I was speaking to my friends Doriane and Jacob today about the people who've helped me along my journey.
I don't mean people who've partnered with me, worked for/with me or invested in my success for a clear ROI. I mean people who could have simply ignored me or given me some simple platitudes and moved on. They had very little to gain by helping at that moment in time but they did it anyway.
There are too many to list them all but some that jumped to mind include...
- Nik who has been supportive and encouraging of me since I was like 9 years old. Showed me the first PDA (before smart phones kids), my first high-rise apartment and my first Porsche. Of course we then went on to work together on Faraday Media, APML, DataPortability etc.
- Martin who randomly reached out to help a kid in the Aussie community. He was so generous I literally had to ask him "Why are you doing this? What do you want in return!?". I was confused when he said "Nothing". He nudged me to create APML which then lead to DataPortability
- Michael who wrote very kind things about DataPortability and, when finding out I was a poor entrepreneur planning to come to Silicon Valley, allowed me to stay in his guest room for free. Wow what an experience!
- Bill Hudak (who seems strangely absent from Facebook) who lent me his guest room and gave me his awesome Pontiac Solstice so I could drive up and down Sandhill road pitching my startup. For free. He and Marty also introduced me to all the VCs and even helped me pitch!
- Ben who I ran into at an event at the Computer History Museum where he proceeded to tell me (after my 30 second pitch) that my startup idea was dumb and no one would use it. At first I thought he was an asshole. Then I realized he was also correct. He then lead me into the city and introduced me to amazing people (and Twitter! - this was 2007 hah). We've since done a lot of things together including working at Uber.
- Chris and Kristie who noticed me at their Web 2.1 conference and gave me a chance to speak - and introduced me to so many amazing people and experiences. They've since become dear, dear friends.
The list goes on and on.
I've had so many people tell me "I don't want to rely on other people" or "I want to do this on my own" - they don't understand that no one who ever achieved anything did it alone. It takes generous people offering spontaneous acts of kindness for no immediate reward.
Of course it also takes partners and collaborators who jump in the trenches with you and do the hard work - but that's a different list.