I'm going to jump up on my soapbox real quick, because I've been screaming this for a while.

All Kanye West has ever wanted to do is create. If you watch the full interview with Zane Lowe[0], aka the interview that Jimmy Kimmel made fun of and started a whole firestorm over, you realize (if you haven't before) that Kanye sees bringing beauty to others as the penultimate goal in life (you could argue he values his family a bit more). In a sense I think that's what most people who get into startups, or really just "hacking" in general, want to do. Create. Bring beauty. Improve the world in a small way. Leave it better than how you got it, as my dad used to say.

Kanye has also gone through some of the exact trials and tribulations that people trying to start a business go through. If you listen to his song Spaceship[1] from "College Dropout" (his debut album) you can really hear the same kind of ethos as he tries to break into the music business while working at the Gap:

>> Taking my hits, writing my hits
>> Writing my rhymes, playing my mind
>> This fking job can't help him
>> So I quit, y'all welcome
>> Y'all don't know my struggle
>> Y'all can't match my hustle
>> You can't catch my hustle
>> You can't fathom my love dude
>> Lock yourself in a room doing 5 beats a day for 3 summers
>> That's a Different World like Cree Summer's

I'm cherry picking a quote, and it might lose it's umph because of that, but besides the undeniable poetic like quality of his words (is my fanboy showing yet?) you can see the dedication, and the repetition he puts into his craft. This is directly applicable to those trying to get a startup off the ground; You need hard work and most of all you need to ship, and keep on shipping to perfect your product. In fact, when I was trying to get my first startup going I more or less listened to this song on repeat as motivation, because Kanye understands the self-doubt. He understands the constant pressure to succumb to social standards. He understands that people push back when you try and break out. In fact, Kanye probably knows this more than most of us, as a person of color. Yet even through all of this Ye still succeeds. In fact, (it could be argued) the massive amount of people who don't like Kanye are more a testament to his success than the people who do. But it doesn't just stop at music. For those who weren't aware, Kanye started off as a producer and against a lot of pressure to stay a producer became a rapper as well. One of my favorite Kanye songs isn't really a song, but a narrative of how he overcame this and got signed in "Last Call"[2]. As per the same BBC interview I referenced above, Kanye is trying to break into fashion, architecture, design, a myriad of industries using the same ideas and work ethic. Work hard, and make something "dope", while disregarding the way "things are done around here" (to complete the analogy for those less aware of the rap scene, Kanye was one of the founders of "backpack rap", a kind of suburban, every day, introspective way of rapping, as opposed to the massively popular "gangsta rap" of the day).

Beyond all of that one of Kanye's biggest messages throughout his music is that the message of "Stay in your place" is wrong. He is consistently trying to upset the status quo. This is a message that should reverberate among any of us trying to shake up an established industry, or trying to create a market that simply didn't exist before. Kanye sees what is "not cool" in the world and tries to fix that, whether it's jumping up on stage and proclaiming on live tv that Taylor Swift doesn't deserve an award, or using shoe design as a way to break the race barrier in fashion. He's just as much a hacker as any one of us who works with code or hardware.

Kanye also sacrifices for his art. He paid millions out of his own pocket (back before he was financially set, I might add) to produce his own music videos for "Jesus Walks", after the studios wouldn't go with the direction as he wanted. I can't pin down the quote right now, but I recall him saying something to the effect of "If that album [Late Registration] wasn't a success I would have been broke". As we all know "Jesus Walks" became a #1 hit, Kanye got his videos on MTV, and the album went triple platinum. He continues to shell out of his own pocket for tours (that consistently succeed far past expectations) and runs his own design company, DONDA. Rumor has it he is financing his stylist's new clothing line. Just because it's not software doesn't mean he's not a VC.

This might not be the most lucid post, as I'm typing rather frantically in order to get this out before the story drops off the front page, but tl;dr: Kanye West exemplifies the hacker spirit, and learning from someone who has succeeded so immensely as a creative person can't be the worst thing you can do.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR_yTQ0SYVA
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGM6N0qXeu4
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q602739kBr4