Few products in history have soared and crashed as spectacularly as the BlackBerry.
The rise and fall of the world's first smartphone is the subject of a new dark comedy, BlackBerry. Adapted by director Matt Johnson and co-writer Matthew Miller from the 2015 bestselling book Losing the Signal, BlackBerry tells the story of a company built by Star Wars-obsessed nerds who briefly revolutionized communication--until the iPhone showed up. The movie premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March and hits theaters on May 12.
Research in Motion (RIM), the Canadian mobile communications company that at its height claimed 45 percent of the U.S. cell phone market, was co-founded by best friends Mike Lazaridis (played by Jay Baruchel in the movie) and Doug Fregin (Johnson). BlackBerry begins in 1996 with the two pitching their "cell phone and email machine" to businessman and Harvard MBA Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton). The tech-savvy but guileless entrepreneurs present a design of their patented device, which can tap into a free wireless internet signal across North America. "It's like the Force," Fregin says to Balsillie, unaware that the latter hadn't seen Star Wars.
The pitch fails, but Balsillie ends up coming aboard as Lazaridis's co-CEO, bringing much-needed sales and marketing expertise to the team. They successfully launch the BlackBerry as the world's first smartphone, a wildly popular device, but Balsillie's growth-at-all-costs mentality corrupts Lazaridis's number one principle: to build the best product possible, no matter what.
That's just one of the business lessons the movie does a good job of distilling. In an interview, Johnson shared other relevant takeaways for entrepreneurs from the film.
1. Not everything deemed 'impossible' is actually impossible.
A pivotal moment in the film comes when RIM engineers proclaim that no more BlackBerry devices should be sold, as adding more phones to the network would crash it. Needing to boost the company's revenue to prevent a hostile takeover from PalmPilot, however, Balsillie hires top engineers from the world's leading tech companies to solve the problem.
"If you think you've hit a brick wall and authority figures are telling you, 'We can't do it,' often what they're saying is that doing the thing you want to do is going to be a lot of work that they don't want to do," Johnson says. "Recognizing that that's the message you're being told, and not 'this is actually impossible,' is an important skill for young people to master."
2. Successful businesses do more than just solve a problem.
Adding email functionality to cell phones was undoubtedly a technological breakthrough, but creating the smartphone product category didn't defend RIM against competition from other innovative companies. One of the reasons Apple was able to make the BlackBerry essentially obsolete--almost overnight--was the fact that the company had a cultural vision for what a smartphone could be, according to Johnson.
"You really need to be selling your clients a vision of a life, and not just something to solve an immediate problem," he says. "These guys had 20/20 vision, but they only saw six feet in front of their own faces."
3. Losing your company culture can lead to losing your company.
Early in the film, when Fregin and Lazaridis tell their employees that their pitch failed, they soften the blow with the "good news" that they're hosting an impromptu movie night and screening Raiders of the Lost Ark, which immediately lifts everyone's spirits. But by the time RIM is a large public company, nearly all traces of its culture of camaraderie--where employees were happy to work long hours together--are gone. According to Johnson, the loss of that culture contributed to how the company lost sight of its mission.
"Don't take for granted the intangibles of your business that do not actually have line items, like fraternity," Johnson says. "You won't know it until it's gone, and then it really might cost you, as it did these guys."
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