姐弟创业传奇

    2006年从鲍登学院毕业的当天，埃里克就收拾行囊，去纽约市追寻自己的专业音乐人梦想。尔后的经历一点也不浪漫。他的乐队“小澳大利亚”(Little Australia)很难获得登台演出的机会——埃里克能够演奏多种乐器，但主要担任吉他手。为了更深入地了解一支乐队如何才能获得签约机会，他最终在一家唱片公司找了一份差事。但这份工作带给他最大的感悟是，原来音乐人和唱片公司的前景竟然如此不堪！“在那家公司，所有员工每天都是一副惶惶不可终日的样子，因为他们随时都有可能丢掉饭碗。”正是姐姐的一个问题帮助他理清了思路。阿琳问，他为什么打算进入一个日渐萎缩的行业，而不是进入一家蒸蒸日上的企业、成为它的一份子呢？

    演出间歇期似乎一眼望不到尽头的“小澳大利亚”乐队一直向一家名为艾米街( Amie Street)的动态定价网站上传自己的音乐。所谓动态定价意指，越受欢迎的歌曲定价越高。埃里克向这家网站的创始人发送了一封主题为“我想为你工作”的电子邮件。他的大胆终于获得了回报：2007年，他得到了一份工作。“我认为这是一个涉足网络音乐，获取经验的机会，”他说。“我还能赚点钱，也就不必担心成为一位落魄的音乐人。”一如他此前的经历，在这家初创公司，他几乎什么都干。

    2008年，艾米街收购了Songza。按照埃里克的描述，Songza这家网站最初提供一种类似于谷歌(Google)的音乐搜索服务——输入一首歌曲的名称，互联网帮你找到它，寻找的渠道通常是YouTube。透过Songza，埃里克和他的合作伙伴发现了流媒体音乐的发展潜力：它让用户马上就能聆听到音乐，而不必把歌曲下载至硬盘里。这支团队决定把艾米街出售给亚马逊公司(Amazon)，这样他们就能够全身心地经营Songza。很快，Songza就演变为一些经过深度编辑策划、以20首歌曲为一组的播放列表，每组播放列表都有一个主题。比如，《90年代一曲成名传奇》(90s One-hit Wonders)或者《熟男催泪金曲》(Grown Men Making Grown Men Cry)。

    通过客户调查，埃里克和其他创始人意识到，这年头，没有人认为音乐是一种产品。埃里克说：“人们听音乐是为了放松心情，以便更好地完成手头的工作，”让音乐陪伴他们渡过乏味的工作时间。这支团队决定把Songza定位为一种帮助用户增加生活情趣的服务，而不是一个音乐发现产品。感到焦虑不安？请打开《60年代原型朋克劲爆歌曲集》('60s Proto-Punk Blastoff)。正在户外烧烤？何不试试《与天王一起野炊》(Cookout with the King)的感觉（对于那些试图进入你的轿车或健身房的广告客户来说，融入这种背景也是颇具吸引力的）。这种看似简单的思维转换引发了一些严肃的讨论，以及投资者的关注。Songza的iPad和iPhone应用于2012年6月进入苹果应用商店，之后，它在10天内就增加了100多万名客户。

    埃里克目前主要从事营销和业务拓展工作。名义上，他是首席内容官，但在这家拥有28位员工，正在迅速发展的公司中，他的职责经常变化。尽管他现在并不是以一位全职吉他手的身份维持生活，但在某些方面，他其实已经实现了当一个音乐人的人生目标。“我在鲍登学院做毕业生荣誉项目时，我的目标是展示我学到的所有音乐流派知识，”他解释说。“如今，我采用一种使用起来非常方便，而且契合生活背景的方式，向人们展示所有不同类型的音乐。”现在，他谋求音乐事业有成的途径不再是做音乐，而是创造性地生产更多音乐。他说：“说来也怪，我也正是在这个时候，开始走向更大的成功。”

    在鲍登学院上大三那年，阿琳•戴维奇曾经遵照老师的要求，设想20年后的自己将身处何方。阿琳的专业是声乐，但她并不认为自己具备上好的音乐天赋。所以她回答说，她打算创办一家唱片公司。她认为，拥有自己的企业可以让她经历一段具有创造性的职业生涯。“这是创业最吸引我的地方，”她说。“也正是这种梦想最初驱使我进入鲍登学院学音乐，但我其实并不具备实现这种创造力的才华。”

    毕业后，经鲍登学院的一位好友引荐，阿琳找到了一份公关工作。工作期间，她发现自己其实最喜欢跟小企业打交道，甚至有可能亲自创办一家小企业。2007年，她如愿进入哥伦比亚大学( Columbia University)商学院，进一步学习创业所需的定量分析技能。

    在哥大求学期间，阿琳决定创办一家企业，但她缺乏一个基本要素——一个好的创业点子。在一位教授的头脑风暴讨论课上，阿琳提到了自己在公关公司的工作经历，说自己非常喜欢与一家为人们的薪金支票提供优惠券的公司合作。这位教授的反应是，“哦，现在还有人领取纸质的薪金支票吗？”阿琳回忆说，“正是这个问题，引导我从事这门生意。”这次面谈刚一结束，她就着手研究“没有享受金融服务的人群”，即那些没有银行账户的人。这个市场的庞大程度让她万分震惊。

    The day Eric graduated from Bowdoin in 2006, he packed up and moved to New York City to pursue his dreams of becoming a professional musician. It was by no means glamorous. He struggled to break into the scene with his band, Little Australia. (He plays multiple instruments but is primarily a guitarist.) He got a job at a record label to better understand how bands get signed, but more than anything it helped him gauge how tough the prospects were for artists and record labels. "Everyone that worked there, they were just scared all the time," he says. "Any day they could lose their jobs." It was his sister that helped clarify his thinking: Why was he considering a shrinking industry, Arlyn asked, rather than joining a part of the business that was growing?

    Little Australia, which is on an indefinite hiatus, had been uploading its music to Amie Street, a dynamically priced music site -- the more popular the song, the more expensive to buy it. Eric sent the founders an e-mail with the subject line "I want to work for you." His audacity paid off with a job in 2007. "I saw an opportunity to get my foot in the door and get some experience," he says, "and have some cash to work with so I didn't have to worry about becoming a deadbeat broke musician." Typical of life at a startup, Eric did a little bit of everything.

    In 2008 Amie Street bought Songza, a service that in its original incarnation was what Eric describes as Google for music. Type in a song, and the Internet would find it, usually via YouTube. Through Songza, Eric and his partners saw the potential in streaming music: It gave users instant access to songs without having to download them to their hard drives. The team decided to sell Amie Street to Amazon so they could focus on Songza, which they evolved into hyper-editorialized twelve-song playlists, each with a theme (think "'90s One-hit Wonders" or "Grown Men Making Grown Men Cry").

    Through customer research, Eric and his cofounders realized that nobody thinks of music as a product. "People listen to music to make what they're doing better," Eric says, to get through their run or day at work. The team decided to position Songza as a lifestyle enhancer rather than a music discovery product. Feeling angsty? Check out the "'60s Proto-Punk Blastoff" playlist. Barbecuing? Check out the songs in "Cookout with the King." (Having that context is also attractive to advertisers who want to reach you when you're in your car or at the gym.) That seemingly simple shift in thinking led to some serious buzz and investor attention. After Apple's App Store featured Songza's iPad and iPhone apps on the same day in June 2012, the company added more than a million new users in ten days.

    These days Eric works mostly on marketing and business development. He's technically chief content officer, but at a fast-growing company with a staff of twenty-eight, his responsibilities change regularly. Despite the fact that he's not making a living playing his guitar full time, in some ways he's fulfilled his purpose as a musician. "When I did my honors project at Bowdoin, my goal was to showcase my knowledge of all of the genres of music I've learned about in school," he explains. "[Today] I get to expose people to all those different kinds of music in a way that's really easy and contextually relevant." Now that he's no longer trying to make a career out of making music, he's more productive creatively. "Oddly enough," he says, "that's when I started to become more successful."

    During her junior year at Bowdoin, Arlyn Davich was given an assignment to envision where she saw herself in twenty years. She was a music major (she sings) but claims not to be the best musical talent, so she answered by saying she was going to start a record label. She thought that having her own business would allow her to have a career where she could create something. "That's what appeals to me about being an entrepreneur," she says. "It's what initially attracted me to music at Bowdoin, but I didn't have the talent to realize that creativity."

    After graduating, Arlyn got a job in public relations through a Bowdoin connection. It helped her discover she liked working best with small businesses and could even start one herself. In 2007 she enrolled at Columbia University's business school to get the quantitative skills she needed to launch her own enterprise.

    Arlyn was determined to start a business while at Columbia, but she was missing an essential ingredient -- a good idea. In brainstorming with a professor, she mentioned how much she liked working with a company during her PR days that put coupons in people's paychecks. The professor's reaction was, "People still get printed paychecks?" "It was the question that led me to this business," Arlyn says. After that meeting she started researching the "underbanked" -- people without bank accounts, and was shocked by how big a market it was.