How To Avoid The Bozo Explosion - With Disruptive Tech

The bozo explosion dooms companies when they hit their stride

Steve Jobs famously told the story of how Apple avoided - or better, dealt with the Bozo Explosion. Here is a short video.

When you are a small tech company you often begin with some dedicated “A” players who create the technology, are marketing whizzes and/or have a knack for getting to just the right new customer.

Small companies are always short of funds - thus many of them go the venture capital route, which we are the first to say is almost always a very bad thing. It’s great for the VC, it sucks for the small company.

We cover that on our JayValentine.com site with stories and examples.

We loathe VCs.

The only species we encountered more natively sinister, more soulless are politicos - something we did for a few years working in the voter fraud space.

When you are building your company you need to grow marketing or customer service.

You don’t have a lot of money nor a lot of promise - so you bring on a recent grad who is happy to work for some stock options and a middle market salary.

That happens in engineering, sales and other parts of your organization.

One day a break happens and your sales catch fire - as in 200% growth then 300% and you are raking in the dough.

You need to hire more people, now you can attract the top of the talent tree, because you are hot, you can pay well, your stock will make the first 50 employees worth F.U. money. (F.U. money means never having to say you’re sorry - as in the movie with Ali McGraw).

The problem you face is your current SENIOR marketing person - that mid level person you started with - is not the top talent - and the top talent is not going to work for a Bozo (meaning someone they cannot learn from).

This is where hot startups struggle.

If you bring in new people, place them above the founder level person, it’s unpleasant and nobody is happy with it.

As Steve Jobs says, when you hire B players, they hire C players because they are threatened. We have 40 years experience at some very hot startups that hit it big - this happens all the time.

Jobs also says “A” players do not deal in petty jealousies - they compete in healthy ways and often are bonded into a community that lasts decades.

We witnessed this first-hand during our painful 36 months in the election integrity space.

Literally everyone there is a “C” player and they fought with each other over everything. That is why that space is considered the untouchable rail - because so many of the players are crazy or appear so.

The problem is hiring “A” players when you do not have the revenue to attract them.

Here at Fractal, we innovated around that problem.

19 months ago, one of the country’s most reputable VC companies offered us $100 million for 10% of the company. They wanted to build a company around Fractal solutions for the Fortune 100 and they understood our technology from the web site alone.

We do not take VC money because we hate VCs, we do not need the money, and we have enough VC experience to know they will destroy our offerings before we hit full stride.

That said, we still cannot hire anyone we want - we have to live within our means - which are not yet 3 full meals a day.

We are into measured growth - and in very specialized areas with highly repeatable applications. More about that in future posts.

So how do you hire the best talent in the world - without going into debt to do it?

We created the concept of “uncles.”

When we were early to market in 2019, we presented versions of the tech to well known execs of better known companies. They understood what we built and introduced us to others.

In one case, we met a person who departed one of the top electric utilities in the world.

He is in his late 50s and does not want to start his career over again - nor does he want to get into another industry since he knows so many people in that sector.

We suggested he consider being an uncle - that he would monetize his Rolodex (again, if you are under 50, it’s where your contacts were before the iPhone).

He is a trusted advisor in the utility industry.

Anyone will take his call.

He understands our two dozen current applications in that space - which you can see at TheFractalUtility.com - one of our micro sites.

He jumped at the idea of sharing in our success - taking us into the top utilities, at the most senior levels, explaining why we can impact their cost structure, and if we get a deal - he gets a percentage.

We ended up with an “A” player, who does not want a full time job, has a Rolodex worth 7 figures to the right people (us), and now he can, and in 2025 he will, make more money with us than he made as an employee.

To date we have uncles who were the Chief Administrative Officer at a major aerospace company, one was the CEO of a large defense contractor, another is the retired EVP of Marketing for one of the world’s largest shipping companies and many others.

We gather the advice of people who often made 7 figure salaries, dealt with some of the most complex corporate issues, and they are fully invested in our future and they are sharing in our success.

One of our uncles has no need for money - he was into F.U. money a decade ago, so for him, we give his percentage to a charity.

We are hiring internally for engineers with years of full stack development experience and building a limited sales force - and we are fortunate to know exactly the people we want - because they were “A” players at previous companies where we worked side by side.

Disruptive technology is a very different sales and marketing process - and we are doing all we can to not only have disruptive offerings - we also have disruptive ways of going to market.

While we are not huge fans of many high tech personalities, we are big fans of the great Steve Jobs and he is kind of an uncle of ours - at least through his videos.

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FractalComputing Substack is a newsletter about the journey of taking a massively disruptive technology to market.  We envision a book about our journey so each post is a way to capture some fun events.

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Fractal Website:  Fractal-Computing.com

Jay@FractalWeb.App

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