TP's Topics

Interview on Vator.tv

Here is a post of a recent interview on Vator.TV where Bambi Francisco and I talk about Web 2.0 and how Wize.com is leveraging the collective to provide consumers with specific product answers...   

Startup CEO Playbook

I just talked to a bunch of my friends who are all startup CEO’s and here are a few of the themes that came out of our conversations.  These lessons are related to the early days of managing a startup and about creating a culture that will have the greatest chance of productivity.….

• Hire hungry ambitious people who will make the personal sacrifices required to make it happen.
• Set up a reward system that’s not just money and stock but all those things that people want for a fulfilled career experience 
• Hire smart people….can’t teach smart….
• Avoid hiring people with lofty titles unless they love getting their hands dirty, and view “working for results in compressed business cycles” as a life-choice.
• Get in the weeds and know what everybody is working on and how it relates to your business model.
• Tell the organization what it’s not going to do. 
• Give the board and your employees a clear plan of what you are going to do even if you are not 100% confident… a direction is better than no direction
• Do everything you can do to increase your understanding of things you don’t understand after a plan is laid before the company and the board
• Hold people accountable to specific deliverables on that plan to a delivery date 
• Give feedback directly good and bad to employees about their performance but with empathy and a major concern for results. 
• Consistently relate their work back to the direct impact it has on the business 
• A CEO should have a personal relationship with everyone in the company especially if you are fewer than 30 people… Find the time
• Don’t expect anyone to do anything that you won’t do 
• Little Things matter…For instance, never let them go thirsty…it’s a signal you care... 
• End working relationships with people quickly who don’t subscribe to the organization’s value system
• Don't tolerate people that continuously give you excuses
• Reward people well that continuously deliver and exhibit the values of the organization.  
• Give people authority…make it clear…don’t create a blackhole for people to figure out who’s in charge
• Be available all the time….
• Let people take smart thought out risks and pat them in the back for trying. 
• Don’t hire an FTE until you’ve proven you need it.  Bootstrap into it.    
• Watch the Money….seriously….don’t get caught up in the hype and do extravagant things that you don’t need to….average, clean office spaces work.  Reward the org with a little more when you’ve proven something to the business community 
• Be clear on what you want and what you expect of the whole organization... Don’t let people guess.  Be Consistent. 
• Don’t hire advisors who are only your buddies, hire advisors that are going to really help you because they know something you don’t. Don’t waste that resource or don’t sign it up.     
• Have Fun.  Once you overcome fear and ego, you see things very clearly for what they are.  We have never had greater opportunities to dare to try something no one else has done before.
• Reflect on yourself for personal growth in this moment where you get to create something special.  Life is too short. Embrace it.... 

Crossing the Chasm 2.0

I just went to a presentation last night by Geoffrey Moore... It was a nice event held at pacbell park sponsored by some of the folks from HRJ capital..

Geoff was talking about his new book and how crossing the chasm needed to evolve into some of the new business models...as crossing the chasm 1.0 was based on an older manufacturing paradigm..

The 4 major topics of discussion were.....

Crossing the chasm in a belly of a whale: discussion centered around how you take entreprenurial businesses and move them through large companies like Cisco without crushing them...The prescription was basically....untether them from the rest of the organization, get entreprenurial folks from inside your organization,  make it temporary so they fold back in once they've reached scale... there were not many cases of successful execution of this 

Reinventing Healthcare:  that creating new drugs is basically a negative ROI game and that the healthcare is about focusing on making the other parts of healthcare more efficient.... The real innovation is around....prevention for things like (diabetes, stroke testing), accurate delivery of drugs (delivery systems), measuring health on a daily basis through small chips that track your vitals...

Alternative Energy: that its early in the game entreprenurially and that the the demand is frightening. See India and China....So move fast and you should do well as the big guns have not gotten around to this area yet....This area has the biggest technological risk.  For example, to create alternative fuel we are trying to do things like training bugs to eat stuff and create fuel via their endocrine systems......not pretty... 

Web 2.0 :  Now Mr. Moore was defining Web 2.0 as businesses where exponential growth was required or there is no opportunity. He also suggested all of these businessed that have been successful have a cool factor.  Om Malik and Geoffrey Moore debated that the none of these cool Web 2.0 companies with exponential growth has a business model.  There was also argument that advertising via google was becoming so efficient and that the biggest issue was that there was no capacity left as demand outstripped supply. The repercussions were essentially that these properties would be suppressed down to a worthless page view cpm once google bought up all the inventory.   

My takeaway was the web 2.0 part of the conversation of was the most in need of work.

I think we are all having a bit of an issue generalizing what Web 2.0 is.  I've heard many different definitions:

Web 2.0 has been defined as :

* the general age of innovation we are in

* a set of cool tools , technologies and features applied against new Web sites (example ajax)

* a certain type of business that is predicated on user interactivity and the creation of user generated content (example facebook) 

* new applications of the Web that leveraging the deep content of the Web to start to answer people's questions and make their life easier (example farecast)

or it could be a combination of all of these things.   Personally, I think that the way to think about Web 2.0 is from the consumer standpoint:

Are things going to be created that :

* Providing with something completely different than I already am getting (i.e. using facebook and efficiently keeping in touch with many people)

and/or

* Providing me with an incredibly more efficient way to consume information ( farecast, knowing you are going to get the lowest price and its integrated into your personal/work travel life) 

The web 2.0 phenomenon is about innovation in creating large and very specific quantities of data that have not existed before from the population(or population representatives) versus the creation of this from business employees.  There are many, many new and vertically focused social media engines (blogs, vertical communities, discussion boards, commenting) that are only growing in scale..   

The next phase of innovation in Web 2.0 is about creating applications that leverage the growing amounts of content by mining it and delivering it in newer and novel ways that makes people lives easier. The potential opportunity is there because the web's content has just been made more comprehensive and can now be mined to truly answer people's questions.  I don't think businesses in this next phase of innovation are going to require exponential growth...it's going to be nailing the consumer value proposition and then creating well thought uses of all this new content.  This will drive up the economic value that can be recieved because of the novelty of the solution delivered and remove the need for exponential growth.   There will be a new wave of interesting business that we will see come forth over the next few years.   As Bryan Adams sang  "I'm Ready"....