September 2
Michael Arrington ignited a firestorm last week when he
posted an article to TechCrunch titled “Too Few Women in Tech? Don’t Blame the
Men.”
“The problem isn’t that Silicon
Valley is keeping women down, or not doing enough to encourage female
entrepreneurs,” wrote Arrington. “The opposite is true. No, the problem is that
not enough women want to become entrepreneurs.”
Arrington singled
out New York media critic Rachel Sklar – who’d pointed the finger at TechCrunch
in a quote for a recent Wall Street Journal article – and said that “
there are women like Sklar who complain about how there
are too few women in tech, and then there are women just who go out and start
companies.”
Sklar responded to Arrington
via Twitter: “
Thanks for making this a
topic of conversation.”
Camp Arrington
It's not a new topic of conversation, but Arrington's rant lent legitimacy to a broadly held perspective on it that's been stifled in a journalistic climate of forever political correctness. So now we can have a conversation.
It's been the elephant in the room, as it is in so many conversations
regarding women's issues -- this sense of "Stop making me feel
guilty" and "I'm tired of bending over backwards to make you feel good"
and "Honestly, I don't care about ratios, I'm just trying to build the best team, because that's how you make money" that I suspect many people carry but feel they can't express. It's hard to have a truly results-oriented discussion about a
social issue when an enormous segment of the population feels their
honest opinion is best silenced. I'm glad Arrington said what he said.
It made me think long and hard about where I stand on
the topic. I certainly ought to have an opinion – I studied computer science as
an undergrad and worked as a software developer in the hugely male-dominated
defense industry for seven years before starting my own company. I’ve been
told, by men, everything from the standard “You can’t just be as
good as the men in the industry, you have to be better” to the near-flattering
“You’re actually too attractive to be taken seriously.” I will say that I've had, on the whole, wonderful experiences working alongside and for men who treat me as an equal -- men who judge me on the merits of my work. These have been the majority of my experiences. Even the men who, in my office, conducted system architecture conversations with my breasts were, in a meeting room, both supportive and justly critical of my input.
For a long time, I
was in Camp Arrington. I felt that whining about the lack of women in
tech and entrepreneurship was disempowering. How were men
supposed to take us seriously, I thought, if we were busy hosting pro-woman
networking events and complaining about how hard things were for us while they
were busy starting companies? And what kind of message did that send to a younger generation?
Defecting
As I’ve gotten older
and a bit more experienced, I’ve more clearly seen the need for this
conversation, and I’ve come to appreciate it. Men have thousands of business
role models to choose from – not just in the Internet age, but in the past
several thousand years of history -- thousands of career paths and
personalities to pore over and pick and choose from, to get some sense, some
little glimmer, of how this is supposed
to be done. Of how people like me
can do this.
For women,
especially in tech, that pool is vastly smaller. In many other previously
male-dominated fields – medicine, entertainment, journalism -- young women today have as many same-sex
role models as the men. In tech, we still don’t. When I encounter a woman I
find relatable succeeding in tech, I hunt her down and I interrogate her. I’m
desperate for examples of how to do this, how to carve out a path for myself in
this world as myself, not as some
chick trying to masquerade as “one of the boys.”
And I guess that’s why I’m not really Camp Arrington anymore.
Today, I know there’s value in creating awareness around the issue; there’s value in
discussing the obstacles and the solutions, and there’s value in actively
supporting and connecting women in this space, in fighting to create those role models and then to create visibility around them. I know because now I need that and I can't find enough of it. I no longer see it as whining but as action toward an important goal. I see that there is power in that.
Community Opinion
This issue is a lot bigger than I am, so I reached out to both men and women in
all facets of the Seattle tech world. I asked them why they thought there were
so few women in tech and whose responsibility it was to change this. I asked them about their personal experiences with the gender divide in tech.
“Women need to step forward, speak
out, and look out after themselves and their careers - in many of the same ways
men do,” says Monica Harrington, CMO at Intersect. “And men need to be more self-aware
about when they're creating a culture that favors men unfairly.”
Harrington referenced her days at Microsoft, when her male
colleagues played basketball early in the morning with the senior execs. “They’d
start meetings with those same execs by recounting glory moments from those
early morning sessions,” she says. “The overt bonding display put me and other
women at a disadvantage. When I called out a very senior exec on that issue, he
told me he thought I was making something out of nothing. He was a smart guy,
but when it came to developing and supporting strong women, he was an idiot. ”
Sharon
Bjeletich, a former Program Manager at Microsoft, brought up a similar issue.
“When I worked at Microsoft,
people would say that women were too timid in meetings. I always wanted to do
training for the upper management where a man came into a meeting room full of
women, who were all talking about sewing and cooking, or something
traditionally female. When the man talked, they would ignore him and then continue
their conversation. They would very quickly and empirically understand why
women tend to be quiet in meetings. You are always more timid when you are the
minority and there is no effort made to include you.”
Peter Chee, founder of Thinkspace, says that “if a woman
wants to be an entrepreneur, then go be one. I don’t go out seeking men who are
entrepreneurs, I go out and seek other successful entrepreneurs regardless of
gender.”
But are women at a natural disadvantage as entrepreneurs?
Tac Anderson, VP of Digital Strategies at Waggener Edstrom, says that
“generally speaking, men are naturally more aggressive risk-takers than women. If things aren't working out at a big company the way a guy
wants it, men are more likely to leave and join another company or start his
own thing. If things aren't working out the way a women wants it, she'll stick
around and work to fix it … I don’t think men are the solution here. We have a
very specific way of approaching startups, and it’s wrong to assume women
should approach startups the same way.”
Dave Schappell, founder of
TeachStreet, echoes a lot of the opinions I heard on the reason we don’t have
more women as founders. “It’s a case of starter pools,” he says.
Marina Martin, a business consultant, agrees with Schappell. “If you really want to see more
uteri in tech, grab your nearest 3-year-old girl and make damn sure she’s
around computers all the time.”
Martin adds that “most women who consider themselves ‘in
tech’ can’t Hello World themselves out of a paper bag. If they can’t motivate
themselves to crack an O’Reilly book, how can anyone consider them role models?”
This response was interesting, I thought, when juxtaposed
with the response I got from Nancy Xiao, a recent high-school grad and
TeachStreet intern. “I’ve come to realize one of my bigger challenges is not
having a technical background,” she says. “Just because a woman doesn’t speak
Ruby doesn’t mean she’s incapable.”
Are we subtly discouraging women from working in tech
because they don’t have technical backgrounds? Is Martin’s outspoken disavowal
of the non-coder folks in tech industries evidence of a quieter and more
pervasive discrimination?
Hillel Cooperman, co-founder of Jackson Fish Market, sent
what was to me the most powerful of all the responses I read. (He sent it after
first referring my question set to his female co-founder – I wrote back that I
wanted to hear male opinions as well.)
“The single most important thing you can do to increase the
number of women in leadership roles in tech is to put women in those
positions,” he said. “Doing is all
that matters. Women in leadership positions beget additional women in
leadership positions. They serve as role models for women, and more importantly
for the broader organization and its partners.”
September 2
I'm in the middle of a book that is fascinating, and troubling. It is One Second After by William Forstchen. The plot centers on an attack on the United States using just three EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) nuclear weapons exploded in space over the country. There is no blast. There is no fallout. But the EMP essentially fries all the electronics in the country and takes society back to pre-industrial revolution times in a matter of seconds. Speaking as someone who once sold electronic design automation (EDA) systems to the military for "rad-hard" applications, this is not science fiction.
An underlying theme of the novel is the power of asymmetric warfare. Not only do you want to hit an enemy where they are weak (of course), but hit them in a way where their ability to respond is circumvented.
In many ways, start-ups by their nature are asymmetric competitors. They are more nimble, more innovative, and have essentially nothing to lose. The big, slow moving companies they attack have everything to lose. However, if those small start-ups attack on a set of terms that are well understood by the big firms, then the big firms have the advantage. You might introduce a product that is better, faster, or cheaper than your competition. But if that's all it is, they can respond by cutting price (temporarily - until you die), promising futures of better or faster (temporarily - until you die), or hiding their price using some bundling technique. (Don't try this if you have 80% market share).
But, if you truly hit your competitors with asymmetric attacks, there is very little they can do. What were the big box specialty stores going to do about Amazon? Ultimately, they all opened their own web sites, but those sites were still just for their specialty, and didn't have the sophisticated analytic elements Amazon built in as a fundamental advantage. Most of those stores and companies are gone now.
OVP has a portfolio company currently in registration for a public offering - Complete Genomics. Because they are in the quiet period, we can't say much about them. But it is public knowledge that their business model - selling the complete sequencing of human genomes as a service for just thousands of dollars each - is an asymmetric attack on the large firms selling machines for upwards of a million dollars each to do a similar function. Those firms have no straightforward way to defend against this small, nimble player who is playing by different rules.
In One Second After, the author quotes Sun Tzu (who wrote The Art of War) saying, "Your enemy will never attack your strength, only your weakness. So, know your weakness." Asymmetric warfare is simply a way to exaggerate your competitor's weaknesses.
It's a lesson both start-ups and Fortune 500 companies should take to heart.
September 1
We
are excited to announce we are launching our new job board today!
While there are plenty of job boards out there, if you are looking for a
local tech job, particularly at a startup, you have to weed through a
lot of irrelevant posts. Seattle 2.0’s job board focuses exclusively on
jobs at startups and technology companies in the Seattle metro area.
There is an extra benefit for employers and recruiters as well. People
who read Seattle 2.0 love technology and have an entrepreneurial spirit,
so employers can reach a higher percentage of qualified applicants.
We’ve
also teamed up with local startup InternMatch to include internships at
tech startup companies. So if you are interested in startups, whether
it’s at the entry level or the executive level you can find it on the job board.
Job seekers and people keeping their options open can find the latest jobs at www.seattle20.com/jobs, on our brand new twitter feed @seattle20jobs, by subscribing to our jobs RSS feed, in our daily email or in our weekly jobs post here on Seattle20.com.
Employers
and recruiters will be able to get their posting in front of tens of
thousands of local tech savvy readers either through a standard or
premium posting. Job posts for non-profits are free and a 30-day posting
for a startup is just $55, while general tech companies pay $85. We
also offer a lead guarantee. If you don’t get at least two leads from
your post on Seattle 2.0 we will extend the post another 30 days for
free.
But
that’s not all, we also have a category for “Co-founders”, which is
free. If you are looking for a co-founder match to get your startup off
the ground, you can use the job board at no charge. We believe this is a
long term investment in the startup community.
Looking
for a job or looking for your next hire? Check out the new Seattle
2.0 Job Board. We’re still in beta so we would appreciate your feedback
to make this new board better! Please email us at
editors-at-seattle20-dot-com.
September 1
After writing my last post there was a lot of interest in articles exploring the challenges of being an early stage entrepreneur, both personal and facing our company. Before I do, I wanted to touch on a startup philosophy that has helped me frame the successes and setbacks of starting InternMatch much more clearly and has helped me travel the enjoyably rocky road forward.
I call this philosophy Lenses and what I mean by this is developing an understanding of how you can and must view different situations within different timeframes. Most important, is realizing you have the power to choose this perspective in any given situation -- like using a microscope you can set and determine how zoomed in you are.
To explain better I think about the stages of starting InternMatch.
When first getting started, we had to zoom all the way out: we had to teach ourselves, advisors, investors, friends and whoever else we were talking to that the problem of internships was huge. We had to avoid getting hung up on any individual problem or else we would never have gotten far enough to learn how to solve it.
After raising money and building a team it was time to refocus and construct medium and short term strategies for success. This included interviewing contractors, compiling leads, meeting with universities and a lot more.
Finally, when executing -- from making cold calls to writing blog posts, to checking in code, we had to zoom all the way in; focusing on the minor details of shipping these products as expertly as possible.
In any of these situations if you use the wrong lens at the wrong time you will fail. If you start investor pitches by focusing on the minutia of execution, people won’t ever get excited enough to put money on the table. If you are thinking about the impact one meeting or sales call has on the company you want to build four years down the road, you are going to lose motivation and under perform.
Okay, so maybe this is old news for most readers, we all figure out intuitively or otherwise that you need to think differently when conveying your vision and executing on it, but as I mentioned earlier the real value I found here came from controlling this perspective on a day to day basis.
Cold calling taught me the value of exploring lenses daily.
As we got InternMatch up and running we knew we needed a base of customers, and an in-depth understanding of employer issues surrounding internships. We decided to sign on board over 100 employer Beta partners, by cold calling local businesses, and setting up meetings.
Three months into this process we had gotten very good. We were setting up upwards of five meetings a day, all scheduled near one another, and we were bringing back to the office Beta partnership forms from three or four out of five meetings. But, I can remember despite enjoying the process of improvement, being at times unhappy with having to make cold calls and take meetings for the vast majority of my hours each day, and for weeks on end.
Finally, one day with enough employers signed up we went live with our first internship postings and after a week or two we made our first match. The long term value of all those calls and meetings came to fruition. We had laid the groundwork so that an intern could find a new job, career path, and future. We had gone from zero website, zero customers, zero anything except for an idea, to building a product that made a tangible difference in someone’s life and future.
I knew I needed to harness this good feeling and I knew that our goal was changing millions of lives not just one, so I found that by understanding how to zoom in and zoom out, I could better reflect on this progress and the different aspects of the business. This tactic is one I now use all the time. I find it incredibly valuable for adapting to individual meetings, but even more important on a daily basis, it lets me enjoy how far we’ve to come, while remaining excited about how far we have to go.
September 1
Greetings. This week’s missive is coming to you from
Black Rock City, where I am very likely covered in dust, sleepy, happy and
thinking about how magical the world is. That’s right, I’m at Burning Man right
now, but with freedom comes responsibility, so I’m getting my work done anyway.
That said, I’ve got a one-track mind, so I’m bringing you all to the playa with
me.
If you’ve been living under a rock and have never heard of
Burning Man, then you need to know that it is a “spontaneous” city of about
50,000 people that exists for one week a year and is the physical manifestation
and celebration of art in all it’s forms. Yes, all the stories you’ve heard are
true, and no, you cannot get your head around it if you haven’t been there.
However, far from the free-for-all that people like to think
it is, Burning Man is a focused and dedicated community of people who coexist
peacefully and collaboratively because of shared principles, which are damned
good principles for both life and business – with or without pink fur.
There are 10 Principles, and because of them, it works.
1. Radical Inclusion
Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No
prerequisites exist for participation in our community.
Obviously, you need prerequisites in your company, it would
be asinine to hire a programmer with no programming experience. However, many
of us get a variety of other “prerequisites” in our head that serve no purpose.
As you build your team, try to focus more on what it is that you want people to
do and accomplish than an your idea of what that person “looks” like on paper
(or in the real world.) If they can do what you need, then it probably doesn’t
matter if they didn’t graduate from high school, weigh 300 pounds, have boobs,
or are older than you. By focusing on the strengths and skills of people rather
than the labels, you may be able to build a team that is both productive and
diverse.
2. Gifting
Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is
unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for
something of equal value.
This is sort of the golden rule of Burning Man. If there is something that you can give or do to someone, then do it. Don’t wait
to be asked, don’t sit and wait to be paid or acknowledged. Just do it because it’s right, and good
and will improve something. It will also feed the spirit of teamwork and
community that ultimately make things work better. Be generous. It will come
back to you.
3. Decommodification
In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create
social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships,
transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such
exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory
experience.
It is tempting to cut deals that will just make a lot of
money, or provide quick returns. As a businessperson, you have to pay attention
to the bottom line. However, you cannot do it at the expense of your product,
your team or your customers. Sometimes the quick-cash situation is the one that
ultimately kills your brand and alienates your customers. Think long and hard.
Profit and integrity are not mutually exclusive in the real world. Beyond that, the strength of reciprocal and mutually beneficial actions is the kind of thing you can build future relationships on.
4. Radical Self-reliance
Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or
her inner resources.
Getting your work done is your responsibility. Period. It is
not anyone’s fault but yours if you don’t get it done. Sure, your teammates
didn’t get theirs done fast enough, and someone was mean to you, and the
music…. Whatever. If there’s a
problem, fix it. If you can’t fix it, then figure out who can and what it will
take. But do not use anyone else as an excuse why you didn’t get your job done. If you fail, then learn something from it, and be sure you fix the problem next time.
5. Radical Self-expression
Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one
other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content.
It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the
rights and liberties of the recipient.
Assuming that you have hired a team of talented people, then
let them shine. The more space and freedom that brilliant people have to be
brilliant, the more great ideas and innovations they will come up with. The
juicer the creative process is, the better. By creating an environment where
there REALLY is no such thing as a bad idea, you will find yourself with many
great ideas to pick and choose from, and that’s good. Reward creativity.
6. Communal Effort
Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to
produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and
methods of communication that support such interaction.
This is obvious, right? We all work better when we’re
working as part of a team that listens, understand, embraces and encourages
each other. Sure, it sounds like the opposite of the radical self-reliance
thing, but it isn’t. Because when you have a team of people who are each taking
responsibility for their own actions, it builds the foundation for everyone
else to have what they need to do the best job they can do. Assuming all your
parts work together, that’s vital. Now, it’s time to work together, make sure
your parts function with the other parts, and that you are all supporting each
other. It only takes one jackass with a pickaxe to sink a wooden ship, but it
takes a team to keep it sailing on course.
7. Civic Responsibility
We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume
responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic
responsibilities to participants.
Everything you do will impact somebody else. Be sure you
take that into account when you make a decision. Whether it is hitting a
deadline or changing a product design, be conscientious about the impact on
others.
8. Leaving No Trace
Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical
trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and
endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when
we found them.
Although this one is an environmental thing in the Burning
Man credo, it has other applications as well. Yes, please take the planet into
consideration as you make business decisions. But also consider the other
environments in which your actions will resonate. Are you sending a positive
message to consumers? Are you creating an environment in which employees are
encouraged and happy and healthy? What is the impact that you are leaving on
the world around you? (Sometimes, I like to imagine what would be said at my
funeral if I were to die, today….
You could do the same with your business, what would people say if you
shuttered the shop today. If the answer is “thank god,” then you’re doing
something wrong. )
9. Participation
Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that
transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through
the medium of deeply personal participation.
If there are people on your team who are not participating
and contributing, ask yourself why. Are they redundant? Do they not have the
tools they need? Are their responsibilities not clearly defined? It matters. Figure it out. All hands on deck at all times. If you don't need the hands, then get them off the deck.
10. Immediacy
Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value
in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a
recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation
in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers.
Be in the moment. Your market is constantly changing. Your
people are constantly changing. Opportunities come and go, sometimes before we
can even notice them because we are so focused on what we think we should be
doing. Especially in the software and technology game. You have to pay attention to subtle
changes in the market, and respond, immediately. It’s okay to change your
plans, to pivot. It’s less okay to fail because you couldn’t change.
And lastly, though it’s not in the Burning Man manifesto,
HAVE FUN. Seriously, if you wake up every day dreading what you know is ahead
of you, then change it. Life is too short to spend any of it sucking. Sure,
there will always be crunch times and obstacles, but, on a very deep level, if
you don’t feel good about who you are and what you are doing, then change it.
Nothing is etched in stone. It is entirely up to you to create the life and
self that you want. No excuses.
______
Alyssa Royse
was going to say something profound at the end
of this piece, but was distracted by a blinky thing, which she had to go chase
down, until she was distracted by a sparkly thing, that was only interesting
until the nice man with no shirt handed her a snow cone. You can read other stuff, some of which is profound, on her blog.
September 1
We'd like to thank our sponsors who support the Seattle 2.0 and, like us, are passionate about tech startups and want to make Seattle an even better place for them.  Emerging technology companies partner with Fenwick & West for a broad range of services, through all stages of growth. We represent venture-backed private companies from formation and initial funding through IPOs and mergers. Through 30 years of partnering with leading technology start-up companies, we have obtained a deep understanding of how companies are formed, financed, grown and taken public or merged and earned the role of key trusted advisor. Fenwick is ranked by Dow Jones as the fourth most active U.S. law firm in helping IT clients raise venture capital and by MergerMarket and as one of the top five technology M&A practices in the U.S.  Garvey Schubert Barer represents emerging companies at every stage of development and across industry sectors, including software, hardware and peripherals, computer gaming, medical devices and clean technology. Our emerging company clients find that Garvey Schubert Barer differentiates itself from larger competitors by providing a steadfast, accountable and experienced corporate counsel to serve as a single point of contact for virtually all their legal needs. We offer a unique value proposition while maintaining a full-service platform which provides access to lawyers practicing in specialized legal areas such as labor and employment, executive compensation, real estate, intellectual property, technology licensing, and tax.  TechStars is a mentorship-driven seed stage investment program. We run a three month long program in Boston (MA), Boulder (CO), and Seattle (WA) once each year. We’re very selective – hundreds of companies apply and we only take about ten companies per city. These companies get up to $18,000 in seed funding, three months of intensive top-notch mentorship, and the chance to pitch to angel investors and venture capitalists at the end of the program.  Freelock Computing believes changes are the status quo. Nothing stays the same for very long. Every day your site sits on a development server is another day it's not bringing in new business. Our motto: Launch early, change frequently. If you're looking for a long-term development partner for your web porject we can help. Want to become a sponsor of Seattle 2.0? Learn more
August 31
 Tony Wright has founded three successful companies, sold two of them, and after recently leaving his CEO position at RescueTime, he is now looking for his next startup. Tony is a Y Combinator grad, a TechStars Mentor and has sorted through hundreds of startup ideas. He's using that wisdom to speak on "Picking an Idea" at StartupDay 2010 on September 25th. We chatted with him to learn more about how he got started, the best advice he received, and the startup myth that needs to die.
When did you know that you wanted to be an entrepreneur? "I'm still not sure I want to be an entrepreneur. Seriously, I just sort of fell into it when a potential employer offered me a contracting gig instead of a job."
How did you come up with the idea for RescueTime? "We were laughing over lunch one day about how hard it was
to build any software with all of the emails and meetings we had to endure."
What's RescueTime's elevator pitch? "Helping individuals and businesses understand how they spend their time and spend it more productively."
What was the best moment in your entrepreneurial career? "Getting accepted into Y Combinator. Or maybe selling my first company."
What was your toughest moment? "Having to fire someone is really hard. Probably the first time I ever had to do that."
Any startup myth you want to bust? "About a zillion. Biggest is probably the order of progress. 'Have an idea, get funding, build prototype, get traction' is WRONG. It's more 'Have an idea, build prototype, get traction, get funding'. Investors want an opportunity to extrapolate success rather than make a leap of faith-- unless you truly have a world changing invention -- or a helluva pitch."
What I will be talking about at StartupDay?
"I'll be talking about how to find an idea if you don't have any and how to pick through 'em if you have too many."
What's the best piece of advice you ever received? "Make something people want. (Paul Graham)"
What piece of advice do you wish you had received? "Start thinking about sales and marketing sooner. Don't invent a product that no one has ever used-- reinvent a product that everyone uses but hates."
What's next for you? "I've stepped down as RescueTime's CEO, but their next step is to continue their (accelerating) growth. My next step is to continue to relax this summer and ponder my next step (which could be a product/marketing leadership role at a small startup or spinning up my 4th company (2 have sold, 1 is still going strong!)."
August 30
Business advice is like cell phone service:you can get it virtually anywhere and
at anytime — except at the exact time and place where you truly need it. That, and it’s getting cheaper every
day.
By the time you finish reading this, odds are a half-dozen
tips-n-tricks, how-to’s, or top-five lists will have been published to your
favorite blog or online business
journal, each telling you exactly what you need to do—and in what
order—to ensure that your company comes out on top.
This is not one of those articles.
Instead, this is a simple list of three things you can do
today to save yourself the agony, heartache, lost sleep, and stupid arguments
with your significant other that will inevitably come about as a result of you
spending every waking moment trying to make a go of your fledgling
start-up. Do these three things
and you can kill your company quickly, freeing you to move on to other more
productive, 9-to-5-ish, less insane endeavors.
Step 1: Don’t Worry
About How You’ll Make Money
Come on, face it.
All of the really cool companies out there didn’t know how they were
going to make money when they first started. You’re young.
You’re hip. You wear Out Of Print tees to your co-working office
space. Why should you worry about
making money either? The real value is
in the eyeballs, man.
Forget for a moment the simple fact that statistically
speaking you have a greater chance of contracting—and dying from—the bubonic plague than you do of founding the
next Facebook, Twitter, or other hot Web 2.0 start-up. Revenue is for sissies. It’s for those strange little companies who’s name no one can
remember and who never, ever make the homepage of TechCrunch.
If you want your company to die quickly, don’t ask yourself
on day one of your start-up: what can we sell, will people buy it, and how much
can we charge for it? Leave that
to someone else.
Step 2: Chase Your
Competition Relentlessly
There is no drama quite like melodrama. And nothing creates melodrama more
quickly than picking a competitor and publicly, if not aggressively, pursuing
them in every endeavor.
When your competition goes left, you go left. But more
left. And with more bravado.
When your primary competitor announces a new feature, you
announce two new features of your
own. And ensure that the marketing
material you put out mentions in bold type that these features are made
possible by the heavy use of AJAX, or tableless
databases, or some other technology that is so new that only you, your lead
developer, and the technology’s inventor even know about it.
Don’t worry about being different. Being different is for losers (remember high-school). Be better. Be faster. And
by all means, be cheaper.
With this laser-like focus on your competition you won’t
have to worry about what the market actually wants from your company. You’ll have a big target that you can throw all of your development
and marketing resources at. You’ll
create a sense of excitement in the marketplace; the kind that hasn’t been seen
since the Browser-Wars of the late ‘90’s.
You and your competition will burn through piles of cash in a death-race
to the bottom. With any luck
at all your company will be dead before they start writing
about you in the papers.
Step 3: Never Talk to
Customers.
Customers are idiots.
All of them.
They don’t know what they want. They don’t know how to describe it. And when you build it for them, they
complain constantly that you didn’t do it right. As if that weren’t enough, when you finally do build
something that they seem to like, they nag you constantly to add more features
to the product to make it easier to use, or to integrate it with some other
useless system.
You know this business better than any customer ever
could. You’ve spent years in the
industry. Or maybe a few
months. Or perhaps you just talked
about it with a friend over beers and thought, after the third round, that it
would be a great idea to start a business around this idea—because every other
company that’s in the space is completely
missing the point.
If you follow only one piece of advice, follow this one: ignore your customers and your business will die quicker
than you could possibly fathom.
August 29
This post has been a long time in coming. Jennifer and I first talked about my writing for Seattle 2.0 on a regular basis back in May, at the Seattle 2.0 Awards show.
I was thrilled at first. Then hesitant. Then panicked that I wouldn’t have the time to commit to this endeavor with the dedication it demanded. Loudlever is still in its infancy after all. The company requires a lot of attention — and I’m a slow writer. It takes me nearly a day to put together a post on my own blog (which explains to a great degree why I post so infrequently). Writing for Seattle 2.0 suddenly seemed like taking on a second job.
But then my wife reminded me of something I shouldn’t have needed reminding of: I love writing. And I love telling people about what we’re doing at Loudlever. And I’m pretty passionate about creating an environment that is favorable to business in this state. In that instant what I had previously feared morphed into the perfect trifecta. I really had no other choice. Hello Seattle 2.0!By way of introduction I should probably explain how I ended up here in Seattle, running a start-up that caters to writers and the writing community. I started my first company when I was 10: Rich’s Wrigglers. My younger brother and I would soak the front yard with a sprinkler on summer evenings, collect the night-crawlers wriggled to the surface, then rise early the following morning to sell them by the dozen to the handful of men who regularly fished the Provo River. We’d earn a dollar a day and spend all of our hard-earned revenue on penny-candy. It was the perfect business. Two years later my first short-story was published in a collection of short fiction and poetry by young writers. Admittedly, it was a sappy little piece about an octogenarian sitting on a park bench, but at the time I felt it to be so much more. Not quite The Old Man and the Sea but very, very close. The euphoria of seeing my own work in print was spellbinding. Even later, when I learned that any student in class whose parents had paid for a copy of the collection had been included in it, my enthusiasm for writing didn’t waver. I was hooked on the thrill of the byline. Then, in the early ‘80’s, an economic recession hit. My family was (and still is) in real-estate development — and when the recession came, housing starts took a nose-dive. While my friends watched MTV each day after school, I watched my step-father struggle desperately to keep his construction company afloat, selling equipment, liquidating investments, and belt tightening until it felt like there was no more belt to tighten. Bankruptcy would ultimately claim his business, along with my father’s and hundreds of others in Central Utah. At times it seemed like the only people we knew who still had work were those who labored at the local steel mill, or for WordPerfect or Novell. Uncertainty pervaded our community like second-hand hope in a soup-line. Despite this being a “teaching moment” if there ever was one, the meaning I took from the situation was crystal clear: If you want three meals a day, never start your own company. The Road Less TraveledDropping out of college in the late ‘80’s, I joined the military and spent the next eight years bouncing around the world trying to figure out what I wanted to do and for whom I wanted to do it. While in the military I got the bright idea that I could finish my degree by taking a handful of English Lit. courses at neighboring colleges. Through a fluke of scheduling I ended up in a creative writing class taught by Richard Peabody (still one of my favorite modern poets) at a University of Maryland satellite campus. That course rekindled my love of the written word. And it planted the seed for what would later become Pif Magazine, an online literary journal I launched on borrowed server space in the fall of 1995. In 1997 I was transferred out of the military and ended up at Ft. Lewis, near Olympia. Falling in love with the feel of the place, I’ve remained in the Puget Sound area ever since. Figuring out how to build a business around writers and the publishers who court them took another 10 years. I won’t bore you with all of the details, but suffice it to say I spent a lot of time working for a lot of other people in a lot of industries completely unrelated to what I wanted to do. The lessons learned were invaluable. What I could have done if I had that time again, immeasurable. Then I had the whole “fear of not eating” thing from my youth to get over. That took another couple of years, I won’t lie to you. Eventually the itch to do my own thing overpowered my wish to do the safe thing. Coincidentally, this shift within occurred at roughly the same time that Adeo Ressi came to town to talk about The Founder Institute. His timing couldn’t have been more perfect. He spoke about finding your passion (which I blogged about last fall). Suddenly the road I had been on made perfect sense. Forget that we were neck-deep in another recession and I had an obligation to put food on the table for my wife and three boys. I had a company to start! What Do I Have to Share?I’ll be honest with you, there are hundreds of entrepreneurs in this town with gobs more experience than I. And I’m not one, to paraphrase St. Paul, who suffers fools gladly. My children and co-workers will tell you that I’ve little stomach for excuses — a trait due, most likely, to my time in the military. But I’m figuring it out, learning what works and what doesn’t. Running a business can seem, at times, like a never-ending battle between what you hope to do and what you need to do. For me it also needs to be about what I love to do — because when a server is crashing at two in the morning Red Bull and willpower just isn’t enough. I have a hell of a lot to learn, I admit. But I look forward to sharing the journey with you.
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