An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
You’re going to fail to the extent that you’re going to feel embarrassed to even tell your family about what you’re doing with your life at times. Some people were just lucky and succeed off the bat. And I think they’re at a big disadvantage. I think there’s a huge advantage to not just failing playfully, but like the devastating lows of failure and the shame that comes with it and sticking with it is useful.
As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Michael Rosenburg.
Michael is a startup entrepreneur, multimedia artist, hardcore traveler, technology designer, and soon to be published author. He dedicated 10+ years to helping build communities of technologists across a dozen countries. He has lived extensively in Sub Saharan Africa and is a global pro at remote work and cross-cultural collaboration. The common theme to these life experiences mirrors a central theme for the novel Paradigm: a fascination with social transformation through the communal creation of technology.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?
I had a moment in my life when I was about 14 years old. When I decided that I wanted to stop feeling like a silly little kid and started wanting to feel like a superhero.
Two things happen around this time. One is that I signed up to take martial arts and I ended up really excelling at martial arts and becoming a martial arts teacher, which was a lot of my background in like helping communities learn and transform.
And the second thing is my dad took me to my high school and demanded that they give me a work permit so that I could go get a job at a local restaurant. He said at that moment, you will not sit around and play video games for another summer. And he repeated that story to me every year for the rest of my life.
Ever since then, I’ve been applying the lessons of what I learned in martial arts about how you can take ownership of yourself and transform yourself and shape yourself into this sort of personal superhero. But also it caused a lifelong endeavor of rebelling against my dad and proving that you don’t need to stop playing in order to enter the world of work and become an adult.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
There’s this funny quote, which is “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.” There’s a variant of that quote which is “Just because you’re overly optimistic, doesn’t mean everything is going to turn out okay.
What both of these quotes have in common is that you can acknowledge your mental state and you can recognize that your mental state is different from reality. Just because I’m paranoid or just cause I’m flooded with optimism doesn’t determine what the world is like and how I’m going to be able to make use of it.
I determine what the world is like for me and how I’m going to respond to it. These quotes are playful and funny, but they remind us to kind of step outside of our world experience and step back into like an intentional relationship with our environment.
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
The matrix. I think the matrix is a metaphor for culture. It’s a metaphor for what I learned when I started taking martial arts, which is that, we’re inside of this paradigm that we don’t realize that we’re inside of.
We think it’s normal. We think it’s how it has to be. How we operate and the metaphor of the matrix for me is that when you step outside of that paradigm and you see it from the outside, you can reenter the paradigm.
For example, the American paradigm is that this is the land of the brave and the free, and it’s the greatest country on earth. It’s the best place to get the American dream, which is the desirable life to have a house, a family and everything that you could afford to buy.
I was raised in that paradigm combined with a paradigm that America is racist, broken and stuff like that. And it wasn’t until I stepped out of that paradigm by traveling, exploring other modes of thought like Taoism, and different religions and different philosophies that I was like I can actually come back to America and participate in that paradigm.
That this is the land of the free and the brave/ a racist broken system. And I can see it with fresh eyes and not be trapped in it and assume that it’s just how things are. And that gives me this super ability to interact with it, shape it, respond to it and be myself in it.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?
My first thought is that there’s no such thing as good ideas. They are just ideas and what we do with them. If you come up with a thousand ideas and you find the one that feels promising, powerful, energizing and inspiring, and then you completely forget about it, it wasn’t a good idea. It was just an idea.
Good ideas are the ideas that we give our attention to and follow through. Step one is deciding which ideas you want to honor with love and attention. I was working with a team earlier today where they were saying it’s so important for us to connect as people.
I was like, okay, great. Do you want to carve out 20 minutes of this meeting so that we can just connect as people? And they were like, oh no, we should get to work. And I’m like, all right, then that wasn’t a good idea because we’re not honoring it with space and attention. When that team decides to actually take time to connect, instead of just describing how good that would be in the hypothetical future, that’s when it becomes a good idea.
Step one is to make a conscious decision to put time aside to give this idea love and attention, and then it becomes a question of, okay, is this idea worthy of devotion and risk taking? If the answer is yes, then the main thing, in my opinion, is to focus on steady progress.
How can I get a meaningful win each week in service of this idea? And that wind could just be sharing it with people to see how they receive it. That wind could be asking somebody if they want to pay for it and getting a no that when could be putting that idea into a social media post and sharing it and seeing how it resonates with people.
Over time, those little wins take a life of their own. Then the idea starts to ask us for stuff. It starts with love and attention and then, you give it devotion and follow through. Eventually, the idea will fizzle out and morph into something else.
Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?
It does not matter if somebody else has thought of an idea or if somebody else has worked on an idea. Ideas are not about our ego or claiming ownership or having the best one or having all of them. It’s, it’s not necessary. That’s separate from a business. You probably shouldn’t invest in a business that doesn’t have a good shot of succeeding.
I’m not going to start a business that is an Uber competitor out of my backyard right now, because I’m not going to succeed. I’m not going to create a competitor to a business that is obviously going to out-compete me. But the idea of better transportation in my community or how can we facilitate transportation around by community? It doesn’t matter that a thousand people have asked about that idea. We should keep asking about that idea.
We have to clear out our minds a hundred per cent. This idea of has somebody else thought of this? Should I even pursue this? That’s a relevant question when we’re talking about investing our time and resources in a competitive company that has to deal with competition. It is not a relevant question when we’re trying to vet whether or not we should pursue ideas. We should pursue ideas if they’re meaningful to us and we believe that pursuing them can serve our dreams in life.
If we feel that they’re meaningful and they could serve our needs and we’re inspired to pursue them, then we should pursue them and we should give them life and tired. And if they become a business model where we want to be smart about how much time and energy and funds and resources we invest in that business model, then we start asking the question about competition and viability of the idea in a certain business.
For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.
This idea of finding a patent and sourcing the production work is I think a sort of the wrong question. Everybody’s process is different. Startups didn’t exist for our parents’ generation. Somebody created the concept of a startup as a new novel way to take their idea to the market. So the idea that anybody can give you a step-by-step process for taking an idea to a market is misguided.
A self-sabotaging approach to thinking about this is that now there are experts out there. There are patent lawyers, and fulfillment professionals. Some people think about the production line from end to end. And when it’s time, you can hire those people and get wisdom from those people to accelerate your process.
But the key here is not having some prescribed sequence that we go to and bring our idea to the market. That is a completely misguided way to approach taking an idea from zero to one. The better question is which of these problems are already solved and which are new. So if I’m trying to get a new product to people, shipping and distribution are already solved, I shouldn’t be trying to innovate on how I ship and distribute our products to people.
I should turn to people who’ve already solved that problem and learn from them. I should focus my intention on the unsolved part, which has a lot more to do with the actual product that I’m trying to get in their hands in the first place. So don’t worry about patents. Don’t worry about whether you’ve got some toolkit or sequence for how to get your idea out there.
Focus on the unsolved problems. And then for the already solved problems, just seek the people who already know how to do it and get their support.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)
One is that I feel like all the literature about how failure is part of the process for entrepreneurs is way too fluffy.
You’re going to fail to the extent that you’re going to feel embarrassed to even tell your family about what you’re doing with your life at times. Some people were just lucky and succeed off the bat. And I think they’re at a big disadvantage. I think there’s a huge advantage to not just failing playfully, but like the devastating lows of failure and the shame that comes with it and sticking with it is useful.
I remember around Christmas time a year and a half ago, I kind of shrugged off people’s requests for updates because I didn’t have good updates. And now I’m just so proud to share with my family and friends where we’re coming from.
Number two is that I can’t underestimate the benefit of having a partner. It doesn’t have to be a dedicated co-founder, but somebody who can stick with you through the process or better yet a community of people who can stick with you for the process and the route you are on. A community that can root for you and cheers you on is very beneficial.
The third thing is to focus on small, weekly wins, as opposed to the big, ambitious milestone just to keep the thing moving. Once you’re in the habit of keeping the thing moving, then you can aim for much bigger things.
My co-founder and I coordinate with each other for a while. We kind of coached each other and hung out when we were both between jobs and then one day kind of deliberately invited each other into co-founding together. It was that slow process of staying in each other’s corner and then eventually opting into more that works for us.
That brings me to my fourth suggestion, which is, don’t take co-founding seriously. Don’t just think of co-founding like marriage. Don’t just flippantly invite people to co-found with you. Think about really tapping into your network, dating different potential collaborators, quote, unquote metaphorically, and let yourself discover which relationships want to serve the work.
Lastly, side hustles are part of the strategy. If you need to get a side gig for a while to pay the bills, don’t look at it as quitting. Look at it as the next smart move you have to do, to not compromise your business by running out of money.
If you need to get a job that you don’t really like, that takes up half your week to not lose your apartment, and have to give up completely on the entrepreneurial stuff, that’s okay. That’s part of your strategy. So see side hustles as part of the strategy to serve the dream, not as giving up and running away.
Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?
If you start with an idea at the very beginning of the process and you’re attached to what it should look like at the end, then it’s unlikely that you’re going to get there without a lot of grief and hardship along the way. Because 99% of the time outcome is that the idea you have changed because you learn about how it operates in the world. So if we’re attached to it, becoming a business or becoming a product or becoming a patented innovation then a lot of times. Make it harder for ourselves to see, uh, like what the idea wants to become and how it can become the thing that grows and works in the world.
The second thing I would suggest is to share it with people, share it with as many people as you can. Share it with them to get them to confirm it. Don’t be like, I have this idea. I’m so excited to share it with you. It’s Uber for cats. Don’t you think that’s awesome? Share it with them because you are trying to gather more perspectives on this thing that you can’t stop thinking about. Like, I keep thinking about Uber for cats and I just want more people. Input on that. How does that sound? Does that sound stupid? Does that sound cool? Does that sound weird? Does that sound like something you’d pay for?
Share it with people and get their authentic and constructive input on it. Let that guide you to where you want to go.
There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?
I researched scientifically strong inventions that could then get infusions of funding that can turn them into businesses. The research showed that what they realize is that if you try and flood scientific inventions with resources, it’s almost always going to fail because nobody wants fancy scientific inventions.
There are some industries where a faster jet engine is what they want, but for the vast majority of inventions, what makes them good in the world is the fact that people embrace them and use them. Some consultants can take you through the process of getting your patents and setting up your products/services for marketing and stuff like that.
But a lot of the time, those consultants do not result in the invention succeeding. There isn’t a really rich customer research component that proves that people want this and sets it up for what people want. If you’re some niche scientist who really doesn’t want to interact with any customers, yeah. You can hire some people who will research the product for you and validate it.
But that research is either going to be very expensive or you’re going to have to look out and find somebody who deeply cares about whatever it is you’re trying to invent. Otherwise, unless you have a lot of resources and are good at hiring talent, you need to take responsibility for getting your idea out there in the world.
You can’t hire somebody else to take you through some imaginary prescribed 10-step process to get your idea out there. It’s a fantasy. Some highly paid professionals know how to do technical things like that.
But all of that just amplifies the core work, which is getting your idea out there in the world, sharing it with people, validating that it’s wanted, letting it evolve and change instead of just holding on at all costs to what you think it should be.
And then you can complement that core work with people who need to know how to do the technical skills of patent law and marketing etc.
What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?
This has a lot to do with capacity. If you have the resources or the ability to do consulting work so that you can bootstrap your company, or if you can get people to enable you to do paid R and D because you’re providing a service while developing your idea, those things are great.
Bootstrapping can go wrong. I knew somebody who sold their car and moved out of their house and moved into their ex-girlfriend’s couch so that they could quote-unquote bootstrap their business. That is not the way to do it. You’re compromising your business by overspending and overtaxing yourself and impoverishing yourself. This business needs your resource. You need to be reasonable to lead this idea into the world.
Bootstrapping is good. All my businesses right now started bootstraps. I’m not rich. I was able to connect with somebody who had a little bit of extra disposable income that they could put into the business. And also we were able to set up these R and D relationships. People would pay us to do the work.
Fundraising is also possible. You can ask your friends and family, you can go for institutional investing. You can go for fundraising. You can look for grants like the NSF grant in the United States, for technical inventions that relate to a Ph.D. level research.
But all of those funding things come with trade-offs and requirements for getting access to them. So you need to have the network, you need to know who can provide that investment in either angel investors or friends and family with disposable income or the venture capital round. And then especially if you’re going for venture investment, it is a famously ugly process.
Founders hate that word. The best, most effective founders I know tend to see that work as an unfortunate, necessary distraction from the real work. Any time that you spend meeting with prospective investors is time that you don’t spend building the product and getting it out there in the world.
So you gotta be down for that and you gotta lean in. And then you also have to realize the trade-offs that come with that, especially venture to invest. They’re going to expect growth and not all ideas are capable of scaling at that level. Not all ideas can survive 10x growth without losing their soul.
So you need to look at whether the idea requires a massive scale to succeed, or will be harmed by the massive scale and make it harder for that idea to come to life.
Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
I’m stepping into this new chapter right now. I’m moving from like a young spunky hustler that takes any job. If it’s meaningful enough, regardless of the pay to somebody who’s established, incredible and esteemed and getting paid for it.
I think that that success has been built on me, just like really going into the belly of the beast of my work. Going to places that are very challenging and being in it. Being at places like Trenton, New Jersey, where I worked in high schools, places like Lagos, Nigeria. When I worked in startups, places like Cape Town, South Africa, where I worked in nonprofits and diving into these places and working on them on my terms.
None of these places was a place where I followed the rules and did what everybody else was doing. Even if it grossed me out just to get ahead in all of these places, I held back to that childhood spirit of play, and also this belief that we can step outside of the paradigm that we came from and the status quo and gain these sort of superpowers to step back in. Sorta like that matrix metaphor.
I’ve done that everywhere I’ve gone. I’ve looked at things differently and I’ve looked at things through the lens of what could we make out of this situation in this environment, as opposed to, how do I just play by the rules?
It’s been slow coming, but the fact that doing that for 10 years has resulted in me feeling like a respected and esteemed entrepreneur in the world that’s getting well compensated for it, I think that is a model for others. You don’t have to fall in line and play by the ugly rules of the status quo to carve a life that feels prosperous and purposeful.
The impact I want to have on the world is I want to share that gift. Look at the world for what it could be. That means looking at the world like we’re opening our eyes to what is going on here in this crazy place where we live. We’re also taking responsibility for it. For what it could be, how we could shape it, and how the clues that lie in reality to what this world could be if we just kind of take responsibility for our relationship with it and our capacity to shape it.
You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
I would advocate for reformative movements. There’s always something in the social structure that I seek to change. Encouraging the mass to think more independently. You don’t have to fall in line and play by the ugly rules of the status quo to carve a life that feels prosperous and purposeful.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
If I could connect with one entrepreneur out there in the world, it would be Adrian Marie Brown. I think that her work is incredible and it is extremely relevant, grounded, and down to earth while also being profound, earthly, and visionary. I feel a responsibility in my life to translate some of them. The essence I see in her work into places that otherwise might not know how to find their way to it like African businesses that are maybe starting from a place of, including people who, are involved in this conversation. About what we owe and what our needs are and how we can form a community together.
White male leaders who are having a hard time unsticking themselves and following up, figuring out how to be in solidarity. We don’t need allies. We need solidarity. So white men in leadership who don’t know how to be in solidarity with moving the world towards being a more inclusive, connected place that honors everybody and their dignity and their capacity to build this world in the image that we deserve and we’re ready for as humanity.
I would definitely love it if I could have a private conversation with Adrian Marie Brown and trade some thoughts on these ideas.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Making Something From Nothing: Author Michael Rosenburg On How To Go From Idea To Launch was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
