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If the Shoe Fits: Does the Description Fit Your Startup?

Friday, August 1st, 2014

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

5726760809_bf0bf0f558_mI’ve been working with entrepreneurs since the 1980s.

Sadly, the mindset has changed significantly—and not for the better.

I’m not the only one who feels that way.

German designer Hartmut Esslinger, who met Steve Jobs in 1982 and told him “Apple’s products were incredibly ugly and wasteful in production,” puts it this way.

“There is a bubble where greed meets hype and fake: Too many want to get rich instead of doing something meaningful for mankind, something for progress, to improve life.”

“Greed meets hype and fake;” what a perfect description of so many apps with billion-plus valuations.

The question you need to ask yourself is, “does it fit mine?”

Image credit: HikingArtist

If the Shoe Fits: Scott Adams on Pivots

Friday, June 27th, 2014

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

5726760809_bf0bf0f558_mIn the dim past (1980s on) when I started working with startups they were carefully thought out, market sensitive/smart, with much of the effort focused on being able to sell the product, AKA, generate revenue, whether hardware or software.

They rarely needed to pivot.

The rise of the Internet/web/cloud/mobile and the falling cost of software development, with a focus on iterations and eyeballs, created a different approach and pivoting became the name of the game.

While ‘pivot’ has many definitions, the one that seems most accurate in many cases is “throw it up and see what sticks.”

According to Dilbert’s Scott Adams, this is how to do a startup today.

Here’s the system:
1. Form a team
2. Slap together an idea and put it on the Internet.
3. Collect data on user behavior.
4. Adjust, pivot, and try again.

Thanks to Google Analytics, Optimizely, Bitly, and other tools for measuring customer behavior in real time, a smart team can try different approaches and different products until something works out. A start-up in 2014 is a guess-testing machine.

Adams says this is why good founders have to be good psychologists.

Every entrepreneur is now a psychologist by trade. The ONLY thing that matters to success in our anything-is-buildable Internet world is psychology. How does the customer perceive this product? What causes someone to share? What makes virality happen? What makes something sticky?

Much of what Adams says makes sense, but are these the ideas or solutions that can recharge our economy, juice the job market or solve humanities ills?

Image credit: HikingArtist

AO OnDemand 2014: BeyondCore

Monday, June 9th, 2014

kg_charles-harris

This week I attended AO OnDemand 2014—a good conference for understanding how the enterprise SaaS ecosystem and its up-and-coming young companies are developing.  The conference also details market changes that are happening around mergers and acquisitions and the strategic moves that large enterprise software players are making to position themselves.

As usual there was an interesting group of people there, everything from startup executives to representatives from EMC, SAP, Oracle and others, which made for good networking with a variety of people from interesting companies.

What I’d like to highlight today is BeyondCore, a very interesting data analytics company I’ve been following on the Internet for more than a year.  Since I’m in the big data analytics market myself, I spend a lot of time getting to know the environment and make it a point to follow the most interesting new companies. 

I had the pleasure of meeting the newly hired VP Marketing Sandra Peterson and their CEO Arijit Sengupta.  They’ve created a brilliant piece of software that truly solves some of the problems in the data analytics world—especially when directed at the business user.  Not only does it automatically look for what’s interesting in the data and present it to you, but it also provides you with an automated analysis to help you better understand the relevant points in the data. 

These are exactly the types of functionality that Sandra highlighted when I asked her why she joined the company.  She had only come on board three days prior, so of course it was interesting to understand why an experienced senior marketing executive would join a young company (other than the options package and pay, of course…).

What she brought up was the unique combination of personal characteristics of Arijit, the founder.  His tenacity as a technology visionary to struggle with the problems of building a company against all odds and his infectious communication of the advantages in the product he’d created in a way that average people could understand were clear attractions for her beyond the technology itself.  I certainly saw both when he briefly demoed the product for me.

BeyondCore has an impressive product with a good team; I wish them good fortune and will continue to follow their development and successes.

If the Shoe Fits: Cheating for an Edge

Friday, May 16th, 2014

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

5726760809_bf0bf0f558_mCheating is rife across the board, so seeing more of it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

I think what does surprise is not how overt it is these days, but the assumption that everyone will participate.

Especially when money is involved.

Recently the CEO of soon-to-go-public Arista Networks offered Fortune Sr. Editor at Large Adam Lashinsky, who had written about the company previously, ““friends and family” shares in Arista’s upcoming initial public offering. The offer was explicit….” (He declined.)

Lashinsky saw similar acts before the last tech bubble burst and sees this as a sign that there is indeed a tech bubble that will soon blow up.

When times are so good that executives are willing to disregard the difference between ethical and unctuous behavior, it’s just one sign that the end, relatively speaking, is near.

I’m not sure unctuous applies as an alternative to unethical, but there is no question about the ethics of trying to bribe anyone in a position to affect an IPO.

It’s cheating, plain and simple and the SEC tends to frown on it. 

Sadly, many don’t see it as an ethical lapse, let alone cheating.

They see it as reasonable business practice.

How do you see it?

Image credit: HikingArtist

If the Shoe Fits: Surviving Your Startup

Friday, April 18th, 2014

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

5726760809_bf0bf0f558_m Whether you admire Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post, or not, you can’t argue with her success.

But it came at a cost, “…seven years ago I collapsed from exhaustion, burnout and sleep deprivation. I broke my cheekbone on the way down and got four stitches on my right eye.”

That incident lead Huffington to add a third metric to success’ standard two metrics of money and power.

…the third metric, which includes our well-being, our wisdom, our capacity to wonder and bring joy into our lives, and our capacity to give. Without these four pillars, life is really reduced to our to-do list.

Too many in the startup community do treat their lives as a to-do list, from starting a company through marriage and kids, with sub to-do lists for each.

They lose sight of the simple; seeing life as a series of competitive challenges.

Which I find hilarious, since that attitude harks back to the much maligned Boomers, whose mantra was “life is a challenge to be overcome.”

Granted, there are many challenges that indeed need to be added to our to-do list until overcome, but there are many others that, although noticed, may be passed by, with nary a ripple in our well-being.

Destroying yourself for the sake of a vision benefits no one—not your team, nor your investors, nor your family/friends and least of all yourself.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Entrepreneurs: the Shallowness of Youth and the Myth of Age

Thursday, March 27th, 2014

http://www.flickr.com/photos/deryckh/2884858619/On one hand you have Jim Goetz, partner at Sequoia Capital, lamenting the lack of enterprise startups and on the other you have Sequoia’s Michael Moritz, “an incredibly enthusiastic fan of very talented twentysomethings starting companies. They have great passion. They don’t have distractions like families and children and other things that get in the way.”

Other things such as experience.

The shallowness of so many of today’s startups makes a great deal of sense if you remember the advice given to every aspiring writer, i.e., write about the things you know; write from your own life and experiences.

Investors give entrepreneurs similar advice, which is probably why you have an abundance of hook-up apps, gossip apps, games and social time-wasters.

And then there is the question of what purpose our economic growth actually serves. The most common advice V.C.s give entrepreneurs is to solve a problem they encounter in their daily lives. Unfortunately, the problems the average 22-year-old male programmer has experienced are all about being an affluent single guy in Northern California.

Monday we looked at the economic dangers from Silicon Valley’s generational gap highlighting the incredible waste of talent engendered.

But the real stupidity in the rush to fund the young is that their success is a myth and not backed up by any kind of hard data.

A 2005 paper by Benjamin Jones of the National Bureau of Economic Research studied Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry, medicine, and economics over the past 100 years, as well as the inventors of revolutionary technologies. Jones found that people in their thirties contributed about 40 percent of the innovations, and those in their forties about 30 percent. People over 50 were responsible for 14 percent, the same share as the twentysomethings. Those under the age of 19 were responsible for exactly nothing. One study found that even over the last ten years—the golden age of the prepubescent coder, the youth-obsessed V.C., and the consumer Internet app—the average age of a founder who could claim paternity for a billion-dollar company was a rickety 34.

Everybody in tech focuses on the importance of “data driven” decisions—until the data doesn’t support the decision they want to make.

That’s when they start talking about the importance of “gut instinct” and “unconscious pattern recognition.”

Data only matters when it supports prevailing prejudice.

Flickr image credit: Deryck Hodge

If the Shoe Fits: Security? Who Needs It?

Friday, March 21st, 2014

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

5726760809_bf0bf0f558_mLaunching an app is all about speed, often because there is so little difference they need to grab users before similar app gains traction.

So, like the construction company that cuts corners and in doing so delivers an unsafe structure, consumer apps are often launched with little regard to security.

“There’s so much focus on acquiring customers and delivering products and services that security is not top of mind.” –Tripp Jones, a partner at August Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm.

This isn’t an insider’s secret, but one that is well known to both the industry and those who prey on it.

The result is that as an app’s popularity skyrockets, so does its appeal as a hacking target.

Tinder, the popular dating app, last month acknowledged flaws in its software that would let hackers pinpoint the exact locations of people using the service. Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site, also said last month that hackers had gained access to customer data, including passwords and phone numbers.

Combined with previous hacks, the Target breach in December may have been the final straw for millions of people who are turning back to cash.

“…debit/credit card and personal data has also been reported stolen from Michael’s, Neiman-Marcus, Sally Beauty Supply and kickstarter.com. Plus, there’s the mother of all “oopses:” An Experian -owned database holding a stunning 200 million consumer records was cracked by a Vietnamese identity theft ring, it was revealed earlier this month.”

If people turning to a preference for cash transactions really is the start of a trend as opposed to a short-term fear reaction startups are especially vulnerable.

Even younger users, who seem to care little about privacy, will react negatively if (when) they are subject to identity theft.

More and more people are coming to understand that “secure site” is more oxymoron than fact.

Data security is much like the real-world infrastructure that politicians rarely fund, because the return in votes is too low.

Much like the bridge that needs to fail before people support the money required to upgrade it, sites need to be hacked before management is willing to focus on security.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Entrepreneurs: Is First-Mover Status a Winner?

Thursday, March 20th, 2014

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tmray02/2726353123/

What do Google, Facebook, Amazon and iPods have in common?

None can claim first-mover status, yet all are recognized winners.

First-mover position isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

In fact, it takes a very special mindset beyond what’s mentioned in the article if you are truly in first position.

Let me illustrate.

Way back in late 2009 I worked with an offshore client who had developed a location-based advertising  platform that provided ads, bought through a bidding system, targeted to users’ exact location, context and behavior in applications on mobile phones, portable navigation systems and internet sites.

They had fully developed software and filed for patents overseas and in the US.

Unfortunately, they were years ahead of the market and couldn’t get traction.

As a result of the frustration and the educational effort/cost needed to move the market they chose to pivot and move on to other ideas.

It was a logical choice at the time, although it doesn’t look like it in hind-sight.

First-mover status, especially in consumer tech, equals primary market educator—an effort that makes the actual product development feel like a piece of cake.

That ‘s why it is often second (or even third or fourth)-mover status where you find the big winners.

Flickr image credit: Tom Ray

If the Shoe Fits: Show Your Love

Friday, February 14th, 2014

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

5726760809_bf0bf0f558_m

Today is Valentine’s Day and a good time to consider how best to show your love for your team.

Basically, there are two ways bosses show their love, either with cool tools or magic minutes.

Think about the old saying, “give a fool a tool and you’ll still have a fool,” which is frequently forgotten in our tech-happy world.

For discussion purposes, the term ‘fool’ denotes an underperforming person or group.

Showing your love by showering them with the latest, greatest technology or apps is unlikely to turn the fools around.

That’s where the magic minutes come in, because the majority of fools really aren’t fools.

They’re more like lost souls looking for a path to productivity, personal satisfaction and success.

Most people want their company to succeed, want to do their work well and want to feel good about what they do.

And whether you like it or not, when you chose to found a company you took on the duel roles of leader and manager.

That means your real job is spending whatever minutes are required to guide them to the path out of fooldom and into becoming an appreciated member of a powerful team.

It’s also one of the most important and satisfying experiences you will ever have no matter what happens to your company.

Image credit: HikingArtist

85 Individuals vs. 3.5 Billion People

Wednesday, February 5th, 2014

http://www.flickr.com/photos/playerx/6046898628/

There’s been a social media firestorm since Tom Perkins had his say in defense of the so-called 1%.

I asked a retired serial entrepreneur who was funded by KPCB decades ago when the names on the door were actually working partners what he thought.

Tom was reasonably liberal when he was running KP. Many VC’s who had made tons of dough became very conservative as they aged, supporting right wing Republican and Libertarian causes. They seemed to regard it as an insult that the government was trying to take even a tiny smidgeon of their billions in taxes.

I get why Perkins comments incited so much noise, both sincere and politically correct, but the real story a few days earlier didn’t get the play it deserved.

Here’s the headline that should have gotten more attention.

World’s richest 85 people have as much as bottom half the population

This means the world’s poorest 3,550,000,000 (3.55 billion) people must live on what the richest 85 possess.

The statistics are from non-profit Oxfam and are neither political nor partisan—they just are.

Nor are they an indictment of the US, since they are global.

In line with the mantra of “think globally, act locally” what can you do to help change this?

KG Charles-Harris says,

“It’s really action in the little ways that makes a difference.  Not everyone has to do big things, but small things are possible every day with little cost.”

Here are some ideas,

  1. Choose your role models more carefully; Richard Branson, Bill Gates and, more recently Mark Zukerberg are all in the 85%, but they model their lives very differently from Larry Ellison or the Koch Brothers.
  2. Commit to giving one week’s worth of what you normally spend on coffee to a cause you care about.
  3. Do the same with the time you save.

I’ll end by borrowing a line from a 1971 Alka-Seltzer® ad, “Try it, you’ll like it.”

Flickr image credit: playerx

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