2b2 Collaboration and Coffeetoasts

Resistance Is Futile: The Film Industry’s Turn

maricelam — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 15:18:23 +0000

“In the end, resistance is futile. Change or die.” Jeff Sutherland Last week I attended a rather productive discussion panel about Film Distribution and where the film industry is and is headed to. I had a lot of fun listening to the similarities between what the panel members were discussing and what happened to the traditional proprietary software, music and publishing industries prior, during and after the advent of the Internet as a traditional-market-shattering-force. In the mid 90s I was performing as one of the product managers for a top power-house that manufactured proprietary databases for aerospace, oil & gas, defense and all sort of engineering related industries. A group of mid-level executives, developers and marketing staff members joined forces to persuade upper management to move fast and transition to the Internet. Within the year after we started the push, most of us ended up moving on because the ultimate decision makers didn’t want to risk loosing the status-quo revenue models. Unlike most of the traditional corporations that didn’t embrace the Internet quickly enough, that company had extraordinarily deep pockets and even though it went thru tremendous downsizing and lost incredibly talented staff, ten or so years later, they were [...]

The 17 Startup Principles – Customer Development Manifesto

maricelam — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 13:16:40 +0000

Paul Marshal created a poster to help us keep the Customer Development principles in the forefront at all times. A startup isn’t a mini-me corporation, it is Temporary Organization Designed to Search for A Repeatable and Scalable Business Model. The one principles that I always like expanding on is to avoid turning passion for making a startup successful into passion for an unproven, untested idea where a founder has fallen in love with the way he or she believes a problem should be solved, but the market is telling a different story. There Are No Facts Inside Your Building, So Get Outside Pair Customer Development with Agile Development Failure is an Integral Part of the Search for the Business Model If You’re Afraid to Fail You’re Destined to Do So Iterations and Pivots are Driven by Insight Validate Your Hypotheses with Experiments Success Begins with Buy-In from Investors and Co-Founders No Business Plan Survives First Contact with Customers Not All Startups Are Alike Startup Metrics are Different from Existing Companies Agree on Market Type – It Changes Everything Fast, Fearless Decision-Making, Cycle Time, Speed and Tempo If it’s not About Passion, You’re Dead the Day You Opened your Doors Startup [...]

The three most common types of problems that lead to a startup’s failure

maricelam — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 15:34:56 +0000

In his Kauffman Sketchbook “Take the Leap” video clip (at end of post), Noam Wasserman, associate professor at Harvard Business School, perfectly summarizes the three key areas that new founders must carefully analyze prior to taking the leap: People (skills, knowledge, preparation), Market (real need vs. passion), Life Stage (can you afford to do this?) Nothing new there, right? That was my first reaction, but I still went ahead and read the book. In the clip, Wasserman points out something that unfortunately we still see way too often and which I have talked about in my post The Danger of Falling in Love with Your Hot Idea: One of the key things that gets in the way of founders if their passion for the idea. They can fall in love with the sexiness of the technology. They are sure that this is something that the world is going to want. They don’t step back to make sure that that passion is not turning into a blind spot for them. The 3 minutes clip is certainly worth watching, even if it just reiterates things you’ve heard before, but so is reading Wasserman’s book The Founder’s Dilemmas. The book’s value is on [...]

We, the Publishers!

maricelam — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:24:39 +0000

Can something so fundamental really be changing? Steven Johnson in an interview for the series How We Will Read Since the last week of 2011, I’ve been learning everything I can about the incredibly fast-pace changes the publishing industry will continue to experience. A couple of projects have enabled me to quickly understand key aspects of the Transmedia movement, several new self-publishing and writing tools, and the new economic and business models being tested as part of innovative reading and writing philosophies, if I can call them so, as well as intriguing forms of crowd-writing. But it was the following line from the series How We Will Read that motivated me to post my two most important learned lessons so far: We engage in conversations with our users every day about what they need to fill in the gap between their reading experience and what they imagine it could be. When I first came to the United States I spent most of my time in my college’s library reading as much as I could so that I could learn English on my own as quickly as possible (I didn’t enjoy the ESL classes.) Soon after I obtained one of my [...]

On Instagram: “Still, there will be a next”

maricelam — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 22:05:14 +0000

…The odd fact of the $500 million financing round completed just before the company sold for a B. This head scratch was best captured by Alexia Tsotsis in her post on TechCrunch. Mark Suster Like many of you, I’ve been curious about Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and read several posts on the subject (this one was compelling enough for me to Tweet about it.) But, no one has topped the lesson in Mark Suster’s post titled Don’t Try to “Pull an Instagram.” Here’s Why … Suster’s cautionary title won’t probably be heeded by many because it requires entrepreneurs, as Mark himself points out, to wait “at least for a couple of years until you’ve grown into your new valuation / made enough revenue / captured enough customers / etc. to justify a strategic price.” It is energizing to see a successful social app startup like Instagram use an impending valuation to get acquired, but as Mark also points out in his (worth reading and sharing) article, not only it isn’t that easy, you cannot pull it off because “You are not Instagram.” Here is a key point of his lesson: Let’s say your company is currently valued at $15 million. [...]

The Danger of Startups’ Unchecked Optimism

maricelam — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:49:20 +0000

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman points out that “One of the benefits of an optimistic temperament is that it encourages persistence in the face of obstacles,” which is extraordinarily important to anyone involved in startups. However, as several researchers also do, he cautions us against the danger of being overly optimistic: “Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be.” The later point is permanently implanted in my mind because this is at the core of the problems that plague projects and startups. We tend to overestimate our team’s ability to deliver on time and on budget. We assume “we get it” when clients try to explain to us what it is that they need, just to find out later that neither the client nor our team members were truly getting what IT was. In his article for Scientific America titled How We Opt Out of Overoptimism: Our Habit of Ignoring What Is Real Is a Double-Edged Sword, Michael Shermer does an excellent job explaining the danger Kahneman cautions us [...]

Does Your Startup Have One Moral Boundery It Won’t Cross?

maricelam — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 11:48:09 +0000

Seth Godin, amongst many other successful entrepreneurs turned mentors, teaches us about the importance for startups to set up extremes or edges (i.e. open vs. closed or innovative vs. traditional) while also emphasizing how moving the set poles (extremes) is necessary for moving the masses. No doubt it has worked for both Google and its users: Google’s philosophy points. Do you recall the First Do Not Evil backslash? This is a great example how, once defined and set, edges can truly help a company reach balance between diverse interests. The endless list of scandals, from massive corporate ones like Enron and Goldman Sacks to individuals deceiving the masses over what seemed to be worthwhile causes like Greg Mortenson, Mike Daisey, and still out to the jury Kony 2012, makes one wonder how can we define and recognize and enforce moral boundaries? How can a bootstrapped startup define them and stick to them when faced with survival priorities? I did a search for the word ‘integrity” in several of the Linkedin groups I’m member of to see if anyone was discussing this and I wasn’t surprised to find out who and in which groups this had even been raised as a [...]

Three Startup Lessons from Cat Videos

maricelam — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 13:14:45 +0000

Last night, after a delightful evening with new friends, I felt like reading something light, uncomplicated and some how my System 1 (from Thinking, Fast and Slow) concluded this title fit that desire My Experiment to Get Rich From Making Viral Cat Videos. By the second paragraph System 2 awoke to how trivial this seemed to be, but then it dawn on me that this article contained several actions that illustrate WHAT NOT to do when choosing a way to monetize the Internet: Trying to tap into a market you lack true emotion and passion for: Sarah Stodola decided to try to make money creating cat videos when she herself doesn’t even own a cat. Something wrong there? One of the reasons I strongly recommend Noah Kagan’s How to Create a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend (Examples: AppSumo, Mint, Chihuahuas), is that he shows us very simplistically how to find a need in a market, but at the same time, this need is something general, shared by lots of people, including yourself and which you can easily execute. I’ve been thinking about this element a lot lately since I have two projects that blur the line between passion for scratching your [...]

Sites Where Your Startup Should Never Stop Asking Questions

maricelam — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 12:59:28 +0000

During the first few months after Hunch was launched, I became fascinated by what their collective intelligence decision-making system could become. Back then it certainly didn’t look like it did by the time eBay acquired it. At that time, I also realized that the ways collective intelligence would evolve was absolutely anybody’s guess. Many sites were experimenting with very intriguing mechanisms to engage people in building collective knowledge. One of those, which is an intrinsic part of what the Internet is all about, is the collaborative Questions-and-Answers approach. Few years into the future we now count with full blown Q&A sites like Quora, where you can test your assumptions while also having fun asking if your own questions-and-answers site competes with it. Startups, particularly during the earlier phases of development, should never stop asking questions to test any assumption or marketing tactic. And fortunately, there are several great sites where questions and users’ answers can easily be collected and analyzed while having quite a bit of fun: Quora Linkedin Answers Reddit Stack Exchange ChaCha Yahoo Answers (I must admit this isn’t one of my favorite ones) Formspring Answerbag Answers.com (I believe this is the oldest of them all) Regardless of [...]

The Danger of Falling in Love with Your Hot-Idea

maricelam — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 13:52:33 +0000

Over the years, I’ve learned the importance of scratching your own itch and the tremendous value of understanding the pain you are trying to solve with your products. Recently, however, I’ve been noticing that there seems to be a very thin line between that and the danger of falling in love with your “hot idea” to the point that you could totally miss what the market is telling you. Within the last week, I saw this first hand with two very different entrepreneurs who have invested a lot of time and resources building prototypes, asking for and receiving one-on-one feedback and simply ignoring them. The worst part, both of them are asking for feedback from the wrong people. They are reaching out to people who have little in common with their target users. Since I promised myself I will never grindf*%#$d anyone, I gave them my comments as politely and as straightforward I as could possibly do and asked them to immediately share what they had built with real potential users before they invested one more penny or one more second on expanding their prototypes. In fact, soon after I played with one of the prototypes I sent the entrepreneur [...]

How to Become a Micropreneur

maricelam — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 15:30:06 +0000

The abundance of how to books, ebooks and articles on startups can certainly create paralysis by information, particularly because reading them and testing their teachings take a lot of time away from the valuable Just Do It, Learn, and Fix It approach. And no matter how much you read, you might find out that until you actually do something and see how it doesn’t work, the teachings have little meaning to you. However, there is little doubt that brief and effective how to posts like the one I blogged about from Noah Kagan can make a world of difference for new statups. A couple of days ago I finally made myself read Rob Wailling’s The Best Software by Rob. The title is a bit misleading, reason why I postponed reading it for so long after it was release. A better one would have been something like: The Danger of Focusing on Traffic or What Not to Do from Day One. And a tag line like Avoid Learning These Lessons the Hard Way would have also been more representative of the outcomes Walling’s lessons pursue. I’m rather pleased I read it and I wish I had done so the day I [...]

The “horizontally scalable, self-replicating, auto-healing architecture”

maricelam — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 13:12:17 +0000

“If you can’t laugh at yourself, then how can you laugh at anybody else? I think people see the human side of you when you do that.” Payne Stewart I was in a red-eye and the people around me weren’t amused when out of the blue I busted laughing (they were trying hard to fall sleep). The reason? I was re-reading Dharmesh’s post Things Entrepreneurs Never Confess To Their VCs listing funny things startups people might say, like my favorite here: #8. Learned from tech guy yesterday that our entire back-end runs on a single “virtual” Amazon EC2 instance. Also learned that “virtual” means that it can virtually disappear whenever it wants. That’s why the engineering team has been working for months on this horizontally scalable, self-replicating, auto-healing architecture so that when we start getting some paid customers, we’ll be ready. If you don’t find Dharmesh post funny, you might be new to the startups world or haven’t yet learned the really hard lessons of the game. Several of the comments added to the fun. If you are a member of a startup and haven’t joined Dharmesh’s Linkedin group On Startup or follow his blog, you might be missing on [...]

Your Startup in a Weekend ala Noah Kagan

maricelam — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 13:08:35 +0000

There is little doubt that if you follow the advice Noah Kagan gives in this post via Tim Ferriss titled How to Create a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend (Examples: AppSumo, Mint, Chihuahuas), you would have a good startup idea in a weekend, literally. Or you and your team could join any of the many successful incubators or mentorship programs across the country (many listed in my blog roll) that offer their versions of the startup weekend. But if you aren’t joining one of those programs and you and your team really expect a startup in a weekend by following Kagan’s or similar leaders’ advice, there are certain checklist items to consider: Are you starting with an idea that scratches your own itch or are you literally following Kagan’s advice of finding a need-solution idea from scratch? If you, or any of your team members, are emotionally attached in anyway with an original idea, you might not be able to drop it or adapt it as quickly as possible if your findings tell you there is something more relevant needed by the market. You might end up ignoring your findings in favor of your desired idea. Is everyone in your team [...]

Ready, Ready to Done, Done

maricelam — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 12:31:41 +0000

Jeff Sutherland has a great intro to his upcoming webinar hosted by SmartBear software. …As we put together the presentation, one of the re-current themes of good Scrum came up. Getting stories ready, and getting things done.We’ve also been working on a new book we’re calling “The Scrum Handbook: Everything You Need To Know To Get Started With Scrum,” and we thought we’d share a bit of Chapter 4 that focuses on being ready, and getting to done. Ready, Ready to Done, Done I want to re-iterate is the importance of being ready and getting to done. When stories are developed and groomed they need to be ready to implement before the Sprint begins. The Product Owner should work with the team ahead of time to make sure that the stories are ready to be implemented by the team. They should be clear, concise, and most importantly actionable. A good Product Owner should have enough stories in that state to fill up the next two sprints. Both the Team and the Product Owner should spend 5-10% of their time in preparing stories for future Sprints. (Emphasis mine.) The reason this is so critical not just within the parameters of scrum, but [...]

Fatal Memory Error & (Non-compiled) Crowd Wisdom

maricelam — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 12:55:07 +0000

If you are a developer or member of an IT team, you must have had to rely on tech support forums too many times to remember. Thus, the story I tell you below about a fatal memory error, which to me feels like a comedy of errors (no pun intended), is probably not uncommon to you. But it reminded me of the movie Being There, where the tech support platform itself played Chance the Gardener, it was just there, giving us tiny pieces of data and the rest of us were going around crazy constructing realities around those bits of data. I felt like there was a joke being played on the hundreds (if not thousands) of people who tirelessly worked at finding a solution to the same problem. So here is the story: Yesterday, when we were on the verge of launching a new web project, we encountered a totally unexplainable fatal memory error. There wasn’t a reason for this error to be happening either at the server level or anywhere else. The platform we’re using has been downloaded over 65 million times, so it isn’t an unstable one, and nothing in the project would generate this type of [...]

TIP: Balance the Stories You Create

maricelam — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 11:06:34 +0000

There is little doubt that the stories we tell to ourselves have direct impact on the reality we live. If you are constantly telling yourself or to others that you can’t do this or that, you are only perpetuating your inability to do something. Constant negativity and put-downs only get you higher walls to climb. On the other hand, you can tell yourself all day long you can do anything, but if you lack essential elements to do that thing, you might just be wasting precious energy and passion on daydreaming open doors to buildings that don’t exist. Balancing the stories we create against the constrains we face allow us to construct stories flexible enough to adjust to the unexpected and still achieve success and do that something we need or want to do. This is a characteristic noticeable in members of successful startups and it’s worth of consideration.

TED’s Offspring: Should We Be Sad? Can We Do Something About IT?

maricelam — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:05:44 +0000

A possible definition of a successful offspring could be based on a linear progression measure of backwards-static-forward. If the offspring lives its life in a larger, bigger or more expanded manner than its parent, the offspring has moved farther ahead in the progression line, thus has been more successful than its parent. If the offspring lives as an identical clone of its parent, it has just stayed static, but it has moved backwards if it has achieved and experienced much less than its parent. You might find the above definition crazy, but that is what I walked away with from reading Nathan Jurgenson’s painful critique of TED’s offspring(s): Against TED. I found this piece painful because I have been following TED from the early stages. Unfortunately, this essay made me feel that TED’s offspring(s) have moved backwards. I had to go back to my social media activity and prove that recently my appreciation for TED has diminished, without me even noticing, due to what Jurgeson points out in his essay. It feels like a big let down for some reason. I won’t extract anything from Jurgenson’s essay, but if you have followed TED or have even participated in it, you [...]

TIP: Everything in Life Has a Price and Free Is NOT the Exception!

maricelam — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 11:27:54 +0000

When I read the headline that a Safari user was suing Google I honestly thought it had to be an Onion parody. But, of course not, reality has to always be more outrageous than fiction. You might have a very strong opinion one way or another with regards to this…uh…this effort to keep one’s privacy while still wanting to use a FREE product from a FOR-PROFIT corporation. I, on the other hand, feel like doing a double, hold it, a major double take. The outrage expressed by some Pinterest users when they discovered that Pinterest wasn’t as transparent as they should have been on how it is they make money generated also a major double take. But that one is for another post. From the very early stages of the “free” business model it was extraordinarily clear that free was a mechanism to move to paid. Simple and straightforward, reason why it has worked so well (FACEBOOK anyone?). Unfortunately, this business model hasn’t addressed the false expectation of ownership over their privacy by many users. Unless you are dealing with organizations like Wikipedia that have a Not-For-Profit foundation and business model and whose offerings and services have nothing to do [...]

Pop-up Corporation or 100+ Years Old Company

maricelam — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 13:41:20 +0000

There is a thought provoking post by Jeff Jarvis that I haven’t been able to shake off my mind since I read it: The temporary, pop-up corporation. In this post, Jeff raises good points that relate to the increasing number of IT incubators-labs and VC-sponsored mentorship across the country, and even to the recent Obama’s administration entrepreneurship program, all of which I agree with. Jeff starts his post with this: A stat I heard repeated all over Davos: that the average lifespan of a Fortune 500 company is now 15 years, according to Cisco’s John Chambers. Trying to confirm that figure, I found others saying the number is less than 50. and goes on to ask: So what if corporations more and more become short-lived enterprises? What would that mean? Although I was still framing his question in relationship to the impact such “short-lived” enterprise life would have on the Fortune 500 list, I had to stop and think about the implications of my own efforts to encourage more and more IT startups to be born. I’m one of the many who believe that: The more tech startups we have. the better our economy will be and the more opportunity [...]

What Is Talent and Do You Need it to Succeed?

maricelam — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:23:22 +0000

There are very few people, dead or alive, who, like Mozart, have achieved an everlasting and transcendent legacy from just using their talents. His music still stands as an archetype of the Classical style, with no sign of that changing any time soon. There are several talented persons who have achieved success in the literary field, but few have achieved the ubiquitous influence Franz Kafka has to this day. This is particularly remarkable considering that Kafka never, ever planned to publish any of his work. Many people don’t even know what the movie The Fly is based on or truly know what the term Kafkaesque stands for, but they have certainly experienced it at one point or another one in their lives. If it hadn’t been for Max Brod, there wouldn’t be an everlasting Kafka legacy…This was rather more like an accident resulting from Kafka’s death. But what is talent, anyway? The definition seems very elusive. Meriam-Webster’s attempts to define talent include the natural endowments of a person, like in the case of Mozart, and a special often athletic, creative, or artistic aptitude, like Kafka, who was creative in his artistic aptitude. However, aptitude is a component of a competency [...]