My friends Alan Shimel and Mitchell Ashley from StillSecure are at the annual RSA security show (“the” show for the security industry) and are reporting and podcasting from the front lines. In addition, Alan has a great rant about booth babes which the feminist in me wholeheartedly agrees with. If you are into security or anti-booth babes, check the posts out.
I’ve written about Discovering Work Life Balance in the past, but when I came across Jim Citrin’s article titled Tapping the Power of Your Morning Routine I realized that I left out an important part of the dynamics of work life balance for me.
Some people are early birds; some people are night owls. I’ve always been an early bird. In Citrin’s article, he talks some of the common characterists of key CEOs that he admires. As a morning person, it was fascinating to see what people do when they get up.
I wake up, get out of bed, drag a comb across my head. Skip that last part about the comb. I try to get up at 5am on Monday to Thursday, regardless of where I am (every now and them I get hosed on travel and sleep in – if I get less than six hours of sleep I have a rough day.) The next sequence is very predictable.
I give myself until 7am for this. I then run from 7am until “whenever my run is over” (I’m in maintenance mode right now so my workouts last an hour – in the summer when I gear up for my next marathon it will be longer.) Shower. Eat breakfast. “Start the rest of the day” (usually before 9am.)
Occasionally I have to do a phone call before 9am – I optimize around this. I’ve stopped doing breakfast meetings – I want the first four hours of my day to myself.
It has taken me a while to figure out this rhythm. While my morning routine might not work for you, I’ve found the notion of a morning routine to be a critical part of my work life balance. Think about your morning – tomorrow.
My reading pace has been slower than usual lately. I digested a few books in January including Sweet and Low (the story of Sweet and Low and the fascinating machinations of a particularly complex family business), 24: Cat’s Claw (to deal with my 24 addiction prior to Day 6 starting), and Christopher Moore’s brilliant You Suck.
Coming off of You Suck I needed something deep and thoughtful. So I settled on AC/DC: Maximum Rock & Roll – the history of my favorite heavy metal band. I was in high school during the Back in Back, Highway to Hell, and For Those About to Rock days and I loved Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, so I got some Bon Scott / Brian Johnson crossover. Of course, the real teenage boy fantasy was to be Angus or Malcolm Young.
The book – AC/DC: Maximum Rock & Roll – was superb. If you are an AC/DC fan, it’s a detailed history of the band that seems real, comprehensive, and written by two people that really care about the band.
If you just want to watch some AC/DC videos, I’ve tagged a bunch of them. Either way, as I head to the airport, I’ve got Highway to Hell echoing in my brain.
Great video on the essence of the web today from Michael Wesch – an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.
I love the title – The Machine is Us/ing Us. The neat question, of course, is where is the web going to be tomorrow? At the end, Michael suggests that we need to rethink a few things, including copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetorics, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family, ourselves. (Thanks Bruce for the pointer.)
I was trying to come up with a clever title for the superb week that Me.dium had, but I lamed out. Me.dium had their public launch this week at Demo (although they are still in a controlled user rollout as one of the extremely hard challenges in what they are trying to do is to infinitely scale the service.) Kimbal Musk – the CEO – gave a great demo at Demo.
I was neutral to positive that Demo would be the best place to launch. I was wrong – it turned out to be spectacular. The initial feedback has been great:
As I was writing this post and surfing around to collect the sites, one of my Me.dium friends (brandonh) opened a chat window within Me.dium with the following.
All those other links are here on del.icio.us.
Me.dium is one of those special companies that gets better every week. I committed to participating in the financing in the first meeting I had with them and have never regretted it. They’ve assembled an incredible team and have just blown away all my expectations in terms of what they have built so far. It’s still really early – the stuff in development is incredible (hint: look for something fun on my blog soon.) Me.dium was one of the hottest Boulder companies to get funded in 2006 – it’s living up to its billing.
If you want to join and see what it’s about, you can get an invite via my link code. You need to be using Firefox (the IE plugin will be out next month) and remember that the invites are still being rationed out to make sure they handle scaling effectively.
Paul Kedrosky has a superb post up today titled Building the Perfect Board Package. The entire post is worth a slow and careful read as it’s “guidance on the subject from a sales-guru colleague to a company’s management on whose board he sits.”
Buried deep near the end is the real gem – metrics for a “perfect enterprise software company” that would trade at 3x revenue (or significantly higher if a SaaS model).
Revenue (License / Service) 55/45
License to Service Gross Margin 75%
License GM 94%
Service GM 55%
Operating Costs 60%
Sales 29%
Marketing 8%
R&D 9%
G&A 8%
Operating Margin 15%
S&M Costs as a percent of Rev 68%
If you run an enterprise software company and need something to benchmark to in your “stable state” (after you’ve become profitable and are growing at a nice clip), here’s a model.
Wallstrip continues to crack me up – almost daily. I’m a small investor in the angel round and Howard and Lindsey are just a riot. Jack in a Box was roll on the floor funny but today Lindsey was trying to interview a random who turned out to be Dylan Ratigan (CNBC’s anchor) – for The Super Bowl Indicator episode – that paid her a compliment. Lindsey didn’t recognize Ratigan (don’t worry Lindsey – I didn’t either) – and her reaction is hysterical.
I’ve been talking about, dealing with (in a “user-generated content context”), and thinking about spam a lot lately. As an investor in email related companies going back to the mid-1990’s, I started experiencing spam as a real problem around 2000. Chris, Ryan, and I spent a lot of time thinking about it and ended up investing in two companies – Return Path and Postini – which have both been very successful companies on the good side of the war against spam.
I was trying to remember when the first spam appeared (I had early 1980’s in my mind) so I went to the source of all knowledge (Wikipedia) and looked up spam. I turns out the first official email spam was in 1978. The ramp of spam – especially in the last three years – has been incredible.
Due to the magic of Postini, I see none of it (although according to Postini I’m now getting over 2000 per day on average.)
A reader pointed me at this good, short post describing the shutdown of a service. Failure is a part of the entrepreneurial experience and it’s even more valuable (although not necessarily fun) if you can learn a lesson from it. The lesson here – well articulated by the author – is that he failed to address a point of pain.