ENTREPRENEURS
Happy businesspeople are all alike. They want to tell you the key to their success, and they seldom do it with humor. But in his new book,The Monk and the Riddle: The Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur (Harvard Business School Press), Silicon Valley veteran Randy Komisar manages to teach and entertain - and still let you know how he got rich.
Formerly head of Crystal Dynamics and CFO of GO, Komisar is now a self-described virtual CEO who offers visionary advice to startups. In his book, Komisar creates Lenny, a composite of the eager Internet gold diggers he's encountered over the years. A hardheaded, aggressive entrepreneur, Lenny wants to get rich off his parlor scheme, Funerals.com.
The prospect of luring people to buy caskets online is meant to seem far-fetched, though on the Net nothing is beyond the pale. (See "Dear Everybody:I'm Dead," below.) But Komisar offers fruitful advice to this Valley desperado, drawing parallels between his own past tribulations and Lenny's current stagnation. The result is a disarming and slightly morbid book that injects some welcome spirit into a stiff genre.
Wired: Why's the Lenny character so thickheaded?
Komisar: That thickheaded attribute is an entrepreneurial attribute. You are selling an idea - Funerals.com - to a skeptical market. It takes a certain resilience to deal with that.
What motivates you?
I don't chase money, I chase ideas. But I'm not Mother Teresa. I'm a businessman.
What's your view of all the money being made in the Valley?
We look at the Internet magnates, and we envy them. We should pity them. They are the kamikazes of our society, spending their lives on things they don't need. What you accomplish is transitory. This goes back to the notion of funerals. Ultimately, time is all you've got.
What do you make of the Tony Robbinses of this world?
The problem with the institutionalized self-help programs is that they tend to become pretty rote: the 5 rules of this and the 10 rules of that. There's no set of rules that will make life work. You can't live within its rules. You know, kill the Buddha when you see him on the road.
You've obviously become a writer: There's a lot of drinking in this book.
I was just trying on the persona.
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