From Hollywood to Silicon Valley, Nobody Knows Anything

When screenwriter William Goldman, whose successes included Butch Cassidy and All the President’s Men, surveyed nearly a century of film history, legions of talented executives and movie stars, and reams of audience research data, he concluded that “Nobody knows anything.”  Producing a new movie, Goldman said, involved as much luck today as it had in 1910, and anyone who believed he could pick the next hit was delusional.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

By my second year of business school at Harvard, I was broke and decided to take a job with the Admissions Department.  My role was to meet with potential MBA candidates for an “informational interview” to help them understand the business school experience.

I was not supposed to give advice, except around process and due dates, which made me uniquely unable to answer the one question every potential candidate wanted to know: How do I get in?

The fact is, I didn’t have a clue.  I had stats about the age, education, and work experience of the incoming class.  Otherwise, I knew that I had been accepted through some administrative bungle, so couldn’t be counted on much to guide a stranger.

Every so often I would be asked to interview a student in high school, always accompanied by his parents.  Inevitably, the father wanted to know: What should his child be doing now to improve his chances of getting into HBS?

Really?  I knew not to roll my eyes, and I also knew to ask the student what he liked to do.  Inevitably, whatever he said—baseball, playing in a rock band, computers—would be exactly the right thing to do to get into Harvard.  It was my sole revenge on a father who would probably be drilling his high school sophomore over dinner that evening about the role of tariffs in the nineteenth-century global economy.

The smidgen of info that I did know was that HBS could build three complete, equally competitive and promising classes of 800 students from the applications it received each year.  It turned out that even the blessed had a two-in-three chance of failing.

In other words, nobody knows anything.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

These memories came flooding back to me when I read KJ Della’Antonia’s piece in Sunday’s New York Times, “How High School Ruined Leisure.”

As the sports and activities kids once did “just for fun” sometimes led to prestigious academic opportunities, the grown-ups caught on and took over, and everything from baseball to math modeling was commercialized and turned into a means to an end. 

The message was clear: These activities were important. What they weren’t was optional, at least beyond the initial decision to sign up. The season was mapped out, the schedule on the fridge.

Hobbies became “extracurriculars” which eventually became essays targeted at colleges.  Why participate in something if it didn’t have a payback?

Little do these poor, stressed, under slept and overscheduled high school students realize: nobody knows anything.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Today, many of my friends are entrepreneurs.  Some have been successful, a few wildly so.  There is nobody I’ve ever met who wasn’t delighted that all his hard work had paid off.  But the real joy in each success, if you listen hard, was not the financial payoff, but the act of being with others and building the business. Doing the work. 

In other words, the win is in the pursuit.  It is a lesson that I saw again and again as I spoke with my friends and researched the entrepreneurial stories included in Innovation on Tap.

Professors Steve Kaplan and Josh Lerner concluded that only 1/6th of 1 percent of new businesses manage to obtain VC funding—1,000 lucky winners out of 600,000 new businesses launched in America.^[1]  VCs are among the best in the world at picking growth businesses, and they get to review most of the very best opportunities.  Even so, of that fortunate 1,000, about half will lose money.

Half of the best of the best, the chosen few from 600,000 possibilities.

Antonio Garcia Martinez, who worked on Wall Street and at Facebook, describes the entrepreneurial journey as something that appears to be an organized process but is really a “sort of flailing thing . . . You try ten things; two sort of work out, and then one succeeds beyond all expectations.  You really only understand why in retrospect, and nobody would have guessed it. . . .”^[2]

In start-ups, as in Hollywood and school admissions, nobody knows anything.  I so wish my arsenal had included that quote when I was interviewing the fathers of a high school-MBA candidates. 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Recently, I heard an author interviewed about his first best-selling novel, a blockbuster that brought fame and riches.  In the course of the conversation, the interviewer discovered that the author had written five previous novels, all of them failures.  “That must have been heartbreaking,” the host said.  

On the contrary, the author replied, those first five novels were some of the best work he had ever done.  He simply loved the discipline of writing, successful or not.

In a world with no guarantees, where it really is true that nobody knows anything, the win is in the pursuit. Write the book.  Play in the rock band.  Launch the company.  Focus on the journey.  Love the work because, win or lose, that will likely turn out to be the greatest satisfaction of all.

---

[1] Steven N. Kaplan and Josh Lerner, “It Ain’t Broke: The Past, Present, and Future of Venture Capital,” Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Volume 22, Number 2, A Morgan Stanley Publication, Spring 2010, 2.

[2] Interview with Antonio Garcia Martinez, “You’ll Grow Out of It," Inside the New York Times Book Review podcast, July 10, 2016.