How to Become Rich
Photography by: Donna Permell
My homegirl said she thought I wanted to be a rapper just so I can become rich. I paused for a long time after she said that. Half the reason I wrote Silicon Valley is to let people know you don’t have to do this to get money. I wanted to expose people to something new, the idea of creating something else. My job as an artist is to trigger thoughts, ideas and emotions to become actions. Music is my purpose and having a dream so strong and powerful can be burdensome but it’s the kind of burden I’m willing to bare.
I’m in what seems to be a declining industry where there’s no straight path and I don’t know the how and when things are going to happen.
You know who else had to endure these same obstacles? Ben Horowitz. No, Ben’s not a rapper but he is one of the kings of this tech trappin. He’s one of the guys in Silicon Valley that’s doing his thing! Ben Horowitz succeeds during the era of the dot com crash, flipping his hardware company into a software company and selling it for over a billion dollars.
I discovered this while reading, Ben’s book The Hard thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There are No Easy Answers. And let me tell you, there are no easy answers in the music industry either.
Reading this book and learning how Ben came out on top despite what everything looked like keeps me motivated.
I only have 50 plays but 22 likes on my Silicon Valley record on Soundcloud. It’s partially a good thing. It’s good because it tells me people really like the record but it’s not enough ears on it, which I’m working hard to figure out how to win that battle. But like Ben I don’t give up, despite what the numbers look like.
I’m not going to punk out, I can’t punk out. I suffered a great depression for several days a couple weeks ago because I couldn’t figure out what the next step toward my dreams needs to be. I felt like I had no one to talk to and realized that I shouldn’t worry about what the next step was and the how, that how is going to come. The only thing I was sure of is if I stop promoting this record I was going to die.
#OnTheRoadToEightGrammys