About Social Media Today
Mention The Grateful Dead in conversation and you might get pegged as a free spirited hippie wannabe. It’s undeniable that The Dead inspired countless people in the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and even into the 90’s to be a little less inhibited, at least for a couple of hours during a concert.
I’ve been to a bunch of shows and enjoyed the music and the scene. But on June 20th, 1992, I actually worked backstage at a Dead show at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. As a huge fan, I was thrilled at the prospect of meeting the band. My job that day was a ‘runner,’ responsible for anything and everything that the promoter or band wanted. I assumed that there would be lots of crazy requests, some possibly illegal, and lots of hard partying groupies.
In fact, there wasn’t any of that. It was very quiet back stage. Some of the guys even brought their families. Somewhat depressingly, the most outrageous request that I received was to find ping-pong balls for the table that had been set up in their dressing room. It really surprised me how professional the band was and how seriously they took their art.
If you’ve ever been to a Dead show, you know that they can take a song that you’ve heard thousands of times and make it unique to that show. I still have tapes – yes tapes! – of hundreds of shows, and while many of song titles are the same, the sound and feeling is unique to each concert.
Many times the sounds coming from stage can be sheer bedlam, but a single note or two can queue the band to morph the cacophonous chaos into a well known song. While at times, Dead concerts may sound directionless or more appropriately, multi-directional, it’s clear that the band has a plan. They may not know exactly what’s coming next, but they have a general idea of how to get there.
In my experience, startups function in much the same manner. Early on, it feels like chaos. There’s too much to do and too little time. You feel like you’re going a thousand miles an hour in all different directions. You need to find the right talent, raise money, build the product, price and market the product, and gather, synthesize and adjust to market feedback. It’s the ‘what’s possible’ stage.
This bedlam eventually subsides as the company identifies what works and what doesn’t. There’s less experimenting and more executing. Much like the experimentation and chaos of Drums>Space eventually leads into well-known songs like Casey Jones or Sugar Magnolia, startups that find their groove do so only when all members of the team coalesce around the goal and go after it with abandon.
