About Christian Hunter
What is @ttention ventures?
It stands for an "attention unit," which, for our companies, means a unit of consumer attention. Everyone is increasingly competing for the consumer's attention, so attracting their attention, their unit of attention or @ttention ventures, is becoming more of a difficult task in today's market.
How do you do that?
Conventional branding is the old way, if we can't map a dollar-to-revenue yield, we say "no thanks".
Why the Internet?
When someone tells me they know of some "cool new net company," I usually cringe. What's a "net company" these days? What company doesn't use the net in some way to communicate, add value to their product, or market? If someone wants to call us a net company, fine, but our focus is in using technology to help consumers do things they're already doing, only better.
Why this, why now, for you?
Everyone asks: WHY are you working so hard? How much money is enough? You know, that's such a misconception - I don't do this for the money. I love it, because I LOVE BEING RIGHT. Not in an I-told-you-so way, but when you're right, it fills a formerly empty parcel of the universe with color and texture that gives you better understanding; it actually proves something. We love to understand things, and for us, the only way to truly understand things is to test them A to Z. That's another reason we love small companies; it's so much easier to "get to right." There's little bureaucracy, little legacy in terms of "how things have always been done," and the typical patina of possibility young companies wear.
Fast forward 20 years. What do you see as your legacy?
I'm 34, and I'm not thinking in those terms yet - maybe as I get older, but today, I'm just focused on being "right."
If you lived in the medieval era, what business would you be in?
Professional heretic.
Who's your favorite role model?
I am drawn to renaissance men like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin. A contemporary role model for me might be a guy like Richard Branson.
I'm really attracted to people of vision who are wildly good at what they do, but not content in letting that be enough. I'm very put off by being myopically focused on one genre of productive endeavor. I think when your interests are varied, you're more likely to find opportunities for cross-pollination. One example, to use Branson, would be the long-term impact his interest in the environment will likely have on Virgin Airways. Owing to his better understanding of environmental impact and fossil fuel scarcity, he's invested in more efficient jet engines. I read somewhere that for every $1 increase in jet fuel, his company is saving in the multi-millions as a consequence of his forward thinking.
Renaissance people are more likely to succeed in business in my view.
Where did you get your start?
I got lucky in that I started after high school in the lowest, dumbest job you could do, and succeeded wildly at it. It really gave me a taste for elevating anything I do to an art form, or at least aspiring to do that. I got really, really good at a really hard business; it was a neat point in the universe to originate. I had no real money to start anything, or pursue a good idea. That is probably what contributed most to my being able to find like-minded, super-talented people to help build something from nothing and sell it for tons.
Learning how to advertise, how to sell, and how to manage people with scant resources makes you particularly suited to an environment that's hard. At the highest level, you learn this: ideas are a dime a dozen - only spend valuable money and time when you know something is there.
I think that being conditioned in starvation helped forge my favorite lesson of all: build in response to demand, not in anticipation of it.
That's what we're doing with @ttention ventures. If it's a good idea, great, let's test it. I don't need to build a huge fishing trawler and send it out to learn if there's fish out there. I'd rather blow up a raft, make a sail out of the clothes on my back, and send you out with a fishing pole. You come back with fish, then we can talk about building that trawler.
That's our basic philosophy at @ttention ventures: let's find interesting ideas or small companies, take a small position in them that we can grow, and use the money we put in to determine if something is there, and if it is, well, add it to the portfolio.
