reecepacheco

Yesterday, my friend and biz partner Joe said to me:

“You may be the closest person to [Teddy] Roosevelt I know.  He just didn’t tolerate incompetent people whatsoever.”  

Joe’s reading a book on Teddy right now.  We sort of revere the guy because he was a total badass, and I took Joe’s remark as a compliment.

I think I learned this from my parents.  Entrepreneurs themselves, they’ve worked long and hard to be successful in the restaurant business and they expect the best out of everyone around them - be it employees, partners, vendors, etc.  

A quick example.  One day, twenty-odd years ago my mother had an incident with a Miller beer deliveryman.  He used that one infamous word that is guaranteed to cause a problem (Hint: it starts with a “C”).  

Well since that day, my parents have never sold a single Miller product in our restaurants.  

Extreme?  Yup… and I love it.

I operate similarly.  I have extremely low tolerance for poor writing.  I expect 100% attention in meetings.  I want the best of the best in people and nothing less.

Does this make me a snob?  I don’t think so.  It’s about having high standards and surrounding yourself with people of similar ilk.  

And if you want a laugh, here’s the relevant conversation with Joe…

Me: …and I just don’t f$#%*@g understand this #$*&^@&*  ”wondered if we might organize an intro…” in an email in which he added the dude he wants to intro already.

Joe: You may be the closest person to Roosevelt I know.  He just didn’t tolerate incompetent people whatsoever. 

Me: That is probably the greatest compliment you’ve ever given me 

Joe: Yea, I would love to have someone say that about me.

Me: Well thanks man. I really appreciate it… Even if it means I’m an intolerant asshole.  ;)  

…this jerk even spelled my f$#%*@g name wrong!

I turned 27 this past weekend.  Thanks to everyone for the well wishes.

And after living in NYC for over 2 years, I finally got my parents to visit - which was my mom’s first trip to NYC… ever.  Yes… really.

We lucked out on the weather and spent a lot of time outside in SoHo, the West Village, on the Highline, Central Park, etc. and hit up a couple ‘chef’s’ restaurants (my dad’s a chef by trade).

Other highlights include:

- A few games of intense pickup basketball with Dan, Joe, Nick and a bunch of scrappy punks at Stuytown.  I’ve got skinned knees and elbows from laying out for rebounds and I love it.

- Meeting up with 4 of my closest friends - Dan, Joe, Matt and Mark - for a couple beers.  Doesn’t matter where we are, we have fun together.   I love these guys.   

- Talking to Mark Suster on the phone for a bit.  I have a ton of respect for him as an entrepreneur and it was great to connect in a solid conversation about HomeField.  Thanks Mark!

- Dinner at SD26 thanks to Daisy’s connections with Massimo Vignelli whom I was able to meet, too.  Very cool place, excellent food and service.  If you’re a baller or have parents willing to foot the bill, try it!

- First game of the year for my NYAC lacrosse team.  We won 21-3 I think.  I’ll take it. ;)

- Allen Morgan making intros to tons of great entrepreneurs, investors and the like.  In a matter of 24 hours, I’d lined up meetings with some excellent people who I’m excited to meet.  Thank you Allen!

- Seeing the premier of “The Startup” - a mini documentary on my startup featured on NYC 3.0.  It’s great to see the finished product after almost 5 months of filming.  If you’ve got some time and/or interest in startups, it’s worth watching.  Hopefully it’s back up - all the traffic yesterday crashed the site!  Nice work Alex and Vadim.

Great weekend with lots of my favorite people.  Thanks all!

Just an FYI: if it’s quiet over here, it’s because I’ve been working on our company blog lately: telling our story from day one, announcing some new partners, handling all the PR for HomeField and dropping posts on new features like this (with video!).  

Check it out once in a while.  Who knows?  You may learn something.

@robgo:

This is a continuation from my previous post about fast followers.

Several times a week, I hear a pitch from for a company that is fairly similar to existing players in the market.  When I ask the entrepreneur how they expect to win vs. the various competitors, I’ll often hear something like:

“Well, they don’t have feature x, y, and z which has been built into our product from the beginning.”

These same folks usually include some sort of Harvey Ball chart to show how differentiated they are from their competitors.

My advice: if you need a Harvey Ball chart to show how you are different, you aren’t different enough.

In my view, winning as a startup doesn’t have that much to do with individual features.  Features do drive success, but great teams and great product development processes drive features.

I saw a talk a while ago by Mike Maples.  In it, he encourages entrepreneurs to “be different, not better”.  I completely agree.

Being different means being WORSE than competitors in some dimensions.  It’s a very intentional decision to forgo some areas of potential strength and choose the 1 or 2 dimensions that no one else is thinking about and absolutely destroy the competition in those areas.

Some examples?  Tumblr, Zappos, Milo, Polyvore, etc.

Be different.

I completely agree here.  This is the way we think about HomeField in terms of some of the competition.

We actually think of most of our competition as market validation and differentiate ourselves by our lack of features. We see it as a strength that enables HomeField to become the ubiquitous video platform for sports (and achieve some other stealth goals as well).