Creativity

My friend Sanjay Subrahmanyan is one of the top classical vocalists of India. Before Covid, he regularly performed at South India’s equivalent of Lincoln Center, for crowds of almost 2,000. After countless delayed and cancelled concerts, Sanjay eventually decided to go rogue. In January 2021, he launched a YouTube channel membership—a direct-to-consumer plan.

I thought this was a fascinating move, especially for someone whose audience consists predominantly of Baby Boomers, in the relatively conservative industry of Carnatic music

Sanjay described the change to me like this:

“In the past, the Music Academy and 10-15 other organizations would come together to produce one huge music festival. It’s a 30-day extravaganza with 5 concerts per venue per day. This was like being one flower in a bouquet. People are used to paying for the bouquet. Now, I’m asking them to pay for just one flower.”

Sanjay has three tiers of subscribers, using YouTube memberships. The basic tier is free, and everyone receives access to hundreds of archived recordings that Sanjay and his wife Aarthi have been collecting since the early 2000s. There are thousands of hours of these, and he releases more regularly. The second tier ($1 per month) gets a preview of the new uploads before they’re released to everyone else. The top tier ($10 per month) gets a brand-new concert every month, released to them exclusively. Sanjay gets together his accompanists, heads to a recording studio with a video and audio team, and performs and records a 90 minute concert each month.

Before the pandemic, the online world and business was a hobby for him. From discovering usenets in 1995 on a trip to the US to releasing songs on mp3s in the late nineties, he’s been personally fascinated with using and discovering new technology and exploring what was out there for his profession. But he considers it just dabbling. He never looked at online as a full-time business proposition because he was busy performing 50 to 60 concerts a year, all through inbound invitations. He was an early user of Gumroad and had also been releasing albums on Spotify and making a lot of his performances free on YouTube.

“But over the last three or four years,” Sanjay told me, “I realized the trend was more toward video: people want to see you, especially during the pandemic. I picked YouTube partly for that reason, and partly because it was very simple for subscribers. Most of my fans are in their 60s, so they need something simpler than Patreon or Gumroad. That’s why I use YouTube, even though their cut is 30%.”

A few takeaways from this:

First, ease is important; fans will be more open to paying if it’s really easy for them to sign up and access their stuff, so a platform where they already spend time has an added benefit.

Second, existing networks compound; YouTube is a compounding engine for Sanjay’s subscriber base. He has ~30,000 basic subscribers on YouTube. Converting a few of these people to paying subscribers and providing the rest with fresh content will reap dividends over time.

Third, it’s so important to keep a record of everything, so you have plenty of content to share and choose from. For a performer, it’s obvious how to do so – record everything. But for a visual artist, don’t discard “work in process” or little day-to-day projects. For a writer, even snippets that show how you work can be valuable. It’s not a big, fully wrapped deliverable, but it’s work you still created.

Sanjay realized that he had to share his performances with his audiences to stay relevant. He also realized he deeply missed performing. Performers have to perform!

To go from singing 60 concerts a year—which included planning and preparing, coordinating with accompanists, experiencing the joy of the performance and the gratitude of having an audience appreciate it—down to zero concerts in three months is very hard for someone who performs at the highest levels. And to lose a year of performance revenue in his prime was not easy. But it was a forcing function that made him take the leap into developing a direct relationship with his audience.

Sanjay has had to evolve from a performer focused on his craft to someone who has to focus on the business side of the equation. To use his creativity and apply it to areas like logistics and business operations, to marketing and branding.

This has unlocked new forms of creativity for him. While he’s primarily a performer of existing compositions, he has on occasion arranged new compositions. But these were all still vocal arrangements that were delivered during live concerts. In the past couple of months, he’s explored how to use video more creatively. He recently created a new arrangement of a beautiful poem called “Tamizhan endroru inamundu,” which means “Tamilians are a tribe.” His collaborators filmed it and developed a visual treatment for the poem.

For creators, will the hybrid model will become the default? Will more artists go rogue like Sanjay? Who are the kinds of creators who will be able to do this? Sanjay is typically a performer of music that other people have composed, so it’s been a relatively low-lift for him to produce new content. What about filmmakers, who have to bring a much bigger team together with (almost always) a bigger expenditure/budget? What about writers or composers, where each piece may take months and many drafts before it’s ready to share?

The “creator” economy is a very broad term that covers creators who are so different from each other in terms of frequency of creation, complexity of creation, ability to share work in progress, and so many other dimensions. It’s in the nuance of the differences that opportunities exist for both creators and for the tech solutions that serve them. Where will we go next?

Towards the end of 2020, I had one of those experiences that vaporizes cynicism. In November, I noticed the book The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp on my bookshelf. I had first bought it during film school, as assigned reading—but it occurred to me that I’d like to read it again. On a whim, I asked my friend Ellen if she wanted to read it with me.

We decided to open it up to anyone who wanted to read it. Surprisingly, about 25 people said yes. 18 people showed up. And 16 people stuck it out through the end!

It was a motivating experience for two reasons:

1. The group of people was awesome
2. The book and the content was a unique take on creativity, productivity, and habits, from someone outside of the performative productivity cabal

Most remarkably, the participants didn’t know each other at all. It was a group that came together over the interest in the book. For most, it was a way to either start or get back to their creative habit. But outside of that, the group was diverse in gender, geography, and profession. Tech people, yes. But also writers, musicians, entrepreneurs, finance people. Everyone was open, listening, learning. There were no titles, no stars, no celebrities, no name dropping. Everyone was on a level playing field in terms of how we treated each other. Each person had a thoughtful, authentic perspective to contribute.

At Spero Ventures, we think a lot about the ingredients of effective communities. Before the pandemic, each quarter, I brought people together to experience something cultural in San Francisco. I called the effort AliveIRL. The first event was watching The Last Black Man in San Francisco, followed by a dinner with the producer Kimberley Parker. The next was attending the Warhol exhibit at SF MoMA. At each, I met incredible people with whom I continue to have a meaningful connection.

Over the past 12 months, obviously the model had to shift. I’ve spent lots of time in all sorts of groups and learned that:

• There are thousands of smart people who are amazing but not (currently) famous. They are, however, very insightful and are key to every community. These people connect authentically – it’s not about who’s in the group or what they can gain from getting to know someone.
• Communities which form around a specific goal should aim to be global. The curious, collaborative individuals who are united in their shared love of learning exist everywhere. By forcing everything to be virtual, the connection to globally like-minded people should increase. (but, finding a time that works for all is very hard)
• The friction around sourcing, scheduling, and gathering the community is still quite high. Until the enabling tools improve, small gatherings will still need a coordinator.
• They will also need a moderator, not just to make sure everyone feels like the gathering is inclusive, but also to ensure that we can learn from the quiet people who often drop gems of wisdom.

Our little reading community decided we wanted to keep going and use the group as a forcing function to read books we’ve all been meaning to read. The next book is Atomic Habits by James Clear (yes, it’s almost unavoidable, the productivity whirlpool). We kick off on February 11th. One of the group members, Josh, split the book up into 6 chunks and we’ll read it over 6 sessions spanning 12 weeks.

Here are the details of how we’ll read Atomic Habits:
Feb 11, 9a PST: Intro + The Fundamentals
Feb 25, 9a PST: The 1st Law
Mar 11, 9a PST: The 2nd Law
Mar 25, 9a PST: The 3rd Law
Apr 8, 9a PST: The 4th Law
Apr 22, 9a PST: Advanced Tactics

If you want to join us, drop your name and email into this Google form.

In 2009, my writing professor, Ira Sachs, suggested we all read Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit as part of our class. His reasoning was that the purpose of writing class is to eventually create something. And the sooner we realized that was our focus, the better. Ira used the class as a forcing function to make a short film, Last Address, which screened at Sundance and Berlin.

I chanced upon the book recently and it made me go into the rabbit hole on Twyla. What an amazing and talented person. This video interview of her captures her essence, which is all about carpe diem, or “shut up and do what you love.”

She’s still creating at a world-class level.

So should we all. So, let’s do it.

I’m proposing that to end this year with panache, we read The Creative Habit, talk about it, and form our own creative habits.

I’m committed to doing this with my friend and poet, Ellen. Let me know if you can join us. Would love to have you.

Here’s how you can join:

1. Buy the book. You can buy it in Kindle or paperback. The paperback is beautifully designed.
2. Sign up: DM me on Twitter to get the calendar invites!
3. Read 4 of the (super quick) chapters by November 19th and join our Zoom call that day at 9am PST. We’ll share our takeaways and prompt a discussion in the group.
4. Read 4 chapters by December 3rd and join our Zoom call that day at 9am PST.
5. Read the final 4 chapters by December 17th and join our Zoom call that day at 9am PST.

DM me on Twitter to get the calendar invites!

These are some guidelines for an improv class.

• Improv is a trial by fire.
• Don’t deny the reality in front of you; react to the world as it is.
• Ditch your inhibitions.
• If you have a good idea, run with it. If you don’t, it could falter. Commitment matters more than the idea.
• Take the initiative to develop your character; otherwise, someone else will.
• Adapt your character as the improv session evolves. Don’t worry about what it looked like 5 minutes ago—that scene is already over. You have to react in the present.
• Improv is about everyone contributing little actions and lines that make the scene killer. It’s not about who said the smartest line; it’s about the whole.
• Figure out how to make others look good. Letting others shine gives them an incentive to let you shine.
• Be in the moment. Don’t focus on who’s watching, on looking dumb, or on being wrong. Instead, focus on what you’re doing.
• You have to take (a little) time to think—but then, be willing to own the spotlight.
• If your performance is inspirational, the others will want to step up.
• Improv teaches you that you control very little, except your performance and how you react. The rest depends on other actors, the audience, and a bit of luck and timing.
• A situation may look bad or good, but every situation is an opportunity.

This is also startups.

Your startup is an improv class.

Human beings are amazing. A mere two weeks after the lockdown started, most people had adapted to a remote world. Kids were learning soccer on Zoom, personal trainers adapted, cooking and baking classes moved to zoom—but I really did not expect theater and filmmaking to adapt in this world.

But, adapt they did. Zoomtheater and Zoommovies are a thing now, 4 months into the pandemic—for example, Host is a horror movie, made on Zoom.

Are these pieces any good? Well, it depends — film, which is asynchronous (i.e. shot and edited before the viewer sees it), can be just as good. For theater, which is delivered in real time, the remote version is not as good as when the cast and crew are in the same location. But the ability to adapt, the ability to even try this, makes me optimistic.

For a polished spin on quarantine filming, look at Mythic Quest, which is on Apple TV. They were filming the second season when the pandemic shut things down. This article outlines what the crew and cast did to shoot a “pandemic” episode that is part of Season 1. They used iPhones with prosumer film software, mics, and shot in all natural light, since lighting is one of the harder parts of filmmaking. They then edited it together to make it look like it was shot on Zoom.

On the other hand, some of Princess Bride’s celebrity cast decided to make a fan fiction, and it’s very clear that it’s shot by non-professionals, embracing the reality of shooting in different locations, with no crew.

In a scene with Diego Luna and Jack Black, they create continuity from two different locations in amazing ways: Diego throws down a green rope tried to a tree in his house and Jack, who is lying on a set of stairs in his house, grabs a hose that is thrown down to him. Diego lifts, Jack clambers, until finally, Jack is back at the top of the mountain (stairs). It’s really well done!

This would never have been considered acceptable pre-pandemic, but with a new set of rules for the world, there’s a new set of expectations. All film-watching requires the “willing suspension of disbelief,” and for these pandemic-pictures (panpics?), the suspension of disbelief has to be extended. But they are so entertaining!

Theater, unlike film, is synchronous – everything is live. This makes it much harder to adapt to a remote environment. While in film, you can do an extreme close up to show the twitch of an eyebrow, theater acting is “bigger,” so that the person in the last row can have the same read of a scene as someone sitting in the front. So Zoomtheater and the innovations there are harder to adapt to the pandemic. But theater has adapted, too. And if the pandemic stretches out, theater will have to continue to adapt. Imagine if there was a plugin that:

• allows a lighting tech to set the stage by adding a virtual background and virtual lighting to make people seem like they’re in the same room, with the mood lighting the director wants.
• controls which person is “shown” to the audience during a live performance. That way, the tech can make sure the right face is shown at the right time.
• enables a “prop” tech to develop a unique, dynamic set and background for each actor and upload it behind them as the stage changes
• allows live mixing of the audio so that music can be woven in, like a play.

It’s entirely possible that this could happen. Because despite the insanity in the world around them, humans continue to create, continue to innovate, continue to live lives of hope and splendor. Constraints make them innovate in ways that they wouldn’t have thought to before.

The same is true for startups. Startups have to startup. And the first requirement of startupping is surviving. But the very best startups, like the best creators, use constraints to innovate and thrive, offering customers an unexpected, delightful solution that moves us all forward.

Chanel Miller said her New Year’s resolution for 2020 was to fail as much as possible.

“Making things that are really crappy and undeveloped until maybe they can be good. I’m way too young to confine myself to one lane and lose the ability to openly experiment.”

This is exactly how a the first draft of a film script develops. Characters and ideas float around in your head, and one day, they’re done with the floating and demand to live on the page. The script gets written, and when you’re done… it’s shitty. It’s embarrassing, you don’t want to show it to anyone, and you wonder how on earth your magical characters and ideas amounted to this pile of doodoo on the page.

But, it’s really important to have this first draft. Because as Miller said, yes, it’s crappy and undeveloped, but you need the crappy and undeveloped to have hope for the good and the great.

Struggling, wrangling, failing, crying, working, pushing forward allows your characters and your story to breathe, thrive, and for the bones to slowly emerge from the pile. Experimenting openly, taking the story in unexpected directions, adding or removing key characters, and messing around with no pressure allows the sparks of creativity that makes the script sing.

Every creator needs that messy time.

The same is true for startup creators. Ideas for a product form in your head over time, sometimes over years. Then one day, you’re ready to put it on the “page” — to code something, to craft something. And it may be a sloppy, messy ball of hair, mud, and hope. Don’t clean it up, polish, and shine it in order to raise money too early.

Love your messy stage, because it is so important to relish that stage. You can only do it once for each startup, and it’s when experimentation, ideation, hanging out, and trying weird things is entirely possible. It’s where ugly is awesome.

At some point, a screenwriter will have to share the script with producers. At some point, you have to share your startup with users and, if you want, with investors. If things go well, they love it, and you build an amazing company. Fantastic.

If you’ve grown your company into a wonderfully world-changing one, it’s worth finding ways to go back to being messy. Get into small groups. Make room for experimentation with ugly, creative things that may fail, because that can lead to new lines of growth. If you have the urge to start again, you could start another company and embrace the new ugly ball of mess. Whatever path you follow, the messy part of creation can be the the best part of creation, and the challenge of it makes your ideas and your company better.

At some point in 2002, while I was still relatively new to eBay, I found myself sitting in a room with the exec staff discussing something strategic. Many of the details of the meeting are now blurry, but one little event is still crystal clear in my mind. People were talking, discussing options with opinions flying around, and I said something. I don’t remember what I said, but I do remember the reaction to it. 

One of the senior leaders—a lovely, but brutally honest and blunt man—said, “That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard.”

There was a pause in the conversation. My heart stopped. And then the conversation continued, while I sat there, stunned. 

I felt in my bones that I must speak again, in this meeting, to get over that comment, to move on and retain the confidence that I can contribute.  I practically forced myself to speak again. Sort of like falling off a horse and getting back on. 

I can guarantee you that the only person who remembers that moment now, 18 years later, is me. It’s actually a moment I’ve thought about several times as one of the key learning moments in my life. 

The reality is that we will all be wrong sometimes, or at the very least, perceived to be wrong. It’s the price of speaking, the price of thinking, the price of writing. So what should we do? Never speak, think, or write unless we are certain we are right? That would erase your voice from the conversation. 

I wrote a post last week about Quibi, and I purposely made a bold statement about how innovative this new film platform is. The innovation is not just the short-form content (or chapters) that Quibi uses; it is creating an interaction between the form factor of the screen (the phone) with the content for the first time in cinema. 

Many (most?) people disagree. Some even wrote to me privately to tell me why I was wrong. I love the engagement. 

Am I sure that Quibi will succeed? Absolutely not. But I am glad they are trying something fresh, new, and innovative, and I certainly hope they will succeed because I love the bold approach. I’ve been watching chapters for the past two nights and it’s a slick user experience. 

As investors, we need to be both right and contrarian to make a return for our LPs. We will often be wrong, too, because the path to success for any company is filled with so many near-death experiences along a very winding road. But we can’t be afraid to make an investment.

Similarly, we can’t be afraid to talk or write. I will be right sometimes. I will be wrong sometimes. What matters to me is the thinking and the engagement. And I prefer to have a hopeful and optimistic view of the world, where I am rooting for success rather than failure. 

Speak up. Claim your seat at the table. So what if you are wrong sometimes? We are all wrong sometimes. Shake it off and move on. I promise you that you are the only one who will remember that moment (even days later). Ultimately, your voice matters. Don’t erase yourself.