About
Every day of my high school senior year, I wore a suit to school. I was at a public school. Some people wore baggy pants, some people wore shorts, most people wore jeans. One guy wore a dress. But nobody wore a suit. Except me. Why? Because it made me stand out professionally. The guy who wore the dress stood out, but no one else stood out in a way that made them look more professional.
In my freshman year at MIT, I found out my Differential Equations grade was 11 points below passing for the year (the class was graded as a total number of points over the year). I was leaving for Toronto for the summer in two hours. I marched into the professor’s office, with my big fatigue duffel bag, demanded to see the final exam key, and systematically found 17 points that had been incorrectly missed. She said “ok, you pass”. I jumped on the MBTA red line and made my flight.
At my fraternity – Chi Phi – I was elected risk manager, not because I was good at eliminating risk, but because I often WAS the risk. I ran on the platform “Where there is risk, there is Davies”.
At my first significant startup experience (Beansprout Networks), I was referred to as the Bumble bee. Why? Because the physics of a bumble bee don’t work – a bumble bee can’t fly. But it doesn’t know that, so it does it anyway1. I didn’t know things couldn’t be done, so I did them anyway.
When I was 25, after working for a few different startups (some good, some bad), I quit my job and successfully proved to the US government that the company of which I was a co-founder would be willing to fire me if we could find an American to do my job.
I’m 32. I’m a partner in S3. Look on the back of any of our business cards – S3 has adopted my personal mantra – Challenge Everything. Nothing, Nothing is sacred at S3. Any employee can (and should) challenge anything about the company. Don’t like how we’ve stocked the kitchen? Challenge it. Think there’s a better way to deploy solutions faster? Challenge it. Believe a client is unethical and we should not do business with them? Challenge it (although thankfully this one hasn’t happened yet).
2008-2009 is currently being referred to as “The Great Recession”. Companies are cutting costs. Travel is being nixed. What is S3 doing? We’re getting on airplanes. Hell, we bought an airplane. We spend the money to talk to our clients. And what do we do when we get there? What no other vendor does – we challenge them. An executive wants to create specs for a product? Sorry, no – we’re going to sit with the people who will actually use it. Someone wants us to add some data to report? Not until you explain why, and even then we probably won’t do it – we’ll figure out the real problem.
What do we do at S3? We solve hard problems very fast. We have a ton of fun doing it. And we Challenge Everything.
Footnotes:
1 obviously a bumble bee can fly –the reason it was originally thought to be impossible has to do with a miscalculation by a physicist.
I truly enjoyed reading this. Great Write-up!!!