The simple answer is NO. Same excitement, same communal spirit, same partner advantages and gripes. In my case, we even had a food scientist who could easily have been a lead programmer or architect in a different setting. Same personality characteristics.

I guess this shouldn’t be surprising. People, after all, are still people. All startup founders I’ve known work long and hard. The early days are like a honeymoon – everyone is still getting to know each other, and everyone is amazed at how much they love working with their partners. But even at the beginning, if you’re watching you can just make out seeds being planted and germinating. I’ve always said that people eventually become caricatures of themselves, and this is especially true in startups. Those seeds become BIG weeds.

Which aspects are similar? Start at the beginning: you have a dream. You play around with it for a while. Test the edges of the amoeba to see what shape it is. You come to believe that you can succeed where so many have failed; that this partnership is different from the others you’ve known. So you start bringing all the ideas together, typically in a business plan. That tends to get everyone focused on the same goals. So far, the high-tech and CPG (consumer packaged goods) companies could be twins.

Typically, you then start working on infrastructure: phones, file sharing, a bookkeeping solution, computers for everyone, etc. If you’re still self-financed, which is pretty typical, you have to do all these things without spending much money. In my case, I set us all up on DropBox for file sharing. Then I signed up for a phone system – RingCentral.com – and got us all office phones. At this stage, everyone can (and was) working from home. The financial investment for all of this was trivial – even for the “professional” phone (PBX) system. And yes, the high-tech and CPG companies are still pretty parallel.

At this point, you’ll start to go your own paths – how you build the product, and how you distribute it. I found that the natural foods distribution channels were familiar – surely different from when I saw in packaged software, but the concepts were about the same.

The two roads converged again: depending on your financing strategy (and luck), you may now be at a point where you can pay your employees. So you have to find a payroll solution (really, you don’t want to do this yourself). Plus, if your product is close to its launch, you’re going to have to think about the various forms of insurance you need – and this is surprisingly non-trivial. In our startup, we chose to use Paychex to do payroll and tax reporting. In the past I used Gevity (now TriNet), which was a virtual HR service (technically, a Professional Employment Organization – PEO). The advantage of a PEO is that all employees are leased from the PEO. While you handle all hiring/firing, etc., the paychecks say TriNet, not your company name. You may be able to get better health insurance coverage this way, and you’ll have access to the HR functions you wouldn’t have without a dedicated HR person. And a side-benefit: if you go out of business, you and your employees will still qualify for COBRA (which would otherwise cease with the termination of the company).

Let’s talk about the founders: are high-tech founders different from our CPG founders? I think not. You still have dreamers, and startups still tend to be created by ADD, or worse Asperger’s, individuals. Both types of startups need somebody like me, who can corral the dreams into a plan, keep focus going, and actually ship the dream that has become a real product.

So my answer is that, while the bill of materials was a lot different, the basics of a high-tech company and a CPG company are pretty similar. I never felt out of place during the creation of our company and product. It was far easier for me to move from one startup to another than it was for some of my partners who came from big, resource-rich companies to this little company that had very shallow pockets.

And for me, it was still home. I thrive in the chaos of a startup. It seems that I was born with the ability to wade through all the (sometimes conflicting) goals, data, dreams, etc. and come up with a clear plan with defined executables and metrics.

Picture by Mike Dierken

Having just left a startup in which I was a founding partner, I’m going to shift the emphasis of this blog – at least for now – from branding to startups. This is the first in a series of articles I plan to write.

…And I’m changing my personal branding statement to “I put the start in startups.”

In my long and varied career, I’ve spent more time in startups than in established companies. Let me relate an experience I had in my first post-graduate school job – I think you’ll understand immediately why I hated big companies.

When I was about to leave graduate school, with an MBA in Computer Applications from a top school (NYU), I was introduced to the Chairman of Bloomingdales. He asked me to come work as the liaison between Finance and EDP (now IT). That should have been my first red flag – here were two essential groups, and the managers weren’t able to work with each other. I later came to realize that the retail business was riddled with nepotism, and this was a prime example. (I don’t mean to say the individual managers were incompetent or bad people, just that the new finance people  didn’t have the experience they should have had for a business that size.)

That position never materialized, so I was put in the Internal Audit department, which was run by Bloomie’s token woman manager. This woman never did a single day’s work in the entire time I worked for the company. She had one employee whose primary job was finding her an apartment in New York City. Too bad, because there was a real glass ceiling in those days, and people like this, who took advantage of the need for business to diversify, set back the women’s cause by a lot.

Working for her was pretty bad. It was also bad sharing a closet with 2 other office workers, but that’s another story – and after all, the closet did have a window, so I really shouldn’t complain.

Starting to get the picture? Well here’s some icing for the cake. I was given an assignment to create some cost accounting information so the cost of charge sales could be accurately computed and allocated among departments. My marching orders were “do the worst job you can – we have to comply with Federated (the owner of Bloomingdale’s) requests, but since we’re their most important store and we don’t want to do this, screw them.”

Being intrinsically stubborn (a good trait for a startup maven, but not so good at Bloomie’s), I ignored these instructions, and did pretty thorough job. Dilbert could have written the script: I wasn’t allowed any access to the computerized records of sales, and so my “little” task required a lot of extra work by the already overtaxed sales audit team. And in the end, I got soundly criticized for doing too good a job.

Fast forward to the first startup I worked at a few years later. In a startup, you do whatever you need to do to make the company successful. Everybody is involved, and everyone works collaboratively. Small and startup means that everybody has opinions about the projects their partners do, and decisions are generally communal. In startups, you don’t have some dumb shit telling you to do stupid projects. And since you own the company yourself (or have stock options – but in any case you’re motivated to have the company succeed), you try to do your projects as well as possible.

I don’t know about you, but one of my biggest frustrations is doing a project that gets put on the shelf, or one that has no value and is just busy-work. That simply doesn’t exist in startups. In this small, naïve environment, everything you do has an impact in the success or failure of the enterprise. I need that to get motivated. I need to see that what I do will have an impact on the business, and by the way, I don’t want to wait five years to see it.

So, when asked why I hang around in startups, which have their own drawbacks, my answer is simply this: I like the enthusiasm, the naiveté, the collaborative spirit. I like seeing the fruits of my labors. I like being accountable. I like being able to change course instantly if the original is headed for disaster. I like working with groups that genuinely enjoy working together, where you don’t have to live with politics and people who think their job is to keep their job. Focus on the product or service, and things pretty much align themselves. At the end of the day, you can come home and say that you contributed to the (hopeful) success of your company.

Almost one year ago, I got found. Getting found is what I had been blogging about for the previous year. In fact, my personal branding statement was “I help you get found on the Internet.”

And then it happened to me.

One of my articles caught the attention of an entrepreneur in Los Angeles who wanted to start a beverage company. He was looking for information on Google Reader, and he got to my blog through a Google search. (Isn’t that what getting found is all about?) He spent some time on my blog, and liked what I’d been writing about, and asked me to join the company.

So the past year has been a real roller coaster. An experience of a lifetime. And it has taught me many lessons.

I left the startup this week. It had consumed me, as most startups will, 24 x 7 for almost a year. But for personal reasons, it was time to move on, so I’m back to writing on my blog! If you’re curious about what we were doing, you can look at the website here. (I expect the site to change over time since I only got the first page implemented. So if you are reading this post some time after I published it, the link may not make sense.)

I’m not clear yet about the direction of my blog going forward: I’d like to write about some of the collaboration tools I implemented for our startup, but I may come back to personal branding at some point. Do you have any suggestions?

Twitter can be an awesome research tool. Does that surprise you? And so can Facebook – and probably dozens of other social networks I haven’t tapped into yet.

Not long ago, I got involved with a startup that is creating a new beverage – it’s a unique new Kombucha. Every founder thinks their product is unique and new, but honestly, this one really is. I say that because almost all Kombuchas taste like vinegar – but the one we’re working on doesn’t. If you’re wondering what Kombucha is, you’re not alone: it’s a fermented tea that contains “stuff that’s good for you.” Here’s a Wikipedia article that will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about Kombucha.

Before I get into how we’re using Twitter and Facebook, I want to say how I got involved with this startup. I have often written about using your blog to find work or consulting assignments. Well, that’s exactly what happened here. One of the founders of the startup I’m helping commented on a blog article I’d written about how publishing can help our personal branding.

Now I’ve never worked in consumer packaged goods, and I’d never tasted Kombucha before – and if you knew me, you’d know I’m not a health food nut. But I do know marketing, and I’ve been participating in Web 2.0, whatever that is, for some time.

What I discovered is that there are lots of people writing about Kombucha – there are sometimes hundreds of tweets every day on Twitter, and there are hundreds of fan pages on Facebook. So I started watching for the word Kombucha on Twitter – and to generate a history of these tweets, I feed them into Google Reader as an RSS feed. (I’ve written about how to do that here.)

We learned a lot from this exercise. Several Kombucha producers tweet, and many people who might be early adopters of a new product have a strong presence on Twitter (and blog about their passion for the drink). We also got a lot of basic competitive information from searching through company and fan pages on Facebook.

How does this apply to you?

• If you’re looking for a job, you can do exactly what I did for any target companies. See what people are saying about those companies. You’ll be able to formulate a better strategy for approaching the companies, and you’ll know far more about them if you get an interview.
• If you’re looking for consulting work, track your competing consultants, and also target companies, as just described.
• If you’re still writing, and hoping to get found (as I did), you can use Twitter and Facebook to augment your subject matter expertise – substantially.

You can share information with co-workers or success team members by making Twitter lists – select the “good” people to follow, put them in a list, and then tell your associates how to find the list. I may write more about these lists, but for now, check out this article Robert Scoble wrote.

Yes, there’s a lot of crap on both Twitter and Facebook. But the real winner figures out how to weed through the junk to find the treasures. You can do it – you just need to follow the guides I’ve written and put some work into your research. We now have information that was never available to marketers before – you can talk directly to people who would be likely early adopters of your product, and it doesn’t cost a dime.

An awful lot of information passes out of Twitter into obscurity every day. Contrary to most sites, where what you write exists forever, tweets are temporal. That’s usually not a bad idea – who wants to keep a history of somebody else’s bowel movements?

Aha! But there’s also a valuable stuff getting lost. So, if you want to keep a record of tweets, you can easily do it in Google Reader.

Why?

1. I keep a record of my own tweets. Can’t bear to see them die – no, really I do it so I can make sure I don’t embarrass myself by contradicting an earlier tweet.
2. I track market research topics. Twitter can be an absolutely amazing source of market information. I’m working with a team that’s creating a new beverage. Turns out that lots of people are tweeting about this type of beverage. Some of the tweets are really pretty good, so I’m keeping them.

How?

There’s probably other ways to do this, but here’s how I do it:

1. Go to the Twitter search page: http://search.twitter.com.
2. Search for something. For example, you could search for “personal branding.”
3. When you get your results page, you’ll see an RSS logo with a link that says “Feed for this query.”
4. Hit the link, and you’ll get the normal RSS signon screen. Please see this post and this other post for instructions on setting up Google Reader – I’ve already written extensively about it there.

If you want to do an RSS feeds of just your own tweets, you can do that from your Twitter home page (e.g. http://twitter.com/wfeigenson). Just look for the RSS feed button.

Remember, once you’ve done this, your tweets will stay in your personal knowledge base forever. Great, and free market research! I’ve written about the value of using Google Reader as your own personal knowledge base here.

Oh, you can also use this to research job opportunities – just set up searches for the companies you’re following.

Keywords vs. Hashtags

Many people use “hashtags” on Twitter. When you see something like this: “#personalbranding”, that means that somebody or maybe lots of bodies have coalesced around a term that describes something they’re interested in, and they’re using a standard keyword to identify tweets that are on their topic. Then, you can go to http://twubs.com and put that hashtag in the search box, and you can watch every tweet as it comes into Twitter – if it includes the hashtag. (Well ok, you can do this at Twitter as well, but it doesn’t update in real-time – you have to keep refreshing the screen.) This is real-time search, and if you haven’t read about it, this is what has Google staying up late at night. They’re much more vulnerable to losing the real-time search business to Twitter than they are to losing the big search market to Microsoft.

These real-time Twitter displays played a crucial role in broadcasting information about the Iranian elections, among other topics.

Very cool, and with practical implications for you if you’re in an area that’s changing rapidly.

The downside of hashtags is that many Twitter users don’t know how to use them. So you may miss things you’d get using keyword search. But the solution to that is to create searches for both, and stuff the resulting RSS feed for both searches into Google Reader. (Twitter, why don’t you find #personalbranding in a search for personalbranding?????)

That title sounds a little weird, I’ll admit. But I’m going to describe a simple technique I use that makes talking on the phone much easier. You can use this for phone interviews, telephone conferences, or just when you’re talking to somebody.

If you can find a picture of the person you’re talking to, and if you’re using Outlook, this is really simple. Essentially, you just grab the person’s photo, and stuff it into a contact record in Outlook. Then, while you talk, you can have the person’s picture on your desktop. I find that it makes it much easier to talk to somebody else that way – especially if you haven’t met the person.

Remember, for most of us, our personal brand – or more abstractly, our logo – is our face. If you’re talking to somebody on the phone (and if you’re paying attention, instead of playing solitaire), you’re probably already doing something like this subconsciously.

Here’s how you can do this:

• Find a picture of your phone call participant – the small photo in LinkedIn is ideal.
• Save the picture on your desktop or someplace else you can easily find. How? Right click on the picture. Then save the picture (or image) as – and provide a name for the file.
• Create or edit a contact in Outlook.
• Find this icon in the Contact form:

• Click on the iconic icon, and navigate to the location where you’ve just stored the other person’s picture. When you’re done, you’ll have their picture in the Outlook contact record.

  

Now, when you talk to somebody by phone, you can have their picture up on your computer screen. It’s not quite like a picture phone, but you may find it helpful, as I do. There are many places to look for photos, but I’d start with LinkedIn.

When I first started writing my blog, I never expected to find the incredibly warm and friendly reception I’ve gotten from other bloggers. In a world where hostility often seems to reign, it’s been a blessing to find a dedicated, friendly, and seemingly innocent (which is to say not yet fed up with the nasty world) cadre of participants. For those of you who lived through the 60s and 70s, this is like going back into the hippie era where peace and love were the words of the day.

Today, I found that the comment system of my blog wasn’t working. This area demonstrates both the best and the worst of the Internet today. The worst: I get dozens of spam comments every day. Can you believe people waste their lives doing this? Most get caught in Akismet, the WordPress spam filter. But I found a nifty way to make it work even better at stopforumspam.com.

I found some code at that site that I added to my blog that looks up the IP and email address of the commenter, using standard lists like spamhaus. The “glue” that makes all this work is from a wonderful site: support.it-mate.co.uk. And the person responsible for this gift is Steven Burn.

Steven offers free an entire program to check messages and signups for spam against most of the popular blacklists. Or you can use a modification to one of the WordPress program files that does essentially the same thing by checking the stopforumspam site.

This is the wonderful (it’s more than good) side of the Internet. People bring their considerable skill and expertise to the world free or at modest cost. Peace and love. We should all benefit. The world will be a better place. And it is.

If you’re not technical, but you’re still reading this, you may be unaware that there’s a tremendous wave of volunteer development and support on the Internet. The entire WordPress world is almost exclusively done without charge, and it’s an incredible achievement. You can think of it as analogous to when Apple and later Microsoft brought desktop publishing to the masses. WordPress and the support groups like Steven’s have brought Internet publishing to the masses. I don’t know how to program, but I’m clever about looking at examples and working hard until I get them to function in my environment.

But sometimes that’s not enough, and that’s the reason for this post. Steven spent several hours helping me work through problems on my site tonight. We’ve never met, never spoken, never emailed each other before today. But he reached out to help me, and then stuck with me and all my dumb questions until we worked out my problems.

This post is the only payment he gets for doing that.

So, if you’re running a WordPress blog, look at the comment spam stuff Steven has. And if you’re not, let’s all take a moment to remember that there are thousands of volunteers in the Internet universe working on open source programs without pay. To make the world a better place for all of us. And thank you Steven Burn.

You should keep a backup copy of your LinkedIn contacts, and since it’s easy to do, you should do it now!

Why?

First, because LinkedIn isn’t perfect, and sometimes they lose accounts. Sometimes they decide you’re violating their rules and close your account intentionally. You really need that contact list on a local storage device just in case.

Second, you may want to use your LI contact list to send emails to your contacts. For example, I create and send quarterly newsletters (you can sign up on my home page – the grey box on the right side). While I don’t use my LinkedIn connections for this, it’s probably something I should consider.

So here’s how to do it – it’s actually pretty easy…

Log into your LinkedIn account, and click on “Contacts” in the left column. That will take you to your contacts page, and if you scroll to the bottom, you’ll see this:

When you click on the icon, you’ll get this screen:

Click on picture for larger image

You can leave it on the default – to export to Microsoft Outlook format. Save the file it creates, which will be something like: “linkedin_connections_export_microsoft_outlook.csv,” which Excel will open all nicely formatted. Because LinkedIn formats this for Outlook (you can also import it there, if you want – LinkedIn has instructions on the confirmation page shown above), there will be many columns you don’t need – so just delete them if you want everything to be neat. (Position your mouse over the column heading, right click and select “delete column.”)

Aha, what can you do with this wonderful list now that it’s on your computer?

I’ve written about using Word and Excel to do mass mailings here. Just be careful not to do too many in any session, because your email provider might tag you as a spammer…

If you’ve added notes about your contacts, LinkedIn will not download those notes.

Should your LinkedIn profile be the same as your resume? I think so – but only if you have a good resume. I’m going to explain my reasoning in this post.

Brand, brand, brand

One of the most essential components of any branding effort is consistency. That’s why every Coca Cola product has the same logo. It’s a simple concept really, seeing the same thing over and over cements the image you have of that product (or here, person).

That’s why it’s important to have a picture – the same picture – on all your social networking sites (and on your business card!). The same argument applies to your resume. Your resume – Word version and LinkedIn version – will be more effective if both are the same. And in case you didn’t know it, you can actually download a PDF version of your LinkedIn profile and recommendations that’s pretty nice. I’ve written about how to extract just the recommendations (to send with a job application) here.

Get found!

If you want to be found on LinkedIn, you have to have the keywords people are looking for in your profile. Hey guess what, if you want to get selected from a pile of resumes a recruiter has, you’d better have the right keywords as well. Almost all medium- to large-size companies digitize resumes today (i.e. they stuff your resume into their applicant tracking system database), and search the resume submissions by keyword.

So the goal is the same in both places.

Uploading your resume to LinkedIn

Today, somebody told me that she’d uploaded her resume to LinkedIn, but she doesn’t know where it is now. Have you seen the option to upload your resume to your LinkedIn profile? Do you know what happens to your Word file?

LinkedIn offers this upload to facilitate completing your profile. Their software “decomposes” your resume into the bits and pieces that LinkedIn needs for the different sections of your profile. Then it stuffs those bits and pieces where it thinks they should go. After that, your Word document vaporizes. I don’t know if LI actually deletes it (I suspect it does), or they keep it for further research on syntactical analysis (so they can improve how they select portions of your resume for your profile). But in either case, your resume is not available for download by you or anybody else.

So how do I post a “real” resume on LinkedIn?

The easiest way is to create a box.net account (the free account is sufficient), and upload your resume to their site. Then go to your LinkedIn home page, and find the “Applications” button, and add box.net. Any files you share will show up on your LinkedIn profile in the box.net section – so viewers can download your resume.

Who can download my resume?

Your box.net application (and any others you use) aren’t visible to people who aren’t logged into LinkedIn. I haven’t been able to find any information about whether people logged into LinkedIn – but who aren’t connected to you – can see your applications. You’d think this would be important information to provide, but LinkedIn help is generally pretty sparse, and this is no exception.

Why?

If a recruiter finds you on LinkedIn – and fully 2/3 of recruiters use LinkedIn as their primary sourcing engine – then you want it to be very easy for them to get your resume into their hot little hands. And add any other documents you think would help you get that interview and job. So use box.net for your documents, and be sure to add SlideShare and upload some PowerPoint presentations that people can see from your LinkedIn account.

Remember, if a recruiter is looking at two people, and one is a blank slate, while the other has a nice juicy digital footprint, guess who’s likely to get that interview?

Don’t know about you, but I’m naturally curious. So I’ve just installed WordPress on a USB thumb drive. Now I can hack away at it to my heart’s content without worrying about how stupid I’ll look to anybody who stops by my blog.

It’s non-trivial, but if you follow the instructions precisely, you’ll get there. Check out the wonderful instructions I found by searching WordPress.org. This points to videos by “Figaro” (I’d like to tell you his full name, but he doesn’t say what it is…). So if you’re interested, go to the WordPress.org page, and then go watch Figaro’s videos.

Comes the usual question: Why?

I’m just starting to investigate, but here are some early thoughts:

1. Play with different themes. You’ll find that they don’t all work the same. Some support things that others don’t. Some are two columns, some three or even four. All look different.
2. Adjust your current theme. Carrington, which is the theme I use, allows impressive customization. For example, it’s pretty trivial to change the colors of the headers and footers. I haven’t found that in the few themes I’ve downloaded to look at.
3. Try plug-ins. I run about 13 plug-ins in my blog. They let me do everything from RSS feeds to moving comments that are put on the wrong posts. There are thousands of plug-ins, and you can play with them on your own system until you find the combination you want.
4. Test anything first. I’ve been worried about upgrading to the latest version of Carrington, and I’ve avoided it because I know I’ll lose some of the customizations I’ve done. Since I just tried it on my own machine, now I know what I’ll have to change. Likewise, I had problems with WordPress stats, and rolled back my upgraded version. I’ve just tried the latest version on my personal WordPress installation and it works, so I upgraded my “real” site.
5. Just learn about WordPress. It’s a great platform, and it brings publishing within the grasp of people like me, but there’s still a lot to learn. It’s surely better to learn on your own real estate.

Just a footnote: you don’t have to run your personal WordPress from a thumb drive. I loaded it on my hard drive, and then copied it to my thumb drive. So I’m actually running it from a high-speed device. On my computer, the response is better than I get from my hosting service.