Chris Sacca: “Create value before you ask for value back”

“I think what really ended up building a business opportunity for me was just being known as being helpful. I mean, we're really lucky in Silicon Valley that nobody asks you where you went to school. Nobody asks you what your parents do for a living. Nobody asks you your credential. Instead, they're just kind of like, How can you help me right now?… And if you're insightful and you're helpful, people just grab you and they pull you in.”

Kevin Rose shares a story of how he got into an oversubscribed seed round for Square by creating an awesome video demo for the Square device and sending it to Jack Dorsey. And this is exactly what Chris is referring to:

“When people kind of tweet me and say how do I get into the game, etc. I'm just like, create value before you ask for value back. Your story is the epitome of that. You didn't ask any permission. You didn't have a preexisting deal with Jack. He wasn't giving you shares to do that. You're just like, look, I think this is a cool opportunity… I'm going to put together something here that I think is helpful and I'm not going to ask anything back in exchange for it. And what it does is just opens the door for a much more meaningful relationship.”

Chris shares another story of Ryan Graves who was the first employee at Uber. Before Uber, he really wanted a job at Foursquare. After applying through traditional channels and not hearing back, he decided to sign 20 deals for Foursquare without asking permission and presented it to the founders. While he ultimately didn’t get a full time offer at Foursquare, it did help him get a job at Uber. At the time of Uber’s IPO, he owned about 2% of the company’s shares and is a billionaire today.

Full video: Kevin Rose “Foundation 07 // Chris Sacca“ (Jul 2011)