I.
It was summer when 16-year-old Sonny Moore finally ran away from home.
At five foot four, with pale skin, black hair, and acne, he was by no means his school football team captain. His escape from bullies who picked on him at the art academy in East Los Angeles where he studied—before his parents pulled him out for homeschooling—was music. Metal. Punk rock. Anything that rhymed with “the world doesn’t understand,” including a relatively new genre called screamo, which involved the scream-singing of often-depressing lyrics about death and heartache. He played along with his guitar at home and made friends with other tortured teenagers at his favorite hideout, the Internet.
Want to pull the rug out from under a tortured teen? Try telling him he’s adopted. That’s what Sonny’s parents eventually confessed, to his horror. Identity shaken, he fought bitterly with them until getting out of L.A. seemed to be his only option for peace. He called it his “obsession.”
So, when he met a sympathetic group of punk rockers from Georgia on Myspace.com—at the time, a new social network for musicians—Sonny saw an escape hatch. Full of angst, he gave Los Angeles the finger and flew, presumptuously, across the country to join the band.
Travis Richter and Matt Good were in a recording studio in Valdosta, Georgia, sorting out their first full-length rock album, when Sonny arrived. The pair, six and four years older than Sonny, respectively, had been playing music together since Sonny was a preteen, and had just signed a deal with Epitaph Records for their emo band, From First to Last. Having recorded an album’s worth of music sans vocals, the rockers now had to decide which of them should be lead singer.
Full of hope for a new future as a rock guitarist, young Sonny showed up to demonstrate his skills to them. But it was too late. “Sorry, we just don’t want to add another guitar to the mix,” Richter told him. But Sonny had come a long way and smelled of desperation, so they let him hang around. “He was cool with it and understood, but just wanted to hang out with us anyway,” Richter says.
Sonny found a place to stay and showed up to the studio day after day, eyes wide, helping out however he could.
And then one day everything changed.
“He was singing in the studio, and we were pretty surprised by his range and tone,” Richter recalls. “So we had him step into the booth. As soon as he sang into the mic, we knew that he needed to be the singer.” Popular emerging bands like The Used were “killing it by singing epic high notes,” he explains, and Sonny’s voice “fit perfectly into the new, ‘screamo’ style that was becoming more and more popular.”
Quick etymology lesson: Screamo is like emo, but with screaming. Emo is like punk rock, but with emotional lyrics. Punk rock is like rock ’n’ roll, only with faster guitars and drums and mohawks.
Early 2000s screamo was not a mainstream genre. But a certain subculture of (mostly teenage) fans obsessed over it. Sonny’s voice, with Richter’s and Good’s guitars, nailed the sound. Everyone was excited. Especially Sonny.
From First to Last recorded his vocals, released the album, and booked a monthlong tour.
Like screamo, the Internet was experiencing its own surge among teenagers: social networking, which had brought FFTL together in the first place. As more households acquired high-speed Web access, and as playing with computers shifted from nerdy to mainstream, kids were spending more and more time in chat rooms, forums, and social networks. What started as the domain of introverts soon became the cool place for kids of all cliques to hang out. Whereas in the past an indie band like From First to Last could reach audiences only through expensive marketing, now it could spend all day talking to fans online.
“The idea was to mimic what was already happening on a mainstream level with pop music and boy bands as far as marketing goes,” Richter explains, “and take it to the underground, which was slowly gathering and amassing on the Internet.”
From First to Last invested in eyeliner, hair straighteners, piercings, and photography. “We wanted each member of the band to be a standout character and play more than just a musician’s role,” Richter says.
Now looking like proper rock stars, FFTL used social networks to book shows. Their self-booked tour eventually turned into a slot at the Vans Warped Tour. At every show, the band promoted its social networking pages, and its popularity surged as fans shared the music with their friends. “The whole emo/post-hardcore trend exploded because of the Internet,” Richter says. “You go to school all day and still deal with the food-chain mentality, but with the Internet you could be whoever you wanted and anti-mainstream.”
This was a disruptive moment for the music industry. Independent bands could suddenly gain a wide audience on an extremely lean budget, and new genres could find fans before a record label invested in an edgy new band.
FFTL was one of the first bands to prove the model.
“We sold like, probably at this point, over half a million units between two records,” Sonny tells me, recalling the band’s status after its second album, Heroine, dropped in 2006. “[With] no major press.” The ripple effect—amplified by the growth of both screamo and the Web—had made FFTL, at the time, one of the biggest indie bands out there.
They started getting phone calls from bigger record companies.
“That courting experience was wild,” Richter recalls. “Every major label was hitting us up, flying us out, flying out to our shows, taking us out to dinner, taking us shopping.” When the executives asked the lip-pierced screamo kids to name their price for a record contract, Richter said, “Seven million.”
Capitol Records smoothly agreed to the number. Perhaps a little too smoothly.
II.
It’s a rare gloomy day at Huntington Beach, California, and Carissa Moore and Coco Ho are floating five feet apart in the middle of the ocean, trying not to look at each other.
The two Hawaiians bob with the tide, scanning the gray horizon, Ho with her black wetsuit and a tall ponytail, and Moore in pink and gray. A hundred yards behind them, muted and out of focus, a mob of bystanders—tens of thousands—scream. What happens in the next 20 minutes will determine who will go back home and who will move on to the semifinals—and eventually finals—of the Vans US Open of Surfing, and possibly who will become the women’s surf world champion.
Currently, Coco Ho is leading the heat, having scored an 8.0 (out of 10) by carving up the face of the most recent, decent wave. The competitors are graded by their two best scores within a 30-minute period.
Abruptly, both women turn their surfboards toward shore. A wave is coming, but as it approaches, the surge looks iffy. Ho backs off.
Moore, however, paddles furiously. As the water rises to a peak, forming a near-vertical face, she stands up. The wave becomes the blade of a bulldozer, shoving Moore forward. She glides through the froth and cuts sharply left to speed down the open face of the wave, emerging from the spray to ride directly in front of the surging peel. From the shore, it looks like the wave is crumbling from left to right, and Moore is floating on the edge of the crumble.
She twists her surfboard to carve up the wave, then pivots forward to speed down the face again, snapping her fins above the water in a brief moment of weightlessness. Two more times she carves like this before the peel overtakes her. She turns her board into the froth to paddle back out.
Ho continues to bob in the distance. The judges announce Moore’s score: 9.5
The clock ticks away. Twenty minutes pass, with no change in the standings. Moore has returned to her original waiting spot. As the timer nears zero, another wave materializes. In a flash, she grabs it in the brief window before Ho spots the opportunity. The water whisks Moore away once more, while Ho paddles around, looking for a wave that can help her beat a 9.5.
That wave finally comes at the buzzer. Frustratingly, Ho sees it late. She swims for it, but she’s too far out in the water. It passes. The round is over.
The two women—who are friends when not competing against each other—swim to shore together. Both are top contenders in the surfing world tour and have faced off dozens of times in high-pressure competitions like this. Both are in their early twenties, and either could outsurf any human on the planet—with the exception of a few of the top-ranked male surfers.
But as one of the event announcers, Leila Hurst, points out, world championships aren’t won by surfing skill, and this heat was no exception.
“It’s really not about surfing and practicing,” Hurst says, on air. “It’s just a matter of waiting for the right wave.”
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CATCHING a wave and getting crushed or passed by is a matter of centimeters, which means the chance of being in the exact right spot in that water to grab a big wave without any effort is akin to winning at Powerball. Being in the water when a good wave comes requires maneuvering into precise position.
Surfers make it look easy. The good ones can recognize the roll of incoming waves, so they can position themselves in the perfect spot to catch them. And at the last minute, a surfer will paddle vigorously to align herself with the wave and match its speed.
Luck is often talked about as “being in the right place at the right time.” But like a surfer, some people—and companies—are adept at placing themselves at the right place at the right time. They seek out opportunity rather than wait for it.
This chapter is about hacking that process.
QUICK SCIENCE REFRESHER: A wave is made up of alternating crests and troughs that from the side look like a squiggly line. When two waves collide, one of two things can happen: they can cancel each other out or, if timed just right, they can combine and increase in intensity.
This is called destructive and constructive interference. The former means the waves collide and go flat. The latter forms a megawave.
In 2004 two waves collided in American teen culture, resulting in a fast and powerful megawave. Those waves were social networking and screamo. From First to Last happened to be in the water when the megawave came, and had the foresight to paddle for it.
But the waves with the tallest crests also have the deepest troughs. By 2007 the wave that took FFTL so far so quickly was about to dump the bandmates off their boards. Soon after signing the band, Capitol Records, which was struggling like other labels in the new Internet economy of iTunes and Pandora, embarked on a large and messy merger.
Hundreds of Capitol staff members were cut. Artist contracts started getting dropped. The newly minted, makeup-wearing screamo kids from Georgia got caught in the turbulence.
“There was so much label fallout,” Sonny said. “People getting fired. There was a lot of negativity.”
The band started to panic. That $7 million chest of money seemed to be disappearing among a sea of middlemen. The glue holding the FFTL surfboard together was starting to disintegrate.
Richter and the others wanted to try to ride it out. But, rather than fall into the impending trough and get crushed by the wave, 18-year-old Sonny decided to bail.
III.
There are two ways to catch a wave: exhausting hard work—paddling—and pattern recognition—spotting a wave early and casually drifting to the sweet spot. “There are people who make careers based on the fact that they know how to read the ocean better than others,” says Pat O’Connell, ’90s surfing legend and trainer. “It’s just about knowing the ocean. It’s timing.”
Sonny Moore seemed to have that pattern recognition; he spotted the rise of social networks and became a power user, ultimately setting himself up to front an emerging band. From First to Last spotted the fast rise of screamo before most bands—and mainstream audiences—saw it coming. When Sonny recognized that the end was near, he got off the wave.
The real question is, was that all just luck? Was Sonny just a natural? Or can such wavespotting be taught?
SOME TIME AGO, DRS. Erik Dane, Kevin Rockmann, and Michael Pratt, researchers in organizational behavior and human decision making, recruited a couple hundred college students to watch clips from some basketball games for extra credit in their business classes. Some of the students had played several years of basketball—the researchers called them “high expertise.” The rest were relative newbies.
The researchers sat the students down and instructed them to watch video clips from two college basketball games and rate the difficulty of each shot a player took. Half the students were instructed to make their assessments using intuition—the first thought they had—and half were instructed to use careful analytical reasoning to judge each shot and to ignore “gut instincts.” Before the test began, the second group created lists of factors from which to assess the shots, things like the number of nearby defenders, whether the shooter was stationary, and how many points the shot was worth. Answers would be compared to a key created by top basketball coaches.
When the results from the intuition test came back, the high-expertise students performed close to 50 percent better than those with low expertise. As one might expect.
The surprise came on the analytical test, where the high- and low-expertise students scored nearly the same, and better than the high-expertise students’ intuition.
The low-expertise students who used their guts to guess at a shot’s difficulty did poorly, as expected. But when these same students used thoughtful criteria, they outperformed the intuition of experienced players.
The researchers then conducted a similar experiment where they asked people to identify counterfeit handbags. “High-expertise” individuals were identified by how many Coach and Louis Vuitton handbags they owned. The results were the same.
In a given domain—be it surfing or accounting or political fund-raising—the familiarity that leads to pattern recognition seems to come with experience and practice. Fencing masters recognize opportunities in opponents’ moves because of the sheer amount of practice time logged into their heads. Leaders and managers who use their gut to make decisions often do so based on decades of experience, archived and filed away in the folds of their cerebrums.
“Intuition is the result of nonconscious pattern recognition,” Dane tells me. However, his research shows that, while logging hours of practice helps us see patterns subconsciously, we can often do just as well by deliberately looking for them. In many fields, such pattern hunting and deliberate analysis can yield results just as in the basketball example—high accuracy on the first try.
And that’s where, like the dues-paying presidents or overly patient programmers, what we take for granted often gets in the way of our own success. Deliberate pattern spotting can compensate for experience. But we often don’t even give it a shot.
This explains how so many inexperienced companies and entrepreneurs beat the norm and build businesses that disrupt established players. Through deliberate analysis, the little guy can spot waves better than the big company that relies on experience and instinct once it’s at the top. And a wave can take an amateur farther faster than an expert can swim.
It also explains why the world’s best surfers arrive at the beach hours before a competition and stare at the ocean.
After years of practice, a surfer can “feel” the ocean, and intuitively find waves. But the best surfers, the ones who win championships, are tireless students of the sea.
O’Connell says, “One of the main things that you do when you learn to compete is learn how to pick out conditions. Know that the tide is getting higher. Counting waves, how many waves come into a particular area that fit your eye that you want to ride.”
Pro surfers analyze the frequency of waves coming in on a given day, where along the coast they tend to break, and which of those waves tend to look the best. They take note of the direction the waves break, the angle at which they peel, and where along the horizon the good ones first form.
On the other hand, sometimes the biggest waves form out of seemingly nowhere. A superwave can show up on a regular surf day when random smaller waves align. When that happens, the only people who can possibly ride it are the ones who actually went to the beach that day. The ones who actually got in the water.
BY THE END OF 2012 Google’s Gmail service had become the most popular electronic mail provider in the world. That same year, Google’s AdSense product accounted for more than $12 billion in revenue, about a quarter of the search giant’s total revenues. Each of those products—smart electronic mail and context-based advertising—caught an enormous wave when it launched.
Like Twitter, as we learned in chapter 4, both Gmail and AdSense started off as side projects. Google was in the water when the waves of Internet traffic came because it was tinkering with new ideas under the umbrella of Google’s famous “20% Time.”
“20% Time” is not Google indigenous. It was borrowed from a company formerly known as Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, aka 3M, which allowed its employees to spend 15 percent of their work hours experimenting with new ideas, no questions asked. 3M’s “15% Time” brought us, among other things, Post-it Notes.
Behind this concept (which is meticulously outlined in an excellent book by Ryan Tate called The 20% Doctrine) is the idea of constantly tinkering with potential trends—having a toe in interesting waters in case waves form.
This kind of budgeted experimentation helps businesses avoid being disrupted, by helping them harness waves on which younger competitors might otherwise use to ride past them. It’s helped companies like Google, 3M, Flickr, Condé Nast, and NPR remain innovative even as peer companies plateaued. In contrast, companies that are too focused on defending their current business practice and too fearful to experiment often get overtaken. For example, lack of experimentation in digital media has cost photo brand Kodak nearly $30 billion in market capitalization since the digital photography wave overwhelmed it in the late ’90s.
The best way to be in the water when the wave comes is to budget time for swimming.
IV.
Over the years, entrepreneurs and academics have suggested that first movers in business—the first to catch a commercial wave—enjoy an unfair advantage over their competitors. In 1988 Stanford professors Marvin Lieberman and David Montgomery popularized the concept, suggesting that the first competitor to move into a market has the opportunity to gain proprietary learning, snatch up patents, and build up buyer switching costs. Later researchers added that first movers receive outsize branding benefits, that a reputation for being “the original,” often enjoys a marketing advantage over copycats. (Think Tylenol versus generic acetaminophen. Or Apple’s iPad versus other tablets that came after it.)
“The first mover advantage is huge,” declared venture capitalist Ken Lerer. I wrote his quote down in enormous letters in my notebook when he emphatically said it to a group of fellow entrepreneurship-curious journalists when I was a student at Columbia University. According to Lerer, when we look at history—and emerging competitions—we ought to expect the first mover to win a disproportionate amount of the time.
Except if we did, we’d be wrong.
CARISSA MOORE IS BACK in the water again. Paddling to her right is local Southern California heroine Courtney Conlogue, a rising star who’s been killing the competition this week at her home beach.
These are the US Open of Surfing finals. The woman who surfs the best in the next 30 minutes will take home a $15,000 check. A win would also place Moore back at the top of the world rankings. Last year’s world champ and runner-up have both been eliminated, but Conlogue’s blond hair is still wet from when she destroyed the then world number one, Tyler Wright, an hour and a half before.
An X-Games gold medalist and Orange County Female Surfer of the Year, Conlogue had beaten Moore soundly in a competition in New Zealand earlier that year.
At age 18, Moore had won the record for being the youngest women’s surfing world champion in history. But the glory didn’t last long: A year later, she had slipped to third place in the world tour. This heat could bring her back to the top . . . or sink her further.
LIKE SHARKS IN WATER, the two competitors drift. A lump forms on the horizon; both paddle for position at the potential break point. As the lump becomes a roiling peak, neither woman backs down. Each jockeys for position, and the peak forms directly between them. Conlogue splits left, and Moore splits right. The wave closes out to the left, but Moore manages to get three moves in. She cuts right then left then right as the face turns to foam. She scores a 7.83 to Conlogue’s disappointing 0.5. The ride gives Moore the lead.
Conlogue gets back in position and waits. The next big wave arrives—a fast lefthander—and she rides it into the pier, performing a few turns before it goes soft. The judges award her a 6.10, putting her four-and-a-half points behind Moore’s total.
But what Conlogue doesn’t see is an even bigger wave forming in the distance.
Moore knew it was coming. Having let the previous wave go by, she gracefully pushes her board out in front of this better wave, stands, speeds down the face, and carves back up it like a ramp. She catches air, her surfboard fins clearing the lip, and slams back down the face with authority.
The judges give her a 6.50.
The pier above is packed tightly with spectators as Conlogue paddles out from under it to intercept Moore’s return swim. A wave rolls in—it looks like something I would paddle for myself—but neither woman pays it any mind. It turns out to be fat, not breaking until close to shore.
Conlogue catches three smaller waves in the frantic final minute, but her capable rides aren’t sufficient to pass Moore’s total score. The judges call out the final tally as Moore’s coach runs out to the shallow water to greet her. The crowd picks Moore up on its shoulders and chairs her up the beach, tossing a purple flower lei around her neck.
TO WIN THE CHAMPIONSHIP, Moore harnessed the phenomenon of wave trains. Unlike coloring-book waves, beach breaks are not composed of perfectly identical troughs and crests. They’re intermittent, choppy, highly variable.
On good wave days, an ocean swell will bring in a massive amount of energy from some faraway place, a moving, macrolump in the ocean. Within that swell are essentially ripples, small waves and big waves that come in groups and often repeat in patterns. Waves on waves on waves. Surfers call these patterns “sets.” A set might consist of one or two or three surfable waves in a row, followed by some period of silence or small waves, before another set rolls in. Often, multiwave sets consist of “forerunners” or fast-moving, but smaller waves, followed by slow-moving waves which contain the peak energy of the swell.
Since wave patterns play out over long periods of time and often behave unpredictably as waves from different directions meet and create interference, it’s easy to miss the train for the waves. In all her heats of the US Open—and especially the finals—Moore benefited from deliberate study of the patterns, which helped her make the smartest wave selections.
“Before my heats at the Open, I watched the lineup and figured out which peaks were the most consistent with good waves,” she told me. “When I was out there, I usually began judging a wave as soon as I saw a lump forming in the horizon.” This study allowed her to beat the hometown hero Conlogue, who certainly had developed intuition on this beach from years of surfing there. Did Moore beat Conlogue because the former studied the waves harder that day, while the latter took her experience in these waves for granted? It appears so.
We also see from Moore’s championship heat that, in surfing, the first mover often doesn’t have the advantage. The second or third wave in a multiwave set is often the more powerful.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to learn, then, that being the first mover is not much of an advantage in business either.
A DECADE AFTER LIEBERMAN and Montgomery convinced the business world of the phenomenon of first-mover advantage, they qualified their conclusions, saying, “Pioneers often miss the best opportunities, which are obscured by technological and market uncertainties. In effect, early entrants may acquire the ‘wrong’ resources, which prove to be of limited value as the market evolves.”
Another academic duo, Peter Golder and Gerard Tellis of the University of Southern California, published a study in 1993 to see if historical evidence backed the claim that market pioneers were more likely to succeed. They researched what happened to 500 brands in 50 product categories, from toothpaste to video recorders to fax machines to chewing gum.
Startlingly, the research showed that 47 percent of first movers failed. Only about half the companies that started selling a product first remained the market leader five years later, and only 11 percent of first movers remained market leaders over the long term.
By contrast, early leaders—companies that took control of a product’s market share after the first movers pioneered them—had only an 8 percent failure rate. Fifty-three percent of the time in the Golder and Tellis study, an early leader became the market leader in a category.
Like early pioneers crossing the American plains, first movers have to create their own wagon trails, but later movers can follow in the ruts. First movers take on the burden of educating customers, setting up infrastructure, getting regulatory approvals, and making mistakes—getting feedback and adjusting.
Fast followers, on the other hand, benefit from free-rider effects. The pioneers clear the way in terms of market education and infrastructure and learn the hard lessons, so the next guys can steal what works, learn objectively from the first movers’ failures, and spend more effort elsewhere. The first wave clears the way for a more powerful ride.
Many of the biggest corporate successes in history—including Lerer’s Huffington Post, which became the number one political website in the world, the first for-profit online-only newspaper to win a Pulitzer Prize for reporting, and which sold for more than $300 million to AOL—have been fast followers in their respective spaces. As entrepreneurship scholar Steve Blank points out in his article for Business Insider, “You’re Better Off Being a Fast Follower Than an Originator,” fast follower General Motors surpassed the first mover in automobiles, Ford Motor Company, in market share in the early 1900s. Google, Facebook, and Microsoft were each fast followers in their respective spaces in the technology sector, leaping past Overture, Myspace, and Apple, respectively (until Apple made a comeback).
In each case, while the pioneers were entrenched in early technology and practices, the tailgaters got ahead. Once you jump on the first wave, it’s costly to back off from the commitment. And by that time it’s usually too late to take advantage of the second wave.
Of course, on rare occasions that first wave actually is the best wave in a set. How is a surfer, much less a businessperson, to judge when to make a move?
Pattern recognition can help here as well. The way to predict the best waves in a proverbial set is established by researchers Fernando F. Suarez and Gianvito Lanzolla, who in Academy of Management Review explain that when market and technology growth are smooth and steady, the first mover gets the inertia and an advantage. When industry change is choppy, the fast follower—the second mover—gets the benefits of the first mover’s pioneering work and often catches a bigger wave, unencumbered.
A good surfer watches the conditions and knows if the big waves come alone, in smooth and steady progressions, or in patterned sets, in which case the second or third wave is often the biggest ride. And if he watches long enough, he can spot the double waves that occasionally combine to form a monster.
V.
After leaving From First to Last in 2007, Sonny Moore went from sleeping in luxurious hotels around the world and playing sold-out stadium shows to living in a warehouse in Los Angeles in a matter of months. FFTL’s seven-figure contract had ended in a puff of smoke as the Capitol merger problems metastasized, and the label dropped the band.
Needless to say, Sonny was sour on the business of music.
He briefly tried his hand at a solo career, vowing to leave agents and labels out of the equation. But with vocal cord problems and no wave to push him further than his savings account could carry him, he was now back in L.A. with no plan, sitting on the floor of a warehouse with a laptop computer.
By that time, personal computers and cheap software were starting to match professional studios in recording and mixing quality, and digital instruments allowed the computer-savvy to create almost any sound imaginable. So, Sonny, fresh off a series of vocal cord surgeries, started recording music on his laptop. No band. No singing. No label. Just electronic instruments he could power with keyboard and mouse.
And he kind of liked it.
“I had a neighbor who DJed,” Sonny remembered. “And I would go over and just jam. I didn’t know DJing was even a thing.” Sonny would show his neighbor his new, digital songs. “He’d be like, ‘this is solid.’”
They started throwing warehouse dance parties, to share their music with friends. Soon, music-scene kids from downtown L.A. started showing up. Electronic musicians started offering to collaborate on tracks; Sonny connected online with DJs around the world who seemed to be popping out of nowhere. Before he knew it, Sonny found himself paddling straight into an electronic-music swell.
“That whole wave ended up being massive,” he said.
IT’S A RARE COOL August evening on Randall’s Island in New York City, a smallish swatch of land sticking out of the East River between Manhattan and Queens, and I’m standing in a pool of water in front of the speakers at one of Sonny’s dance parties. Sonny and his friend Alex Ridha (known in the music community as Boys Noize) are above me on the DJ platform, peeking out over a snarl of cords, a mixer, and four electronic turntables. Behind me, lurching to the drum-and-bass that throbs out of Sonny’s speakers, partygoers are indeed dancing.
Only unlike most dance parties I’d been to, the attendee count for this shindig is approximately 100,000.
I turn my back to the speakers to soak in the spectacle. A sea of humans unfolds, extending so far that I expect it to disappear over the curvature of the earth. The collective bounces in rhythm, a blur of neon green and a hue that I can only describe as “shirtless white guy.” Someone in the back is waving an American flag on a banner, while someone else holds up the Union Jack. A giant brown Japanese cartoon monster bobs above the mohawked and pigtailed heads to the right, held up on a stick, and a dozen balloons bounce above the crowd, illuminated by a massive array of seizure-inducing strobe lights and LEDs. Half the audience wears 3-D glasses.
The massive wave Sonny had mentioned was a new genre of popular music called EDM—electronic dance music. The genre exploded faster in Europe and America than almost any other musical style had in recent decades. A combination of the Internet’s disruption of traditional music distribution (services allowing artists to sell individual tracks without middlemen) and the rise of more viral-ready networking platforms (sites that connected artists to millions at a scale that early music networks didn’t) created a musical wave that approached consumers from the north, while an appetite for electronic music—and the tools to create it—created a wave from the east. They combined to form the superwave that Sonny Moore managed to hop on at exactly the right time.
While living in that warehouse, Sonny had started releasing his EDM tracks online, for free. It was good stuff, and between the parties and social networks, his body of work started to gain recognition.
One day a producer approached him, asking if he’d like to remix a record for an up-and-coming artist named Lady Gaga. “This was right before she really exploded,” Sonny says. He recognized the cultural jetstream Gaga was busy creating with her dance-and-art-infused pop, and said, Yes.
Gaga became one of the first musicians to bring EDM from underground to mainstream, dominating the music charts and racking up half a billion views to her video for “Bad Romance” on YouTube, the hit single that Sonny had just remixed.
And once again, things got crazy.
I TURN TO FACE the stage, which rests on top of an array of speakers the breadth of a New York City block. The bass is so powerful that it sprays droplets of water on me with every thump. The treble slamming out of the speaker cones is the sound of a million defibrillators being jammed by alien radio transmissions. The hairs on my arms dance with the sheer vibration as I, alone in the security moat between stage and crowd, raise my camera and notepad to document the scene. Above, Sonny Moore, now the artist known as Skrillex, headbangs over his turntables, his 15-inch-long hair flying against a backdrop of white electricity.
In the past three years, Skrillex has won six Grammys, including best dance/electronica album twice in a row (and a nomination for best new artist), and has come to symbolize a genre into which thousands of artists—and millions of fans—are flooding.
“He is this generation’s Kurt Cobain,” says Joe Villacrusis, tour manager and music industry veteran who’s traveled with and babysat rock stars since the early ’90s. “Look at the history of music . . . he’s the face of a movement.”
The once-king of screamo was now the king of dubstep, having caught not one, but two gigantic musical waves in less than a decade. Sonny certainly wasn’t the first mover in either genre, as artists had been pioneering—struggling to break ground on—emo, screamo, EDM, and dubstep for years before the styles reached an inflection point with listeners. He hopped on board for the second wave and paddled hard for it each time.
From First to Last sold a respectable 500,000 records. By now, Skrillex has sold more than 2 million. And his success has gone deeper than money and fame. Just before the Randall’s Island show, Sonny landed from a humanitarian trip to Africa for the nonprofit “(RED)” and, perhaps more importantly, had found peace in his life. He’d repaired the relationship with his parents. (His dad now hangs out regularly with Sonny’s music crew.) And whereas he’d spent most of his life with long hair covering up his acne scars, Sonny shaved one side of his head, unafraid to be himself and to be seen. The look soon became iconic.
A casual observer might conclude that Sonny just happened to be in the right place at the right time, two times. That he was just lucky. But that’s not what happened. Sonny actively experimented with trends when they were still early—the Web, social networks, scream-singing, EDM—sticking his toe in different waters until he recognized incoming waves. And it should be noted that he tried some things that didn’t work (a solo career as a rock singer) and was quick to shift strategies.
Conventional thinking leads talented and driven people to believe that if they simply work hard, luck will eventually strike. That’s like saying if a surfer treads water in the same spot for long enough, a wave will come; it certainly happens to some people, once in a while, but it’s not the most effective strategy for success. Paradoxically, it’s actually a lazier move.
There’s a reason some people practice things for twenty years and never become experts; a golfer can put in 30,000 hours of practice and not improve his game if he’s gripping his clubs wrong the whole time. A business can work five times harder and longer than its neighbors and still lose to rivals that read the market better. Just like a pro surfer never wins by staying in one spot.
“I think that being able to pick and read good waves is almost more important than surfing well,” Moore tells me. “If you don’t have a good or better platform to perform on than your opponent, you are going to lose.”
Her secret, and Sonny’s (and Google’s and 3M’s and General Motors’), isn’t practice—though that certainly helps. It’s going to the beach to watch the waves and getting into the water to experiment.
And if you’re in the sweet spot when that superwave does come, Sonny says, “It’s pure energy.”