I had dinner and drinks with my two friends last night. These are 2 successful businessmen turned serial entrepreneurs. They've dabbled in many different ventures, most centered around the act of helping launch and grow startups. Because of this, they've accumulated a strong network and an understanding of what makes a company gain traction.
We talked about their passion for taking on new initiatives, a recurring itch that returns like clockwork after a launch. The excitement and challenge of building a company from scratch are what fulfills them in their careers. The act of keeping a business running, dealing with operations and ongoing logistics is less appealing to them.
Naturally, I proceed to ask what the next one will be. They chuckle and look at each other, then tell me they're starting a beef jerky business, Tuff Stuff.
It's quite possibly the most random thing I could imagine. These guys have experience in endeavors ranging from tech innovations, investment firms, and asset management companies. They're smart guys who have solved difficult and interesting problems, yet they choose dehydrated meat as their next big challenge. "Haha no really, what's the company" "That's it, beef jerky". Of course, I insisted they explain themselves and after getting the justification from them, it surprisingly made a lot of sense.
Beef jerky is simple, easy to make, cheap to produce (salmon jerky fisherman get paid ~$2 a pound apparently), and it's not a saturated market. They plan to target gym-going meatheads looking for natural protein sources after a workout and throughout the day. They've already dubbed their tag line "Are you Tuff enough?". After getting the deep dive into their business plan, I shook my head and smiled at the utter brilliance of it.
It was a paradigm-shifting moment for me. Making money and building a lucrative business doesn't need to be as complicated as many people think. It can be as straight forward as implementing a simple idea that not many people have done, that doesn't require much capital to start, and which relies on existing processes that have already been proven to work (production lines, factory sourcing, packaging, distributing, etc).
In Silicon Valley, we're surrounded with fascinating, innovative, and forward-thinking startups and initiatives that are changing the world. Because of this, I've been thinking on a larger scale since moving here. I want to be a part of the next big endeavor that will solve a world problem, help millions, and/or replace an inefficient institution. And that's all amazing and it's something that would excite me. But there are other directions one can take, and the one chosen should depend on what one considers fulfilling.
You either thrive from the act of the doing (input) or from the what you're doing (output). My beef jerky friends are the former, I am the latter. They don't care what business or industry or product they're working on. They just enjoy the act of starting something new, building a company from nothing and developing a strategy to make it successful, and then passing it on and moving to their next thing. While I enjoy that challenge as well, the product/idea/mission I'm working on is just as, if not more important to me.