Quote:
Originally Posted by spinner2000
Nice post. Do you think you could expand a bit further with an example?
So towards the end of my poker career I started trying to launch "internet businesses" things like MFA sites (made for Adwords), usual affiliate sites, things like that. I learned a good amount about SEO and the building of websites but they all inevitably failed, I mostly just lost time though.
Eventually, I realized poker was ending for me and that the opportunities I liked were drying up and so I left officially to take a job at a small website getting an entry level job involved with the website (off the back of my personal project experience).
It was a pretty big hit to the ego from playing poker, this job was a step above minimum wage but I took it seriously. The real value though is that I got access to real world problems with websites, how businesses think about their websites and most importantly
why valuable changes to websites don't get made. I also taught myself to code from scratch.
Around the one year mark (I had it in my head one year was a critical minimum for a resume) I started looking for my next position. I got hired by a well respected SEO agency moving from Las Vegas to NYC and finally was being paid well. This is where everything took off, two of my coworkers in this newly opened NYC branch of our agency were just incredible business talents (one now in the laudable Google Creative Team, the other an exec at the agency).
Basically, they helped me take my technical skill and start applying it in business situations. Pitching, selling, negotiating, building business relationships. After about 12-18 months I was really confident in the space, I had worked with hot startups, Fortune 500 companies, international brands and everything in between (super profitable niche medium sized businesses).
It's progressed from this point and now I have an understanding of what makes a profitable business operation. How do you structure teams, how do you structure their interactions and what metrics should be used to judge performance. And what you can do with that is really boundless.
So far, I've received very big job offers, investment deal flow, partnerships of every sort. A lot of them I've had to say no to because I don't want to work 80 hours a week but I've made more money every year by multiples so I'm happy with the progress.
I'll continue to build a team to help me take advantage of this access I've received and I'll continue to focus on growing my access to bigger and more valuable problems.
I got lucky lots of times throughout this story and made plenty of mistakes. The key I think has always been a flexible mindset. I have no restrictions on what I'm willing to try, work on, learn. If something I invested a lot into fails I usually feel the knowledge I gained compensates for it because I choose where to put my energy carefully. Every time I do something new I try and do it better or else make it a process and focus my energy elsewhere.
Last edited by cwar; 03-03-2014 at 09:58 AM.