In the same way that watching The Big Short and Margin Call (and Kill the Messenger with American Made) together, gives you two sides of the same story. Dawn Raid tells the New Zealand side of the entrepreneurial story where hustling only gets you so far, and where a lot of good entrepreneurs (or good hustlers in the case of WeWork) fail is when they are required to scale and they fail to put in place systems to protect themselves, and simultaneously put in place experts in business strategy who they can trust, to support their exponential growth and avoid the (to some) obvious pitfalls.
It sometimes amazes this writer, given these conditions, how people like Steve Jobs, Neri Oxman, Tom Kalinske, Peter Tamte, Jay Silver, Will Wright, Paul Boswell, Marty Sklar and Jony Ive were able to succeed at such a level, without falling victim to these pitfalls. A different time perhaps? Or maybe that part of the story was left untold, in the main biopics.
A fiction series that gives a lot of these keen insights is the South Korean drama, Startup 2020 by Park Hye-Ryeon (not to be confused with the less realistic, but ultimately more exciting American series, Startup 2016 by Ben Ketai.) As a family member once said to me when I was trying to build a tech startup, “You need a Do San.” Referring to the fact that I’m not a software/hardware engineer (the CEO in the series is a young woman called Seo Dal Mi, and Nam Do San is the software/hardware engineer genius, who at first wanted to be the CEO), although I am a digital product designer and developer.
WeWork: or the making and breaking of a $47billion Unicorn 2021 (dir. Jed Rothstein)
A roller-coaster ride of a film, about a company I had never heard of with equal parts charisma and idealism, but in the end when business sense was lacking the void was filled with bulls&%t and it crashed through the floor hurting those who loved it… With a bail-out for its creator. Still, lesson learned, when you can afford to, you should pay your staff what they’re worth. And/or at least not be a hypocrite about socialist ideals.
This is a fascinating flick!
And reminds me a bit of the story Dawn Raid by Oscar Kightley of the nz hip-hop label Dawn Raid.
In both cases, the business that was created by the creative hustler entity’s innovation and momentum, almost permanently changed their environment’s landscape positively which would have massively impacted the potential opportunities for the next breed of game-changers in their community.
Yes I do understand that the people behind WeWork are hustlers to the point of criminality. Other than that the two stories are eerily similar.
Wework: 2.5 stars
Dawn Raid: 2.5 stars
Takeaways:
- Everybody hates on you when you get big.
- Innovators and hustlers often don’t know what to do when they start to scale – that’s when the accountants/vultures attack.
- Lawyers and actual accountants are useful when you start a business, use them – they could save your life (but they shouldn’t be in charge of creative decisions.)
the joy of eating and the folly of thinking 