Today I am attending a great event on rethinking education and the potential startup opportunities in that space. While I am personally obsessed with lifelong learning I am not a fan of our higher education (or primary/secondary) system, actually I hate it. I am a big fan of self directed learning, primarily by doing (no surprise to readers of this blog). All of this made me think of a blog post I had written earlier this year for Boston.com  but never cross-posted on my own blog.

Should you get an MBA before founding a startup?

Hell no.

If you intend to found a tech startup I believe that an MBA is a complete waste of money.

There is one exception to that rule. An MBA from Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Wharton, and maybe 1 or 2 other schools in the entire world might be somewhat useful. An MBA from one of these schools may be useful not for what you learned at those schools but because of the social connections you made with some of your fellow students and professors. If you’re lucky you might make some alumni connections to people not in the startup world but working at potential acquirers and partners during your time at one of these schools.

If the possibility of making a couple of interesting alumni connections is worth enough to you that you’re willing to spend two years of your life and accumulating an average of $88,000 in debt, go nuts. It isn’t to me, nor I have I seen it payoff for anyone I’ve encountered during the last 15 years.

Coming out of school with a ton of debt would make anyone more risk-averse. That’s not a quality you want in a startup founder. I recommend that you try everything in your power to be entirely debt-free before founding a startup. It’s hard enough to sleep at night as a startup founder without being in personal debt, don’t add any unnecessary pressure on yourself.

Wait, isn’t it easier to raise capital if you learned how-to analyze spreadsheets and dissect a business case at school? Nope.

As an angel investor I’ve never given any advantage to a start-up because one of its founders had an MBA. Recruiting a talented engineering team is far harder, and more impressive, than recruiting a building full of MBAs.

What if none of the founders are MBAs. Should they hire any MBAs into their companies?

For me an MBA wanting to join a startup has always been a worrisome sign. I guess this is because when I see this happening it makes me feel that MBAs are starting to think there’s a short-term possibility that joining a startup is going to make them rich. If you’re interested in making money then please don’t start or join a startup. Anyone who has started a business will tell you there are far easier ways to make money in this world than founding a startup. Despite the urban legends you hear about very, very few startup founders ever make any money let alone get rich from their startup.

Marc Andreessen, a superstar entrepreneur and startup investor, says that when MBA graduating classes start wanting to go into tech startups we’re seeing a leading indicator of a bubble forming.

If you’re a seasoned entrepreneur, were lucky enough to make some money, and you feel like going back to school to get your MBA for fun, go for it. I have many friends who have done just that. But these friends were already successful entrepreneurs, they never rested their hopes on an MBA helping them found a business and neither should you.

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“You can’t learn in school what the world is going to do next year.” – Henry Ford

I was recently speaking with an entrepreneur whose company is in the same space as my previous company, Performable (which was acquired by Hubspot). He was asking how I thought they should compete with a particular competitor. This competitor is good at producing software quickly and extremely adept at copying its competitors — they went as far as copying much of Performable’s copy and product names after we were acquired.

The situation this entrepreneur is in is not unique — this happens to most companies in competitive markets every single day. If you are doing something worthwhile, others are going to try to do it too.

At HubSpot we have competitors who copy-n-paste our copy and messaging daily. But the thing that none of these cloners understand is the thought that goes into each message and product — the reasoning behind why we use the words we used and why we built the features that we built.

It’s the why that is important, and it is the why that they are missing.

The why comes from genuine interest in solving your customers problems. Not knowing why is something you can’t fake for long. Sooner or later, customers catch on and move out.

My advice to this entrepreneur was the same advice I gave my team every day at Performable: “Focus on customers, not competitors. If we do that, we’ll win.” Writing software is the how, not the why.

Always focus on that why. Always focus on solving customer pain and good things will follow.

Truth be told, the idea of everything being in balance on a daily basis is a myth. - Dave Ramsey

Based on what I’ve learned from talking to people over the past decade, there is no clearer path to misery than attempting to live the lie that is work/life balance.

Achieving perfect work/life balance is impossible — for starters, there simply are not enough hours in the day for us to exercise, walk the dog, have meaningful interactions with our kids, read a book, learn something new, eat good food, help others, meditate, nurture our relationship with our spouse, be sexy, drink a good wine, watch a great TV show — oh, and do our full-time work. You won’t ever be in perfect balance and you’re going to drive yourself, and the people around you, nuts if you’re always trying to get there.

Recently I was talking to a founder I met at the Business of Software conference this year about being out of  balance.

Business is going well for this guy, but he is frustrated about one thing: his success is causing him to be so busy that he doesn’t have time to do the very thing, his passion, which led him to start his company in the first place (his company makes software for CrossFit gym owners & athletes).

I don’t think anyone can achieve perfect work/life balance, especially if you’re running a startup. Stop trying. Think of it this way: if you even have the luxury of contemplating work/life balance in the first place, you’re ahead of 90% of the world’s population. Maybe 95%.

Is there a middle ground between the guy who decides that “life is too short” and moves to Brazil to surf full-time, and the guy who works 20-hours days? I think there is but it starts with killing the work/life balance myth.

So how about this: instead of aiming for perfect balance, try prioritizing your days based on the top 3 things you care about.  My top 3 priorities are cliché, but true. They are:

1. Family
2. Me + Friends 
3. Work

Using these priorities to guide my daily decisions has really helped me feel like I could better pay attention to all the areas in my life that need to be nurtured without feeling guilty that I was letting someone down or something slip.

Free yourself from the myth of work/life balance and focus on what matters most to you.

It’s easy to get caught up reading about the startup that codes from the beach, or the other startup that was featured  in [insert name here], or that other startup that raised a bunch of money and was valued at a billion dollars (in make believe money that is).

Blah blah blah. Those are not accomplishments that matter. Raising money and getting a high valuation is not a milestone worth celebrating — it’s a reason to get to work. Don’t waste your time reading about them. Don’t waste your time trying to emulate them.

What matters is creating something that people love. What matters is solving a customer’s problem.

What matters is:

• Shipping,  not talking or reading or dreaming. #shipit
• Learning every single day, no exceptions.
• Becoming a craftsman – always trying to make the thing you made just a little bit better; never saying “It’s good enough.”
• Building a team you love.
• Changing people’s lives for the better, making a positive difference, making someone smile when they use that thing you built.

And who matters most are the people you do it alongside: the friends, the colleagues and, most importantly, your family.

On this Mother’s Day weekend I hope you’re focused on what really matters. I know I could not do what I do without the endless support and encouragement from my friend, partner, and wife, who also happens to be an amazing mother to our children.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there, and thank you for putting up with us!

Note: This post was originally posted on BostInno.com on April 13th, 2011 but never cross-posted on my own blog.

I find this post to be even more relevant today at HubSpot as we transform our team into the greatest engineering team I have ever seen; I hope you find it useful.

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Companies change. Products evolve. Approaches get thrown out the window. The centrifugal force alone of that kind of rapid development is enough to throw anyone off center. Throughout my experience, one guiding rule on team building in fast-moving companies has emerged: hire people, not skills.

It can be tempting when you’re first growing to hire someone specifically to fill a gap in your company’s skillset. If you hire someone for skills alone, however, they may lose balance as the company grows, when those skills are no longer as central or get placed into a different context. Each time I have built a team, personal traits – not professional skills – have been what propelled the company forward.

So, what traits matter? The answer is going to vary by company and founder, but I look for the following:

Cultural Fit (45%)

Fit is arguably the most important of any qualification. Start-ups can be very hard, and they become impossible if you don’t love the people around you. Getting the culture right is critical. No matter how stellar a candidate’s skills are, if they don’t fit well with your team, it won’t work out for anyone involved. Be careful here though: fit should not signal conformity. You do not need 12 identical personalities. You need a mix of people with differing perspectives but shared values. You need at team that is cohesive because of its differences.

Scrappiness and Drive (35%)

At Performable, we include scrappiness in the job description. We seek out people who have toppled challenges with very limited resources. This is not just about being lean. It is about the character of the team. The four most powerful words coming from a new hire are: “I’ll figure it out.” Find someone who you can trust to say that and follow through on it, and you’ve found a true asset.

This kind of drive is different than traditional ambition. Ambitious people will succeed at any task laid before them. They will personally excel, quickly rising from manager to director to vice president. A scrappy person who is driven does not rely on titles or defined responsibilities. He or she will push the company forward even when no one’s looking. Driven people move through the responsibilities on their lists, but also keep a constant eye on how the company as a whole can do things smarter and better.

Intelligence and Experience (15% and 5%, respectively)

Intelligence and experience are valuable, but a scrappy person who fits well on the team can learn fast. In a start-up, jobs are always changing. So when you think about intelligence and experience, make sure you are thinking about it in terms of a genuine hunger to learn and level of life-experience that enables the candidate to easily adapt and evolve.

Discovering these traits in candidates may come down to a gut feeling for many, but some of it can be illuminated by carefully posed questions and by getting a candidate outside of the typical interview set-up. Whenever possible change the setting, meet candidates outside of the office, at events or out for coffee. Get them talking rather than answering. Find out what it is that makes them tick.

I finally got around to uploading my presentation on Creating a Data-Driven Business today.

I gave this talk last fall at the Business of Software Conference here in Boston. The talk is a variant of my Creating a Data-Driven Startup version.

Since Performable was acquired by HubSpot last June (2011), news here and here, I’ve had the chance to learn a lot about creating and scaling a highly data-driven business. I hope you find the presentation useful.

Looking back at the last 1.5 yrs since we started Performable, one thing is very clear: the single best decision we ever made was to make customer service everyone’s job.

Everyone on the team is assigned a day on our support calendar when they answer the phones, reply to all emails and proactively reach out to customers to see if they can be helpful. This customer service focus has grown from a company mantra to a company religion. Obsessive customer focus shapes everything we do, from how our dev team builds our product to how we recruit new team members.

Yesterday my co-founder, Josh Porter, gave a great talk at a MassTLC SaaS event that shares our greatest secret weapon, customer driven management.

We’re always looking to do a better job. If we missed anything please let me know below in the comments and we’ll send you an awesome Performable t-shirt.

At Performable we are building the Salesforce.com of Marketing.

Along the way we have expanded our service to better meet the needs of our customers. Lots of startup people viewed this evolution as “pivots“, a term made famous by Eric Ries and the Lean Startup movement.

I didn’t really see our evolution as a series of “pivots” but I can see how others saw them as such.

At SXSW this year I presented the following Case Study on Performable and our early evolution:

Please let me know if you found this presentation useful.

Last weekend I was at SxSW to give a talk on Startup Pivots at the Lean Startup event held there. It was an excellent event put on by Eric Ries and Dave McClure. All the stars of the game were there; I was honored to be included.

I have been trying to decrease the number of startup events that I speak at and attend this year so I can focus all my energy on Performable. Despite this I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to share tacos and margaritas with my friends down in Austin.

While I was there I experienced something that has happened to me many times before. It always goes down like this:

Stranger: (walks up to me cold) “Hi, I’m XYZ from startup ABC.”

Me: “Hello, nice to meet you.”

Stranger: “I’m a competitor of yours.”

Me: “No, you are not my competitor.”

At this point the stranger becomes really confused, it is clear that he has been following the daily changes at my company, so he believes he has a good handle on what we are working on.

So why don’t I see that startup as a competitor?

I believe a startup only has one real competitor, indifference.

People not caring enough about your product is your true competition, not some other startup.

Please stop sweating other startups in your market. (Stop reading Techcrunch please.) They do not matter. Always solve for making people care.

Who are your competitors?

Note: I wrote this post on my phone so please excuse any typos or errors.

The best way to save a disgruntled customer is to provide a great customer experience when things go wrong.

Joshua Porter (@bokardo), my co-founder at Performable, wrote a great summary of  a recent post by Zendesk’s Justin Flitter on the steps to fix a negative customer experience.

Some of the steps they suggest include:

Make contact and call/talk to the person, asking questions that dig deeper into what happened

Print out the blog post and read it during a staff meeting, even a board or management meeting

Reply with a personal comment on the blog post from a senior person and the store manager to demonstrate awareness and appreciation

At Performable we’re obsessed with providing the best customer experience humanly possible. Sometimes we nail it and sometimes we suck. The important thing is that we continue to focus on improving it every single day and consistently WOW-ing our customers.

Why the obsession? We believe that marketing is broken and sucks today. Outbound, inbound, whatever.. At the end of the day people hate marketing and marketers. They hate marketing because it is still interrupt driven, it is still about distracting me and not about delivering value.

Our goal at Performable is to revolutionize marketing, to kill the spam, and to teach marketers that the point is delivering value to their customers, not once but over the entire lifetime of the relationship, or as Seth Godin would say “embracing lifetime value“.

Once you change your mindset to embrace the lifetime value of a customer, to focus on building relationships and not just interrupting people the more important it becomes to invest in providing amazing customer experiences.

How do you measure your customer experience?