DJ Jonas Tempel

Jonas is the CEO of Beatport.com.
From a recent interview:
“After graduating with a degree in graphic design, I was DJing in the early rave scene and doing tons of rave flyers for promoters all around the country. In late 1996, I founded a company called Factory Design Labs to handle all the flyer work. Meanwhile, I was the resident DJ at The Church nightclub in Denver. By 2003, I had grown Factory from a flyer firm to a more organized and legitimate branding agency with 20 employees. In early 2003, a friend of mine, Eloy Lopez, came to me with an idea for a new company. He had purchased Final Scratch and was buying vinyl and recording it into his computer so that he could play it. He thought there had to be an easier way. Together with Eloy, myself and another partner, we came up with a business plan for Beatport (www.beatport.com). In May 2003, we decided to make a run for it.”

“My experience as a DJ, CEO, creative director and entrepreneur helped me understand the complex world of growing great companies from scratch. It is incredibly challenging to do things right. There is a great book called Good to Great by Jim Collins (HarperCollins, 2001), and the first sentence of that book summarizes the challenge of starting a new business. It is simply, “Good is the enemy of great.” I live by that every day. It is so much harder to do it great — and so tempting to settle for good or worse. At Beatport, we have a culture of excellence that has helped us when times were tough, when we desperately wanted to cut corners. It is our fundamental belief that doing so will hurt us more than the extra effort that it will take to be great. That is the advice that I would give anyone starting a business. Don’t be sloppy. The results you get from your business will be in direct proportion to the effort that you put into it. Starting a new label is no different. Young labels or old established labels with deep catalogs all have the same opportunity — to put out great music that is relevant to a market audience. If it is worth doing, it is worth doing right.”