Tuesday, March 04, 2014

I'm Guessing Chris Franzen is Not a Fan of Rodney Mullen's TED Talk on Creativity and Innovation

Chris Franzen:

In the skate game or whatever, let’s say you’ve come up with some crazy fuckin trick nobody’s done before. You need to keep that shit a secret, clump all your footage together, and then release.

So I’m trying to get a check from Rocco and them—cause I need money; everyone wants to live the dream. There were a lot if kids—including me—that were the same as this, and they’d go and show the footage and then Rodney would go tell whatever pro what trick was going on. Then you’d look like you copied that dude. It’s kind of like a big game. So I wouldn’t necessarily say blackballed, they just made sure nobody would work with me, plus I think the drugs were another major problem.

And then—skateboarding is no place for an entrepreneur. It’s not that there’s no place for it, it’s just that the guys before you think that they deserve to control you and make money off of you because that is what happened to them. Everything we thought we weren’t—like, we’re not part of society and this and that—bullshit, man. We’re just part of a big machine to sell product. So I made the mistake of letting Rodney and them know that I had these intentions. When you say you’re going to do a company, they need to make sure you don’t get released to the public—like run ads and this and that. I made the dumbass mistake of not playing dumb.I think when I realized this, I got super depressed and started using some fuckin’ heavy drugs. It was like Breaking Bad—except I wasn’t making it. I was like that Jesse dude. ...

Jesus, Dani, and Alfonso were all trying to do the World thing at the time, but Rodney wasn’tgiving them any love because he already had a Spaniard–Enrique.

Just like me, they’d go and release some footage, show it to Rodney to try and get on, and he would show somebody else, and then that person would come out with the trick. So you’d have to come out with tricks that nobody could do—some fuckin insane shit. ...

You know, it’s funny because when I smoked glass, I’d be like “I can make this company. I can make my board company.” And then as soon as I’d run out of meth, I’d hear Rodney’s voice saying [in Rodney Mullen impression voice] “it’s impossible and a lot of work to make a board company.” I would not necessarily call this brainwashing, but when your hero tells you something face to face, it is pretty persuasive. Why should anyone be scared of hard work, anyways? Now I understand this was only a strategy to keep people from taking market share and actually rather common practice in business. I meet programmers all the time that work for major software companies that are deterred from starting the same thing because of this same practice.

Of course, it is difficult for anyone to implement their beneficent Zen master management strategies when the public face of the company is a bunch of drug addled kids.

1 comment:

C.FRANZEN said...

Actually I rather enjoyed his TED talk, I just had to act like he was not the one saying it. :)