Salient Lessons on Entrepreneurship

I was just listening to David Heineimeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and partner at 37signals, on the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Podcast, as he shared some interesting thoughts about entrepreneurship. David brought up some interesting entrepreneurial advice which is worth highlighting:

1) Work Smart – get plenty of rest and sleep and focus your energies on producing output that scales. You are not going to outspend or outbuild a Microsoft so focus your energies on turning an industry or a sector on its head and focus your own work around something that gives you a multiplier effect in time you put in vs. time-to-market traction.

2) Sleep – dumb entrepreneurs work day and night and then brag about it; smart ones work day jobs, do something on the side for 10 hours a week and then take that on full time when it gets traction. In fact, when you are 5X more tired, you level of effectiveness drops by 50X – it’s a multiplier effect.

3) Work within constraints- constrain the time you are willing to put in. Don’t take a college approach to business by doing anything more than is required of a particular task – that’s not working smart.

4) Don’t take venture capital, whatever your do – David was pretty adamant about the fact that venture capital is a time bomb that is strapped to your shoulders. It makes you complacent because it is not your money and at the same time it gets you hooked on the drug dealer (VC’s) so that you are jonesing for than next cash infusion. In short: build businesses that are profitable from the get-go.

5) Don’t ever plan long term (which he defined as longer than 2 months out). David argues that long term planning is flawed because how can you, in a startup environment, purport to know where the market or product will be in 1-5 years? I don’t particularly agree with this one, as I think that some long-term thought can go a long way in helping you design dynamic strategies/approaches that do not hinge on a reactionary mindset- ie) What do we do next week? This type of thinking is unfortunately indicative of the common myopia that can potentially be detrimental to the long-term growth of any business…

You can listen to the full podcast here.

What Matters Now

Seth Godin’s new book, “What Matters Now,” is an interesting co-creation by a number of web influentials. Although as you might expect, it is a bit scattered in focus in that it sometimes calls out contradicting views (ie – “Slow down, don’t live through your iphone” and “the world is interconnected, participate!”) it is nonetheless an interesting collection of 1 page thought bursts from some very smart people. Esentially, all of these people were asked to answer one simple question in short form: “What matters now?”

Download the free e-book here

Some of my favorite quotes:

The past decade has been an extraordinary adventure in discovering new social models on the Web—ways to work, create and organize outside of the traditional institutions of companies, governments and academia. But the next decade will be all about applying these models to the real world. – Chris Anderson

You are only as rich as the enrichment you bring to the world around you. -Rajesh Setty

For decades, organizations and their leaders were comfortable with strategies and practices that kept them in the middle of the road—that’s where the customers were, so that’s what felt safe and secure. – William Taylor

Management is great if you want people to comply – to do specific things a certain way. But it stinks if you want people to engage -Daniel Pink

You grow (and thrive!) by doing what excites you and what scares you everyday, not by trying to find your passion. -Derek Sivers

Crowdsourced Job Descriptions

In thinking about how businesses can become more socially-calibrated, I am surprised we are not seeing more experimentation with crowd-sourcing job descriptions. Certainly, Best-Buy has already proven that this could technically be done by crowd-sourcing a job description for a social media manager position through customer polling… I wonder how that worked out for them.

However, think about what corporate life would be like if every job description, even the CEO’s, was internally crowd-sourced within the organization… job descriptions could become living, breathing documents that can be dynamically calibrated to suit the ever-changing needs of the company. Certainly, most high-level competencies and roles might remain more static, but sub-routines within those larger competencies could certainly become more fluid.

Crowdsourced job descriptions could also potentially lead to more measurable individual performance metrics, eventually bubbling up into more socially-calibrated resumes.

Career Fulfillment through Social Business Design

I am most passionate about social business design and its potential to make our careers more meaningful and fulfilling for us on a personal level. For far too long, corporations have neglected to understand and engage with both their customers and their employees in meaningful, collaborative interactions, opting to apply industrial age approaches to information age challenges. Now, with the advent of new media, organizational hierarchies are flattening into horizontal networks of influence and businesses are starting to understand that it is more effective to influence than to coerce, more rewarding to converse than to message, and more fruitful to engage than to target.

The Challenge
While new media is in the process of transforming an organization’s outward facing institutions such as marketing and public relations, I believe that it has only begun to affect the organization’s internal business structures; as a result, most organizations struggle to more effectively inspire their employees to be more passionate in their work. To address this problem, it is imperative that businesses develop a deeper understanding of their employees: an understanding that extends beyond the resume or job description to one that values an individual’s brand, influence networks and most importantly, personal passions.

While businesses struggle to grasp how to tap into the innate passions of their employees, they also grapple with the challenge of attracting the right talent in the first place. Like employees, they too stumble through the archaic interview process, while in the back of their minds thinking that surely there must be a better way. Grasping at every possible tool in their arsenal, companies create sleek “web 2.0” websites, corporate blogs and twitter accounts, hoping to exude some shred of humanity by crafting a corporate-approved “genuine voice.” Unfortunately, such efforts are often uncoordinated at best and frequently represent the voices of only a handful of individuals with the corporation.

Conversely, prospective employees struggle to fully understand what a corporation, or a specific role within a corporation, will entail and how that role marries with their personal talents and passions. Stuck in an endless cycle of hope and disillusionment, many professionals cling to the promise that their next career experience will be one that ignites their personal passions, only to be disillusioned upon realizing that reality may fall short of expectations. While this is certainly a part of human nature (Read: Stumbling Upon Happiness), I think we still have quite a bit of room for improvement here.

Looking to the Future
Building on the initial promise of enterprise 2.0, businesses will become both more social and more open, encouraging employees to broadcast their professional activities as a part of their current social life-streams. In doing so, employees will achieve a higher level of synchronicity with the organization, enabling a new level of “hive mindedness” that will allow them to grow faster. Additionally, businesses will find that in encouraging more openness and synchronicity, they will be able to attract and retain more of the right talent. This combination of transparency and social signaling will also redefine “leadership” by rewarding social influence over corporate politics and backstabbing.

The confluence in all of these trends in social business design will create an entirely new set of business opportunities for entrepreneurs in the coming years. In the immediate short term, there will be opportunities for consultancies, like the Dachis Group, to guide current businesses through this transitional period of social business change.

In the longer term, there will be opportunities for new entrepreneurs to create businesses and business networks built, from the ground up, on the principals of social business design. It is this new era of social business design that I am most passionate about, as I believe it holds the greatest promise for the future of our careers.

What are you most passionate about?

Social Media Guru

Hilarious:

Our Engagement Photo Shoot with Glen Cooper

We just got the photos from our engagement photo shoot with Glen Cooper; and they speak for themselves. Check out Glen’s blog post about it here.

Parallel Thought: Dachis Group

It’s not often that you stumble upon a group of people who’s thinking about the future of business so closely parallels your own.. a social business design consultancy called Dachis Group. The Dachis Group helps businesses make sense of how to effectively apply a social business design strategy internally, to bring about transformative social progress, emergent innovation and hive mentality.

Incidentally, if you have the time (20 min), here is David Armano (principal at Dachis) talking about personal branding (which I found shortly after I writing about it – wierd):

Take Control of Your Personal Brand

…through social media.

Each of us, as individuals, has a personal brand, which is shaped by our collection of professional experiences (resume/CV), our passions and interests, and our cultural background. It dictates, to a large extent, our career paths, our professional and social encounters, and our future opportunities. Should we then not take the same pro-active approach to developing, shaping and managing our personal brands as we do those of the corporations we work for?

Dan Schwabel has a great post on his personal branding blog, outlining his personal branding predictions for 2010. In it he details a number of trends that are culminating in the increased importance of personal branding in 2010, but I would like to focus on two specific ones:

1) Your voice becomes stronger than your resume
2) Social Media is being used more for career development

As Google, Yahoo and Bing begin to value social media activity more and more in serving search results, it’s no wonder that social media mediums such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc are going to continue to be elevated more and more to the forefront of your personal brand… when was the last time you did a vanity search on Google?

Which brings me to my point: if you are not pro-actively managing and shaping yourself as a brand online, your personal brand will be relegated to a kelp-like amorphous blob being pushed and pulled by the relentless current of your digital footprint.

However, if you become the architect of your brand online, your voice will become your resume, you will find your career to be more rewarding (by attracting employers interested in you for your passions, not just the bullet points on your resume), and you will earn a hell of a lot more money.

Right now, each of us has an amazing opportunity to shape the structures, connections and flows of information around our personal brands: we can architect the rivers of influence that flow into (and shape) those brands, while molding ourselves into the professionals we dream of becoming … are you taking advantage of one of the most important opportunities of your lifetime?

I am. It’s one of my main reasons for starting this blog: to begin to evolve and shape my own personal brand.

Collective Intelligence & The Future of the Web

Another interesting post by Nova, who is the founder of a semantic web company called Radar Networks, wherein Nova talks about how the web is evolving into a sort of collective intelligence:

“I think that these trends are all combining, and going real-time. Effectively what we’re seeing is the evolution of a global collective mind, a theme I keep coming back to again and again. This collective mind is not just comprised of humans, but also of software and computers and information, all interlinked into one unimaginably complex system: A system that senses the universe and itself, that thinks, feels, and does things, on a planetary scale.”

The quote and the post only go skin deep (at least for me) but if you are really interested in digging deeper, and have a few minute to read a brilliant seminal post on this topic, Nova wrote this one a while back. This was, for sure, one of those posts that just makes you dream; I found myself spacing out and thinking about “the global mind” and “collective intelligence” for days after reading this one.

“The planet-sized “Web” computer is already more complex than a human brain and has surpassed the 20-petahertz threshold for potential intelligence as calculated by Ray Kurzweil. In 10 years, it will be ubiquitous. So will superintelligence emerge on the Web, not a supercomputer?”

I also like this chart which Nova produced, which alludes to a potential evolutionary path for the web:

As always, I don’t really give much credence to the timelines we tend to attach to these types of predictions, as the web has continually proven us wrong; things just move so much quicker than we expect, that I think we will have this type of collective intelligence much sooner than the timelines that Nova talks about (50-100 years in the first post I linked to).

RIP: Garmin & TomTom

Rest in peace, Garmin and TomTom – platforms like Android will bleed you dry and eventually kill you… it will be slow and painful.

You’ve been busy spending time developing hardware and software, all of which has fallen very short of perfection. Very few companies (ehhhm, Apple) have been able to do that successfully, and you are not one of them.

You always turn on too slowly, you dont query a server for points of interest (POI’s) and require that I manually upload POI’s or pay for your “premium” services. You have have dated user interfaces and none of you augment my reality or act as my phone…

Well… you try to be my phone:

Anyways, let me save you the trouble and tell you what will happen to you:

1) You will consolidate the marketplace

2) You will develop inferior mobile applications (you don’t know software-not really, even if you do integrate with google maps)

3) You will have to slash prices… and shed manpower

4) And finally, you will slowly but surely shrink out of existence

So say good night, Garmin & TomTom – spend your last few years in quiet dignity.