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

I found several useful/interesting reads yesterday and thought I’d share them with you.

If you’re wondering what’s hot (security) and what’s not (social and dating apps) take a look at the thoughts of Sequoia Capital’s Mike Moritz after recently listening to 146 pitches in a row.

Investing in startups is like bird-watching, (…) For venture capitalists, Moritz advises not to look at the flock, but at each individual startup. “Each one is different, and I try to find an interestingly complected bird in a flock rather than try to make an observation about an entire flock,” Moritz has said.

That said, some trends appear when the looking at the group as a whole.

Moritz is also the PayPal board member whose penny-pinching advice saved the company in 2008 and every founder should be following it now.

“That focus was instrumental in PayPal’s survival,” Roelof Botha said. “We could have been spending money willy-nilly and fallen by the wayside by accident.”

Tenacity is lauded in the startup world; the idea is that passion and never quitting are the hallmark of successful founders, but the story of François Reichelt proves that Kenny Rogers offers a more common sense approach.

“Know when to hold ’em and know when to fold ’em.”

Last are two links that provide useful tools for you.

First is a way to find company emails when you have the name.

Oleg Campbell has automated the process of hunting for someone’s corporate email with a nifty new Chrome extension built on top of Gmail. It’s called, descriptively, Name2Email.

Second is tech lawyer David Tollen’s Tech Contracts book and website, with helpful information and free forms for SaaS, software licensing, and other IT agreements.

It’s a plain-English how-to guide on IT contracts for lawyers, contract managers, salespeople, IT staffers, and executives.

Image credit: HikingArtist

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

In 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

Jeff Bezos holds kick-ass entrepreneur credentials.

First, he really did create something humongous from nothing.

Secondly, he didn’t patent every innovation, like one-click purchasing, that would have crippled all of ecommerce.

The following video is from 2009.

Here’s the money quote, or perhaps mantra is a better label.

“Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood. You do something that you genuinely believe in, that you have conviction about, but for a long period of time well-meaning people may criticize that effort, and when you receive criticism from well-meaning people it pays to say — first of all, search yourself — are they right? And if they are you need to adapt what you’re doing. If they’re not right, if you really have conviction that they’re not right then you need to have that long term willingness to be misunderstood.” 

But it’s his recommendation that you need to honestly explore the possibility that the nay-sayers may be correct and you need to adapt that is most important.

Thanks to Business Insider for reincarnating this information.

YouTube credit: AspenInstitute

Do you read Agnes? A few days ago she asked her friend if she was superstitious; when her friend said not often Agnes told her she was sortofstitious. Agnes then made an over-the-top superstitious comment and her friend said she was megastitious.

The wordplay got me thinking.

In reality, most entrepreneurs are superpreneurs or they won’t make any headway.

Then there are the megapreneurs who manage to innovate, create successful companies and then do it again (think Tony Hsieh) or stay in the same place and keep innovating (think Steve Jobs, the Google Guys or Intuit’s Scott Cook).

However, there are still plenty of sortofpreneurs, who create me-too businesses (think daily deals), that stand little chance of success (although they often get funding), instead of real innovation.

They have may have the passion of a superpreneur, but in their rush to riches they want to skate—not innovate, i.e.,

• not solve a problem that needs solving or create something that nobody even knows they want;
• not provide real value to stakeholders; and
• not create an entity that provides jobs and futures to its people.

It’s not that sortofpreneurs can’t become superpreneurs, but to do so they need to give up (relatively) instant gratification and be willing to both slog and pivot as necessary.

A tall order for someone who is in it for the money.

Flickr image credit: 401(K) 2013

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

Long-term success is as much about attitude as it is about product.

How do you rate yourself on the following?

I believe that

• good information can come from nobody; bad information can come from somebody;
• values verbalized must be values lived;
• to be valid, a social contract can not embrace the concept of “but me;
• fairness comes from applying all rules evenly and equally, no exceptions;
• listening, especially when it’s something you don’t want to hear or from an unusual source; and
• it’s sometimes necessary to modify or let go of an initial vision and pivot in order to succeed.

What would you add to the list?

Option Sanity™ embodies fairness.
Come visit Option Sanity for an easy-to-understand, simple-to-implement stock allocation system. 
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Warning.
Do not attempt to use Option Sanity™ without a strong commitment to business planning, financial controls, honesty, ethics, and “doing the right thing.”
Use only as directed.
Users of Option Sanity may experience sudden increases in team cohesion and worker satisfaction. In cases where team productivity, retention and company success is greater than typical, expect media interest and invitations as keynote speaker.

Flickr image credit: HikingArtist

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

Pivots are the name of the game, but why would someone go from founding a commodities company in Dubai (that died when the economy crashed) to creating an e-commerce site offering merchandise from socially conscious startups supporting a wide variety of causes?

“What I was doing before was incredibly unfulfilling.”

So says Brent Freeman , founder of Roozt.

Unfulfilling.

It’s a more common sentiment than you might think.

Even when the exit is lucrative it may not be satisfying.

As someone once said to me, “My startup job made me rich, but it didn’t make me happy.”

Perhaps that’s why so many alumni from places like Microsoft and Google become socially responsible angels.

How fulfilling is your startup?

Option Sanity™  is fulfilling.

Come visit Option Sanity for an easy-to-understand, simple-to-implement stock allocation system.  It’s so easy a CEO can do it.

Warning.

Do not attempt to use Option Sanity™ without a strong commitment to business planning, financial controls, honesty, ethics, and “doing the right thing.”
Use only as directed.
Users of Option Sanity may experience sudden increases in team cohesion and worker satisfaction. In cases where team productivity, retention and company success is greater than typical, expect media interest and invitations as keynote speaker.

Flickr image credit: HikingArtist

As an article on in Forbes points out, your culture is the only part of a company that can’t be duplicated and is, therefore, your biggest and most sustainable asset—if you take the time and invest the energy to make it more than great-sounding words.

While the article doesn’t break new ground it did offer up a great image bite that may resonate with you.

All music is made from the same 12 notes. All culture is made from the same five components: behaviors, relationships, attitudes, values and environment. It’s the way those notes or components are put together that makes things sing.

It points out that the reason that culture can’t be duplicated is context, meaning that two people arranging the same components will have a different result.

That’s because context = MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) and there is not such thing as two people with the same MAP.

Even identical twins won’t have identical MAP because MAP is the result of perception, not just experience.

The problem is building a culture that sings, whether concerto, R&B, pop or rap, takes effort, entrepreneurs are always in a time crunch and culture gets pushed to the back burner.

When that happens just remember that when reality requires you to pivot, when success requires you to staff up quickly, when the bugs surface or your competition is killing you the strength to overcome will be found in your culture—or not.

Flickr image credit: The-Lane-Team

I read an article on naming a company or product, but it is the need to REname it that I want to focus on today.

Not when, why or what to rename it, but the founder resistance to doing so.

I work with both foreign and US entrepreneurs and although I’m not any kind of naming expert I’m often asked what I think of the product or company name (often one-in-the-same).

As a good wordsmith, I can spot many of the obvious problems described in the article, especially those that center on meaning, sound, spelling, etc. (I have no knowledge of legal stuff, other than knowing that domain availability is not sufficient.)

The resistance to any suggestion of name change is almost laughable—not just resistance, but umbrage—about the same reaction you would get if you comment unfavorably on a child’s name.

Yes, startups are often compared to babies and references to founders giving birth are common and no where is that more obvious than when discussing the name.

Falling in love with anything in your company, let alone a name, is never a wise move, since responding to your market is a big chunk of your success.

But strange as it seems, founders are more willing to pivot than they are to change a product name.

Go figure.

Flickr image credit: Jack Dorsey