I'll keep this short or I'll get all sappy. I love hanging out with this group and pushing our bodies and suffering together. It's the best thing I could possibly do with my time. Thanks guys (and girls).
My time at Business Objects has finally come to a close. It was an awesome two years, with a lot of learning. I met a lot of extremely talented people there and through my association with the company. I was feeling the entrepreneurial urge again so i decided to throw myself back out of the perceived safety of the corporate life and back into the chaotic startup world. I have been out for two weeks so far and couldn't be happier. I feel like I'm "home".
Now that I'm out, I'm taking on a few different projects. I'm working with a group called Hinchcliffe and Company. They are a leading Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 consulting, training, advisory, and media firm headed by Dion Hinchcliffe. I am joined by a top-tier team that is seeding the company and it our goal to ramp up this company very quickly. I will predominantly work in the corporate training, enterprise consulting, and startup advisory area - helping startups with their business planning, go-to-market
planning, technology strategy, and/or sustainability practices.
This will also give me the time and flexibility to work on some other business, technology, and sustainability related projects that I have been wanting to work on for a while as well as to build out my speaking engagements and writing and blogging.
Some people ask me how I tie this all together? I explain it like this. I have come to the conclusion that it is my mission to use business and technology to create a better world. That includes Web 2.0 (bringing a social aspect to computing and to business) or Sustainability (bringing a social and ecological aspect to business).
In my new role(s), I will be doing all of that - sustainability, web 2.0, business building. I have the best "job" in the world! Because I get to work with entrepreneurs, BE an entrepreneur, and work with people who want to change the world for the better.
It's going to be a crazy and fun year - I can sense it already!
My new contact information is: troy at hinchcliffeandco dot com. My cell hasn't changed: 604-551-8275 (Vancouver). Drop me a note if we haven't spoken in a while and we'll catch up!
Thanks to Ean and Sibylle for throwing a great Club Fat Ass party - the Capilano Canyon Night Run. About 40 30 of us gathered at the William Griffin Rec Center tonight to do the run.
Sibylle threw me out of the short distance group, so Blue and I joined the tail end of the long course team. Thankfully Doug was at the end doing sweep. Then I stopped to wait for Doug...and lost the group entirely. So I joined up with Ryan and Ellie...and we got lost. We backtracked and found Craig who led us....onto the short course.
Finally we intercepted the Long Coursers, lost Ryan and Ellie to the LC team and Craig, Blue and I ran on through the night in relative solitude enveloped in fog. When Craig and I were almost done the course, I was attacked by a pack of coyotes that ripped at my flesh. One by one, I beat them off me, and ran to catch up with Craig. [Update: Apparently somebody at the party spread rumours that there were no coyotes and that in fact I tripped into a prickle bush that tore up my leg and hands after doing my business in the bush - the nerve of some people!]
The run ended about 1h 30 min later back at William Griffin, and was followed by a quick trip to soak in the hot tub at Harry Jerome. Lo and behold, the hot tub was out of order. Or they saw us coming all covered in mud and decided to put the sign up to stop us from muddying up their hot tub!
So, never a group to be daunted by such a thing, we created a game of six person, four ball murderball in the pool, much to the dismay of the lone swimmer in Lane 1 who we seemed to graze more often than he wanted.
Murderball was followed by a fantastic potluck at Ean and Sibylle's place. Unfortunately it looked like it was full swing when I had to hoof it back to get to bed so that I could get up early for a ride with a buddy.
(For the most recent articles on Web 2.0, check out my full Web 2.0 articles category.)
This posting has links to all of the Web 2.0 Summit 2006 blog posts that I wrote:
Here are the day 3 notes for the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco:
[My notes and analysis in this square brackets.]
The Alumni Report - Web 2.0 Launches Revisited:
Michael Tanne / Wink: he gave a very long demo
Veoh Networks: YouTube except for high-resolution long videos. We have figured out how to store them in a distributed peer to peer way and deliver massive bandwidth on demand.
Satish Dharmaraj: Great demo of Zimbra's offline client that syncs to their server and gives the exact same interface whether online or offline (using the "work offline" feature in the browser.)
Calcanis: sold Weblogs to AOL. Is trying to turn Netscape into a social media company like Digg
[I wonder about the sense of taking a brand that has one known name and trying to turn it into something else. I don't get it. Same problem AOL is going to have trying to move from "makers of walled gardens" to "open standards media infrastructure company". It's hard to turn Volvo from "safety" to "sports car" in people's minds after 40 years of brand impressions.]
Satish: We raised $15M. But we haven't touched it yet. We're veryb passionate about the business and think the exit will take care of itself.
Dmitry: We have raised $4M and $12M in two rounds and we need a war chest to go after a very large space.
Question: Do you all have a hiring problem?
Dmitry: Yes, it's very hard.
Satish: For us, we are using a team who have worked together on startups already and who are doing another one. Calcanis: We don't have a hard time finding developers. Go find the best developers who are already employed. If you have a star working for you that the developers can respect, then they'll want to come and work for that person.
Question: What did you screw up royally in the last year?
Dmitry: We tried to solve the more difficult problem of huge bandwidth rather than consumer video. That cost us...1.65 Billion.
Calcanis: I blogged about things at AOL that sucked like AOL Search. That pissed a lot of people off who got defensive about their stuff that sucked. I was used to being an entrepreneur who would "kill the enemies and take the hill" but AOL was like the Senate - "we talk everything through here". I posted that AOL search sucked and that upset the execs and the team. I was used to a level of transparency and to finding out what sucked about my product so that we could make it "suck less" but that whole concept really didn't wash at AOL.
Question: Any advice on how to deal with how to prioritize once lots of opportunities start to find you?
Calcanis: Cuban said: "remember what got you here. Blogs got you here, they're profitable, keep driving on that and focus, focus, focus." Parallel entrepreneurship doesn't work well. Why have seven moderately successful #3 companies? Bill Gross has done it but he's rare and he's still having problems.
Dmitry: We could take any one piece of our business and turn it into a whole other new business. Keeping focused is a constant challenge.
Mark Tanne: replace "viral marketing" with "grassfire marketing" (:-)) If something is hot, it will tear across the internet. If you don't get that response right off the bat, then it isn't resonating. Great. Shut it down or adjust or do something else.
[This supports the principles of rapid adaptation and mutation. I agree with this a lot. There was a comment from somebody at some point that when you build something on the net, it either resonates and takes off or it doesn't. Listen to that. Don't say, Well it's growing at 10%/month and that's pretty good. Bullshit. Use Skype as the measuring stick and watch how flat your curve REALLY is. If it's not a wildfire success, mutate quickly and watch the rate of change of the ramp, and if you're not getting hotter and hotter, keep mutating it, or kill it and move on.]
Day 2 notes from Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA:
[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]
"What GoDaddy Knows" by Bob Parson, CEO of Godaddy
You need to be careful about who to listen to - like analysts who don't understand basic business.
www.bobparsons.com - he talked about why they filed for and then withdrew their S1 application to become a public company. It cost him $3M to realize that once he went public he would have to listen to the advice of a lot of people who had no clue about his business.
"I met a lot of analysts who didn't know the basics and who focused on short-term financials rather than on good solid business basics."
Here's the lesson: "people love the convenience and speed of transacting business over the internet but when it comes to resolving problems and learning features, people much prefer to deal with other people." 920 of our people are in customer support. But analysts would ask: when are you going to move your customers to self-service? Ummm. Never.
Cashflow is WAY more important than paper profits.
[I agree wholeheartedly with Parsons here and this is one of the top lessons I drill into the startups I work with. For a small company, cashflow is life & breath!!]
We will have $340M revenue and cash of $50M (?) of cash flow ($1M free cashflow PER WEEK) so I think we're doing okay.
When it comes to promoting your company, everybody wants you to fall in line and offend nobody. That's just the wrong idea. To be different you have to be polarizing. Market analysts asked "when you go public, will you stop being so offensive?" Hah!!!!! So I found an offensive ad agency and forced them to make me an ad with a buxom brunette with Godaddy.com written across her chest. Their ads can be found here. We have been promoting our business with "GoDaddyesque ads" - which is now defined as: "somewhat tasteless and slightly inappropriate." The biggest mistake you can make is to please everyone - particularly investment analysts. It's much better to alienate 10% of your audience and have the other 90% pay attention.
[There have been multiple studies in the automotive industry that seem to show the same thing. Cars that polarized their audience into love/hate like the Beetle, the Mini, and other memorable cars, performed better than the average cars that people couldn't tell apart from each other. The summary lesson was: build interesting vehicles that people will either love or hate, don't try to please everybody.]
we let podcasters create their own ads for us - they're weird and crazy and even a bit "off" but they're specific to their audiences so in that way, they were perfect each and every time.
FINAL MESSAGE: Don't forget the fundamentals and be VERY careful who you listen to.
[Dan Pena uses the phrase - "Don't listen to the morons" where "moron" is defined as anybody who hasn't done what you're trying to do - which is most people. I tend to agree with Pena on that point so I appreciated Parson's talk and thought it was the most grounded back-to-basics talk of the day. Thanks Bob!]
Carlotta Perez, historian, talks about all revolutions: excitement, bubble, bubble burst, actual deployment cycle. We're now heading into the real period of the web finally.
This is the biggest change to company structures, competition, and the way companies create value that has happened in the past hundred years!
My company has done large $500M syndicated research projects to understand this stuff.
I have been studying web 2.0 for six years now.
Web 1.0: HTML; standard for presentation
Web 2.0: web services; multimedia, geospatial, mobility, integration, "the thing"; it is becoming a platform for application building in its own right but is not a presentation layer.
The act of putting stuff on the web is "programming" the machine.
Enterprise 2.0 is about the economics of collaboration:
Why do firms exist? Transaction costs; the cost of coordination to bring it all together to solve a problem. Otherwise, everything would be built by individuals. It's cheaper to do things in the corporation than as a single person.
We moved from industrial age corporations to the extended enterprise, to the business webs (think of the IT global supply chain web) and moving to "mass collaboration" - this is MUCH more than crowd-sourcing or social networking. Social networking is becoming a new form of production. Self-organization What used to take millenia or centuries can now happen in years, months, or overnight.
BMW's X3 is built by Magna, a globally distributed group of manufacturers, not by BMW. This is about changing how BMW makes cars.
Goldcorp: published his proprietary geo-data on the web and held a competition for $500K to see who could find gold on the property they owned. For $500K investment, he found $3.4B worth of gold. His market cap went up to $10B. He had all sorts of crazy responses from geologists, mathematicians, etc. and got crazy solutions.
HOLY COW
He acted globally; he shared his private data; he changed the game.
Mass collaboration:
Question: Could you create something other than an operating system with open source? Answer from Linus Torvalds: I don't think there's anything you couldn't create.
Red Hat: Linux; Spike source; open source applications are all good examples.
Zopa.com: peer lending is mass collaboration where people help other people build their businesses.
Cambrian House lets a group of people come up with innovative ideas, grade those ideas, narrow the list to the best ideas, build those ideas, and then Cambrian House sells that widget for you and you as the contributor or team, profit from it. Click here to see how it works. [WOW. Bizarre concept. I wonder...how good will it be at manufacturing. Or selling/distribution?]
The Chinese motorcycle industry is an open source ecosystem
Ideagoras: cooperative markets innovating in business (see chart below)
Second Life: the REAL story is not that their currency is pegged to the USD but the product is entirely created by its customers (pro-sumer)
So you could pro-sume clothing, mindstorm robots,
Biotechs and pharmas could have owned gene patents but they collaborated instead.
Mashups ecosystems will be collaboratively built on a massive scale
IntelliOne: calculate the location of any cell phone over time (like watching traffic)
Boeing - the Dreamliner has no spec. Companies collaborate together, build chunks of the plane and those chunks are snapped together like LEGO. [I don't buy that statement. You can't build a wing or a fuselage or a nav system or anything else without a specification / blueprint, particularly not if the parts are going to fit together like LEGO. It will be interesting to see how Tapscott covers this in his book.]
Enterprise 2.0 is causing a crisis of leadership! It is the single largest change in corporate structure and operation in the past century.
S3 and EC2 are storage and processing. They should not be very interesting. So why are people so excited?
Because the time from concept to delivery has been collapsed. We removed server hosting, contract negotitation, server infrastructure, etc.
We have removed the "muck"; You come up with an idea, you wade through the muck, and then eventually you get to working on the fun parts.
And then when you come up with your NEXT idea you have to go through the muck all over again.
up to 70% of your time, energy, and dollars for web-scale apps goes into undifferentiated, heavy lifting and "muck"
We want to swap the 70/30 to 30/70 (undifferentiated muck / differentiated work that makes you stand out). That will free up 40% for more creativity and differentiation!
Web scale computing should be elastic; fast; always on; rock solid; simple cost effective; pay per use.
It is being used by Xerox Global Services (S3, Simple Queuing Service and E3), Second Life; PowerSet (Natural Language Search) - now using EC2 as their back-end infrastructure;
Tagline: "We make muck...so you don't have to."
"We have been a low-margin, high volume business with aggressive cost structures for 11 years. I feel that that is the best and most defensible model because it doesn't have a soft underbelly that people can come after aggressively unless they're as good at it as you. "
[For a long time I have been trying to come to terms with conflicting approaches. I now see that Dan Pena's model (>80% margin or don't do it) is great when you're consolidating an industry and need to do cashflow lending to buy the companies you are acquiring. And given that his goal is to consolidate, aggregate, and then re-sell, that model makes sense. Bezos' approach (which is also the Dell / Wal-mart approach) is viable when the intention is to build the business up and keep it. I have to admit that I hadn't considered that operational excellence in minimizing margin could be a defensible strategy but it makes sense now.]
Battelle: Why are you doing this? Bezos: We think this is a great business and we're good at it. We have three businesses: consumer facing, seller facing business, developer facing business. The consumer/seller businesses drive our revenues. The developer facing business will one day have significant impact.
[I'm surprised that Battelle would ask this question but as the emcee, it is his job to ask the obvious and/or painful questions. Maybe that's why he's asking it. It only makes sense that Amazon, having developed this core competency, would turn around and resell it. Jay Abraham has a long set of principles, one of which is, figure out what your company has become really good at from a practices, systems, and technologies perspective and turn around and resell THOSE in addition to your core business.]
Fulfillment by Amazon is a very simple service. We have a global network of fulfillment services. You can ship something to us and we'll receive it. We get it. We stow it. And then you can send more calls to us and when you do, we'll pick those out and we'll send those things to you. We're giving pay by the drink, variable cost fulfillment to the marketplace. This allows developers to use us by writing software, to treat this 10 million square foot network of fulfillment centers as a peripheral device like a printer.
Battelle: Sun tried to do grid computing before and failed. You are succeeding right out of the gate. Why? Bezos: We have a policy of not talking about other companies. But I'll talk about S3. We think that there are three reasons it is succeeding: it is pay-per-use, it is self-service, and it is VERY simple for people to work with.
[The shadow space of that statement is that Sun's attempt was none of those things...which was true. It was heavy to implement, heavy to negotiate the contracts, and relative to S3 - very inflexible. S3 is to Sun's grid as Google's AdSense is to Doubleclick.]
Battelle: what is your cost of power? Bezos: Our biggest costs are not power, servers, or people. The largest cost is the opportunity cost of not fully using our facilities. And the same goes for our customers. The rest of the world is building data centers that they're only using on average 17% of the time. People are buying 747s and parking them 83% of the time! This doesn't make any sense.
[This goes to the heart of the Abraham principle above. Not only does this type of service mean that Amazon is running at near 100% asset efficiency (or more, since they're making money on them?), but their customers can run at near 100% capacity as well, rather than at 17%. Higher asset efficiency = higher shareholder value.
[Mike Cannon-Brookes and I were joking that it would be fun to build a company and take it from concept to bizplan to website to goods to online ordering to application development to online fulfillment to peer-based service and support....in 24 hours. Sounds ridiculous but with the number and type of services now available, it would be do-able.
I was referred to this great story by my friend Lorraine today and had to post it immediately:
[From Sports Illustrated, By Rick Reilly]
I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans. Work nights to pay
For their text messaging. Take them to swimsuit shoots.
But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck.
Eighty-five times he's pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in
Marathons. Eight times he's not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a
Wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and
Pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars--all in the same day.
Dick's also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back
Mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. On a bike. Makes
Taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?
This is without a doubt the best business movie of the
year for its content. And it is probably one of my favourite movies of
the year for its film quality as well. This movie is BRILLIANT.
It is the true story of a men's brogue shoe factory in
Northamptonshire, England that in order to survive, stopped making men's brogues, the market for which had been swamped by cheap Eastern European
knock-offs, and found their "niche market" - kinky boots for drag
queens and transvestites.
It is: a story of commtment; advice on how to be open and flexible to
changes in your business environment; a treatise on finding
opportunities in the strangest of places; a tale about how to be true
to oneself; a lesson on respecting others even if they are different than you; and finally a lesson on leadership.
The other thing that I love about this movie is that it has a strong story, a lot of heart, it used fantastic venues (a one hundred year old factory), and it employed a bunch of the shoe factory employees in the movie. The writing was great, the scenes that were awkward and tense were intentionally written that way and it was not played up for laughs. There are a lot of moments in the film that you really want to end because they're uncomfortable. But that's the magic. Those uncomfortable moments are there in life!
Go rent this movie. And if you are a business school leader, show this to your class. Here are some great lessons that I found. Which ones will you find?
A company is a collection of individuals who have committed their
time and energy to the enterprise. Respect them and respect their
commitment. Show them your loyalty - they deserve it.
If disaster strikes and you have to lay people off, don't make excuses. Do it quickly and cleanly. It will suck and that's life.
Before you lay them off though, ask them for their ideas. They
are close to the work. They will surprise you and may even save the
company.
Look at your business environment for big changes. When they
come, change your business, change your product, change your service.
Adapt or die.
Look for new opportunities every where you go. Do this by finding
somebody who is in pain from an unfulfilled need. Don't try to create a
market - find one that is underserved or not at all served.
If you and your life partner don't want the same things, you'll never
really reconcile it. You're better to move on and live out your lives
apart.
Also, if your life partner can't support your 100% commitment to
your business, your partnership will fail. It's hard enough to run a
business. It's impossible to do it when your partner isn't there to
support you, or worse, is acting against your effort.
Work with your customer to build rapid prototypes and get rapid
feedback. If they tell you it's wrong, then go back and do it again.
Forget your old business so that you can learn your new business.
The old assumptions and beliefs and goals are probably not true. (In
this case, the factory went from selling "life-long comfort" to selling
"Two and a half feet of tubular delicious SEX!")
You can push your people hard but only if they know that it's for them and not for you.
Sometimes the tide of attitude can shift away from you or towards
you on the suggestion of just one person in your team who holds a lot
of sway. Earn that person's respect and you have earned the respect of
the group.
Aim high. Choose big hairy scary goals that are way beyond your
comfort zone. (I disagree with the "S.M.A.R.T." goals approach in life.)
You can run from your childhood but you can't hide. You don't
need to "deal with it" all first, unless it's getting in the way of
your life. In which case, go figure it out and then get on with things.
Life, relationships, business, sex, gender, psychology - they're
all messy and uncomfortable. And that's the way they're supposed to be.
Find something you want to do. Pursue it with all your heart. And share that adventure with people you care about.
My view on the interesting things happening at the intersection of business, technology, society, and the environment.
This video made me smile and laugh all the way through it: a crazy Friday night at Crossfit suffering with good friends and enjoying life
