“We’re hope that we are Led Zeppelin’s first album…for small business analytics.”
What else can I say about that? Watch the video and pass along the link!
Transcription:
Hi! I am Adam Neary, and this is “Confessions of a Startup CEO.” Today’s episode is called “Startup lessons learned from Led Zeppelin,” and the episode is prompted by all the great blog posts out there called start up lessons learned, and most of the bloggers are writing great articles about things that entrepreneurs have done that we should all learn from. I realizes one of the best learned lessons that I have learned, that was actually from the early days of Led Zeppelin. So if you haven’t read Hammer of the Gods you should because it is a seminal piece of literature in rock journalism. It is a great lesson…separate from that from my experience listening to American blues that I think it is relevant.
The analogue that I am going to draw is that we can run around telling customers about Profitably and we first to try and find the groove and how we talk about this thing is business intelligence. We want to help customers you know grow their businesses and you know we work on the charts and graphs and analytics and you know how my background relates to what we are doing. It has been a choppy experience quite honestly learning how to describe what we are trying to do and what occurred to me was Led Zeppelin didn’t bother.
So both Jimmy Paige and Robert Plant, both huge American blues fans before they even met….they had stacks and stacks of Willy Dickson and Howlin Wolf and all the classics and when they met that was one of the first things that both had in common. Few people know this…so, you know, when they decided to bring the American blues to the British mindset they didn’t run around and ask everyone, “Hey do you listen to Albert King. Do you like Howlin Wolf? Do you like Mississippi River Delta Blues or Chicago Blues? These are the questions that people would not know how to answer, and I think there is a good lesson in there for what we are doing…
You know, when I started to ask small businesses about business intelligence often times they have a negative opinion because they know it is not something that they can usually get a lot of value out of nor are there any offerings for them. So a lot of time they don’t know any of the solutions that are available in the marketplace for large organizations. So I have started to do what Led Zeppelin did which is just show them what I know is business intelligence and say “look is this awesome or what?” and the answer is as it is.
If you look at Led Zeppelin’s first album you know “I cannot quit you baby” and “you shook me,” both Willy Dickson’s songs. They just played them. No problem. “How many more times?” they managed to merge Howlin Wolf’s “How many more years” with Albert King’s “The Hunter” to create one song, and it is awesome. “The Lemon Song” in the second album is Howlin Wolf’s “Killing Floor” and a couple of lyrics are from Robert Johnson’s “Traveling Riverside Blues.” They just took these songs and just started playing them and they played them in a way they knew that British or London contemporaries would enjoy and they played them in a way which was just awesome. They were very successful.
So I think the startup lesson learned there is do what Led Zeppelin does and what we are trying to do is we are going to take concepts from operations consulting, data mining you know heavy data analytics. We are going to take concepts from business intelligence but rather than tell people what they are doing here is what we are going to do, we are going to do what makes sense and we are going to do it for small businesses and we hope that the result is awesome.
We hope that we are Led Zeppelins’ first album for small business analytics and we hope that people who use it are as excited as all of us the first time we heard Led Zeppelin do what we know that you hear the Blues is to create something that was fantastic. So that is the startup lesson learnt for today and I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you think oh my god it has been a long time since I have listened to that album and it is awesome and you will go and listen to it. If you have ever you should check out Willy Dickson as well because that is where it all came from. So I hope you are having a great night. It is a great weather out here in New York and that’s the end of the episode! Talk to you soon.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe to my RSS Feed
Follow me on Twitter
