A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
During a recent conversation I heard several entrepreneurs say they didn’t have time, energy or money to invest in the holidays.
I get the money, but they are wrong about the time and energy, especially if they would like to goose both the creativity and productivity of themselves and their teams.
Just the act of getting away from your startup for a few hours, both mentally and physically and eating real food will clear your brain leading to improved creativity and productivity.
You can accelerate that improvement if you unplug completely.
The holidays are a tough time of year for many; even more so if they are feeling rejected—whether real or perceived.
Just touching a warm object seems to stem the feelings and subsequent depression and even loss of self-worth.
Notably, touching something warm after a feeling of ostracism — like holding a warm cup of coffee — is enough to halt and even reverse some of these autonomic responses. (…) The findings, of course, don’t just explain why so many lonely souls while away the hours at Starbucks, embracing a warm cup of joe.
Knowing that, you can jump your own efforts an order of magnitude by taking a few minutes to reach out to someone who is lonely—not just now, but all year ’round.
You may not have the time or energy to volunteer, but how much effort does it take when you’re getting coffee to chat with a stranger who looks down?
And who knows what great things will result or what you may learn from your caring effort?
Option Sanity™ is inclusive. 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.
Venture Summit Silicon Valley 2012 really brought home to me, yet again, the importance of being in the “right” crowd in order to move forward as a startup CEO. This event was packed with a mixture of entrepreneurs, VCs, angels, bank and debt financing partners and press. All the things necessary to succeed.
However, one of the most important issues seems to be the ability to network. While all the necessary people were here, gaining value from the experience was more related to being able to meet the right people. To do this should be easy in this environment, but I saw a lot of people who had difficulty going up and introducing themselves to other participants, or who didn’t have their 10-second explanation of what their company does clearly articulated.
In fact, it was quite interesting to see how many of the entrepreneurs present had difficulty with one or both of these issues; to aggressively introduce themselves to others and who couldn’t smoothly describe what they did in a few sentences.
How is it possible to be willing to pay so much money to be in the right place and still stumble on the goal line?
The density of interesting persons was sufficiently high where this may not have been a significant problem, but as a startup CEO it is absolutely essential at all times to be able to say what the company does, in a simple and easy to understand manner. Especially to people who are not experts in the area you are working in, which describes most investors and partners.
I’d like to laud Tony Perkins and AlwaysOn to have put on a conference that brings together entrepreneurs and potential funders in such an intimate setting. The surroundings were beautiful at the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay, the people interesting, and the keynotes, presentations and breakouts well thought out.
Mobile, cloud, big data, industrial internet – up
Social media – down
The most interesting aspect of AlwaysOn Venture Summit Silicon Valley was getting a perspective for where the technology industry is going and what’s being funded. There are a number of major trends that entrepreneurs need to be aware of while building companies and investors have clarity around if planning an investment to drive towards a profitable exit.
AlwaysOn VSSV is an annual gathering of some of the leading entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley and beyond, focused on understanding investment themes and technologies that will drive the future.
At this particular conference, it was clear that one of the most important trends was the significantly reduced presence of Internet and social media startups among the speakers and on the panels. The seemingly unstoppable social media storm has slowed down quite a bit.
One of the factors cited for this was that there was a saturation of these types of startups and another was that investors, having invested heavily in these companies over the past few years, were looking for investments with more predictable outcomes.
The effects of the GroupOn and Facebook IPOs (among others) resulted in negative investor sentiment toward these types of businesses.
So, what’s in vogue these days?
Mobile and big data companies seem to have taken over where Internet and social media left off. The opportunity in the mobile space is a result of a movement that started about a decade ago when people moved from the desktop to the laptop. The interaction with computers is now iterating to handheld devices such as smartphones and tablets, which are with us most of the time and collect data on what we do, where we are and who we interact with.
All this collected data forms the basis of the big data opportunity. The ability to use this data to deepen our understanding of customers, manufacturing processes and many other areas has been a dream of business people, politicians and technologists for many years.
I’m personally very happy about these trend shifts. Partially because EMANIO is perfectly positioned to take part of the development of this new industry of big data and analysis, but also because it has been difficult to understand the business basis of the social media phenomenon.
It has been difficult to discern a pattern for success within social media, but with mobile and big data this is much more logical.
Usually, when people talk about “too big to fail” they are referring to financial institutions and insurance companies.
But what happens when a company is too big to reign in? When it does what it wants and wields so much political clout that investigations seem to evaporate?
Walmart is such a company.
But maybe this time they will have to answer for their actions.
Because, fortunately, it is The New York Times that has been doing the investigating, not a government entity or by Wal-Mart—the internal investigation was shut down by company executives when the evidence wasn’t in their favor—and has been ongoing for years.
It seems that much of Walmart’s global growth in Mexico and other countries has been fueled by bribes.
Rather, Wal-Mart de Mexico was an aggressive and creative corrupter, offering large payoffs to get what the law otherwise prohibited. It used bribes to subvert democratic governance — public votes, open debates, transparent procedures. It used bribes to circumvent regulatory safeguards that protect Mexican citizens from unsafe construction. It used bribes to outflank rivals.
In a statement a Walmart spokesman said, “We are committed to having a strong and effective global anticorruption program everywhere we operate and taking appropriate action for any instance of noncompliance.”
But actions speak louder than words and Walmart’s actions are a case study of leadership failure in the home office—all the way to the top.
But Wal-Mart’s leaders did not tell Mexican authorities about his allegations, not even after their own investigators concluded there was “reasonable suspicion” to believe laws had been violated, records and interviews show.
It seems similar tactics were used in India and China, too.
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is a federal law that makes it a crime for American corporations or their subsidiaries to bribe foreign officials and the Justice Department and SEC Have started their own investigations.
As the investigations unfold it will be interesting to see if a corporation can, indeed, be so big that it’s above the law.
On a related topic.
One more thought for those who believe that newspapers are no longer relevant.
I seriously doubt that any Internet media company, let alone a blogger, could or would have mounted this investigation and stuck with it—nor can this story be told in 140 character spurts.
No matter what happens we owe a debt to The New York Times.
Over the years some people take my expanding box idea and try and tell me that the boxes are actually replaced, not expanded as I described yesterday.
I (respectfully) tell them they are wrong.
It isn’t about replacement or creating boxes within boxes, it’s about expansion.
Everything that existed in the old box continues to exist, but new dimensions are added, because the box is larger.
And it especially isn’t about ‘using up’ what’s in your box before you can expand it; it’s about choosing to explore beyond what’s known and/or comfortable—or not.
We all push our boundaries organically as we age; it happens through experience and just plain living—and we’re not even conscious of doing it.
Some folks enjoy consciously pushing back boundaries in evolutionary ways, exploring new areas a bit at a time.
Others take a revolutionary approach and willingly leap into the unknown, not knowing where they will land or if they’ll survive. Very scary—but the unknown has always been scary.
Most of us combine all three types, organic, evolutionary and revolutionary, with ascendancy changing depending on what’s happening in our world—as well as the larger world.
What needs to be understood is that the person who leaps into the unknown is not intrinsically more valuable than the person whose box enlarges organically through their own life experiences or the ones whose boxes increase incrementally through conscious, measured efforts.
All three types, along with their varied, changing combinations, are necessary for life and for Life to continue on our planet.
Look at any list of great innovators from the past and then think of all the people who enhanced/changed/added to the original ideas; then add on all the lives involved, one way or another, with these ideas.
All the contributions have value within their own world—what is different is the size of each innovator’s world and since society tends to equate size to value—the bigger the greater the worth.
Not all of us want to/can change the world, but each of us can take care of/improve our little bit of it.
As for me, I’d hate to live in a world where all the little bits were a mess because everybody was out changing the whole.
Shopping may not be exactly the kind of subject matter you expect when you visit, but you have to admit it’s timely.
Although not everybody loves it, “I hate shopping. If I need something, even a pair of socks, my assistant has to get them for me. I hate shopping!” The quote is anonymous, but it could be my sister, except she doesn’t have an assistant.
Shopping serves many purposes.
Tammy Faye Bakker, she of the four-inch false eyelashes, thinks shopping is therapeutic, “I always say shopping is cheaper than a psychiatrist.”
I’ve seen many comparisons of shopping and sex, but Adrienne Gusoff’s is one of the funniest, “Shopping is better than sex. If you’re not satisfied after shopping you can make an exchange for something you really like.”
Shopping is different for women and men as pointed out by Elayne Boosler, “When women are depressed, they eat or go shopping. Men invade another country. It’s a whole different way of thinking.”
I think men should learn to eat or go shopping, but as Cynthia Nelms so wisely says, “If men liked shopping, they’d call it research.” That’s OK, research beats war any day.
Then there is Usher, who is either more introspective or more honest than most men, “I was so nervous…I just had to go shopping”
And with just nine more shopping days nervous is what a lot of you probably are, so go shopping.
Organic foods may make you less generous. Men are dumber around women. People filter language through their fingers. New fathers pay less. Women use red to impress men.
Her goal: to determine when we’re most likely to divulge intimate facts and when we’re apt to keep our lives to ourselves.
TMI has another incarnation in the form of the not-bragging brag, which is truly annoying.
Enter the self-deprecating boast known as the “humblebrag,” a term devised by the comedian Harris Wittels, a writer for the NBC series “Parks and Recreation…”
Finally, if you love words as I do, it is interesting to note that similar sensationalism is found in the hard copy world, too.
Last week, the British newspaper The Guardian broke a story from the dictionary world that seemed, at first blush, to be quite scandalous indeed.
PS Sorry to be so late. I wrote this and forgot to click publish:(
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
How do you treat your customers? At what point does generating revenue out-gun your ethics? In other words, to what lengths will you go to make money?
Nobody expects much from Facebook when it comes to privacy, although not everybody takes their practices lying down.
At the beginning, Goggle positioned itself differently when its highly publicized informal corporate motto “don’t be evil” morphed into “You can make money without doing evil,” the sixth point of its corporate philosophy—but that was then.
When it comes to privacy, Europeans enjoy a high degree of legal protection, unlike Americans who receive little-to-none in the name of encouraging commerce and “enhancing the marketing experience.”
The problem, as I said last spring, is that the definitions of words like “evil” are fluid and it’s a sure bet that Wall Street’s definition and that of most entrepreneurs bare little resemblance to each other.
It’s not a question of ‘to track or not to track’; it’s a question of ‘to tell or not to tell’.
And that choice is yours.
Option Sanity™ is transparent.
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.
As usual, he provides great info and insight, but there is a hidden jewel in it and that’s the slide show from his talk.
I work with entrepreneurs (and others) on slide presentations and it seems that no matter how many times they hear/read/see great examples they still have a hard time.
So before reading the post look at the slides.
Are his points obvious? Do you understand what he is saying from just the slides?
When a presentation is done right the whole story is coherent and clear from the pictures and a few simple words on the slides.
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Share the story of your startup today.
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Questions? Email or call me at 360.335.8054 Pacific time.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
During a recent conversation I heard several entrepreneurs say they didn’t have time, energy or money to invest in the holidays.
Usually, when people talk about “too big to fail” they are referring to financial institutions and insurance companies.
One more thought for those who believe that newspapers are no longer relevant.
Over the years some people take my expanding box idea and try and tell me that the boxes are actually replaced, not expanded as I described yesterday.
We’re fast coming up on a new year.
Organic foods may make you less generous. Men are dumber around women. People filter language through their fingers. New fathers pay less. Women use red to impress men. 
