KG sent me a link to a post in the WSJ by Jason Nazar, co-founder/CEO of Docstoc, which was just acquired by Intuit.

It should be mandatory reading for every budding entrepreneur.

Why?

Because it tells the other side of what’s involved building something with just a four million dollar investment.

The “other side” is about the long days (and nights), the stress and the negative effects on family and friends.

All the stuff that is rarely mentioned and when it is discussed it’s either glossed over and minimized or rationalize to the point that most entrepreneurs shrug it off.

KG understands this well, because he is traveling the same road.

And while you may not be able to ask Jason Nazar questions you can ask KG in the comments and he’ll respond.

As the CEO of a startup, I’m really nothing more than the Chief Hustler. 

I hustle to attract team members, capital, advisors, etc.  I also hustle to ensure that we’re moving along quickly enough to be ahead of the market, though resource constraints and ambiguous choices always want to slow us down. 

The ability to attract resources (team, capital, etc.) is probably the most important job that I have – most people who write about the startup CEOs job mention the visionary, cultural or managerial aspects of the job.  For me it’s the constant hustling.

My hustle starts as soon as I wake up in the morning – pick up my iPhone and start reading and replying to emails at around 04:30.  Then I move on to reading articles from news sources, keeping an ever vigilant eye out for potential competitors (especially ones with abundant funding or interesting technologies).  There is an element of a negative flutter in the stomach whenever I come up on one of these – how will they affect the market, will they try to poach my carefully developed team, what is their technology basis, how do I find out more about them…

As a hustler, I’m basically a sales person. 

I’m selling investors, potential team members and anyone who wants to listen or who can potentially affect the development of what we’re building in a positive manner.  And as a hustler, there has to be a little of the “confidence man” in me – providing security where none can be had.  Making people believe that the impossible is possible, not because I’m trying to cheat someone out of hard earned cash or time, but because I truly believe it myself, and with their help it will come closer to being reality.  Hustling to create something out of nothing.

This hustler is very grateful for the people he’s getting the pleasure to work with to create something that is slated to be industry changing.  I just got a sneak peak of the UI/UX and I’m really happy with the initial cut.  Of course, it will have to be completely redone after our beta trials, but it’s so revolutionary that I’m now getting positive flutters in my belly – the kind of excitement that makes me want to shout from the roof-tops, “We’re coming!” 

But I have to temper my excitement – we still have a long way to go.  Months of hard work with the team, more delays and disappointments, and more insecurity about whether we’ll succeed or not.  Every day, however, is a joy because of the people I have around me; my woman, my friends, my family, my team.   To say “my” doesn’t clearly denote how I feel – not ownership, but privilege in being able to be part of their lives and have them in mine.

This is the essence of entrepreneurship at its best – good people, good goals, good development and good prospects.  It’s a pity that it isn’t always like this.  It does, however, make me appreciate the good times when they are here.

Thank you all.

As I was entering AO OnDemand 2014 and moving toward the main conference auditorium, I ran into Kevin Longa, a young entrepreneur I had met two years ago at a Hackers & Founders meetup.  We got to talking and I found him very pleasant; having just graduated from UCLA he was on a search for what next he wanted to do.  Keving found that deciding on whether to join a startup, go traveling to experience more of his Asian roots (he’s mixed) or continue his education was challenging and in some ways confusing.

Well, whenever I meet young people at that stage in life I believe it’s important to impress upon them that taking some time up-front to experience life in other parts of the world and with other people than usual is often a good way to get perspective and get started on the next stage of life.  I believe it’s important to actually take some time to experience life, before being continually caught up in the hustle and bustle of one of the most stressful cultures on earth—American society.

To my surprise he listened attentively to my pontification and later embarked upon a long trip to Asia while also shooting a documentary series encompassing the four passions of his life – food, entrepreneurship, travel and film.  He has now reached the point where he is in post-production with some of the work he has created and is continuously adding to his body of work.  And above all—he seems happy.

Encountering him now, two years later, was a great experience for me.  After his travels he received a scholarship to Draper University where he further immersed himself in the art and craft of entrepreneurship.  His greatest takeaway was how to think about problem solving, team building, adversity and loneliness as an entrepreneur, rather than hard skills such as law, market research or accounting.

There is no doubt in my mind that Kevin will be successful.  He has an ability to learn and to adapt to new situations in a way that’s unusual for a lot of people.  In addition, he has that quality that is absolutely necessary in an entrepreneur: tenacity. 

I’ve seen so many get out of the game just as they were about to break through.  The level of determination and sacrifice necessary to succeed is rarely stressed enough, but anyone who has succeeded knows that success would often elude us, without “stick-to-itiveness” and an almost masochistic ability to increase commitment when others would judge it hopeless. 

This is true regardless of industry and calling—the cost of entrepreneurship is high and fraught with failure.  People like Kevin will succeed because he works tirelessly, learning and pushing forward even when things are difficult. 

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.

Yesterday was the first day of the SIIA Maximize Conference (Software and Internet Industry Association) and it was fantastic, in spite of starting with an apparent mistake.   Mine, not theirs…

I thought I had registered for Software Pricing’s 4-hour seminar with Jim Geisman, an expert in how to price software products, both SaaS, on-premise, embedded and other models.  Apparently I hadn’t, since I wasn’t on the list, but In spite of that I was allowed to participate.

The session was intimate and excellent and Jim provided a lot of deep information and practical advice for how to think around the price-setting challenge.   The audience was comprised of CEOs, CFOs, VPs of Marketing and Sales from large companies and startups alike.  It was exceedingly interesting to see how pricing is a problem across several different sizes of companies and industry segments.

There is no question that Jim and his partner Chris Mele are the most knowledgeable people with regards to software pricing I’ve come across after more than two decades building software companies.  The importance of pricing optimally—setting the price in a way that entices the highest number of customers without leaving money on the table—is a discipline that I’ll definitely pay more attention to in the future and I’m sure to use Jim’s services to ensure we don’t make any mistakes in this important area as we go to market.

SIIA’s Rhianna Collier and her team from the software division put together tremendous networking opportunities with both arranged meetings and speed dating sessions.  It was some of the best networking I’ve experienced, yielding several additional companies to round out a set of initial test users for the system we’re launching in September.  This is very exciting, as finding initial customers is one of the most challenging parts of releasing an enterprise product. 

When selling to organizations, the challenge is to have managers and executives allocate their and their teams’ time and resources to iron out the wrinkles in a new product.  This is not a trivial challenge for a startup. 

The networking was valuable not only for me, but also for people from companies such as HP, InformationBuilders and SAP, with whom I spoke.

I’ll end with a story that proves once again just how small the world really is.  As I was standing in the first part of the arranged networking I started speaking to Shannon Murray from Totango who was surprised when I knew of the company.  It’s a small series B company that just raised 15.5m and are in an interesting space called Customer Success software. 

I explained that I followed their blog, as probably thousands of others do.  The blog is written by Ellis Luk who, together with their CEO Guy Nirpaz, has created a company blog that is helpful and instructive by enabling their customers to speak about their problems and how they are dealing with the challenges around enabling their customers.  This is crucial for a SaaS business to get right as renewals are completely dependent on this.

The first day was very good and I’m looking forward to the following two.

A couple of weeks ago KG wrote about ageism and attitude and I followed up by considering an often ignored basic fact about age and change.

However, what I realized is that we had never shared the primary article detailing the situation.

But that’s OK, because it’s been turned into visualization for those of you who would rather watch than read.

 Credit: Jonathan Ezer

A few months ago I read the book, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat.  It was a tremendously interesting book and confirmed many of the concerns I’ve been having about my own industry for some time.  Subsequently there have been a slate of articles wondering about AI and how the industry is progressing.

One of the book’s premises was that we need to take a step back and think about the moral and ethical basis of what we’re doing and how and what we’re imparting to these machines. 

I believe that it will be difficult, or impossible, for the AI industry to change direction mid-streams and start being concerned about morality and ethics.  Most of the funding for AI comes from DARPA and other such institutions that are part of the military and affiliated organizations.  Finance is second largest funding source.

Most of the people who are concerned about AI (including James Barrat) worry about when machines gain human level intelligence.  I am much more concerned about what happens before that.  Today it is said that the most sophisticated AI has the intelligence of a cockroach.  This is no small feat, but it also brings with it some clear implications – cockroaches have important drives and instincts that guide their behavior.  Survival, resource acquisition, reproduction, etc. are all things that cockroaches do.  How far away are we from when our AI exhibit these characteristics?  What about when we get to rat-level intelligence?  

At that point machines will be very powerful and control many of the essential functions of society.  Imagine a frightened rat (or 6 month old toddler) with infinite power – what actions would they take to protect themselves or get what they perceive they want or need?  How would they react if we stood in their way?  How concerned would they be with the consequences of their actions?  Most adults don’t do this today.

Before we achieve human level intelligence in machines, we’ll have to deal with less intelligent and probably more dangerous and powerful entities.  More dangerous because they will not have the knowledge or processing power to think of consequences, and also because they will be controlling our cars, airplanes, electricity grids, public transportation and many other systems.  

Most AI optimists ignore the dangerous “lower mammal, toddler and childhood” stages of AI development and only see the potential benefits at the end.  But we need to think about the path there and what we can do to prepare as individuals and as a society.

Not to speak about the fact that once we reach human level intelligence in AI, we’ll be dealing with an intelligence that is so alien to anything we know (after all, we have lots of experience with cockroaches, rats and toddlers), and no way of knowing what its motives are.  But that will be left for another discussion.

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

Yet again Sarah Milstein and her crew at Lean Startup have knocked it out of the ball park.  The first time I experienced it was at their Lean Startup Conference last year.  With the new Office Optional Conference, they have tapped into a motherload of issues that affect the Future of Knowledge Work and Workers.  Companies both large and small are struggling with attracting, growing, retaining and managing distributed teams, just like an increasing portion of the workforce is enticed by the ability to work from home (or anywhere).

I attended with Galina Landes who leads our engineering team, and one of the great experiences was to see how differently she and I experienced distributed work and strategies for improving what we’re doing.   But then, engineers have always had a more logical approach to most things than those of us working in management or other functions in a company.  Combining our perspectives and discussing strategies was interesting and very productive.

This conference on distributed teams dealt with collaboration, communication and the tools necessary for achieving goals as a team and creating a positive work environment.  I’ve personally struggled with this in my previous company and now as we are building a new one.   Our small team is fully distributed, although several of us are in the San Francisco Bay Area and can meet face to face when necessary.  But it’s still challenging to build a company culture, have good communication and trust without which we can’t achieve our strategic goals. 

Personally, I got a lot of ideas for tools and strategies to enhance our collaboration and communication.  In addition, many of the speakers spoke about the need to create an environment where “water cooler talk” and informal communication (and interruptions) was acceptable.  Just like in a normal office environment.  After all, we human beings are (mostly) social creatures and need to create bonds and trust with those with whom we work to achieve goals.

It was a pleasure to see that so many people from large organizations such as GE to small startups like EMANIO, and everything in-between, dealing with the issues around an increasingly distributed workforce.  In interacting with fellow participants, it was clear that we were all neophytes in the area and even those organizations that successfully had deployed a distributed model were still learning and adjusting their strategies and methods.  Office Optional was a great learning experience and I’d exhort anyone dealing with these issues to participate next time they put it on.  It was invaluable for us.

My only negative feedback would be that toward the latter part, the speakers became a bit repetitive.  However, for a first conference small issues like this should be expected and judging from my prior experience with the Lean Startup team the next one will excellent.

The day ended with a conversation between Eric Ries, who wrote The Lean Startup, and Stanford’s Bob Sutton, who penned the No Asshole Rule, and more recently, Scaling Up Excellence.  Though the conference would have been very good on its own, this was the crowning part of my experience.  Professor Sutton is an engaged and charismatic speaker with deep knowledge of how organizations work.  Excellence is what we’re all striving for and he provided a captivating roadmap for how to achieve it.

Image credit: HikingArtist

The results of a new survey of 500 business leaders drives the home the importance of personality, which makes perfect sense, since it is “personality traits” that underlay “cultural fit.”

78% cited “personality” as the most desirable quality in employees, followed in importance by “cultural alignment,” and then finally “skill-set.”

“Skill-set” as a distant number three makes perfect sense considering the speed of change, especially when technology is involved.

Skills can be learned.

For a prime example, consider Declara CEO Ramona Pierson.

In 1984, at age 22, Pierson was hit by a drunk driver. The car tore her body apart, slicing open her throat, gouging her chest, leaving her heart and lungs fully exposed.

Pierson was in a coma for 18 months. She was totally blind for 11 years, though she has regained partial sight in her left eye thanks to a corneal transplant. It was the process of having to learn just about everything from scratch (including how to breath and walk) that made her realize how important it was to be a lifelong learner.

Which shaped her approach to hiring.

“We don’t hire people for a job. We look for very smart people and look for roles that let them continue along their path.”

KG Charles-Harris has a similar attitude and since I’m helping him with staffing I thought I’d share his Hiring Manifesto with you today.

It’s one I hope more managers/companies adopt.

QUARRIO HIRING MANIFESTO

Quarrio has used AI technologies (natural language processing & machine learning) to create the technology that enables natural language querying and analytics of structured and semi-structured data sources.  We believe this will change the analytics and enterprise software markets.   

We are seeking programmers to join our team who are willing to work for options until we are funded.  We expect funding to be in the coming 3-4 months.

Our compensation plan is completely transparent and we are happy to share it once we establish mutual interest.

WHAT WE WANT

Most companies, especially startups, look for “stars” with extensive experience in specific skills sets.

Quarrio has a different approach.

We seek people willing to work hard, constantly learn new stuff and who are diligent and dependable. People who perform at their peak because they care and constantly strive to improve. Our current team is truly world class and we plan on maintaining that standard as we grow.

We are a company of experience; our current team members are all over 40 with extensive and varied backgrounds. While their knowledge is deep they love learning; they know multiple languages and operating systems, are familiar with many others and have learned new ones as needed for our product.

WHAT WE NEED IMMEDIATELY

Programmers with

• Ruby or related knowledge
• Ruby on Rails
• HTML 5 & CSS3 & JavaScript

OR

• willingness to learn them coupled with a viable technical base on which to build.

WE DO CARE ABOUT

• Your attitude and
• fit with Quarrio’s culture.

WE DO NOT CARE

• If your experience comes from a formal background, working/OJT experience, self-taught at home or different tech background, but strong desire to learn and branch out;
• where you live (current team includes Seattle); or
• what you are.

One or another of our current team has faced and overcome every prejudice that is/was active in the workplace.

First and foremost, we care about getting the work done, so by hiring your mind and attitude as opposed to your body and proximity we have the luxury of finding talent that many companies miss. For example,

• wounded warriors and others with disabilities;
• minorities, including extraterrestrials;
• mothers re-entering the work force;
• “old” people;
• women;
• people with no interest in relocating to Berkeley.

In spite of the current prefunded status I honestly believe that Quarrio offers a unique and real opportunity or I wouldn’t post it here.

Yes, along with the right attitude you need to be willing to take the risk—but everything is a risk these days. And you owe it to yourself to take the time to evaluate this one.

I also hope you will share this post with your friends and network wherever they may be.

Please write miki@rampupsolutions.com or call me at 360.335.8054 for more information to discuss the opportunities.

Flickr image credit: Tim Green

KG wrote a great post about ageism that started an interesting conversation regarding what needs to happen on both sides of the age line-in-the-sand for things to change.

But what people seem to forget is that, at the time, the Boomers were plenty disrupting and more demanding than their parents.

In fact, historically each generation has disrupted the status quo and demanded both more and different than its predecessor in one way or another.

Every generation has focused on various traits of the upcoming generation and deemed them the end of civilization—if not the world.

I’m sure our hunter ancestors looked with horror at their gatherer children and predicted starvation if the herds weren’t followed.

It’s a given that what’s currently happening always seems more difficult, and even brutal, than what happened in the past when viewed from a distance.

I have no problem when Gen Y demands and walks when those demands aren’t met for two reasons.

1. Most of their demands are of universal interest (ability to make a difference, respect, challenge, opportunity to grow, etc.) and will improve the workplace for all ages; and
2. walking is the privilege of the un’s—unmarried, unparenting, unmortaged, unencumbered.

One of the few constants is that we will always have a multigenerational workforce.

So everyone would do well to remember that eventually we all become our parents—maybe not in our own minds, but definitely in the minds of the newest generation agitating for change.

Flickr image credit: Eric Danley