Breaking Glass by Rishi Dean

Summary: At a startup is there ever really such thing as “downtime”? How about “work / life” balance? The lines don’t exist for entrepreneurs, and is increasingly blurring in other jobs as well. Here’s a different way to think about what it all means.E-mail. Tweet. http://rdean.me/wlbmyth

As an entrepreneur, your work and your life are intertwined, there is no such thing as a “balance” between them. You’ve made immense personal sacrifice, ask much of those people near and dear to you, so anyone who tells you you need to make crisper distinctions, simply doesn’t understand what it takes, and what you’ve signed up for. Yes, taking a “job” is different, but startups demand this level of effort.

Moreover, this type of lifestyle is increasingly seeping into the mainstream. Given the nature of mobility devices (laptops, iPads, smartphones), connecting us ubiquitously wherever and whenever (including planes and trains) we are. This shift will change the very nature of work, and in turn blur the lines of work and life, the way most entrepreneurs face it.

So what does that really mean? The best metaphor I can use is pro sports, and with basketball and football seasons in full swing, I thought I’d illustrate what I mean using those as analogies.

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Summary: What happens when you get a 40+ person company to design its own office space? More importantly, will they want to? Turns out the results are better than expected, speaking in large part to an incredible culture and a great group of people. See for yourself.E-mail. Tweet. http://rdean.me/ez369R

Well, if you haven’t heard, we at Visible Measures recently moved office space. However, what you probably didn’t know is that this move, and all of the office space design, was performed entirely by the company employees….this is a lesson in crowdsourced design.

As a growing technology company, with state-of-the-art technology, and in a really hot market, we were bursting at the seams of our former office space…so it was time to move on to bigger, and better office space.

What we did

Unlike most companies of our size, we decided to go back to our roots, and keep things very frugal, and “startup”…or as VM advisor, David Cancel, would say “ghettopreneur”.

This approach meant all of the basics would have to be handled; like boxing stuff up, moving furniture, renting a U-Haul truck, and lots of little trips back and forth. However, in taking this approach, we were afforded to do something very unique: to all pitch in to design our own office space. To make things fun, we enacted an HGTV-style competition where teams signed up and developed their own concepts on a limited budgets, and timeframe, to execute their concepts. While the budget was fixed, we erred on the side of fewer rules, in order to let the creativity flourish. Additionally, we employed the best interior designer I know (um, well…ok it’s my wife) to provide guidance to the teams, and to help out with our other common areas.

See pictures of the space

Summary: While designing and building culture anywhere is difficult, startups have unique qualities that make it especially challenging. Here I give a mini-model, called the “Three Ps”, which can serve as a reminder of the key elements to create, maintain, and align culture. E-mail. Tweet.

I was recently asked by good friend, and coach Bob Radin, a professor at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, to speak to his MBA class, called “Managing People in Organizations”. Bob asked me to give them the perspective of what it takes to design and build culture at a startup; for which I provided some perspective, as well as a mini-framework, to help students think about how culture plays an integral role when founding a startup, or even selecting where to begin their post-MBA career.

In addition to the slides, here is a description of the main takeaways of the discussion.

See the presentation slides and commentary

Summary: While there are many ways to rate startup employees, The “Carryover Question”, and its ‘Net Carryover Score’, can help cut through the fluff. E-mail. Tweet.

One of the most challenging thing to do in a startup is to keep your eye on employee growth and development, while fighting the day-to-day grind of helping to build your business. On the one hand, there is no point looking at employee career development since if the company doesn’t succeed it doesn’t matter, whereas on the other hand to build a sustainable and successful company, investing in employee development is a must.

So the essence of employee reviews is to make them relevant in a specific, timely, and succinct manner without any ambiguity. Let’s examine how we may do that with a single question that can sum up any other form of evaluation.

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Summary: There’s more to start-up finance than raising money, here are the “5Ps” you need to know. E-mail. Tweet.

While I try to keep topics on this blog related to innovation strategy, and product development (rather than being a pure “startup” blog) sometimes I need to weigh in on topics that get me a little annoyed. That is, in nearly every meet-up of young startups (the best places to find the seeds of innovation sprouting) the discussion is centered around raising money. All too often venture capital financing is lauded as the holy grail for a startup, over running your business. However, if you’re supposedly operating as a “lean startup”, these are the financials you should be focused on…not raising money.

Financial Management vs. Raising Finance
There is much more that goes into the financials of a start-up (I almost called this post “Why Startup CFOs Matter”). Consider that if the core objective of a business is to make money, and likewise its death is to run out of money, it’s worth examining how the areas of day-to-day financial operations of a startup.

Here I propose “5Ps” of start-up financial management:

• Planning
• Process & Policies
• People
• Pricing
• Partnerships

Let’s explore each of these in more detail.
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One of the toughest things in a start-up is to figure out when to invest in initiatives that take a longer term to payoff (e.g. channel partnerships, brand building) vs. those with immediate revenue generating opportunities. On the one hand you feel that optimizing for immediate revenue always trumps anything else; however, on the other hand, if you don’t invest in longer term market development initiatives, you can starve the customer pipeline.
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When you’re deep in the trenches, these are often heard phrases, which if you don’t take with a little humor, can drive you nuts:

1. “Why don’t you just…” This also crops up under variations such as: “What you need to do is…”. To me, this one implies that you aren’t doing something obvious, and that obvious thing is simple to execute. This phrase is most uttered by current MBAs who just read a case study, or management consultants.
2. “That was my [friend/aunt/cousin's] idea…” Now I don’t mean this as they actually started a business, more that they had a tangentially related idea in the shower, or over beers, and never did anything with it….Kind of like how I “thought of” LinkedIn in 2001.
3. “Since you work for yourself, can’t you take today off?” Uttered by those who don’t understand your internal sense of urgency driven both internally (your desire to change the world), or externally (customers, competitors, or distaste of Ramen noodles).

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I recently came across the blog of a former classmate, Gummi Hafsteinsson. While always insightful, Gummi’s post, entitled “What makes a good product manager for software development?” is particularly noteworthy.

Gummi’s keys to excellent product management
In his post Gummi argues that to be successful, one needs the following core traits:

• Deep technical understanding
• Speed of execution and juggling skills
• Obsessive enthusiasm about the product experience

While I wholeheartedly agree with Gummi (and I would highly encourage you to read his post to fully understand his perspective), here’s another way to think about what it takes to be a great PM…

My take: Be like Jake

Yes, shamelessly capitalizing on Avatar’s popularity, I think the core traits a good software product manager needs are well embodied by Sam Worthington’s character in Avatar: Jake Sully. These are simply:

• Brains
• Guts
• Charisma
• Character

Here’s how good product managers use each of these.
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As the year, and decade, come to a close, it’s time to reflect and to celebrate some of your accomplishments.

There’s no such thing as unequivocal success in a start-up
Too often in start-up life there is the elusive ideal that you will have those “unequivocal successes” to celebrate. The truth is, those never happen. Too often things move in such a way that there is never a natural moment to stop, take a breath, and soak in what you’ve done.

For instance, suppose you’re working on a big deal with a major strategic partner or sales agreement, when is the right time to pop the champagne? After you reach verbal commitment, you’re probably embroiled with lawyers, terms, and conditions, knowing that things could change with any moment. When the signature finally does come, you’re waiting already for a ong time, and have moved onto the next pressing matter of implementation or transition such that actually receiving it seems trivial when contrasted with what lies ahead. So, there really isn’t such a time where you can have that feeling of “unequivocal success” — it may happen in movies and sports, but not in a start-up, so you have to make those moments happen by celebrating the little victories.

Raise a glass to what you have accomplished so far
So many times, you don’t know when the next big thing is going to come, you’ve been working your tail off so the only way to celebrate your success is to take a pause and look back on what you’ve accomplished. It could be getting your product to market, reaching a sales milestone you didn’t expect but somewhere along the way, I’m sure you’ve made more progress than you thought, in a lot of areas.

So this evening, raise a glass and look back on 2009 (and even the previous decade) and celebrate your hard work and accomplishments, whatever they may be…knowing bigger things are yet to come.

Happy New Year to all.

I am a big fan of Paul Graham, and once again he’s given us a great essay, this time on determination. His basic idea is that determination is a factor of “willfulness balanced with discipline, aimed by ambition”. A very good post, that I encourage you all to read.

In keeping with the thread, I offer the following video, from ESPN’s “Outside the Lines”. If this isn’t the essence of Paul’s three traits, I don’t know what is…and if it doesn’t choke you up a bit, I’m not sure what will.
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