Criticizing a mother is the easiest thing to do about the hardest job in the world. It’s also a thankless job, in some ways… While motherhood is bar none the toughest gig there is, fatherhood isn’t that behind, and IMHO, in third place, very much analogously, comes the thankless job of entrepreneur/founder. Don’t get me wrong: all jobs are hard, vast majority are thankless, but if you will allow me, the three ultimately require constant sacrificing of one’s desires, needs, wants, impulses & wishes, to prioritizing others’ survival, well-being, development, growth & success – with little appreciation, recognition or awareness throughout. This isn’t a pity party, these are some of the the greatest gigs around, it just takes you time & experience to figure that out!

“If You Want to Go Fast, Go Alone. If You Want to Go Far, Go Together”

Throughout history, prophets, kings/rules, commanders, explorers, scientists, inventors, storytellers, and more recently, technologists were the leading entrepreneurs of their era. Entrepreneurship can be explained in many ways, but it’s ultimately about identifying a vision, articulating a mission, recruiting people and leading the collective to some promised land, driven either by purpose, promotion or profit.

If Chris Rock said “no one has led more young black men to the promised land than Pat Riley,” I proudly proclaim that no one hired more inexperienced and/or unproven creative talent than yours truly. We can go on a sidebar about whether hiring creative people counts as hiring Creatives or if recruiting talented individuals represents Talent in industry jargon (they do not), but the point being:

  • micro: as someone who was constantly passed up for interviews, let alone job offers, the chip on my shoulder was to give unparalleled access to all openings to all people. You want DEI, you got DEI! I really didn’t care about anything other than opening the door.
  • macro: no successful entrepreneur let alone storyteller ventures on this course to success with a focus on profit, it’s always about the product/programming, which means people.

The Citizen in the Arena & the Mad Scientist in the Lab

People, along with Competition are the two levers of success in business. You compete to stay alive to thrive, but to grow, you have to push people. This causes conflict and friction – hence levers, pulling one means an effect on the other. Depending on your culture, you can navigate the terrain or crash. But your culture isn’t some abstract thing, it’s the outcome of all the previous communications & exchanges, which created relationships with their own dynamics, and that, becomes your culture.

And “culture does indeed eat strategy for breakfast,” which explains why Alexander the Great defeated the mighty Persian Empire, but also why it fell apart once he died. It also explains why WatchMojo was able to out-compete much deeper funded belligerents led by more experienced & better connected fighters.

Growing Pains

These days, I have come to love turnover and attrition. It’s a natural process no different than skin shedding, nails growing and being cut off. It’s healthy. It’s therapeutic. Not just for me alone, for others, as well. As people find their course to success early on, eventually work/life/play balance changes, and they then need to chart their path to happiness. Sometimes that means a job they held dear no longer makes sense. They should leave, for themselves, but also for the greater good: to let someone else step up and seize greater challenges. This is the cycle of corporate life, whether we life it or not.

When we tripled headcount from 2013 to 2017, we retained the overwhelming number of stars we wanted to build around. But losing a few people stung. For some, a 9-to-5 office job wasn’t in their sights. But I recognized that for others, if they were creative but didn’t want to buy in to a culture, team and system that has proven so successful over time, I understood if they wanted to produce something else. Whenever someone leaves, I ask them if there’s anything I can do to change their mind, if not, I wish them well and want to see them do well. Very few leave for entrepreneurial pursuits, usually it’s another job – I get it: becoming a successful storyteller / entrepreneur is tough, you need all three of these traits to have a chance to succeed (something we covered in episode 7 of InsideMojo):

Glassholes & Glass Houses

A CFO famously once asked his CEO “what if we invest in our people and they leave?,” to which the wise CEO replied: “What if we don’t and they say?” Analogously to the CEO/CFO example above, if you never ask your happy employees to comment on their experience, well, you create a clear canvas for those who aren’t to do so.

While my principle that any criticism may be valid remains intact and as much as I try to encourage direct feedback, sometimes, people aren’t comfortable to be direct, let alone believe that you want to hear it.

My door/inbox is always open, my suggestion box is anonymous and eager for feedback, we conduct job satisfaction surveys (overwhelmingly positive), but nonetheless, anonymous online public forums become the perfect venting outlet. I get it. I vent in my writings!

As a leader, you realize that not every project or person will succeed: some people were meant to fail (in general sense, of experimentation, as they figure out what their purpose is). There’s nothing wrong with trying and failing. During our WM2020 initiative, we invested a ton of money in projects, programming, personnel and most of which fizzled (power law remains undefeated). But many worked – that’s the key: even those in Cooperstown struck out 3 times out of 10.

The projects that didn’t, we tried to retain the people we brought on. That was a mistake, because it would have been less frustrating to admit “we brought you for X, X did not prove sustainable, thank you for your service, off you go.” But by trying to retain people and provide them with ongoing gainful employment, we cast eagles as turkeys, and turkeys as eagles… and not surprisingly, it did not pan out. 

For some of those, enter Glassdoor.

“The Score is for the People Sitting in the Stands”

When my current investors invested in 2020, as part of their due diligence, eventually they asked about Competition, as well as Human Resources. With HR, they were trying to reconcile the people we were as they spent six months getting to know us with the picture our Glassdoor painted. They understood it all, but it was something I dreaded and couldn’t wait to address. They were sophisticated and savvy to understand how a company’s online propaganda may not match their actual principles and practice. I joke sometimes to people who ask my email after connecting on Linkedin “If you can’t find my email… I’m not sure you can be my latest salesman.” Similarly, if you are gonna work at WatchMojo which is ultimately a factual programmer that requires you to fact check, it should be clear to you what’s what. This was also part of the “self-correcting” mechanism I had concocted to ensure writers only selected topics to write on that they were well-versed in, i.e. I can write a great script on a topic I know in a couple of hours, but if I took on a topic I had no business picking up, no one benefited: not the writer, not the viewers & fans, and certainly not WatchMojo. Most of the early complaints were of writers saying some projects took too long, and their effective hourly rate not compelling. That was a feature, and not a bug, to ensure people had an incentive to do justice to our fans.

When it came to Competition, I framed it by saying that different stakeholders view competition differently:

But in trying to do my job, I mentioned that while we ultimately compete with everyone for mindshare and watch time, amongst one of the main buckets of competitors was Valnet, also by coincidence founded out of Montreal, adding an admittedly backhanded compliment that they were formidable competitors in particular due to their backgrounds in the adult industry – for no reason other than many of the leading marketing practices online originated from the T&A racket.

The main point I was trying to make, though, that given the trends in media, we compete with everyone, including Donald Trump who sucks up all the media oxygen in a room. This is America, we’ll take it. But it ate at me a bit that I had to benchmark and justify our practices – rooted in our principles – relative to… Valnet? Now to be clear: I had intended to open up about the parallels between father & founder, and their thankless nature, but then when I came across The Wrap’s takedown of Valnet, it just reiterated this notion to sticking to your guns. Valnet, to be fair, is a small part of Valsoft, which is really focused more on rolling up software assets, akin to publicly traded Constellation (whose shares I own). Valsoft is now backed by Viking, the Desmarais family’s Power Corp. / Portage unit, whom all know what they are doing.

But, point being: tech is more binary, more brute force, with little room or time for finesse. In storytelling, the stakes are different. In an age of clutter with no barriers to entry, taste prevails like a warm knife through melting butter.

When I read The Wrap’s exposé, I certainly wasn’t happy about it. Imagine running McDonalds and seeing questionable practices at Burger King (for the record, I love all both! 🙂

  • I wasn’t “happy” that the quality of Collider’s 191 daily articles was being questioned, I was vindicated that I didn’t listen to my board’s suggestion that we double down on articles & the WM O&O website. That seems like a downward spiral with no end, despite my personal affinity for writing.
  • I wasn’t “happy” to hear that when they bought companies, they would sack everyone, I was vindicated that I raised objections to blindly pursue inorganic opportunities if we weren’t really committed to the target’s mission, purpose & people, etc.

You Know What They Say About Opinions

Throughout your journey, other people create these benchmarks and yardsticks and you have to determine what matters to you and what is noise. Years before in 2016, when our success originally drew competition, prospective investors and advisors would constantly question my idealistic approach and view of things – people ahead of profit, covering topics for the sake of – you know – being interested in something and not to appease the algorithm, etc. – Valnet (& others) constantly came up.

One morning, while on vacation in upstate New York, I woke up to read an email from the former financial manager of one of the wealthiest men in America, blast me for all things under the sun (and 99% of it was fair and fine).

I’d like to point out that the book in question was written on my vacation, and intended to be adapted into something as part of our WM2020 efforts.

Boomerangs & Blacklists

It speaks volumes that a time when companies ranging from Meta/Facebook, Bloomberg and Valnet have been reported to maintain “blacklists” of former employees who are persona non grata, my team also takes it for granted that I am not dogmatic about these things. Indeed, we have a handful of employees (out of a relatively small number given 20 years of operating history) who have returned. I won’t lie and say “everyone is always welcome back,” but indeed, that is one more thing about us that is sometimes takes for granted. If your kid leaves at 18 after an argument but then wants to move back at 20, how do you react? Now of course, companies are not family, they are teams. But for me, from the onset, they were ultimately my dependents…

Shutting Up the Haters (But Not That Way…)

This month, I received an email which caught my attention and triggered my decision to address this theme:

No!!!

When I fought for fair use, it was about freedom of speech, expression and the media’s right to cover topics. Critical of censorship and always been a pretty employee-focused CEO, I would never in a million years consider that, let alone do it.

Fast forward to this year: my investor asked me if I was angry. I said I was exasperated and frustrated. WatchMojo viewers ask me if I am passive aggressive. Do you want aggressive version of me? I would take passive aggressive me. To me, it’s just sarcasm.

But now, I see it’s more a sense of vindication. So yes, there’s also frustration if I choose to look back… that, is ultimately on me. I tell my team this glass before you is half full or empty based on your prerogative. Eventually, you have to apply your own medicine.

So in the end, it’s a process where any frustration quickly turns with perspective into a sense of appreciation and deeper gratitude. As an entrepreneur, you walk to the beat of your own drum… something has to be bothering you at any point, a problem, an enigma, a challenge, whatever. But eventually, you realize it shouldn’t, and it no longer does. When they say “entrepreneurship is working a few years like few want to, so you can live the rest how few can,” it’s less about money than just that freedom.

Self made men & Born on third base differ more to others than to one another

At one point in the early 1980s, my father was arguably one – if not the – wealthiest man in Iran. No, not literally. But figuratively, hear me out. He was an Iranian who spoke nearly 10 languages, worked for a foreign embassy, with his two oldest sons too young to be sucked into a bloody war with its neighbor Iraq. He was not political, so the government did not have any enmity towards, but because he worked for a foreign government, he was persona non grata. We left to Spain for a year, before settling in Canada when I was 6. That’s a win for me right there, everything else has been icing and cherry on top. Hence, when in a strict entrepreneurial origins sense you can argue that I am self-made, I recognize that I stood on other People’s shoulders, my dad’s, for one, and many others.

When I was young, I recall seeing my dad eat the end of the lettuce, a bitter taste if ever. Now, I wonder if it wasn’t also partly to leave as much of the actual lettuce to his family. Then again, maybe I’m overthinking things, as I tend to do.

“The good lord brough you here, it’s now time for the lord to take you elsewhere.“

I used to view every departure as a personal failure. I had recruited someone to assist with a new project. Supported them and tried to be the yin to their yang. Years later, to their credit, they apologized for the drama. It was not necessary, but certainly appreciated. But the compound effect took its toll. Not so much because of the effect any departure would have, we built a process. But because some would think it was a systematic issue, when I knew of the “real true system” at competitors and the industry. Even when we were effectively an insolvent going concern that wasn’t really going anywhere, we for example paid freelancers on net 0 terms – despite the widely known crap treatments freelancers had elsewhere. VICE was a media and investor darling, commanding at one point a $5.7 billion paper valuation, before filing for bankruptcy and now under the control of its lenders Fortress and Soros.

The effect was psychological and eventually physiological. After the many lessons to better balance work/mental well-being, the many “burn-outs” which ultimately led to flirting with anxiety and depression, you eventually learn to live, let live, and let go.

Entrepreneur vs Investor

Does this mean I now encourage/beg the staff (who are happy) to write about their experiences? No, given my nature (Taarof), es imposible. Can’t do it, won’t to it… but as the ZIRP phenomenon era is now bygone, individuals may finally truly understand what diversity, equity and inclusion mean, perhaps they will separate the true servant leaders who emphasize all stakeholders’ wellbeing with the phonies that rode hashtags in the sole pursuit of profit while sacrificing any principles they may have had.