Fear and Entrepreneurship: Overcoming our Evolution | Sam Tarantino | TEDxBlairAcademy
how's it going guys so let's talk about fear for a second cuz my talk is gonna be about fear who here is afraid of spiders I can't look at that picture how about snakes yeah I'm not that bad with snake snakes I can hold and be alright how about Heights that's a big one for people yeah these are fears that are pretty palpable because they're obvious right but what about fears that are a little bit under the radar a little bit more hidden who's here afraid of failure right we see afraid of being alone alright so there's a lot of fears but you ever notice how some of these things seem to evolve from survival right fear was a natural mechanism that kept us alive and because it kept us alive we're here today you know saber-toothed tiger doesn't maul our ancestors therefore here we are right so fear is an important basis for its evolution our tendency to congregate in group Sam you have to be social as part of that whole thing too but ever notice how when kids first start out they've absolutely no fear I see three or four year-olds on the ski slopes and they're just like they've absolutely no fear whatsoever meanwhile as we get older it's like oh no a mogul I'm gonna die so what's interesting here is where does this come from I'm gonna address a lot of these things is it effective to have fear what how does if you're evolved so I actually believe fear is in appendix you know in appendices it's a useless vestige of something that used to be part of our larger test and then no longer Nellie does it no longer serve us but it actually can get inflamed and hurt us I really fear as a part of that we live in a very safe world these days relative to when saber-toothed Tigers were out stalking us and unless you're in the middle of Montana where Grizzlies are still attacking people then in for the most part fear is kind of an irrelevant I think for us so my name is sam tarantino i started a company called Grooveshark which was one of the first music streaming services today you all use Spotify and Pandora and things like that we were one of the first ones in 2005 and 6 to do stream music we grew that company to 120 employees 35 million users and about 50 million a year in revenue all to see it gets sued for 17 billion dollars lose it and then watch my partner pass away at 28 years old so I've seen the rise and the fall and all the stories that go along with that and I can tell you that fear the entire ride was a major part of it and having gone through that wife here is a complete illusion now so let's start with my story I have been a musician since I was 12 I started playing piano then I learned guitar and as I got older I found a place of comfort in the fact that I was really good at it so I went to UF and Florida or I continued to be involved with music and I went into a band and of course when I told my parents I wanted to be a musician not an economist they said fine let's see how you handle your bank account being turned off which became the impetus to say oh I need to actually build a business this is interesting now I had no idea what entrepreneurship was entrepreneurship was this thing that really wasn't defined yet it was sort of like these people that build businesses but I knew I wanted to do something in music so I go to this entrepreneurship Club meeting which sounds very nerdy and it is but I encourage you if - if you want to be in and doing anything in entrepreneurship go to a non traditional club meeting in college when he go there because it's it's a very inspiring place that people trying to do cool things and there I met my eventual co-founder Josh Greenberg who was a technology guy I was a business guy I looked I looked at things from the music side and from the business side and we became really complementary I said you know what let's do it he was very analytical he knew how to do product development and I knew how to do the entire business side because I was an economics major now I wanted to kill him at times because there were times throughout our entire 10 years of doing Grooveshark where I said why did you make that decision oh my god I'm gonna kill you but I knew that there was an underlying trust there that he would do what's best for the company and I would do what's best for the company so that partnership was really strong so with my early college savings he basically got our first office this was about a hundred square foot well that is actually there's like garbage that we're working on it was the white board box that we kind of put on top of another box and that became where kind of early early conference table so and Josh actually yelled at me when I got an actual desk is accuse me $50 of our startup capital on a desk yes and that is actually a CRT monitor were you think that's not just a prob this was 2006 so early days and we were just you know getting started now the first version of the product was terrible this is this is so embarrassing I dug this up and just the fact that it's pink and blue and very when web 2.0 was like what people called it first version was terrible second version was terrible who their version was terrible and what we found was that people want to actually just perform an action and something that really disrupted everything was it in 2007 the iPhone was released well this is the first time by the way let me set the stage here this is 2006 there was no iPhone most of you probably grew up with headphones but I'm having a time when you didn't have a portal to all the humanities knowledge at your fingertips that was a day that there was no streaming right you actually had to load up songs onto an iPod from iTunes which used to be a terrible piece of software and that was a six step process to get songs on the go that when I was in high school it's actually the CDs that you had to burn and rip and I'm not even gonna go there I'm feeling old so when the iPhone came out as a big deal because we said you know what into in a couple steps you're gonna be able to just play a song directly to your hand basically which was insane and that was the version of Grooveshark that actually started to really explode another thing at this time myspace was the largest site on the Internet so put that into perspective yes probably what's myspace right my space was like early Facebook before Facebook came along so they were doing a little bit of streaming music but it wasn't really popularized yet so this version you literally just searched and then you'd play a song so in two clicks you were playing a song right away and we had that on the on the first versions of the iPhone as well now that was revolutionary because that had never been done before and it hadn't even done without any sort of plugins or signups or anything you literally just went to the site search the song played song and that was what started blowing us up we started growing by about 200,000 users a month and that kind of growth was pretty well there's a source to Spotify we when you're growing that fast you're starting to spend money more fast - kids laugh see you're using servers and stuff and at the time we were ecstatic we said oh man like we need a new office space we need to like hire people to like maintain all this growth and serve people then we actually had to grow revenue and stuff so at the time we actually did install servers and so we spent a lot of 2/3 ham nights to serve her home at the data center actually turned installs now these days if any of you are gonna build a service you just go on this nice little thing called Amazon Web Services or Google cloud and you hit a button and it now creates a server so it does all of this in about 15 seconds which shows you how much technology has progressed and how much easier it is to build things as time goes on so one day I get a random call we're sitting here like struggling oh no we're running at a cache like next month what am I gonna do like we have 5-10 employees like this is crazy well I got a call one day from this guy at Intel I think at the time we were about a hundred thousand employees I got this guy he says my son uses your site every day and we don't like Intel is in the company Intel is and again I'm 23 years old just like I just got a call from a fortune 500 company they want to invest and I told my co-founder Josh I think we should fly out there this sounds important and so we flew out there and they invested the first series a which are the first seed round which is a couple hundred thousand and our team grew from this initial team to this team - over the next couple years this team and it was about a hundred twenty people the peak and throughout that time we're growing up to about thirty five million users at the peak and actually we were very very big in particular in Latin America Latin America the net Pandora I wouldn't have anything and they used to call us a groove there which was really cool it's like a nickname so we would go down to the various markets and I would start building with my team the various revenue components and Josh would continue working and iterating on the product so that was a story of the rise and the thing about this interesting is that at every milestone we kept popping in a pain because it was wild right we're growing so fast it was like oh my god million users whoa champagne you know five million users yeah 10 million users for champagne actually our landlord was yelled at us because the roof this the roof part of it was was all sticky from worship so we were living a dream it's I don't know if you guys have seen the Facebook movie but that whole like excitement about growth and stuff it was real like it was everything that I could have ever imagined that the startup world would actually be and better and every time we've done a street you go oh my god I used rashard that to me was the biggest reward because they know that something that came out of our heads and we built that people actually use on a daily basis and affected all these lives was just mind-blowing to this day I don't even like 35 million users doesn't even register it's like a weird it's just some people they used it and we were on the you know Forbes 30 under 30 three years in a row and we were like the spotlight and it was strange because here I was this college kid that now was had created a real product in a real business even during the crash as hard as it was to raise funding and I have a whole bunch of stories and raising funding even during the 2008 crash a lot of our competitors are going into business so they were coming to us so we grew actually faster during after the 2008 crisis the challenge on that front was actually raising money to help pace thing that amount of growth that was happening so we got through all the crisis problems which again I could spend an hour I'm head alone but breaking even if you're doing a business and that's what you want to do I can tell you breakeven is the greatest day of your life it is very very liberating that you actually build a business that is self-sustaining and running and you're actually growing on your own now actually got a mascot that would go around to all the conferences and sort of parade card company and then we had a real issue we had to get all four of the record labels in the music industry in order to become viable and it's a bit of a catch-22 you need money to get to sign the labels you need the labels doesn't get money and there's a lot of political you know it's not part of politics inside of the record labels and we had two of the four record labels but the other two weren't playing ball so the other two sued us and we had a seventeen billion dollar lawsuit on our hands it's okay we can handle this like we've gone through though a crisis and some other things and I felt like we could handle it the press was very innovative in their portrayal of the tatha crew shark we had this for about six years we were fighting the lawsuit and of course every month there was you know a shark through a roof is it over but then it actually happened after a while it finally ended and we got about a week away from trial and we decided to wave the white flag his trial is a lose-lose situation you spend all your money regardless of whether he win or you lose so we decided to shut down and take a take the summer off this was the last wall of all of our employees that signed the goodbye for Grooveshark and at the time Spotify had just entered the market and they had raised about half a billion dollars and didn't pay the labels a ton of money to come here the US which is why you use Spotify today in that crusher so we figured it's okay we'll take this would be half time you know sometimes you know Tom Brady just lost the Super Bowl there's next year we figured this was our lost Super Bowl and we would win then we would win in the next round but that wasn't gonna happen because Josh was found dead for no cause at 28 years old and I got a call from his girlfriend that he had passed away this is the what do you the last voicemail yeah hey I feel weird leaving this in your voicemail but I imagine the concept of a piano teacher on oculus imagine learning piano through oculus so picture like a a virtual piano teacher who understands so it was last I heard of it was the night before he passed and what it illuminated for me was how short life was how you could just not exist and then the flash and a28 I thought I was doing the unthinkable which was giving funeral for my best friend my co-founder person who was going to continue on to the next startup with Josh I thought who's vegetarian healthy how could someone like that just die I mean I eat meat for that reason how can I justify it say hey you know not the ready to go but in all seriousness there were no answers there wasn't even a cause I could get around so I went into this very dark place what's the purpose of anything and why I did great people to get taken from us and loss became the set of waves that sort of as time passed the ripples dissipated and a friend described it as the ripples continued to dissipate for a while but they're always there and always in the background of your thinking now it really taught me a lot about fear 700 people showed up at a Funeral kid was 28 years old 700 people we actually at UF we're in Gainesville and at UF we had to actually get the auditorium for his funeral and it thought taught me it's funny how someone so young could have such a massive impact on a community not to mention the 35 million users that we had I was getting thousands of tweets saying sorry fear loss and it's interesting because like the whole time leading into grooveshark and on the way up I was afraid of failure terrified failure what if this doesn't work I dropped out of school it's sophomore year because Intel came in on his investors fact that I dropped out of school was because what if I fail Intel what if all this happens and to think about what is is there not real just like this Mirage looks as real as water right but if you get closer to it it goes away and that's a real real lesson on on fear the closer you get to it the closer you get to the things that you're afraid of the more they actually start to disappear and the whole process of Josh really taught me that everything I had feared not only did things happen so much worse than what I figured but I survived it I got through it I'm standing here in front of you today who knows this photograph this is the most famous photograph of all time right it's when the Wright Flyer first took off but what people don't see are these photos two crashes once where they flip or in early parts of the development of the Wright Flyer they actually had to the Wright brothers had to get by in in order to get a military contract from this guy Thomas Selfridge well they took him on a test flight to see if he wasn't wanted to buy a bunch of right flyers it crashed Orville and him crashed and they he got killed not a great way to get a military contract he killed a guy who was the buyer of the planes so after that Orville really flew but they got back up they worked hard to get it fix the bugs fix the issues and get back on on the horse so I offer a couple tips on recovery because and I never do believe this stuff happens to all of us bad things will happen at some point in our lives and the question is how do we deal with them because the only choice we have and I realized that fear as it relevant as fear has become and is unreal as it is the way to get through it is actually have courage and courage I believe is a set of choices and those choices I think are as follows trusting and having faith if you're religious it's faith sometimes it's in the universe it's very in various worlds it's a different name but trusting that there's some sort of balance always believe like from physics every action as an equal and opposite reaction and so with bad things come good things and there's a balance in the universe learning and teaching after Josh died I had to immerse myself in technology I didn't know how to code I didn't know anything but in learning the process of the things that he's done over the years it actually brought me hope and I could feel his spirit in me of like wow this is what he did I can actually feel it and I'm now part of that whole world and teaching others is another thing because as you see people light up an excitement they can do what you do it actually gets you out of that sadness friends and family I had friends and family go through me this entire just entire process and I couldn't have done it without and facing discomfort I used be terrified of public speaking like terrified and facing discomfort is something that actually strengthens you I'm I was heard to quote that the way a diamond is made is through pressure and facing discomfort you can't get any more pressure than things that you absolutely got viscerally have a discomfort on and lastly preparation preparation is an interesting one because I'm a huge nature lover I do a lot of mountaineering and the thing about nature and outdoors is preparation is a key part of survival when you're out in the outdoors in the nature without preparation you could be in some serious life-threatening situations fear on the other hand is what makes you more more likely to hurt yourself and there's a good analogy there Joseph Campbell says follow your bliss and universe will open where there were only walls easier said than done right there's all this fear that we have like what if this doesn't work what if I get out of this relationship and there's no one for me what if you know there's all these what ifs that we have but the hard part is to have those curves that have the courage to go through those and say I'm gonna ignore this fear and I'm gonna go right towards it so that leads me to today I year and a half ago moved to this place where I used to vacation called Colorado all the time and I said I can make a choice right now to be happy to stop being sad to get off my butt and actually start taking action to change the way I think action is an incredible thing because it's it's the only thing you have control over is what you do things happen all around again back to the nature analogy storms hit like things that are all fires hit like so there's all these things that already control but all you have control over is action so I moved to Colorado and began this new company called chromatic which was an offshoot of one of the features of Grooveshark and it's where people make their own radio shows and it to me this was not just about creating a new company but it's about finishing when I started the future finishing what I started with Josh and actually taking it to the next half that we did so I want to talk about traps because inevitably you all deal with this at some point and I think it's helpful to look at at the things that can trip you up and I thought oh I have all this experience second company is gonna be so much easier experience yields ease right turns out is exactly the opposite what the hardest thing to deal with is a victim mentality why did this happen to me why it's natural to think when something bad happens like Josh dying or whatever why did this happen to me that's everyone's first reaction and the reality is bad things happen everyone and so there's no specific personalization to you and getting into mentality if I'm a victim actually leads you down a path that keeps you a victim but to say I'm not a victim I'm gonna get through this gets you past it another trap I found was entitlement 31 now I started your shark at 19 I had no idea what I was doing I mean I had probably I was like yeah I was basically getting homeless your age no idea what's inside no reference no frame of reference as to what could go wrong well when you're older and things go wrong you now suddenly get stuck sometimes on well I paid my dues or I are I deserve this already because I already went through all this bad stuff and the reality is the like the universe and the world doesn't really care like you will it's gonna be hard regardless lastly past in our thirdly past and future thinking there's a tendency I've had at least to think oh wow it was like this a crew shark therefore it should be like at this but the world's changed the world continues to change and it's hard to get stuck into like how something was and to stay into that world versus how should be so presence I found is something that's really really important you got to stay present and and in the current moment because everything changes so fast these days external control and expectation it's easy to say well it's all out of my control Josh died people that I grew shark dies but at the end of the day again you can take action and the hardest thing to do that I found is to have non attachment to the outcomes of things but still work 110 percent knowing that it may not work out the way you want it to that's hard but that's what creates anything right the best athletes in the world don't expect to get gold medals they go out there wanting gold medals and working towards gold medals and then the non attachment to the outcome it could be for years could be eight years could be twelve years until they get that gold medal but they work as hard as they can to do it and lastly this grows I've noticed as you get older here as fears of uncertainty again when you're first starting out who knows maybe it'll like just see what happens as bad things happen to you you start to get into a mode if I never want that to happen again and then it's poisonous because that becomes the reality that you will it amazes me how much what you think becomes the reality again I've seen the side of growth and excitement and I've seen the side of death and ending and having been on both sides and seeing the whole thing the entire consistency of the whole process was what I thought became reality and that is mind blowing that goes to show you how powerful you are in the process of creating anything and getting through anything so I'll leave you with this because I believe there is a capacity for greatness in every single one of you this is this is probably many of you about po2 college and it got into the world and the reality is there is every single person here has fears doubts uncertainties but every single one of you has an courage inside of you that can get through it I love you at this quote I do not think I'm especially especially fitted for success in any commercial pursuit even if I had the proper personal and business influences to assist me I might make a living but I doubt I would do ever more than this this is Wilbur Wright inventor of the airplane like the fact that even someone like this and literally is little hitter he's left history is littered with examples like this people that thought there's no way that's gonna happen the founding fathers who we looked at as these mythical creatures and gods they knew that they were going to get hanged if they lost the American Revolution so everyone has fears and it's a matter of the courage that you have to make the choices to take action to get over those fears because remember fear is an evolutionary vestige and we live in a safe fairly safe environment where fear is no longer needed so go out there conquer those fears push yourself to have courage because history is eagerly awaiting you thanks guys you