The Many Iterations of ZaZa

Someone recently asked me to start talking more about my journey as a founder. Which made me laugh a little because the founder’s journey involves an extraordinary amount of sitting at a computer doing shit you’ve already done.

Yesterday, you built the thing. Today, you learned something new, so now you’re rebuilding the thing. Tomorrow, you’ll probably discover that the thing needs to connect to another thing you haven’t built yet.

It isn’t glamorous and sometimes it’s incredibly one-sided. But I keep thinking about how many ZaZas there have already been and how many more there are going to be. I don’t mean that ZaZa keeps becoming an entirely different thing. Quite the opposite, actually. I can see pieces of what ZaZa Media Co is now in things I was doing years before I knew I was building a media company.

Some ideas turned into projects. Some projects turned into properties. Some experiments did exactly what experiments are supposed to do and taught me something. Some things got scrapped. Some things circled back and some things I’m working on now make me look at something I did two years ago and think, Oh. That’s what that was.

But I also know there are iterations of ZaZa Media Co that haven’t occurred to me yet. There are probably entire projects I can’t conceptualize yet because I haven’t had the conversation, gone to the place, met the person, learned the thing or had the experience that will make the idea possible.

Not knowing exactly what ZaZa will look like two or five years from now doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m building. I know what ZaZa is. I’m just increasingly aware that I don’t know all the ways it can exist yet.

There are things that make perfect sense under ZaZa Media Co today that I couldn’t have explained a year ago. There are things I was doing two years ago without understanding where they would eventually fit. Which makes for a strange combination of being very certain about some things and leaving a lot of room to be surprised by the rest.