But there’s much more to art than meets the eye. Many of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world have an almost innate ability to make parallels between seemingly incomparable subjects. Take, for example, Ben Horowitz’s parallel between Freaky Friday and the problems the Sales Engineering and Customer Support teams had in one of his companies, or Jack Dorsey’s legendary analogy between the traffic on Golden Gate Bridge and Square’s money flow. They both learned something by watching a movie or gazing at the Golden Gate Bridge and made a brilliant parallel that massively impacted their businesses.

On that same note, one of the things we pride ourselves with at Brainient is our reports. They are gorgeous, undoubtedly influenced by our admiration for all things pretty. I hate to be blowing our own horn, but they’re so beautiful that clients talk about them with other people in the industry, which brings more business our way. Who would have ever thought a beautiful .pdf can generate sales?

I think there’s a lot we can learn from art that can directly impact our businesses. It’s all about training the eye to observe and educating the brain to make unexpected associations between subjects and areas with no apparent connection. It doesn’t come easy if you’re not Ben Horowitz or Jack Dorsey, but it’s an invaluable skill once you get the hang of it.

What I’ve realised over the past few months is that the same strategy works brilliantly beyond fast moving consumer goods as well. Say with your investors. We all want those intros, contacts, recruiting help and product feedback from our investors, and ideally it should be proactive rather than reactive. And although most investors will help you happily when you ask them to, very rarely do they proactively offer their support. Most times, it’s simply because they’re busy and you’re not one of those “last few things” on the list, so they don’t even think of you when an opportunity arises. What would happen, though, if you’d use the recency effect on them?

If we rephrase its definition slightly, we get something like: given a number of startups they’ve invested in, investors tend to remember the last few ones more than those in the middle. Sounds like the recency effect in it’s full splendeur. How do we then make sure we’re one of those last things in our investors’ minds? There are many ways to do it (including sticking your logo on their laptop, phone, car, child), but I found that the most efficient is… email.

I’ve been doing this for a while now and it works great. My board of directors gets about five to ten emails per week from me. I also try to send out a by-monthly update to all our investors and advisors, and have calls & coffee with everyone regularly. This keeps Brainient at the “top of the list” in their minds, which means that whenever they’ll spot a useful contact or an opportunity, they’ll think of us.

Last night, while looking at my RescueTime stats for the previous week and putting some meetings in the calendar, I had an epiphany. How awesome would it be to be able to track my offline time as well? You see, I have a rather poor memory so everything from meetings with clients to holidays and dinners with friends goes into the calendar. It has become a habit, which means that I can go back and see what I was doing on September 9, 2009, for example.

I would kill (and pay) for an app or a RescueTime feature (wink, wink, gents) that would import all my calendar entries and automatically add people to categories (eg. Sales, Friends, Business Development, Entertainment, Health – of course, after I’ve indicated what category they should go in). I would then be able to see how I spent my time on a particular week, and optimise based on that. What a killer app that would be, someone should build it.

But recently I’ve come to think about networking in the context of a similar activity, but one that people give a lot more forethought to: flirting. Flirting is fun. Partly that’s because the objective is clear. For some, it’s phone numbers; for others, it’s not heading home alone. It also makes you think creatively. So I’m thinking: if you can flirt your way into a marriage, can’t you flirt your way to a term sheet?

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not much of an expert at flirting. But let me share a few tips I’ve picked up over the last few years. Basically, it all boils down to this: you need to stop talking, and start listening.

It starts with identifying your prospective targets. You can either work the room, or you can subtly encourage people to come to you. Some of my friends call this “peacocking” (not a reference to my sadly undeveloped genitalia), and I find that the easiest way to do it is with clothing. For example, I often wear red shoes. You could, I dunno, wear a pink tie. I’m willing to bet you that people will come and compliment your tie. It’s a good ice breaker, and it brings them to you. That’s what you want.

If you get peacocking right, you’ll get a lot of attention. They’ll come to you and start a conversation. That’s good. But it’s also bad. It’s good because you don’t have to work the floor. It’s bad because you will only have about eight seconds to make them stay. Of course, they won’t leave after eight seconds, but their eyes will be after someone with a better, more colourful tie. Have some ice-breakers ready. Tell them something interesting. Something funny. Talk about how you spilled coffee on your trousers right before the pitch.

Once they feel comfortable around you, they’ll start to actually listen. They might even ask you a question about you. It’s important to recognise that IT’S A TRAP. Don’t start talking about yourself just yet. Instead, ask them about themselves. Listen carefully. Don’t say anything or think about what you’re going to say. Just listen. Ask more questions. One of two things will happen. They’ll either be boring, self-involved and dull, in which case you’ll feel like running away, and so you should. (But that’s not nice, so here’s a trick: look around the room and eye one of the other boring people you’ve met. Say “Dan, I’m so sorry to interrupt, but let me introduce you to X, I think you’d have a lot to talk about”. Then run to the loo, grab a drink or feed the meter. Dan will notice you’ve cut him off but will appreciate the effort of finding someone for him to rant at.)

If, on the other hand, Dan is both interesting and fun, the conversation will flow naturally. You’ll end up speaking about yourself – and hell, maybe you’ll even exchange business cards. Don’t just stop there. Make Dan remember you. One way to do this is by saying something memorable, albeit stupid, like, “I just realised, you look a lot like my dad”, which will likely make him laugh. You can then follow-up with an email saying “Hey Dan, I’m the guy with the red shoes who said you look a lot like his dad”. My mates in the pub call this anchoring, and it works like a charm.

Last but not least, you get a lot of Nos when you flirt. Blunt, direct, aggressive Nos. In networking, you get a lot of passive nods or endless speeches. They’re essentially the same thing. When that happens, it’s time to move. Introduce her to someone else and move on. Flirting is a numbers game, and so is networking.

While we all appreciate how your startup will disintermediate videocasting folksonomies by leveraging back-end users, I simply don’t care. It’s not interesting, entertaining, funny or useful. So rather than banging on endlessly, how about you stop and listen for a change. Listen to many, speak to a few, as Shakespeare would say.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe thinking big is necessary but I find it dangerous as it encourages daydreaming. I can’t even remember how many times I pictured getting that email from Yuri Milner saying “Dude, I have the spreadsheet right here and we think you rock, here’s $100 mil on your terms. Game?”. Yes, it’s going to be a big company one day and yes, it is going to take over the world and yes, Warren Buffet will call but you’ll be too busy. Until then, however, how are you going to reach next quarter’s targets if you don’t know what customers need, um, today? And if you’re always focused on where you think the company should be in five years, chances are you have no clue what your clients need today. ‘Cause unless you get really lucky, your vision is probably very different from your customers’ real problems. And how can you know what problems clients have if you don’t focus on them rather than the big picture?

If there’s one person guilty of “thinking big” and too much daydreaming, that’s me. Until a little while ago, the headline of this blog said “Young entrepreneur, trying to change the world”. Not anymore. Not because I don’t want to create something that changes the world someday, but because I’ve learnt something over the past few years. It’s all about small wins. A great team. A great product. Great investors, great clients, great partners, great traction, great growth, great exit. Small steps, one at a time.

The ability to focus has always been one of my biggest challenges. My brain seems to be in constant need of something new, from the color of the walls in the bedroom to girlfriends or business. Almost every morning a new feature or idea makes its way into my consciousness and tries to take over. Sometimes that’s good, especially when I was trying to find product/market fit and understand what customers needed. But it’s bad when one gets to the execution / scale phase. Let me explain.

Brainient started as a video management platform with interactive features. Shortly after launch we discovered that people were more interested in the interactive stuff than the video management solution and decided to focus on that. A few months thereafter we discovered that although publishers & video producers were interested in our interactive video capabilities, they weren’t willing to pay as much as we wanted them to. So while brainstorming what could be done with the technology, we saw a huge opportunity in the interactive video advertising space. We went that way and started to see the light at the end of the tunnel. If we would’ve focused on what we were doing initially, there wouldn’t be any Brainient today. We discovered and improved because of a lack of focus, and it proved to be the best thing we could have done at that time.

However, every company gets to a point where the lack of focus becomes its biggest enemy. I learnt this the hard way. While we were producing shows for BrainTV, an online TV channel I started a few years ago, we failed to observe that one of the shows was generating more views than all the other ones altogether. Actually, we did observe it but because of a lack of focus we failed to act on it. We could’ve created more similar shows or increase the frequency of the successful one, which would have generated more views (read: more advertising revenue). We didn’t and the company ran out of money within 12 months.

Focusing is hard and like everything else in life, there’s no silver bullet to it. But there’s even a bigger problem than focus and that’s refusal. Once you’ve put your time, energy and sweat into a bunch of things, it’s quite difficult to just pick one and focus on it. Everything feels critical, important and everything needs to be done now. I have this problem all the time. And what I’ve done to solve it was to find a Don. A person who understands what we do at Brainient but because he’s not involved in the day-to-day operations, he can be quite objective. He’s the one who shouts “focus, Bobby” and helps me figure out the way.

It reminds me of when I was a kid. I would come from school, do my homework, write some code, play some games and then watch cartoons, M*A*S*H or Police Academy for about an hour. I didn’t do it every day, so I’m assuming I was spending about 15 – 20hrs per month in front of the TV. I was a kid back then so wasting time in front of the TV wasn’t such an outrageous thing, but it’s amazing how much my social media behaviour today resembles what I was doing with TV as a kid.

Firstly, social media, as TV, stops my brain from thinking about stuff. I remember that when I was watching TV as a kid, my consciousness would stop thinking about school, homework and all the stuff I actually needed to do. Hence I almost never got anything done on time. Secondly, not a lot of interesting stuff ever came out of that TV box. Yes, TV documentaries were sometimes revealing in the same way social media helps me discover interesting news and events today, but that probably only happens in 10% of the time spent on either.

However, the most interesting thing I’ve noticed while looking over the stats this morning is that I consume social media all day long. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s bad, that’s real bad because it’s incredibly distracting. As a kid, I only watched TV in the evening. Which means that, during the day, it wasn’t a distraction. Social media on the other hand interrupts me every other hour, according to RescueTime.

Now, there’s one more thing I remember from when I was a kid. I was in my last year of high-school and had managed to get myself quite busy by doing freelancing work, preparing for final exams and starring in a TV show. I tried cutting back on my TV time, but found it impossible until I made quite an extreme move: threw it out of the flat. And now I’m wondering if I should take the same approach with social media.

The same rule applies when it comes to sales, especially when you’re selling to big companies. And in the past few years I’ve learnt that the sales process is always much, much more complicated than you think it is. And even though most of the problems one can stumble upon can be solved fairly easily, there is one that can bite you in the ass so hard you won’t even know what hit you. Like that isn’t enough, it’s also incredibly difficult to spot it if you don’t know your industry like the back of your hand: external factors.

External factors are so bad because they can’t be controlled. Timing is one of them. Steve Jobs deciding not to support Flash on the iPad is another. If you’re a retailer in the UK, the VAT increase to 20% is another, and so on and so forth. And not only you can’t control them, but they’re almost impossible to predict as well.

However, there are two things you can do if you realise an external factor you can’t control is interfering with the sales process. The first one is quite obvious: it’s better to adapt yourself to the world than try to adapt the world to you (I don’t remember who coined this phrase but it’s worth remembering). The second one is even more important than adapting and usually makes the difference between the startups that make it and those that don’t: make sure you have enough money in the bank until you solve whatever problems the external factors caused. Which is tricky given that external factors are pretty unpredictable, but hey: it’s all part of the game.

Keep it simple stupid, adapt, and check your bank account.

PEOPLE DON’T HAVE TIME.

People you usually want intros from are the “connectors”. And, well, the connectors get tons of email. I think it’s somewhere in the 150 – 400 range, with an average of 350. They also have very little time each day for doing email, probably between 1 and 2 hours per day. Let’s say 90 minutes. That means they need to process & reply 3 emails / minute. Not to mention they need to write their own.

SO, 3 EMAILS / MINUTE and you want them to write an intro email for you? FOGGEDDABOUTIT!

Instead, do this: ask them to FORWARD an email for you. Forwarding takes 5 seconds. Write a few lines on why you want to talk to that particular person and simply ask the connector to forward it. It always works. Except when it doesn’t, of course.

The moments it doesn’t work is when the connector realizes all you want to do is meet Sean Parker for a coffee. Well, guess what: connectors become connectors because they help people. If you just want to have coffee with Sean Parker, chances are you’re just wasting everybody’s time. To avoid that, do this:

Link your intro request to a very recent event, and explain how you will provide value. As in: I saw the company X just started doing stuff in the video space and I think we could help them make some money. TA-DA!

Without further ado, here’s a quick template that always works for me.

Hi Joe,

Congrats for the new pet [or some other recent event that shows you care].

I recently saw that Company X just started producing videos, and I’d like to have a quick chat with them and see if they’d be interested to make those videos interactive. It would help them engage viewers and potentially generate sales. Do you think you could forward this email to John Smith, their CEO? (I know you sit on their board).

Many thanks in advance!

Best,
Emi

‘Cause if you really mean it, there is one way to do it: PERSEVERE. Email, call, visit and hustle until you get a meeting. One month, two months, three months. Sounds like a no-brainer but we do it so rarely. It takes balls to push people but it always pays off.

And here’s a short clip from Shawshank Redemption to inspire you. It’s 6m long but I promise it’s worth it.