Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup

Chapter 73. Practice Your Passion

Eran Egozy

Eran is the co-founder and CTO of Harmonix Music Systems, the creators of the video games Guitar Hero and Rock Band. He has been a TechStars mentor since 2009.

I have two passions: music and building things. When I look back at what has happened in my life, it all comes back to those two things. At age six, my parents got me Legos. At 11, I started playing the clarinet. At 15, I wrote a machine language program for my Apple IIe to play back digital music with six-note polyphony. I painstakingly entered each note from a score of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in machine code. While this was the first time I combined my two passions, I didn't realize I was doing it, although in retrospect it all makes sense.

After undergraduate and graduate school at MIT, where I got degrees in Engineering and Music, I started Harmonix with my friend Alex Rigopulos. Unlike some entrepreneurs, we didn't start the company to be entrepreneurs. We started the company because we had a mission: to let anyone in the world experience the joy of making music. Starting a company happened to be the only way we knew to fulfill that mission. Alex was the business guy. I was the tech guy. I got to build software that makes music again just like when I was 15.

Passion is often an overused word that loses its meaning, especially when attached to marketing statements such as "Your ...