The Kev Blog

My friend Tyler showed me this tonight, and it looks friggin’ awesome.

VeloCity, a new residence at UW, fostering entrepreneurship and innovation, specifically in the mobile & web space.

“VeloCity is no ordinary student residence.

It’s a place where some of UW’s most talented, entrepreneurial, creative and technologically savvy students will be united under one roof to work on the future of mobile communications, web and new media.

It’s a place where students, faculty and corporate partners will be active collaborators and beneficiaries of the talent, ideas and innovations that evolve.

It’s a place where the ‘next big thing’ could happen.

VeloCity launches in September 2008.”

Apparently students will be free to pursue ideas of their own, while working with some of the brightest minds and undoubtedly one of the most innovative universities in Canada, if not the world. VeloCity also shows some promising backers, with a note already posted from Apple Canada in regards to their support for the program. Students will also have access to VCs and other members of industry.

It’s certainly a step in the right direction for entrepreneurship & innovation in Canada.

Cool. Almost makes me want to go back to first year.

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 is going to be a unique post for me; in the Tom Peters, rant-style, in the heat of the moment kind of way.

I’ve recently been shooting emails back and forth with Albert Lai. For anyone who doesn’t know, Albert was featured on the cover of Canadian Business magazine in June 2008.

Here’s what I can tell you about Albert:
-28 years old
-founded, invested in or consulted with over a dozen startups in the past 10 years
-Founder of:
-MyDesktop
-BubbleShare
-BuyBuddy
-and a TON more

From what I hear, he sleeps about 3 hours a night - bed at 1am and up at 4:30am. The guy is incredible, and what I’ve written doesn’t do justice to the work he is doing or how highly regarded he is in the web/tech world right now.

Read the article in Canadian Business here.

Something that has come up a lot over the past few months is being visionary, forward-looking, and determined to follow through with an idea - no matter how crazy people think you are.

There’s been a few times over the past few years (and heck, even more when I look back to ever since I can remember) where I did NOT follow through with something (an idea, a project, a business, or even saying something) no matter how good I thought it was. “What will other people think?”

Well, Kev, what the hell were you [not] doing?

I was recently speaking with my dad, one of my most trusted mentors, about Albert.

“How the heck does he do it, Dad? People search their whole life for just one idea. Here’s this guy that’s taken over twelve ideas and turned them into profitable, exciting, and most of all disruptive new ideas.”

My dad’s answer:

“No Fear.”

And, just like most father-son moments, he was exactly right. You can’t have fear.

Most importantly, when people say you’re crazy (and they will!), you’ve got to keep pushing.

A good idea is a good idea. Want to follow through? Just do it. Don’t let anyone tell you no.

To be completely honest, I think you’ve got to be at least a little crazy, quirky, weird, and/or straight up strange if anyone’s going to listen to you. People might tell you you’re crazy, but that’s when you know you’ve got their attention.

I’ve had the “crazy talk” with a few people recently. Most notably, Marc Stamos. Another ‘crazy one’. Here’s a guy who ‘had it all’, including a lucrative career in corporate law.

But, he did something very unique. Marc looked up the corporate ladder at the firm he was with, and decided it wasn’t for him.

What did he do? He quit.

And he turned his attention to what is one of the coolest projects/organizations I have seen in a while: REBEARTH (www.rebearth.com)

Another “crazy one” who didn’t let fear get in the way.

It makes me sad when I encounter someone so scared of change that it almost paralyzes them. I actually, no word of a lie, feel sad - because they’re missing out on the exhilaration of trying something new, taking risks and working for something they actually believe in - not to mention the possibility of success! They let fear get in the way.

So here is what I’m going to do (and I owe this to the person who gave me some very good advice today over the phone). The next time I have an idea - I’m just going to do it. I’m not waiting for anyone’s permission to try something out, and I’m certainly not going to wait to have things perfected before I get the ball rolling. I’m just going to do it, ‘crazy’ or not.

You see, ‘crazy’ is a relative term. You’re only considered crazy until everyone else thinks the same way.

And besides, who will listen if you’re not half crazy?! In the words of Jack Welch:

“You can’t behave in a calm, rational manner. You’ve got to be out there on the lunatic fringe.”

Here’s my commitment to living out on that fringe. I am a lunatic. And I am more than OK with that :)

Just to finish things up, here’s a great ad from the mid 90’s Apple campaign called Think Different:

Please, if you do one thing tomorrow: be a little crazy. The world could use a few more crazy ones.

-K