@Gregory's Motivatr

Time to ditch the term “non-technical cofounder”

Over the past couple of years the term “non-technical cofounder” has come into vogue to describe someone who is starting a tech company but is not a programmer. While this title is an improvement over calling such a person “CEO” before there’s even a business (though it’s important there’s a CEO once there is a business), it’s still a pretty awful title. 

Putting aside the oddness of describing someone by what they don’t do, a “non-technical cofounder” in a two or three person tech venture really should be pretty technical. Here are just a few of the technical skills and concepts any founder needs to have or understand (or learn) to effectively do the business-side of a very early stage tech startup: metrics, copywriting, APIs, conversion funnels, A/B testing, negotiations, basic bookkeeping and basic contract law. Often, the “non-technical cofounder” is also the de facto product manager, in which case you can add user flows, wireframing and usability testing to the list. Show me someone without any of those technical skills and I’ll show you, dear programmer, someone you should not partner with.

Of course, we do need to call these people something. Here are a few suggestions:

• Business cofounder
• Hustler
• NTC (maybe we’d all forget what it stood for, like IBM)
• Business lead

Hopefully we can all agree on one of these, or  let me know your ideas and I’ll add them to the list.

“If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?”

Over the past few years intelligently changing what you do as a startup has fashionably been terms a pivot. I actually think it’s a great term, because it’s now much easier to tell your team, investors, press, etc., that you’re pivoting rather than changing what you’re doing. Pivoting also has a bit of a more nuanced meaning according to Eric Ries who popularized the term, “idea that successful startups change directions but stay grounded in what they’ve learned.”

Through no falt of Ries, there are two harmful misconceptions of the pivot that have emerged as the startup economy has heated up: 1. It’s easy. 2. Once you pivot to something that works you’ll be done pivoting.

A fresh reading of former Intel CEO Andrew Grove’s 1996 management classic Only The Paranoid Survive brutally quashes both misconceptions.

The book was recommend to me years ago by a fellow entrepreneur, but I avoided it due the the chilling title. Who wants to be paranoid? I’m an optimist. Of course, that very optimism lead be to finally read the book. And I’m glad I did. Though I am left to wonder, was reading this book a trump of optimism over paranoia, or is it possible to be optimistically paranoid?

Grove does an excellent job telling the story of Intel’s dramatic change from a semiconductor to microprocessor company and extrapolating big ideas about how hard it is to change a business or even ones own career — and what it takes to do so successfully.

Here are a few of my favorite lines from the book, by way of Kindle’s highlight feature and Findings:

Strategic change doesn’t just start at the top. It starts with your calendar.

Often in the course of traversing a strategic inflection point your people lose confidence in you and in each other, and what’s worse, you lose confidence in yourself.

I can’t help but wonder why leaders are so often hesitant to lead. I guess it takes a lot of conviction and trusting your gut to get ahead of your peers, your staff and your employees while they are still squabbling about which path to take, and set an unhesitating, unequivocal course whose rightness or wrongness will not be known for years. Such a decision really tests the mettle of the leader.

The most important tool in identifying a particular development as a strategic inflection point is a broad and intensive debate.

This is not fun. You may want to hide from exposing the holes in your strategic thinking—after all, having them on display in front of a group of your own employees would be embarrassing, wouldn’t it? Yet I think it would be far better to let your employees find them when there’s still time to make corrections than to allow the marketplace to find them later.

What used to be referred to as “managing by walking around” has to a large extent been supplanted by letting your fingers do the walking on your computer keyboard… I spend some two hours a day reading and responding to messages that come to me from all over the world.

Managing, especially managing through a crisis, is an extremely personal affair.

My favorite part of the book was the thought exercise Andy went through with Gordon Moore before committing to making a massive change in Intel’s business:

I turned back to Gordon and I asked, “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?” Gordon answered without hesitation, “He would get us out of memories.” I stared at him, numb, then said, “Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back and do it ourselves?”

And that’s what they did.

Billing systems matter

I wrote a guest post for PaidContent titled How The Magazine Industry Can Save Itself (Hint: Not iPad Apps), in which I argued magazines would be better off letting customers subscribe easily month-to-month a la Netflix rather than focus on iPad apps.

I started thinking deeply about monthly reoccurring billing models as we launched Muck Rack Pro a couple months ago, which is Sawhorse Media’s first subscription product.

It’s an extremely powerful business model and a better experience for users in most cases. While I’m certainly not the first to figure it out, I’m surprised companies from Conde Nast to Salesforce still don’t offer it. Here’s my reasons they should:

—Monthly fees appear lower than yearly fees. Even cable companies have figured this out. Time Warner Cable is offering me cable and internet for about $150/mo. Would you reconsider your cable package if they asked for $1,800 a year? You can buy a MacBook Air and iPad for that! Subscribing to The Week at $4.13/month, or even $5/month (which would more than cover the additional credit card fees), sounds pretty good.

—More people will subscribe. If people know they can cancel anytime, they’ll be more likely to subscribe. Even better, offer a 30 day money back guarantee like we do.

—You never have to ask people to renew. With monthly reoccurring billing, the default behavior is renewing. If you don’t yet appreciate the power of defaults just read AOL’s income statement.

—Selling additional products is easy. If I want an additional DVD from Netflix, I don’t have to type in my credit card again. Magazines could let customers buy their books, tickets to their event and other new product with one click.

—It will make you better. Once you’ve moved to a cancel anytime model, there’s a huge incentive to invest in your product and provide great customer service to lower your attrition rate. All they money and effort that you spent spamming your subscribers with begging letters and weird gift offers could go into figuring out what the future of magazines truly are.

Be sure to read the full post.

Belief

I’ve come across a few stories recently about the importance of belief for entrepreneurs. What struck me most about all of the stories is that belief is both an essential companion and a fickle friend to anyone on an uncharted journey.

You can’t accomplish anything without belief, yet belief won’t always be there for you. Like a fair-weather friend, belief might abandon you precisely when you need it most. So what do you do?

Ben Huh, the founder of Cheezeburger, wrote a powerful post about his bout with depression and worse titled When Death Feels Like A Good Option. He recovered by, as he put it, leaving the room:

It wasn’t for several months that death no longer became an option, but leaving that room and dealing with reality was the best antidote to a make-belief world where life just wasn’t worth it. When I was fantasizing about death as the panacea, the harshness of reality actually helped — it presented me with problems that I could actually solve… 9 years after I left that room, I would call Brad Feld to invest $30 million in my odd-ball company… For those of you who struggle with this, I’d encourage you to keep walking out that door everyday.

Spencer Fry just posted Startups: Stress and Depression advocating having a cofounder as a way to share the burden:

I use to think that after having co-founded two successful startups I wouldn’t need a co-founder for my next one. I was wrong. You can be the most seasoned operator, but at the end of the day you need another shoulder to lean on… Without a co-founder to share the emotional side of running the startup, then, you’re left to bottle things up inside yourself. That’s not healthy and will negatively affect you as a person, which in turn will carry over to negatively affect your startup. You’ll take your stress out on your employees, the product, your loved ones, and your friends, all because you didn’t have a co-founder who could relate 100% with you about what’s going on. Don’t do this alone. 

Marten Mickos, the former CEO of MySQL, gave a Stanford talk emphasizing the need to have others who believe in you, because sometimes you’ll stop believing in yourself. For Mickos that believer was overtime his mother, mentor, investors and even subordinates:

What I’ve learned only in recent years was that I reflected over the fact that thirdly you must always have somebody who believes in you. And you must have somebody who believes in you more than you do, more than you can believe in yourself, because a human being wakes up every morning asking him or her herself, am I useful? Am I needed on this planet? Am I okay, am I doing okay? And we have this nagging doubt, self doubt that follows us throughout life. And when we are in a startup business or in the entrepreneurial world, we will face challenges, challenges that seem insurmountable, really bad situations. And then you have this double whammy that just when it is bad, it also feels bad. And you’re sitting there as the entrepreneur and realizing that you don’t really trust yourself. You are not sure you can make it through the day. You’re not sure you can solve the problem or the challenge you have. So, you have those moments of self doubt just when you cannot afford them. And that’s the moment where you need somebody else who believes in you and who reminds you that you are capable and who reminds you that you are a wonderful entrepreneur

I’d love to hear more people share their stories.

The newspaper with only good news

Newspapers cover the planes that crash, but never the planes that land safely.

Of course the crash is news and the safe landing isn’t, but what a skewed view of the world it leaves us with. Bruce Schneier gave an interesting Ted Talk on how this way of understanding the world leads to a dangerous disconnect between perceived risks and real risks — we worry about a plane crash rather taking precautions to drive more safely on the way to the airport.

I often wondered, what if there were a newspaper with only common, mostly good news. Coverage of all the babies born rather than babies kidnapped, of planes that landed safely rather than ones that crashed, and of people who died peacefully after a full life rather than in horrible accidents. It would be an awfully boring paper and go out of business, but what a statement it would make.

Now we pretty much have that in Facebook, Twitter and the like. For the most part, people only post good news about themselves: vacations, promotions, new relationships, babies, parties, and even safe landings.

Facebook is publishing that impossible newspaper of mostly good news. And they’re making a load of money doing it.

However, this rush of good news isn’t all good news.

As Caterina Fake says, it exploits our basic human anxiety of FOMO (fear of missing out). We share our news of fun parties, successes, and vacations, rather than times of boredom, self-doubt and drudgery. How can one’s real life to live up to the imagined lives of others as informed by their Facebook timeline?

In another Ted Talk, Eli Pariser warns that we’re all in “filter bubbles” that rob us of a common front page experience. Pariser quotes a prescient though depressing observation by Mark Zuckerberg, “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.”

Five lightweight tools essential for managing contacts

I have always lived my life by making lists: lists of people to call, lists of ideas, lists of companies to set up, lists of people who can make things happen. Each day I work through these lists, and that sequence of calls propels me forward.

- Richard Branson

We all know that our relationships and contacts are one of the most important assets we have, yet how much care do we really give to nurturing and keeping track of them?

I’ve tried a bunch of heavyweight tools such as Gist and Salesforce (which we use as a company), but I’ve found the lightweight tools have made a much bigger difference for me. Here are the four tools I’ve found essential:

Gmail (obviously)

This seems almost too obvious to mention, but I still come across plenty of people who aren’t using Gmail. And some of them aren’t even forced use to use something else by their company.

It’s a tremendous competitive disadvantage to not be able to search and pull up years of past correspondence in a matter of seconds. I remember from my days of using Outlooks/Exchange that it was almost impossible to search and would even take a few seconds to process sending or filing an email. 

Almost more useful than Gmail itself is Gmail’s ecosystem, which all the tools below use. So if you’re at a big company, find a way to use Gmail by hook or crook. 

WriteThat.Name

We all know how it goes: You connect with someone you want to build a relationship with, so you spend 5 minutes copying and pasting parts of their email signature into the right fields in your contacts manager (first name, last name, phone number, title, zip code, etc.). Enter WriteThat.Name, which automatically goes through the email signature of people who email you and adds their info to your Google Contacts. Its user interface is minimal, its graphic design is ugly, but it just works.

WriteThat.Name costs $3 per month after the first month, and if you get someone else to sign up then you get a free month. Speaking of which if you click the link in this blog post I get a free month.

Rapportive

Rapportive gives you a view of the latest social activity of anyone you’re receiving an email from or sending an email to. This information is essential. If it’s someone you don’t know well (i.e. Who is this asshole?), you can get a sense of who they are with one click access to their LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter profiles. Even if you know the person well, it’s helpful to see their latest tweets right in Gmail to know if they’re on vacation, just back from the dentist or recently got a promotion. 

Boomerang: Send Later

Boomerang solves two very different problems in one package, so I decided to cover them separately. 

An entrepreneur might write emails at 3am and want them to send at 9am to appear professional, and the corporate ladder climber might write an email at 9pm and want it sent at 3am to appear a workaholic. Outlook solved this problem over a decade ago by allowing users to schedule email. It’s a feature so basic you think Google won’t even launch the Gmail beta without it, but they still haven’t added it. Boomerang gives you this simple but powerful functionality. 

Boomerang: Reminders

Often times we send emails that we know we should follow up on if we don’t get a response but never do because we forget. Boomerang will return an email to your inbox if no one responds to it within a given period of time. Simple, but knowing the importance of persistence and following up could change your career and maybe your life.

The first Facebook POTUS

I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while and Sam’s Facebook Timeline feature reminded me to finally do it.

In about a decade or so, we’ll have our first Facebook President of the United States. I’m not talking about a president like Barak Obama who’s increasingly embraced social media. I’m talking about a president who’s been using Facebook since at least college, before she ever thought she’d even enter politics. 

In 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton admitted to trying marijuana. I don’t think Clinton did this out of a sense of duty to tell the truth to the American people, but rather to earn the trust of his fellow baby boomers. No baby boomer would believe someone who grew up in the 60’s didn’t do it. (Or they at least couldn’t relate to someone who didn’t.) George W. Bush, Al Gore, John Kerry and Barak Obama followed suit by admitting to smoking weed.

Facebook is my generation’s marijuana.

In college we’ve all been tagged in drunken photos, posted pompous status messages and friended slackers. We probably poked people we shouldn’t have too. Pretty soon, every presidential candidate will have all of these undignified moments in their Facebook Timeline. If they don’t, we won’t trust them.

The great shakeup

Despite all the joking about it, I found yesterday’s earthquake quite humbling. How many New Yorkers woke up yesterday worried about the stock market or their jobs, or totally consumed with some due project, never expecting an earthquake. As innocuous as it was, who knows what could have happened had it been only a magnitude or two larger. We were helpless during the shake.

I write this not to cause fear, but as a reminder of how arrogant it is to assume we know enough about the future to even know what to worry about or be excited about. 

The very fact that humans exists, if you believe in evolution, is a mathematical wonder. Yet we’re still fragile, able to survive only as long as fortune continues to smile upon us. 

Today I’m going to spend a couple extra minutes enjoying the taste of my coffee and the beautiful New York City weather. I hope you do too.