Dan Heath
Co-author, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
He thought he was going to be a lawyer. But a $100 bet, a chance call with a risk-taking investor, and an intuitive editor at Random House were all part of a series of blind shuffles that ultimately led Dan Heath on an entrepreneurial joyride.
Heath is a best-selling author, entrepreneur and training consultant to some of the nation's largest businesses, including Microsoft and Dow Chemical. Living day by day, having fun and not taking himself too seriously is how Heath has succeeded both professionally and personally.
As long as he can remember, Heath has been taking chances and following his interests. As an undergraduate at the University of Texas's ACTLab, most of Heath's peers were working on robotics and discussing cyborg theory while he was producing a multimedia physics textbook. "I was definitely the goody-goody," he says.
It was the heyday of the short-lived CD-ROM-era and Heath found it fascinating. After graduation, Heath started working with a UT professor on the development of interactive messages about cervical cancer.
Simultaneously, and for reasons Heath says he can no longer reconstruct, he applied for law school and was accepted. That summer, a $100 bet changed the course of his career.
The financial backer behind the cervical cancer project, who Heath had gotten to know over the summer, bet him $100 that he had an offer that would keep him out of law school.
"I figured I'm either going to get $100 or a sweet deal," Heath says.
The investor said he would give Heath seed money to start the multimedia textbook business he had often talked about — if he first blew off law school and completed the cervical cancer project. "I withdrew four weeks before I was due to start. It was one of the happiest days of my life," he says.
By the fall of 1996 Heath had launched Thinkwell, a developer of multimedia textbooks. Less than a year later, however, the company was running out of money and he had to let go most of his employees. With two weeks of payroll left, Heath used his final dollars to print 100 business plans. "I basically spammed the venture capital community with them," he says.
Then, one by one, he cold-called each investor, inevitably getting a voicemail or an assistant but never a return call. Discouraged, Heath nonetheless continued to dial. Finally, one day an investor — Kent Fuka at CenterPoint Ventures—answered the phone.
After an infusion of CenterPoint's capital, Thinkwell successfully launched its line of next-generation textbooks. The company celebrates its 10th anniversary this fall.
By 2001, Heath was worn out and hungry for something new. He enrolled in Harvard Business School and yet another change in course occurred — Heath became a writer. Ultimately, Heath wrote 10 HBS case studies on entrepreneurial success stories, such as London's Innocent Drinks and the infomercial geniuses at Idea Village.
Earlier this year, Heath published a New York Times best-seller, Made to Stick, a book he co-wrote with his brother Chip Heath. The book remained one of the top 100 books on Amazon.com for six months and landed the Heath brothers on NBC's Today show.
"I have always wanted to write a book, but I thought it would be a mystery novel," he says. But an editor at Random House read an article penned by Chip Heath that talked about sticky messages — messages that resonate with people. The editor called Chip and soon after the Heath brothers went to work.
While riding the wave of the book's success, Heath works as a consultant for Duke University's executive education unit, where he designs custom training for corporate clients, for example a simulation that asked Dow executives to respond to unexpected macro-events like a pandemic or a chill in United States-China relations.
Heath's proudest creative moment? Beating out 13,000 other entrants to win the 2002 New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. "I was ecstatic," he says. "The only downside is that it unmasked me as the kind of person who enters cartoon caption contests."