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When Design Meets Ergonomics – And When They Fail Together

Zoli Erdos — Sat, 7 Nov 2009 17:16:30 -0800

Styling and ergonomics don’t always go hand in hand. Look at these cool chairs:

And look is about all you can do – good luck trying to sit in them for a longer period.

But in the case of the latest Mouse War, you have great design, ergonomics and functionality all on one side, and ugly bulkiness and utter uselessness on the other. But I’m not telling which is which :-)

(P.S. I seriously thought it was a joke - but we're nowhere near April 1st)

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Why I Cancelled My Google Apps Premier Account

Krishnan Subramanian — Sat, 7 Nov 2009 00:01:00 -0800

Few days back, I upgraded my Google Apps Standard account to Google Apps Premier account because I needed more space and I thought it will be nice to pay for a cloud service and, in the process, get rid of the annoying ads. I was also very keen on using their Postini services and wanted to use the 10 GB space on Google Sites for some project. Plus, $50 per year per user is peanuts for the value one can get out of Google Apps premier edition. But, I cancelled my subscription in exactly two days and for a reason which could be easily dismissed as silly or amateurish.

First, a little background on how I use my Google Apps account. I have two email users in my Google Apps account. One of the email addresses is used for my communication purposes and the other one for everything else. I use the catchall option (well, since I trust Google’s spam filter very much, I am not all that worried about spam coming due to the catchall option. In fact, I, probably, get around 5 or 6 spam emails every month and it is ok for the convenience of the catch all address). I forward the catchall mails to one of my users in the Google Apps account. Since Google Apps Standard edition is free, life hummed along very well without much trouble.

Google’s pricing approach to Premier account is a bit odd from my point of view (where I assume that usage based pricing means you only pay for what you use). Instead of giving an option to allow premier upgrade for only those accounts that needs an upgrade, Google forces the customers to upgrade all the users or none. Also, with their 50 user limit, if you ever have 51 users, you need to pay for all 51 users instead of 50 free + 1 paid user. When you are a 50 people organization, you have a free email system for your organization but if you have 51 people, you have to pay $2550 per year (which is still peanuts though, no doubt).

When I decided to upgrade my 2 user Google Apps account, I wanted to upgrade only the account I use for email communications and not the other “reservoir” account. Since I don’t have the option of selectively upgrading the user accounts, I moved all the mails from the “reservoir” account to another domain of mine with the hope that I can use that standard edition user account as my “reservoir” account including the mails coming due to catchall option. I removed the “reservoir” user account from my domain and upgraded to Premier account with just one user. After the upgrade I realized that the catchall address can only be an address from the same domain. I didn’t notice it when I had the standard account because having an extra user account didn’t cost me anything and, hence, didn’t think about it much. Now, I realized that I cannot forward the catchall address to the Google Apps account for another domain and, then, decided that I will use the group option to push the mails to the other Google Apps account. I set up a group email address under my domain and set it to forward mails to the other Google Apps account. But, Google Apps didn’t allow me to use a group email from the same domain as the catchall email address. It appears one can only use an user account (not a group account) from the same domain as a catchall email address. In short, the only way for me to have a catchall email address is either by using my main email user as a catchall user or pay for another user and then use it.
I perfectly understand the logic behind forcing the catchall email from the same domain. I agree that it is not expensive to buy another account. I also agree that Google Apps is mainly directed towards enterprises and they don’t care about paying for another account as long as the emails don’t go out of their own domain.

However, I feel that Google is wrong for the following reasons. First, even though Google Apps are directed towards enterprises, their main customer base are SME, individual users, non-profits, etc.. For them, $50 per year is not a small amount. Forcing someone to pay $50 for a simple thing like a catchall email is just ridiculous. If the Premier account is really customized for enterprise users, they should have a premier lite targeting individuals and small businesses. This act of forcing the customers to pay for an extra account (or, live with all the catchall mails in the main account which they don’t want to use for the purpose) goes against the Google’s self imposed motto of “Don’t be evil”. It is not only wrong but, also, absurd.

PS: There may or may not be an advanced routing option as an work around. I didn’t dig enough to rule it out. However, irrespective of whether such an option exists or not, there should be a straight forward way of doing it. Period.

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You Can’t Report to Yourself

Derek Pilling — Fri, 6 Nov 2009 13:39:16 -0800

Everyone needs someone to report to; even VCs.

This may sound strange coming from a VC. Some entrepreneurs who choose to raise venture capital have great disdain for the necessary evil of reporting to their investors. That disdain is appropriate to the extent investors are asking for mundane information that creates a reporting burden and does not add information necessary for critical board decision-making. But entrepreneurs that cross the line and don’t like to report because, well, they don’t want to report to anyone, are making a great mistake. There is no excuse for not wanting to stand and be counted; no excuse for not wanting to answer difficult questions; no excuse for not wanting your thinking challenged. I once interacted with an entrepreneur who chose another investor over us because, “we understood the business too well”. Apparently this entrepreneur thought my understanding of his business would be a “burden”.

VCs have someone to report to; Limited Partners and Advisory Boards. Yesterday, my Partners and I reported on our progress here at Meritage Funds to our “bosses”, our Limited Partners and Advisory Board, at our Annual Meeting. In a series of sessions, we stood and were counted; we answered difficult questions; our thinking was challenged. In presenting our progress, we strive for transparency and to give a balanced view to our Limited Partners. We talked about the elephant in the room - the difficult macro-economic environment and the difficult fundraising landscape for venture capital funds. We shared our enthusiasm for the opportunity to invest the capital we have raised in our Fund III and the excitement over the opportunities we are currently evaluating. We talked about our failures and the lessons learned. We talked about the challenging spots in our portfolio as well as the upside opportunities. And most importantly, we told our bosses what we were doing to capture the opportunities we’ve created and what we are doing to minimize the risks we see. The picture we drew was not all rosy and bright, nor dark and depressing; it was balanced. Beyond getting in person annually, we send written quarterly reports, have quarterly Advisory Board meetings, and a semi-annual conference call that all Limited Partners are free to attend.

We don’t report to our Limited Partners and Advisory Board because we have to, although we do. We do it because it is a good and valuable discipline. If we could convince our investors to gather quarterly, we would be thrilled. The process provides us with the opportunity to record and contend with the facts; to deal with harsh reality; to account for decisions we have made in the past, and to explain and justify what we are going to do next. For us, this is a valuable exercise; one we cherish. The feedback we receive is invaluable and helps to shape and reframe our thinking in constructive and positive ways.

Many entrepreneurs share this view. Such entrepreneurs use their Boards of Directors as sounding boards. They report with transparency and share not only what they have accomplished, but also where they have failed. These entrepreneurs cherish the opportunity to stand and be counted. I like this kind of entrepreneur. They understand that you need someone to report to; and that you can’t report to yourself.

Enterprise 2.0 Caffeine: Let’s Debunk the Non-Debate

Mark Fidelman — Fri, 6 Nov 2009 08:17:32 -0800

We can’t be everyone’s friend. Dennis Howlett has written another anti-Enterprise 2.0 whopper calling the subject vague and wrapped up in marketing spin. And he’s right. He surfaces a lot of great points that we in the industry need to take note.

Although we’d all like to treat him as the enemy I suggest we look to him as the industry’s Devils Advocate. Not the Al Pacino version in the movie with the same title, but guy who argues for the sake of arguing. You know who I am talking about.

So let’s remove our collective hands from around his neck and dissect his arguments. Howlett writes:

“I’ve argued for years that the notion of anything that has ’social’ attached to its moniker is about as welcome as breaking wind in a spacesuit. I’ve also argued that I’ve never heard anyone ask for some Enterprise 2.0 though I’ve heard plenty ask for ERP, CRM etc. Most recently, the new buzz phrase ’social business design’ has hit the streets.”

I happen to agree with Howlett on these two points. First, using Social and business in the same sentence scares decision makers in the corporate world today especially with a lackluster economy. We can use social to describe aspects of Enterprise 2.0, but not lead with it. In my experience as a senior executive in large and small companies and with my discussions with executive peers, social does not resonate with board members or decision makers with large budgets.

Second, I don’t see many companies buying Enterprise 2.0 solutions. Sure they are purchasing solutions from vendors in the Enterprise 2.0 space, but there is not a collective push for an Enterprise 2.0 solution in the corporate world today. Companies do buy ERP, MRP and CRM because they are succinct mission critical solutions with proven ROI models and case studies.

We need more groups like the Adoption 2.0 Council and industry analysts like Gartner, Forrester, CMS Watch, Gilbane etc. to create ROI models and to start categorizing Enterprise 2.0 solutions into recognizable buckets. For example (and I am not an expert on naming conventions) I bet if there is an Enterprise Business Collaboration (EBC) category with well defined boundaries, case studies and ROI models, companies will start to budget for it.

Like Web 2.0 is broken into many slices and categories, Enterprise 2.0 must take the next step and do the same. Enterprise 2.0 vendors need to collectively work together to agree on terminology and start using them in similar fashion.

People can convince themselves of a lot of things and Dennis is no exception. His 1.0 thinking is itself a good case study in what the industry is facing these days in the executive ranks. What Dennis fails to mention is how he’d measure enterprise 2.0 success. Instead he rips apart the panelists without suggesting a single metric on how the industry should measure itself in order to be viewed a credible industry.

Dennis follows up with another assault:

The only conclusion I can reach is that none of these people has done any significant work inside organizations or if they have then they haven’t a clue about how business is organized, how the moving parts operate, how business cultures develop or what motivates people to work. If true then they are either charlatans or dim witted.

His use of the ad hominem aside, the view he espouses above is from an outsider’s perspective - accurate. The Enterprise 2.0 marketing and hype is all about the technology and not about how our solutions are solving specific business pain. We can and will change that.

Let me offer some real world examples of enterprise pain that Enterprise 2.0 solves in organizations today.

Work Management and Transparency

Today’s corporations only have transparency of work and projects at superficial levels. Sure executives can see Gannt charts with detailed milestones and project timelines, but they can’t easily drill down into the underlying work to see what’s happening. Worse, they can’t quickly collaborate with their teams to rectify major issues without finding the content (usually on 20 different laptops or stacks of paper on someone’s desk in India) and calling a meeting. This process can take weeks just to organize.

How is it done today without Enterprise 2.0 solutions? Through email, conference calls and lengthy meetings. Compounded by the problem of global corporate teams spread across multiple time zones, the situation becomes untenable. This occurs multiple times in every company every day. How then Dennis do you quantify the value of an Enterprise 2.0 solution that solves this issue? We’d appreciate your input.

Duplication of work

I’ve seen multiple cases in multiple industries of employee duplication of work. I’m not referencing simple, repeatable work like data entry; but different teams of people that are replicating research or project work that was created by another team in the past. Even more frustrating are the numerous times I’ve re-created elements of work previously created by others that I could have used to expedite my current projects. But I didn’t know and didn’t have any way of knowing that the work existed in the first place.

Had I a way of finding the content or experts that created the work, I would have saved the company thousands of dollars in wasted hours. In aggregate across the enterprise, this dollar figure becomes very large. Again, how do you accurately account for that?

Data Silos

If they are lucky, executives and managers today have real time access to department level data. Rarely do they have access to data from multiple sources that give them complete pictures of the enterprise. Using ERP systems like SAP, I can view reports in SAP (although it’s still a challenge). I can’t however view a mash-up of data from SAP, my demand management system and Salesforce.com So why is this important?

I’ll give you one example (although there are myriad). As a senior executive I want to know in real time why sales are down for a specific product in a specific region. Is it a supplier issue? Is it a marketing issue? Is there a lack of demand? Do our retailers not have the product on the shelf? Is our sales team even aware of the issue? Moreover, I’d like to get each of the team members to review the data and recommend solutions in a single location so that everyone can see and respond to them. Then if the issue occurs again, other employees can search for the resolved solution.

Today, this problem is nearly impossible to solve without either an expensive custom solution or a much more affordable Enterprise 2.0 solution that pulls information from each of the systems into one location and allows for teams to collaborate on the data.

Lack of Innovation

Countless Global 3000 companies have seen sales decline because a young innovative upstart has quickly captured market share. In large organizations it can take months before senior management discovers and recognizes it as an issue. That issue aside, companies must do a better job of getting input from their customers and employees on innovative ideas for new products and solutions.

Without Enterprise 2.0 solutions, people are emailing their boss to tell them of a great idea they have for the next widget, but those tend to end up in her trash folder because she doesn’t have time to study the issue. Maybe the employee was on to something? Who besides their boss will ever know? Why not expose the idea to the rest of the organization and see what happens?

Maybe the crowd improves the idea and the R&D department quickly assembles a project page to study it. R&D invites manufacturing and manufacturing invites their suppliers to the project page to solicit feedback on the cost and viability of the idea. Best case they expedited an otherwise lengthy and arduous process and bring the product to market. Worst case they quickly kill the idea and stop spending wasteful cycles on it. Either way the company wins. Wins big.

Hutch Carpenter writes about an excellent study on the subject

Polaroid is a good example of a company slow to react to business change. I can’t say for certain that an Enterprise 2.0 solution would have saved the company, but I do know that their employees at the time were screaming for management to build digital cameras. Alas, no one listened and no one took action. Line managers were filtering information to Directors. Directors were filtering information to VP’s. VP’s were filtering information to the Executives and Executives were presenting a unrealistic picture of the business to the Board.

Each layer of management created a rosier and rosier picture of the business until the Board thought it all a well manicured garden. Lack of transparency will do that to a company.

Crowd sourcing your customer service and technical documentation

Much has been written of crowd-sourcing and long tail economics. Study after study have proved these concepts have legs. Today, companies waste countless hours and money creating FAQ’s, technical manuals and online answers to customer service questions. They write them with a singular use case in mind and/or for a single profile of people.

To illustrate, let’s assume you want to find best practices for filming outdoors in low light, in a cold climate at a soccer game for the new camcorder you were given as a gift. The manual and manufacturer’s website do not account for this use case and because you are figuratively working in the dark your film turns out poorly.

In contrast, let’s assume the manufacturer had an external knowledge base which the company seeded with original content. Then the company opens it up to the crowd to add long tail use cases and to improve the manufacturer’s own content. So to extend the scenario above, a passionate camcorder expert has decided to write about his experience in low light, cold conditions. Why? Because he wants to be seen as a video expert.

The real ROI benefits are obvious. First, the crowd has created SEO content that users searching for camcorders that work in low light, cold climates will find. Second, customer satisfaction increases because the knowledge base has answered a long tail use case (unexpected pleasant surprise). Third, the customer may continue to come back to the site to have other use cases answered or share his experience with the camcorder (community building). Then, the manufacturer has many opportunities to market additional products to the customer for purchase.

Public Safety

The best law enforcement central command center I’ve seen is Chicago. They have large screens showing maps of the city, live news coverage, and live image feeds from major crime areas. They even have remote devices all over the city that monitor gun shots. When shots are fired, a camera next to the device instantly feeds a live image to a large screen in the middle of the room. Police units are dispatched and the scene is secured.

Despite this state of the art multi-million dollar system, homeland security, law enforcement, the fire department etc. do not have real time access to each others data. There is also not any citizen participation. How much more effective would the system be if the general public were able to participate online? Imagine a neighbor watch program integrated with law enforcement in order to proactively monitor crime activity and collaborate on solutions to crime. These socially valuable enhancements can be delivered with Enterprise 2.0 solutions.

A few more remarks on use cases can be found in the video produced by Oliver Marks and Andrew McAfee:

In Summary

There is of course a lot more enterprise pain that can be solved with Enterprise 2.0 solutions. Howlett hasn’t yet acknowledged the pain exists, but is quick to point out Enterprise 2.0 shortcomings. If Howlett really believes these solutions aren't providing value then it's he who needs a corporate refresher course. Disparate teams can't continue to rely on email and Microsoft Office to solve today’s business challenges. Especially when an IDC report predicts during the next 5 years digital content will grow at a ten-fold rate.

Fortunately Dennis doesn't run a Venture Capital firm or his quest for hard proof of new business models would preclude any new investments in innovative areas. Worse he hasn’t provide a framework to gauge the success or failure of new business models.

Still, in an odd way Howlett is forcing us to better define ourselves and the value we provide. We actually need more people like Howlett to push us to create measurable value in the enterprise.

Yet with criticism there is also an obligation to propose solutions. Even better, collaborate with us to find the answers. Set up a discussion wiki and let's figure this out together.

Releated posts:

Is Enterprise 2.0 a Savior or a Charlatan? How Strategy-Driven Execution can pave the path to proving legitimate business value

(Cross-posted @ Seek Omega)

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Causes Leaves MySpace for FaceBook

Dan Morrill — Fri, 6 Nov 2009 06:39:11 -0800

Causes is a social networking donation platform that uses MySpace so that people can raise money for causes or issues that they believe in. Generally these kinds of activities help provide a community around issues like Breast Cancer, or stop smoking, or other issues that are part of our daily life. Causes is an excellent application that makes the process of raising and donating money for a specific cause very easy and embeddable into someone’s MySpace page.

Last night according to ReadWriteWeb and Stanford Social Innovation Review, Causes has sent an e-mail out to all their MySpace members stating that they will be moving over to Facebook and no longer supporting MySpace. I do not see why they could not do both, but apparently Causes does not want to support both platforms. From a business viewpoint – Causes would be very smart to provide support for both platforms; everyone needs a simple easy way to donate to the cause they believe in.

Stanford Social Innovation Review though also brings up the specter of money, in that it is well known that Facebook caters to a richer clientele than MySpace. Going out to Quanticast – the demographics for MySpace and Facebook makes this a compelling argument.

MySpace Demographics:

Facebook Demographics:

What is interesting about the Quanticast information is on the right side data pane where people who are likely to visit Facebook, Causes shows up as the number one entry in the likely to visit category.

Where on the likely to visit column causes does not even show up.

Demographics are also telling – people are much less likely to be college educated on MySpace, meaning they just simply do not make a lot of money. However, some research points out that poor people donate more overall money to causes that influence their groups or their interest groups than rich people do. The problem also might be in the micropayments processing side; small amounts of money usually are quickly degraded by mounting fees from payment processors, handling, and movement than larger payments, which is a definite possibility and, one of the drawbacks to the micropayment system.

What is sad though is that rather than supporting both platforms, which is just good business, Causes has decided to abandon MySpace in favor of Facebook. Regardless of the reason, from a business viewpoint you don’t abandon a channel until it stops being profitable, if Causes believes that MySpace is no longer profitable, then there is more here about the internal workings and visitor counts of MySpace than we generally have discussed in the blogging world, let alone the press.

Causes definitely needs to post a statement on their blog, so we know what the reason is, rather than speculating as to what the reasons are.

MYTH BUSTED: Internet Use Doesn’t Lead to Isolation (mashable.com)
5 Ways To Instantly Boost Your Facebook Page Traffic (allfacebook.com)
Facebook ‘What People Are Up To,’ MySpace ‘What People Are Into,’ News Corp. Exec Says (blogs.wsj.com)
SocNets Poised to Follow Email Down Spam Path (marketingvox.com)

(Cross-posted @ TechWag)

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Spammers start trying out jokes to sell stuff

Dan Morrill — Fri, 6 Nov 2009 06:39:11 -0800

Most of us at least look at our spam queues on our systems on a semi-regular basis, what is always interesting is to see the variances in tactics that spammers are using to try to get their stuff into your system. This time it is all about jokes, ones my kids would like.

There is nothing wrong with a good joke – and spammers seem to have caught onto the idea that burying their ads under jokes might just work – odds are also highly likely that it does.

As a tactic this would work for some people who do not pay good attention to spammers and what they are doing or how they vary their techniques to get their links back to their pages filled with drug pushing goodness. I would also bet that many web site owners would pass on these thinking that their spam filter might have caught legitimate traffic. After taking a quick look through Google and filtering for obvious joke sites, there are about 30,000 sites that approved the Viagra to ground beef joke, meaning this tactic worked. What was interesting to see was there was not a tracking code within the spam message this time to make it easier to search Google for a random series of numbers and letters.

Not bad, interesting change to tactics on the part of spammers and very social in its nature, we all love a good joke. In addition, something to watch for as you approve or not approve messages on your web site or forum.

Yahoo CEO tees off on media; “frickin’ Google” (seattlepi.com)
Spammers Newest Tactic: YouTube Video Spam (readwriteweb.com)

(Cross-posted @ TechWag)

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Swiss Re - One of the Smart Companies

David Terrar — Fri, 6 Nov 2009 05:41:48 -0800

On Monday In Zurich during SOMESSO's Web 2.0 University™ based masterclass delivered by Jim Benson, one of the attendees related her company's adoption of Social Media. I was soaking up the material and offering Jim a little help, as we have just started to represent Hinchcliffe and Web 2.0 University™ in the UK. One of the weaknesses that we currently have in the enterprise 2.0 or "social media in business" space is not enough good case studies, with the existing pantheon of stories being recycled too much. That's one of the reasons that Susan Scrupski's 2.0 Adoption Council initiative is attracting such a buzz at places like the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

Anu Elmer's explanation of the collaboration platform they call Ourspace inside Swiss Re is another great "text book" example of how to get enterprise 2.0 and social media adopted properly in the corporate landscape. Swiss Re is the World's second largest reinsurance company and has been in operation since 1863. Their business is all about understanding risk, and they are known for being a conservative organization, which makes it all the more powerful that they have made such a success of this new technology. Anu, who is their Vice President of Communications and HR, told us that the mantra for the project is the proverb "None of us is as smart as all of us", which is a superb way to position their intent. She says:

"increasing virtualisation of work including a large number of geographically dispersed teams drove the need for a collaboration platform in Swiss Re. We needed to break silos and increase interaction between different units and experts.."

Swiss Re have done some of the classical things you need to do to make a project like this a success. The project was sponsored by a member of the Swiss re Executive Committee. Before they started they held an online stratewgy "jamming" session involving a significant percentage of all Swiss Re staff - this is an online, forum based discussion, a concept first piloted by IBM back in 2001, something that we strongly advocate. When the project itself started, they involved 1,300 users in a pilot that ran from April to September. The platform, based on Jive, is available to all 11,500 employees. As of today 55% of all Swiss Re employees have logged in at least once, and they are seeing a steady increase in creation and viewing of content. There are currently 347 groups created for collaboration on business topics with both global and local themes. The participation is cross-functional and comes from all regions and countries. They had used data from an existing internal user directory, called "Who is", as a starting point and IT had been amongst the first regular users, but eventually they've even got their account managers involved.

There are some important messages to learn from their adoption story. Anu explained that they had to fight against the perception that they were creating an internal social network like Facebook, and that the social media terminology got in the way (more on that in a later post). They were careful to position this as a set of business collaboration tools. They spent time considering what type of exclusive and interesting content the community would need. They trained community managers and recognized (and budgeted for) the significant amount of time that group moderation, support and management takes. They identified a network of advocates, or champions, who they helped develop and encourage. They consulted group owners to see what more they could do to help. Anu also commented that it took a lot of off-line promotion to get things moving.

One of the key questions that people from the corporate world ask about this kind of project is where is the ROI and how did you cost justify the project. Anu used the classical example of old style group working with a presentation sent by email to 9 people. You are immediately out of control, with 10 copies of the presentation - who's got the latest version? You then have to track and make sense of all the email dialogue back and forth. If you put that presentation in a shared group, the master presentation is in one place, and the team can have a sensible, threaded discussion together to agree what needs to be done. Anyone can see the benefit to that style of collaboration, but part of the problem with tracking ROI is that the company didn't measure how efficiently it worked the old way, so it's not easy to come up with "hard numbers" to help cost justify the spend to get to the new way. When we discussed this Anu explained that Swiss Re had taken a similar line to some other companies like Wachovia. They argued a very modest percentage saving in overall travel budgets. They had two existing, old, and not very effective Knowledge Management systems within their Intranet. These systems were turned off and the associated cost savings along with the travel reductions were used to help fund the project.

This is a great adoption story for enterprise collaboration. I'm hoping we can facilitate a longer case study write up, but Anu and the Swiss Re team should be congratulated on how far they have come. I think it's fitting that the hosts of the 2009 SOMESSO in Zurich should be such a great example of the conference theme - bridging the gap between corporate culture and "the web 2.0 society".

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Good Judgment Comes with Experience, But Experience Comes from Bad Judgment

Mark Suster — Fri, 6 Nov 2009 03:43:00 -0800

This is part of my Startup Advice series of posts.

I heard Bruce Dunlevie of Benchmark Capital say these words at a conference in London nearly 10 years ago. I jotted the words down (I normally pay little attention to anything said at conferences. Most of it is BS) and thought about them much over the years. I later learned that the quote was taken from somewhere else (perhaps as early as the 13th century!) but whoever is responsible I just want to help spread it.

There is a folklore in Silicon Valley that you should fund first-time entrepreneurs. When you see the successes of Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry & Sergey, Marc Andreessen and Marc Benioff it is easy to see the allure (either that or invest in people named Mark

But it’s not my strategy. I definitely don’t rule out first timers – I just invested in one to be announced soon who I am really excited about – but I greatly prefer experience. It’s easy to say you’d back a great team that has previously been successful – that’s a no brainer. Fred Wilson outlines why in his piece “Swinging For the Fences.” He outlines that Union Square has overwhelmingly had success with either first-timers or serial succeeders.

I can’t argue with Fred. He has a great track record and I’m a newbie. But I was asked recently whether I would prefer to back a first-time team or a team that had failed once before. Obviously it depends on the team and the idea but holding all else constant I would personally back the team that had previously failed.

I’m fond of saying that I F’d up everything as a first time entrepreneur. Actually, we got much right, too. We corrected mid flight. I believe great entrepreneurs do that. They do what VC’s like to call “pivot.” Boy did I pivot. I went from 92 staff members + 30 contractors (e.g. 122 in total) to 38 people in one day and then down to 33 immediately after that. I went from managing a team to “flipping burgers.”

So in my case, I believe that I acquired good judgment from my previous bad judgment. We eventually got a successful exit but I can’t say it was a Google like exit! I believe that it helped me succeed in my second company.

Seeing how entrepreneurs handled adversity and difficult decisions tells me a lot about who I’m going to be working with if I invest. I learn much from hearing whether they have humility, understanding what they learned from their failure (or success), gauging the speed of decision-making and willingness to admit when they were wrong. I also look to see whether they can make the really difficult decisions (like firing all of your friends – this is no fun.)

The way I like to make my point about the quote is with something that all of us know innately. When your parents told you at 15 not to feel so heart-broken when your girlfriend or boyfriend broke up with you because you’d meet many more people in life you probably remember feeling like the only special person you’d ever meet just got away. They couldn’t tell you this – you had to learn it.

For many of us we had warnings about not drinking too much and yet we still found ourselves “praying to the porcelin G-d” on prom night or at a frat party. Instructing people can’t create wisdon, experience will.

Which is why I recently wrote a post called, “Is it Time to Earn or to Learn” asking people to think about what they hope to attain from their current job or from the job for which they’re currently interviewing. I wasn’t trying to encourage everybody to become a CEO tomorrow – I was encouraging them to learn.

Every day I talk with entrepreneurs in my office. I’ve been a VC for 2.5 years now (an entrepreneur for nearly a decade before that) and as a result I’ve gotten to see many first-timers progress over time. It amazes me the pattern spotting you can pick up from all these meetings. I had so many discussions with people when they launched their companies about what each of us thought would happen and now it’s enlightening to have those conversations 18 months later.

Some of these people are people I wasn’t ready to back but I said, “I’d love to find a way to work with you on your next company.” I think this quote would resonate with most of them.

I prefer second time (or more) entrepreneurs. Sure, I would love to work with people who have had multiple successes. But I’m not afraid of entrepreneurs that didn’t succeed the first time. I want to work with talented people with good judgment. And so I’m out to spread the word, “Good Judgment Comes from Experience, but Experience Comes from Bad Judgment.” Go out and learn.

(Cross-posted @ Both Sides of the Table)

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People must have really hated Vista

Dan Morrill — Fri, 6 Nov 2009 02:55:00 -0800

Image by techedlive via Flickr

Reports are all in that the initial launch of Windows 7 has been a huge success for Microsoft – which is good, because the general reviews of Windows 7, and my own beta testing of the product showed that it was much better than Vista. But when you see something that is selling at a 243% clip over Vista’s roll out and something that directly results in a 49% bump in PC sales as people skip Vista, that is a lot of pain to undo.

Vista was the Microsoft OS that everyone loved to hate, much like Windows ME, Vista besides being late, really had a lot of issues, and still does. Windows 7 addresses many of the issues that annoyed people, made computers act fat and bloated, or otherwise made it impossible to sit down and go to work, you had to go through a very long boot cycle. Lawsuits aside, and Steve Ballmer’s comments on Vista’s one big mistake, or the many other mistakes that people are pointing out on their own web sites over the years, Vista was the OS to skip. This means that Windows 7 had to perform, and had to live up to its hype, even with the cool party packs that Microsoft was shipping out before Windows 7 launch date.

Another surprise: High volumes of boxed-product sales. Windows 7, when sold alone, saw sales that were 234 percent higher than Vista's own boxed-product sales in the first days of its launch. NPD projects sales for Windows 7 to have been 82 percent higher on a revenue basis. Baker figures that's due to a healthy population of PCs on the market that can run Windows 7, making it less necessary to purchase combined system-and-OS packages. One of the major features of Windows 7 is its smaller footprint compared to Vista. So if your PC can run Vista, it will definitely run Windows 7. Source: Internet News

In all good news for Microsoft – but what keeps this one interesting is that there has been a lack of generally bad press since launch. Everyone is talking highly of Windows 7, and one has to wonder if that is also part of the reason for the huge bump in sales. Vista got such a negative reception that many decided to skip it, and keep XP. One of the reasons that XP stuck around for much longer than Microsoft wanted it to, bad press, and a generally poor replacement.

Microsoft might have hit this one and hit it out of the ball park, but just about anything is better than Vista. And there is still no reason for me to give up my shiny apple laptop yet, but maybe, just maybe, I’ll forgo my Apple planned upgrade and buy another windows computer. But only after work upgrades and I have a chance to use it at work. I am going to be very stingy with money, and not just simply accept the trade press reports this time, I’ll need a compelling reason to leave apple, and go back to Microsoft.

At launch, Windows 7 sales are triple that of Vista's first week (infoworld.com)
Buying a new computer in the age of Windows 7 (lockergnome.com)
Windows 7 Still Vulnerable to Viruses - Durr, Really? (wired.com)
Windows 7 sales leave Microsoft coffers unstuffed (theregister.co.uk)

(Cross-posted @IT Toolbox)

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T-Shirt Friday #16 - Glue

Ben Kepes — Fri, 6 Nov 2009 02:30:00 -0800

Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with a great t-shirt is a prime candidate to have a great product also. Click here to see the series.

If you’d like your t-shirt reviewed, flick me an email to arrange things. The judges decision is, of course, final and very little correspondence will be entered into (perhaps).

Glue isn’t a tech company, rather it’s a conference (and a very cool one at that) organized by the same people who do Defrag every November. Unusually for a shirt giveaway, the Glue attendee shirt is a long sleeve crew neck in dark gray. The conference is cool but the shirts aren’t so much (sorry Eric) – the logo is a little gaudy, the fabric is partially synthetic (sacre bleu!) and the byline on the back is questionable.

Hot

It was free!
My wife wears it to bed in wintertime

Not

50% synthetic – killing the world one thread at a time
The logo is a little over the top
Made in Haiti… where the water runs hot (as in Geiger hot)

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