Back in the early days of Raizlabs I emailed Steve Jobs. I told him we were going to change the world and he should listen. He did. We got a meeting out in Cupertino with members of his team.
He didn't offer to buy our photo sharing startup.
It wasn't a pivotal moment in the company history.
It didn't transform the way that the world uses their camera, but it did change me.
As an entrepreneur, the unsexy truth is that business and entrepreneurship takes a lot of work, often unglamorous. A lot of grinding to create the opportunities. Each individual opportunity isn't an absolute win, but collectively they put the odds in your favor.
I sent an email to Steve, got a response, got a meeting. It felt great but the truth is that I sent hundreds of such emails. They don't all land (Richard. Cough. Branson.) but it's a numbers game and entrepreneurship is often about beating the odds and getting noticed: New York Times, yep. Google, yep. Microsoft. Yep. TechCrunch. Yep. The problem is that for every one of these Yes's I had to get 100 'No's'. Even worse I would often get 100 no-responses.
The repetition and rejection is hard but it also teaches you very quickly what works and what doesn't. Your pitch gets polished and your message gets tighter and more concise. If you get to roll the dice enough times your probabilities go up.
Entrepreneurship is about opportunity creation. Your role is to be the magician and create opportunities out of thin air. So get ready, it's your job to create a reality distortion field and make the impossible possible. Ready? Go.