I’m now sitting in the Ritz Bar (they now call it the Taj, but that doesn’t work for me) a few hours later with Amy doing some writing while she reads. I took a break and decided to write up how the last seven weeks have been for me emotionally.

Basically, they’ve sucked. I wrote The Physiological And Emotional Fallout Of My 50 Mile Race two weeks after the race. I was tired, struggling with depression, but feeling like I had turned a corner. It was a nice fantasy – after a month I was still having wild mood swings, feeling very tired most of the time, totally uninterested in running, and generally feeling overwhelmed by my travel, work, and all the people around me.

I’d been through this before in my mid-20′s when I was very depressed for several years while running my first company. This was different – I haven’t felt depressed, but it was just over the horizon. Instead, I had a steady low grade anxiety all the time which would spike up for a few hours before dissipating. I’d feel ok and then suddenly be exhausted and want to take a nap. Or I’d just feel like canceling all my meetings and going home. I knew the feelings would pass, so I just rolled with them when they came up, but I didn’t deny their existence.

Other than sleeping a lot, Amy tells me that I’ve been fine the past seven weeks. Low energy, but not noticeably in distress, crabby, or difficult. I haven’t done a survey of the people I interact with on a regular basis, but I’ve been open about how I’ve been feeling and I assume the people close to me have been giving me some space. I’ve been keeping up my typical work pace with one exception – I’ve been sleeping in many mornings as I just haven’t been able to drag myself out of bed at 5am.

I felt something noticeably shift two weeks ago. Amy and I had a couple of wonderful days together in Chicago and then I flew on Sunday to New York. I spent the afternoon with a close friend whose wife is very ill, just sitting, talking, and enjoying being together. I went out to dinner with two CEOs we’ve funded and then had a good night sleep. I woke up Monday morning feeling a little flat, but by mid-day I felt normal and attributed it to being sad for my friend and his wife. I felt fine during the rest of my NY trip, I flew to SF for an extremely enjoyable dinner, and then spent the past 10 days in Boulder.

While it has been very busy and there is a lot of pressure coming from different directions, I’ve felt very normal the past two weeks. I’ve had a few anxious moments, but they are all tied to specific events and easy for me to process. My normal temperament is very stable and mellow, even when the shit is flying everywhere, and I’ve felt generally back in that zone. I’m running again and enjoying it and I haven’t felt like curling up in a ball in the corner of the room in at least two weeks.

As I’ve written before, running the 50 mile race was an amazing experience. But I’ve decided not to do it again while I’m working at the level and intensity that I work at. The training was too much but more importantly the recovery has just been way beyond what I feel like I want to process again anytime soon. So – it’s back to marathons for me, which I know makes Amy smile.

Occasionally one of you, dear blog reader, will ask if you can do anything for me. I usually say something like “just do awesome things” but this time I have a request. If you live near one of the Brookstone stores with a Sphero, go check it out. Play with it. Have your kids play with it (if you have kids). And if you like it, buy one.

Cats are cute, right? What could be more cute than a cat playing with a Sphero?

How about the President of the United States playing with a Sphero. Ok – that’s not cute, it’s cool.

Now, how about you playing with a Sphero? At a Brookstone store. And then buying one? That would be mega awesome cool.

If you travel through any of the following airports on Memorial Day, go check out our little robot friend

• Chicago (O’Hare)
• Dallas/Fort Worth,
• JFK
• Los Angeles
• Miami
• Newark
• Orlando

Following are the addresses for the stores in alpha order by city.

Here’s a taste of what’s saturating my brain.

• Shit My Cloud Evangelist Says, Just Not to the CSO by Chris Hoff, Juniper Networks
• Foragers, Farmers, Forks & Forgers: On Software, Patronage and Craft Brewing by James Governor, Redmonk
• Using APIs and Infrastructure by John Musser, Programmable Web
• NoSQL Smackdown: Cassandra, MongoDB, and Neo4J by Tim Berglund
• The Badass Beyond Hadoop: Percolator, Dremmel, Pregel by Mike Miller, Clouant

And then it was lunchtime. Breath deeply.

In my last post, I provided a few tips for job candidates when interviewing at a startup.  This week I wanted to cover a simple process for hiring managers to follow when communicating with candidates about salary requirements.

There is the old saying that people spend more time planning their vacation than they spend planning their retirement.  I’ve found the same concept sometimes applies to job candidates when thinking about their compensation requirements.  As the hiring manager, you need to ensure that a candidate has fully considered their compensation needs before you make an offer.  Over the years, I’ve refined a simple and effective approach to facilitating this discussion.  I’ve used this technique countless times with great results.  The process starts with an email to the candidate:

“Dear Candidate,

From a skills and values standpoint, it seems like we are both excited about the possibility of you joining our company.  If you agree, the next step in the process from my perspective is to determine if we are aligned from a compensation standpoint.  As such, it would be helpful to get the following information from you:

- Current compensation.  Please breakout your base salary from any variable compensation if applicable.

- Your view of your current compensation as it relates to your next opportunity.  It is particularly helpful if you provide this feedback by selecting from either

a) I believe I’m fairly compensated and would anticipate making the same salary at my next opportunity

b) I’d be willing to take less for the right opportunity

c) I feel I’m currently under valued and looking for an increase of $x in order to be excited about my next opportunity.

If it works for you, I’d prefer to have this communication via email.  Over time I’ve found that putting this stuff in writing helps people think about it more before responding.

Love,

Chris”

Of course there are no right or wrong answers.  The goal here is simply to get a clear understanding of how the candidate is thinking about their future compensation by using their current compensation as a frame of reference.   Best case, the candidate’s expectations align with yours and the offer moves forward with a high probability of success.  Worst case your expectations don’t align but you now have a thoughtful starting point for negotiations if you still want to move forward with an offer.

A couple of additional points:

1) Even if the candidate has expressed salary requirements during the screening process or during your discussions, I strongly recommend you have this written conversation as the final step before you make an offer.  For example, perhaps your conversations along the way changed their perspective on salary requirements for the position.

2) The key to this approach is to do this communication in writing.  I know it can seem silly or impersonal, but it makes a huge difference in terms of requiring people to give thoughtful answers instead of answering on the spot.

Before using this approach I had more than a few occasions where candidates indicated verbally that they wanted $x, we offered $x, and then they responded with “I was thinking about it more and I really need $y to feel good about joining”.  Once you hit this situation, it puts both parties in an awkward position and it can be hard to recover.  You can avoid this potential pitfall with one simple email.

Oh, by the way, Gnip is hiring!

I’m a huge Eric Ries / Lean Startup fan and believe that the methodology can be quickly taught. What I saw yesterday is further evidence of this – 13 teams spent from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon using the Lean Startup Methodology, the concept of customer development, and the lean startup canvas to go from idea through a series of validated learnings to get to a better idea. It’s not a coding / hacking weekend – it’s an applied process of the Lean Startup Methodology.

The event took place in the Scrib co-working space in downtown Boulder. I hadn’t been there yet so it was a good chance to meet the founders of Scrib, see the space in use, and get a sense of the energy. It was excellent and I expect Scrib will be a great contribution to the Boulder Startup Community for a long time to come.

After we saw 5 minute presentations from each team, the judges sequestered for a while and came up with first and second place. The winner of Lean Startup Machine Boulder was I Want My Bike Back and second place went to Dig Rentals. We came up with fun awards for all of the other teams and there was no doubt in my mind that it was a useful event for everyone.

Lean Startup Machine has a goal of doing 50 events in 2012 and 200 events in 2013. The next ones are in San Francisco (5/25), Toronto (6/8), Rotterdam (Netherlands – 6/8), Los Angeles (6/15), Boston (6/15), and Seattle (6/29). If you are in any of these cities, I encourage you to check it out.

David and I wrote a book last year called Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup and this is his riff to a room full of developers about some of his top tips. Special bonus – see a photo of me in my pajamas at minute 7.

First – an overview on what I’m working on now

I founded MoveableCode back in 2009, initially to do some mobile Augmented Reality research on a National Science Foundation SBIR grant. We quickly learned that we could make cool things but no money and pivoted. Two years later, we are all about innovative mobile entertainment. We have a grand vision to build a kickass company and Incantor is a big part of that.

Post pivot, I’ve been lucky enough to lure in two good friends, Kevin Mowrer and Trivikram Prasad. Kevin used to run all of R&D for Hasbro and founded their entertainment division. He used to be a client of mine. Triv was an engineer at a company I worked for when I first came to the US as a product manager. He went on to lead teams for Intel and Intuit and is now based in Bangalore, India. I’ve known both of them for 15+ years and we immediately clicked as a team. We’ve raised a modest amount of money, just enough to get some proof points and are now getting in to high gear.

Incantor is our vision of what happens when addictive gameplay is combined with immersive, community-driven fantasy. It is built on a simple premise: Magic Made Real. The game unites people, places and things and is played with your smartphone, a magic wand and your friends. The magic wand is a sophisticated bluetooth device and the game is played as a fantasy LARP in the real world.

We made the decision to go the Kickstarter route because we wanted to connect with fans. Community is vitally important to the game and we want to embrace that from day one. There’s nothing quite like it out there… and there are some really cool parts we’re not talking about yet. This is going to be a fun ride… “Do or do not. There is no try.”

Rewind to five years ago

Brad was my first VC man-crush. About five years and a couple of startups ago, I mercilessly tracked him down and he was good enough to meet and hear the pitch for the startup I was with at the time.

To say we were excited was an understatement. This was the guy that we wanted to meet. If he heard our pitch, the infatuation would be instant and we would walk away with a nice big check. We were going to score!

Sadly, I can say with some confidence that it was the worst pitch I have ever given. Everything that could go wrong did. We crashed and burned as badly as possible and Brad and his colleagues were as gracious as they could be. I even made the “oh no you didn’t” mistake of mis-dialing after the meeting and accidentally calling Brad as he went to the airport.

But as an entrepreneur, you move forward by getting up after you fall down. That startup died, but I stayed in contact with Brad and we’ve chatted many times since then.

MoveableCode is my latest startup and it’s been getting some great early traction. He’s now a backer of our Kickstarter project and I couldn’t be more pleased.

As the saying goes… Never give up, never surrender

1. Board members should be actively engaged with the company on a continuous / real time basis.

2. Existing board meeting dynamics are often an artifact of how they’ve been done for the past 30 years.

3. The way most board meetings are currently conducted is a waste of time for management, significantly inefficient, and generally ineffective.

One of the very simple tactical things I’m shifting to is a totally different board rhythm. Historically, many of the companies I’m involved in have been on a board rhythm of meetings every four to six weeks. As they become more mature, these board meetings shift to quarterly, although many of them have mid-quarter update calls. The board meetings themselves are long affairs (even the monthly ones) – often lasting three or more hours.

At some point I’ll dissect one of these board meetings and explain all the things that are artifacts of the past. These artifacts are a result of the communication methods that existed 30+ years ago that required paper and face to face meetings and resulted in very structured communications. But for now, I’ll give you three specific things to change.

1. Separate the monthly financials from the board meeting. Send out monthly financials (Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow) with a written analysis of them. This written analysis should be done by the CEO (or president / COO), not the CFO, and should be in English, not accounting-ese.

2. Have quarterly board meetings. These should be in person meetings with no laptops, smartphones, or iPads in the room. Give the people pads of paper to write on if they don’t bring their own (I don’t carry paper). 100% attention for the meeting. Arrange the meeting so you can have a dinner the night before or after the meeting. The meeting shouldn’t last more than four hours but should be fully engaged.

3. Provide regular weekly CEO updates, to all board members. The best entrepreneurs I know communicate regularly with everyone in the company and have a structured update process of some sort. The best CEOs send out short but focused weekly updates to their boards. These are not “templated updates” – they don’t necessarily fill in a set of things that they update each week. Often they are just a “sit in front of the computer and send out an email update” type of update full of substance, whatever is on the CEO’s mind, and requests for help. My favorites have typos and look like a blog post of mine (e.g. it looks like someone just wrote it rather than struggled over it for hours to get it just right.)

While my 2012 board meeting schedule is locked in, I plan to shift to quarterly meetings in 2013 for every board I’m on. I’m sure some of my co-investors will still want monthly meetings, but that’ll be up to the CEO to ultimately decide and I’ll commit to being in person for one a quarter, but fully engaged on a continuous basis (like I try to always be.)

I’ve never run down Bowery. I’ve done the East River many times and ended up under the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge, but I don’t recall ever seeing them from the top. The Manhattan Bridge totally surprised me – as I approached it I had a sudden flashback to running in Paris around the Arc de Triomphe.

As I was running, I realized that I’ve learned many cities by running them. I used to be terrified of Paris – now I love it – and I attribute that to running all over the city. Rome fascinates me and I can run through it forever, always discovering new things. I’ve figured out how Manhattan works through all of my runs over the years. San Francisco is less of a mystery to me now that I’ve run all around the city. And I’ll never get lost in Boston or Cambridge because I’ve ran the damn thing so many times.

After my run I had breakfast and then walked from the East Village to Times Square in the rain for a meeting. Muggy, damp, soggy, dirty, grimy, splashy, gritty New York. Lots of construction, lots of noise, lots of people. But something magical about it. The perspective on foot is always powerful, at least to me.

I’m on the all@company.com list for a number of the companies I’m on the board of. CEOs and entrepreneurs who practice TAGFEE welcome this. I haven’t universally asked for inclusion on this list mostly because I hadn’t really thought hard about it until recently. But I will now and going forward, although I’ll leave it up to the CEO as to whether or not to include me.

In an effort to better figure out the startup board dynamic, I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of continual communication with board members. The companies I feel most involved in are ones in which I have continual communication and involvement with the company. This isn’t just limited to the CEO, but to all members of the management team and often many other people in the company. Working relationships as well as friendships develop through the interactions.

Instead of being a board member with his arms crossed who shows up at a board meeting every four to eight weeks to ask a bunch on knuckleheaded questions in reaction to what is being presented, I generally know a wide range of what is going on in the companies I’m on the board of. Sure – there are lots of pockets of information I don’t know, but because I’m in the flow of communication, I can easily engage in any topic going on in the company. In addition to being up to speed (or getting up to speed on any issue faster), I have much deeper functional context, as well as emotional context, about what is going on, who is impacted, and what the core issue is.

Every company I’m involved in has a unique culture. Aspects of the culture get played out every day on the all@company.com email list. Sometimes the list is filled with the mundane rhythms of a company (“I’m sick today – not coming in”; “Please don’t forget to put the dishes in the dishwasher.”) Other times it’s filled with celebration (“GONG: Just Closed A Deal With Customer Name.”) Occasionally it’s filled with heartbreak (“Person X just was diagnosed with cancer.”) Yet other times it is a coordination mechanism (“Lunch is at 12:30 at Hapa Sushi.”) And, of course, it’s often filled with substance about a new customer, new product, issue on tech support, competitive threat, or whatever is currently on the CEO’s mind.

As a board member, being on this list makes me feel much more like part of the team. I strongly believe that board members of early stage companies should be active – and supportive – participants. My deep personal philosophy is that as long as I support the CEO, my job is to do whatever the CEO wants me to do to help the company succeed. Having more context, being part of the team, and being in the flow of the all@company.com communication helps immensely with that.

There are three resistance points I commonly hear to this:

1. “I don’t want to overwhelm my board members with emails.” That’s my problem, not yours, and the reason filters were created for people who can’t handle a steady volume of email. If you are a Gmail user, or have conversation view turned on in Outlook, it’s totally mangeable since all the messages thread up into a single conversation. So – don’t worry about me. If your board member says “too much info, please don’t include me”, ponder what he’s really saying and how to best engage him in continuous communication.

2.”I don’t want my board members to see all the things going on in the company.” That’s not very TAGFEE so the next time you say “I try to be transparent and open with my investors”, do a reality check on what you actually mean. Remember, the simplest way not to get tangled up in communication is just to be blunt, open, and honest all the time – that way you never have to figure out what you said. If you don’t believe your board members are mature enough to engage in this level of interaction on a continual basis, reconsider whether they should be on your board.

3. “I’m afraid it will stifle communication within the company.” If this is the case, reconsider your relationship between your board members and your company. Are you anthropomorphizing your board? Are you shifting blame, or responsibility to them (as in “the board made me do this?”) Are you creating, or do you have, a contentious relationship between your team and the board? All of these things are problems and lead to ineffective board / company / CEO interactions so use that as a signal that something is wrong in relationship.

Notice that I didn’t say “all investors” – I explicitly said board members. As in my post recently about board observers, I believe that board members have a very specific responsibility to the company that is unique and not shared by “board observers” or other investors. There are plenty of other communication mechanisms for these folks. But, for board members, add them to you all@company.com list today.