The Kev Blog

I know, I know…I should have read this one years ago. Nonetheless, I received Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days, by Jessica Livingston, for Christmas and have been in full force isolation mode while I soak it up.

Anyways, the opening hooked me:

“Apparently sprinters reach their highest speed right out of the blocks, and spend the rest of the race slowing down. The winners slow down the least. It’s that way with most startups too. The earliest phase is usually the most productive. That’s when they have the really big ideas. Imagine what Apple was like when 100% of its employees were either Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak.

The striking thing about this phase is that it’s completely different from most people’s idea of what business is like. If you looked in people’s heads (or stock photo collections) for images representing “business,” you’d get images of people dressed up in suits, groups sitting around conference tables looking serious, Powerpoint presentations, people producing thick reports for one another to read. Early stage startups are the exact opposite of this. And yet they’re probably the most productive part of the whole economy.

Why the disconnect? I think there’s a general principle at work here: the less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on seeming impressive which makes their actual performance worse. A few years ago I read an article in which a car magazine modified the “sports” model of some production car to get the fastest possible standing quarter mile. You know how they did it? They cut off all the crap the manufacturer had bolted onto the car to make it look fast.

Business is broken the same way that car was. The effort that goes into looking productive is not merely wasted, but actually makes organizations less productive. Suits, for example. Suits do not help people to think better. I bet most executives at big companies do their best thinking when they wake up on Sunday morning and go downstairs in their bathrobe to make a cup of coffee. That’s when you have ideas. Just imagine what a company would be like if people could think that well at work. People do in startups, at least some of the time. (Half the time you’re in panic because your servers are on fire, but the other half you’re thinking as deeply as most people only get to sitting alone on a Sunday morning.)

Ditto for most of the other differences between startups and what passes for productivity in big companies. And yet conventional ideas of “professionalism” have such an iron grip on our minds that even startup founders are affected by them. In our startup, when outsiders came to visit we tried hard to seem “professional”. We’d clean up our offices, wear better clothes, try to arrange that a lot of people were there during conventional office hours. In fact, programming didn’t get done by well-dressed people at clean desks during office hours. It got done by well-dressed people (I was notorious for programming wearing just a towel) in offices strewn with junk at 2 in the morning. But no visitor would understand that. Not even investors, who are supposed to be able to recognize real productivity when they see it. Even we were affected by the conventional wisdom. We though of ourselves as impostors, succeeding despite being totally unprofessional. It was as if we’d created a Formula 1 car but felt sheepish because it didn’t look like a car was supposed to look.

In the car world, there are at least some people who know that a high performance car looks like a Formula 1 racecar, not a sedan with giant rims and a fake spoiler bolted to the trunk. Why not in business? Probably because startups are so small. The really dramatic growth happens when a startup only has three or four people, so only three or four people see that, whereas tens of thousands see business as it’s practiced by Boeing or Philip Morris.

This book can help fix that problem, by showing everyone what, till now, only a handful of people got to see: what happens in the first year of a startup. This is what real productivity looks like. This is the Formula 1 racecar. It looks weird, but it goes fast.

Of course, big companies won’t be able to do everything these startups do. In big companies there’s always going to be more politics, and less scope for individual decisions. But seeing what startups are really like will at least show other organizations what to aim for. The time may soon be coming when instead of startups trying to seem more corporate, corporations will try to seem more like startups. That would be a good thing.”

-Paul Graham
Intro to Founders at Work
By Jessica Livingston
Apress Publishing

This from a Tom Peters post in September:

Describing Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind.

Fundamental premise: “The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind—computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers.

But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind—creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers. These people—artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers—will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.”

Pink makes a sound analytic argument for all this, based on the Rise of Asia and the New Technologies, among other things. One other zinger I cotton to:

“The MFA [master of fine arts] is the new MBA.”

The other book is The Big Picture, from the person I consider to be the most innovative educator in America … Dennis Littky. Dennis considers the current school system a disaster.

He’s working on a new model, piloted in Providence, RI, and now spinning out across the nation courtesy a big grant from the Gates Foundation. Littky’s work dovetails brilliantly with Pink’s. He believes we need to get beyond the rote learning and teach-to-test shackles … and get kids to engage in activities that mean something to them.

Consider: “From the media, we hear these great tearjerker stories of kids who succeeded despite the odds. But all of our kids are instead facing the odds of an education system that is all wrong. The odds are against them because the system works against them instead of with them. … I see it every day: kids who people have dismissed as ‘dumb in math’ or ‘uninterested in science’ or ‘nonreaders’ doing incredible things in these exact same areas because they were (finally) allowed to start with something they were already interested in. A 9th-grade kid who ‘hates science’ sees a movie about freezing people, then decides to read a college biology text on cryogenics, and then gives a presentation on it that blows your socks off.”

Peters then goes on to explain that he thinks the state of education in the world is as important as terrorism. “I don’t think I’m crazy,” Peters says. “I think this is the equal of security concerns … perhaps the ultimate security concern?”

Image credit.

Check this out from Engaget today:

UPS turns to software to cut down on left-hand turns

Posted Dec 12th 2007 2:06PM by Donald Melanson
Filed under: Transportation

While it won’t have quite the same effect that, say, converting its entire fleet to hybrids or all-electrics would have, UPS is apparently taking some steps to improve the efficiency of the 95,000 trucks it has on the road, including using software to cut down on the number of left-turns its drivers make. As The New York Times reports, in addition to improving the packing and sorting of its cargo, UPS’s so-called “package flow” software program also maps out the best possible route for each of its drivers, which UPS says cuts down significantly on the time they would otherwise spend idling while waiting to make a left-hand turn. According to UPS, those improved maps helped it shave some 28.5 million miles off its delivery routes last year, which translates to a 31,000 metric ton cut in CO2 emissions, not to mention a savings of about three million gallons of gas.

Full article in NY times here

Read more at www.thekevblog.com

Last Thursday I attended my first StartUpCamp ever. While I don’t have a startup going right now (at least in the tech/web sector), it is certainly something I am interested in and wanted to check out. The startup ‘community’ is really exciting to me, probably because it combines the best of why I ever decided to get involved in ‘business’ in general; creativity, problem solving, persuading others you’ve got something of value, and of course, the ‘pitch’.

A lot of readers of this blog are not in the tech scene or involved with a startup. I always said that this blog would be a way of me communicating the really cool things that I discover, for others who may not have heard about this stuff yet.

So, for those who haven’t heard about StartUpCamp, here’s the def’n:

Startup Camp is an unconference-style event that’s dedicated to bringing together the various members of the startup community for a face-to-face collaborative meetup where its the attendees that drive the agenda. http://wiki.startupcamp.org/wiki/AboutStartupCamp

What’s great about StartUpCamp is it provides a venue for feedback, networking, and just learning about what’s up and coming from new companies in the area.
So, a few new startups pitch their ideas and the work they are doing, then the floor is opened up to whoever might be there; other entrepreneurs, VCs, Angels, random people like myself. Sometimes the startups have specific questions for the audience, other times they leave it completely open for any constructive criticism. Really cool!

The startups that presented this time around were:

InvestMate
Investmate creates customized CAPM model portfolios based on personal interests for those with little to medium amounts f money who desire to invest in the stock market.

Workspace
http://www.createworkspace.com
Building an online IDE to help developers create web applications faster and easier while following best software engineering practices. Application is at alpha stage and seeking funding.

Defensio.com (Karabunga Inc)
http://defensio.com
Defensio is a better spam filter for social web apps. They make spam management less of a chore with spaminess ranking and an open API.

CakeMail (The Code Kitchen)
http://www.cakemail.com
CakeMail is a multilingual white label email marketing platform with an architecture that is open to extension by third parties. Just launched public beta; building a developer community.

FreshBooks
http://www.freshbooks.com
The profitable Trinity of Software as a Service is product, marketing, and service. FreshBooks explains how to balance all three. Focused on a target market and crossing the chasm.

(stolen from http://barcamp.org/StartupCampToronto1)

All really cool ideas, that, with some tweaking and creative problem-solving, have the potential to succeed. It was great to see a somewhat more mature startup, Freshbooks, talk about the issues they are dealing with as they grow (and quickly too! 250,000 users in just over 4 years!).

I had read up on the event before I got there, so it was pretty much what I expected - a lax environment and some really smart people working together. There was, however, one thing that John (my friend and coworker) couldn’t help but notice:

Where the heck were the young people!?!?!?!

This is STARTUP camp! Were they studying for finals?!!! Or Christmas shopping?!!! I’m not sure, but I expected a TON of young people to have filled that room! I think I was the youngest person there, and the only others that were visibly under 25 years old were the two students who pitched “InvestMate” (who were great, btw: tons of energy).

Albert, who was present and delivered the opening speech, has blogged about the lack of interest from (or perhaps encouragement for) young people in startups and entrepreneurship before. Check out that article here.

Anyways, I felt young there, and was pretty quiet this time around, but I definitely plan on heading back for more. What a cool place/event. Also have to check out DemoCamp and BarCamp in the future.

For a really detailed post about Toronto: http://blog.madwhips.com/?p=55

Albert’s speech was great - a lot of talk about how failure is the best way to possibly learn. He also mentioned how for every startup he’s “succeeded” with, there have been waaaaaaaay more failures. It takes a lot of confidence to be okay with the idea of outright failing. I thought that was pretty cool.

Anyone who knows about Maktub Leadership knows I’ve already failed once. Let’s see if ‘Millrush’, the idea I’m working on now, works out! (fingers crossed).

StartUpCamp Waterloo is coming February 26 at the Accelerator Centre: 6pm - 9pm. Get more info here, and give me a shout if you plan on going.

For more info on the Canadian startup scene in general, check out StartupNorth

We all know that global warming, or at least our knowledge of global warming, is nothing new. “It’s been an issue for years!” you might think. How about 50?

Check out this film by Frank Cappa from 1958. Seems like the original Inconvenient Truth!

So what exactly does a ‘flat world’ mean? Well, it means that the “global competitive playing field is being leveled” says Thomas Friedman.

Still confused?

Think of it this way:

“It is now possible for more people than ever to collaborate and compete in real time with more other people on different kinds of work from more different corners of the planet and on a more equal footing that at any previous time in the history of the world.”

It means that MBA students in North America can work on projects with MBA students in China, and then have that work edited by MBA students in India.

It means that someone with a laptop in an internet Cafe in Nigeria can start a business using Yahoo search engines and UPS logistics to ship products he has manufactured in China directly to the buyer who ordered the goods online, the whole time never touching his own products.

It means that anyone with a laptop can connect to absolutely anyone else with a laptop, and collaborate on any project, in almost any country, and change, create and develop anything they have the imagination to come up with.

It means a site like MySpace, if considered its own country, would be the 8th largest in the world, and that 1 in 8 couples married in 2008 will have met over the Internet.

It means that a company can open up its management, product development, and marketing tools to the world, share information that was once considered ‘for executives’ eyes only’, and see customers participate in company processes that used to be reserved for the boardroom.

It means that 6 billion people have a shot at participating in the new global economy.

Well….almost.

Friedman is quick to admit that not all the world is flat…at least not yet. There are still close to 3 billion people in rural parts of China, India, South America, Africa, and even Europe and North America who don’t have access to the flat world. However, that is changing as well. In efforts to maximize the global ‘talent pool’, individuals and organizations already in the flat world are now using globalization and collaboration to solve these problems.

Take Jeremy Hockenstein, for example. A former McKinsey employee, Hockenstein left to start a not-for-profit data entry firm that outsources work to Cambodia of all places; not the best of economies or work environments. So what did he and his colleagues decide to do? Bridge the gap between the flat world and the un-flat world. They opened “Digital Divide Data” and trained people in Cambodia to type information into computers. They then went to India to find data-entry organizations who needed text inputted into computers in digital form to be stored in databases. They also returned home to America to find work there. In fact, Harvard gave Digital Divide Data its first big contract, archiving old copies of its school newspaper. So, in a nutshell, two Americans trained people in Cambodia to type and use the Internet so that Indian companies and Harvard University could outsource data-entry work. The world is flat.

While we’ve all heard the arguments against globalization, it is critically important to see the advantages of living in a truly flat world. When projects like this can happen seamlessly, and its just as easy to communicate with someone in the next city as it is the opposite side of the world, the possibilities are endless. It will surely be exciting to see where the flat world takes us, and how it will shape education, governments, health care, organizations, and individuals.

The World is Flat should absolutely be a required reading for all business and economics students (at the very minimum), not to mention professors and faculty.

If our generation will be living in a flat world, should we not be educating for it?

With all the tools and technology out there, there is no reason why business and economics students are not working on research papers, assignments, and projects right alongside students in India and China.

There is no doubt that the concept of a ‘flat world’ is one that every future employee, business leader, politician, entrepreneur, student (and the list goes on), must understand.

The fact that globalization is happening is a non-issue. What does matter is the how the human race pushes globalization along. Friedman’s The World is Flat is an excellent starting point, but just like in the flat world, its what we do with all this shared knowledge and collaboration that counts.