Larry Chiang is a coat-tailing instructional humorist that rode the anti-MBA sentiment into psuedo celebrity fame. His 15 minutes is going into over-time with major media placements on CNN, ABC News and Wall Street Journal. He confessed to an IQ of 88 on TechCrunch and somehow manages to get Ivy League schools to pay him to speak. Chiang takes coat-tailing to legendary, record-breaking, heights. His most recent feat in the publishing world was promoting his mentor, Mark McCormack, back onto the NY Times best-seller list.
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By Larry Chiang
There’s this theory I have that is making me popular enough where people are paying me for my thoughts (vs just reading them for free here at Business Week). My theory is simple-stupid-genius: It is easier for a CS major to learn to be CEO than for a CEO to learn what a CS major knows.
Hmmm!
Given that simple-stupid-genius foundation, I lecture, mentor and advise CS majors aspring to be tech CEOs. Look inside our conversations by searching my hashtag #CSMajorCEO. Here is some awesome stuff spoon fed: “Top 8 Business Mistakes of CS Majors Turned CEOs”
-1- Getting Mentored from a Non-Selling VC
Ok, there are VCs out there that have never sold or gotten sales. If you’re getting schooled, learn from someone who has done what you need to do or sold in a way, shape or manner that you need to sell.
Don’t get mentored in sales from an advisor who mentors you on programming.
Me, I talk to my nail technician about cuticle management and cuticle management ONLY. Because of her 3x divorce history, I try to elicit relationship chatter to people with a slightly better track record.
-2- Don’t Let Urban Myths Guide You
There’s this silicon valley urban myth that company Z sold for $170mm. Replicating from an urban myth playbook is tough. Mimicking sales practices in a granular “blocking and tackling” is your best plan.
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-3- Events + Social Media + Direct Marketing
You have to spend 10/hrs per month doing these three things. Ideally, it’s before an industry conference. If you’re selling janitorial services tracking software, locate the case study on OrangeQC. Yeah, its CS majors selling at an industry conference for very little money.
-4- Dumb Down, Sandbag For Sales Success.
Remember, we don’t want to impress the CS Majors we met at college, Stanford eBootCamp, Bar Camp or Foo Camp. We want to dumb down so a silly person who graduated in the 70s or 80s called a C-T-O is impressed.
Note: the disparity in knowledge between a junior in CS and a 30 year-old CS professional has never been smaller.
-5- Biz Model.
Focus all your energy buying $20 bills for 3-7 bucks.
It’s my opinion that your first goal should be a lifestyle business. Having a goal to reach $10mm in sales where you keep about $500k in profit is a pretty lofty goal. A lifestyle business is frowned upon by VCs but last time I checked… every billion dollar business at one point was worth $30mm. True story.
What are you charging $20 for?
How much does it cost you to make that $20. If your answer is ‘less than $20′ then you have a business.
-6- Hiring a Business Guy
A good 1st biz dev person is tough. Steven Blank writes about the hazzards. Paul Graham and Dave McClure advocate extreme caution so much so that you can count the number of their portfolio companies to have reached $2mm in revenue (ever) on one hand.
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-7- We’ll Just Do A Partnership
Zaw Thet did a deal with Gannett for 4INFO
Peter Pham did a deal with T-Mobile for BillShring.
Both of these deals were legendary. Doing a partnership like this takes doing about 400-480 maneuvers of a possible 650 micro executable things – It is not easy to properly execute a partnership with a big partnership. If you’d like to talk to Zaw or Peter, paypal me $5 and I’ll sell you access to their cell. Translation; I’ll fwd your texted question to them :-) Text me at 650-283-8008
-8- 80% of CEOs Sell
This stat is misleading because it is true.
Apply this to a miniscule amount of action by slightly selling and promoting. Self-promotion or selling your own company is tough because failure is so uber personal.
Here is how you the CS major needs to sell
A) sell yourself as an expert first
B) promote some other company or concept first
C) mentor while your market your product/service
D) host something
E) educate media/bloggers about what you’re an expert on to get testimonials
F) Set aside your own fear of failure because
Larry has a new company where he helps entrepreneurs get a dashboard look into their accounting reports. It’s called inDinero. ‘In’ like inside/outside. ‘Dinero’ like Mexican for money. He was working on Muck9 which does something similar. Muck9 is Money’s Underground Cashflow Knowledge. He is co-founder of Duck9 where he has testified before Congress on credit and been an expert witness at World Bank.
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