Pacifica Stories

Good Misfortune: Tales From A Recovering Success Addict

Pepperdine graduate, entrepreneur, churchman, story teller and all around impresario Alec McNayr visited the Pacifica community September 29th as the 2027 Minchin Center for Innovation Insight Series Speaker.  Drawing on his experience as a founder of the advertising firm McBeard with college classmate Alan Beard,  Alec described his experience of fast and early success and the ways in which that challenged his assumptions about what the good life truly entails.

In the morning Alec visited our Economics and Entrepreneurship class, bringing to life many of the lessons students have been learning about growth mindset, problem-solving and innovation. Alec’s experience at the genesis of social media advertising spoke directly to the lives of this generation of students who live in the marketing world that McBeard helped create.    Students asked questions about pivotal moments in Alec’s career, ranging from the cringe-worthy failures to the high-profile successes and everything in between.

The evening session started with the origin story of Alec’s first name, which came to his parents as they watched the original Star Wars while young soon-to-be Alec was in utero.  Alec then traced his career starting at Pepperdine doing marketing and the fateful opportunity to pitch the tech firm Nokia, who became a rather big fish first client for his marketing firm, soon to be christened McBeard.  McBeard grew rapidly to several hundred employees after just a few years and established itself in a then-new frontier of social media advertising.  Studios and film promotion quickly became McBeard’s bread and butter as they created marketing programs that went viral just as the concept of ‘going viral’ was going viral itself.  McBeard was sold to Fullscreen Media, which was eventually wrapped up with ATT/Warner Media so Alec, after bootstrapping his firm with a single partner, somewhat ironically ended that phase of his career as a VP for one of the largest media tech firms in the world.

Alec Guinness, it turns out, hated Star Wars and the iconic character he created, Obi Wan Kenobi.  So it happens that a person can have the greatest success imaginable, from the outside perspective, and nevertheless find it unsatisfying. That, as it turns out, was the greatest earn-out of McBeard’s entrepreneurial adventure.  Success can be a performance like any other which, as Alec explained, can sneak up from underneath the surface to exact costs of its own.  The entrepreneurial success Alec enjoyed led to a season of reflection and personal growth that ultimately created more value  to him than any marketing campaign or private equity deal.  Students and community members who participated in this year’s Insight Speaker Series were fortunate to bear witness to Alec’s extraordinary entrepreneurial and personal journey.

For more information about the Minchin Center for Innovation and the Insight Speaker Series, contact Minchin Center Director John Reimers at jreimers@pacificachristian.org.

Explore more stories from our Insight Speaker Series, including an evening with Dr. Anthony Bradley