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

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

Marc Stamos, who I introduced in a previous entry about Startups and Fear, has been doing great things with his new organization REBEARTH. A series of talks scheduled for Waterloo, Montreal, and Toronto is just about complete. The Toronto event will take place next Tuesday, November 27th at 7pm in the Bahen Centre for Information Technology at the University of Toronto. All are invited - check out the link HERE.

To give you an idea of exactly how compelling Marc’s talks are (not to mention REBEARTH itself), check out this article which was featured on WorldChanging.com today!!

Fund, Design and Build: The project of (y)our dreams?

Jon Booren
November 21, 2007 2:44 PM

As Jason Diceman pointed out last month, Worldchanging has covered quite a few social networking sites, all trying to bring people together in slightly different ways. Here is one more project that is worth reading about.

Marc Stamos, an entrepreneur from Montreal, has a vision. He wants to help grow a world that 6.6 billion people would want to live in.

While articling as a law school student, Marc had an opportunity to see David Suzuki speak at the University of Toronto. Coming away from that experience, he felt so inspired to effect change that he decided to finish his position, stop and regroup. He took the next number of years to educate himself, network and find a place where he might be able to help. His conversations, work and effort have all culminated with this: REBEARTH.COM

On Tuesday evening, Marc spoke to an audience at McGill University in Montreal and laid out a world that would contain the following appetizing characteristics:

• Businesses that increase employee morale, regenerate the environment and are profitable.
• Children’s toys that are fun, engaging, profitable and release nutrients when chewed.
• Desirable transportation that is silent, clean and profitable.
• Human impact is a positive, prosperous and regenerative force.

Okay, so that sounds simple enough. Where do we start?

What Marc and his collaborators want to do is create an internet hub that links ideas, with finances and skills; wiki-style networking, with a bank account and muscle power.

REBEARTH’s immediate goal is to begin with one project, a house.

Have you ever thought about what your dream house would look like? What characteristics would it have? Would you be willing to contribute your thoughts to help this house take shape? REBEARTH’s hope is you would.

How about your skills as a project coordinator, designer or architect? No skills, just cash? Fine. They’ll take that too. Getting the prototype off the ground will help work out the system they hope to form. A system that can then be applied to anything we want.

Perhaps you’re not interested in building a new house; you want a new shoe, fabric, community heating plant, or bicycle tire. Suggest it, collaborate, design, fund and build.

REBEARTH wants to take collaboratively formed ideas and make them marketable. Taking any generated innovations and share, systemize, franchise and/or license them out to other companies for use, but there is a catch. There goal is not to just make money from the commons, REBEARTH was started to help grow a world that 6.6 billion people would want to live in. Companies who want to use the innovations in traditional application, without the social or environmental contribution will have a bit of a tougher time.

And the money that comes in, goes around. Not only to those who put up the financial backing, but to all those who have been involved in the project.

Interested in finding out more? Marc will be making presentation #2 in Toronto this coming Tuesday, November 27th, at 7:00 PM in the Bahen Centre for Information Technology at the University of Toronto. For more details you can check out this internet invitation.

Those of you unable to make it to Toronto, please visit their website and email them, they would love to hear from you. Because after all, it’s going to take people just like you to make this thing work.

http://www.worldchanging.com/local/canada/archives/007605.html

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