Dream Merchants

A good entrepreneur is also a good "Dream Merchant". Not a Huckster, not some creature from Hollywood's distortion of reality, but a person who has a dream, has embodied it in some form, and sees where it can go where others cannot yet see it.

I will give an example. In 1980 I went to Warner Cable. The Chairman at the time wanted me to develop a business using video on demand and extend it well beyond home shopping and banking. I took that dream and embodied it in reality and then brought in companies like Bell Atlantic, Bank of America, GTE and DEC. Each did their due diligence and the like. The problem with many dreams is exogenous factors often interfere, Warner rand upon hard times with Atari, and also we were a bit too early, say thirty years too early. But the Dream had legs, it was an Amazon before perhaps many today at Amazon could read. But that is at best a foot note to history.

At the other end there were executives at our partner, who would say that this home shopping would never work. They went on to head major banks and computer companies. They were right in the short run but well off the mark of the march of history. Yet in business timing is everything. Dream Merchants are only as good as the timeliness of their dream.

Now to a piece in the New Yorker. It says:

The greatest business icon of our era, Steve Jobs, was legendary for his “reality-distortion field,” which allowed him to convince people that improbable outcomes were not just possible but certain. Jobs’s endless rehearsals for his public presentations and his scripting of every moment for maximum effect—these are all straight from the con artist’s playbook. So, too, is the sense of conviction he projected. In Weinberg’s words, “Before you sell a deal you have to live the deal. You have to believe in it, because, if you don’t believe in it, you can’t sell it.”Of course, the fundamental difference between entrepreneurs and con artists is that con artists ultimately know that the fantasies they’re selling are lies. Steve Jobs, often enough, could make those fantasies come true. Still, that unquantifiable mélange of risk, hope, and hype provides both the capitalist’s formula for transforming the world and the con artist’s stratagem for turning your money into his money. Maybe there’s a reason we talk about the American Dream.

I knew Jobs at a distance from my Atari days. At Atari they saw Apple as the competition, and even had Apple decals lining the urinals, some Silicon Valley humor I guess. But Jobs was a Dream Merchant, but one who always believed that he could achieve the dreams. He was not a con man, for the most part almost all entrepreneurs are Dream Merchants and not con men. The article's nexus is not only unfair but a distortion of reality. I have seen con men, they stand out like sore thumbs. I have seen them in Russia, Poland, Korea, New York and yes California. They have no substance behind their pitches. Jobs had reality.

Dreams and Dream Merchants as entrepreneurs are essential to our culture. They "burn their boats" and set out forward towards their dream. Without them we would have a very different world. Jobs had to have certainty, after all he is setting out on a journey from which there is only one goal, success, achievement of what he predicted. Then again, like Warner, he may have a great product but at the wrong time, look at Lisa. Yet in the long run he set a standard that few can beat.

The author in my opinion totally misunderstand the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur is no con man, the entrepreneur is what makes America. We have con men everywhere. We need to honor and cherish and nurture our entrepreneurs, not defame them out of ignorance.