Quarterly Management Meetings

Meetings, meetings, meetings. They're sort of a necessary evil to running a business. People need to communicate in order to synchronize efforts within and across groups. They can be a huge time suck. At Collective Intellect we were having weekly management meetings. These became laughable at some point due to the overall activity in the company. People were either traveling or knee deep in some project or other with too little time to formally sync every week.

Through the tangible and immediate need to get projects done the team has naturally moved towards more frequent, informal hallway, and highly efficient meetings. So the meeting needs have become more about steering than rowing. We recently decided to solve this gap by instituting quarterly management meetings. This is a technique we borrowed from my last company.

After being purchased by webMethods in 2003 I became part of the management team. We held quarterly meetings that were one quarter strategy and three quarters execution planning. We applauded the accomplishments from the previous quarter, discussed the failures, and talked about what we wanted to accomplish in the next quarter. Each department would present how they planned to support those quarterly goals. We would typically do two days and have dinner together on the night in-between. The dinner was a great opportunity to blow off steam and enjoy each other's company out of the trenches of day to day business.

We've had one of these thus far at Collective Intellect. It wasn't perfect. We've got work to do. But it's a great step forward in the maturation of the company.

hay field ice storm

Driving across Kansas last Thursday I came across this eerie hay field scene. I seem to be mesmerized by ice covered nature lately so thought I would share.

Eating your own dog food

Often in companies in which I'm involved, the quote, "eat your own dog food" occurs. The etymology of this phrase is apparently based on a circa 1970s Alpo dog food commercial where Lorne Greene professes the benefits to be so great he feeds it to his own dogs. This allegorical cry for using one's own products and services is neither appropriate nor in many cases doable. For instance, if you're Lockheed Martin you likely don't have a real need for a drone helicopter missile launcher, no matter how much you would like to use it on your competition. Closer to home, in my last company we built an enterprise software package for business activity monitoring (coined by Gartner as BAM). Using the software in a small but growing concern the size of Dante Software would be complete overkill where a simple spreadsheet would suffice.

We're in another round of similar discussions at CI and in this instance it seems altogether appropriate. In the current business we baseline, measure, and analyze the impact of word of mouth on a company's industry, products, and services. In this case, eating our own dog food is not just an exercise forced upon some unsuspecting corner of the organization, it is critical to our survival and growth.

wicked ice

Formed by water dripping off of other icicles off my roof.

success at sales

Just concluded another sales call this morning. Seems like I'm doing more and more of this as my career progresses. There's an inherent need in any technology company to be able to communicate the vision of the company and the industry in a comprehensive and credible way that co-opts the customer into a sense of purpose. Having been the evangelist and not the closer I've had an interesting vantage point into the selling process. I was talking to Glen Springer about this process today and here is what he outlined as the successful sales genome:

- Keep your promises
- Follow up on time
- Ask open ended questions
- Ask for the order

He also said that he had heard 78% of sales people never ask for the order. That's a fairly amazing statistic given how obvious the advice is, but I believe it's likely to be true. A great sales person has a killer instinct and knows when to go in for the close. I think most people in sales are just really great at socializing and while they do perform well they never become great. Having been in and owned startups during the bubble this was especially obvious. Selling in the bubble was like bobbing for water. Anyone without hydrophobia could do it. Once the bubble burst only the great sales people survived.

Boulder Startup Trivia

A free six-pack of Fat Tire beer to the first person who can tell me the person in the Boulder entrepreneurial community with a copy of Samuel Jackson's character's wallet in Pulp Fiction. You know, the one that says "Bad Mother Fucker" on the outside?

(all people who were at dinner with this person last week are excluded)

add your guess to the comments

Co-CEO

I love starting companies.

I don't regard anything quite as professionally rewarding as setting foot on that journey with an old laptop, a head full of ideas, some wits about me, and at least a bit of anecdotal evidence that this could be "big". It's an absolute blast! And as in most journeys (other than spiritual quests - onesomes :) it is good to have someone along for the ride equally up to the challenges ahead, unbridled in their enthusiasm, and complementary in skill.

Because as much as I love the experience, starting a company is hard as hell. There is a dogged uncertainty kept at bay with the constant push towards value. There are pressures and deadlines: pressure to complete the product, pressure to sell the product even before it has fully materialized as living proof that value exists (see, they bought it). Adapt, adapt, adapt. There are pressures exerted by employees past, present, and future, that most human aspect of the business dictated by individual needs, struggles, and desires. There are pressures from investors to move the ball forward to make it to the next stage of the game. There are networking functions to attend, constant meetings with venture capitalists, investment bankers, and other interested parties. There are sales calls, vendor relationships to manage, and a frenetic challenge to be everywhere at once.

In my last three companies I have been the Chief Technology Officer and have had the good fortune to have started the last two with my good friend and CEO Don Springer. Don and I have always co-managed the company and I was reminded of the healthy aspects of this model by the founders of MadKast who told me they were co-managing their company. We've always operated in this model and in fact debated in the first few weeks before starting Collective Intellect which one of us would hold the CEO title. The debate went something like this:

Don: Tim why don't you be CEO this time around
Tim: I don't think you're getting off the hook that easily. No way. You should be CEO.

My advice is to find someone you have professional and emotional balance with. I deeply understand the technology. Don can sell and has an innate ability to put together multi-page cap tables with no circular references. I am a big picture guy who pursues ideas, and Don is more detail oriented. Don will put together a presentation with 40 slides where I will use 5. We can finish each other's sentences, drink our scotch, have fun, vehemently argue a point without offending the other, and still get the presentation done in time. The bottom line is that we hold a lot of mutual respect for each other. Enough to actually listen.

Being able to lean on someone else to help make the hard decisions and steward the company is priceless in bad times and incredibly rewarding in good times.

Defrag Quotes and Whitman

Just a couple of quotes to pass along from Defrag ...

From Doc Searls presentation:

we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings - and our reach exceeds your grasp. DEAL WITH IT
-- Rage Boy

What if we could help vendors understand us instead of being herded like cattle into walled gardens and milked? What if we could manage our own data, our preferences across whole markets? What if what mattered most were our real intentions, rather than just our attention?
-- Doc Searls in talk about Vendor Relationship Management

Doc also had a wonderful Whitman quote from "Song of Myself" but unfortunately I didn't stop to write it down and didn't recognize it after re-reading the entire poem here.

I love Whitman so the quote caught my attention. Searls has a knack for documenting our age in a spirit similar to Whitman.

Turn On, Tune In, Stream Out

I sat on a "Harnessing Collective Intelligence" at Defrag this year. Curiously it was all Boulder companies on the panel. Todd Vernon, CEO of Lijit was there, David Mandell of Me.dium, Ryan Martens of Rally Software, and myself. Each company had it's own take on the subject of the session with Lijit claiming the high ground on social search as a foundation for creating a better search experience, Me.dium extolling the social virtues of co-browsing and flash mobs, and I talked about how companies could really improve their reach and understanding of their consumers. Rally represented the business end of what I discussed and talked about using technology to engage their customers.

I want to reiterate one point that I made on the panel when asked where I saw Collective Intellect being in five years. I don't think it's possible to overstate the importance of the momentum behind consumer generated media and social networking. It is revolutionary in the same way that television changed everything in the 50's. Companies will have to change the way they market to consumers. Family dynamics will change with less time in front of the television and more in front of the computer. News creation, distribution, and consumption patterns will change with more people writing the news, traditional media mining blogs for newsworthy ideas, bloggers feeding off of news and creating viral effects, and news consumers using news readers, blog aggregators, as well as more traditional news outlets to keep informed. There is a sea change at work in how we interact with one another and the entities that are important to us. This can include family, friends, lovers, vendors, and rock stars. One of my friends at work has a teenage son who comes home after school, passes by the television, and logs into MySpace to digest the day.

This is the age of Hyper-Communication. I publish what I'm doing 20 times a day between using Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, my blog, and email. I watch what dozens of friends are doing via these same media. I'm not certain of the destination but know the journey changes everything.



Turn On - Think about the way the world is changing in this new age of Hyper-Communication
Tune In - Listen to the human collective. Become involved in social media and social networking.
Stream Out - Publish Publish Publish. Become a speaking participant!

facebook and widgets

I attended the Widget Summit in San Francisco a couple of week's ago. So much has happened since then. The Rockies clinched the ALCS only to be swept by Boston in the World Series. Facebook received a huge investment from Microsoft for a very small percentage of the company. Halloween has come and gone. And the weather has turned noticeably colder in Boulder. Widgets have certainly not gone cold however.

The conference was very well attended and there were many good presentations on creating viral growth, what works and what doesn't, how to monetize (and how hard that is), widget platforms and best development practices for some of those platforms. Mobile is one of those platforms and I think often overlooked in the face of the big social media platforms (pun intended). According to Nokia mobile has a current subscriber base of 3 BILLION and will have 4 BILLION subscribers by 2010. The logical conclusion to all of this is a personal web app that incorporates all of your social media interaction, your mobile platform, your blog, news, weather, travel, email, calendar, favorite blogs, twitters, ... in short, everything you interact with daily. Someone will deliver this application framework. Facebook gets pretty far down this road but doesn't really integrate mobile well. The rest will be accomplished with widgets.

And since Facebook is all the rage I thought I would pass on a few tidbits from the Lead Developer of Slide. Slide is the creator of some of the most popular widgets on Facebook with about 1 of 4 Facebook profiles containing one of their widgets, including slideshow, funpix, guestbook, and skinflix.

"get an app out there. if taking more than 3 days then you're over thinking it"

"don't take things so seriously"

"your content is not interesting unless it is interesting to your friend"

"News feed is one of the most viral apps"

"Not good support for monetization at this point, really up to you to get ads in your app"

"Focus on engagement"