Posts filed under 'Finding your Niche Stage'
February 16th, 2010
I think that there are better products, impossible products, and unthinkable products.
Better products follow an established trajectory in an industry. They are “15 minutes ahead” and the easiest to sell…for a while. Examples include:
- Faster computers with larger memory
- Cars with better gas mileage
Impossible products find a way to relax one or two constraints that designers of better products have taken as fixed. They are harder to sell, not so much because they are hard to understand but difficult to believe, prospects will ask you “What’s the catch?” Examples include:
- ATM Machines replacing human tellers to dispense cash
- Ethernet over twisted pair
Unthinkable products are typically developed by someone from outside the target industry or are the result of repurposing a product from another industry. Their developers were not handicapped by the mental roadblocks that come from following established practices and patterns in an industry. They can be extremely difficult to get prospects to understand–much less believe in–as they are almost always incompatible with current practices and infrastructure. But they can create an entirely new category of product. Examples include:
- IDDQ testing in semiconductors
- The Reebok Pump shoe
- Henry Ford realizing that a meat packing plant’s “disassembly line” could be run backward to assemble a car.
What are you working on?
See also
February 7th, 2010
Recapping ideas, papers, and books that had changed my life yesterday reminded me of Saras Sarasvathy’s Effectual Reasoning Model from her 2001 paper “What Makes Entrepreneur’s Entrepreneurial” (There is an annotated version on the Khosla Ventures site at http://www.khoslaventures.com/presentations/What_makes_entrepreneurs_entrepreneurial.pdf )
What follows are some quotes from “What Makes Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial.”
Effectual reasoning, however, does not begin with a specific goal. Instead, it begins with a given set of means and allows goals to emerge contingently over time from the varied imagination and diverse aspirations of the founders and the people they interact with.
Effectual thinkers are like explorers setting out on voyages into uncharted waters.
All entrepreneurs begin with three categories of means
- Who they are–their traits, tastes,and abilities;
- What they know–their education, training, expertise, and experience
- Whom they know–their social and professional networks.
In our “Idea to Revenue” Workshop we talk about three kinds of capital that startups begin with: intellectual, social, and financial. We don’t call out what she refers to as “human capital” or “who they are–their traits, tastes, and abilities” as a resource but instead encourage teams to “begin in phase two.” That is, to build on prior accomplishments and long term interests so that early customers view the startup as a continuation of earlier efforts and focus.
But I like this model of bootstrapping entrepreneurs as foragers: living off the land as hunter-gatherers until they can find a market to homestead. Bootstrappers have to start from where they are and search for opportunities. Pasteur advised that “Chance only favors the prepared mind” so you have to open yourself up to possibilities and be prepared to be surprised (which is another way of saying you have learned something new). Some more quotes from her paper:
Using these means, the entrepreneurs being to imagine and implement possible effects that can be created with them. Most often they start very small with the means that are closest at hand and move almost directly into action without elaborate planning.
Plans are made and unmade and revised and recast through action and interaction with others on a daily basis. Yet at any given moment, there is always a meaningful picture that keeps the team together, a compelling story that brings in more stakeholders and a continuing journey that maps uncharted territories.
Eventually certain of the emerging effects coalesce into clearly achievable and desirable goals–landmarks that point to a discernible path beginning to emerge from the wilderness
Seasons entrepreneurs, however, know that surprises are not deviations from the path. Instead they are the norm, the flora and fauna of the landscape, from which one learns to forge a path through the jungle. The unexpected is the stuff of entrepreneurial experience and transforming the unpredictable into the utterly mundane is the special domain of the expert entrepreneur.
One of the reasons that we run the Bootstrapper Breakfasts as 90 minute unconferences–where folks introduce themselves and put issues on the table they would like to discuss–is that it keeps everyone in an entrepreneurial frame of mind:
- When you hear someone describe a challenge that they are facing, it gives you much better insight into their thinking and allows you to evaluate what they might be like to work with.
- Often as not they are describing a common problem, or aspects of a common problem. Hearing their perspective just on the problem can give you new insights into how to solve it.
- It’s good practice to learn how to ask for advice and insight. Entrepreneurs need to do a lot of that in the early market especially.
- Explaining how you managed an issue or situation can deepen your understanding of you solution, it forces you to put it into terms others can use and understand. This is good practice for scaling up (e.g. adding your first employee).
Sarasvathy stresses the cooperative nature of entrepreneurship in the paper, a perspective that I share. Often an entrepreneur is attempting to obsolete an aspect of the status quo, but they have much less competition and much more opportunity for collaboration than is appreciated.
Markets are stable configurations of critical masses of stakeholders, who come together to transform the outputs of human imagination into the forging and fulfillment of human aspirations through economic means.
Effectual reasoning may not necessarily to increase the probability of success of new enterprises, but it reduces the costs of failure by enabling the failure to occur earlier and at lower levels of investment.
Entrepreneurs are entrepreneurial, as differentiated from managerial or strategic, because they think effectually; they believe in a yet-to-be-made future that can substantially be shaped by human action; and they realize that to the extent that this human action can control the future, they need not expend energies trying to predict it. In fact, to the extent that the future is shaped by human action, it is not much use trying to predict it–it is much more useful to understand and work with the people who are engaged in the decisions and actions that bring it into existence.
She highlights three key differences between effectual reasoning and traditional startup management models:
- Risk taking
- Traditional: expected return, work the plan to deliver results to your investors (“Ready Aim Fire” can become “Aim–not big enough–Aim–not big-enough–Aim…”).
- Effectual: affordable loss, make many small mistakes as early and cheaply as possible to speed learning (“Ready Fire Steer“)
- Focus:
- Traditional: competition
- Effectual: strategic partnership (especially with early customers)
- Value Creation
- Traditional: rely on pre-existing knowledge to aim for a known market you can dominate and exploit
- Effectual: leverage contingencies; create opportunities as you map a new market
She goes into some detail on the “affordable loss principle” and offers extracts from an interview with an expert entrepreneur’s approach to a new market:
While managers are taught to analyze the market and choose target segments with the highest potential return, entrepreneurs tend to find ways to reach the market with minimum expenditure of resources such as time, effort, and money. In the extreme case, the affordable loss principle translates into the zero resources to market principle. Several of the expert entrepreneurs I studied insisted that they would not do any traditional market research, but would take the product to the nearest possible potential customer even before it was built. To quote but one of them, “I think I’d start by just… going… instead of asking all the questions I’d go and say.. try and make some sale. I’d make some… just judgments about where I was going — get me and my buddies — or I would go out and start selling. I’d learn a lot you know..which people.. what were the obstacles.. what were the questions.. which prices work better and just DO it. Just try to take it out and sell it. Even before I have the machine. I’d just go try to sell it. Even before I started production. So my market research would actually be hands on actual selling. Hard work, but I think much better than trying to do market research”.
In finding the first customer within their immediate vicinity, whether within their geographic vicinity, within their social network, or within their area of professional expertise, entrepreneurs do not tie themselves to any theorized or pre-conceived “market” or strategic universe for their idea. Instead, they open themselves to surprises as to which market or markets they will eventually end up building their business in or even which new markets they will end up creating.
This is also an approach that favors older entrepreneurs to the extent that they have larger social networks (based on more shared work experience with more people) and deeper professional expertise. The one caveat is that they have to be open to new possibilities and not be blinded by what they “know” to be true in the face of new information.
This 2001 paper offers another perspective on bootstrapping entrepreneurship that is independently derived and predates “Four Steps to the Epiphany (2003)”, “Blue Ocean Strategy(2005)”, and the “Sales Learning Curve (2004).” But all four are clearly addressing different aspects of the same core paradigm that takes a scientific or hypothesis driven approach to new products and new markets.
I will leave with two final quotes from the paper which highlights the value of establishing enduring relationships.
Expert entrepreneurs [...] are actually in the business of creating the future, which entails having to work together with a wide variety of people over long periods of time. [They fill their future] with enduring human relationships that outlive failures and create successes over time
This is largely ignored in our entrepreneurship curricula which tend to focus on market research, business planning, new venture financing and legal issues. As far as I know no entrepreneurship programs offer courses in creating and managing lasting relationships or stable stakeholder networks, nor on failure management.
Related Posts
December 17th, 2009
Steve Blank had a great post today “Building a Company with Customer Data, Why Metrics Are Not Enough” that highlights the need–even for Web Startups–to get out of the BatCave and talk to strangers who may be potential prospects. Engineers in particular can feel that this is not as productive a use of their time as some form of automated interaction. As Steve recounts, here is a typical reaction when he suggests that surveys in particular are not the best way to start:
“We’re a web startup, all our customers are on the web. Why can’t I just get them to give me the answers I need this way?”
Often founders may try and substitute market research data for “seeing the elephant” or having actual contact with live prospects. Blank warns:
…market research firms are excellent at predicting the past. If they could predict the future, they’d be entrepreneurs.
There were two questions in the comments related to when and how to talk to prospects:
Q: At what point in the process of our startup do we want to start getting interactive feedback from our target market? How much focus should we give to gathering customer preference while we are still in the inception phase of our idea?
As soon as you can clearly articulate your hypotheses about the customer’s problem you should get out of the building and start having serious conversations. Customer Development proceeds in parallel with product development and informs it.
One piece of paper with a prospect’s name and a few questions can communicate that you care about their perspective and have given some thought to making it a productive 10-20 minute conversation (if they want to talk longer you should let them, but you should be able to finish a short conversation in ten minutes or so).
Q: Talking to your customers directly is awesome. But, what is even better is to get a group of your customers to talk to you AND each other.
In the early market this is can cause problems when interviewing prospects: focus on one conversation at a time. Don’t let one prospect’s perspective who speaks first on a topic inadvertently anchor the group somewhere. Instead ask open ended questions and listen, prepared to be surprised.
Consider an appreciative inquiry approach to understand the customer’s operating reality.
Customer focus groups are effective for feature planning but more problematic in determining product/market fit in the early market.
October 1st, 2009
This week I have been developing content for a client’s website. We are helping them formulate a message that is intended to explain both their knowledge of their customers’ problems and how they are able to help.
Good marketing is really just good content.
It focuses on your customers’ problems and how they will benefit from your offering. It is not about your product features. It answers all of the questions–or at least all of the common questions–a customer will have they have as they consider buying your product or services.
Good marketing material should be useful, interesting, and even funny to your customers. Material should be clear and concise, it should be use the language that your customers normally use to talk about their challenges and their needs.
Here are a couple of examples we have worked with our clients on over the last year:
August 1st, 2009
On Hacker News about 18 months ago someone posted a question on “Dealing with Post Startup Depression” that read
I recently shut down my first startup ever. I am having a really tough time getting over it and starting all over again. A feeling of extreme weakness and failure has taken all over me, clouding my judgment. Any tips on getting back to normalcy would be highly appreciated.
My answer
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” Winston Churchill
Exercise and a break from the computer are both a good idea.
I think you have to reflect on what happened but with some emotional distance.
Remember Thurber’s observation that “humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility” and write down your lessons learned once you can laugh about it (at least a little) so that you are not just re-opening wounds.
Some amount of lateral drift (reading books, seeing folks you’ve neglected as your firm was failing, etc..) can also give you perspective on what to do differently next time.
I had a painful failure about a decade ago and concluded “I am through with being an entrepreneur.” After five years at a big company I realized that I had mis-assessed and that I couldn’t help being an entrepreneur.
Failing at a startup doesn’t mean you should give up being an entrepreneur, but you should get some perspective on how to make “new mistakes” the next time out.
Dan Vogel posted a pointer to this YouTube clip of Michael Jordan on Failure where he says the following:
“I missed more than 9000 shots in my career.
I have lost almost 300 games.
26 times I have been trusted to take the game winning shot… and missed.
I have failed over and over and over again in my life.
And that is why I succeed.”
Update Nov-24-2009: Reprinted in Silicon Angle with a much nicer set of graphics and the Jordan quote embedded as a YouTube video.
July 13th, 2009
Both engineering and entrepreneurship alternate exploration and verification cycles to develop a solution that satisfies a customer’s need. Both of these rely on the scientific method of “observation, hypothesis formation, prediction, and experimentation” to develop and validate testable theories, engineering solutions, and profitable products. Both require that a new configuration or an opportunity be recognized as distinct and worthy of experimentation/validation efforts and that you understand if you satisfied or failed to satisfy each constraint or requirement.
This is the basis for “I will know it when I see it.”
A key difference between the talented first level contributor and the effective manager, or the talented solo entrepreneur and the effective entrepreneurial CEO, is their ability to delegate. They must be able to orchestrate a shared understanding and common sense of mission around an idea.
Guy Kawasaki makes this point in “The Art of the Start” when he talks about “making meaning” and a team mantra. If you look at Apple’s success, it is because they are able to frame the requirements for a product in a way that everybody on the project can link their activities to the key goals of that product. They don’t have a hundred-page feature list; they do have a mission for their product.
“I will know it when I see it” also applies to engineering a new technology product. A new technology product is born at the intersection of entrepreneurship and engineering.
How do you make the leap from being a solo entrepreneur or a talented engineer to becoming an effective CEO or manager? The move is really one of doing the work, forming a hypothesis and verification, to being able to delegate. There are broadly two kinds of delegation:
- The first kind of delegation is the ability to get it out your head in some way that you understand:
- Can I write a program that does some of this?
- Can I run a Google search?
- Can I build a spreadsheet?
- Can I construct a model of what I am trying to accomplish: e.g. a drawing, an analogy, a simulation or animation?
- Do I know it well enough to define step by step the process that needs to be followed?
- The second kind of delegation is the ability to form a small team and create a shared mission. If I am working on a small team or a medium-sized team, can we have a kind of two-pizza meeting with five or twelve people, and hash things up, run a whiteboard or a flip chart or some shared collaboration environment that we come to a common sense of mission. Once that happens, we get beyond the “let’s go see if the boss is happy with this” to actually acting around the objective.
On the engineering side, “I will know it when I see it” comes in a number of ways. In verification, as a particular detail, we have gotten very good at generating a whole bunch of tests. But, what we haven’t been good at is figuring out, what is the status of the test; are we getting closer or further away, where are we; are we making progress? “I will know it when I see it” is not really a good navigation method. We like to know where we are, and where we want to go. We also need to have at least a theory of a path that connects from where we are to where we want to go. There are three requirements for navigation: we have to know where we are, we have to know where we want to go, and we have to have some idea of a path that connects where we are to where we want to go.
One exciting startup that helps engineers with this particular problem is Achilles Test Systems.
“Achilles solves the problem that was created by the first generation of automation efforts. When trying to validate something, the first step was to generate a huge number of tests. We help with the fall-out of all of these automated tests by analyzing the results. There is the risk, if we apply computing power naively, to overwhelm the team with a mass of detail. Our tools address this issue of analyzing the mass of detail. There is no substitute for detailed root-cause analyses; we are not taking the engineer out of the loop. We help the engineer visualize what is going on and allow him to focus on the critical issues,” explained Chris Kappler, CEO of Achilles Test Systems.
Achilles goal is augmentation, to free up the engineer to focus on the tasks where he brings distinctive value. The question is how to alleviate 80 to 95% of the work that doesn’t require expert engineering judgment and analysis and free up the team to focus on the 5-20% that truly benefits from human root cause analysis.
“The first challenge is to prioritize the team’s efforts to where we deploy human expertise against the mass of detail. We run a classifier to categorize the outputs. In a list of a thousand outputs, we want to know: what are some cases are more likely the benefit from human expertise, what are some cases that are less likely; and where should we focus our engineering talent to do some debugging? The second challenge is how we debug or analyze these class or categories of outputs. If we know that we have cases that are similar, can we do root-cause analysis on a couple of them, and then make an inference about the rest of that population. For example we have three populations of problems: we have errors that are red, errors that are blue, and errors that are purple. In the naive process, we might start at one end of the errors, debug all the red ones, make changes to the design or change the approach, and rerun. A better approach may be to pick three or four representatives of red errors, debug them; three or four representatives of blue errors, debug them; three or four representatives of purple errors, debug them; and then rerun and see if we have actually killed the class or did we not get it right,” continued Kappler.
Whether you want to call it exploration and verification, whether you want to call it effective delegation, effective automation, or the need to blend human expertise with automation; this is a problem that engineering teams and startups wrestle with. At SKMurphy, this is a category of problems we have been worried about ever since we formed. We look for solutions that automate the “I will know it when I see it”.
Update Sept 1-2009: I will be giving a talk based on this post at the SFBAY ACM on Wed Sep-16-2009 at 6:30pm. See this page for details.
June 10th, 2009
I spent today at the Hadoop Summit 2009 (hadoopsummit09). Although I paid my $100 registration fee in advance I made the mistake of getting there a few minutes after 9am with the first keynote underway and joined a thick knot of hangers on in one of the doorways to the ballroom (don’t tell the fire marshal). Finally at 10:30 they broke the wall down that separated the adjacent salon and expanded the ballroom.
The first keynote I listened to was a long sales pitch from Sun. I don’t know why you would give a room full of hundreds of engineers and scientists a basic sales pitch for cloud computing, but it was a waste of time for both Sun and the audience.
Enough whining, the rest of the conference was very thought provoking, some quick impressions:
- If Moore’s Law has delivered roughly a million fold improvement in computing performance in the last 40 years, Hadoop, Zookeeper, and similar orchestration layers allow another thousand fold improvement for suitable problems.
- Amdahl’s Law trumps Moore in many situations but some of the problems now being solved were intractable, at least for a reasonable budget, if not unthinkable five or ten years ago.
- To put a million fold increase in perspective, that’s a lifetime of calculation (40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, 40 years working lifetime) compressed into 288 seconds, 12 seconds shy of five minutes.
- The ability to orchestrate a thousand to ten thousand machines on a problem (admittedly you need a suitable problem) means we are looking at project CPU budgets measured not in CPU years but CPU millennia.
- This is not entirely new: certainly there were DoD and NSA projects working at that level with specialized hardware two and perhaps three decades ago. Pixar announced in 2006 that their movie Cars took 23 CPU millennia to produce, again with specialized hardware.
- But Amazon EC2 uses commodity hardware and makes CPU hours available for a dime with a credit card. Admittedly a CPU millennium will set you back roughly $876,000 at current prices.
- Several requests or comments on the need for fractional hour billing, which I took as at least anecdotal evidence for good parallelization of a lot of the tasks.
- Amazon reminded us that they are quite skilled at accepting (and shipping back) physical media containing data sets for their Elastic Compute Cloud.
- “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.” Andrew Tanenbaum
- The show reminded me a lot of INTEROP 88, the year that Interop transitioned from workshop to trade show with a few dozen vendors at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The vendor ecosystem for Hadoop is not yet as diverse, but the focus was clearly on system administration and technology, with the applications discussed in highly technical language. The crowd seemed to be researchers and system programmers for the most part, but the potential business impacts are starting to become a lot clearer.
Postscript June 14: Jinesh Varia made a remark during his keynote about “please check out our security whitepaper, some firms are building HIPAA complaint applications” so I did and found this paragraph which clearly telegraphs their strategic intent to move to the heart of enterprise applications:
Certifications and Accreditations
To provide customers with assurance of the security measures implemented, AWS is working with a public accounting firm to ensure continued Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) compliance, and attain certifications and unbiased Audit Statements such as recurring Statement on Auditing Standards No. 70: Service Organizations, Type II (SAS70 Type II). AWS will continue efforts to obtain the strictest of industry certifications in order to verify its commitment to provide a secure, world-class cloud computing environment. The flexibility and customer control that the AWS platform provides permits the deployment of solutions that meet industry-specific certification requirements. For instance, customers have built HIPAA-compliant healthcare applications on AWS.
June 7th, 2009
I don’t know how I overlooked Andrew Chen’s “Your Ad-Supported Web 2.0 Site is Actually a B2B Enterprise in Disguise” He succinctly outlines some hard facts that many founders spend a year of their life to learn:
- Unless you are a ridiculously huge consumer internet site, you have to build up your revenues through brand advertising sales. It’s very hard to just use ad networks like Google AdSense to sustain yourself: just do the math using 10 to 25 cent CPMs and you’ll quickly see why.
- The users of your website are not really your customers. Your actual customers are the ad agencies and advertisers. Your Web 2.0 consumer startup is actually a B2B that sells inventory to brand advertisers.
- How to avoid this: directly monetize your users by coming up with something so compelling people will pay for it through subscriptions, virtual goods, or other E-commerce models.
Too many media startup founders think that their audience is their customer, when it’s their advertisers (or the firms who want to advertise to reach the audience that they have assembled). As Patrick McKenzie commented on Hacker News: “I’m terminally old-fashioned in a lot of ways. I hold open doors for ladies, take off my hat before entering buildings, and define customer as “someone who pays money for a good or service”.
March 24th, 2009
You are not alone. We talk to firms every day that are challenged by the current economic environment. Let me suggest a couple of things you can do:
- Come to a Bootstrappers Breakfast™ and compare notes with other bootstrapping entrepreneurs for the price of your breakfast. We host four a month, the next one is 9AM Friday March 27 at Red Rock Coffee (second floor) in Mountain View at 201 Castro Street. Here is the calendar of events.
- Sign-up for our “Getting More Customer” workshop next Tuesday. It’s goes from 8:15 to 1pm and includes lunch, you will leave with a 90 day plan and as part of the workshop we follow up with you four times–at two weeks, four weeks, eight weeks, and 13 weeks–to help you stay on track.
- Make a list of thirty people that you have enjoyed working with. Reconnect. Offer to meet for coffee or a meal. Suggest an event that would be of interest to both of you. Write an endorsement on LinkedIn for them to let them know how much you appreciated working with them. See what you can do for them and let them know what kind of firm constitutes a good prospect for your products or services.
- Contact firms that fell off of your prospect list and former customers and see how things have worked out for them. Perhaps you can help them informally, perhaps they are interested in becoming a customer (again).
- Give me a call or drop me an e-mail (see contact info for coordinates) to schedule a free one hour consult on your current situation. Depending upon where you are we can work through a map of the path from idea to revenue if you haven’t launched or spend some time debugging your sales process if you have and you aren’t where you want to be.
Update Sat-Mar-28 One thing that will help to give the discussion some structure is answering at least one of the following set of questions. I suggest this because these will be the kinds of questions I will be asking to understand where you are:
Don’t assume that there is one thing you need to do that will make all of the difference: it’s more than likely going to require a combination of things applied diligently for months.
March 21st, 2009
“Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs,
the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity
for a different business or a different service.”
Peter Drucker “Innovation and Entrepreneurship”
My uncle John Murphy was a doctor in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) unit in Korea. He only talked about his experiences twice that I can recall and his memories of events were of one long stress filled tour of duty. He had a family and was in the reserve when he was called up a few months before his WW2 deferment obligations would have expired. He chose to go to a MASH instead of a hospital in Japan or Seoul because he earned points faster and would be home much much sooner. Although the units were supposed to be “behind the lines” they frequently came under sniper fire and had to continue to retreat as the UN front lines pulled back in the face of the Chinese onslaught after the Yalu river was crossed.
And yet it was in the MASH units in Korea that several new surgical techniques were pioneered. Not because it was by any means an ideal environment, but because the alternative was the death of the injured soldier before they could be airlifted to a traditional hospital. Everyone was out of their comfort zone but the needs and the likely alternatives were clear.
I don’t think the current recession will prove as personally harrowing but I do think we are going to see the end of many firms and the radical re-invention of others that choose to innovate and survive. If your current business model isn’t working, keep experimenting until it does.
I walked by a newspaper rack today and was surprised to see “Silicon Valley Jobless Rate Hits 10 Percent.” A year ago it was five percent. The Sacramento Bee has an interesting animation on the geographical distribution of unemployment in California: many counties are in the teens and some in the twenties. Unlike the dotcom crash the economic pain extends well out of Silicon Valley.
Three suggestions:
- Focus on reducing existing or easily identified cost streams for your prospects.
- For software and service firms figure out if there is a deal available at any price: if the alternative is idleness take the deal.
- This may last at least another year, find ways to persist. Cultivate sisu.
We did some work with a group of Finnish entrepreneurs a few years ago who were ultimately acquired but first spent a while having to persist in the face of modest market acceptance of their technology. They talked about the need for sisu, which is a Finnish word for determination and endurance. It’s what you need to survive if you need to live on the ice for a month and eat lichen. It’s not courage as much as determination to survive in very difficult situations.
See also
- The Finnish Line: “In the five years since my last visit I’d almost forgotten about sisu, a Finnish word for something that’s hard to translate. The equivalent in English might be “determination.” Sisu, however, implies a trait much deeper in the Finnish character, so deep, in fact, that it’s best observed in the dead of winter, when added reserves are needed just to make it from one five-hour day to the next.”
- Silicon Vikings “The Silicon Vikings is a collaborative business networking organization for the technology sector. Silicon Vikings operates in the intersecting worlds of Silicon Valley and the Nordic Region (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Iceland, and Sweden) to help members succeed in their professional and personal endeavors. Silicon Vikings accomplishes this by providing lunches, mixers and events that are of professional and personal value, and by effectively communicating valuable information of interest to its members.
- Mar-11-08 “Quotes on Courage“
- Nov-23-07 “Success for a Bootstrapper“
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