Hope

I usually leave the photography to my friends with far better cameras and better aesthetic sense, but I thought that this image captured on my camera phone at a recent Barack Obama rally in Philadelphia was worth sharing.  What could more personify “Hope” than children on their parents shoulders straining in the darkness to see the light of the man who will hopefully be the next President of the United States.

 

 

No Excuses

It has become a fairly common refrain that business school is a great place to start a business (sounds intuitive enough eh?), but I have heard many argue persuasively to the contrary.  To be sure, loan-funded free time provides ample opportunity for ideation, but the workload, social distractions, and omnipotent executive recruiters provide too many convenient excuses for most to stagnate and then abandon entrepreneurial plans.  Commitment, the most important catalytic ingredient in executing on a startup, is simply too easy to avoid.

I’ll admit that in the past couple of months I have fallen prey at different times to making excuses based on school.  Balancing a full-time graduate program while maintaining momentum on the more than full-time job of propelling a startup forward has been difficult to say the least.  I watched as both undergraduate and graduate peers that I knew left school (or took leaves of absence) to pursue their companies and wondered about the trade-offs that I was making.  I cringed nearly every time I heard myself say “it’s been a challenging semester balancing school and work”.

But after completing my last final last week, I will finally wake up tomorrow in a zone of no excuses.  The leg weights of school will be off and we will be just another startup, running as fast as we can, founded by two guys who were lucky enough to meet each other at school, but whose company will be judged in the real world without a safety net.  Granted, we were both on the management team of startups prior to school and crave the freedom and challenge on being out on a limb, but I won’t deny that playing the student card had occassional merits.

“Had”… past tense.  With only one title in life now, there will be no less work and no more sleep only more focus and no room for excuses.

 

Saving Coffeeshop Wi-Fi

This post comes in two parts as I had written “The Problem” last week, but didn’t have the “The Solution” until today.  Hat tip goes to my friend Neel who posted a link about Whisher on Facebook.

Part I: The Problem

This morning in New York City, I bounded down to one of my favorite coffeeshops in the world, Snice in the West Village.  Hot coffee and bagel in hand, I opened my laptop only to find that Snice no longer offers Wi-Fi.  I should have seen it coming as the last time I was in there, there was a guy who had literally brought an iMac desktop, complete with full keyboard, and smacked it down on a table (whoever you are, you are an inconsiderate idiot!).  They had instituted a no laptop policy on many of the tables especially on weeekends, so it was only a matter of time.  I finished my coffee, did what I could offline, and walked around the corner to another favorite, Grounded on Jane Street.  I ordered a decaf this time, sat down, opened my laptop and once again, nothing.

I am now at Starbucks, where, thanks to T-Mobile, for $40 a month, I am assured of a connection.  The problem is that I don’t like sitting in Starbucks.  I want to sit in Snice or Grounded, or Tryst (if, god forbid, I’m in DC), or Cafe Hausbrandt (in Philadelphia), or the Panini Garden (in Santa Monica), or the Dolores Park Cafe (in San Francisco).  Last I checked, Tryst, Hausbrandt, and Panini Garden all still offered free wireless connections.  But free is not the issue, I’d be happy to pay.  The creative, office-less class is killing coffeeshop Wi-Fi and we must figure out a way to save it.

Starbucks doesn’t face the same problem.  The vast majority of their sales come from quick serve “to-go” customers.  In fact, Starbucks recently announced that it is moving from T-Mobile to AT&T and will now be offering patrons a free two hours of wireless access per coffee purchased.  The same is not true of neighborhood coffee shops which serve breakfast, lunch, and assorted food along with coffee and make their money on “sit down” customers.  Those of us wanting to co-opt their space for our office reduce turnover and hence revenue opportunities.

Part II: The Solution

The earliest proposed solution to this problem seemed to be aggregators like Boingo who were piecing together networks and ostensibly offering some royalty back to the access point from which traffic originated.  It now looks like there is an even more direct solution to the problem in the form of Whisher, a new software application which lets any access point owner turn their node into a pay-for-access hotspot.

So there you go.  Snice, Grounded, et al… you have a customer waiting.  Charge me.  I want to pay because I realize my rent should not be completely free and I want to continue working in pleasant spaces.  Please, take my money, but don’t evict from my office!

 

Ask First, Shoot Later

Paul Graham, founder of ViaWeb and partner at Y-Combinator, does not blog, he writes essays.  Thought-provoking, experience-laden, well-reasoned essays.  I have no personal interest in being a cheerleader for him except that I find myself devouring nearly everything he writes and looking forward to future essays.  Judging by many of the comments on his site, he stirs up passionate debate in the programming community, but as an outsider to such “inside” conversations, I perhaps read Paul’s commentary with a useful detachment.  His May 2006, How To Be Silicon Valley, is a wonderful work of cultural anthropology and is a must read.  More recently, Paul had me aggressively nodding with approval last month with, Six Principles for Making New Things.  In it, Paul writes:

I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

It is remarkable how often I see technologists operating in reverse, creating elaborate (and costly) solutions to, at times, over-solved problems, that no longer need fixing (or that cannot be fixed by technology).  It’s a “shoot first, ask questions later” mentality that leads down many wayward paths.  For me, the successful path to creating new technologies is to “ask questions first, ask questions second, and shoot third to deliver simple solutions to clearly articulated problems.”  While there are brilliant technologists that can succeed with “build it and they will come” solutions,  the vast majority of successful ventures will be built by listening carefully to potential customers and making their lives tangibly easier as simply as possible.

 

Proceed At Your Own Risk

This morning I presented some thoughts on initial product development and prototyping and best practices for working with outsourced developers at a half-day ”Meet the Expert” session for companies engaged in the Wharton Entrepreneurial Program’s Venture Initiation Program.  In collecting my thoughts on the topic, I spent some time trying to get my head around a simple exercise for conceptualizing how one wants to go about getting an initial prototype to market.  This diagram was the outcome of that brainstorm:

Unfortunately, I come across all too many ventures in the upper/middle lefthand corner of this diagram who feel that development shops have over-promised and under-delivered.  In many of these cases, it is not necessarily an unscrupulous developer, but rather an inability of the entrepreneur to adequately articulate the product vision and properly product manage the process.  In my experience, working with outsourced developers is analogous to working with a contract manufacturer of any product.  The output is only as good as the blueprint and detail you put in - what you put in, is what you get out.

My conclusion, if you are an entrepreneur pursuing the development of even a moderately complex application in partnership with an outsourced team and are not particularly technically adept, you are going to be in a world of trouble.  Find yourself a tech-savvy co-founder or reliable and very committed advisor or proceed at your own risk!

 

Prepare or be Crushed

“The exam is hard.  There are several places on the exam where you will be asked to apply concepts in a new way. I expect the average score to be somewhere around 65 percent. There may be a few perfect scores, but not many. People who are not prepared will be totally crushed.”
                                                       -Professor Andrew Metrick via email

Professor Metrick is one of Wharton’s most popular professors (though he is on his way to become one of the Yale School of Management’s most beloved professors and my section was his final class at Wharton).  He is an expert on the financial modeling of venture investments and a favorite amongst students.  His final exam was indeed hard, yet, in my estimation, fair.  Yet this post is not at all about exams, but rather about the need for preparation in life.

The more I pondered Prof. Metrick’s warning that we’d be crushed for lack of preparation, the more it made perfect sense to me in an increasingly information-intensive world.  The cost of being prepared (for a meeting, for a date, for an interview…) is near zero.  A quick google search plus a look at one’s facebook or linkedin profile, blog, or other web presence can provide a wealth of background information.  Companies are profiled in detail and written about extensively and nearly everything is available for free in matter of seconds.  The result of this extraordinary ability to prepare is that the cost of being unprepared rises dramatically as the expectation of preparation increases.  Walk into someone’s office without at least a cursory knowledge of the news impacting them in the past week or the current blogosphere buzz on them and you deserve to be crushed.

Similarly, running a business or living a life that makes you difficult to prepare for has increasing consequence as well.  The less one knows about you in advance, the more time will be spent covering mundane details rather than having substantive discussions about life, business, or corporate partnerships.  If you are impossible to prepare for (i.e. you are ungoogleable) you will face a serious uphill battle (this certainly explains why, according to a Pew study released today, more people are googling themselves than ever before).   There are obvious exceptions to this rule (the highly influential media and entertainment investment banking firm Allen & Co. is notable for not having a website), but these exceptions are based on previously formed reputation.

Our new, prepared world will be dominated by those with new skillsets.  Success will no longer rest on one’s ability to horde and protect information, but rather by the ability to rapidly synthesize multiple streams of information.  As Prof. Metrick puts it, you won’t be asked to regurgitate acquired facts, but rather “to apply concepts in a new way”.  Transparency will no longer be valuable, it will simply be required.  While some may worry about the privacy impact of such information-rich environments in our social lives, I hope it will force us all to have richer, emotional relationships that bypass casual small talk.

I personally find this new information spigot liberating, but there are many entrenched (economic, social, and political) interests fighting against it.  I’d advise they learn from Prof. Metrick and prepare or be crushed.

 

Here Comes Another Bubble

Blog, blog, blog it all
Blog if its big or small
Blog at the cineplex
Blog while you’re having sex
Blog in the locker room
Babies blogging in the womb
Blog even if you’re wrong
Won’t you blog about this song?”

I couldn’t resist.  This is a must watch.

Update: Unfortunately, this video is the subject of a copyright dispute, so it has been taken down.  The controversy surrounding it is pretty interesting though and TechCrunch has most of the details.

 

Wearing My Activist Hat

One of my favorite recent posts over on Fred Wilson’s AVC blog was entitled, Wearing  A Lot of Hats, where he discusses his week’s work as venture partner (at two firms), parent, activist, and blogger.  I can very much appreciate the conundrum as at any given hour, I may be donning one of several hats.  Last week, I wore my social activist hat for an interview with ClearAdmit (one of the most popular blogs catering to MBA applicants and students).  For those interested, the interview highlights alot of the work happening on Wharton’s campus to improve our brand around business ethics and social responsibility (including my personal work to launch a new website as a clearinghouse of information across a number of organizations: www.whartonsocialresponsibility.org)

A few choice quotes:

“To the world at large, the Wharton brand doesn’t stand for social responsibility,” says Greg Neichin, vice president of communications for Social Impact and a WASR member. “To the world, Wharton is Donald Trump and finance and ruthlessness,” he continues. The hope with WASR is to change this perception, he says.

“From our perspective, there’s a lot of work to be done to change Wharton’s overall brand reputation in this area,” says Neichin. “It’s going to take five or ten years of Wharton alums advocating out in the world,” he says, coupled with attracting people with a focus on social responsibility, admitting them, and cultivating them while they are there.”

 

What I Didn’t Do Today

Today 10,000+ people lined up in the streets of Philadelphia to run the Philly marathon (or half-marathon).  I was not one of them.  A little more than a year ago, I declared that I was going to run the 2006 Philadelphia marathon, a project that fell to the wayside amidst a hectic schedule of business school classes.  Two months ago, feeling particularly good after a Sunday run of 8+ miles, I called my dad and announced that I would certainly give the half-marathon a go.  But balancing the full-time demands of running a startup with what has become the side project of finishing my MBA program does not offer much spare time.  I have probably embarked on only a handful of solid, outdoor runs since then and would be lucky to make the 8 mile mark today.

On Friday, I stopped by the Wharton Entrepreneurship Conference and heard Ted Leonsis (coincidental given my last post that included him) talking about the life changing experience of being on an aircraft that was forced into an emergency landing.  A startup workaholic, he sat down in the days after the incident and made a list of the 100 things that he’d do before he died.  I am an avid reader of Brad Feld, a successful entrepreneur and investor, and am always impressed at his personal commitment to running 50 marathons before his 50th birthday.  I have many friends and former colleagues balancing the demands of family, friends, hobbies, travel, and life with their all-consuming passion for building great companies.

The startup life is often as much about what what you didn’t do that day as about what you did.  This morning, while not running, I quickly flipped through the pages of the New York Times Sunday magazine edition, an issue devoted to winter travel around the world, glancing at cities that I haven’t yet made time to visit.  Though some are better than others at balance, you would be hard pressed to find the founder or senior executive of a startup who wouldn’t admit that there were significant sacrifices that had to be made.  I think we all hope, and continuously try, to find the right equilibrium of the things we did and didn’t do that day and create the right life mix of activities that balances our passions, loves, ambitions, and responsibilities. 

 

Key Boulevard

This morning I belatedly (as it was released on November 1st) caught the funding and launch announcement of Qloud, a new online music service that has already amassed one million registered users in just 3 months and has deployed a top performing Facebook app.  The new company is backed by Steve Case’s Revolution LLC and has a very impressive Board including Ted Leonsis, Chris Blackwell, and a host of others.  The intent of this post however was not to shamlessly plug the new service (though all should feel free to check it out at www.qloud.com), but rather to congratulate Qloud Co-Founder Mike Lewis on the news!

Mike, a Dartmouth classmate, and I were roommates back in 2000 as I was packing my bags for the West Coast and winding down my time in the Northern Virginia (Arlington) suburbs of Washington, D.C.  Mike’s funding announcement got me reflecting on  the apparent entrepreneurial spirit of my little house on Key Boulevard.  We may have been luddites with lawn equipment (one of my fondest memories of the house was the manual push mower that we used to cut the grass), but a number of us who called that house home figured out our way around computers.

Nader Akhnoukh, with whom I originally “settled” that house and who’s programming talent is rivaled only by his cooking, was at the time working for the Internet soap opera called Microstrategy.  He headed West for i-drive and then became employee #2 at Tamale Software, a company plowing ahead on research management software for the financial services industry (John Lee, another member of the Key Boulevard contingent was Tamale employee #3).  Mike, working for AOL at the time, headed on to Ruckus and then founded Qloud.  Scott Braman, a documentary filmmaker, inhabited for a couple of months (as only Scott could do), a corner of my room affectionately known as “the nook”, and has gone on to launch VeniceTheMenace, a new adventure in online video.  And now I too am trying my Founder’s hand.

Granted, when we moved into that house in 1999 times were quite frothy and it seemed that with the right venture, we’d be retired by 30, but I am nonetheless quite proud of the class of Key Boulevard and wish them all continued success!