[MUSIC PLAYING]
Great entrepreneurs, just like great artists,
are fantastic at seeing the world, ingesting information,
and somehow being able to apply their own expression into creating something
new.
I'll give you an example from my own personal experience.
When I was a talent agent for many years,
I noticed that we were getting bombarded daily
with press kits of artists who wanted to get booked by our agency.
This was an era where everybody was sending CDs through the mail, often
at a great cost.
And frankly, most of them just kept piling up on my desk.
I simply did not have the time to go through them.
But more importantly, we had an informal rule
that, unless an artist was making $3,000 or more,
we simply couldn't really take them on as a client.
So I had a question-- where were all these musicians going?
How were they connecting with promoters?
What was the process of helping them get these gigs?
Which I knew were happening, but not in a systematic way.
So this is when I thought that the internet would
be a great medium of bringing what were fairly disconnected parties together.
So that was the inspiration behind my own company, Sonicbids,
which came as a direct byproduct of my experience,
as well as a product of me seeing the changes that were
happening in the environment around me.
A lot of it I take from other people that I know.
And I watch them go through a job and I'm like, wow, that's really relevant.
And I remember what that was like.
And I'm going to write a song about it from this perspective.
And then always, reading the newspaper, books-- so much from books.
I mean, it is emotional.
It's something that makes me feel like something,
but it isn't necessarily my own personal pain that I'm writing about.
If I find some artwork that's inspiring to me
or some music that's inspiring to me, I say, OK, step one-- identify.
Why do I like that?
But then say, where did this person start to get there?
So that's a way for me to always stay current, is
to be really thinking about, well, what are the things that I like? [INAUDIBLE]
to me.
I'm always out of the studio, looking at things, and then right back
into the studio-- focused on what I'm doing, thinking about those things,
but then applying very critically how the people got there.
I have a number of different things that I do.
One is that I love to see art.
I love to see where artists are being inspired, because they're unedited.
I think for me, as a designer and being a designer in corporate America,
we're edited much more.
And it feels a little bit more constricted.
So I love to see where artists are going.
And then this one might be a little harder to explain,
but I totally get inspired by creative collisions.
I remember back when the Prius first came on the market.
I was living in Portland, Oregon, and the Prius was selling like crazy.
Then I realized-- but they're Hummer was doing really good at the same time.
And you realize that ultimately what happened
is we have the crossover utility vehicle,
the smaller, more functional utility-- and they merge.
So I always tell people, you might feel really comfortable in one place--
like loving this and inspired by that.
Look at what's happening at the 180 degrees.
You have to have other interests and other passion
to be able to bring that back to your music and re-inspire you.
Even walking down the street, you here a weird sound from a train and your like,
how can I sample that and incorporate that in my music?
Or how somebody is talking or another language.
Actually, I'm learning Nahuatl, which is the language from the Aztecs.
And that actually changed a little bit my lyrics
and how my phrasing works in English.
So, becoming a keen observer of your environment
is key to becoming both entrepreneur as well as,
let's face it, an expressive person.
Think of how much amazing art was simply created
because an artist was open to the environment and the stimuli
around them.
And they were influenced by that.
Think of U2 writing a song like "Sunday Bloody Sunday" or Crosby, Stills, Nash
& Young moved to write a great song like "Ohio" after witnessing
the shootings at Kent University.
So observation of your environment, whether it
moves you to write a great piece of music or to start a business,
is critical in your journey.