Eric Ries: On The Internet, No One Knows You’re A Dog

Eric Ries: On The Internet, No One Knows You’re A Dog

Eric can explain feeding a major publishing house some not-so-true tid bits of information as a teenager with surprising brevity. “You know that famous New Yorker Cartoon?” (Take a look to the right) “Well, On the internet no one knows you’re a kid.”

The publishing house that printed Eric’s first coding tutorial had no idea he wasn’t a veteran coder, java expert, or an adult. He was a cocky teenager, convinced he could publish a tutorial on Java programming despite the fact that he learned Java two days before pitching the publishing house. The best part is, Eric was right.

[Catch Eric Ries’ keynote at Signal, May 19th – 20th in San Francisco]

“Not only did I think I knew programming in high school, I thought that I could teach programming,” says Eric. “I was an arrogant kid.” The key to Eric’s success with the publisher was that his arrogance was matched by his ingenuity. His code was on par with the adult, 40-something engineers he was pretending to be. He never talked to the publisher on the phone, for fear his voice would give away his age. It all went well, until he had to write his date of birth on the publishing contract. That’s when he got a call from the publisher that he couldn’t ignore. The publisher wanted Eric’s parents to endorse the deal. That was it. A few months later Eric, a 17 year old, was a published author. Heck, he was an expert in print. The one chapter in The Black Art of Java Game Programming served as one small step for Eric into a career of programming.

Looking back, Eric fully recognizes how ridiculous the story sounds. But people do crazy things for love, and Eric was deeply in love with programming. He just didn’t know that he could do the thing he loved for a living. “Nobody told me you could make money as a programmer. It didn’t even occur to me. A year after high school I realized you could do programming for a living, and get a job, and that was one of the happiest days of my life. I couldn’t believe it. It was like someone was saying you could play video games all day.”

If programming was like playing video games, Eric wondered if he really needed someone to teach him how to play video games. It turns out that the folks at Yale have a good track record for the whole teaching people thing, so Eric went to Yale. He founded a recruiting site, sold it, and made some pre-DotCom-bubble burst money and quickly looked to his next venture. He can’t remember when he caught the entrepreneurship bug, it was just there in him. He learned that while you can teach someone to play video games, you can’t teach them to love video games. Eric loved video games.

The same teenage love that made Eric do crazy things for programming, fuels his career as an entrepreneur. Eric believes that you have to have an unquestioning passion for what you build. There are an impossible number of pitfalls you will undoubtedly cross on the way to successfully founding, running, and growing your business. If you don’t have what Eric calls a “vision” for your business, and the passion to back it up, there’s little point in trying.

“Starting a company is so hard, there’s no point in doing it if you’re not passionate about it. There are so many other ways to make money if you just want to make money. You have to have a vision for the world to be a better place because of what you’re doing.” “When things are going wrong, you can give up. But when you have a vision, you can see it so clearly that it has to come true. You say ‘something’s going wrong, how do I change my strategy and figure out what I need to learn to make my vision successful.’”

In this light, you can see Eric’s little white lies to the book publisher as a teenager as his very first pivots. They were his very first steps on the road to being an entrepreneur.