Accidental Empires

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I have been a fan of Robert X. Cringely for a long time. Back in the day I used Bob's Nerds 2.0.1 PBS documentary to train new hires on the basics and history of the Internet. While I am not big enough of a fan to know what the X. is all about I must admit much of my writing style is a poor man's knock off of Mr. Cringely. 

If Nerds 2.0.1 was back in the day, Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date is back in the yesterday. It was written in 1992. But nearly 20 years later remains an entertaining and insightful read about the birth of the personal computer industry.

The chapter entitled "The Prophet" is worth the price of admission. The prophet is Steve Jobs and what Cringely writes is prophetic.

Steve Jobs sees the personal computer as his tool for changing the world. I know it sounds a lot like Bill Gates, but it's really very different. Gates see the personal computer as a tool for transferring every stray dollar, deutsche mark, and kopeckin in the world into his pocket. Gates doesn't really give a damn how people interact with computers as long as they pay up. Jobs gives a damn. He wants to tell the world how to compute, to set the style for computing.

Pretty spot on.

Some of the passages in the book are clearly timeless in the land of the geeks.

People who actually rely on computers in their work won't tolerate being more than one hardware generation behind the leading edge.

And this one could be ripped from many articles on impending IPOs today.

Companies don't go public to raise money; they go public to make real the wealth of their founders.

Accidential Empires is both an enjoyable and must read for anyone that cares about computing.

October 18, 2011  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Books, Computing

It’s Hard

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That is my first impression of the iPhone 4S. It has a really really hard hand compared to my relic iPhone 2G. That and a great camera and external speaker set. Perhaps more when the initial sync finishes. It is amazing how much value Apple packs in a device.

October 15, 2011  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Mobile

Brave & Persistent

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We have been looking for a community manager to join Half Off Depot for sometime. The basic plan was to have introductory meetings and then move forward with second interviews where the candidates would provide an overview of what they would do if given the job. Best plan gets to execute kind of thing.

I had a good first meeting with a woman who I will call Brigette, mainly because that is her real name. We setup the follow up meeting on the spot. I was a little worried about the timing of it and mentioned this to her. More than once. She said she was in. And then she cancelled. She had a reason. It did not matter. I blew her up. She was no longer a candidate. A commitment with care thing. This was back in June.

Mid July Brigette sent me this note.

Hi Lance,

I attended a social media meeting recently, which underlined two key qualities of a good community manager: being brave and being persistent. I figured it was the universe’s way of telling me to send you the deck I created for the Half Off Depot Community Manager position.

If you haven’t hired anyone yet, I’m still interested and enthusiastic … and to prove it, here’s the first Half of my deck. The rest, I’d like to show you in person.

Here’s the deck. To add a little context to the title slide Mr. Livewell is our mascot.

I wanted the full story. She earned herself another shot. Brigette starts at Half Off this week. I think she is going to be a great.

Be brave. Be persistent.

September 13, 2011  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Half Off Depot, Management, Presentations

Flashpoint Engineers Startups

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So the past few days I have been hanging out a bit in the nifty new Flashpoint accelerator space. It's kinda a cool open space with high benches and work seats. Very open flow to it. And it is quite shocking to see a logo you helped create in a larger than life execution. We wanted the green to pop and boy does it. Kinda hides the fact those are official Georgia Tech blue and gold colors in the logo.

Flashpoint Wall 2
Flashpoint had it inaugural class kickoff yesterday. The accelerator program run through Georgia Tech, and which I played a small part in getting together, has selected its inaugural class of 18 teams to participate in the first cohort which runs from September to December. These teams are being funded by the $1 million Flashpoint Investment Fund I which is led by Sig Mosley of Imlay Investments. The program will culminate in two demo days, one in Atlanta and one in the valley hosted by 500 Startups.

Led by Merrick Furst, Flashpoint has an interesting focus. The accelerator intends to de-mystify the startup process by improving on a repeatable process of scalable business model discovery and further developing principles that support real world value creation. They call it startup engineering. Along with Merrick's startup risk framework, Flashpoint is using two textbooks to help the teams with the process. The Four Steps to the Epiphany which has been a personal favorite and Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers which seems so practical that I have already ordered a personal copy and may get the iPad app.

It is going to be interesting to both help a few of these initial teams as a mentor and see what pops out at demo day come December.

September 8, 2011  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Entrepreneurship, Startups

The Winning Formula

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With Groupon mishandling its IPO, Facebook closing down it's Deals offering and Yelp cutting back on its deals staff, pundits are starting to question the viability of the deals market. Lots and lots and lots and lots of questioning. These folks are as wrong as those that said Facebook Deals would be the death of Groupon.

Recently Jim Anderson of Silicon Valley Bank wrote a nice analysis of the online deal market.

The money quote:

This brings us to the critical success factor for all these daily deal companies. Getting repeat customers from the 5 million strong e-mail list is easy. Making your real customers, the merchants, successful with the product is the challenge….

We think a winning formula is sitting in front of anyone who has strong relationships with these local merchants — especially a firm that has a history of helping them with Web marketing and promotions. Whoever teaches the merchants to use these new techniques will own this market.

Jim and I think alike (except getting a 5 million strong email list may be a bit more challenging than he makes it out to be). I am not a pundit, I am an operator. An operator that is seeing double digit traffic and revenue growth. The deals market is a large opportunity that is not going away anytime soon. The key to success is helping merchants use online promotions to get and keep new customers while offering great deals of value to consumers.

It's as simple as that.

September 1, 2011  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Customer Focus, Deals, Half Off Depot, Internet

100 Days

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So give or take a day or two here or there I have been at Half Off Depot for 100 days. Time to take stock of what has transpired.

I joined the company as employee 21. We have about 50 now. The largest department remains sales, it has just about doubled in size. We have field sales folks now. Depending on how you count I have about 14 direct reports. 

We are also building out strong teams in dev and marketing. We have a part time CFO that put together a financial model any spreadsheet jockey would be proud of. Service and support are coming together. We are hiring solid and smart people that know what to do. We had an offsite where we laid out our strategic initiatives for the second half of the year.

My primary job is to lead our sales expansion. I have seen this movie before. In about two weeks time we set our sights on our first true expansion market. It was Tampa. We launched the effort on June 1. Started actively marketing to consumers on July 1. By mid July it was obvious that things were exceeding expectations. I told our board this and recommended that we accelerate our market expansion plan. They agreed to enter three additional markets by October 1. Two days later my leader bumped that up to August 30. Yesterday we started marketing local deals one day early. Today we officially launch in Charlotte, Nashville, and Orlando. From two to six. Boom baby.

As a partial result of all of this sales growth is quite nice. Partially because our sales is still mostly coming from three markets. Our monthly revenue run rate is up about 35% since May. This revenue growth is without the aid of the markets we just opened. Yesterday was a record sales day, beating the old record by 25%. We are learning to tune the engine. Add on the incremental markets we just opened. It's gonna work.

The downside at the moment is I am kinda killing myself to make it happen. Since I made that October 1 commit I have had a total of two days where I did not work at least six hours. My daughter's 13th birthday and a quick lake trip. The norm is 5:30am to midnight with a few hours for the family in the early evening. Several Fridays have not ended until nine. Cars, hotels, and planes. I have woken and could not remember what city I was in. Most Saturdays start at six in the morning. Not sustainable.

So we need to continue to build out revenue and start work on getting more leverage in the business. People, processes, and scale. That is going to be the focus on the next 100 days or so, which will pretty much land us in 2012.

August 30, 2011  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Half Off Depot, Startups

Love What You Do

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The first person that I heard espouse "do what you love" was Chris Wanstrath of GitHub fame. He covered it in his Startup Riot keynote a few years back.

The guy that said it best was Steve Jobs in his 2005 Stanford commencement address.

I am saddened by his resignation as the CEO of Apple. But strengthened by his words. 

Love what you do. Know that you are going to die. Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

 

August 25, 2011  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Computing, Current Affairs

Quick Thoughts on Google/Motorola

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This article by Henry Blodget for Business Insider and the below chart got me thinking about the smartphone market.

Smartphone-hardware-market-share-q2-2011
Some quick thoughts.

All the leading smartphones have been integrated software/hardware solutions. Blackberry/Treo/iPhone. The PC model does not work in the smartphone market.

That Android OS bar is going to get a lot more orange.

Apple will not be reduced to niche status.

HTC has a big problem.

Microsoft needs to make a move.

August 16, 2011  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Business, Mobile