Taste of Eship with Bill Warner
Last night we had Bill Warner come to Taste of Eship at Krashpad Central. Bill is the founder of Avid Technology, Inc. and Wildfire Communications, Inc., FutureBoston, Inc, and Warner Research, LLC. He has already accomplished so many great things during his lifetime, but I want to focus more on his talk last night. If you would like to find out more about him, you can go here: Bill Warner.
Bill started the discussion talking about growing up in New Jersey and how amazing he thought Boston was when he first came here to attend MIT. He even went as far as saying that “Boston is the best city in the world to start something”, but that it has also really changed and grown over just the last 5 years.
Bill got hurt diving at a young age, and ended up in rehab. He credits his entire career to that room he stayed in at the rehab center in 1974. He couldn’t feel sorry for himself, with two roommates that were paraplegics with much less mobility. Bill said, “You’re going to come to low points in your life… but the great thing about the low points is all the high points”. Tom, one of his roommates, was paralyzed from the neck down. He called his girlfriend every night, but someone had to prop the phone up to his head. The only problem with this was that Tom couldn’t hang up the phone when he was done. Bill had no experience in engineering (he was an economics major at St. Louis), but he decided he could do something about Tom’s problem. He went out and bought a whistle switch, and made it so that Tom could use it to turn a light on and off. This triggered someone to come and hang up the phone for him. Back then there was no internet, so Bill had to go in his wheelchair down to Canal Street in New York to get a sequencer. At that time he didn’t even know what a sequencer was. The guy at the store would ask him, “You mean a stepping relay?”, “Oh yea, a stepping relay!”.
In 1975, a man came into his dad’s shop by the name of John Bell and told Bill’s dad to send Bill by his shop. He had a garage for a shop and was building ECL switches, which Bill said,
“was like doing cocaine upside down, it was crazy!”
ECL was the fastest, baddest electronics there were, and no one could get them to work. No one was doing digital in 1975. When Bill arrived at the shop, he was sent over to a guy that called himself a dirt farmer from Alabama. The man handed him a book titled “Signetics Guide to 7400 Chips” and said that was all he ever needed. After that Bill got to work, eventually attended MIT, and continued down the path to where he is now.
He credits a lot of where he is today to that “crazy” man, John Bell, who took a 19 year old in to do something that should’ve been done by someone with a Masters or PhD. The main point with all of Bill’s stories was a one he kept driving at. He said, “you just need to go, and things will happen”. You’re not going to lay out this big course and say, ‘I need an investor for this, and a cofounder for this, and…’. Even if you could lay it all out and it work out, it would still suck… and that’s because your plan would suck, because you don’t know what you want. “Stop planning, stop seeking, seeking sucks. If you seek, they (everyone that could potentially help you) will hide.”
One of the questions was asked, “If there’s this random chain of events that can lead you to success, how do you pick and choose which paths to follow?” Bill said that it comes down to a source of energy that’s in you. Build on that positive energy… build your team, build your product, etc. “That energy I like to call intention. When people can feel that positive energy, they want to help, and they want to join in. It’s about doing things where you’re adding to the positive. But there’s also a negative, where ‘that doesn’t feel right to me’.” If something doesn’t feel right, there’s no need to say no… say, “That doesn’t feel right to me.” What does that do? It opens up a discussion where you may come to a new understanding on what does feel right. If you have this approach, you’re going to end up with this huge array of things that feel right in front of you that you’re going to be picking from. “It’s like being able to pick only from the winning slot machines, and then being able pick the ones that pay out the most.”
Bill was a great speaker, very genuine, and a joy to be around. A big thanks to him for stopping by Krash and hanging out.
Thanks for reading,
Brent