Scrollin' On Dubs

Jun 01

Founders At Work Digest complete

Entrepreneur, JumpBox 3 Comments »

Well May is over and I finished yesterday the last of the posts on the Founders At Work Digest. The book by Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston was dense with practical advice from people who had built and sold successful startup technology companies. I started taking notes and had originally intended to write-up a single post summarizing my thoughts but I ended up with way too many thoughts and decided to do the “post a day for the month of May” series instead.

So what is the secret sauce that freed these founders from the laws of physics that bind the rest of us and allowed them to create amazing companies that changed the world? While there is no single “success chromosome” that can be identified, there were definite themes and character traits that became apparent across all the stories. I highly recommend this book to anyone with a startup. If you’re thinking about buying it, scan the digest first for the major takeaways and decide if it’s worth it. I summarized each story and peppered the commentary with anecdotes from our own founder perspective having built JumpBox from scratch over the past year. I hope you find it useful. Enjoy!

May 24

Seth Godin is a quitter

Events 10 Comments »

In every good sense of the word that is: he’s quit all the right things. I had the opportunity to see him speak in front of a group of about 300 this morning at the Tempe Improv in Arizona. His talk was themed around his latest book the dip and dealt with the subject of when it makes sense to quit. My friend Francine wrote up a great summary of the content of his talk this morning and Guy Kawasaki covered the book well in his interview with Seth. So rather than rehash either of those, in “purple cow” style, I’m going to cover what I believe was remarkable about both.

I finished reading the dip just now. At 75pgs and big print it took less time read it than to hear the talk he gave this morning. His talk was essentially a multimedia version of the book with a focus on anecdotes that make the message more memorable. Seth is a marketing wizard and everything he does draws upon the basic marketing pillars he espouses in Purple Cow. The $50 price tag for this morning’s talk was actually positioned as a mandatory 5-book buy and a free pep talk, which is genius because he knows people will give away the books and “sneeze” his message to others. The books themselves contain a “guest book” registry at the back and encourage the reader to pass it along once finished.

Screw the long tail

Seth takes the heretical position that we don’t quit enough. That’s right. We stick it out too often in a mediocre situation content with average performance in an average arena rather than achieving “rockstar status” in a smaller, more-differentiated arena. His argument is that in a society where we are flooded with choices and different options along with the ability to quickly research and connect with the winner, why would anyone choose 2nd (let alone 15th) place? While the “long tail” produces huge profits for companies like Amazon and Netflix across many selections, individuals represents only one of those selections and therefore should strive to be the juicy #1 in a long-tail-type situation. The relationship between #1, #2, #3, etc is non-linear because the “winners win big because markets love a winner” effect.

Everything you learned in school is wrong

This was a powerful and jarring statement but he is right: the academic system (in America at least) encourages the wrong thing: mediocrity. Which report card do parents and teachers reward more, the kid with an A-, B+, B+, B, B or the kid with an A+ and all C’s? And yet how as a consumer do you choose your physician or auto mechanic or decorator- do you care what grades they got in the other classes? I asked him the question “assuming that you can’t effect policy changes in the broken school system, what can a teacher do now to improve things and impress the dip thinking on kids?” He responded with a personal story about seeing a 6th grader sing “somewhere over the rainbow” for the first time in front of an audience of 400 parents and how that one experience galvanized that child to become a different individual growing up from that point, to seek out that “rockstar” level of heightened experience in everything she did thereafter.

Be the best in the world

The critical thing is how you define “the world.” He advocates being the best in your customers’ world. Depending on what you’re doing, the parameters of that world may mean “the best organic supermarket in a five block radius of Manhattan.” Whatever that world is, identify a territory that is tenable and worth occupying and then dominate it. The second half of his book is titled “If you’re not going to get to #1, you might as well quit now.” This is a message you would never hear in school or from your parents but given the premise of the new economy, I believe he’s right. Obviously this doesn’t apply to hobbies and leisure activities- it’s only for the areas that involve pain and sacrifice for the pursuit of a goal.

Applicability to JumpBox

So I’m always looking through the lens of how this applies to our own startup and the things that resonate:

The fear of competition of other companies besting us in our space is a healthy thing as it keeps us sharp and slamming forward, but the fear of being stamped out by a goliath like a Microsoft is irrational- their world is by necessity not ours right now and it’s all in how you define “the world.” Our strategy to cordon off a very small world initially of IT admins having pain with Open Source is validated. Conquer that world first and then move up the food chain.

His point that “selling is about a transference of emotion, not a presentation of facts” is spot on. It’s the whole “sell the sizzle not the steak” idea. We are sometimes guilty of promoting all the logical reasons why one would choose to run their applications as virtual appliances but the reality is that until you appeal to that deep visceral gut emotion, all the figures and advantages are shallow “head-reaching” facts as opposed to “heart-reaching” feelings. This thinking has inspired me to make two critical initiatives for our online stuff which will become apparent shortly.

“The only reason the Space Shuttle still exists is because no one has the guts to cancel it.” So true. Why the hell are we still sending the Shuttle up in the sky? There has got to be a better use of that energy and those people- are people afraid that we won’t be able to come up with something as cool as the Shuttle program if we were to cancel it? No politician wants to be known as the person that nixed the great mission of space exploration, but that’s a lame reason for continuing to spend billions of dollars on it. This thinking has got me examining what I can and should quit that I’m doing now and how this could free up energy to focus on the dips worth tackling.

So to summarize: These seminars are great but it’s not what you learn or don’t learn but how it ultimately alters your behavior going forward. Dips are good because they screen the rest of the jokesters from being able to have rockstar status- scarcity creates value and the Dip is to be embraced. Failure is different than quitting. Quitting strategically when you’re in a cul-de-sac instead of a Dip is smart because it frees you up to pursue the avenues worth pursuing. I highly recommend you see Seth speak if you get the chance, he is an inspirational presenter. It was an honor to meet him and get a personalized “moo” shout out from the Purple Cow himself!

May 18

Workaround to solve a major annoyance in Quickbooks

Tutorials 4 Comments »

File this under the “probably-never-need-this-but-invaluable-on-the-day-you-do” category.

If you’ve been keeping your company’s accounting via Quickbooks and decide to start using the online banking feature that connects to your bank account to automatically grab transactions, you will run into a major annoyance for which there is currently no good solution. The online banking feature will grab the entire history of transactions from your account and keep them until you either add or match them. This would be fine if there was some way to remove the online retrievals that are duplicates for ones that have already cleared but you cannot match transactions that have already been reconciled and there is no “force delete” button. You’re basically stuck with no way to get rid of any of the transactions that were automatically pulled which have already cleared your bank.

I’m on Quickbooks Premier 2006 and I came up with a hack to remove these transactions and explained it briefly on the Intuit forums but I’m posting a mini-tutorial here because it was sufficiently-frustrating and the solution is anything but intuitive – I know of no other way around this problem short of voiding all your cleared transactions (which would be greater of the two evils). The essence of the hack is that you setup a dummy account called “Already reconciled transactions,” add the duplicates to that account to clear them from the match screen and then go through and manually delete all of them and lastly, delete that fake account. This is tedious but it does solve the problem so here goes:

Assuming you’ve already setup the dummy expense account titled “Already Reconciled” and you have successfully configured your quickbooks to talk to your bank, go to the online banking screen.

Click the “Go Online” button to retrieve all the transactions from your bank.

You’ll see a dialogue like the following as Quickbooks connects to your bank and pulls the history.

Now click the “view” button to review the transactions you just downloaded.

On this screen you’ll have a ton of unmatched transactions. If you have any history of reconciled transactions in your Quickbooks this is problematic.

Trying to match these with the ones that have already cleared produces the following error.

Instead, add the transactions to the register one by one.

And assign them to the fake “Already Reconciled” expense account you created.

This allows you to then go into your Chart of Accounts and do a custom report.

Create a filter that pulls all the transactions from this fake account.

Go into each of these transactions…

And delete it. The last thing you’ll want to do is kill the fake account once you emptied it with all the duplicate transactions.

This is a hugely annoying way of dealing with the problem but at least it works. A simple button to “force delete” in when matching transactions would save all these steps. Hopefully Intuit will clue in to this issue and fix it in a future release.

Tagged with: suppressrevivepost

May 08

How to tap the knowledge you don’t know you don’t know

JumpBox 13 Comments »

It’s at the core of every innovative advance; that magical moment that occurs when your sphere of awareness extends to encompass new territory – the stuff “you didn’t know that you didn’t know.” This typically happens when people from different cultural, disciplinary or age groups traverse one of these boundaries and cross-pollinate an idea that had meaning in one context into a new one. So what do I mean by, “don’t know what you don’t know?” It’s important because this is where the magic of innovation occurs. Everyone loves a good pie chart, here’s one:

Let’s assume for a minute that we can represent the theoretical body of all knowledge in existence as a pie. Sorry to burst your bubble but you know about one sliver’s-worth of stuff – all the things you can do yourself (speak English, use a computer, read a blog). You’re aware of a larger chunk that you cannot currently do but nonetheless you still know exists (how to bull fight, speak swahili, knit a sweater). These two taken together constitute your awareness of the world. But you remain oblivious to the vast majority of this pie (pacman’s body in this picture). It exists regardless of your awareness and from time to time knowledge from pacman is absorbed into your world either through first-hand experience or simply by becoming aware of what you don’t know. What’s an example of knowledge from this mysterious pacman space? For instance, until my friend Bryce told me, I never knew the spinning hard-boiled egg trick. You can tell the difference between a hard-boiled egg and an uncooked egg because the uncooked egg won’t readily spin (presumably because the inertia of its liquid center and the tendency to resist a change in motion).

If the real advancements occur when you are able to access that pacman space and discover insights that let you innovate, how can we willfully tap into that knowledge? I know of two ways and one of them we’re facilitating tonight in Scottsdale.

Stone Soup Seminar

Our friend Ed describes this concept as “not being aware of the water in your own fish tank” and the epiphany that occurs when you are able to see the water in other people’s tanks and make inferences about your own situation. If you’re local in Phoenix tonight, come out to the first ever “Stone Soup Seminar.” The design of the event is to distill the suggestions of the crowd to solve business and technical challenges of the first twenty people that RSVP. The benefit is that as an RSVP’r, not only do you get actionable suggestions to solving your problem, you get the additional perspective of the fish tanks around you and the chance to reach into pacman space and learn about the stuff you didn’t know you didn’t know.

Innovation Games

I completed my certification this weekend in California to be able to facilitate the Innovation Games Â® as collaborative exercises to unearth insights into customer needs. It’s very difficult to ask a customer what he/she wants in a new product and get a meaningful result- had Apple explicitly asked people what they wanted in a music player it’s unlikely we would have arrived at the iPod and yet it’s a ridiculously popular product. Innovation Games are one way to build the bridge of understanding starting on the customer side of the river and working your way backwards. If we get through every one’s issues and still have time left over, we’ll experiment with some of the Innovation Games. I had the opportunity to do a podcast with the author of the Innovation Games book, Luke Hohmann- you can listen to his interview here.

I know we’re competing with the Sun’s Playoff game tonight but the game doesn’t start until 7:30pm and the first quarter of basketball is always boring anyways. Details on the Stone Soup Seminar are here and we look forward to learning the stuff we didn’t know we didn’t know from you all.

May 07

How many human hands

Ponderings 1 Comment »

My friend Noah and I were pondering some deep thoughts this weekend and came to simple yet powerful thought experiment:

Look around the room you are in right now and ask yourself how many human hands are responsible for making the stuff that’s around you?

It sounds childishly-silly at first pass but seriously, try this experiment. Consider that every object in the room in which you are sitting was put together by either a person or a machine- but even the machines that automates the production of the tiny filaments in the light bulbs above you were at some point engineered and assembled by human hands. The cotton gins that culled the fibers which make up the carpet under your feet were assembled and then driven by people. The sand that went into the concrete poured into the foundation under the building you are in, that too was dug and then crushed by someone. You can carry this thought experiment out indefinitely. In fact, barring the natural features of the land around you, everything in your immediate vicinity was directly or indirectly assembled by a human being.

I think about the more abstract implications of these ideas with respect to what we’re building with JumpBox:

the Ubuntu operating system underlying each virtual appliance we make – the product of hundreds of developers contributing their intelligence

the virtualization technologies upon which JumpBoxes run – each company has between 20-2000 employees with who-knows-how-many involved in developing and marketing these platforms

the Open Source applications and components – by definition, collaborative works from many volunteers donating their time

the physical machines upon which this stuff all eventually runs – designed and put together at some point by people

the wires over which the electrons travel to make these applications accessible to their users – placed by humans

The logical extension to this experiment is to consider the question, “who will benefit from my work?” How many unseen people whom you will never meet will utilize the product of whatever it is you do each day? We see the notification emails that come in when a JumpBox is registered and we see entities like “Harvard Business School, Mayo Clinic, US Patent and Trademark Office.” I like to think that somewhere, a medical researcher who otherwise couldn’t have set up a wiki is using JumpBox to collaborate with colleagues on an important project, and that our hands will have a small part in helping advance their work. Or that when the defense contractor asks us for the ability to bundle his own application on a JumpBox and redistribute it, we become a cornerstone ingredient to a foundation upon which important buildings can be constructed, like the sand in that concrete. It gives you that warm fuzzy “we’re-all-in-this-together-type-feeling.”

Then again maybe guys like Noah and I just think way too much about this type of stuff ;-)

May 01

How to disable your car alarm panic button non-destructively

Lifehacks 35 Comments »

If you’re like me you have a janitor’s key chain with twenty things on it. At least once a week I set off the panic alarm on my truck by accident because one of the gadgets on my key chain presses the button. In fact the only time I ever intentionally use the panic button is when I’m trying to locate my truck in a parking garage. But I’ve realized I can get the same honk and light flash by clicking the arm button twice and since I rarely panic anymore I now have zero use for this button. Here is the trick I came up with this evening to eliminate the annoyance of accidentally triggering the alarm:

Step 1 – Take the backing off your alarm remote

Step 2 – Remove the circuit board from the rubber button piece

Step 3 – Rip off a tiny piece of paper and stick it between the button and the contacts

On these cheap remotes the button is not pressure-sensitive, it’s activated when the metal on the rubber piece closes the circuit. By putting something in between the contacts you prevent the circuit from closing and you can take the paper out if you ever decide that you need the panic button to work again. A non-destructive, 30sec fix to a weekly annoyance. It’s the simple things right?

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