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Q: In your book The Monk and the Riddle, you refer to yourself as a "Virtual CEO." Where did this job title come from?
A: When Steve Perlman founded WebTV a few years back, I agreed to help him get started, first as an advisor, and then as a member of his board. Gradually, I became more active in the business, but I declined to assume a more traditional role as an executive in the company. One day in 1996 Steve presented me with business cards that read "Randy Komisar, Virtual CEO, WebTV." The title stuck.
Q: How do you define what you do?
A: Basically what I do is incubate startups. I provide the scarcest commodity of allleadership and experience, helping people build their ideas into successful businesses. I support entrepreneurs as a kind of junior partner, a full member of the team, an owner and a decision-maker, not a hired hand. I invest my time, and in return, I receive an equity stake in the business. With that stake, I think like a team member, and sink or swim with the founders. I generally devote myself to each company for a year or two. During that time, we should be able to raise money, develop the product or service, prove out its basic tenets, and hire an operating team. Once that team is in place, I retreat to an advisory capacity and give more hands-on attention to the next startup.
Q: How does your role differ from that of a traditional CEO or a Venture Capitalist?
A: My work is improvisationalthat's the best part. I get to be creative within a business environment. And although I'm involved in all the planning and decision making, I don't play any day-to-day operating role. On the org chart, I'm the bubble around the management team. Startups require frenetic execution and relentless perseverance. My role is to keep my head out of the cyclone and provide insight, direction, and stability. I try to bring to each company the experience I've gainedraising money, setting strategy, building and leading teams, establishing strategic relationships, developing products and services and bringing them to market. And I make available to the startup all my contacts in the industry.
When I advise a startup, the business for me is the founders. It's an expression of their collective vision. As director of a publicly held company, I accept a fiduciary duty to the investors, but, in a privately held startup, I don't favor the investors over the founders. This is probably the crucial way my thinking differs from a VC's.
Q: Why the need for "leadership on demand"?
A: The New Economy has been marked by a dearth of experienced management talent. Silicon Valley veterans share a tacit understanding that what a startup needs isn't one CEO, but threeeach at successive stages of the startup's development. The first must assemble the core team, the product or service, and the market direction all around a coherent vision. She must also raise the money and secure crucial early customers and partners. She is prized for her tenacity and inventiveness. The second CEO must find the market and prove the business. He needs to build an operating team and establish a market beachhead. He is prized for his keen sense of direction and company-building skills. The third CEO must lead the team, pulling an operating company that grows heavier by the day with people and public company responsibilities. She is prized for her constancy and scalability. None of these, to me, is more valuable than the other. All are equal in importance, just different in skills and temperaments. I mentor the founding CEO so she can go as far as she wants or as far as her abilities permit. And when she decides to pass the mantle, I help with the transition to new leadership.
Q: In The Monk and the Riddle, you talk about creativity in the business world, making it a very personal commodity. How does it come into play in a realm where ruthlessness is the norm?
A: I realized over the years that business isn't primarily a financial institution. It's a creative institution. Like painting and sculpting, business can be a venue for personal expression and artistry, at its heart more like a canvas than a spreadsheet. Why? Because business is about change. Nothing stands still. Markets change, products evolve, competitors move into the neighborhood, employees come and go.
Business is one of the last remaining social institutions to help us manage and cope with change. It, however, has a tendency to become tainted with the greed and aggressiveness that at its best it channels into productivity. Left to its own devices, business may never deliver the social benefits that the other fading institutions once promised. But, rather than give up on business, I look to it as a way, indirectly, of improving things for many, not just a lucky few. I accept its limitations and look for opportunities to use it positively. In the U.S., the rules of business are like the laws of physics neither inherently good nor evilto be applied as you may. You decide whether your business is constructive or destructive. I help people understand this and express themselves in what they do, trying to make a difference through business.
Q: Your book also discusses the "Deferred Life Plan." What's the basic premise?
A: The "Deferred Life Plan" is simple. There are two steps. Step one: "Do what you have to do." Then eventually, hopefully, step two: "Do what you want to do."
The "Deferred Life Plan" certainly dominates Silicon Valley. Most people think that getting rich fast provides the quickest way to get past the first stepand where can you get rich faster than Silicon Valley? The problem is that, despite the undisguised affluence, the vast majority of people in Silicon Valley never get rich. Most business ideas don't get funding. Even the majority of those that do ultimately fail. And the lucky winners may get to step two only to find themselves aimless, directionless. Either they never knew what they "really" wanted to do or they've spent so much time in the first step and invested so much psychic capital that they're completely lost without it.
Q: In avoiding the "Deferred Life Plan," you distinguish between passion and drive. What's the difference?
A: The distinction between drive and passion is crucial. Passion pulls you toward something you cannot resist. Drive pushes you toward something you feel compelled or obligated to do. If you know nothing about yourself, you can't tell the difference. Once you gain a modicum of self-knowledge, you can express your passion. But it isn't just the desire to achieve some goal or payoff, and it's not about quotas or bonuses or cashing out. It's not about jumping through someone else's hoops. That's drive.
Q: Eventually, you came to a point in your life where you came to the realization that you were on the "Deferred Life Plan." What changes did you make to stop yourself from continuing along the same path and to ensure you embarked on a different one?.
A: I started to pay attention. I was succeeding by everyone else's standards but my own. That became clear as each new success was short-lived and ultimately unfulfilling. I looked back on my life and took note of those times where I had felt real satisfaction and passion. I realized that variety, creativity, ideas, and working with a blank canvas all mattered more to me than titles or salaries. I leaped off the elevator to the penthouse, expecting a free fall but finding wings. I set my own expectations, my own standards, expressed my own values. To my surprise, it worked. I was able to integrate who I was with what I did sufficiently to move from the "Deferred Life Plan" to the "Whole Life Plan." I just wish I had had enough confidence to do it years ago.
Q: If a reader could take away only one message from The Monk and the Riddle, what would you like that to be?
A: When all is said and done, the journey is the reward. There is nothing else.
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