The Sandbox Savant

10 lessons for Web Tech Startups

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 10:39:00 +0000

//original piece first published in memeburn - some updates in this post//

Having been involved in the web tech space for some time now (Vottle.com, IS Labs and recently QuirkLabs), I have been lucky enough to have worked with and around some of South Africa's best entrepreneurs. Here are some lessons I have learnt:

1. The Boot: Almost every business can be bootstrapped to start. And should be. Not even Google (server intensive) needed outside financing for its first couple of years. Superstar entrepreneurs have an uncanny knack of making money go extremely far and this in itself forces creative solutions to problems that almost always spawn new opportunities. I strongly encourage entrepreneurs to seek financing later in the development of their business, ideally post prototype, and as close to product launch as possible. Too much capital makes a small businesses lazy. If you use finance as an excuse to start your business, you should be getting a job, not starting a business.

2. Capital Efficiency: I have never found a reason to pay founders what they are “worth” in the market. If you want to start a business and believe that venture finance should be paying you a professional salary, you should be a getting a job. In fact, I have always believed that founders should use venture finance only for stuff that relates directly to a cost of sale. The easiest thing for founders is to beg, borrow and steal (figuratively) from the 3 F’s (friends, family and fools).

3. Cash really is King: “Turnover is Vanity, Profit is Sanity and Cash is Reality”. There is nothing more important to a startup than cash-flow. Nothing. I advise all founders to build a real-time cash-flow model that works for them. There is no need to get caught up in GAAP intricacies either. Put simply, it is your total cash in the bank less bills (“burn-rate”) plus revenue. Income statements are mostly irrelevant for early startups and balance sheets only become useful if you want to sell your business or borrow money (assets as collateral).

4. Two-Minutes Noodles: If the entrepreneur can eat Two-Minutes noodles and still be evangelical about their business, you know your founder has the right value system. The truth is, successful entrepreneurs never do it for the money, they do it to change the world. This is, of course, less about eating the noodles and more about seeing what type of person you are.

5. Product Paradox: The founders need to get a product out as soon as possible and then iterate through a fast customer feedback loop. At the same time, the founders need to operate meticulously. Product development needs to be thoroughly thought-out and planned. And I don’t just mean in the founders heads. I mean detailed planning. Your planning will invariably look far different from actuality, of course, but that is fine. Planning forces you to think of the roadblocks that could derail your business.

6. The Law of Two: Successful startups (measured in terms of longevity) almost always have two co-founders. One is usually more visionary and the stronger communicator, the other, highly technical and strong on the detail. The best startups have founders with all the skills, just in varied strengths. One thing is certain, their skills are invariably complimentary.

7. The Darwin Rule: As Darwin eruditely said: "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change." Having the best product, while extremely powerful, is almost never the deciding factor of success in a startup. Rather it is the business most able to respond to market shifts. Gone are the days when product life cycles lasted decades. People who are unable to adapt quickly and want the next day to resemble the previous should rather get a job.

8. Ideas are like Carbon Monoxide: They are increasingly abundant and of little use. Don’t be married to your idea and don’t think your idea is worth money - it almost never is. Most ideas are worth nothing without execution. Ensure you spend time unpacking your idea and formulating an action plan to assess viability and value. The devil is always in the details. Most great businesses started off with an idea that was, at best, only loosely-related to what made them successful in the end. Such is the evolutionary nature of business.

9. Evangelical Rule: Entrepreneurs need to believe so strongly in what they are doing, they believe they are saving the world through their product. They believe, like Steve Jobs, that they are “putting a dent in the universe”. They have evangelical zeal that on the surface is quite annoying. It is hard to overstate the importance of this frame of mind in your founders. It is the difference between people who do 8 hour and 16 hour days; between two-minute noodles and long lunches; between living your startup and seeing it as a “job”.

10. Ham-and-Egging: Coined by Profs Bhide and Stevenson, it is the challenge entrepreneurs have of getting capital from investors to build product based on "imminent sales" and landing customers with the promise of "imminent delivery". Typical chicken and egg scenario. Start-up salespeople (one founder at least) need to be natural ham-and-eggers. They have to make the case that their company is perfectly capable of providing their service without full knowledge of being able to do so. This is often difficult because of the ethical issues, specifically, where do you draw the line on lying. My take is, as long as you honestly believe you will deliver, do it. Many of the successful startups I know of have had to do this in the early stages, so it is clear to me that this is one of the awkward necessities of a startup.

The ideal founder

So, if we take the above lessons and construct the ideal founder, they would look something like this: A zealot with an almost annoying passion for their business and who could talk about their startup up every day, all day, easily. They are good at selling. They believe living frugally is spiritual and necessary. Understanding highly technical ideas as well as the bigger picture is something they are good at. They are not usually analytical. They don’t mind that each day is continually different, despite the chaotic nature of such. They know that money matters, but don’t spend too much time worrying about their personal bank account – that doesn’t help sell the product. Blind faith is often used to describe them. So is naivetéy. They are comfortable with these personifications, even reveling in them and the fact that it makes them an outsider and “strange”. They deplore rules, even when the rules make sense. Nothing is ever accepted knowledge until they have put it to the test. They are almost impossible to manage and are often deemed self-centered. The latter is just zeal misunderstood. Consideration is for people with jobs and they, after all, are changing the world for the better, so you need to get out the way.

Achtung!

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 14:37:00 +0000

Linda Stone, former VP at IBM and Microsoft now dedicates her life to studying "attention".

I highly recommend watching this video of her discussing her research - while average video quality, the content is extremely insightful.

May I have your attention please? - Linda Stone - SIME 09 from Ayman van Bregt.

My notes from the video:
1. Attention is our primary currency

2. Attention, expressed collectively defines a society, community and culture

2. She coined "Continuous Partial Attention" a state where we are continuously doing multiple tasks that require cognition. It creates a heightened state of crisis, similar to that of "fight or flight". She argues that we have become "communications centred" rather than highly productive when working. The implication is that the quality of our work likely suffers and with this modus we struggle to solve deep and difficult problems, that require uninterrupted thinking.

3. She talks of "Email Apnea" which is the temporary cessation of breath or shallow breathing when doing anything in front of a screen.

4. While technology has definitely increased our productivity, it has also compromised the quality of life by being "always on". We use technology to "stay on top of things" but it rarely works out that way and it creates a "artificial sense of constant crisis". in large doses this can have significant health implications, such as, cortisal burnout,

5. breathing is the body's master control for attention and cognition. with email apnea you are in "fight or flight" mode which is not optimal for deep problem solving and creative thinking

Four tips to choosing your digital partner | memeburn

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 08:25:00 +0000

Magnificent post by our Quirk CTO, Craig Raw (@craigraw)...

Four tips to choosing your digital partner | memeburn

There is no doubt that digital continues to be a growing part of every marketing budget. Choosing the right partner to assist your digital efforts is a critical decision. As critical, I’d argue, as the choice of agency in any marketing discipline to date. The reason for this lays in the nature of digital itself — uncontrovertibly, digital has technology at its heart.

For a marketer, what does this mean? When I talk technology, I mean hardware and software — always behind the scenes, but as essential as the engine in your car. Like your car’s engine, you leave the design of such technology to experts. And similarly, just like you would never buy a car without knowing you could get spare parts and expertise to fit them, so the choice of digital partner must be considered with the support necessary to maintain the software (and hardware) they use and create. This maintenance issue is a difficult one — without the knowledge of a software expert, how can a marketing professional make the right decisions upfront to avoid expensive rewrites later? The first step lays in choosing the right platform for your needs.

Look for solutions that fit your needs
If you are running a guesthouse, boutique store or similar small to medium business, it is very likely that you will be able to use off-the-shelf software. You will most probably have common requirements that are already addressed with little to no modification — for example, your website could be aWordPress or Magento install. Support for most of these platforms is widespread and reasonably priced.

If, however, you are an enterprise, you should be looking at enterprise software. Your requirements are almost certainly going to be specific, your modifications necessary, plentiful and long running. Your choice of partner… critical.

This is custom-made software — while your software developer will use common components and perhaps even a branded platform, the finished product will be unique to the needs of your organisation.

The first thing to look for is an enterprise level programming language — languages like Java and C# can be heavyweight for simple needs but possess an inherent structure that becomes important as the size of a software project grows. These languages provide good support for important enterprise software features like packaging and multithreading, and benefit from excellent developer tool support. In general, avoid PHP unless you are primarily looking for a CMS platform, and beware Ruby on Rails if you need to integrate with legacy systems.

Don’t let IT define your choices
At many organisations, the IT departments exert an unusual level of control. Partly because they are in charge of aspects of the organisation that are opaque to other departments, they are frequently given the ability to make decisions that affect the business beyond their remit. Let’s look at the company website. The goal of the website must surely be one of marketing, with a sales component ifecommerce is present. Hence, the needs of the marketing department should be paramount.

However, it is frequently IT that makes the software decision — a decision that is often clouded by the needs of IT to serve the company’s staff. A good example of this is Microsoft SharePoint – while SharePoint is a great choice for document sharing within an organisation, it is generally a poor choice to power an ecommerce website. If you are measured on sales and marketing, make sure the software choice is aligned with your goals.

Specialist or full service?
Once you have narrowed down your software choices, you will be looking at two types of partners to fulfil your needs. The first, a specialist software development house and the second, a full service agency. The focus of each differs. The software development house is often concerned with the development of so-called “backend” systems – examples include financial processing software and fulfilment software, largely used by specialist trained staff, or with no user interface at all. Software development houses employ mainly software engineers and often have limited design or usability proficiency.

Full service agencies have both of these skills however, and given their marketing background are accustomed in writing software suitable for a wide audience — the company’s consumers or entire staff complement. Such software has particular constraints in ease of use, look and feel and performance that (with all due respect) require expertise not core to the capabilities of most software developers. Choose correctly depending on your needs.

In particular, beware the lure of two agencies collaborating, one on the backend programming and one on the design.

The complex nature of software development means that such partnerships are prone to a poor end product or even failure. As any software development methodology will instruct, the best possible environment for developing software exists when the entire project team works in one room. By this I mean the software engineers and developers, designers, copywriters, usability practitioners, project managers, system administrators, conversion experts, SEO practitioners, QA staff, and all the other roles that go into the development of a modern digital marketing product.

Choose for the long term
Finally, the consequence of software maintenance is the need for a long term partner. No matter how well documented, any complex custom-made software will take time to transition from one development team to another. Even if your aim is to take the maintenance in-house, a partner chosen for their experience will develop software that avoids gathering “technical debt” and is written in a way that is easier to maintain and adapt to new needs, particularly as your business scales. Look for a partner who can demonstrate that they have maintained software for many years, and have successfully handed large projects over to other teams.

Ultimately, trust is critical. Your risk in digital is growing with your increasing investment, and so is the need for a partner that understands your strategy and can assist you in making the correct choices now for your future needs.

Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 10:56:00 +0000

check her column for slate: http://www.slate.com/blogs/thewrongstuff.html

[hat-tip: Andrew Warren]

Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 18:40:00 +0000

Some Dan Pink genius...

Conformity

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 09:53:00 +0000

Silicon Cape & South Africa's bright future

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 04:29:00 +0000

Last Tuesday made me love South Africa even more.

Those who know me, know that I am quite vocal about my belief in this country's future. Put simply, I have invested my future here because South Africa rocks. Two important companies made my belief even stronger last Tuesday, namely: Cell C and Sun International.

Firstly, Cell C sponsored a Silicon Cape event that launched an exciting product called MyTools - in fact, they launched to the Silicon Cape community *first* - clearly a great accolade of the things being done in Silicon Cape. Essentially they launched a "Cloud" (in the web) based product that allows their customers to manage the mobile telephone through a web interface, from address books to different voicemails for different users. The roadmap looks exciting for this service too. Cell C are the first mobile carrier globally to launch such a cloud based management tool, a very bold move if you know the nuances of the Industry. They are also the first mobile carrier to sponsor a Silicon Cape event too. Lars (Cell C CEO), the Cell C team, the fonYou team from Spain and SCI's Roger Norton really did put on a superb event with absolute professionalism. I was impressed.

Prior to the event, the Silicon Cape Board (and for the first part Roger) convened a board meeting to map the future of the Silicon Cape Initiative. In attendance at the SCI board meet: Andrea Bohmert, Matthew Buckland, Justin Hartman, Dave Duarte, Henk Kleynhans, Rob Gilmour, Rob Stokes and myself - absent was Arthur Goldstuck but who had tabelled his item prior.

What was awesome about this was that Sun International (another big South African company) had reached out to provide both a venue and all expenses paid lunch at The Atlantic Grill, The Table Bay hotel. The lunch was prepared by the increasingly famous @ChefDallas and hosted by the gregarious Shaun Wheeler, GM of The Table Bay. The food and the view were impeccable. What I loved most about this lunch is that they thought our Silicon Cape Initiative (SCI) was important enough to offer the lunch without any strings attached. They care.

Are these two companies unique in South Africa? Yes and No. Yes because they have "invested" early in us, when we readily admit we still have a long way to go. The investments were high risk... And possibly they are not unique, because South African companies for the most part understand that investment in the community is required to make the better future. My view is that South African companies do this better than those in Australia and United Kingdom, countries I have lived for long periods.

This is why I love South Africa.

(Disclaimer: Sun International is a Quirk client. This lunch offer was made to the Silicon Cape board directly not through Quirk. I work for Quirk, although not on the Sun International account, and sit on Silicon Cape board)

Presenting is a Privilege

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 18:02:00 +0000

Firstly and most importantly, presenting to people is a privilege. People have given you their most precious commodity: time. Be respectful by putting love into the presentations you do.

Presenting has many benefits but the most obvious one is you get to pitch your ideas (hopefully) to tens if not hundreds of people rather than one-to-few, so it provides excellent return on time invested. Generally I will spend at least 10 hours preparing for every 1 hour I present but if you run the math, the investment is always more than worth it. Many presenters do up to 30 hours for every presentation.

Interestingly, it seems we humans respond well to both good story telling and beautiful pictures, the two key components of good presenting, making it a very powerful form of communication. And it is true that the most successful presenters always articulate their message through narrative and carefully crafted stories.

Design your speech or presentation using the same criteria you use in buying a bathing suit says Joel Hochberger:

"First, it has to fit. Next, it has to reflect your personality. And finally, it should cover only the parts that are interesting!"

My rulebook for presenting:

1. Narrative is paramount. The best presentations always contain great storytelling. Malcolm Gladwell relies solely on it. It is not easy, as Ira says it requires the "Anecdote" and then the salient "Moments of Reflection" to bring in the message. This post has some great content on storytelling: http://bit.ly/d5nBG3

2. The 2 E's. The best presentations educate *and* entertain - regardless, you have to do at least one or you have failed.

3. Have a strong opening. Never apologize and open by addressing the following three questions: What's the problem? Who cares? What's your solution?

An interesting technique I found on the web:
A high-school mathematics teacher was giving a lecture to an intimidating audience: a group of college math professors. Early in the presentation, the teacher made a mathematical error. The professors immediately noticed and corrected the problem. And for the rest of the lecture, they were leaning forward, paying attention to every word, looking for more errors. look for tricks to get your audience engaged early on.

4. Conviction. Believe what you are telling your audience or dont bother. Anything is else is wasting everyone's time.

5. Font. Always use sans-serif fonts (no tails) like Helvatica, Verdana, Tahoma. Makes large writing easier to read. I never go under a 20 font and by default use a 34+ font. Varying font for emphasis is also useful.

6. Ideas. Try and keep one idea per slide max (think: billboard).

7. Love controversy. If you have the opportunity, be controversial. It will force your audience to engage. An engaged audience, even if they disagree, are the best audience.

8. Question time counts. It shows you respect the people who have been listening to you. Always leave time for this. It can be the difference between a good presentation and a great one.

9. Practice. If you can, record your presentation. You'll discover a thousand horrible, horrible things you never knew about yourself. Now watch it again without the sound. Why are your hands flying around like that? Now listen to it without the picture. Get rid of those ums!

10. Bullets kill. Dont ever use them in a presentation. Ever. Numbers *can* be okay. As Rich points out in comments below, it is a nice way to convey a logical thought pattern but I believe it is over used and therefore you should think of better ways of conveying that logic. There are bazillion better ways than bullets, so rather put the effort in and be different.

11. Method: Billboards or The Stream. In my view, there are only two successful ways to build a slide deck. One, which I prefer, is to treat each slide like a billboard. Short and clever copy with very strong visuals. The second is the "stream" approach, used by Jobs and perfected by Lessig, it takes several slides to convey a single point and acts like a stream of content, moving quite rapidly through each slide. Neither approach is better than the other, rather it is what suits the presenter. Be sure to choose a camp though or you will suck.

Good sites to help presentations - Garr and Nancy are two of the best:

http://www.garrreynolds.com/Presentation/index.html

http://blog.duarte.com/
http://presorockgods.posterous.com/

Twitter 101: WTF is Twitter and how do I use it?

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 17:48:00 +0000

Right, so you have heard loads about this thing called "Twitter". You see it on CNN and almost every web page you visit, but you are not too sure how it works. You have been to the site, you registered and you stare blankly at a web page that has no content and you are not too sure what to do next.

You work out that you need to follow people to get content on the page in front of you, but you dont know who to follow, what your friends twitter handles (unique identifiers) are, so you possibly follow randoms that twitter recommends.

Once registered, you get this web page (called your Twitter stream) that has lots of banal, irrelevant and arbitrary crap. This looks stupid right? It pretty much is at beginning, but hang in there. It is a wonder how twitter ever took off frankly. However, the power of twitter lies not in its webpages but in its 325,000+ server infrastructure that switches people's "tweets" (140 character messages) around.

Accordingly, you need to download an application to get real and consistent value from twitter. I recommend TweetDeck - it works well on my android phone and Mac (it works on PC and iPhones too).

I still use the web front end to see someone's profile and twitter stream before I subscribe to them but outside of that, nothing. What does make the twitter experience more powerful by a factorial is a good client on your phone. There are software clients for Android (above), iPhone, Nokia and Blackberry. Presumably Windows 7 will have one shortly too.

Once set up with your power software, the trick is to follow "signalers" (smart people who tweet great content) and see who they follow. You want to avoid "banals" (people who tweet crap).

Accordingly, you as Twitter citizen need to follow the The Rule of Three when tweeting:

Be insightful
Be funny or
Share interesting content - either through posting of links or retweeting

Twitter Dont's:

Do not tweet your every action unless there is some real significance
Do not have conversations with people that could be taken onto a better suited medium, like email - even DM is better than sharing a conversation between you and one other person (there are rare exceptions)

Remember, as member citizen of twitter, you have an obligation not to pollute the environment with boring and banal tweets

Here are some good South African minds to start with:
- Simon Dingle
- Toby Shapshak
- Duncan McLeod
- Richard Mulholland
- Mike Stopforth
- Rob Stokes

I wouldn't start your new twitter relationship following brands (companies). Following brands can come later once you understand the nuances, etiquette and community side of things. Spend time getting socialised on twitter first.

Some statistics that talk to the power of twitter:

Some basic twitter vernacular and etiquette:

Tweet: is a 140 character missive. Ideally it contains an interesting link, insight or witticism
Retweet: when you take someone else's tweet and resend it to your network because you believe is valuable to other
Hashtag: it is when you add a "#" to your tweet, usually at the end, followed by a single word. done when to make memes easily searchable and followable. These are very effective for following conferences
Meme: a concept that catches on quickly and spreads virally from person to person via the internet
Unfollow: when someone you follow is polluting your twitter stream, you drop them. can be seen as an insult
Direct Message (DM): the email like feature of communicating in the background between you and one other twitterer

See you on twitter!

@justinspratt

Brief History of HTML5

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 21:19:00 +0000

excerpt from this great post: http://bit.ly/9IhTKA (Smashing Mag)

Once upon a time, there was a lovely language called HTML, which was so simple that writing websites with it was very easy. So, everyone did, and the Web transformed from a linked collection of physics papers to what we know and love today.

Most pages didn’t conform to the simple rules of the language (because their authors were rightly concerned more with the message than the medium), so every browser had to be forgiving with bad code and do its best to work out what its author wanted to display.

In 1999, the W3C decided to discontinue work on HTML and move the world toward XHTML. This was all good, until a few people noticed that the work to upgrade the language to XHTML2 had very little to do with the real Web. Being XML, the spec required a browser to stop rendering if it encountered an error. And because the W3C was writing a new language that was better than simple old HTML, it deprecated elements such as and.

A group of developers at Opera and Mozilla disagreed with this approach and presented a paper to the W3C in 2004 arguing that, “We consider Web Applications to be an important area that has not been adequately served by existing technologies… There is a rising threat of single-vendor solutions addressing this problem before jointly-developed specifications.”

The paper suggested seven design principles:

Backwards compatibility, and a clear migration path.
Well-defined error handling, like CSS (i.e. ignore unknown stuff and move on), compared to XML’s “draconian” error handling.
Users should not be exposed to authoring errors.
Practical use: every feature that goes into the Web-applications specifications must be justified by a practical use case. The reverse is not necessarily true: every use case does not necessarily warrant a new feature.
Scripting is here to stay (but should be avoided where more convenient declarative mark-up can be used).
Avoid device-specific profiling.
Make the process open. (The Web has benefited from being developed in the open. Mailing lists, archives and draft specifications should continuously be visible to the public.)

The paper was rejected by the W3C, and so Opera and Mozilla, later joined by Apple, continued a mailing list called Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), working on their proof-of-concept specification. The spec extended HTML4 forms, until it grew into a spec called Web Applications 1.0, under the continued editorship of Ian Hickson, who left Opera for Google.

In 2006, the W3C realized its mistake and decided to resurrect HTML, asking WHATWG for its spec to use as the basis of what is now called HTML5.

Debunking 7 Sacred Cows of Marketing

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 13:23:00 +0000

"Medici Effect" - the idea that creativity is new, valuable and realised

This is a great video: http://www.media2010.com.au/?page_id=1137

Tim and Saneel's mantra: "the future doesnt fit in the containers of the past"

Here is a summary from the clip:

1. "All ideas are good ideas" - "no" - they are not all good ideas when you have finite resources

There are two types of creative output: Omakase (leave the selection to the Chef - experts) vs. Idea Buffet - agencies are good at divergent ideation that provide a buffet of ideas
give me the a frankenstein of all half baked ideas
prefer convergent ideation - take one of those ideas early on and make it the lead horse for divergent thinking and then continue on this tight loop.
Instead of brainstorm facilitator use a idea bouncer to keep ideas on track

2. "Ad Campaigns are an essential marketing expense" - no, good for ad and media agencies, however, campaigns not good for clients, limited by time. It is transient and goes away. And the idea that it is an expense. They believe that marketing should be evergreen, be ongoing. And instead of an expense, create assets. Creating ecosystems instead of campaigns.

3. "Teams of Superheros are the best agencies". We tend lionise the specialist within marketing but that is not the best way to innovate. They believe that intersectional innovation - the nexus of different skills and schools. A melting pot rather than super specialists. Generalists yield much better results.

4. "Creative Leaders should be the most creative people" - this doesnt make sense however. Creative rockstar cannot deliver all the time. A leader however, helps others be creative. Creative rockstars dont want a promotion they want more airspace. A creative catalyst will want to lead.

5. "Each employee should strive for perfection"- we should be inventing the best jobs not filling jobs with the best people as the main priority - to be honest, i didn't really get this sacred cow

6. "Marketing is a masterpiece to be unveiled" - this is not the case. now we iterate to make it better. you used to have to fully bake the cake before you revealed it. Now we have the tools to iterate and be realtime. The collaborative launch is the best way. The old adage: if you are not embarrassed by your first release, you have launched too late. You need to keep marketing in perpetual beta - something that is ready to evolve which is often more important that invention.

7. "Integration is the ideal"- yes, but it is really hard. very rare that is a marketing initiative that is perfectly integrated. rather build an small part of the idea and rally the assets to meet that and if it fails, start again.

Boiling the Ocean: Building a mobile telephony business

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 06:41:00 +0000

Building a mobile telephony business from scratch in an industry 30 times our size, using VoIP and WiFi

Boiling The Ocean

View more presentations from justin spratt.

Boiling the ocean is an idiomatic phrase that can have a few related meanings. One is that it is obviously impossible to boil the ocean. Where would you start? Thus boiling the ocean can refer to an impossible task — something so complicated it’s hard to know where to begin.

Another definition of the boiling the ocean is used in business and tends to relate to projects that are hugely complex, perhaps overly so.

Here is some graphical note taking from the talented Talya Goldberg:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/talyagoldberg/4893647594/in/set-72157624603821087/

Say ‘no’ to government broadband

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 06:31:00 +0000

Australia’s government is trying to push the idea of a national broadband network, or NBN, through that country’s parliament. It wants Australian taxpayers to build a A$43bn fibre network that connects 90% of homes with broadband access of up to 100Mbit/s.

To put that in context, in SA most households with Internet access are lucky to get an effective 1Mbit/s into the home.

Finland recently promulgated a law along similar lines. It is now a legal right of all Finish citizens to receive 1Mbit/s to their homes. The Finish bureaucrats want to increase this to 100Mbps by 2015. Other countries are also looking at similar laws.

In theory, this is a great idea. In practice, allowing politicians to drive any project, especially a technology project, is a recipe for disaster. Politicians should be confined to policy only.

Before I unpack this, allow me to state the obvious benefits of having an NBN in a country like SA.

In macroeconomic parlance, such a project would provide excellent stimulus for the economy. It would create jobs and the multiplier effects (other sectors benefiting) from spending money on the infrastructure would be fantastic. It would also be great public relations exercise for SA and, if pitched correctly, could induce foreign direct investment.

For companies like Internet Solutions (the company I work for) it would likely prove to be a boon as we would sell more Internet connectivity. We would also sell more computer server hosting space as people built new businesses on the back of this fast Internet to the home. Many industries would undoubtedly benefit.

Sounds incredible, right?

Wrong. All of this is predicated on two fundamental assumptions. The first is that the SA government can deliver on a project like this. The second is that it is a project with a profitable payback.

The first assumption is almost certainly wrong. Just look at the “liberalisation” of the telecommunications landscape in SA as evidence of this.

The second assumption is also incorrect. There is no business case in SA, or anywhere in the world for that matter, that justifies such a heavy hand from government. Taxpayers would almost certainly be left carrying the can.

Andrew Mosey, an Australian technology expert working for a large accounting firm, agrees that these projects don’t make economic sense: “As a heavy downloader I’d be one of a very small percentage of Australians willing to pay more for a faster connection. Even then I fail to see the point of spending A$43bn on such a project,” Mosey says.

He says he’s seen nothing to suggest Australia’s NBN project has a business plan, and he doubts Australians are willing to pay more than about A$50/month for broadband.

TPG, an Australian Internet service provider, already offers 180GB on high-speed ADSL2+ lines for $50/month. Not many would be prepared to pay for a faster connection. It’s the markets that should be allowed to determine the pace of the roll-out of broadband projects, not governments.

As a country, SA could do with more bandwidth. The Seacom undersea cable and the roll-out of national fibre networks by private enterprise has shown us this. But this is not the argument. It is about who pays.

Politicians need to stick to creating policy — policy that enables the markets to decide what is delivered. Ideally, there ought to be unfettered liberalisation of the telecoms sector. If that were to happen, private enterprise would deliver the best Internet experience over time, without government raiding taxpayers’ pockets unnecessarily.

First published on TechCentral, 13th July 2010:

http://www.techcentral.co.za/say-no-to-government-broadband/

10 lessons for tech startups

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 07:13:00 +0000

Having been involved in a number of web and tech startups from Vottle.com to a VoIP mobile startup under the auspices of Internet Solutions and co-founding ISLabs, I have been lucky enough to have worked with some very bright entrepreneurs, and have learnt some valuable lessons along the way. From Two-Minute noodles, to Darwin, to Ham-and-Egging, here are my 10 lessons for founders.

1. The Boot:
Almost every business can be bootstrapped to start, and should be. Not even Google needed outside financing for its first couple of years. Superstar entrepreneurs have an uncanny knack of making money go extremely far and this in itself forces creative solutions to problems that almost always spawn new opportunities. I strongly encourage entrepreneurs to seek financing later in the development of their business, usually post prototype, and as close to product launch as possible. Too much capital makes businesses fat. If you use finance as an excuse to start your business, you should be getting a job, not starting a business.

2. Capital Efficiency:
I have never found a reason to pay founders what they are “worth” in the market. If you want to start a business and believe that the venture finance should be paying like a professional, you should be a getting a job. In fact, I have always believed that founders should use venture finance only for stuff that relates directly to a cost of sale. The easiest thing for founders is to beg, borrow and steal from the 3 F’s (friends, family and fools).

3. Cash really is The King:
“Turnover is Vanity, Profit is Sanity and Cash is Reality”. There is nothing more important to a startup than cash-flow. Nothing. I advise all founders to build a real-time cash-flow model that works for them. There is no need to get caught up in GAAP intricacies either. Put simply, it is your total cash in the bank less bills (“burn-rate”) plus revenue. Income statements and balance sheets are irrelevant for startups and operating small businesses. In fact, they only become useful if you want to sell your business.

4. Two-Minutes Noodles:
If the entrepreneur can eat Two- Minutes noodles and still be evangelical about their business, you know your founder has the right value system. The truth is, successful entrepreneurs never do it for the money, they do it to change the world. This is, of course, less about eating the noodles and more about seeing what type of person you are.

5. Product Paradox:
This is an interesting contradiction that needs to be managed when starting a business. The founders need to get a product out as soon as possible and then iterate through a fast customer feedback loop. At the same time, the founders need to operate as professionally as possible. Product development needs to be thoroughly thought-out. And I don’t just mean in the founders heads. I strongly suggest doing a business plan for every product. This discipline will force the founders to think of hurdles and ensure they can react quickly. Balancing this is probably the hardest objective as it requires the founders to simultaneously wear two hats.

6. The Law of Two:
I haven’t studied or been exposed to startup that has been successful (measured in terms of revenue) without two founders. One is usually a big picture business person and the other is the highly technical and analytical. Both need to be skilled in the others areas too, ideally, but they will own one of these two areas. The technical person understands the vision and sales, while your business person needs to understand, even if only at a high level, the product technically.

7. The Darwin Rule:
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change. The best product, although very helpful and ideal, is almost never the deciding factor of success in a startup. The most adaptable business wins over time. People who are set in their ways and want the next day to resemble the previous should get a job.

8. Ideas are like Carbon Monoxide:
They are increasingly abundant and of little use. Don’t be married to your idea and don’t think your idea is worth money. Ideas are worth nothing without execution. Ensure you spend time unpacking your idea and formulating a business plan. The devil is always in the details. Most great businesses started off with an idea that was, at best, only loosely-related to what made them successful. Such is the evolutionary nature of business.

9. Evangelical Rule:
Entrepreneurs need to believe so strongly in what they are doing, they believe they are saving the world through people buying their product. They believe, like Steve Jobs, that they are “putting a dent in the universe”. They have evangelical zeal that on the surface is quite annoying. It is hard to overstate the importance of this frame of mind in your founders. It is the difference between people who do 8 hour and 14 hour days; between two-minute noodles and long lunches; between living your startup and seeing it as a “job”.

10. Ham-and-Egging:
Coined by Profs Bhide and Stevenson, it is the challenge entrepreneurs have of getting both capital from investors and sales to customers without having either in-hand. The ultimate goal is to do both simultaneously, but can be done incrementally. Start-up salespeople (one founder at least) need to be natural ham-and-eggers. They have to make the case that their company is perfectly capable of providing their service without any experience of having done so successfully. This is often difficult because it borders on lying. My take on this, is that if you honestly believe your startup can deliver, do it. It is true that many successful and socially beneficial startups have done this at the early stages, so it is clear to me that this is one of the awkward necessities of a startup.

The ideal founder?
So, if we take the above lessons and construct the ideal founder, they would look something like this:

A zealot with an almost annoying passion for their business and who could talk about their startup up every day, all day, easily. They are good at selling. They believe living frugally is spiritual and necessary. Understanding highly technical ideas as well as the bigger picture is something they are good at. They are not usually analytical. They don’t mind that each day is continually different, despite the chaotic nature of such. They know that money matters, but don’t spend too much time worrying about their personal bank account – that doesn’t help sell the product. Blind faith is often used to describe them. So is naivetéy.
They are comfortable with these personifications, even reveling in them and the fact that it makes them an outsider and “strange”. They deplore rules, even when the rules make sense. Nothing is ever accepted knowledge until they have put it to the test. They are almost impossible to manage and are often deemed self-centered. The latter is just zeal misunderstood. Consideration is for people with jobs and they, after all, are changing the world for the better, so you need to get out the way

first published in Memeburn.com on 9th of March 2010:
http://memeburn.com/2010/04/10-lessons-for-founders/

Stephen Fry: "What I wish I had known when I was 18"

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 05:56:00 +0000

STEPHEN FRY: WHAT I WISH I'D KNOWN WHEN I WAS 18 from Peter Samuelson on Vimeo.

Summary:
- abdication of self - less about being altruistic and more about not focusing on "I" because of its negative consequences
- dont do the same things... choose a different DVD - he wishes there was a roulette for netflix that would randomly send him a DVD
- noel coward quote "work is more fun than fun" - his point is that you should be doing a job that you really enjoy
- "have a hero" - that we should be shameless about having heroes
- mastering stuff comes through interaction with others
- authority comes from the validity of information and its openness, not arbitrary power

Top 10 - Economic Books

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Sun, 16 May 2010 13:07:00 +0000

Here is my top 10 economic books. A list that give a reader a commanding grasp of all economic issues that drive the discipline. These are not technical books (most frameworks buckle under the weight of their assumptions) but all are seminal in their own ways and therefore essential reading in my view.

1. Capitalism and Freedom - Milton Friedman - Alongside Schumpeter, Mises and Hayek there is arguably no greater "Free Market" thinker than Friedman. He explains why Capitalism is the best eco-political system. He explains how the great depression was the fault of government policy rather than failure in markets. He shows how the Keynesian multiplier and other government redistribution tools are based on false assumptions and are primarily motivated by political gain and utopian fantasies of equality. This is a masterpiece.

2. The Ascent of Money - Niall Ferguson - this is a seminal book that explains how money came about and importantly how credit markets were born and have driven markets for last few hundred years. Despite the ego, Ferguson really does have a talent for making the complex understandable

3. On the Wealth of Nations - PJ O'Rourke - this is an excellent summary of arguably the most seminal book in the subject of economics, ever: "The Wealth of Nations", Adam Smith. Unfortunately it was written some 200 years ago and suffers from the dated language and many ideas that seem obvious to us today. O'Rourke's abridged and updated version is therefore ideal

4. Origins of Wealth - Erik Beinhocker - the title is play on two masterpieces - The Origin of the Species (1859) by Charles Darwin and The Wealth of Nations (1776) by Adam Smith. Beinhocker reviews classic economic theory and then puts forward the Complexity Theory of Economics which deals with market entropy versus the traditional view of market equilibrium.

5. The Prize - Daniel Yergin - Like Gold, Oil drive a disproportionate amount of economic activity. Put simply, this is the best book on the subject. With most modern economies having built their consumption on $30 a barrel, the current trend toward $100 a barrel looks set to make this black gold ever more important

6. The Power of Gold: a History of Obsession - Peter L. Bernstein - Like Oil, gold is increasingly important as world governments are awash with too much debt post the "Credit Crunch". Many smart economists are saying that a flight to gold is an inevitability. If this happens, and understanding will be crucial

7. The Black Swan - Nassim Taleb - History appears to most to proceed in steady fashion but as Taleb demonstrates, it almost always proceeds with “the tyranny of the singular, the accidental, the unseen and the unpredicted.” Gradual change is our paradigm, yet actual change is “almost always outlandish.” This is perhaps the only book that has questions on it greatness, but it is listed because it delivers essential ideas in the neatest way. The future is highly unpredictable, most of all behaviour, and therefore it is important we understand this

8. Freakonomics - Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner - the first useful book on Microeconomics ever, in my view. Levitt's central premise hangs off incentives. Sometimes obvious, but never boring. Some of the examples, like why it is economically a better decision to sell crack in Chicago rather than get a job, makes it is essential reading for any deep thinker

9. Against the Gods: a history of Risk - Peter L. Bernstein - understanding of risk is essential to both Finance and Economics, hence why this book and Taleb's Black swan will appear in both Finance and Economics "Top 10" lists. This book will give you everything you need to know about the subject

10. The Commanding Heights - Daniel Yergin - this is a excellent book on how command controlled (communist) economies fail. Although most know that Soviet experiment was clearly a catastrophe, it is important to understand why. Often we see policy makers making the same mistakes that took the world toward Communism

Venture Capitalists can add value too, not just money

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 07:16:00 +0000

Great anecdote on how VC's can add big value, relayed by Ben Horowitz talking about Ron Conway, Valley Godfather:

A particularly memorable moment was one night I was in the office at 11pm with our then director of finance, Alfred Lin (now COO of Zappos). We were at wit’s end because we had just lost our biggest customer opportunity which was with a large US telecom company. Normally “losing” didn’t phase us as we even developed a motto: “losing is just a step on the path toward winning.” But this time, we were really in trouble because the customer was signing a long-term contract with our competitor later that week. We had already appealed to the President of the division; the only further escalation points were to the CEO or Chairman. We had already tapped out our VC contacts. If we lost this customer, as Alfred dryly pointed out, it was unlikely we’d be able to get our revenue over our fixed costs in any reasonable timeframe. I asked Alfred what about any of our angel investors, so we went through them and none seemed likely to be able to pull this off.

Alfred said, “Well there is this one other investor, Ron Conway.” I didn’t know Ron at the time, and his investment was quite small. But we had nothing to lose by reaching out. So sometime after 11pm, I wrote Ron and essentially said: “hello, you don’t know me, I’m an executive at a company you’re an investor in, and we need a meeting—in person—with the CEO himself of this Fortune 50 company—this week—and if you can’t make this happen, hey that’s ok, but we may be going down—sorry.” Ron wrote back in literally 2 minutes and said, in what I have learned is Ron’s distinctive email style (immediate, short, all caps), “AM ON IT.”

The next morning, Ron had done it. Tellme went on to win an eight figure contract that led to a nine figure contract. That’s a lot o’ money from a desperate email from someone he’d never met at 11pm.

Tellme was eventually acquired by Microsoft for about $800mm. My view of building startups is that it is somewhere between impossible and almost impossible, so you want all the help you can get. Tellme’s VCs (The Barksdale Group, Benchmark and Kleiner Perkins) were also extremely helpful, and I don’t think Tellme could have succeeded without them, including help with customer connections. But my personal opinion is that I’m not sure we would have made it without Ron either.

http://bhorowitz.com/2010/04/07/ron-conway-explained/?dbk

How to Hire Superstars

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 12:10:00 +0000

I am very stoked to have a world class team working for me currently. It is my belief that every manager should strive to work themselves out of a job and I think I am pretty close to having done that. I am there merely to guide decision making and lay out strategic direction. Almost every part of the execution is done by the current team.

This was not always the case however. I have had my share of failures, which hopefully you can learn from. When I was first appointed general manager I rushed a hire that while enthusiastic, just was not smart enough for the job. I then hired someone who was really smart but prone to procrastination and went AWOL when the pressure increased.

So the key takeaway is to hire people that have both of these attributes:

1. Smart - problem solver
2. Prone to Action - "Get Things Done"

Industry experience, I have realised, is secondary to these. In fact, people from outside the industry often bring fresh perspective (Group-Think is very dangerous) and more energy because of the newness of what they are doing.

To determine Smarts and Prone to Action you need to build a set of open ended questions that talk to each with reference to your industry. Below are some guidelines on how to construct these.

Defining: Smart
This is not IQ. I am with Gladwell on this - anything over 120 has diminishing marginal utility. This is *all* about problem solving and applying ones mind. Increasingly we live in world that is constantly changing, so memorising a rule book is not going be that helpful. We need problem solvers that can easily adapt to an increasingly changing environment. You need people that can be presented with unique challenges and find optimal solutions, regularly.

Defining: Prone to Action
Passion is a great indicator of Prone to Action. Passionate people are always motivated to change things they dislike and evangelise things they believe in, both of which are excellent things in any business. Getting Things Done is imperative to producing results. This means "shipping" product. I cannot emphasise enough the importance of an ability to execute.

The Hiring Process

1. Getting CVs: CVs dont tell you much about the candidate, but obviously provide a good filter. It is so easy to build a great CV that there is no excuse for not having one. What I strongly encourage is cover letters: a well thought out letter speaking specifically to my role and how they would be good for it. I like candidates that take a stance - that are bold and emotive in the letter. This process is a great way to see their passion and how well they write (writing well is critical). I also highly recommend pushing your HR department or recruiter to check all references and degrees. I was caught out on this with my first hire - dont make the same mistake as it cost me much time and money because it took me a year to work him out.

2. Phone interview: a brief, half hour phone interview can save everyone a great deal of time and importantly it also limits the prejudice that the "halo" effect gives someone who "looks the part". While looking the part can help, it is far less important than being Smart and Prone to Action. Build a series of quick-fire question designed to weed out the crap. Let them do all of the talking.

3. In-Person Interview: I usually have a minimum of 2 physical, in-person interviews. Usually a panel interview with the team that will work with the candidate. Then another with myself, the final decision maker. Ideally I would have one more with a senior manager from another division or an executive. Perspective is important.

4. The Presentation Interview: because I work on the revenue side of the business, it is key for the people we hire to be able to articulate a message - whether selling product to customers or selling a new business idea internally. Here I ask the candidate to do a 10 slide, 20 minute presentation on why they should get our job. I usually have 4 to 8 people watching this from within our team and senior people outside of our team.

5. I then collate all the information from this interview process and make a call. I usually wont allow a single person to veto a hire, but if there are two people in the process it raises red flags.

So what does the above process tell you? Hiring is very important! Important enough to spend a great deal of time getting it right in fact. Which is why I do. The cost of hiring the wrong person is massive - it has large negative multiplier affects outside the direct costs of hiring that person, such as morale and company culture. Micro managing these people out is a terrible waste of leaders precious time.

The old adage rings true: "hire hard, manage easy".

Niall Ferguson in Davos on Credit Crisis

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:04:00 +0000

Live-blogging transcript from a video I watched of Niall at Davos regarding the credit crunch and the future.

Crisis not due to simple "bankers are greedy", much more complex and nuanced than that!

The crisis had 6 dimensions:

1. Monetary System became compromised by the excessive leverage on company balance sheets. Investment Banks were leverage 25 to 1 (debt to capital)

2. Contamination of Bond Market: fatally corrupted by series of financial inventions. Synthetic credit and collateralised debt obligations: only 12 AAA rated institutions prior to credit crisis, yet 64,000 AAA investment vehicles. Defaults in subprime exposed the fraudulence in credit derivative market.

3. Monetary Policy: Fed kept federal funds rate (short term) at below 1% while housing was increasing by 20% year-on-year. Greenspan believed his own press. "Fed doesn't need to worry about assets prices" argued leading economists. Fed should focus on core consumer inflation is what they countered. "Markets will regulate themselves".

4. Corruption of Insurance: Explosion of Credit Default Swaps allowed companies like AIG an opportunity to build businesses in uncertainty, and not sticking to what they were good at - risk. False sense of security occurred, thinking all synthetic credit was in same way hedged.

5. Over-hyped House Push: both parties liable for pushing this agenda. Politicians to blame. They regulated Freddie and Fannie

6. Chimerica: relationship between China and America. Chinese did saving, US spending; Chinese exporting, US importing; China all the investing, US all the consuming. If it hadn't been Chinese accumulation of US debt $2tn, the bubble wouldn't have been so severe.

So why didn't this cause another "Great Depression"?

By some measures it was actually worse but it was prevented because of:
i) Monetary Policy - Fed doubled size of its balance sheet by buying toxic assets (Niall thinks this one is most important)
ii) Fiscal Policy - Treasury increasing deficit in true Keynesian fashion

Krugman reckons its deficits that saved the world, Niall thinks it might sink the global economy. Makes the argument that deficits of 90% of GDP could slow growth and increase risk of inflation.

Public debt run up is unprecedented in peace time. CBO say debt will 90% of GDP in 2039 (optimisstic) and 2021 (pessimistic).

Key question: how will bond investors react to this explosion of debt? China has put a floor on the price of treasuries in last 2 years (by buying them). Will they continue to do this? If bond market sentiment on US treasuries changes and yields rise, it will start crushing US recovery.

UK and Ireland at sever risk of this already. Greek, Portuguese, Spain already "basket" case. Thus, the Eurozone will likely keep bond traders from moving out of US debt any time soon.

Developing nations look well poised to benefit from this "Anglo" crisis. It remains to be seen which developing nations these will be.

Future Risks: Excessive debt is a big worry, crisis in Eurozone because of this debt, slowdown in China and clash of civilisations between West and Islam nations is still very real, and could send a geopolitical shock greater than the financial crisis - smaller things have lead to wars!

SxSW - Fire Alarms, Billionaires, Porn, Crowdfunding and Public Speaking (Part One)

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 11:50:00 +0000

Right, two days in and I am super happy with this conference thus far. Here is what has been happening in the 3 days I have been here, in no particular order:

1. the first session I went to was #battleforyourtv - this was an awesome verbal battle between Mark Cuban (sold his broadcast.com for almost $6bn, now runs HDNet) and internet legend Avner Ronen (founder of Boxee). Essentially, Cuban asserted there is no business model for HDTV across the Internet - a post-event blogpost summarising his points well. It had been brewing for about a year via blogposts between the two. The argument got heated at times with Cuban resorting to Argument by Dismissal (by being richer - Cuban made the point that Avner hasnt made any revenue yet). To his credit, Avner stayed cool (are all Israeli's this calm?) and won the crowd over. But as Cuban said, the crowd was pretty self-selective (internet nerds), so they were likely to side with Avner's point of view (free TV)... Half way through there was the fire alarm and this classic tweet by Andy Volk (@downtempo):

Needless to say, we sat still. Good reviews here and here.

2. Then there was the Battledecks session fed back to me by Ivo. As described by SxSW, it is:

Battledecks is a fast-paced, fun, laugh riot where "contestants" have to  put together a presentation on the fly as slides are randomly projected  for their confusion and the delight of the audience

It sounds like something we should do back in SA. Maybe at a 27Dinner. I loved this porno tweet about battledecks, forwarded to me by Sarah Blue (@superblue):

3. We then had our panel on CrowdFunding, set up by the indomitable Eve (@eved). We had almost 60 people there and of those we had about 10 questions from 6 people. A presentations success is measured in terms of its interaction in my view, and 10% is very high, so hopefully that meant it was successful. There was a nice review of it written here by Dan Oshinsky (@danoshinsky). Although it was Heather Ford who spoke of the "ubuntu" meaning, not me. That would be ironic: Aussie tells crowd about South African ubuntu.

4. The Public Speaking session with Tim Sanders (@sandersays) was excellent. He spoke of the "deliverables" (he gives these all the time, great MO in my view) on how to become a $15k-per-gig public speaker. He mentioned there we two ways to get into this league: write a book taking a contrarian view on something or being very skilled at one niche' topic and write about it in a fresh manner. (He rightly pointed out you cant orchestrate a tier 1 $60k-a-gig plus career a'la Clinton, Gladwell, Seinfeld, unless you have a blockbuster). Bottom line: you need to write a book to get into this league.) He did mention you can publish a serialised blog on a popular topic in place of a book and even get published this way, but it is very rare. Other things you need: a 5 to 20 minute DVD that is done professionally of you speaking at a gig. Podcasts are a good part of a CV and easy to do, he said. You need to the register with a "Bureau" (translation: talent scouts that put together speaking arrangements for events - not sure what they are called in South Africa).

History Repeats: Economic Surges of Modern Times

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 15:55:00 +0000

"When you go back and read contemporary accounts of life in the 1880s and ’90s, you could replace the words steamships and telegraph with computers and Internet and the text would sound completely modern" Carlota Perez

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The first surge was the classic Industrial Revolution that started in 1771. It brought mechanization, factories, and canals. The second, centered in Victorian England, began around 1829: the age of steam engines, coal, and iron railways. The third was the age of steel and heavy engineering. Civil, electrical, chemical, and naval engineering developed impetuously then.

Around the mid-1870s. That was when cheap Bessemer steel made possible transcontinental railways, major tunnels and bridges, and rapid steamship lines. Those, along with telegraphy, led to the first great globalization — which, by the way, was coordinated by the British Central Bank and the City of London. With those technologies, Argentina, Australia, and others in the Southern Hemisphere could send grain and meat in refrigerated ships to the northern winter markets.

In the fourth surge, which started with Henry Ford’s Model T in 1908, the center of gravity shifted to America. This was the age of oil, mass production, and the automobile. Our present, fifth, surge, the age of information technology and telecommunications, began in 1971 with Intel’s microprocessor. If the historical pattern holds, this surge still has 20 to 30 years left to realize its potential.

I could guess that the next wave will involve biotechnology, bioelectronics, nanotechnology, and new materials. But those are still in gestation, just like the transistor of the 1950s represented the microprocessor in gestation

Investment Banker to The Valley gives his outlook - Frank Quattrone

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:42:00 +0000

So what was Quattrone’s market outlook for 2010?

—Quattrone told the venture capital partners in the audience, “Guys, if you were a stock, I’d short you.” While the mid-1990s were good years for technology IPOs, he said too many venture-backed companies that went public after 1998 have cratered. “Basically every [VC fund] vintage since 1998 has been negative,” Quattrone said. If you’re a limited partner investor, such as a university endowment, that’s invested in a post-1998 venture fund, Quattrone said, “This is not an asset class. This is a train wreck.”

—Because of the dismal record of IPOs after 1998, Quattrone said, there’s a perception that venture-backed companies have to be much bigger and more mature before registering to go public. If a venture-backed company could previously go public with $100 million in annual revenue, Quattrone says now it has to be $150 million to $200 million. Deal size also must be much bigger. “IPOs were done all the time for under $40 million in the ’80s and ’90s,” Quattrone said, “but nobody wants to do that any more.”

—”The whole approach to marketing and allocating IPOs has to change,” Quattrone said. “The mutual funds that are committed to being long-term holders of the stock—the T. Rowe Prices and the Neuberger Berman Guardians who really understand tech—should get more.”

—The IPO market has been closed for so long that hundreds of venture-backed companies are waiting to go public, “so there is an enormous backlog,” and Quattrone said he expects to see a stampede among the less-attractive companies to go public as soon as possible. “The very best are not the ones that rush to get out,” Quattrone said. The logical implication, which Quattrone didn’t say explicitly, is that disappointing debuts in the first wave of new IPOs could end up tainting the market. But then, aren’t the bankers supposed to have some responsibility for that?

the full story, plus interesting comments from the interviewer are here: http://bit.ly/brXlwa

Gold's three "M's"

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:01:00 +0000

Gold's three "M's"

By Freeman from Human Action

I’m still amazed by how little people understand of gold.

It is clearly a massive indication on just how effective the government propaganda machines have been in the era of worthless, backed-by-nothing paper. But gold is now starting to stand up and speak for itself. Gold prices expressed in paper currency terms will keep rising, occasionally suffering sell-offs, but marching steadily higher nonetheless. Can we reach $10,000/oz? Yes. Can we go even higher than that? You bet. Voltaire said in the late 18th Century that all paper currency eventually tends to its intrinsic value, zero, and when the US dollar’s debt metrics finally topple over, the 80-year experiment with un-backed pieces of paper will come to an end.

To fully understand gold and why its price expressed in paper currencies must keep rising, you need to know gold’s three “M’s”: Money, Manipulation, and Misunderstanding.

Money
Gold is money and money is gold. That’s the first M you need to get because it really is everything – the beginning and end of any discussion on gold. The other two M’s follow from this fact. Not only is gold real money, but all other forms of money used in history have been a distant second. Fiat paper currency is at best a money substitute, but nowhere close to real money.

Why is real money gold, and not stones, seashells, cattle or paper notes? Gold (and silver) has been proven by history and thousands of years of trial and many errors to be the best substance to fulfill the role of a medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account. People have tried to use cattle, but it was not divisible, and neither was it uniform, durable, or portable enough to withstand the rigorous demands of the market for money. They’ve tried seashells, until someone figured out that a trip to the beach was lucrative and destroyed its value. Governments tried to mint less precious metal such as copper or other alloys, but could never ensure enough scarcity of supply to maintain value, rid the system of forgery, or concentrate enough value in the coins to make the money conveniently portable. Governments have tried paper, but it was too easy to print out of thin air and countless regimes from the Weimar Republic to Mugabe’s Zimbabwe have utterly destroyed paper’s value.

Throughout this process of men, leaders, empires and governments ignoring gold as real money, vast wealth has been destroyed, transferred or confiscated unjustly, particularly as the state has tried to foist its chosen form of money on the people. Time and again, year in year out, century in century out, millennium in millennium out, the people choose gold as money.

Manipulation
Because gold is real money, it is the prime target of state, government or central bank manipulation. “Give me control of a nation’s money” Mayer Amschel Rothschild famously said in the 18th Century, “and I care not who makes her laws.”

From Roosevelt in the 1930’s to Nixon’s supposed final nail in gold’s coffin in 1971, the state quickly took total control of money, fully unhinging it from any solid backing, and embarked on total manipulation of gold.

The market’s verdict was swift, and by the end of the ‘70’s the gold price expressed in US dollars and other currencies was exponentially higher than the $35/oz in 1970. By 1980 the situation had become untenable. The only way for governments to ‘prove’ that their money was good enough was to raise interest rates in a Draconian fashion (US interest rates jumped to 20% under Regan/Volker), making the opportunity cost of holding gold prohibitive to doing so, and selling or leasing their vault gold into the market.

The period 1981 to 2001 was such a time of manipulation as governments tried to restore the perception of paper currency, and diminish the perception of gold. Since 2001 gold has broken out of its manipulative shackles, and now central Banks have far less gold in their vaults while individual gold ownership is climbing. The scope for manipulation is fading, but people have to understand that governments will always try to manipulate, control, and monopolise gold because it is real money.

Misunderstanding
Lack of knowledge and understanding of the first two “M’s” is why gold remains the most misunderstood good. Financial analysts, investors, fund managers, shop keepers and paupers all have a similar understanding of gold – next to nothing. If they claim to understand the metal, it’s usually a misunderstanding.

Most people I engage with on the subject usually dismiss gold as a barbarous relic, think buyers of gold are silly, and think the current bull market is driven simply by sentiment.

Wrong.

Gold’s current bull run is no less than the market’s fundamental verdict on failing paper currency. It is mankind’s perpetual and ancient vote for real money. It is the ever-approaching triumph of market over state. It is a quest for sound exchange and a just, accurate store of value.

That so few people realise this still means that the gold price expressed in paper currency has a lot further to climb.

See HumanAction website for more insights like this

Elements of Successful Startups

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:24:00 +0000

Elements of Sustainable Companies

Start-ups with these characteristics have the best chance of becoming enduring companies. We like to partner with start-ups that have:

Clarity of Purpose
Summarize the company's business on the back of a business card.

Large Markets
Address existing markets poised for rapid growth or change. A market on the path to a $1B potential allows for error and time for real margins to develop.

Rich Customers
Target customers who will move fast and pay a premium for a unique offering.

Focus
Customers will only buy a simple product with a singular value proposition.

Pain Killers
Pick the one thing that is of burning importance to the customer then delight them with a compelling solution.

Think Differently
Constantly challenge conventional wisdom. Take the contrarian route. Create novel solutions. Outwit the competition.

Team DNA
A company’s DNA is set in the first 90 days. All team members are the smartest or most clever in their domain. "A" level founders attract an "A" level team.

Agility
Stealth and speed will usually help beat-out large companies.

Frugality
Focus spending on what's critical. Spend only on the priorities and maximize profitability.

Inferno
Start with only a little money. It forces discipline and focus. A huge market with customers yearning for a product developed by great engineers requires very little firepower.

Source: http://www.sequoiacap.com/ - one of Silicon Valley's most successful venture capital companies

Eric Schmidt - Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Spratt) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:40:00 +0000

I was referred to the above video of Eric Schmidt interviewed at a recent Gartner Conference by friend Brian Pinnock... he also kindly summarised the 45 minute video for the GMs at IS.... here are his notes:

Main key point is that Google is going to be a major competitor for ISPs in desktop-to-cloud apps especially e-mail. They are just going to get incrementally better at this.

  Enterprise Story
• CIOs are trapped in inflexible 1980s architectures.
• Inherited from previous CIOs
• Vendor support of these architectures is good but internal customers are complaining that they cant get stuff done particularly mobile devices
• This inflexibility hampers their ability to provide seamless experience especially for mobile-to-fixed apps
• Consumer solutions are more flexible and provide better user satisfaction.
• Browser based solutions are inherently insecure – but Chrome allows each tab to be in its own address space
• Address space separation improves security.
• Certificate replication & other security features will make google apps more secure outside the firewall than traditional apps.
• Consumer wants a seamless experience but very hard to secure
• Old architectures just cant be secured in the same way as new architectures
• Enterprise is a huge priority for Google.
• Unlimited hiring budget for engineering in this space.
• Its the next big business that Google is looking at along with their new display business.
• Prices are $50 per person per year not advertising driven
• This is because of tiered support and SLAs
• But enterprises don’t want advertising supported enterprise apps
• Expect more features in the calendar space.
• Google Wave move from consumer to enterprise focus
• Wave aimed at corporate collaboration space
• Chrome OS is free and delivered on Intel and ARM platforms (not just for netbooks which are only the initial target)
• Idea is to bring total cost of ownership hardware and software costs way down
• In less than a year enterprises could bring costs for (at least some) of their internal customers down by a factor of 5x by using Netbooks + ChromeOS + Cloud apps + Hosted/Virtual for core apps
• “Couple of million” companies using google apps now
• Biggest is 35,000 seats but rest is mostly small and/or universities
• Google Q3 earnings = $500 million from this space
• Core revenue in enterprise is growing faster than advertising revenue!
• Gmail’s growth is gaining share from everyone else
• Google eats their own dogfood so use their own apps and e-mail
• Enterprise sales call....

price is a non issue because google is always cheaper
migration is the issue (but there are migration tools now)
sometimes lack of features is an issue (but they have a roadmap)

• Enterprises want sophisticated document management, storage, replication etc.
• Not all supported by google today but will be
• Both Wave and ChromeOS not “shipping” yet but will be available in a year
• Netbook = pure cloud computing model because there’s no hard drive
 
Cloud Story
• Cloud can make things cheaper because of scale
• Cloud can also do scale way above what Enterprises can achieve on their own
• More control of unstructured (on hard disk data)
• HTML5 = standards version of Google gears i.e. Offline/local caching
• Need this to solve the airline problem i.e. Netbooks are sometimes offline
• Trust architecture is crucial in order to solve security issues
• Google will have a generic trust architecture
• 3rd parties are likely to solve the legal architecture problems e.g. HPPA, PIC etc
• Need to build bridges between clouds (Data Translation)
• Don’t trap data in clouds - “Data Liberation Front”
• Lots of scope for 3rd parties to add value to Google cloud
 
Internet Story
• Internet will be more non English. Will be Chinese.
• Mobility will be dependent on uptake of mobile access.
• 5 years is a factor of 10 in Moore’s Law
• In 5 years BB networks will be well above 100Mbps in performance in western world
• Technical distinctions between TV, radio and internet will disappear
• Huge volume of high quality content on YouTube
• Twitter, Facebook etc realtime search needs to be part of Google.
• Google can do that but its hard to rank realtime info ala pagerank (Twitterrank)
• Most people information will be gotten from other people rather than traditional sources

How do you rank positioning information? Google can.