David Hogg Quits

David Hogg got a lot of publicity for gun control.  He fed a narrative that the press wanted to put a megaphone on.  He became a symbol.  Then, after the election, he got in a spat with My Pillow founder Mike Lindell.  If you don’t know My Pillow, just watch a conservative news channel or listen to a conservative talk radio show for 30 minutes. You will see an ad.

Lindell himself is interesting.  He was really down on his luck.  He was a crack addict.  He became a Christian and turned his life around.  He built a company manufacturing pillows and now other things in Minnesota.  It’s not easy to build a company in Minnesota since the tax climate isn’t exactly business-friendly.  It goes without saying the actual climate can be challenging several months a year.

Lindell has been virtually banned from all social media channels by the hard leftists that run Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.  Banned not because of anything but his political beliefs.  Lindell is not singular in his experience.  The new Jim Crow is alive and well.

Hogg shot his mouth off and said he was going to compete.

He didn’t really have a great idea.  All he had was intense spite for someone he disagreed with.  Revenge entrepreneurship is never a good idea.

He wanted to start his manufacturing company in California.  Turns out that was a bad choice.  California is a worse place than Minnesota to start a manufacturing company.  There is a reason Tesla left.  There is also a reason Dimensional Fund Advisors left a long time ago.  Lots of businesses and people are leaving California. They are flooding out of Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and other high tax/regulation states too. The bureaucrats and left-wing politicians haven’t figured out why but the rest of us have.  Hint, it’s not the weather and it’s not Covid.

Entrepreneurs that were truly committed to what they were doing, making a bad decision early wouldn’t trip them up.  Virtually all successful entrepreneurs, even Jeff Bezos, can recount the bad decisions they made while on the journey to building a blowout company.  Great entrepreneurs press on and find a way.  They are resilient.  They don’t need cheerleaders and yes people.  They don’t desire publicity for themselves.

The interesting thing to me is when a truly great entrepreneur gets publicity, it’s usually about the company and not them.  They find themselves in a position to get good exposure and they seize it.  They don’t cultivate it actively.  When they get the chance, they take it and talk about their business.

I have seen entrepreneurs turn down opportunities for publicity because they want to stay stealthy.  Seems counter-intuitive but publicity sometimes screws up a company.  Just because you see your name in lights doesn’t mean you won the fight.

I don’t think much of Hogg as a person.  I wouldn’t be enthused if he showed up on my doorstep to date my daughter.  If he showed up on my doorstep asking for investment the response would be a polite, “No thank you.”

Politics, being “woke”, and building a company don’t mix.  But that doesn’t matter.  The lesson here is pretty clear. Building a company is really arduous.  It will be the toughest thing you will ever undertake in your life.  Entrepreneurs are a different breed of people.  They are wired differently than most humans.

Just because you can get a headline on a social media site doesn’t mean you can build a company.  It’s just a dopamine hit.  Dopamine hits aren’t sustainable.  Great execution is.

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