Everything I ever needed to know about startups I learned from Ocean’s 11. Not the original one, but the 2001 remake. I’ve watched that movie hundreds and hundreds of times: while working in a lab, while studying the law, while working in technology transfer and while building a startup incubator. At each point in my life, I related to the story differently. The twists and the colorful characters resonated in unexpected ways.
You’re going to need a crew as nuts as you
Ocean’s 11 is an underdog story. A small-time criminal, after serving time for a busted score, assembles a crew for his revenge heist. It skates so close to being precious, or trite, but the gravitational pull of its star-studded cast keeps it from tipping over. Ocean’s 11 doesn’t quite coast by on its charm, but the charisma of its cast keeps ludicrous plot moving: almost frictionlessly.
Years ago, I watched a film essay discussing how the director, Stephen Sodebergh, may have been making a movie about making movies. It makes a lot of sense: a crew of colorful characters, each with different specialties, carry out an elaborate plan and improvise – constantly – when problems arise. The essayist, also a film maker, compared the same beats of the heist movie with the beats of making a movie. How the planned shot may need to be abandoned because of the weather, or the light, or any of the million other things that can go wrong. The energy of careful planning, unexpected complication, and brilliant improvisation was likely channeled from the filmmaker’s own experiences.
You bet big, and then you take the house
It got me thinking that a heist, a movie or even a startup also share a similar energy. A team of colorful experts to accomplish something together they can’t do separately. Together, they roll with setbacks, the complications, and the reversals. They carefully execute a plan until they need to improvise as the situation demands. They stand up to a tyrant casino owner, the studio suits, or an entrenched corporate competitor. They come together to accomplish something exacting, difficult, and valuable.
The score itself lends itself to the emotional journey of Ocean’s 11. The crew sets its sights on stealing hundreds of millions of dollars. The very scale of it becomes a character itself: the take from three different casinos – on their busiest night. The whole movie is drenched in Las Vegas glitz just as the city was hitting its stride as an attraction. It’s that sense of financial scale that further helped me relate my experience dealing with tech startups to the crew. The unicorn ambitions of tech startups create world-changing wealth. Deep tech university intellectual property adds another dimension: not just a casino heist, but three casinos — on a fight night. My experience with startup culture brings an expensive glitz, not unlike Las Vegas, that colors the entire story.
So, watch this space as we discuss the colorful characters, the romance, and maybe the moonshine of startup culture through the lens of one of western civilization’s true cultural achievements: 2001’s Ocean’s 11.
a candle, unlit 