- First Round Capital's Holiday Card Is The Best One Yet
- Books: My First 100 Marathons
- Twitter Delivers Dinner in Raleigh Durham
- Make A Philanthropic Gift Instead of Sending Out Physical Greeting Cards
- Give Your Sales People All the Knives
- Awesome Marathon in Huntsville
- Hanging Out In Huntsville
- Lijit Is Hiring - Again
- The Heroes At ViaWest and StillSecure
- Avoid the Fearmongers
- Did You Miss Me?
- Some Practical Advice For Getting Profitable
- Feld Thoughts on Down to Business
- Lookery Site of the Week
- Take Responsibility For Your Actions
First Round Capital's Holiday Card Is The Best One Yet - Top
I bitched about paper holiday cards the other day and then came back from a week out of the office to pile of them. All of them went into the trash (bah humbug). Then - I saw the online one that my friends at First Round Capital have done.
Fantastic guys. I especially liked seeing my special friends at Gnip and Foodzie dancing, along with the ever present Howard Morgan (old guys have moves also!) Nicely done First Round - y'all put a smile on my face this morning.
Books: My First 100 Marathons - Top
There's nothing quite like reading a book about marathons on a weekend that you run a marathon. I carried My First 100 Marathons: 2,620 Miles with an Obsessive Runner
Jeff is a massive inspiration to any marathon runner. The book reads like a combination travelogue + novel + running philosophy treatise. I was really pleased with my Huntsville performance and - after reading Jeff's book - was even more motivated to get up off the couch as quickly as possible and go run another marathon.
If you are a marathon runner, you'll love it.
Twitter Delivers Dinner in Raleigh Durham - Top
As I was boarding the plane today in Dulles, I twittered At Dulles on the way to Raleigh durham. Post marathon travel is painful. Within a minute I got an email from Jeff Turner, the founder of Blogbeat:
"I just saw on Twitter that you're in route to Raleigh... I know you're probably booked up, but just in case you aren't, I thought I'd check in & see if I could buy you a beer or cheeseburger (or something). really just want to say hi and thank you formally for the FeedBurner connection. Either way, hope you're doing well & recover soon from your marathon!"
It turns out that I was landing at 6:41 and I had nothing scheduled, so a few quick emails and we were set to meet for dinner at 7:30. Jeff and I had never met, but if you remember my post from July 2006 titled Stats Evolved - FeedBurner Acquired Blogbeat you may know that Jeff approached me randomly via email for advice, that turned into a longer conversation, which ultimately resulted in FeedBurner (which I was on the board of) acquiring Jeff's company Blogbeat.
The most interesting thing - Jeff and I had never met in person. We've had some email contact over the last two years but our paths had never physically crossed. They did tonight (thanks to Jeff's initiative and the magic of Twitter) and we had a couple of beers and a great dinner in Raleigh at Thaiphoon Bistro along with a super conversation.
Jeff - thanks for the evening. Those who twitter together, dine together.
Make A Philanthropic Gift Instead of Sending Out Physical Greeting Cards - Top
I've never totally understood the "send out physical greeting cards" thing. I get that it's a "tradition", but it has always seemed like a waste of time, energy, and money to me. Yes - I know I've signed my share of these cards - I've just played along, but it doesn't change the way I feel about them.
I now get a flood of electronic cards (and birthday wishes - thanks everyone!) These make me smile and often generate a response via email from me to people I haven't talked to in a while. I received very few physical birthday cards this year (which is good) since pretty much everyone that would send me a card sent me an electronic one.
I just received an email greeting card from my friends at KKO. In it, they say "In lieu of mailing holiday cards we have made a charitable donation to Emergency Family Assistance Association."
As this is likely to be a horrible year for charitable giving (based on the downturn in the economy), I think this is a fantastic idea. Even if it is a modest amount of money, I (a) got my greeting card from KKO and (b) the money they gave to EFFA is going to be put to good use.
Nicely done guys.
Give Your Sales People All the Knives - Top
As Q408 stumbles to a close, I'm seeing a distinct trifurcation of sales performance among the companies I'm working with. I'm pleasantly surprised by the companies that are solidly outperforming their Q4 plan, especially since Q4 is the hardest quarter to outperform (since the plan is now typically great than 9 months old.) Some are fighting to get to their Q4 plan and some are going to fall short regardless of what they do between now and the end of the month.
This is in direct conflict with what you might think if all you do is read the newspaper and watch television. If this is your information base, you'd conclude that no one could possibly have a successful Q408. Not true!
That said, in all of the companies I'm involved in, people are being very cautious about Q109, even in the ones that are outperforming Q408. Anyone who has ever played the MIT Beer Game understands how multi-stage supply chains can mess with your mind (if you don't have any idea what I'm talking about, grab three friends and play the online beer distribution game.) Every startup is now living in an extreme version of this with a severe bullwhip effect.
Sales organizations - and decision making around them, especially in the forecasting part of the cycle - are especially susceptible to this phenomenon. Since most companies are now working on their 2009 plans, paying special attention to this on the top line is especially important this year. While talking through this at one of the SaaS companies I'm involved with, I made the comment "give your sales people all the knives."
In the software business, we've been struggling for the past few years with the transition from traditional perpetual software licensing to subscription based licensing. Layered on top of this is the split between desktop software, server-based on-premise software, and SaaS-based software. All are valid deployment, sales, and pricing approaches although on some days of the week you'll notice that religion takes over, especially when VCs tell you "we only are funding SaaS-based software companies" or "enterprise software sales is dead." Ok - whatever.
My solution is to give your sales people all the knives. I'll be more specific in another post, especially since it won't really matter this quarter. In the mean time, go play the beer game before you finalize your operating plan.
Awesome Marathon in Huntsville - Top
Marathon #14 is done. It was fantastic - I finished in 4:39:21 which is my fourth best time of the 14 marathons that I've run. The course was fantastic, the weather was perfect, and I had a great pace car (Matt Shobe).
As I mentioned in my previous post, I didn't feel particular ready for this one. My running has been solid and steady with a good base, but I was feeling tired from the cumulative effect of travel combined with four other marathons this year. I had a great vacation a week ago, but last week was brutal and I didn't really spend any time thinking about the marathon until Friday. Oh - and I'm still heavier than I want to be (although lighter than when I declared a jihad on my weight.)
There were about 1100 runners in the race. Matt and I started in the very back of the pack so it was satisfying to pass a number of folks (I was the 847th finisher.) I felt very strong at the half way point (2:18:36) and was able to hold the pace in the second half (a 10:29 per mile pace overall.) I had a ton left at the end - I had an 8:46 pace for the 1.2 mile stretch from 25 on.
Once again Amy has been a phenomenal sherpa. We're sticking around to see Huntsville (US Space & Rocket Center anyone?) and are planning to have dinner with Andy Smith, the founder/CEO of Gyminee (one of the TechStars 2008 companies that is based here.)
I feel superb right now - a little sore but basically like I just did a long run. I'm hopeful that I'm starting to figure out how to train for and run these things.
Hanging Out In Huntsville - Top
I'm running the Rocket City Marathon tomorrow. It'll be my 14th marathon in my quest to finish one in every state in the US. My co-host in this experience is Matt Shobe, one of the founders of FeedBurner. Matt's a real runner (PR of 3:25) but, as he writes in his post This time, I'm running for charity, he's going to pace his slow friend Brad.
I've had a hard time getting my head into this marathon. I had a great week off the grid in Mexico but then returned to an incredibly intense week. After four 15+ hour days, I finally had a little chill time which masqueraded as "travel to Huntsville day". I went to the Expo (small and cute), got my number, and started to get excited. I don't feel especially trained or well rested for this one, but the weather looks like it's going to be perfect, the course is flat, and I've got a friend who is going to suffer through 26.2 miles with me - what more could a marathoner want?
It turns out that my coach Gary Ditsch of Endurance Base Camp drove down from Kentucky to run this one with a triathloner that he also coaches. We met face to face for the first time and are planning to head out to dinner (yup - pasta) as a micro-gang.
As Matt says, he's going to run this one for charity - in this case Children's Medical Missions. If you are so inclined, please support Matt (for the both of us) - I just did (that feels a little recursive.) And - as always - thanks to my anchor sponsors Return Path and Pixie Mate for their support of Accelerated Cure via their sponsorship of my running quest.
Lijit Is Hiring - Again - Top
Lijit has five open positions:
If you are interesting, drop Lijit an email.
The Heroes At ViaWest and StillSecure - Top
As you probably noticed, for the past three weeks my blog has been up and down. The week of November 20th, Feld Thoughts came under a large distributed denial of service attack. While we're not sure who began this attack (or why) we have finally been able to mitigate it enough to get the site back online thanks to ViaWest. Now for a little history as to what happened and how we combated it.
When we first started noticing problems with the blog, Ross did all the normal stuff and didn't really notice anything. The server was online, CPU usage was nominal as was memory usage. It was available, it simply wouldn't serve pages. Netstat eventually revealed the problem was a big DDoS attack.
For the first week, our friends at StillSecure jumped in and helped us tune our existing server to try to get us back up and stable. Each time we would get ahead of the attacker he/they would step the attack up to another level taking us back down. We'd been talking about moving from our small hosting provider to a Tier 1 provider given the existing traffic levels before the attack - we finally decided to bite the bullet and move everything to a new server at ViaWest (where many of our portfolio companies host.)
I'm happy to report that we have moved the site over to the new server with ViaWest and we've been able to put a real firewall in front of the server. This firewall, coupled with a much more powerful server and ViaWest's substantial infrastructure, has gotten us back online and running great. While the attack continues we have so far been able to handle it.
So a big thanks goes to ViaWest and their team for the assistance they've given us getting our new server up and running. Also, big hugs to my friends at StillSecure for jumping in on a moments notice help us get to a place where at least we we able to weather the attack.
Thanks guys, you're the best!
Avoid the Fearmongers - Top
On October 7th, I wrote a post titled Ok Entrepreneurs, Time to Step Up. There were plenty of great comments about the post that - as with most good comment threads - are better than the actual post. In it, I linked back to a post I wrote on April 21st titled Fear Is The Mindkiller (my favorite quote from Dune
Michael Parekh tweeted a link to a great article in the New York Times today titled in Hard Times, Fear Can Impair Decision-Making. Gregory Berns, M.D., Ph.D., the director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University starts off with a dynamite line - "WORK is feeling more and more like a Skinner box." Midway through the essay, he has a paragraph that cuts right to the essence of the issue.
"This means not being a fearmonger. It means avoiding people who are overly pessimistic about the economy. It means tuning out media that fan emotional flames. Unless you are a day-trader, it means closing the Web page with the market ticker. It does mean being prepared, but not being a hypervigilant, everyone-in-the-bunker type."
Sound familiar? If you read this blog with any regularity, it should. It is part of the core of my philosophy of life. Berns continues:
"I DON’T care what your business is, but if you think it will eventually come back to what it was — your brain is in the grips of the fear-based endowment effect. What I am doing is looking for new opportunities. This means applying neuroscience discovery to realms where it hasn’t been used before."
In my opinion, this is true for all things, not just business and work. Fear shuts down everything - in Berns words "The most concrete thing that neuroscience tells us is that when the fear system of the brain is active, exploratory activity and risk-taking are turned off."
I never suggest that you deny reality - in fact the line from Atlas Shrugged "Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever" is another part of the core of my philosophy of life. Don't fake reality, but don't let yourself be paralyzed by fear. And one way to start is by avoiding the fearmongers.
Did You Miss Me? - Top
Ahhh - that was a very nice vacation. Q4 vacation is often around my birthday, so Amy whisked me away to Cabo for a week of being completely off the grid. If you don't follow me on Twitter, I was on a blogging vacation for a week before that because a distributed denial of service attack (what did I say, who did I piss off?) apparently took me off line for the previous week.
While the DDOS attack continues, things have been more stable since we've changed a bunch of config things. Once we finish the move to a much more industrial strength hosting service, I hope the probably goes away entirely. And - if it doesn't, maybe I'll just take another vacation from blogging.
In the mean time, I'm back, rested, and ready to blog again. For what that's worth.
Some Practical Advice For Getting Profitable - Top
Ted Rheingold at Dogster has a great post up titled 10 Tips for Building a Profitable Business. My favorite is #4: Spend at least 50% of your time selling.
Many technology companies assume if they built great product it will sell itself yet that almost never happens. Usually we’ve found that incorrect assumption is a rationalization of people who love building product, but secretly loathe the business side of running a business. Such a strategy is a great way to lose a lot of money. So constantly ask yourself, are we spending 50% of our time selling? I bet you’ll always realize you’re focusing too much on the product and not enough on finding customers that want it. (Of course the inverse is true. If you love selling you need to make sure you spend at least 50% of your time building product or your sales effort will be for naught.)
In most companies, too few people sell too little of the time. If you are a member of the senior executive team of a company that is trying to become profitable, are you spending 50% of your time selling and generating revenue? If not, why not? And, if you have a board of directors, are your board members selling also?
Feld Thoughts on Down to Business - Top
The nice folks at Down to Business have republished my post The Priorities of a Venture Capitalist.
Down to Business is a website and online show that is a fresh take on the business Q&A. Host Pat Croce cuts through buzzwords and jargon to find out what drives the people who are revolutionizing business in the worlds of media, technology, entertainment, fashion, and beyond.
It's got some fun stuff on it.
Lookery Site of the Week - Top
Thanks to the guys at Lookery for making Feld Thoughts their site of the week. As an endless obsessed data weenie, I'm enjoying seeing the data and demographics that Lookery is tracking for my site. Neat stuff.
Take Responsibility For Your Actions - Top
I made a mistake this morning. I allowed myself to get ramped up during my morning information routine. As I read through my online news and feeds, I kept seeing various permutations of discussions around "the bailout." Which bailout you ask? So did I. Before I knew it I was way down a rat hole of reading about all the various requests around "the bailout", tricks for getting "your share of the bailout", absurd requests from very large established companies regarding "the bailout", some surprising and particularly offensive (at least to me) requests from other companies around "the bailout", and lots of justification for action couched in terms like "economic disaster", "crisis", and "collapse."
You don't have to go very far to see where I started getting ramped up - just read the front page of the New York Times business section online this morning. Note to self - you are an idiot - you should have gone running instead.
I hate the word bailout. None of the companies I invest in are getting a "bailout." When they make bad decisions, don't execute, or run out of capital, they fail - which sucks, but it's part of the economic cycle. I tried calling 1-800-BAIL-OUT to see if I was missing something. They wouldn't help me, but they let me rant about what I think about bailouts (smart entrepreneurs!)
Everytime I hear the word "bailout" it makes me think of Atlas Shrugged
I'm not against government involvement and financial support in the broad business ecosystem. That's not what got me ramped up. What got me ramped up is the pervasive and omnipresent requests for a piece of "the bailout" along with endless hyperbole justifying the naked requests for money from the government without clear consequences. This, combined with the endless language of fear and panic from our "leadership", rather than a rational discussion of cause, effect, and proposed solutions makes me nuts.
Fundamentally, I feel like the ethos of "lack of responsibility" is finding its way into every nook and cranny of the discussion. The connotation of "bailout" is "it's not my fault - please bail me out." By definition, if you are asking for a bailout, you need to take responsibility for your actions and how you got there.
Before I end, I'll leave you with two things to clean your palate. The first is from my friend Shawn Broderick titled UAW Rip and cuts to the core of the notion of taking responsibility for your actions, understanding cause and effect, and coming up with solutions based on a real understanding of the underlying facts. The second is from another friend - Karyn German (who is one of the execs at NewsGator) titled What I Have Learned About Leadership. Just reading it made me feel better.