How Passion Leads to Innovation - AJ Vernet

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Everyone around me is always talking about the “trail-blazers”. The ones who reinvent the wheel time and time again, like Steve Jobs did numerous timesduring his career at Apple. What i don't hear enoughtalk about are the people who are passionate in our immediate industry - the Ad Tech space! Those people make just as many significant strides forward, though maybe they’re not as heralded as Steve Jobs. These are the ones working overtime, solving problems by making frequent, iterative changes to existing products or fields that lead to industry change. I look up to these people and I like to know what makes them tick.

I recognize that if you don't love what you do, you cant be passionate about it and if you're not passionate about something, its much more difficult to be great at it. I know if I were less passionate about design, technology and advertising then there'd be no way I could succeed through the face of adversity. For me, passion is a cocktail made from a number of things. It’s an equation that can vary from person to person. For me the equation is (ADD+OCD+DRIVE)-FRUSTRATION = RESULTS! You have to be ADD to be an entrepreneur and you have to have some level of OCD to be a successful one. Drive is what gets me through the night - the drive to be a success. Frustration – that’s simply part of the game and you have to be able to overcome it.

This equation usually means I'm the type of person who fixates on challenges in my daily life and thenpursue a way to solve them. I like to work a challengeover and over again until i see a way the solution.Once I find the solution, I look to execute. This is usually how I pick my next project or company to start. I find this to be an iterative process – an evolutionary process. Its less dramatic than reinventing the entire wheel – its more perfecting the wheel and using it for new solutions. The solution to a problem doesn't mean you have to blaze and entirely new trail – maybe you just need to mow down some of the grass and refine the path that was already there. Maybe you can restructure the wheel in order to make it suit your needs better? This can meanspending the time to figure out a more efficient way to do the same thing you were doing before, but with less time or effort.

I see a lot of efficient restructuring happening in our industry over the last ten years. Those tweaks lead to little innovations that often lead to huge shifts in our industry. Companies like MySpace were conceived because people like Tom and his partners saw inefficiency in companies like Friendster and Match.com. Companies like Facebook and Pathwere built off MySpace's inefficiencies. I see innovation in ad platforms; buying, selling and local optimization from companies like Centro who automated a process for companies searching for a better ROI across the board in those categories. Twitter, Instagram, Cinigram, Whatapp and Vine to name a few are all companies that emerged from texting, email and communication roots. These businesses have evolved as new efficient ways of communication and I can bet you probably use most of them today.

Jason Fried, at 37Signals, is someone I admire a lot even though we’ve never met. Jason and his team have created a company so they could create other companies solving problems industry wide. 37Signals’ most notable business is BASECAMP and it solves a huge production communication workflow issue in our community as things go further digital. We’re going to see a lot of innovation coming in and around the production space now that tools are easily accessible thanks to everything being in a cloud. I created companies like Red Lever, Rey Interactive and Republic Project to solve issues with inefficient video, banner and rich media production. Those were my pain points, what are yours and should you do something about it?

l hear about a lot of new business ideas on a monthly basis and I constantly wonder why everyone is always trying to reinvent the wheel instead of just rearrange the one that’s already spinning! If you could evolve one thing in your daily life what would it be? I already have a long list for me but I'm curious to hear what you would change as you look towards the future.

AJ Vernet is Founder and CEO of Republic Project, which is a Los Angeles and New York based digital and video production company positioned to partner with agencies, creative firms, publishers and brands as a scalable and seamless production resource. AJ can be reached at AJ@republicproject.com.

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