I love my morning reading routine. Most mornings during the week – between 5am and 6:30am – I sit at my computer, catch up on email, read the stuff in my daily folder, go through my RSS feeds, and generally explore whatever I can on the web. Some is systematic (my daily folder, my RSS feeds), some is more random (Techmeme, Hacker News), and some comes from places that I couldn’t tell you how I got to.
Today’s amazing story was from The Tech, MIT’s newspaper (currently in Volume 130). The article is Opinion: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell and is a great story from Keith Yost, an MIT grad, about his relatively short experience working at BCG in Dubai as a management consultant.
It’s a story that will be familiar to anyone who started working at a management consulting firm straight out of school. Or an investment bank. Or a law firm (out of law school). Or an accounting firm. Or any number of other “professional services firm.” It’s especially relevant for anyone who got an A+ education and was at the top of their class, which seems to correlate with the type of people that management consulting firms are interested in hiring.
When I was at MIT, I never really contemplated getting a job working for anyone. I started a few companies while I was in school, the first two of which failed but the third (Feld Technologies) took hold. During my senior year, I was also finishing up my first year of business school at Sloan so for the hell of it I went to a few recruiting dinners, mostly to see what they were like. I vividly remember one for McKinsey at L’Espalier when it was in its old location on Gloucester Street. This would have been 1987 when L’Espalier was the best ticket for a fancy meal in Boston (I think I’d been once) so there was plenty of buildup. The evening was one part delightful (the meal was awesome) and one part “turn a power drill on, place it between my eyes, and put me out of my misery” as the senior consultants and partners from McKinsey took the room through a presentation using overhead slides (this was before the age of Powerpoint) talking about the firm, the firm’s history, the firm’s importance in the universe, and a bunch of other things I forgot within 15 seconds of leaving dinner.
Over the years I’ve had plenty of opportunities to work with other large management consulting firms on various projects. While I found the style and tempo to vary, Keith’s article rang true to me, especially when I talk to some of my ex-investment banking friends who didn’t make it through year three of their “advanced copy machine operation and presentation wrangling” skills.
If you are early on in your career in a professional services firm, you’ll benefit from reading Keith’s article and thinking about the story of “Find Me A Rock.” If you are a manager or a partner, you’ve probably already found a rock, but it’d be worth your time to read this story also and ponder what you are doing on a daily basis. Think of it as having something healthy for breakfast instead of the usual Cocoa Puffs.
A few days ago I wrote about the launch of the MIT Entrepreneurship Review. I neglected however to mention their actual launch party, which is happening on April 7th from 7pm – 10pm at the MIT Media Lab. The MITER (er- MIT Entrepreneurship Review) party will gather together a bunch of folks in the MIT and Boston entrepreneurial ecosystems. It looks like it should be a fun event – email Jen Novak if you want an invitation.
I just read Rework, the new book by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals. It’s fantastic. If you are starting a business, or thinking about starting a business, or running a business, or breathing air, this is a book you should read.
There are an endless array of “startup books” to choose from. Most suck. Many are ego trips for successful entrepreneurs. Others are self-help books from entrepreneurs that haven’t been successful, but are trying to be successful as entrepreneurial self-help book writers. Very few are useful, authentic, or powerful.
Rework nails it on every dimension. I was annoyed during the first chapter since the book started out with the typical “bootstrap your business rather than raise money from clueless investors” screed that Fried is famous for. While I strongly agree that is one way (my first company was started with $10 and that was all the money we ever raised), it’s not the only way and I get tired of hearing polarizing rhetoric around this.
It turns out that was Fried and Heinemeier’s way of getting my attention. Rather than passively rolling into chapter two, I was fired up. And then, in the style of Gary Vaynerchuk, they Crushed It (another awesome book, BTW). I was glued to my couch for the next hour as I pounded my way through the book. It’s a collection of short essays and cool drawings built around one liners that everyone running a business should ponder. As a bonus, they have a great essay on four letter words and why “fuck” and “shit” are not ones you should be concerned with. And, in a demonstration of their mad skills, they have an awesome attack ad for the book.
I spent most of today grinding through another draft of “The Tao of TechStars”, a book that David Cohen and I are writing based on lessons we’ve learned from TechStars. After reading Rework, I’m hopeful that we’ve written something as good, and as important, as what Fried and Heinemeier have written. Time will tell.
Over the past eighteen months I’ve gotten to know Bill Warner through my work with the Boston program of TechStars. Bill was a well known entrepreneur when I lived in Boston between 1983 and 1995 – he’d founded Avid which is one of the famous MIT software companies to come out of the 1980’s and the subsequently founded Wildfire Communications with Rich Miner, now of Google Ventures and another great entrepreneur in Boston that I’ve gotten to know over the past year.
When I met Bill I was captivated by his deep desire to see the Boston entrepreneurial scene – especially around software and Internet – get re-energized. He was clear that the history of Boston was rich with entrepreneurial success and was sick of all of the anti-Boston bias coming from folks, especially on the west coast. I’ve watched Bill step up and take a huge leadership role in this effort and in one short year see it paying dividends already.
Yesterday, Bill wrote two great blog posts that should be required reading for anyone in the tech economy in Massachusetts and anyone in a city that aspires to have a long term growing innovation economy.
I encourage you to go read them and then have dessert with Scott Kirsner’s article You can’t tell how the innovation economy is doing without a scorecard. These guys just get it and are doing great things for the Boston innovation economy.
And – while you are thinking about entrepreneurial communities, take a look at the new article in the Fast Company series titled Why You Should Start a Company in… Seattle. Andy Sack, an long time entrepreneur, partner in Founders Co-op as well as the Managing Director of the TechStars Seattle program, has a great interview up.
But wait, even though I’m not announcing a new tablet computer, there’s more – this time in Boulder. Andrew Hyde announced Project Boulder Connect, a new initiative he’s putting together for a variety of user groups in Boulder.
It’s time to hop in the shower and then head over to do Community Hours at the Bunker.
While the rest of the US is watching football, I thought I’d sit quietly at my house and catch up on some writing, most notably what David Cohen, Entrepreneur Magazine, and a few other special people are waiting for from me. However, before I dig into that, I thought I’d procrastinate by catching up on some reading from the week and, motivated by a few interesting things I came across, stall a little more by writing this blog post summarizing the interesting things I came across today.
More (Steve) Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs: Let’s start out with an absolute must read Op-Ed by Thomas Friedman. Read it to find out why we should start calling 2010 the year of innovation, or more cleverly – the year to “Start-Up America.”
My Dad and the Story of the Stolen Stamp Collection: My dad and I are writing a series of letters to each other on our blogs. His second one is up and it’s the story of what happened to my stamp collection in sixth grade and how we addressed it together. I remember this like it was yesterday – it was a very formative experience for me that heavily influenced my view on directly confronting bad actors as well as the importance of honesty.
Bill Gates is blogging: When he first launched his blog, there was no RSS feed. There is now.
5 Minutes With OpenView Venture Partners: Mark Solon at Highway 12 Ventures has a nice Q&A up on his blog with Scott Maxwell and George Roberts at OpenView Partners. I’m good friends with Mark and Scott; Highway 12 and OpenView are co-investors in Balihoo, and I’m a small investor in OpenView Partners. Good stuff.
We Believe in Magic: Last week Memeo (we are investors) released Memeo Connect for Google Apps. You can now access your Google Apps docs from the desktop as well as sync them to the cloud. Automagically. Like Magic. Memeo explains why and how. If you are a Google Apps (Docs) user, this is for you!
Founder Dating Seattle, Boulder: Seattle has Founder Dating on 2/9; Boulder has it on 2/10 right before Ignite Boulder. Brilliant.
Open Angel Forum Colorado – Feb 3 FAQs: OAFCO is heating up – all five sponsorships are sold out, the list of angels coming is great, and we are sorting through a nice list of companies that we are inviting. If you are interested in attending as an angel or presenting as a company, just wander over to the FAQ.
What I really feel like doing is laying on the coach, eating a mango popsicle, and reading some mental floss. Fortunately I downloaded Stuart Woods latest book Kisser yesterday.
A few weeks ago Fast Company published an interview between me and Laura Rich titled Why You Should Start a Company in… Boulder. This morning I woke up to Fred Wilson’s discussion of his article Why You Should Start a Company in… New York.
Fred and I did our interviews separately – there was no coordination between us. I was struck by a common theme – startup hubs take a while to develop. Fred says:
“we’re into the second decade now, and what the second decade is really turning out to be is serial entrepreneurs who’ve done it one, two, three, sometimes four times now, who can bring teams together very quickly, often teams that have worked together very quickly, can get on opportunities fast, can get money raised fast, can build companies pretty fast.”
Compare that to what I said:
“You have a lot of those entrepreneurs that had a success. Wasn’t necessarily their first company, but they had a success. And then, they had a failure between the 1998 and 2003 timeframe. So they started another thing or made some investments that got caught up in the bubble. So they had both a success and a failure in that time. So some set of those people started companies from 2004 forward. They were very mature entrepreneurs. They’re entrepreneurs that had success AND failure and understand what was required to both win and also were humble enough to recognize that you could lose.
Then, we both talk about mentors and the engaged cycle of old and new entrepreneurs in building and sustaining the entrepreneur ecosystem. This – as I’m sure you know if you’ve been reading this blog – is a core thesis behind the TechStars program now running in Boulder, Boston, and Seattle. Again – first Fred:
“And now you have role models. So the first time entrepreneurs can find angel investors. It’s exactly what has been going on in Silicon Valley for three, four decades now. Marc Andreessen becomes hugely successful, makes a bunch of money, becomes an angel investor, backs a bunch of people, mentors them, becomes a VC. That migration path is now playing out here in New York, and so most of the investments we do at the first angel-round stage is ourselves and a bunch of serial entrepreneurs in New York who are now making twenty-five- to fifty-thousand dollar investments as angels in these companies, sometimes acting as informal advisers and mentors to the first-time entrepreneurs.”
Now me:
So you had that against a backdrop of, everybody here is at most two degrees of separation away from any other entrepreneur, because there’s only 100,000 of us, right? And that then is great because what you have is this easy access to everybody. And even though there’s competitive dynamics and occasionally friction, and there’s plenty of personalities. More generally, you tend to see that people try to help each other here, especially around the thing that I think is the generator of new entrepreneurial activity, which is young, first-time entrepreneurs.”
Finally, even though both Boulder and New York are actively in the midst of an entrepreneurial renaissance, it requires continual effort to sustain this. I’ve committed the balance of my professional life to this (hopefully at least 20 years) – not just in Boulder, but in other entrepreneurial communities around the United States, including New York (which I love to both spend time in and work in.) See my parting comment:
“I think there’s been a ton of energy by entrepreneurs in energizing Boulder in the last four or five years. And that has to continue. There’s no such thing as resting on your laurels. There’s no such thing as being complacent. The entrepreneurial beast is hungry. And if you want to have a great entrepreneurial ecosystem you have to keep feeding the entrepreneurial beast. And it has to be fed all up and down the chain, from some entrepreneurs who are young to experienced entrepreneurs, and they have to keep caring about the place they live in, their community, and the dynamics amongst them, the people in the community.”
I’m curious to see if Laura picks up similar themes in her other interviews. Knowing some of the people and cities involved, I expect she will.
I’m at CES all day wandering the floor looking for additional devices to wear on my body to monitor all aspects of my life. In the mean time, there’s a bunch of great stuff in my world that has happened so far this week. Here are links with a little commentary.
Rally Software Raised $16m in a Round Led by Greylock: My friends at Rally Software are creating an important long term company in the Boulder ecosystem. 2009 was a great year for Rally – they grew a ton and dominated their market segment. They didn’t need any additional financing but were approached by several firms in Q409. Greylock put forth an attractive offer and their involvement, including the addition of our new board member Tom Bogan (Chairman of Citrix among other things), is a huge addition.
Jive Software Acquires Social Media Monitoring Startup Filtrbox: I’m extremely proud of Ari Newman, Tom Chikoore, and the rest of the team at Filtrbox. They were part of the TechStars Boulder 2007 class and are now the fourth company from that class to have a positive exit (the others are SocialThing, Intense Debate, and Brightkite). The team will become the Jive Boulder office and I expect they’ll grow nicely over the next year.
Kidrobot Moves to Boulder: While I’m not an investor in Kidrobot, I’m a huge fan. Paul Budnitz is moving with about half of the 45 person company from New York and plans to hire another 20 people in Boulder in pretty short order. Look for life sized Kidrobot thingies on the Pearl Street Mall this summer.
TechStars Seattle won the Seattle Flashies “Tech Triumph of the Year”: Huge props for Andy Sack and Greg Gottesman for driving the creation of TechStars Seattle which will launch its first class in the fall of 2010.
There’s a lot more coming, but for now I’m going to go touch as many screens and tablets as I can in the middle of the debauchery that is Las Vegas.
I read a fascinating book yesterday called The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future by Martin Ford. I can’t remember who sent it to me (someone did – thank you); it appeared on the of my infinite pile of books so I gobbled it down as my first book at 2010.
The first half of the book sets up the situation and the corresponding problems. I agreed with much of the first half. The second half proposes a solution. I had a hugely difficult time with it. Ford anticipated this as he regularly acknowledged (unnecessarily) throughout the second half that many people would have a hard time with his proposed solution. Yet he marched on relentlessly.
Ford’s basic premise is as follows:
“At some point in the future – it might be many years or decades from now – machines will be able to do the jobs of a large percentage of the ‘average’ people in our population, and these people will not be able to find new jobs.”
Ford does a good job of spending the first half of this book making the case for this. He draws nicely from the notion of a technological singularity (which many of us are now calling simple “the singularity” for convenience), explains why mainstream economists (and the notion of econometrics in general) are basically historians rather than effective predictors of the future, does a nice job weaving the Luddite Fallacy into the mix, makes a compelling argument about China’s role in this he calls the “China Fallacy”, and wraps it up by revisiting a variety of conventional views of the future while asking “do we really believe they are going to play out this way?” (answer = no).
At this point I took a break and went for a walk around the block with my dogs. I knew the book was shifting from “problem” to “solution” (the next chapter was titled Transition) and I wanted to clear my mind so I could absorb it. I had a couple of weak ideas about where Ford was going to go, but it was pretty fuzzy to me. So I dove back in.
The second half of the book blew me away. Ford starts by asserting underlying his mental model – that in the future 75% unemployment will permanently exist because jobs will have been automated away – and they will not be replaceable. So – the vast majority of people in our society will be “unemployable” in a conventional sense (as in a 40 hour / week job). Ford asks rhetorically “Is it possible to have a prosperous economy and a civil society in such a scenario?” (answer = yes and he’s going to propose a way to do it.)
The base on which he builds his solution is the following idea:
“We will have to undergo a quantum shift in our value system. In order to preserve the free market system, we will have to come to the realization that while work (at least for most people) may no longer be essential, broad-based consumption is essential.”
He then spends the balance of the book explaining a government-driven taxation and incentive approach that taxes companies based on their permanently lost wages (based on automation, which he asserts will increase gross margins) while incenting the unemployed to act in ways that benefit themselves and societies by paying them based on how they act and contribute in this “non-traditional job” way. Ford suggests several simple categories, including Education (self and others), Community and Civic Activities, Journalism, and the Environment. He then spends a lot of time explaining the implementation at a high level, including an abstract example of how a functioning free-market society could exist post the singularity.
Sometime during reading this stuff my brain exploded and I had to go take the dogs for another walk. When I came back, I tried to explain this to Amy but couldn’t. I tried to make the argument that all government employees (local, state, and federal) are already in this category so the jump from the federally reported 10% unemployment to 75% isn’t as big as we might think since 8% already work for the government (so let’s say the jump is from 20% to 75%). I couldn’t do it – I just couldn’t take myself seriously.
While I love Ford’s tenacity with the idea and radical approach, I think this book would have worked better as science fiction rather than an attempt at an economic / political essay. Ironically, I might have been able to buy the argument better in the context of science fiction; when put against the backdrop of our existing social / societal construct, it was too difficult for me to absorb.
I have a belief that the structure of what we call “modern society” will have to change post singularity. I don’t yet have my own hypothesis for what this looks like, but many of my favorite science fiction writers have been hacking away at this for several decades. And I’m continuing to slurp down as much stuff as I can about the singularity since I both (a) believe it will happen in my lifetime – assuming I live a normal life expectancy and (b) I hope I’ll be involved in helping create it.
I’ll be following Ford’s blogging at his site econfuture: Future Economics and Technology. Even though I struggled with his solution, it’s another interesting input for me to ponder. And all of this also led me (via an article titled Martin Ford Asks: Will Automation Lead to Economic Collapse?) to a fun new website called Singularity Hub which has now been added to my feedreader. Now, time for some more Philip K. Dick.
When I’m at my house in Keystone, I work my way through my infinite pile of physical books rather than reading on my Kindle. It’s always a mystery as to what has made it to the top of the pile (I don’t select anything particular – I just read whatever is “on top” and, since it’s an infinite pile, “top” doesn’t actually refer to any particular place in the pile. Two of the ones that I gobbled down in the past few days were spectacular.
If you are any sort of solo athlete (runner, swimmer, biker, triathlete) you must read Matt McCue’s An Honorable Run. This also goes for anyone that is a coach, a mentor, or an entrepreneur that has a mentor. It’s a great running story, a great coach story, a great human being story, and a great Colorado Buffs story. Plus, McCue is an excellent writer.
The other book, American Power, is by Mitch Epstein. Amy gave this to me as a present. You might remember Epstein by my review of his incredible book Family Business which Amy gave me about five years ago. The book inspired me to post a long essay about my dad’s dad (Grandpa Jack) which – after just reading the post again – brought me chills, especially against the backdrop of An Honorable Run.
Epstein is brilliant photographer. In American Power he travels the United States and takes photographs where he investigates the notion of power (both electrical and political). I love great photography when it is tied around a particular theme and Epstein just nails it. It is mostly photographs, but finishes up with a crisp essay about his experience of putting together the book, travelling the US, and running into all kinds of issues with cops and security guards as he photographs public buildings, or non-public buildings while on public property.
I’ve got another week up here to read a few more books from the infinite pile. You’ll hear from me if I read any other excellent ones.