There’s a wing joint that dominates the city of Austin and has started its migration across Texas. Started by two former University of Texas students, Pluckers has become the name that defines Buffalo wings in the state capital.

The chain was recently featured in The Alcalde [Note that the article on Pluckers is not available online], alumni magazine of the University of Texas.

According to The Alcalde, the idea to create a late-night wing delivery restaurant came to the two founders when they were up late one night in the dorms, but they didn’t put it together until they graduated. Contrary to what they had imagined, they spent most of their first months in the kitchen rather than spending their days shaking hands and chatting up customers inside the restaurant. Always putting service before everything else, the founders would personally deliver corrected orders and apologize if a mistake was made.

On a recent visit to Pluckers, some friends asked if one of the TVs could be tuned into the UT men’s basketball game. Unable to locate it on the satellite programming, a Pluckers employee brought out his laptop and placed it on their table so that they could watch the game while they ate. Pretty nice service if you asked me.

Each store has it’s own motif of college sports memorabilia, but to keep it up to date, Pluckers also has policy of updating a store every 5 years to keep it fresh and keep the TVs top-of-the-line for sports fans.

The greatest link that established Pluckers as the dominant force it has become is its incredibly close tie to all UT Austin’s sporting events. Pluckers hosts events at each location and gives out coupons for free wings after almost every UT sporting event.

With this motto of service, Pluckers has put itself on top.

Note: I apologize if the word “asshole” offends you, but for the purpose of this post, I am going to have to use the word quite a bit. Earmuffs please.

I got into a little debate over at On Moneymaking tonight about whether you have to be an asshole to be successful. Jon’s post there suggests that you should accept becoming an asshole if you want to be successful in life.

I know about a dozen people that make over $1 million per year, and I’d imagine all of them are called assholes on a regular basis. The two seem to go hand in hand, and I think there are reasons why.

Extreme Success Requires Extreme Focus

Jon goes on to note that focus requires giving “all of your attention and ignoring everything else” and comments on a pattern for wealthy, successful people that I don’t quite find to be true.

Frequently, they’ll:

• Leave behind a trail of broken marriages and forgotten children
• Lose the life savings of their friends and relatives on an ingenious but doomed business
• Refuse to lend anyone money or give to charity
• Avoid unnecessary expenses to the point of miserliness
• Treat everyone that can’t help them as if they’re expendable

In the end, Jon implies that all successful people are assholes in some capacity, and you should be willing to be called an asshole to be successful.

Frankly, I just don’t agree with his suggestion. Even if you put your all into your work and some call you a “workaholic,” true character is what shines through and labels someone an asshole. I don’t think that many people legitimately label you an asshole just because of your wealth or success, and the few that do should be proven wrong by seeing your actions and character.

James Chartrand of Web Content Writer Tips and I went through several exchanges in the comments before finally coming to the realization that we actually agree. You can follow our long exchange in the comments.

James and I both agreed that you don’t need to be an asshole to be successful, and although you may run the risk of being called one, you don’t have to act like one to be a success.

From James:

Do people need to be assholes to be successful? No. But they do need to be focused and have drive and determination. They need to put themselves out there – and risk being seen as assholes.

The basic gist of my argument is simply this:

I don’t think that to be successful, you need to give up not being considered an asshole. Yes, stop obsessing about what others think, but don’t let that also lead you to fall into a philosophy of accepting your asshole-ism.

There’s a large difference between being an asshole and being successful, and I hope that many of the future moguls of America don’t take his advice to become miserable people because they think being an asshole is the only road to success.

On a minor note, Jon starts off using these examples as asshole successes:

What do Simon Cowell, Steve Jobs, Dr. House, Bill Belichick, and Donald Trump have in common?

Eliminating Dr. House because he’s not real, I had to argue that Bill Belichick while quiet, internal and often misunderstood by the press is no asshole. As for Steve Jobs, when did taking a $1 annual salary and refusing bonuses when coming back to save the company that you founded make you an asshole? I must have missed something with those examples.

My example of a very non-asshole success: Bill Gates. He is retiring to a life of philanthropy, has a successful marriage with children and I doubt he ever lived miserly during his rise in business. The only hit you have on him is running off with the idea for Windows, but can you blame him?

In what can only be described as the fulfillment of my winter break spiral towards greater levels of nerd-dom, I spent my free time reading Game Over: Press Start to Continue: The Maturing of Mario by David Sheff with some new chapters contributed by Andy Eddy.

Sheff and Eddy’s narrative works both as a fan service and informative business manual. The evolution of Nintendo from a hanafuda card producer to the international leader of the electronic entertainment industry is fascinating–more because of the gradual transition the company takes from traditional business practices to innovating, aggressive tactics than for all the gaming nerd facts. In all truthfulness, I enjoyed the gaming nerd facts as well though.

Shrewd decision-making and almost omniscient planning got Nintendo to the top of the entertainment world, and depending upon what console fanboyism you believe, Nintendo still retains a large market share–especially post-Wii launch–in the gaming and entertainment industry.

The Japanese leadership of Nintendo, led by the third president of the company Hiroshi Yamauchi, made such extensive plans during the early years and development that plans never had to drastically change throughout their rise to domination during the 1990s. The initial plan was so good that Microsoft may have even borrowed from it with their launch of the Xbox.

Back when Nintendo first launched the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in the United States, Yamauchi had a dream of integrating an Internet connection (dial-up at the time) to provide a network for its users. This network, Yamauchi thought, would increase their install base and provide greater applications for their console.

Nintendo established a network in Japan allowing stock market access and banking, but due to protests against Nintendo including a lottery service that could fall into the hands of minors, Nintendo never launched its grand network in the U.S. In fact, they practically gave up the idea completely because Nintendo never attempted to integrate a network into a console until their latest offering–the Wii–even though it was part of Yamauchi’s original business plan for the NES. Some say that Minoru Arakawa, Yamauchi’s son-in-law who ran Nintendo of America, never fully accepted the dream.

“By the end of 1992, it appeared that Nintendo would miss out on the enormous opportunity. If it did, the reason would be a lack of vision and commitment to it. Jerry Ruttenbur said the network never flew because Minoru Arakawa didn’t support it in spite of a sound business plan and projections of huge profits. ‘It was Yamouchi’s dream, not Arakawa’s,’ Ruttenbur said. ‘Arakawa never bought into it.’” (Game Over, pg. 397-8)

With the Xbox, one of the crucial selling points at launch was Xbox Live, the premium service that allows all Xbox gamers to connect, compete and share online. Microsoft had both better timing and a greater extent of networking experience when they entered the market, but the fact that their plan was so similar to Nintendo’s original for the NES makes me wonder whether Bill Gates read Game Over.

For more on the history of the industry, read Game Over or check out Play Value, a podcast from ONnetworks that covers the rise of Nintendo and the entertainment industry.

If you are not familiar with Threadless.com, they make shirts. Unlike most companies who choose their designs based upon focus testing and select influential parties, Threadless uses the crowd.

Similar to SnorgTees.com, Threadless accepts user-submitted designs. They use a public rating system to determine what shirts to print; therefore, they let the crowd run their product development like open source software.

According to MarketingVOX, the company expects $15 million in sales this year. It emerged from the minds of two Chicago art students who put in just $1,000 seven years ago.

The site opened a real live, in-person location in Chicago that doubles as a brand builder.

Launched in September, the store has become a great brand-awareness opportunity, since most people coming in aren’t familiar with the website.

And in terms of getting those familiar with the brand incentive to come in, the retail location launches new shirts three days before they hit the web.

To top it off, they have plenty of online support.

How many companies do you know with online and retail locations that compliment each other so well?

If you have never heard of One Week Job, the blog/video series follows Sean Aiken as he travels from job to job in search of his passion. The ultimate goal of the project is to work 52 jobs in 52 weeks and possibly find his dream job.

In week 30, he visited SnorgTees.

SnorgTees is a web-run t-shirt company out of Georgia. Founded in 2004 by brothers and run along with a few friends, the company has grown profitable after a few months of struggle. Matt Walls is the president and definer of the word snorg–a “replacement word” that can be whatever you want. His brother Bryan Walls takes the title of “Creative Director” probably for creating the “snorg” in the first place. Really, if they did nothing else besides invent the word, they probably could have been considered pretty creative people in some circles. Instead, they defined a word that defined a company. SnorgTees positions themselves well outside of the “faceless corporate entity” stereotype in their own description, and it’s definitely not a category they have danger of becoming.

Part of their innovation depends upon customers who appreciate their designs and company enough to submit awesome designs to them on a regular basis. They pay anyone who submits a “thumbs up” idea $100 and give them a free shirt! What does that mean to consumers? They are approachable and involve their consumers. It’s the closest thing to a social network running a t-shirt company in existence today–if you are into that sort of Web 2.0 business hot topic these days.

Sean of One Week Job is also quick to point out that it’s not all fun and games running your own company. These guys may look like they are having the greatest time ever–and they should–but Sean notes that “If you want to run a successful company, you can’t forget all the details and long hours that go into it.”

“After the first six months of doing this full-time, I was pretty nervous. Then, every month it gets better and better and more comfortable and more fun,” Bryan Walls, president of SnorgTees, said. “Having a taste of owning my own business and working for myself, I definitely think that’s what I want to do the rest of my life.”

Overall, they seem to have found a pretty laid back company and discovered the dream we all have: managing your own fun company and making your own paychecks. Oh, and they also get to hang out with beautiful, young models half the time when they do ad and design shots for their site. I offer them up as inspiration, and in jealousy, shake my fist.

I think it’s appropriate in this new media landscape that we start off the profiles by talking about an entrepreneur that is as close to my age–part of the reason I get so antsy about getting my own startup together.

No matter how exactly Mark Zuckerberg got the idea, he has quickly established himself as the man to beat in the social networking scene.

Zuckerberg’s launch strategy was the real genius move. By allowing only college students to login to the network and securing it by requiring an .edu address, Zuckerberg was able to provide an asynchronous communication and sharing network for busy college students. Right at the time in your life where networking becomes so important and faces are thrown before you on a daily basis, Facebook made it all easy. Colleges talked up it’s benefits and the networks spread like wildfire.

Only after establishing a strong and loyal user base did Zuckerberg even consider going to the public. By that time, he was already known as the kid who turned down $1 billion from Yahoo! when their original offer fell apart and gave him a chance to convince his board that Facebook could be bigger solo. According to Wired, analysts think he might be the United States’ richest man under 25, and Silicon Valley loves him.

As a result, Facebook is the now most buzzed-about company in Silicon Valley, and Zuckerberg is constantly compared to visionaries like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Even some of the tech industry’s most legendary figures are genuflecting before Zuckerberg. In an entry on his blog, Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen called Facebook’s transformation “an amazing achievement — one of the most significant milestones in the technology industry in this decade.” Says Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, “I’m in awe.”

Zuckerberg emerged as a true leader after turning down the Yahoo! offer and led Facebook through a transformation that would make it the beast it is today.

I remember where I was when “News Feeds” were announced. I was in class when I was invited to a group on my laptop protesting the new feature. Students hated it because they felt it would open up their inner stalkings and flirtations to all who friended them. Being a college player could never be the same. Luckily, Zuckerberg recovered with what made Facebook strong in the first place–privacy. New privacy settings gave users the ability to lock down everything on their profile if desired so that could keep friend A from finding out about friend B–or hook up A from finding out about hook up B in the college “hook up” culture.

Zuckerberg’s original idea was basically making Facebook a database for your life. In his own words via TechCrunch interview:

MZ: a social graph is a model for Facebook, we’re not trying to make new connections, but mirror the real world. On platform, the idea is providing more utilities for users, part of the bigger social graph.

The public launch was a smoother success. The site continues to grow significantly with members over 35, and my guess would be that is mostly because Facebook is far easier beast to navigate than the jumbled and flashy MySpace.With the industry looking to him, Zuckerberg now has to establish the advertising revenue of Facebook to make a business.

For all the excitement, one sobering fact remains: Facebook has yet to prove itself as a business. The site’s nearly 40 million active users generate more than a billion pageviews a day, but ad clickthrough rates are low. An estimated half of its $150 million in revenue comes from an advertising deal with Microsoft. Independent developers are drawn to Facebook because Zuckerberg lets them keep any advertising revenue their applications generate; if Facebook can’t prove itself as an advertising venue, the deluge of new applications will slow to a trickle.

Movements are being made to establish this next move for Facebook and take it officially from startup to cash cow business. With the incredible valuations coming from all corners of the tech world that some have warned against, Facebook marketed itself well enough to have Microsoft fork over $240 billion for Facebook to expand it’s operations. It’s note often that a young company gets to decide between Google and Microsoft, but Facebook did and became the fifth largest Internet company behind only Google, eBay, Yahoo and Amazon. With this new money, Facebook can launch the ad network it has been talking about for some time.

Now rumors are circulating that MySpace users may soon make a mass exodus to Facebook. While these moves are all just rumors and speculation, there could soon be a migration if Facebook continues to develop above the heads of MySpace’s innovators. The latest secret findings point towards Facebook integrating the tools of LinkedIn, the professional networking site. Allowing users to separate friends into groupings with separate privacy settings and providing resources for networking could easily bring in more users from the 35+ age group that is showing growth on Facebook and draw people away from the limited connection options of LinkedIn.One thing is for sure, Zuckerberg is not taking the easy way out. He is now worth an estimated $3 billion and leading Facebook into its next strategic moves. Via his TechCruch interview:

Q: hypothetically, News Corp buys Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace, how would the merge. MZ: it will never happen (laughter).

For more on the future of Facebook and their upcoming advertising program release, check out this article from Wired.