About six months ago, I finished a pretty major project. I walked all the way across Turkey. I started on the west coast, at the Aegean Sea, in the city of Kuşadası, and then I walked east, to the Turkey/Iran border east of Van. I walked every single meter. Every single meter between those two points.
The whole trip took me about 7-1/2 months, and along the way lots of people asked me, “Why are you walking across Turkey?” Why are you doing this? I asked myself that. But tonight I’m not going to speak at all about why I walked across Turkey. I’m just going to speak about one thing, and that is, “How did I raise money for this walk across Turkey?”
I raised money on a website called Kickstarter.com. Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Kickstarter.com. So a few people have heard of Kickstarter.com. I know from experience that Ertuğrul heard about Kickstarter.com tonight, when I was telling him about it.
Kickstarter.com, for those of you who are not familiar with it, is a website where basically you have a project that you raise money for. So you go onto the website and you describe your project. You know, making a movie, or doing a dance production, or in my case, walking across Turkey, and then you say, “I want to raise X amount of money for this project.” And then you hit the start button, and you begin with friends, and then friends of friends, and then pretty soon word of mouth takes over, and friends of friends of friends of friends contribute. I did this for about two months, and I raised about $5,184. It doesn’t take a whole lot of money to walk across Turkey, or anywhere really, because walking is free, it’s a pretty cheap activity, and sleeping by the side of the road is also a cheap activity, so I didn’t need very much money. But I raised about $5100, and in Turkish lira how much is that, that’s about 11,000, 12,000 Turkish lira or something like that.
When the campaign was over I asked myself, “Who are these people who contributed money?” There were 81 people. 81 people contributed that $5,184, but of those 81 people, there were three people who together contributed most of the money. I think those three people contributed about 25% of the total.
So I talked to those three people, and those three people, by the way, one of them, her name is Angie Walls. She’s an old friend of mine who lives in Seattle, and we used to work together in the mid-90s, so 94, 95, 1996, somewhere around there. So about 15 years ago we worked together. And we’re good friends, but we haven’t kept in touch. So for 15 years we were out of contact with each other.
The second biggest donor, his name is Marc Gilmore. He is a Scottish guy, and I met him here in Istanbul in 2006. Since then he’s gotten married, he had a kid, he’s moved on to a couple different cities, a couple different countries, so we’ve lost touch, and when he contributed to the campaign I hadn’t seen him in five years.
The third person is named Fan Haisheng. He’s a Chinese guy, as his name suggests. So Fan Haisheng, how do I know him? In 1992, after I graduated from university, I went to China, and I lived in China for a year and I taught English. He was one of my students, so I was 22 years old and he was 18 years old. I was his English teacher, and that was 20 years ago. And then I left China after a year, and that was before Facebook and before email, so we didn’t keep in touch at all. We totally lost track of each other, and I thought about him many times over 20 years and wondered, “What’s Fan Haisheng up to?” But we had no contact at all, until, and I don’t know how he found out about me, but 20 years later he found out about me, and so I had my three biggest contributors to this campaign.
When the campaign was over, I went to these three people, and I went to some other people too, but especially to these three people, and I asked them, “Why did you contribute this much money?”
And they all said basically the same thing, with slight variations, but the general theme, the basic theme, was 5 years ago, or 15 years ago, or 20 years ago, you did something, or you said something, that inspired me to live a bigger life. For 5 years, or 15 years, or 20 years, these three people have been out there in the world living a bigger life and inspiring other people to live bigger lives, and that was why they deemed this project worthy of contributing to.
Now, most of us in this room are entrepreneurs in some way. We’re starting some sort of business. And you all know the statistics of new businesses, that 2/3 fail in the first couple years. So chances are that whatever business you’re working on right now, whatever project you’re working on right now, statistically speaking, chances are that project is going to fail.
And the project you take up after that, the business that you start after your failed business, that’s going to fail too. If you’re lucky and you live through that process and you start a third business, that third business might succeed. It might reach some level of success. So you might reach some level of success, but for some years you are going to have to face failure on a daily basis. You will fail many times on the way to success.
But one thing that will not fail, one thing that is guaranteed to succeed, is that the people around you, whether they are your friends, or your family, or your customers, or your vendors, or your investors, those people, five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, those people are still going to be around.
And what those people want, more than anything else, more than a great product, more than profits, more than a nice return on their investment, what those people want more than anything else is to wake up in the morning and feel inspired to live a bigger life.
And they’re all going to want to live a bigger life in a different way, but they’re going to wake up in the morning and they’re going to want that inspiration to live that bigger life.
So your job, it’s very important of course, to start a successful company, and make a good product, and get investors, and make all these people happy and all that stuff, but your main job, even more important than those things, your main job is to wake up every morning and ask yourself, “Am I living a life that inspires me, and also inspires the people around me, to live a bigger life, and in fact inspires them so much that they inspire other people too. That is your biggest job on this planet, and it is far more important than anything else you’ll do for your business as an entrepreneur. Thank you.