O’Reilly began to see starting a company as an interesting way to live life on his own terms. “I wanted more control of my life,” he explained in a company newsletter in 2002. “I wanted work to fit in, not to dominate; to support, not to lead the pattern of my life.”
“There is a wonderful rigor in free-market economics,” he wrote in an early company manual. “When you have to prove the value of your ideas by persuading other people to pay for them, it clears out an awful lot of woolly thinking.” [edit: there are numerous “web companies” who should really take this into consideration]
In 1992, O’Reilly published The Whole Internet User’s Guide & Catalog and, at the last minute, added a chapter about the World Wide Web. At the time, there were roughly 200 websites, none of them run by companies. To market a general-interest book from a small publisher about a relatively obscure topic, O’Reilly devised a novel marketing strategy: He would turn himself into an activist. He hired the former director of activism from the Sierra Club and devised a campaign that treated the adoption of the Internet like the effort to save the rain forests. He mailed copies of the book to every member of Congress and then went on a media tour in New York City and Washington, D.C. “I was saying, ‘The Internet is coming; the Internet is coming,’ ” he says. And O’Reilly Media had the only book that could explain it to you.
But the more VCs he talked to, the more he worried that taking other people’s money might either force him to pursue uninteresting things or cause him to lose the business altogether
“Money is like gasoline during a road trip,” he says. “You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations. You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn’t be about the money.”
Chemical reactions, he says, require activation energy in order to begin, but once that happens they tend to proceed on their own. “I think there is that quality in this company [edit: and I think this is where Drexel Smart House is in the transition to the 3rd generation right now—we’re applying the activation energy]
Today, he spends most of his time gathering information — reading blogs and webpages, checking Twitter, and taking pitch meetings with entrepreneurs. O’Reilly says his process is to look for patterns — “faint signals,” he sometimes calls them — and to figure out what those patterns say about the future. Then he launches businesses: a conference or a new line of books. He invests in start-ups through his venture capital firm, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.
Beyond getting the word out about any particular idea or trend, O’Reilly says he has tried to use his company to demonstrate that being an entrepreneur can represent a means of exploring the world, one that is just as profound as religious inquiry or Greek philosophy or New Age introspection. “Business doesn’t have to be separated from the rest of life,” he says.
O’Reilly is old enough and rich enough to consider retirement. But if he sold the company today, he is not exactly sure what he would do. A life that doesn’t include helping out with the construction of the next transcontinental railroad doesn’t sound to him like a very interesting life. “When I imagine what it would be like, it’s like, What would I do then?” he says. “Right now, I have this tool that I can use to make stuff happen. If I sold it, I’d just have money.”
As O’Reilly tells it, the banker chastises him with a metaphor. “You don’t fish with strawberries,” the banker says. “Even if that’s what you like, fish like worms, so that’s what you use.”
At first, O’Reilly accepts this advice. Who can argue with the idea that customers should get what they want? But as he thinks it over, he begins to see things differently. “[A] small voice within me said, with a mixture of dismay, wonder, and dawning delight: ‘But that’s just what we’ve always done: gone fishing with strawberries,’ ” he writes. ” ‘And it’s worked!’ “
It’s hard not to read these words as a parable, meant not just for his small staff of book editors but for any person in business — maybe even for anyone trying to make his or her way in the world. “We seek to find what is true in ourselves…trusting that resonance to lead us to kindred spirits in the world, and them to us,” O’Reilly writes. “I like to think that we have the capability to fish with worms when necessary, but in general, we’re farmers, not fishermen, and strawberries go over just fine.”
