Andrew Medal sits with Dee Murthy at the Beverly Hills headquarters of Five Four Club.
1 min read
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Dee Murthy is co-Founder of Los Angeles-based, fashion membership Five Four Group and Young & Reckless. The e-commerce platform has a portfolio of brands that include New Republic by Mark McNairy, Grand AC and Oshenta.
Murthy is also a seasoned investor and partner at Queenbridge Venture Partners as well as partner in popular Las Vegas shoe store 12 AM RUN. He is a co-host with Chris ”Drama” Pfaff in weekly lifestyle podcast Group Chat in addition to his business ventures.
This Entrepreneur won the 2008 CrossFit Games, and now he runs over 20 gyms.
1 min read
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Few men have had the honor of being named the Fittest Man on Earth, but Jason Khalipa is one of them. The 2008 CrossFit Games champion has competed at the Games eight times and only once placed outside the top 10. He has won every regional competition he’s participated in. He’s not only proven his fitness prowess, but he’s also achieved great success as an entrepreneur with more than 20 gyms internationally.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
When Nipsey Hussle’s Crenshaw mixtape dropped in 2013, I was in the penitentiary serving a two- to five-year sentence. I had been following his music since 2008 when I first heard the song “Bullets Ain’t Got No Name,” and because I am a Socal native, it gave me pride to see him coming up. While in the joint, I found a way to purchase a smuggled bootleg compilation of Nipsey’s music and would bang the lyrics in my Discman on my prison rack while teaching myself to code with textbooks, or when I was getting tattooed.
On March 31, 2019, Nipsey was attacked by an envious gunman, and tragically passed away. His untimely demise has shocked his childhood community of Crenshaw and the world at large. Nipsey was more than a rapper. He was an entrepreneur, visionary and leader. He provided hope to so many people, including myself, who have had crazy pasts. He showed us it didn’t matter where we came from or what happened to us, we could still accomplish anything. He taught us that by betting on ourselves and keeping it real we can still make it to the top.
In 2018, before he dropped his Grammy-nominated and arguably the best album of the decade, Victory Lap, I sat with him to chop up life, music and his legacy. We met at his latest investment, Vector90, a coworking space in the heart of his hometown in Crenshaw. As a tribute to his legacy, my show Action & Ambition (hosted on the Entrepreneur Network) will be replaying the episode we did in 2018. You can catch it on our Facebook Watch Page.
Nip was a business savvy musical genius who gave back to his community in big ways. The world will no doubt feel his loss. In his honor, here are seven lessons we can take from his life and his legacy.
1. Never stop learning.
Nipsey was never one to stop learning. Maybe he built his business from a natural sense of savvy, but he also built it by listening and learning. He read a lot of books. In fact, his idea for his $100 mixtape, where he made only 1,000 copies, was born from the book Contagious by Jonah Berger. Anyone that knew him will tell you he was relentlessly focused on getting better in every way, and made a habit of personal development and growth.
“Told my mama I’mma gang bang graduate/ Pioneered the transition from this Crippin’ wasn’t easy n—a, but I mastered it/ That’s why I still deliver raps so passionate/ Built my own lane, ain’t no n—a ever hand me shit/ Slauson Ave., do you understand the averages?/ The fact I’m still standing speaks volumes to my savages.” (“Love?”)
2. Be prepared to do all the work.
Nipsey saw success because he was willing to do any work, no matter how menial it may have seemed at the time. Even as he soared further and further toward the top, he still maintained a willingness to do the tasks that others might consider to be below them. “Most people want to skip the process,” he said, “not knowing that when you skip steps, you miss the lessons.”
He took out the trash and swept the floors of his own studio. Starting out, he built his own basement recording studio to make sure that he could engineer and record his own music. Without this willingness to put in all types of work, he would not have learned what it would take to achieve the goals he set.
“My thing is that I don’t give no person that much power over my path that I’m walking. Not one person can make or break what I’m doing, except me or God.”
3. Make genuine connections.
Entrepreneurs know the importance of networking and making connections. For some, it’s a tedious process of trying to get in with important figures of a particular industry. It’s a game of kiss-ass. But for Nipsey, he focused on making genuine connections based on true talent. Relationships he formed with musicians such as Kendrick Lamar and Puffy were lasting and real. They were collaborations that meant something. But he also knew how to create genuine connections to the people who consumed his music. He’s always been the people’s king and it’s because he not only shared the good but his struggles too, which made him that much more relatable.
“If you sharing your success and not your struggle, you’s a fool.” (“U Don’t Got a Clue”)
4. Build your brand.
Nipsey understood his brand and what it represented. He was the one who built it and promoted it. He knew what he wanted to represent. His brand-based goals were clear. Nobody understands his brand like he did, and that’s part of the reason he was so successful.
“I never wanted to alienate my brand for business.” Nipsey said, “I always wanted to keep it authentic and keep it as pure as I could.”
5. It’s a marathon.
Some people want success to happen overnight. It doesn’t work like that. Nipsey, and artists like him, all knew that the road to success would be paved with long-ass hours and year after year of struggle. Talent wouldn’t cut it. A true desire to achieve success, whether as an artist or as an entrepreneur, means never approaching your work halfheartedly. Nipsey didn’t focus on immediate wealth. He didn’t want to churn out one hit single after another. He wanted to build and develop his own label. He focused on long-term wealth and a lasting reputation as an artist.
“I’m about seeing the long-term, seeing a vision, understanding nothing worthwhile happens overnight, and just sticking to your script long enough to make something real happen.”
6. Focus on what makes you passionate.
It’s easy for people to lose themselves in their desire for success in any industry, including both business and music. Fortunately, Nipsey knew himself and stayed true to that image and to his own story. He found fans that loved and related to him. He didn’t create a character or pursue something that just wasn’t him.
Like he said in Victory Lap, “Find your purpose or you wastin’ air.”
7. Remember the community that built you.
There is no doubt that Nipsey loved the community he came from. His childhood neighborhood is known for being violent and rough, one of the places where its residents try to leave and outsiders tend to avoid. Nipsey found success, but he never left that neighborhood behind. He invested in it, building playgrounds, helping children learn and offering residents opportunities for economic success.
Some of the most powerful words Nipsey sang were from the song “Dedication”: “These songs just the spirituals I swam against them waves with/ Ended up on shore to their amazement.”
He not only kept history in mind, but he also worked with the history of U.S. racism and acknowledged its impact on his music. He doesn’t forget the factors impacting his community and all the structural inequality they need to fight against.
Nipsey Hussle’s death is tragic. He was no doubt a brilliant self-made artist and visionary. He was smart and charitable, and he believed in his roots. He never wanted to take his achievements for granted and he wanted to give people the building blocks to create achievements of their own. Had he not seen such an early and tragic end, he would have certainly seen further successes. But he achieved what he wanted, saying in “Killer,” “And when I visualize success it look like right now/What was once gray skies is now white clouds.”
Yes, his life was cut too damn short. The loss is being felt around the world. Prayers to his family, real friends and all fans. But, as he would tell us all, the marathon continues. And, his legacy will live forever through his words, and the people he inspired on a regular through his lyrics and actions. Long live Nipsey and his hustle.
“Try to have more faith and less fear, try to express it to your peers, I’m talking about dreams / Better to do it and let it be seen, cause then it’s so clear.” (“Am I Gonna Make It”)
Being on both sides of the cell door, I know there’s a lot that CEOs can learn from their prison counterparts.
6 min read
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As anyone who goes through the system will tell you, guards may watch the prison, but inmates run it. The prison system is based on a set of rules called “prison politics” that are endorsed and enforced by the inmates themselves, not the Department of Corrections. You can think of it as a sort of C-suite in the business world.
A shot caller, generally speaking, is the top leader in a prison system. Specifically, the shot caller is an inmate who, as so aptly named, calls the shots. In prison slang, it’s the inmate who “has the keys.” The highest ranking shot caller does so for his entire prison gang and race. Then there are shot callers for each housing unit, yard and so on all the way up.
What is a CEO? Basically the same thing, but instead of an orange jumpsuit, they sport a neutral colored (depending on seasonal trends) custom Armani suits with dollar sign cufflinks instead of wrist and feet shackles. I’m joking, but at the end of the day, both are leaders in their own right, albeit one may lead with violence while the other leads with 401k incentives.
But being on both sides of the cell door, I know there’s a lot that CEOs can learn from their prison counterparts.
1. Put work in and earn your cred.
While some CEOs might rise to the top because of nepotism, the truly good ones earned their title. In prison, only the truly good ones can rise to the top and get elected to be shot callers. Reputations need to be built in the office or in the prison yard. You don’t get named a shot caller if you have a bad rep, are untrustworthy and don’t work hard. You get named a shot caller after you’ve established your name.
2. How to maintain order.
Shot callers don’t just start brawls or order hits. They need to be diplomatic and negotiate with other groups and with individuals within and outside of the crew. It’s your job to back your buddies or your co-workers, but it’s also your job to try and keep the peace. In addition to working with their fellow inmates, shot callers also have to work with the other shot callers. This is an important lesson for effective CEOs and leaders too. Maintaining order and balance in a chaotic environment, whether on the prison yard or the pit of cubicles, is key to a successful culture.
3. Prove that you’re down.
In prison, proving that you’re “down” might mean doing some dirty deeds, like starting a riot or some sordid act unfit for office life. But as anyone who has ever climbed to the top knows, you gotta do the dirty work to get there. While a CEO might not need to earn respect through shows of violence or a reputation on the street, CEOs make it to the top by first doing the jobs nobody else will step up to do. It sets you apart as someone who is “down” to do what it takes to achieve success (I’m not talking anything illegal here).
4. Put the interests of the group above your own.
Some people want to become shot callers for the sake of their own ego, but they’re not likely to be successful if they do. It’s the same with CEOs. If they’re doing it purely for the money or the prestige, then the company will not be as well off as if they were doing it for the good of all involved. Decisions need to be made based on the good of the whole group, not for the good of one individual. It’s not all glamour, respect and (in the case of the CEO) a hefty paycheck. It’s a tough job that sometimes involves putting yourself last.
When the rest of the prison is ready to boil, it’s a shot caller’s job to resolve the chaos. Sometimes shot callers need to make the decision to let a brawl happen or the riot to reach its pinnacle, but more often than not, the shot caller needs to maintain a sense of calm when the world around him is ready to rip itself apart. The ultimate duty of a shot caller is to keep order. The most successful shot callers are the ones who keep peace and have strong emotional stability to accomplish their big goal. They are the leaders that other inmates look up to, and in order to manage an entire prison yard, they need to be able to master themselves first.
Successful CEOs need to be great leaders. Shot callers are, inevitably, great leaders. The general public likes to dismiss the prison population, but the reality is that there is an entire world within those walls, and it takes somebody with strong leadership skills and some serious stamina to keep it running. The guards are there to guard, the wardens are there to keep the laws, but the real problem-solvers and go-getters of the prison system are the shot callers themselves. They’re the first responders. The prison diplomats. They’re the ones who call the real shots, and if you want to be a CEO with some true leadership skills, you can learn a thing or two from shot callers (just not the illegal shit).
The opportunity blockchain represents is just getting started.
5 min read
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Outside of all the consistent price speculation and novelty of cryptocurrencies, a compelling trend toward a more open and accessible financial ecosystem has materialized.
Underscoring this movement is the expansion of the infrastructure and regulation required to facilitate a transition toward open financial tools. From standardized identity protocols for KYC/AML (know your customer/anti money laundering) compliance to modular, open-source tools, the digital asset market is converging with traditional economic structures.
For entrepreneurs, the sheer scale of innovation in the sector is dizzying. The narrative of monetary sovereignty that cryptocurrencies have molded has coincided with broader trends toward data privacy and more accessible financial tools for the unbanked parts of the world. The potential for open, decentralized finance is enormous and has become one of the most convincing areas for attracting entrepreneurs.
The movement towards open finance and integrated financial services
Decentralized (i.e., open finance) is commonly defined as an interoperable financial system where the core beliefs revolve around increased accessibility, transparency, standardization and financial inclusion. The notion of wider access to financial tools is especially important.
According to the World Bank’s Global Findex, more than 2.5 billion people globally do not have access to formal bank accounts or other financial services. Cryptocurrencies have inherently lowered the barrier for accessing value storage and transfer mechanisms by removing intermediaries and creating a new class of assets outside of the existing financial system.
Parallel with the emergence of cryptocurrencies is the emphasis on open financial tools, either built directly on blockchains as open protocols or hybrid services for digital assets offered by commercial entities ingratiated with legacy systems. These projects expand on the concept of cryptocurrencies by building transparent and open financial instruments for creating and tapping into the power of digital assets.
One of the more compelling developments has been the rise of open financial tools — such as MakerDAO, Compound Finance and Dharma Protocol. These projects are open protocols that operate on the blockchain and provide secured lending services.
Secured lending currently constitutes the largest sector of open finance, but other areas such as security tokens and decentralized prediction markets are also gaining traction.
Despite the potential of open protocols, a wholesale transition to open financial instruments on blockchains is unlikely. Instead, the more prudent approach is a hybrid ecosystem of traditional financial services and businesses integrated with open protocols and digital assets.
The reality of an open financial system is only possible with the proper infrastructure and innovations in related spheres. Regulators and financial institutions in the U.S. are gradually warming to the notion of digital assets, but are looking for the right market maturity and infrastructure before diving in headfirst.
As startups have transitioned away from ICOs, a new focus has been placed on security tokens and transparent, regulatory-compliant digital assets. Similarly, models for ICOs have begun to strictly follow KYC/AML processes in an effort to provide assurances against their previous notoriety for fraudulent crowdfunding.
Increasing regulation, identity standardization and data sovereignty
With increasing regulatory oversight comes concerns about data privacy and security, as users traditionally need to duplicate personal data across various industries and markets to comply with KYC/AML processes. Within an open financial system, compliance with regulatory structures will be necessary, but initiatives are underway to make the process much more seamless — via standardization and enhanced data security.
Data sovereignty has coincided with the cryptocurrency narrative of monetary independence. Blockpass is a distributed KYC platform that is one of the primary companies pushing the transition to self-sovereign digital identities, and their work has some crucial implications in open financial systems.
“The issue is that a user’s digital identity is not private to them,” said Blockpass founder and CEO, Adam Vaziri. “Identity consists of the most sensitive information relating to an individual. This is not something that should be controlled by a corporation — it should be developed and controlled by the user.”
Standardized identity protocols such as Blockpass enable users to store their data locally on their devices and can easily comply with KYC/AML processes across industries via attestations to the authenticity of their identity, without revealing unnecessary personal information. Their model is highly useful for financial service companies in the digital asset sector — such as exchanges — using their identity verification portal. Similarly, a new generation of ICOs and STOs are targeting regulatory-compliant launches.
A standardized and open financial ecosystem
The future landscape of an open financial system built on open protocols and hybrid financial services is an exciting proposition. For entrepreneurs, the rapidly expanding market presents some unprecedented opportunities for building in a cutting-edge field that is reshaping an outdated financial model.
As countries transition to cashless societies, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies provide a fundamental hedge against the privacy and censorship-prone abuses that come with an absence of cash. A hybrid system of open financial instruments and cryptocurrencies creates an environment where the billions of unbanked in the world can enter into the modern digital economy with monetary and data sovereignty on their side.
This is the story of how theChive.com got started.
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Brothers John Resig and Leo Resig founded Chive Media Group and its flagship site, theChive.com, in November 2008, with no capital and a lot of hustle. Leo was living in Chicago (the “CHI” in “CHIVE”), and John was living in Venice (the “VE”).
With backgrounds in digital publishing and the financial backing from partner Doug Schaaf, the Resigs were able to turn a three-man project into the nationwide, 170-employee entertainment digital media company that Chive Media Group is today.
To help mitigate the impact of those speed bumps, here are four lessons that most successful entrepreneurs have learned the hard way, but maybe you don’t have to.
7 min read
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
The path to building a successful business is rarely a simple one.
But in the beginning, it seems simple enough: you’ll build an amazing product, market it and watch as people pull out their credit cards. Then you’ll hire people to take over menial tasks and you’ll move into the role of CEO, eventually delegating that as well and living on the beach in Bora Bora, sipping on a martini.
Of course, anyone who’s spent more than three months trying to build a business knows that isn’t the common story arc for a thriving startup. The truth is, building a business brings lots of unexpected twists — people quit, products fail, you burn out.
To help mitigate the impact of those speed bumps, here are four lessons that most successful entrepreneurs have learned the hard way, but maybe you don’t have to.
1. Your first idea is rarely your best idea.
When you launch, your product is a bit like a newborn baby. It’s delicate, fragile and the last thing you want to hear is that it’s ugly — or worse yet, to hear nothing at all. Unfortunately, the latter is often the case when an ambitious entrepreneur launches a product they love. Since your market doesn’t want to outright tell you that your product is terrible, they don’t say anything at all — they don’t interact with your content, they don’t click on your CTAs and they are quick to unsubscribe from your email list.
And that’s OK. More often than not, your first idea isn’t your best idea, but can segway into a profitable idea if you do everything in your power to understand your market and what they really need. It’s not about getting it right the first time, but about getting it right eventually. In the words of Eric Ries, which easily sums up what a lean startup is, “The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.” By the way, if you haven’t read TheLean Startup yet, it’s a must for first-time entrepreneurs.
Lesson: Don’t get married to your ideas. Focus on the metrics that matter. Test everything before and during your building process.
2. Hiring the wrong person is more expensive than waiting for the right person.
When an amateur entrepreneur hires their first employee, it usually has more to do with how much they like the person and how cheap it costs to employ them than it does with how good that person is at their job.
It doesn’t seem like such a bad idea at first. But it only takes doing this a few times to find out that hiring people because they’re cheap or because you like them is a terrible idea. You’re better off hiring someone who’s good at the work they do even if they’re more expensive — over the long run, the higher performer will actually save you money. Red Adair put it best when he said, “If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.”
Lesson: Take your time when hiring. You may have heard this before, “hire slow and fire fast.” It’s applicable to this point. Only hire when you absolutely must, initially. If there are things you can do early on, do them. But also, if it’s best to hire and delegate to focus on cash-generating activities, do that too. This is when you’ll have to trust your gut.
3. Your mental health directly impacts your business’s success.
Entrepreneurship has a dark side — a side that’s riddled with mental health ailments. Statistically, entrepreneurs are twice as likely to struggle with depression and five times more likely to struggle with ADHD than their less ambitious counterparts.
You could make an argument, of course, that the entrepreneurial lifestyle has a tendency to attract those of us with chemical imbalances, but I think it’s equally likely that building a business creates (or at least aggravates) symptoms associated with depression, ADHD and even bipolar disorder.
And the more that you struggle, the more your business will struggle. I hit a workout recently with Austin Paulsen, the founder of AP Performance, and he explained, “It doesn’t take long to figure out that your own mental fortitude directly influences how quickly your business grows. I coach lots of people on their health and if there’s one thing I’ve learned along the way, it’s that a person’s health directly impacts their daily performance, at home and behind the desk.”
Lesson: Your mental and physical health is everything, and it’s not worth the cost of your success. Don’t fall into that trap. Be an entrepreneur focused on longevity and sustainability, which means you need to focus on your physical and mental health too. Eat healthily, exercise often and disconnect multiple times per week.
4. The road to success can be a long one.
When you launch your business, dreams abound. You don’t just dream at night, either. During the day, you find yourself wondering distractedly what it might be like to make millions of dollars or to lead a team of genius-level employees.
And sure, for some businesses, that dream is a reality. But don’t get sucked into the media frenzy highlight reels. Building a company from the ground up takes time and work. Sometimes it will be a perfect storm and things will move faster, but be focused on the long term too.
Sometimes, the reality is far more boring, but also far more likely. A gradual slope upward that’s riddled with relatively uninteresting spikes and plummets. That’s how it’s supposed to be. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about entrepreneurship, it’s that you have to enjoy the journey. If you love it, then you’ll succeed.
Lesson: Be patient in your journey. Don’t compare yourself or company to others. And, focus on the things you can control. Entrepreneurship is the greatest thing I’ve ever experienced, but it can also be the most volatile. Embrace your journey.
You’ll have lots of unexpected twists and turns along your entrepreneurial journey. You may be subjected to lawsuits from partners or customers, you may raise money and lose it all in the same day, you may grow sales or go bankrupt.
Fortunately, you can learn from people who’ve already been there and done that. Successful entrepreneurs will act as your guiding light to help get you where you want to go. Find mentors, read books and network with your peers. By remembering the above four points, you’ll streamline your path to success and bypass a few of the lessons that most successful entrepreneurs had to learn the hard way.
Catch the third season of my Entrepreneur Network video series Action & Ambition on Friday, March 22. The entire reason I created the show is so that we could learn the backstories and journeys that other successful entrepreneurs have endured along their path to success.
You thought prison slang was reserved for hardened convicts and characters of ‘Orange is the New Black’?
6 min read
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Prison life is hard. It requires its own language, a slang understood only by those who experience it. Do you know what else is hard? Your job. While you might not be confined to solitary, your cubicle might sometimes feel like a cell. Or sometimes, even a death sentence.
When you’re at your most pessimistic and your boss is being a dick, when the co-worker next to you is about to drive you to some heavy level manslaughter shit, you need the right slang to truly articulate how horrible life can be in the cubicle cell in which you live (or, maybe it’s not so dramatic and you just want to have fun).
Some of these prison slang can translate to everyday office life, which just might make your interactions with co-workers a little more enjoyable. You probably already have a lot of things you want to call some of the people you work with … but here are some suggestions straight from the prison yard.
1. Buck Rogers time: In prison, this is used to mean that your release date is so far into the distant future that it doesn’t even feel real. If you work one of those 9-to-5s where Friday feels like an eternity and even your one-hour cubicle-bound lunch break seems distant, then you’re livin’ Buck Rogers time.
2. Cowboy: Spell cowboy backward. What is it? “yobwoc.” This might sound like rubbish, but in prison, it means “young, obnoxious bastard we often con.” Basically, your unpaid intern.
3. Ear hustling: We all have that gossipy, nosy co-worker who spends more time listening in on your phone calls and butting into the Monday morning conversations you have with your work friends. He’s “ear hustling,” which in prison means eavesdropping without permission.
4. Dry snitching: In prison, dry snitching means to snitch indirectly by talking in an excessively loud voice or drawing attention from the guards, or offering some information but no names. Dry snitching is snitching for cowards. Instead of just telling on you outright, a dry snitcher in the workplace speaks loud enough so that your boss or supervisor can hear what he or she was going to tell on you for, and gets you in trouble anyway.
5. OG: An “original gangster.” In prison, this is a respectful term for someone has been in the joint for a long time. In the work world, this is someone who has been with your startup for more than three months.
6. Road Dawg: This is your homie. It’s the guy you walk with during rec, who you share your commissary with and the guy who has your back in a riot. He’s the one who doesn’t rat on you for staring at internet memes all day.
7. Wolf tickets: When an inmate sells wolf tickets, he’s talking shit without backing anything up. He’s just “selling wolf tickets.” Same thing in the office. This is the co-worker who says he’ll close the client or make the next big deal but spends his day scrolling through Facebook because he’s doing “market research.”
8. Bug: In prison, this is an untrustworthy or unreliable prison staff member. You don’t want to get close to a bug. They’re untrustworthy and don’t have your back for a second. This is that person in the office who always looks through the stall door to see if you’re texting in the bathroom and then turns you in for it.
9. Cellie: In prison, this is the person you share your cell with. At work, it’s the guy or girl in the cubicle next door. They share your pain. You commiserate when work gets tough and your boss keeps threatening to take your stapler.
10. Fresh fish: In prison, the new inmates. At your workplace, the recent college grad with no work experience.
11. Holds the keys: Whoever holds the keys is the shot caller for that prison yard. At your office, it could be the janitor, who literally holds the keys. Or, it could be the IT guy, because let’s be real, he has all of your emails and therego controls your life.
12. House mouse: In prison, this is the inmate who maintains communication between prisoners and the deputies. At work, it’s your supervisor and general manager. Call em’ a glorified house mouse with a higher paycheck than you.
13. Juice Card: Holding a “juice card” in prison can get you out of some real trouble. It means you have some sort of influence with guards or even other prisoners. This works in the office, too. It might be that you’re tight with the CEO and your boss knows it. Or you could have a juice card because you’re a legitimately good employee who actually knows how to work and you earned respect the old fashioned way.
Oh, I know you’re on a new diet and are now using a standup desk for work, but how about you try out these prison slang terms and shake your day up even more. See how your co-workers or your manager reacts when you use a term usually reserved for prison gangs. Or watch how that higher up, who has a huge paycheck just for being persistently douchey, acts when you tell him to, “stop being a cowboy and quit all that ear hustling or I’ll take the damn keys from you.”
If you like the slang you see here, there’s a lot more of that in my upcoming book, Don’t Drop the Soap: The Wildest $#*! About Prison You Can’t Learn on Netflix. You can find more names to call your co-workers, and you can discover a ton of other incredibly valuable stuff such as prison life hacks, prison food recipes (yum!) and prison workouts. Do you want to learn how to light a cigarette with a battery, or, how to make your own tattoo gun with a Walkman motor, guitar string and pen case? Well, then, my prison book is just for you! Go get it.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Potentially earning thousands per post, influencers are cashing in on their ability to captivate large audiences and thus heavily impact the purchasing behavior of their followers. It’s clear why brands keep throwing products and money toward these social media stars — influencer marketing works.
Influencer marketing has 11 times the ROI of traditional digital marketing, as reported byTapinfluence.com.
Seventy percent of millennial consumers are persuaded by the recommendations of their peers in buying decisions, as reported by Collective Bias.
Thirty-seven percent of customers place more value on the quality of a post then its sponsorship and 67 percent don’t have an adverse reaction to sponsored content, according to Collective Bias.
Almost 40 percent of Twitter users have purchased a product or service as a direct result of an influencer tweet, according to Twitter.
I grew my first company in 2009 with influencer marketing (before it was even a term), which spiked sales and created crazy brand loyalty in a short time. We went from zero to millions in revenue in under 12 months.
Are you onboard with influencer marketing? If so, here are four tips to working with social media tastemakers you must consider:
1. Co-create with your influencers.
Influencers are a direct extension of your brand, so act like they are. Sew them into the fabric of your company by creating content together. Rather than just telling them what to post, learn about them and their audience and how your brand fits into their daily life.
I recently spoke with Sebastian Merkhoffer for an episode of my new podcast. He said he’s currently recording eight-figure annual revenue for his company, FitVia, thanks mostly to influencer marketing. “Influencer marketing is becoming a standard part of the marketing mix. For us, success in developing our core partnerships has stemmed largely from co-creating content together,” he said.
Merkhoffer said FitVia has influencers bring his products wherever they go. “Recently, we sent a German influencer for a detox weekend where she took her followers, and our team, along for the ride. It’s something authentic and far more engaging than just posting a photo of your breakfast.”
2. Leverage IGTV as the latest go-to social channel.
By 2021, it’s predicted that mobile video will account for 78 percent of all mobile data traffic, according to Instagram.
In June of last year, Instagram released IGTV to compete with YouTube. It wasn’t a home run off the bat, but marketers should stay keen on its advances to come.
“While user engagement with IGTV has been fairly disappointing so far, I expect Instagram to improve the functionality and visibility of IGTV content and put a lot more money behind getting brands to make use of the feature,” predicted Michael Edelmann, senior marketing manager at The Business of Fashion, on Later.com.
As a brand, it’s integral to keep an eye on these shifts to immediately track how your social media collaborators are responding. Are they early adopters to all the latest platforms? Or are they a bit more reserved, and stick with what they know?
As Alfred Lua explained in a Buffer article, “You might also want to check out less-known and less-popular social media platforms as well. For example, Musical.ly, a platform for creating and sharing short videos, has become very popular among teens. Other platforms you can check out include Anchor, Medium and Tumblr. “
3. Focus on gen Z.
Millennials still hold the reins with more than $200 billion in purchasing power. However, gen Z is on track to become the largest group of consumers by 2020, and according to Millennial Marketing, they already account for $29 billion to $143 billion in direct spending. Gen Z is a growing section of the influencer economy across all platforms, making it vital for brands to consider their future consumer base.
For example, kidfluencers can be a massive opportunity for brands. “More people are looking at kid influencers for product recommendations. It’s definitely a long-term play. It’s building brand awareness and affinity through generations,” Zoe Marans, vice president of MediaKix, recently told Fast Company.
4. Slowly invest in influencer marketing.
Before you jump on the influencer marketing bandwagon, be cautious not to throw your entire marketing budget to YouTube stars. Sure, throwing $1 million at Beyonce to post about your product may reach hundreds of thousands, but that buzz will die in a matter of hours. Instead, start small to figure out what type of influencers will have the broadest impact.
“The key is to invest your budget into influencer marketing slowly,” Merkhoffer said. “I can’t stress how important it is to test, learn and then scale. The process iterates on itself and marketers must stay agile enough to integrate feedback as it comes through, not just once a quarter or annually.”
Even better, if you can use product or swag as payment to start a campaign, that can be an effective way to get influencer buy-in, especially if these are influencers that are already using your brand. As Lua explained, “If you are offering a discount or free samples for their followers, be sure to create a specific discount code or landing page for each influencer. That’s to help you with tracking the effectiveness of your campaign.”
Ready to ramp up your influencer marketing campaigns? Understand that success lies in your marketing team’s ability to nourish relationships that build trust between your brand and your target customer. Make sure you vet your influencers diligently and create a very clear deliverable so that everyone’s on the same page.
False sense of security? Even major apps and platforms can fall victim to security vulnerabilities.
6 min read
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
With the recent rush toward enhancing consumer data protection due to GDPR and other privacy regulations that have taken effect, businesses have strengthened their platforms toward better protecting and securing user data. But is this enough? What do you need to know as a business owner, entrepreneur or manager?
Recent vulnerability reports prove that even major ecommerce and social platforms can easily become an attack vector for cross-site-scripting (or XSS) attacks, and these happen even if the platforms themselves are secure. With vulnerabilities in third-party application providers being used by major customer-facing platforms, there is an increased risk that user data will be exposed to malicious players. This is the risk we all face, unfortunately.
Data privacy regimes
Perhaps the biggest tech news in 2018 was the enforcement of the European General Data Protection Regulation, which sought to protect European Union citizens’ personal data from being collected and utilized without consent. With the GDPR, any business that handles data on E.U. citizens, or which counts E.U. citizens as among their clients, will need to explicitly inform said users of data gathering efforts, and seek explicit content for doing so.
GDPR has had its impact even outside of Europe since any business that provides services to E.U. citizens or residents will need to comply. In addition, there have been numerous privacy-focused regulations that are also in effect worldwide, given the recent consumer and business focus on data privacy, which are all good things that are working to protect us.
Even with an increased focus toward enhancing privacy, however, there are still a lot of risks involved when it comes to businesses losing user data to malicious hackers. For one, given the collaborative nature of services (e.g., an ecommerce store utilizing a payment processor or a logistics provider), the weakest link here would be the service that can introduce a potential breach. In this regard, the moment a third-party application puts the user at risk, the entire operation could already be compromised.
XSS in a nutshell
In the simplest explanation, XSS attacks are a form of data-injection, wherein malicious client-side code is injected by an attacker into an otherwise legitimate website. This works by injecting code — usually JavaScript — into a website or web app’s output, often working through forms such as search fields, feedback forms, forum text entry fields and even cookies stored on a user’s browser.
When an unsuspecting user accesses an affected website, the injected code has the potential to deliver a payload, which can include executing code, stealing data, controlling a user’s session or installing backdoors to a computer system or network.
Such attacks are borne by the need for today’s websites to be interactive. With the numerous interactions between browser and server over a single session, XSS can even be used to pull content from a third-party website, use existing cookie data (which can include usernames and passwords), or interact directly with an app’s client-side processes.
What platforms have been vulnerable?
A recent DOM-XSS (document object model-XSS) exploit has been found on prominent social networking and ecommerce sites including Tinder, Shopify and Yelp, reports VPN Mentor late in 2018, exposing as many as 685 million users globally to data theft.
Digging deeper into the potential extent of the risk, the security researchers discovered that the XSS vulnerability included money transfer service Western Union and image sharing service Imgur. Other services affected by the vulnerability were Canva, Letgo, Lookout, Fair, Amazon Music, TicketMaster and Reddit, among others.
The weak point is assumed to have originated in Branch.io — a third-party mobile linking platform that unifies user experiences across different devices and channels. The service has an alias subdomain for its partner sites (including the ones listed above), and clicking on links pointing to these subdomains may have rendered users vulnerable to data theft through scripts injected by malicious hackers.
What can businesses and users do?
The company involved has promptly fixed the potential vulnerability after receiving reports of the XSS risk. However, this precludes the possibility that attackers may have discovered the vulnerability and exploited it to steal data. Therefore, this means that users who have recently or regularly used services detailed above like Tinder, need to double check if their accounts are not compromised. Password changes and browser cache/cookie clearing might be a good idea.
For businesses, meanwhile — especially those that run consumer-facing platforms, or even those that utilize websites for employee access — there are several methods to minimize the risks, as explained by ComputerWeekly, associated with XSS. This involves building applications with a tight security development lifecycle. This means constantly building and updating in order to reduce or eliminate security-related errors in design and coding. This also means assuming that all data that is being received by the application can potentially come from an untrusted source, even if it comes from users who are already logged in and authenticated.
As such, some changes that can be adopted for entrepreneurs, business owners and managers can include:
Not trusting user input blindly. This means constantly validating the input for type, length, format and data range whenever such data goes across trust boundaries;
Reducing client-side input, to preclude the possibility of unwanted code or character sets being passed through;
Setting a webpage’s character set to the bare minimum (ISO-8859-1), which is enough for English and most European languages;
Asking users to re-authenticate before accessing critical services;
Immediately expiring login sessions if access from multiple IP addresses is detected;
Utilizing vulnerability scanners to keep track of such risks in real-time;
And conducting penetration testing before an application or website goes live.
The takeaway
As XSS attacks have been all over the headlines, it makes sense to focus on preventing security risk, especially in the light of calls for better data privacy and protection. This is important today, given the fact that most sites will not work without client-side scripting.
If this has still gone above your head, make sure to contact your webmaster and have him or her walk you through these important points regarding data protection. Knowing that major social networks and services have actually been at open risk to a big XSS attack, both businesses and users need to be proactive about their security.
