No matter the job market, founders go on and on about the lack of the right talent for their needs.

I, on the other hand, and others like me, keep saying that attitude is more important than skills.

Want proof?

OK, answer this question.

If you were a basketball coach would you want a one-handed player?

No?

Boy, is that a bad assumption-based decision.

Kind of like assuming that skills are age or school-based.

YouTube credit: ScoutsFocus.com

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

Well, actually, it was a shared 1st place with the Garage.com conference I went to in 2000 and met Guy Kawasaki and Bill Reichert who funded my company based on the impromptu pitch I did to them at the conference.

However, I am writing now about the last day of the Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco.  A fantastic last day.

It completely reinforced what I wrote yesterday, that this has been the most practical and useful conference I’ve been to as a startup founder.  

Even though I’ve done several startups and had successful exits on three, and been on the other side of the table as an institutional investor in startups, it was astounding how much I learned that was useful.  

I really wish that this conference had existed 15 years ago when I got started in the startup business!

In the morning I went to a seminar led by Ash Maurya, author of the book “Running Lean,” called Innovation Accounting: A Blueprint for Defining, Measuring, and Communicating Progress With Internal and External Stakeholders.  

In addition to Ash being a good presenter, every minute and every slide he went through was deep learning in how to get the operational aspects of a startup up and running around a new product.  

In fact, it was a systematic methodology of building new products that I wish had been available for my past ventures.  Everyone who is in the process of creating a new product, especially a software product, should read Ash’ book and participate in one of his practical seminars.

The afternoon session was called Science of Pricing: Tools to Optimize Price Without Sacrificing Conversions and was led by Justin Wilcox.  

I have yet to experience a more dynamic, fun and practical seminar leader.  In building a startup or product, one of the core challenges is how to price the product to get maximum conversions to sales at the highest possible price.  

What Justin did was lead us through a hands-on session of how to accomplish this and got us actually doing a practical test on several products (after dividing us into teams, each testing pricing on one product) focusing on how to price them and pinpoint the optimal price to sales ratio.  

Justin and his team are experts well worth consulting with to get this right.  It is guaranteed to earn you a lot more money and save you from pain.

To be honest, based on past conferences I’ve attended, I had low expectations arriving at the Lean Startup Conference.  And as you have read, I’ve been totally blown away by what I experienced.  

If you are an entrepreneur, even an experienced one, you must beg borrow or steal to get the opportunity to go.  

Don’t miss this learning opportunity – for me. It would have saved me millions of dollars in cash, several years of time, and lots of sleepless nights and struggles at home and at work.

I have one criticism about the conference – please choose better names for the sessions.  

The naming convention was horrible and made it difficult to compare notes with fellow conference participants of what they had experienced since none of us could remember the names of the sessions.

Thank you, Lean Startup Conference – I’ll see you next year!

Image credit: HikingArtist

I am seldom effusive in my praise of any conference I’ve attended.  

Most conferences bring in speakers who simply recycle the presentations they’ve done for many other audiences, people clap and get a momentary high from associating with others and hearing engaging speakers.  But a few days later, it’s all gone.

This is even truer for conferences dealing with the startup ecosystem.  

These are focused on getting already poor (sometimes starving) entrepreneurs to pay hundreds (sometimes thousands) of dollars to go and listen to the same stuff.  Often the carrot is meeting angel and VC investors, but very few people I’ve encountered (if any) ever received an investment based on meeting an investor at one of these conferences.  

The Lean Startup Conference is very different, in fact, I cannot be more enthusiastic.  

This is one of the few conferences I’ve attended as a company founder and serial entrepreneur that has provided practical knowledge that I can use in building my company.  

Low bullshit factor, lots and lots of case studies related to company problems and solutions, great strategic insight and golden nuggets strewn through all the speakers’ talks.  In addition, the conference was well organized and the logistics worked flawlessly.

The audience was very diverse – race, geographical origin, profession (software engineer, bioengineer, marketing, C-level execs, tech support, etc.), size of company (everything from pre-revenue startups to major companies like GE and Intuit), and industry (pharma, tech, government, automotive…).  

It is doubly impressive that they managed to pull off a conference that worked for such diversity.

Maybe there is excellence in the conference business after all.

Parallels are constantly drawn between business and sports—building and motivating teams, leading in all its many guises and, of course, the importance and power of stars—whether first round draft choice or coder from the hot startup.

I am not a believer in stars and have written numerous times on why they are a bad idea.

I frequently told I’m wrong, especially sports-wise; I’m told that every winning team has stars or they wouldn’t be winning

Not true and thanks to Craig Bohl, North Dakota State’s football coach, I have someone to point who has a very winning team sans stars.

Since 2011, the Bison have posted Division I’s best winning percentage (36-2, .947), slightly ahead of Alabama (33-2, .943) and Oregon (32-3, .914). N.D.S.U. has beaten four Football Bowl Subdivision opponents in four years, most recently the defending Big 12 champion, Kansas State, in this season’s opener on Aug. 30, and is 7-3 against F.B.S. teams since 2006.

Bohl’s understands that with the right attitude and hard work he can build his own star team.

“A lot of our guys come from the farm or hard-working backgrounds, and we’ve leveraged that as we’ve developed our football team. It goes a little counterculture to the way college football is now, with spreads, up-tempo offenses and all those other things. We’ve taken a blue-collar approach on playing hard-nosed, physical, disciplined football, great defense, controlling the football. That’s how we’ve won.”

He’s pragmatic; he doesn’t believe his winners have to walk on water; they just need to be damn good.

“I don’t think there’s a team in the country that would absolutely destroy us, 70-0, or anything like that. Obviously, there are teams that have more talent than we do. I won’t deny that either. But I think we could hold our own with a lot of teams out there.”

Bohl’s approach isn’t rocket science, other than few other coaches want to bother building a team this way or prefer splashier players whose glory can provide a halo effect for coaches and teammates alike.

While Bohl qualifies as a star, and there is constant talk about who will lure him away, he doesn’t seem to be interested.

And he stays for the same reason talented employees always stay.

“When you find a place that fits your value system, the allure of ‘what the big time is’ is not such a big hook.”

Image credit: Ilco

A few years ago I wrote that stories are a useful management tool.

Stories are also the best way to present your company and its products to the world.

The problem is that most founders are focused on the vision can’t tell the story—at least not the whole story.

Listen to Brooke Hammerling, founder of Brew Media Relations.

“I can’t tell you how many times we’ve met with early-stage companies, and they start by telling us their big vision. They say, ‘This is what we’re about and what we want to change.’ But when we ask them what they actually do, they can’t tell us. If you can’t answer that question, don’t do anything else until you can. Nothing else matters.”

I certainly don’t have Hammerling’s experience or knowledge, but I hear the same thing.

To start with, a vision isn’t a story—it’s an overview.

Usually a macro level overview drawn in sweeping strokes that quickly degenerates into a micro description of the technology.

Worse, the vision is almost always a product of the founder(s), often conceived before the company actually started, and enshrined as stated unless there’s a pivot.

It’s a unilateral view that often misses peripheral or subtle background factors that may yield better positioning.

But if not the founders, what’s a better approach? What’s the source of the story?

When Hammerling takes on a new client, the first thing she does is separate the key members of the team, including the investors. Then she fires questions at them about the product: “What are you? Why are you? Who are you? What problem are you solving and how are you solving it? Why should people care right now?” The idea is to hear what all of them say — where are the differences? Where are the overlaps? What do the people who care most about the company’s success think it is?

While founders can’t/shouldn’t create the story alone, everyone agrees nobody can provide the passion that must permeate the story like a founder.

When a product, message and strategy align with a founder who can deliver it all clearly and persuasively, there’s no telling how powerful that can be. 

So if you’re looking for a great strategy to develop your brand’s voice use the link; the information Hammerling shares will give you an excellent, workable framework to build upon.

Flickr image credit: portland general

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

I read a great article about a guy who is CEO of a private 1.5 billion dollar company that sports a 20% compounded growth rate every year since 1988.

Not bad for someone who focuses on people instead of products and profit.

His name is Bob Chapman and the company is Barry-Wehmiller and he believes that if you create a culture with a relentless focus on building employees so each one achieves everything possible then the products and profits will follow.

Chapman’s sums it up in his tagline.

“We Build GREAT People Who Do EXTRAORDINARY Things.”

This goes back to our conversation about the startup social contract, but goes beyond startup and shows what people-focused value means in the long-term.

Chapman explains his approach in the following TEDx talk and you can learn more at Barry-Wehmiller’s well-stocked YouTube channel.

Image credit: HikingArtist

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

What kind of entrepreneur/person are you?

The kind who posts an “I hate” rant, then edits it and claims it as “humorous satire” when publically taken to task?

The kind who equates a problem like patent trolls to a truly heinous crime like child molesting. 

Or the kind who makes your money from an anti-societal app, with essentially (IMO) no redeeming characteristics?

Your legacy probably isn’t of primary concern when most of your life is still to come, but knowing that anything you say or do will exist long after your body has turned to dust should make you think.

Does it?

Image credit: HikingArtist

Do you love technology? Do you long for or live on technology’s bleeding edge?

Which comes first in your mind, the technology or the problem it addresses?

Too many entrepreneurs’ focus is 80/20—80% technology and 20% problem.

“To me, the computer is just another tool. “It’s like a pen. You have to have a pen, and to know penmanship, but neither will write the book for you. —Red Burns, the “godmother of Silicon Alley” and head of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

The problem is the book and the book is what you’re selling.

Your buyers/customers/users don’t care about the technology—at best they won’t notice it; at worst they can ignore it.

They will care about the book; about the story it tells and the experience it offers.

It is the book they will pay for—not the technology.

And it is the book that others will invest in.

Flickr image credit: brewbooks

I read about a lot of startups, but the ones that really resonate with me are the ones that are doing more than creating a business.

I can’t write them all up, so I though I’d give you the links to a few favorites along with my reasons.

For Israel and Palestine, entrepreneurial passion may do what so-called diplomacy has failed to do.

Even by Middle East standards, the scene in a Dead Sea restaurant, situated within a “green zone”–a no-man’s-land claimed by neither Israelis nor Palestinians–was surreal.

What do you get when you combine an Israeli Special Forces commando, an Arab investor and a religious Zionist? An ultra hot startup called Webydo.

Webydo has removed software code developers and programmers from the picture – enabling professional graphic designers to create sites on the fly for ten times cheaper, and far faster.

I am a dedicated recycler, so you can imagine my feelings when my grocer stopped taking plastic bags for recycling. When I asked why he said that China wasn’t accepting them for recycling, so there was no place to send them. Terrific! We use all that energy to send them to China, so they can ship back whatever they made from them.

I much prefer a solution being developed by Sierra Energy called the FastOx Pathfinder.

The centerpiece, a waste gasifier that’s about the size of a shower stall, is essentially a modified blast furnace. A chemical reaction inside the gasifier heats any kind of trash — whether banana peels, used syringes, old iPods, even raw sewage — to extreme temperatures without combustion. The output includes hydrogen and carbon monoxide, … can be burned to generate electricity or made into ethanol or diesel fuel.

As you can see, the apps that entrepreneurs and investors seem to love aren’t on my interest list; they mostly solve the imagined problems of “affluent and hyper-connected 20-somethings in cities with great cell service and ample Wi-Fi” who prefer impersonal sex-without-strings, bargains and inane pastimes.

But there’s finally an app a parent can truly love—especially when separated from their children in a war-torn country—from an entrepreneur who had the sense to avoid the bleeding edge.

According to UNICEF,  RapidFTR’s ability to photograph, record and share information about lost children has reduced the time it takes to reunite families from over six weeks to just hours. The app was not particularly complicated, from a technical standpoint, but Mr. Just wanted to make sure it was something aid organizations would actually adopt.

Personal annoyance, in this case with charging wires, has always been an innovation driver, but stubbornness and a silo-breaking mentality also help. And even after all that, Meredith Perry still had a difficult time getting uBeam funded—well, of course SHE did.

Her idea, she discovered, meant marrying the fields of sound, electricity, battery technology and other subspecialties. (…)  Each expert seemed to dwell in his own private silo, so that whenever she crossed from one discipline to another, she would run into the same wall of constricted thinking.

Finally, on a lighter note, another woman is out to abolish the need for the underwire that provides all that lift that women tolerate and men crave.

In this case, 3-D has nothing to do with 3-D fabric printing, but rather with the way the Curvessence technology used in the brand’s lingerie works. Cohen says the nylon polymers sculpt to conform to a woman’s torso, and “remembers” its shape over time, slowly returning to its original form if it is temporarily stretched, for instance.

Flickr image credit: Seth Waite

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

Based on current media reading and discussions with founders and startup employees I decided it was time to revisit a 2011 post from Matt Weeks. I might add that the ethics underlying the Startup Social Contract are applicable to any company and every manager. –Miki

“Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation; for ’tis better to be alone than in bad company.” –George Washington

For early stage companies (and for all well-run private, Pre-IPO or Pre-Acquisition firms), the stock awarded to employees and the executive team is a form of “social contract” that promises them unusually high “return” for their risk, hard work, “sweat investment” and belief in the company.

The unstated social contract goes something like this:

I will initially forego a higher salary and cash compensation, in lieu of stock options that will increase in value at a faster rate than possible elsewhere, and will “return” more than the forfeited cash compensation might have, over time.

This is both an investment risk approach (“Do I believe the company’s product or service can win in the marketplace?”) and a simple ROI calculation (“Is the salary/cash compensation I forfeit going to be made-up (and then some) in a reasonable amount of time?”)

Because I am now an “owner” (“investor”) in this company (seeking to boost stock value. i.e. company value), I presumably have strong incentive to help the company thrive.

This includes being diligent and helping avoid risk, helping to find and fix problems everywhere, as well as going above and beyond my “job description” to help the company thrive and grow. I am super-diligent and respect and protect the company’s assets, reputation and product/service quality.  I treat this as “my” company.

In short, as an owner-employee (at any level), I understand that I have to “have the company’s back” and that others in the company “have my back.” We all watch-out for one another.  Our stock positions fairly and accurately reflect our contributions and risk “investments” we’ve made in this venture.

If the workers and/or the exec team come to disrespect, disbelieve or ignore this social contract, the company is lost.

Image credit: HikingArtist