By Paul Feinberg and Carolyn Gray Anderson
Both the lunchtime and afternoon keynote conversations at this year’s CREATE Conference were marked by great energy, thanks to the easy rapport between guests and their interlocutors. Edward Glazer, owner and co-chairman of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Docstoc founder Jason Nazar both shared their stories of business struggles and successes, doling out their best suggestions for MBAs interested in advancing ideas, projects and careers.
Though separated in age by a couple of generations, both guests advised unequivocally, “Just ask.” As Glazer put it, “You’d be surprised how much you get in life if you just ask. You have nothing to lose by asking.”
Glazer, who also serves on the board of the family-owned Manchester United soccer team, steered the conversation in a “lessons learned” direction that edified his audience of fellow entrepreneurs. Among his words of wisdom: “Surround yourself with great people”; “Sometimes the best deal is the deal you walk away from”; and “Anytime you go to a meeting, bring a second person with you. Because that second person will pick up on something you didn’t catch.”
He also cautioned that “You’ve got to pick the right field or you’ll spend your whole life working like a dog and not achieving. You can all get fantastic degrees but if you choose the wrong business or field you will not be as successful as you want to be. A race car driver is only as good as his car.”
After Glazer graduated from Ithaca College (where he and his wife have a stadium named for them), he shadowed his father, Malcolm Irving Glazer, for years. “I went to the Irving School for my MBA,” he said — even receiving a diploma from his dad.
In 2012, Glazer oversaw a complete overhaul of the Buccaneers’ marketing and sales departments and launched a new member relations department created exclusively for season pass holders. JD Powers ranked the Buccaneers #1 in customer satisfaction among all NFL teams for the 2012 and 2013 seasons. “You have to go into a business that people want,” he told the audience. “Forget what you want, give the people what they want.”
Nazar sat down with Rochelle Bailis, director of content at Connexity and Nazar’s managing editor and content producer at Docstoc, where they’d been in the trenches together. The former colleagues’ familiarity made for jovial conversation.
Nazar is a native Angeleno who studied at UC Santa Barbara and Pepperdine. He plodded along writing business plans for other people for about a year and a half. In 2007 when Nazar was in his mid-20s, he and Alon Schwartz launched Docstoc, the electronic legal and financial document repository, with $750,000 Nazar raised himself.
Nazar encountered numerous pitfalls as CEO of a growing company, and doubts plagued him even though he was at the helm of the most trafficked site for business and legal documents. “Everyone feels like a fraud,” he declared, “don’t let them tell you they don’t!” In 2013 he sold Docstoc to Intuit for $50 million, and said he might have held out longer (and for more money) but decided to move on.
Nazar did stress persistence: He said he believes that for every business that gets funded, 10 others will “flame out.” He said, “Manage your burn rate carefully. Mentally plan for it to be a decade of your life. Don’t invent something, sit on it for a year, and exit.” But, he added, “Don’t struggle with a struggle. Expect and accept that what you’re setting out to do is going to be hard.”
He advised that people starting businesses should “stay attached to the problem you’re trying to solve, but be flexible in the solutions to those problems.” Solutions, not solution: Whereas the myth of the successful business is that it’s driven by a lone visionary, Nazar feels strongly that the truth is, businesses willing to pivot in new directions are likelier to succeed. And, not mincing words, he said, “I hate hiring MBAs.” He said they tend to gravitate toward process and look for the “right” way to accomplish something when they need to be more open to unexpected possibilities.
For the last three months or so, Nazar has self-identified as a “stealth entrepreneur,” “working on cool new stuff,” as he put it.
UCLA Anderson’s Entrepreneur Association and High Tech Business Association, in conjunction with the Harold and Pauline Price Center for Entrepreneurship, presented the annual EA conference, now in its 30th year and newly named CREATE.
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