Posts filed under 'Rules of Thumb'
August 28th, 2010
Startups have fewer meetings than larger companies but entrepreneurs still need to make those meetings effective, in fact there is less margin for unproductive meetings in a startup than there is in a larger firm. Here are two sources of good information on effective teams and how they meet:
- James Shonk’s “Working in Teams” is a great place to start (and available used for a penny plus shipping on Amazon).
- Michael Lopp’s “Rands in Repose” blog category devoted to management is also useful, in particular his post “How to Run a Meeting“
Shonk offers a great model for effective teamwork:
- Goals: what are we here to accomplish?
- Roles: who is going to play each position on the team?
- Process: how are we going to work together, what are the rules for interacting?
- Relationship: how do we feel about each other?
While poor morale or interpersonal conflict can often be a harbinger for deeper problems, it’s much more effective to make sure that everyone is clear on the answers to the following two questions before analyzing particular processes or interactions:
- Are the goals for the team/group clear and agreed to?
- Are the roles that each attendee will play in contributing to them clear and agreed to?
One key metric for a team is interdependence: if you don’t need a member of the team to accomplish the key goals, shrink the size of the meeting and see if that improves focus and traction.
Lopp offers another perspective on meetings in a product development environment that complements Shonk. He suggests that every successful meeting needs:
- an agenda
- a referee to keep the team making progress.
We take part in a number of working meetings with founders where it can sometimes seem that more heat than light is shed on a topic. Most of the founders we work with are engineers or scientists and they typically chose those careers because their underlying personalities are more comfortable interacting with things and ideas than people. There can be a temptation to try a new technology or software tool to address meetings that have become dysfunctional
A better place to start is to make sure that the goals are both energizing and challenging for your team. And that each member has a key role to play. That being said we have found that using a wiki page for a common agenda and minutes/action-items works much better than e-mail for teams up to a dozen or so and creating a parallel chat session if you are on a conference call allows members to add quick comments, suggest related URLS, raise their hand to speak, and capture shared notes contemporaneously (which not only adds value but demonstrate that they are actively listening).
August 23rd, 2010
Ed Weissman (edw519 on HN) had a great comment a while back on Hacker News at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=83561 that I got his permission to re-publish here:
My target market is small business. 3 Reasons They Prefer Pay Over Free:
- They don’t want their employees looking at ads.
- They need leverage when they have complaints. (Why would they listen to me if I’m not paying anything?)
- They want you to stick around.
Provide them with something they want and charging them will not be an issue.
His answer was in response to the question “Who is building a startup/product and making money by charging customers?” and he offers a great list of reasons why business buyers prefer to pay.
I think an alternative to #1 is that ad driven sites tend to promote more page views and page refreshes, which tend to lower productivity compared to a well designed subscription driven site (so they value their employees time, and the work that they deliver, more than they want to get a “free app”). Also, some amount of screen real estate has to be lost to ads that could instead be applied to improving the information content on the page directly relevant to the task the employee is performing.
#2 is very under-appreciated by the advertising driven sites. I think that startups stay in “free beta” too long in particular. I only want to use an application in support of my business, especially if it impacts prospects or customers, if I know the developers will respond, and the default terms of service typically say that they can disappear without warning (along with my data). Even a 15-30 day grace period with a warning for shutdown would be a huge improvement.
#3 points out a misunderstanding between how technologists or solo consultants may view a new tool and the total cost of adoption that a small business faces. A small business has to bear a lot of cost in workflow and process changeover. They do want you to stick around because their true cost of adoption is much higher than what they are paying you.
Andrew Warner has a great interview with Ed Weissman on “Why Do People Join On-Line Communities” where Ed describes in detail the benefits he gets from taking part in the Hacker News community.
July 30th, 2010
Pierre Kawand has an intriguing E-book out “The Results Curve™: How to Manage Focused and Collaborative Time” that makes the following suggestions for increasing your personal effectiveness in the face of the plethora of sources for interruption and distraction we can leave ourselves vulnerable to if we are not careful.
He has five key observations/suggestions based on years of research into productivity:
- The Results Curve™ plan for 40 minute segments of focused activity. While different timeboxing techniques suggest setting aside 15, 25, or 30 minute blocks of time for focused execution, Kawand’s research suggests that after 30 minutes you are now fully in gear and another 10 minutes of focused effort typical results in significant additional accomplishment.
- MicroPlan™ take a minute to jot down three to six key steps or sub-tasks that you want to accomplish in your 40 minutes of focused activity.
- Use a Timer to help you stay in the zone for 40 minutes. With a watch or clock you need to keep checking which risks loss of focus, a timer will interrupt you at the end of your block but doesn’t distract you before then.
- Disable External Interruptions turn off your phone, turn off your e-mail, put a “do not disturb” sign on your cube or office door, turn off IM/Skype, and take steps to eliminate any distracting sounds.
- Follow Focus Time with Collaboration Time catch up on E-Mail/IM/Skype and return any calls that have come in.
The book is a 36 page briefing that’s worth 40 minutes of your time. If you find it useful I would check out his “Accomplishing More with Less” workbook.
July 27th, 2010
This is the third in a series about my decision to move away from using Facebook. On June 4 of this year I wrote “Deprecating Facebook” where opened with:
I have decided to deprecate my use of Facebook . Because my decision is based on a lack of trust of the current leadership I will revisit it every six months or so to see if things have changed sufficiently to warrant a re-evaluation. I deleted about 80% of my connections tonight and don’t plan to add any until a I re-evaluate the service in early 2011.
Social networks are part of the “mission critical infrastructure” for a firm like ours. We had not been actively using Facebook for marketing or networking, for the most part I joined out of curiosity and accepted invites, many of which seemed to be generated by folks dumping their e-mail address books into the system. Something that I have never done on any social network.
Two days later I wrote “Deprecating Facebook Part Two“ Where I noted this insight from Anthony Jay:
In “Corporation Man” Anthony Jay suggests that there is a natural limit of 500 for a tribe size based on an analysis of human history. He offers one very powerful rule of thumb that I have come to see the wisdom of: use systems to replace and augment memory, but minimize systems that replace face to face communication.
Marcelo Rinesi is now blogging at PhaseLeap where he wrote “From Social Networks to Social Manifolds” back in May but I just came across it and thought he had done a better job of summarizing my misgivings about Facebook than I had:
In fact, contemporary society puts us in contact (regular or irregular, professional or not) with literally thousands of people in dozens of different ways, and neither our brains nor our software are at present capable of successfully dealing with this. Every online social network website attempts, more or less credibly, to become the standard clearinghouse for our social exchanges, but they eventually stumble against the same problem: our social lives don’t take place in orderly networks, but rather in complex manifolds with which we are constantly in contact.
We don’t need computers to manage our network of family and friends; humans have always excelled at this sort of social skills, and, if anything else, the size of our families and immediate circles is smaller now than it used to be. But the size, complexity, and dynamism of the more chaotic “social soup” surrounding this network has grown immensely, and, as anybody trying to cope with an online “friends list” of hundreds will assert, software isn’t quite useful in this regard yet.
Something analogous happened years ago, when the Internet grew so much that Yahoo!’s ongoing efforts to index and order it couldn’t compete with Google’s more successful approach of letting the content of the web itself reshape minute after minute how we interact with it. Every time we tell Facebook something about our social environment, we are trading something we worked hard at gaining (knowledge about a social relationship) for something of very little value (a tool to easily communicate with people we already have dozens of ways to communicate with).
We can handle our social networks just fine. It’s the rest of society we need software to help us with.
June 29th, 2010
- Don’t make an equity investment in your startup so that you can pay yourself a salary. Put enough money in to cover expenses in advance of revenue. Live off of savings.
Why: making an equity investment that you take back out as salary means that you are paying taxes for the roundtrip. The combination of Federal, state, and local taxes will cut your runway by 20-30%.
- If the company needs more money to cover expenses in advance of revenue then make a loan to the company at a realistic interest rate.
Why: if you choose to pay the expenses out of pocket they may not be deductible, if you buy additional stock in the company it is difficult to get the cash back out without paying taxes on it, either as dividends, salary, or bonus. The loan can be repaid and the only taxable component is the interest.
- Run consulting dollars through your new firm not your old one.
Why: this revenue can be used to offset costs and extend your runway. This also enables you to get on the approved vendor list for a firm you may later want to sell a product to.
- Don’t have one founder take a salary if both or all don’t get one.
Why: this inevitably causes a disconnect in motivation for both parties.
- Have one founder write each check and another sign it.
Why: do this from the beginning so that you minimize the risk of misunderstandings and have a simple review and approval process for expenses.
June 25th, 2010
What follow is based on both my direct experience and stories folks have shared at the Bootstrappers Breakfast over the last few years. Your co-founder can come from one of three groups
- friend, current co-worker, former co-worker
- friend of a friend or former co-worker, someone who trusts someone you trust
- stranger / other
Make a list of everyone you have successfully collaborated with in the last decade or two.
Recontact them and reconnect if you have lost touch.
If their background, expertise and interest are a fit with your needs: assume that it will take a month or two to come to a working arrangement and get started.
If they are not a direct fit explain the kind of co-founder or co-founders you are looking for. If they can introduce you to someone that they can vouch for, and vouch for you to the other person, take some time and work on a small project or two.
Allow three to six months to come to a working relationship. Consider adding your fried or former co-worker as an equity compensated advisor.
If you meet a stranger at a Meetup, a Startup Week, a Bootstrapper breakfast or other event and do not have friend or former co-worker in common assume that
- It will take working together on two or three projects of escalating complexity before you can have enough data to be able to ask them to help you create a company.
- You will need to meet as many folks that they have worked with as possible with relevant knowledge for your startup. Create an informal advisory board (“kitchen cabinet”) that has one or two folks they know and one or two that you know.
- You will need to allow three to nine months working on a few projects of escalating complexity before you can make a find decision to go forward with them.
June 24th, 2010
- Actively Manage Expectations With Clear Communications
- Always Assume Everything You Do Will Become Public
- Listen For What Isn’t Being Said
- Predictable Behavior Inspires Trust
- Trust Doesn’t Scale, It’s Knit by Aligning Actions With Prior Commitments
Related Posts
June 16th, 2010
Ben Yoskovitz has a great blog, his only defect is that he does not blog often enough. His two most recent have been direct hits on the need for entrepreneurs to focus on problem, work toward a clear understanding of it, and develop a passion for solving it.
Useless Feedback
Without a strong hypothesis and problem statement, there’s no reason to get feedback.
Asking a friend, “What do you think of my idea?” is almost completely useless.
Asking a friend (or someone else who isn’t as biased as your friend, “Do you have this problem, and how painful is it?” is a much more useful query.
Startups need to solve problems. Problems need to be defined. Define the problem that you’re tackling (without focusing on the solution) and get feedback on that.
Misplaced Passion is Common for Early Stage Entrepnreeurs
But what we see quite regularly at the early stages of startups is not too much passion but misplaced passion.
Ask yourself this question, “Are you more passionate about the problem you’re solving or your solution?”
It needs to be the former — the problem you’re solving — because there’s a very, very good chance that your solution isn’t the right one. Or at minimum, it’s going to change significantly through many iterations.
When one of my partners–Anthony Scampavia–worked at Cisco he kept a question at the top of his whiteboard in his office for more than a dozen years:
What is the problem you are trying to solve?
Always a good question to start with.
June 15th, 2010
In one my my early jobs I worked with an extremely talented Vietnamese engineer who had gotten out of Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in a leaky fishing boat with his father and brother. It was a difficult journey but they managed to escape, avoid drowning, and ultimately resettle in San Jose.
We were hired on the same day and went through orientation together. He was quiet and kept to himself but we were assigned to the same project and got to know one another over the course of a few months working together.
One day I said something that really made him angry.
I said “that can’t be right, you must be mistaken. You should try it again.” I think we were discussing which compiler switches needed to be set to solve a particular problem.
He said “when I tell you something, it’s because I have tried it and I know that it’s true.”
I hadn’t seen him angry before and was a little taken aback. But I realized that he was very serious and that I had screwed up and challenged him in a way that I had not intended.
I try and remember this when I am responding to folks who tell me something that is contrary to my personal experience.
Backing someone into a corner rarely works. I can often learn something new if I say something like this instead: “That’s interesting, I have never seen that happen before, can you tell me more about it?”
This also works with prospects, customers, co-workers, business partners, children, spouses, and most other humans.
June 4th, 2010
“You have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity” – Zuckerberg, 2009
I have decided to deprecate my use of Facebook . Because my decision is based on a lack of trust of the current leadership I will revisit it every six months or so to see if things have changed sufficiently to warrant a re-evaluation. I deleted about 80% of my connections tonight and don’t plan to add any until a I re-evaluate the service in early 2011.
Social networks are part of the “mission critical infrastructure” for a firm like ours. We had not been actively using Facebook for marketing or networking, for the most part I joined out of curiousity and accepted invites, many of which seemed to be generated by folks dumping their e-mail address books into the system. Something that I have never done on any social network.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, lent his name to an opinion column in the Washington Post “From Facebook, Answering Privacy Concerns Over New Settings” which outlined the the principles under which Facebook operates:
- You have control over how your information is shared.
- We do not share your personal information with people or services you don’t want.
- We do not give advertisers access to your personal information.
- We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone.
- We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone.
As far as I can tell none of these are actually measured or enforced and all of them, depending upon your definition of personal, seem to be violated routinely.
Zuckerberg was recently interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the All Things D D8 conference. He didn’t evidence much candor or willingness to engage substantively on what were for the most part softball questions. This indicates to me not just a lack of media training but some fairly serious deficiencies in his understanding of what his responsibilities are as a CEO of a technology companies used by hundreds of millions of people. The fact that he was able to do this also indicates he hasn’t hired anybody that either understands Facebook’s obligations to its users or has the ability to influence the CEO to do the right thing. This makes them dangerous as a supplier of mission critical infrastructure.
Brad Templeton has written two good posts on Facebook and Privacy in the last month that I have find personally very persuasive. His post “The Peril of the Facebook Anti-Privacy Pattern” makes this observations:
There’s been a well justified storm about Facebook’s recent privacy changes. The EFF has a nice post outlining the changes in privacy policies at Facebook which inspired this popular graphic showing those changes.
But the deeper question is why Facebook wants to do this. The answer, of course, is money, but in particular it’s because the market is assigning a value to revealed data. This force seems to push Facebook, and services like it, into wanting to remove privacy from their users in a steadily rising trend. Social network services often will begin with decent privacy protections, both to avoid scaring users (when gaining users is the only goal) and because they have little motivation to do otherwise. The old world of PC applications tended to have strong privacy protection (by comparison) because data stayed on your own machine. Software that exported it got called “spyware” and tools were created to rout it out.
[...]
Users will demand the rich experience, but what they need is a way to assure that sites that want to make use of personal information only ask for, and only get, what they truly need in order to make that experience work. If they don’t need your birthday, or all your friend’s names, they should not get it. And this must happen all the time, not just when you take the time to use a complex privacy console to control what they will be given. This is not something individual users can or will negotiate on a site by site basis. They don’t have the power to negotiate it and the companies don’t have the time. Negotiation requires parties of equal power to get real give and take.
If we don’t solve this, the two forces (market pressure to reduce privacy, and natural monopolies in identity provision) will drive us in a direction we don’t want to go. As I have written before, I believe the only answer is to move social apps back closer to our own computers and away from the cloud, as tempting as the cloud is. Only if the data never leaves our hands will they remain under our control. We need a resurgence of the belief that software that took our data and exported it for inappropriate purposes was spyware. Facebook and its partners are now purveyors of spyware, yet no anti-spyware program is yet ready to delete it from your browser for you. Indeed, the new way the protections work, your friends are offering up information about you when they visit the partner sites, and you have even less control over that.
Facebook argues that their whole service is “opt in” because you have to join it. That’s true to an extent, but ignores the fact that if social apps are going to be useful, we should find a way to do them without the pressure to strip users of all privacy, and not only offer people the choice of living in a glass house or never leaving the house at all.
In “When is ‘Opt Out’ a ‘Cop Out‘” Templeton critiques the Zuckerberg column in the Washington Post
Coming soon, you will be able to opt out of having your basic information defined as “public” and exposed to outside web sites. Facebook has a long pattern of introducing a new feature with major privacy issues, being surprised by a storm of protest, and then offering a fix which helps somewhat, but often leaves things more exposed than they were before.
[...]
We’ll only be able to convince web sites to truly protect our rights if we can sit down and negotiate with them. Users can’t negotiate, and privacy control panels create the illusion of negotiating, but letting you tweak the terms. But you can only choose among the options they have decided they like. Opt-out control panels may seem like they enable user choice but they can actually harm it. Real choice comes only in being able to put your terms forward in negotiations.
In an “Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Step Down” Shel Israel addresses Zuckerberg directly:
Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg are topnotch interviewers, but they were also your hosts. They asked tough questions in a nice way. You had to know those questions were coming. On your level, you should have smart people in the back room asking you those same questions.
Mark, watch the above video. You swung and missed at every important question. Often, you just answered different question than the ones being asked, and Mark you did yourself and your company no good. I would say you did yourself some damage.
Mark, the tech industry has a long history of young entrepreneurs who were challenged to grow as fast as the companies they had created. Some succeeded and are still at the helms of their corporate ships. Others did not and wisely stepped down to allow firmer hands to guide the ship.
It is time for you to do exactly that, Mark. You will be remembered as a brilliant founder. You will have planted seeds to a mighty tree that will live on.
Danah Boyd has been a perceptive observer of on-line social netorking trends since early in this century (21st not 20th). Her “Facebook and Radical Transparency (A Rant)” concludes with some excellent suggestions for how Facebook could demonstrate commitment to their stated values:
If Facebook wanted radical transparency, they could communicate to users every single person and entity who can see their content. They could notify then when the content is accessed by a partner. They could show them who all is included in “friends-of-friends” (or at least a number of people). They hide behind lists because people’s abstractions allow them to share more. When people think “friends-of-friends” they don’t think about all of the types of people that their friends might link to; they think of the people that their friends would bring to a dinner party if they were to host it. When they think of everyone, they think of individual people who might have an interest in them, not 3rd party services who want to monetize or redistribute their data. Users have no sense of how their data is being used and Facebook is not radically transparent about what that data is used for. Quite the opposite. Convolution works. It keeps the press out.
The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It’s a battle over choice and informed consent. It’s unfolding because people are being duped, tricked, coerced, and confused into doing things where they don’t understand the consequences. Facebook keeps saying that it gives users choices, but that is completely unfair. It gives users the illusion of choice and hides the details away from them “for their own good.”
I have no problem with Scoble being as public as he’d like to be. And I do think it’s unfortunate that Facebook never gave him that choice. I’m not that public, but I’m darn close. And I use Twitter and a whole host of other services to be quite visible. The key to addressing this problem is not to say “public or private?” but to ask how we can make certain people are 1) informed; 2) have the right to chose; and 3) are consenting without being deceived. I’d be a whole lot less pissed off if people had to opt-in in December. Or if they could’ve retained the right to keep their friends lists, affiliations, interests, likes, and other content as private as they had when they first opted into Facebook. Slowly disintegrating the social context without choice isn’t consent; it’s trickery.
Jeff Jarvis has come interesting observations on “Confusing A Public With The Public.”
I will argue that we face choices today about keeping something private or sharing it with our public or with the public at large and that we need to see the benefits of sharing—the benefits of publicness—as we make that calculation. I will argue that if we default to private, we risk losing the value of the connections we can make today. I will argue that we need institutions—companies and governments—to default to public. And I will argue that the more we live in public, the more we share, the more we create collective wisdom and value. I will defend publicness. But I will also defend privacy—that is, control over this decision.
And if you don’t think deprecating your Facebook account is enough, WikiHow explains how to “Permanently Delete a Facebook acount“. I am keeping it on file.
Previous Posts