Chase Bailey to budding entrepreneurs: ‘You don’t have time to sleep’
Andrew Leibs of Seacoast Media Group attended Catapult’s Business Speaker Series event June 30, 2010 with speaker Chase Bailey. Here’s the article he wrote and published on our event;
PORTSMOUTH — “I went from art to high tech to art again; I still start businesses, and support local people and charities, and I have fun — that’s my life,” Chase Bailey said to members of Catapult Seacoast at its latest Business Speakers Series event Wednesday at the 100 Club.
Catapult aimed to inspire its network of young professionals with Bailey, an artist, scientist, entrepreneur and general manager of Portsmouth-based Left Bank Films. Bailey retired from Cisco Systems in 1999 to paint in Paris — not the first executive to cash out to chase a dream, but one of the few to actually catch it. He had agents, one-man shows and a painting selected for the Dalai Lama’s world exhibition “The Missing Peace.”
When he began making films a decade ago, Bailey’s creative circle included John Malkovich and Johnny Depp, stars of “The Libertine” (2004), which Bailey produced.
Bailey’s story reads like an edgy script or memoir: Hospital bills following a car crash (he said he was high) that forced him from his studies at the Kansas City Art Institute, which precipitated his being drafted and serving as a Marine in Vietnam. The silver lining was the G.I. Bill, through which he earned several degrees including an master in business administration from the University of New Mexico, before the government finally cut him off.
His art found new expression during the frontier days of high-tech networking. He joined microcomputer pioneer Varian Data Machines in 1974 and within two years, was developing companies and technologies that would one day power the Internet.
“A computer program has to do all its work at the start of the code and push all the if-stuff at the end,” Bailey said. “There’s a structure: there are the parameters, everything that has to be decided on, and then conclusions — like the three acts of a screenplay.”
Bailey’s first boss was British computer scientist Stephen Bourne, whose “Bourne shell” furnished the default macro language for the Unix operating system. He said he wrote the first TCP/IP stack (data structure) for Silicon Graphics and patented Segmentation Reassembly, which fragments and refits information into packets for transfer over ATM networks — the core technology for Efficient Networks, a broadband solutions provider Bailey took public in 1993 and which Siemens acquired in 2001.
Mounting wealth didn’t diminish Bailey’s passion for high-tech pursuits, which is why, in 1993, he became chief scientist for Cisco Systems, running its university research programs while teaching at Santa Clara University. But in 1999, when Bailey’s then-wife asked him what his true passion was, he knew it was time to move to Paris.
“It was the hardest decision of my life because I loved my job,” Bailey said.
Left Bank Films enables Bailey to tell stories with technology, albeit one that changes every few months. “I shot my first film on Super 8,” he said. “Now, you shoot and edit in HD on your iPhone.”
Bailey’s aesthetic thrust is abstract expressionism: changing something to the point where you can’t tell what it is, but have a feeling of it.
“John Malkovich said if a film gives too many answers, it bores the audience; if it’s abstract and doesn’t answer any questions, that bores the audience, too,” Bailey said. “You want to get to that fine gray area where you make people think and give them something to go home and talk about.”
Bailey cited “The Life Before Her Eyes” starring Uma Thurman as an example of how he likes to push boundaries. “Half the people walked out of the theater asking, ‘What was that? I didn’t understand it;’ while the other half said ‘Wow, that was heavy.’ I like those kind of films.”
During a question and answer session moderated by Catapult chairwoman and co-founder Helen Donington, Bailey advised aspiring entrepreneurs to be honest and awake. “You don’t have time to sleep,” Bailey said. “You get ideas; you end up getting up at 5 because you can’t go back to sleep. So get up and do it.”
Bailey said honesty, on matters great and small, is a crucial quality. “Don’t be afraid to tell the boss you screwed up,” Bailey said. “If someone said that to me, I’d say, ‘Let’s work on it, make this better,’ and I’ll go back to that person for the next assignment. People who are dishonest, I’ll push away and give them the not-so-productive assignments.”
Lastly, Bailey warned you can’t make business decisions without proper data. “If you’re doing a startup or project and need to raise money, you have to have a great business plan,” he said. “The most important parts are the executive summary, the five-year finance plan, and your team.”
Poor planning is why most of the 10 proposals Bailey receives each month never progress past the initial e-mail.
Donington said the Catapult speaker series fits its objective of cultivating the Seacoast’s and state’s future business and community leaders. “The series provides a unique opportunity to engage with dynamic, successful and local professionals in an intimate setting to hear their stories and to ask them questions.”
Catapult Seacoast has more than 1,500 members, Donington said. For more information, visit www.catapultseacoast.org.
