. And we realize, as all backable people eventually do, that when you get dismissed, there is always another room.
And if that’s not enough to convince you to play the Game of Now, then consider this: even when our ideas don’t reach their intended destination, they still touch and inspire people along the way. Truth be told, Rise didn’t become the powerhouse that he thought it would be. When Rise was sold to One Medical, it was a nice outcome for their team and a solid return for their stockholders – but he signed the paperwork with mixed feelings. He had hoped they could have been more.
But years after the sale, he was approached by people who were building their own version of Rise. He got to share what he learned from his experience inside classrooms and hospitals. At a conference hosted by Fortune magazine an entrepreneur spoke about a service he built that dramatically shrinks the cost of mental health care. When this entrepreneur was asked how he came up with the idea, he said, “I was inspired by a service called Rise.” He didn’t know the author was in the audience, and his comment caught him off guard, because they had never met. When we play the Game of Now, the direct result of what we do isn’t the end of the story.
The author knows the three words that hold most of us back from the Game of Now: “I’m not ready.” I’m not ready to start my business; I’m not ready to write that proposal’ I’m not ready to speak my mind. We’ve all felt that way. Even as he type the final words of this manuscript, there’s a faint, sometimes loud, voice saying, Why you? Why would anyone want to read what you have to say?
But after spending five years interviewing and studying people who’ve changed the world, something occurred to him: none of them were ready. A hedge fund manager with zero entrepreneurial track record wasn’t necessarily ready to build an offline bookseller. Friends from design school weren’t prepared to disrupt the hospitality industry. A fifteen-year-old from Stockholm wasn’t ready to lead an environmental movement. But today, Amazon is not only the world’s largest bookstore, but the biggest online retailer. Hundreds of thousands of people check into an Airbnb every single day. And Greta Thunberg has been named the youngest ever Person of the Year by Time magazine.
The Game of Now may not always lead to success. But the opposite of success isn’t failure; it’s boredom. So let’s play this game together. Let’s fight for the ideas that make us come alive and inspire good people to join us in the game. Let’s experience moment that we’ll cherish forever, even when it hurts.
Because you are ready.
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