Dustin Curtis asked me to join his Svbtle Network, and I accepted. For the near future, I will be posting over there at Learntoduck.net. Go check out my first post, Your Early Adopters Don’t Matter.

So, I figured a-bloggin’ I would go.

I get asked this question a lot. In the explosion of startup accelerators, it makes sense. Raising money is hard. Really hard. Doesn’t matter what the tech news blogs say, its hard.

Especially if you aren’t in New York or San Francisco.

As a young entrepreneur, applying to YC or Techstars or 500startups or <insert 1000 other accelerators here> looks like free money. If you can get it. Thats really hard too. Well for some of the accelerators. For others, its super easy.

Oh, and mentors, lots and lots of mentors. Some great; some not so good. Some are dicks; some are super cool.

Space to work, a group of other companies to work with, and the ability to join a network of founders that understand the difficulties that you face.

So why wouldn’t you join an accelerator?

The most common comment I hear is age. Yes, there is a belief that accelerators are for the young. And, more so, for the inexperienced.

Often, you hear Techstars and the rest counter with the founders “of age” that have been successful in the program. Good selling strategy, right?

Here are the facts about an accelerator:

• Being forced to work around companies that are doing an insane amount of work and having to validate that work with the accelerator staff and mentors is probably the single most amazing reality about membership in the accelerator club. Its impossible to replicate this in any coffee shop, co-working space or basement.
• Being held accountable not only by your peers, but by potential investors, is a great litmus test for your ability as a founder to deal with the roller coaster of startupland.
• Having access to mentors drives critical and creative thought in a way that is impossible outside of the accelerator dynamic. Even though that creativity and constructive criticism is overwhelming and not always creative or constructive.
• It is easier to raise money if you have been through a well-regarded accelerator like Techstars, 500 or YC. Its impossible to raise money later if you don’t raise at, around, or just after demo day. Take too long, and your shine wears off.
• Getting into YC, Techstars, 500, etc. is not like getting into a fraternity/college. Its not fucking party time. Its work time. The Bloomberg “reality” show was bullshit. Don’t believe the hype. Its work or die. And as friendly as the other companies are, they will gladly see you die in order to win. (Yes, I am being bombastic. But, in every single class, there are a couple of “favorites” that do extremely well, and then everyone else. Everyone wants to be the favorite, after all, everyone is a Type A. Don’t lose sight of that reality.)
• Some companies are just not made for accelerators. You might not be thinking big enough. Your concept may be outside of the comfort zone of the accelerator’s staff and mentors. There are many reasons why your company just doesn’t fit within the accelerator framework. Its not the accelerators fault.
• If you are worried about the equity you have to give up to the accelerator as part of the program, then don’t go. Seriously, don’t go.

Bottom line. Should you do an accelerator?

Maybe. It’s really your decision. Techstars Boulder’s deadline is 3/16/12. Get on it.

But, if you get in, and decide to do it, then do it 120%. Work harder than everyone else. Push yourself and your team. Become great. Don’t be one of the forgotten companies.

And if you decide that you don’t need an accelerator, well then, thats cool too. Prove to the world that you don’t.

I was going to write a long post (and now that I have started writing, I will probably end up being long-winded) about how, as an entrepreneur, you have to cut through the positive feedback to truly get the important data points.

But I kinda covered it. Dontcha love it?

This past week I have had several conversations with various entrepreneurs about how things were going with their startups.

“We got so much great feedback! Everyone loved it!” exclaimed the founder.

“Really? When have you ever had someone tell you to your face that your product sucks?”

“You do it all the time.”

“Yeah, but Im a dick.”

I hate when entrepreneurs go to events where they demo their product. Or even SXSW where they are meeting people in a party situation and showing what they are working on.

Because everyone lies.

Think about it. They are going to either know you for :60 seconds and have no desire for that interaction to include you thinking they are mean, or you will run into them a hundred more times, and who wants to make those interactions uncomfortable?

The world is full of false positivity, especially the supportive kind, that in truth, is just the opposite.

It all started with our moms.

“Don’t say anything if you can’t say something nice.”

Damn it, mom.

I pride myself on being honest. The other day a friend said to me, “Micah, thats a kind thing to say.”

“Its not kind. Its honest. Sometimes, honesty is also kind.”

As an entrepreneur, critically listen to everything that is told to you. Look for commonalities and contradictions as data points. The commonalities show how most people see your product, and the contradictions show potential UI issues.

And, more importantly, don’t listen to people give you design feedback. Its pretty and its ugly are subjective. And if design, at its core, is all about usability, spend effort on understanding people’s ability to do, understand and act and less about how much the like your fonts and color schemes.

Which brings us to investors. Investors, as a rule, hate to say no. And even when they do, its with minimal data points. Treat it as just that. A no. Move on. Seriously. Shush. Don’t say it. No, if X was different, they would have said yes. Whats the X? Don’t know? Move on.

Entrepreneurship is changing how we do business and engage with people, but the fundamental need to be liked hasn’t changed.

Help me be a better entrepreneur, and solve big problems with interesting solutions.

You can keep your I love yous and false positivity.

you didnt just say that did you?

Actually, I did. And I hear it from entrepreneurs at least twice a week.

But its not true.

Over the past couple of weeks, along with reading two great articles on venture: Francisco Dao over on PandoDaily talking about the talent economy and Joe Stump’s great post on whether you should raise money or not, I have had no less than 6 conversations with various entrepreneurs whose companies are in the process of raising money.

Its easy to view VCs as opportunistic, money driven old white men who see the vast amount of product and company ideas coming out of the brains of nubile hackers and hustlers as fertile ground. They trade money for equity. As soon as the going gets tough, they focus on the companies in their portfolio that are doing well, they invest only in companies that are talked about on Techcrunch, blah blah blah.

Is that true? For some, yes. Does it make VCs dicks? no.

Its important that as an entrepreneur if you decide to raise money (and I counsel most founders to not raise money for as long as they can) that you understand the dynamic of how venture works. Francisco says it best:

In Silicon Valley, we take venture capital for granted but few people realize what a fundamental shift it represented in the relationship between capital and labor. Since the dawn of capitalism and the industrial revolution, the balance of power has overwhelmingly favored those who controlled the capital. Labor, and all talent associated with it, was beholden to those who owned the factories. The introduction of venture capital essentially reversed these roles with capital now chasing talent. It is difficult to understate what a dramatic change this was. Instead of capital (the means of production) acquiring talent, Silicon Valley runs on the basis of talent acquiring capital.

As the talent, you hold the power. Initially, the only power the VC wields is saving you from living in a box and stealing wifi from the Starbucks on the corner, and by selling a piece of your business to venture firm, you are required to do only one thing: build your business as fast and as big as you can, so that in some reasonable time frame (say, around 5 years), you can experience a liquidity event that makes the initial investment worthwhile for the VC.

And thats when the perception of the VC as a dick arises. Now, the VC’s job is to get you to not think small. To provide insight, connections, and even direction, to push you to grow your company fast. (This is sometimes the same deal with angels, but most often not).

Now, many VCs reading this post, will start disagreeing with that point, while many entrepreneurs will agree.

Its this fundamental disconnect in perception that is the primary reason for friction between VCs and entrepreneurs, even in a successful business.

Brad Feld, a VC, who’s method I believe in, was quoted in a Boston Globe article about Google Ventures:

“VCs love to talk about the ‘value they add’ while trying to exercise control over companies from the top down…’’

Do I believe that VCs are dicks? That their goals are not in-line with the goals of the founders?

No.

I believe that its imperative for the entrepreneur to understand the dynamics of the VC/CEO relationship and define it early on in the lifecycle of the business. Its your business after all. You hire everyone — including your investors — so have the same high bar for everyone involved in the business.

For young entrepreneurs, there are three distinct moments of joy when starting a company: 1) getting other people to believe in your vision and come work with you; 2) getting people to give you money; 3) your first user.

In each case ill-defined communication interaction will make you believe this:

1) your employees are dicks;

2) your investors are dicks;

3) your users are dicks.

When, in truth, you are the dick.

Understand and own every stage of your business and the people the business engages. It may not guarantee success, but it will remove you as the reason for its failure.

Its in the DNA of the Hustler to work towards getting a ‘yes.’ Its what drives them. Getting users, investors, partners and the like to say yes to their vision and passion is the penultimate effort for a Hustler.

For most, it creates the appearance of a lack of focus (for some) and a complete lack of focus (for others).

This is the primary rub between Hackers and Hustlers and the #1 reason that founders divorce. Hackers demand focus. Hustlers demand ‘yeses,’ which, by definition, require a high level of flexibility which leads to a lack of focus.

I am a Hustler. Yes, a Hustler with a capital H. And because of that, my #1 fault is my apparent inability to realize when I am being unfocused.

I love the word yes. Who doesnt?

Hackers.

Yes means work. Yes means shifting priorities. Yes means roadmap adjustments. Yes means late nights and frustration. Yes means a loss of faith.

I hate the word no. Passionately hate it. It doesn’t compute. How can we become a better company because people are saying no. When I raised my Series A, 37 potential investors said no.

That’s more than enough no to last me a lifetime.

No.

About eight months ago, I realized this very dynamic. To help a Hacker be successful, they need the space to focus on problems and solutions, and to do that, everything that is not core to that mission has to be thrown away.

The Hustler has to learn to say no, and by doing that gives the Hacker the ability to build awesome things, because they arent spending time in meetings or thinking about how to “just make it work,” or make “that deal that is going to make the company” work.

They are just building.

Eight months ago, I started to force myself to say No multiple times per day. I started with my dogs. And, yes, those punks didnt listen, but at least I learned I could say the word and not feel bad.

Then I took our product roadmap, and every time an idea or potential deal was brought to the table, I weighed it against that roadmap, and as a default, I said No.

No. Not right now. And the quality of our product and the speed at which it was developed – and more importantly, the ease at which its selling – has accelerated.

The power of no.

Saying no for the Hustler is a learned skill. It seems like a simple thing, but its really the antithesis of a Hustler’s core value.

Does that mean a Hacker should learn to say yes?

No.

“Hey you! If you are an accredited investor, show you love a member of 500startups by investing a small amount. Trust me even $5 or $10k can make a huge difference and you should do it.”

After reading what Dave has said in person many, many times, I smiled and went back to watching Glee. (Ricky Martin was on! That man has amazing teeth.)

Over the course of the next several hours, there was quite a debate about if it was right to expect mentors to invest in the member companies of the accelerators in which they are mentoring.

I remember a conversation I had with David Cohen of Techstars. He asked me, as a mentor, what did I expect in return. I said, a nice meal where I learned more about how the program was doing, and what the incoming class looked like. Quizzically, he asked if I expected equity in the companies in which I mentored.

“Expect? No. If the founder believes I have value to provide past Techstars, then I am happy to discuss it with them.” I replied.

There is a fine line in the world of accelerators, and part of the problem lies in how people define the roles of folks circling about, and part of the problem lies in the motivations of those same folks.

So, before we dive into that, lets pretend to be legal-like, and lay down some definitions.

Company: a company that is a member of the current class of an accelerator. Specifically, they have given up some amount of equity in return for some amount of cash and access to the program and network provided by the accelerator.

Mentor: a person who provides time, expertise and connections to a Company and is pre-selected and filtered by the accelerator. Generally, there is no remuneration by the accelerator for providing these services to its member Companies.

Advisor: a person who provides, time, expertise and connections to a startup (who may or may not be a Company) and is NOT pre-selected and filtered by the accelerator. Usually there is a form of payment in terms of equity or cash.

Investor: a person or institution that provides cash in return for equity in a startup.

Usually the progression of roles are that someone is a Mentor to a company, then becomes an Advisor or Investor, but that is not required or (usually) expected.

An Investor can (sometimes) serve as an Advisor, but usually once money enters the mix has very different goals than a Mentor and/or Advisor who is not an Investor.

Sigh. See the confusion?

Companies that enter accelerators do it for two reasons: raising money and building a network. Yes, there are immediate benefits to the insane amount of time spent working accelerating your business; and the mentorship is great in terms of getting feedback and direction (although “mentor whiplash” is real, and I have seen many founder get crushed by it.)

Companies select mentors often based on the ability of that mentor to help the startup achieve their goal of raising money or building a network. Therefore, its often easiest if the mentor invests money (creating a positive signal given their closeness to the project), and convinces their network to also invest. (The “hot” startups often don’t need mentors to invest, and often, unfortunately, are dicks about creating space in their rounds or bringing mentors on as advisors because they are drunk with attention.)

Long winded…but that should put us on the same footing.

So, here is the question. Should mentors feel a requirement to invest?

I strongly believe that if people become mentors because they are interested in increasing deal flow and perhaps “getting in early” on a promising Company, then those people are dicks, and should not be part of the accelerator ecosystem as Mentors (as Advisors or Investors, sure…)

If an accelerator is too heavy handed with their expectation that mentors become investors, then, frankly, that accelerator is scummy. At best. (To be fair, this was not what Dave was doing. He was being very passionate about two things he is fanatical about: the companies he invests in, and the importance of angel investing to a startup ecosystem.)

Every time I get asked to be a mentor for a program, they ask if I expect something. I always say the same thing: “I expect the companies that take full advantage of the program to achieve their goals more readily than those that come in with messed up expectations. Im happy if the companies I work with crush it. And if all I get out of that is a “hey dude, thanks” email, Im cool with that.”

I’m also very particular about the startups and founders I get passionate about, because I want them to succeed and will do whatever I can to help that happen. This is not unique to me, in fact, most of the mentors that I meet that completely blow me away have similar goals in mind.

As a mentor should I invest in the companies I mentor?

Yes. I should.

[side note: One shouldn't/can't invest in a ventured backed company -- one that issues shares -- unless you are "accredited," or in rare cases "sophisticated." Accredited means you have a net worth over $1mm and sophisticated is that you don't have a net worth of more than $1mm, but you understand all the risks, etc. If you are a company that is accepting investments from unaccredited, non sophisticated investors, you are creating a potentially huge problem later down the line in due diligence for a merger, acquisition or IPO.]

It is really that simple. Folks that want to become mentors do it because they want to see the companies succeed, and one way to help the company succeed is by investing in them.

What if that amount is nominal? $5k, $10k?

Its still meaningful in both signaling other investors that the company is worthy of larger investment, and shows the founder that you weren’t just spending time out of obligation, but out of excitement and support.

But here is where it gets tricky…investors should not mentor. Mentors should invest. When being a mentor, the values and goals of the mentor mentality should supersede the goals and desires of the investor. Take off your investor hat when determining which companies to work with, and equally important, companies take off your “I need investment” hat when selecting mentors.

One of the things I like about 500startups being a fund and accelerator with a really blurry line between the two is that all the companies that are in the accelerator start on equal footing. Some of the other accelerators that have a fund associated (loosely or otherwise) create a different dynamic because of it. I also like that the “Sith Lord” of 500startups is so passionate about getting all of his companies funding.

What I don’t like is that the basic premise of the accelerator and the mentor/advisor/investor has gotten so screwed up that in the end, the companies are hurt by their inexperience with dealing with each type. It is imperative for the accelerator to educate their companies on the roles and expectations of mentors, advisors and investors, and for mentors to mentor, advisors to advise and investors to invest. The clearer the role definitions the more value the company gets from the accelerator and the startup ecosystem is continually improved.

Wait, no I shouldn’t.

Entrepreneurs are the most hopeful people on the planet. They all start something with the hope that it will be “the next Facebook” or will be as important as Netscape, or maybe will become a billion dollar company with minimal social value like Groupon.

We believe in ourselves so much, that when someone else doesn’t believe in us, we are flabbergasted.

So entrepreneurs apologize. They apologize for broken code; they apologize for bad UI; they apologize for getting funded (or not). They apologize for screwing users (accidentally) and then for being slow to correct it.

Stop apologizing; start being honest.

We color numbers, and listen to investors way too much.

Entrepreneurs are pussies.

Its the same with products and features. Time and time again, I will talk with an entrepreneur about his product, and he will continue to extoll how awesome a feature or product is.

“How many people are using it?”

“Well, we are in beta, so not many, but its going to be huge!”

“You’ve been in beta for a year. How many people are using it?”

“Have you seen how well designed it is! Apple will totally feature our app because of its design!”

“Stop being a pussy. Kill the stupid feature.”

We hang on to things too long, we continue to employ folks that add no value, or worse are roadblocks because we don’t want to fire someone who has done so much for the company.

Entrepreneurs confuse activity for achievement. Working hard is not working well. We drink tons of Red Bull, stay up late, write missives on our blogs (wait…I resemble that remark!) or develop a cool side project that kinda is something that we might use at some point in the future.

Just stop it.

Its your company. Its your time, and future, and blood, sweat and tears. Its time for you, as an entrepreneur to stop apologizing for the short comings of your product (which may appear as shit taking about other startups. Yeah, I know, and you know that your “critique” of other startups is only a defensive mechanism to make you feel better about your companies short comings.)

Own it. Your company is your company. Not your investors, or friends, or users or Techcrunch’s.

Own your decisions. They are your’s to make. Make them and live with the consequences.

Own your future. Find what makes your business tick and focus on that and only that. Everything else is distraction.

And, most importantly, stop being a pussy.

Fuck yes.

(Just making sure…)

The past few weeks have been really interesting at Graphicly. We have achieved product/market fit, our new product launch has been overwhelming, and there is a clear direction and focus in the company. Revenue is doubling week over week, and our internal mantra has gotten equally clear.

“You are either building, selling or leaving.”

So much has be made of “vanity metrics” and our apparent love affair with them. As entrepreneurs, we are told by the media, investors, and other entrepreneurs that whats cool isn’t $1 million but $1 billion. That Instagram is AMAZING and their 15million plus users are the reason why.

How can we not buy into the importance of vanity metrics, when it seems that the ONLY THING THAT PEOPLE CARE ABOUT is vanity metrics?

Fuck it.

For a company to be successful there are literally only two functions the company has to perfect. Building and Selling. Thats it. Metrics and analytics are only the score card, the reporting mechanism to determine if what you are building will sell, and what you are selling is worth building.

Last rant on this point: Find a metric that is truly indicative of what makes your business go. It may be a vanity metric like page views, or something more interesting like reads/user, photo filters per session, or times my mom shares my baby pictures on Facebook. Find it and love it. Throw out all other charts and graphs. Put ONE FUCKING SLIDE in your board deck/presentation and tell your shareholders if that number is going up or down and why. Any other metric just makes it easier for your investors and employees to tell their friends why the company they are a part of is cool in a dumbed down fashion so others can understand. But DONT CARE about those numbers.

Care ONLY about the metric that proves that you are building something worth selling, and selling something worth building.

Now, about sales.

Both Brad and Mark have written about Grinfucking. Its an epidemic. No one wants to be the bad guy. The working stiff dreams of being involved in that super cool startup with the sick lounge. When he gets pitched by that startup founder in the flannel shirt and Warby Parker glasses, Toms shoes and Charity:Water rubber bracelet on a cool new technology and he doesn’t understand it, then he is full of FEAR THAT HE IS AN IDIOT.

Which makes the awful, awful truth that the prospect will never say no.

Your goal as an untested, unknown founder, who has a product to sell that NO ONE CARES about is to find what about your product makes your users lives better. Read that again. Thats not a feature. Thats not a price. Thats a feeling. Better is a feeling. Sell the feeling.

For enterprise its 99% of the time that you are making your prospect look good to his/her boss. Thats it. Focus on that.

For consumer its 99% of the ego or time. People want to be part of something amazing, or want something to help them become amazing. At Graphicly, we consider our “Content Empowerment Platform” an easy button for authors and publishers. They want their stories seen. We make it so. Its amazing and it helps each one of them show the world how amazing they are. It makes their lives better. It makes them happy. (I hope.)

Instagram makes people happy. Its not the number of users, but the amount of engagement that is what makes them awesome.

Stop getting excited by the “maybes” and “lets have another meeting” responses you get to your product. IT MEANS YOUR PRODUCT SUCKS.

Budgets, approvals, etc are all excuses as to why they don’t want to buy, but don’t want to say no.

If it takes more than a simple presentation of your value to a prospect to get to a verbal yes, YOUR PRODUCT SUCKS. (Ok, maybe you SUCK as a salesperson. But sales isn’t hard if you are a founder. You are just making it hard.)

Get to an answer.

Build, Sell or Leave. It IS THAT EASY.

Finally, about revenue.

In todays funding climate, if you are not thinking about your business in terms of speed to self-sustaining revenue, you are a moron. Seed rounds are, and will continue to be, relatively easy to raise (sub $1mm). Series A investors are now looking for real businesses with real potential. Call it a crunch, call it Jennifer, doesn’t FUCKING MATTER if you don’t have a real business, because you will be called DEAD.

Have a real path to revenue. Test that path immediately. Ensure that its a real path, with the real ability to simplify sales, and go that way. You never want to get in the car, see the path you need to travel, press on the gas and find the tank empty without a gas station in sight.

Just Fucking sell. Your company depends on it.

Apple is going to change education!

Apple is going to destroy publishing!

(Interesting that no one really said “Apple is going to sell more iPads!” but we live in a world that hopes that everyone leans towards doing good for goods sake.)

Did it happen? Did the world turn upside down causing the worlds publishers to weep?

No.

Apple’s move into the education market is an important one. This year, for the first time ever, Amazon sold more digital books than print books. Print, for lack of a better word, is dying. People are still buying books, in fact some could argue that more books in total are sold — the diversity of purchases has increased (as defined by the total number of titles), even while the sales of printed books has slowed.

At lunch with Ron we talked about how the science fiction of our youth was actually coming true. Cable has passed its usefulness; people are watching TV in 3D, and the government is still run by troglodytes that believe the can control the flow of communication and information. (One would think they saw the Christian Slater film Pump Up the Volume…). Technology is no longer a “thing” to marvel and discuss, it just is.

Publishing is probably the last bastion of old school media that digital is disrupting. With low(ish) price points and the amazing smell and feel of paper, and the romanticism we still attach to the printed word, it seemed that digital was almost an after thought.

Amazon, with its Kindle, began to widen the crack in the wall, and now with Apple’s ebook Authoring tools, the walls have fallen down.

Or have they?

We all love the interactivity of tablet based books, and the application for text books is clear, but its not as simple as that.

Currently there are more than 30 different marketplaces that an author could distribute their work digitally — if they own the digital rights that is. Most markets have wildly different file formats, so that building for one certainly doesn’t work as well for another — especially if the book is any other than flowing text. Most markets have different payment terms, revenue splits and requirements, rights requirements, and thats just if you are writing a flowing text-based book.

You want to do a fixed format children’s book? A graphic novel? An illustrated novel? Cookbook?

You’re screwed.

Apple’s authoring tool comes with another kicker — if you build a book in their authoring tool, and IF you can get it to work on another marketplace, you legally can’t distribute through the other marketplace without a financial arrangement with Apple.

Yup. You read that right.

Im not going to spend much time on that, Paul Carr over at PandoDaily (great work Sarah!) does a great job of writing about it, and I agree with his assessment.

Being an independent author or publisher has just gotten more messy, rather than less.

I am excited that Apple has entered the eBook space, especially the education space, as I know it will do wonders for readers.

But, there is something wonderful about a book. There is something beautiful about being able to read that book (on any device), in any way you want, and hopefully, one day this gigantic mess of rights, distribution, file formats, etc. will be cleared up.

At each meeting, I asked the same question, “What do you think of digital?”

And each one answered the same.

“There are more people pirating my comic books than there are buying them. Perhaps as high as 5 to 10 times.”

The comic book industry, which saw its heyday in the 1990s, when highly successful books would sell in the hundreds of thousands, is now ecstatic if a book sells even fifty thousand.

Online piracy has absolutely decimated the industry.

How bad is it?

Comic books come out every Wednesday. By the time I wake up in California, I can already download most of the books that came out earlier that day on the East Coast.

Its not the big guys, Marvel and DC that get squeezed. It not even the little guys–although most will never see a publisher print their book–that are getting smashed, its the publishers in the middle like Image Comics and Archaia that are feeling the vast weight of piracy the most.

Piracy, on many levels, is helping to drive more market share to the top guys, Marvel and DC (both backed my billion dollar companies that aren’t as sensitive to the success of individual books or creative teams), and eliminating the necessary diversity required to ensure a healthy industry.

As Graphicly has grown, we have seen it time and time again. Small and mid-sized publishers struggling for consumer awareness and acceptance in a world dominated by Spiderman and Batman. As diversity dies, so does the ability for the industry to sustain growth.

Every once in awhile a great story like The Walking Dead will break out, but thats not the norm. Interestingly enough, I would say that the pressure piracy places on the mid-tier publisher has actually driven them to become more creative in order to rise out of the shadows of the big guys, but its not easy.

There is no other way to say it, but that piracy is probably the biggest single digital issue facing the comic book industry.

But SOPA and PIPA are not the saviors that “old media” companies hope it will be.

Giving the government carte blanche to censor sites and control the flow of information will cause more damage, deeper damage, long lasting damage to the industry that I have grown to love. The publishers and creators that Graphicly works to support will be hurt in ways that I personally, cannot be a part of.

There are better ways to end piracy. We can improve access. We can develop a platform that allows publishers and creators to be as creative with the distribution, pricing and promotion of their work as they are with the stories themselves. We can help fans discover great stories easily, simply — no more difficult than clicking on a link — removing the burden of surfacing great content.

We can help connect publishers and creators directly to their fans — and believe you me, pirates are some of the biggest fans in existence, as crazy as that might sound — so that those fans can show their support directly to the stories and creators they love.

On January 18, my blog will be censored. I personally am standing next to many of my friends, mentors and colleagues by doing this.

I have also decided to not blackout Graphicly.com.

I made this decision, because we have thousands of creators and publishers that are making real money distributing their stories in a “new media” style, that it would be wrong to deny that. And, more importantly, the access and discovery it provides to great stories are paramount in the fight against piracy, even if “old media” doesn’t understand it.

I am ardently apolitical, yet stopping SOPA and PIPA is exceedingly important, so important, that I have written about politics for the first time ever in the several years this blog has existed.

I want piracy to end.

I want all the story-tellers that should be discovered to be found. I want them to get paid, and I want their fans to get unending enjoyment out of supporting their work.

But, I won’t stand for censorship.

“Excited to turn the Doomsday Clock back a minute?”

The Doomsday Clock was invented in 1947 during the Cold War. Set at seven minutes to midnight, it represented how close the world was to global thermonuclear war.

Seven minutes in 1943. A high of 5 minutes in 1984. A low of 17 minutes in 1991. Currently, as of 2010, we are at 6 minutes.

A cold, numeric, non-emotional reminder that as a world we are always that close to complete and total destruction.

(whew. thats pretty emo.)

So many of the founders that I work with and speak to see the financing event as the penultimate indication of success. Its nothing more than the purchase of a lottery ticket (perhaps with a bit of inside knowledge).

Investment lets us turn that Doomsday Clock back a minute. It gives us the time needed to build a business.

The truth is that all startups are dying the moment they are birthed, and its our responsibility to do whatever in our power we can to keep them alive for just another day.

If I have learned anything in the decades I have been involved with startups is that you should apply a Doomsday Clock to everything. Products, people, partners, business plans. Everything. Nothing should be spared; everything should move that Doomsday Clock back a minute.

Imagine if before you signed a partnership deal; started building a product; hired a person, you simply said: “The Doomsday Clock hits midnight if X happens. As long as this partner, person, product doesn’t do that, its a benefit to the company. Push the minute in the wrong direction, and make a change.

Is that evil? Kinda mean? Maybe, but your world, your startup is hurtling towards total global thermonuclear destruction. Perhaps you should do everything you can to stop that.  Maybe.

Even on the grandest stage, time is the greatest gift you can give.

Six minutes to midnight.

Perhaps you should stop caring about raising money, and find new ways to turn that hand back. Understanding and treating fund raising as a distraction as to what is important is the first step.

Build a sustainable business. Or…

Boom.

Storytelling resonates with me more strongly than any other single sociological/community building concept.

Think about it. The first written communication was a story.

Pictures of deers and hunters with oversized spears (even then, we men exaggerated), running through trees and mountains.

We learn about our world through stories.

Stories are told each night on the news, and people make trillions and trillions of dollars, if the stories are told in just the right way.

I saw the movie Hugo this afternoon, and it was really a story about telling stories. It was about the heartbreak felt by a man, who no longer felt his stories were being heard, yet they were captured in the dreams of a young boy who struggled to find his place in a world that didn’t want him.

Story telling is an art. Its an amazing talent when its coupled with the desire to provide value, real value through the tale itself.

Yet, stories have a dark side, and not just around the campfire, but when we believe that the story is more important than the truth.

The world has been lying to us about what its like to be an entrepreneur.

What do you mean that Zuckerberg and friends worked 24 hours a day for months and months in a smelly small space filled with nothing but nerds? Where was JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE DAMMIT!

We have decoupled the story teller from the story, and apply value to each separately.

I see it happen all the time with entrepreneurs, who believe in “what a founder is” and how “an entrepreneur should act,” that they forget their primary purpose is to build a company and make decisions regardless of the prettiness of the action (or reaction), but based in the righteousness of the conclusion.

Raising money is not the story. It is a step.

Getting press is not the story. It is a step.

You are not the story. You are the shoulders on which your startup should stand for all to see.

Take a moment and think to yourself, what is the story you are telling? What do your employees, investors, customers think of your story?

If your story is not telling the world that your company is 1) adding enormous value; or 2) that it has a deep belief in its mission, then perhaps you are telling the wrong story.

And, most importantly, if you are letting others (including the tech press) dictate what your story should be, you are fucked.

The story of your company should capture the dreams of your users, employees and investors, and I can guarantee that none of them are dreaming about you.

When I was a kid living in Mountain View (532 Thompson Avenue!) a rather large, but old tree fell down in our backyard during a storm.

“Geez, Dad, how are you going to get rid of that tree?”

“Remember that bike you wanted, Micah?”

“Of course”

Ive been wanting a multiple gear bike for months, constantly annoying my parents with pictures, magazine articles, strategic walks through the mall, basically anything I could do to get them to take a gawd damn hint.

“Then you’ll be getting rid of the tree.”

My grandmother was visiting from Albion, Michigan, and I turned to her and used the biggest “woah is me” look I could muster.

“Don’t worry about it, Micah,” she assured me in that special Grandmother way, and headed out of the house with my mom.

A couple of hours later, my grandmother returned, and I bounced up from the couch.

“Hey Grandma!”

“Here, Micah, I got you a gift!”

My excitement quickly waned as she pulled a bow saw out of a bag.

“With this, you will make quick work of that tree.”

With that stupid, gigantic tree sitting between me and the bike that I was destined to ride, I hung my head and walked into the backyard, and for the next three weeks cut branches into three foot logs with a bow saw from Sears. Finally, my dad brought out his chain saw and cut up the rest of the tree (lesson I learned? Those with the right tools for the job like to give those without “life lessons.”)

It was then that I decided that having other people do the work rocked, and in every business I ran afterwards, the first thing I did was hire strategically. (The best example of this? High school when I started a pool cleaning business I hired the star football and baseball players. Lets just say I had a very fine high school experience.)

Then as I started to work at larger companies I started to see a trend. Have a problem? Hire a person. Problem goes away? Fire the person. When I was at Kozmo.com, I hired 5 folks to help run our launch marketing. We killed it. Our output was 50-75x of any other city. Yet, once we smashed our goals, I was asked to lay off those 5 people.

Later, when I explored the idea of buying a bar (Running a neighborhood bar has always been a dream of mine), I was talking to someone who had 5-7 bars in the Denver area.

“People are cheap,” he said. “Food is expensive.” He explained that the number one downfall of a bar was serving food. Food goes bad. You can always hire more people.

Over time, as the businesses I built got bigger, and the need for employees grew, it became clear that it was good business practice to understand that people — “head count,” was to be viewed financially and strategically as a renewable resource.

I hate it.

Yes, finding good employees (read: productive — does culture fit really matter? yes. sort of. Have an amazing engineer that has to poop in his own house, so he won’t travel more than 3 days? Betcha make sure he is always close to his own toilet) is hard. Amazingly hard. So hard that an entire recruiting industry has grown up around solving that problem. Companies like BetterWorks exist to help solve that problem. Its a problem. I get it.

But on a balance sheet, employees are no more or less valuable than the rent you pay, and to truly be an effective leader, you have to understand and accept that.

Its why I hate employees.

Know a very common solution to extending your runway? Lay offs.

Know what most corporations do to protect themselves during bad economic times? Lay offs.

An entire industry has grown up around THAT.

By the way, the department of human resources tells you IN ITS NAME what corporations think of their people.

When we started Graphicly, I swore that we wouldn’t run the company by seeing our employees as human resources. I demanded it of myself.

And we don’t.

Have we fired / laid people off? Yes. Its a function of business optimization, and with startups, its often the by-product of pivoting. (Love to pivot? Better love to fire people too.)

We don’t have some ridiculous program or hidden insight, and, frankly, I don’t know if we even get it right.

What we have instituted is a very healthy sense of respect for and belief in each other, and a very open communication path.

Does that mean that we hang out, high five each other and discuss world affairs? Not every day… :)

It means that we respect that we each have ideas, a life, a work style, a high level of ability and an amazing focus on being productive. It means that we ask each other how things are going…and mean it. We treat our little company as a part of the large community we are fostering, and extend the same respect and open communication to that community.

For Graphicly to succeed, it can’t have employees that are building a company; We are just part of a larger community of artists and storytellers that is built on respect and communication.

I hate employees. I hate that we have to hire people who’s tenure with the company is based on the success and direction of the business. Its antiseptic and the opposite of how we as people build communities.

Graphicly stands on the edge of 2012 looking into a future that is filled with amazing tales spun with breath taking art, and as we help creators and publishers get their stories seen the world becomes just a little bit more rad.

We’re looking to build our team. Shoot me an email if you believe you have the technical, product or design skills to build and design the tools that make that world a reality and want join our effort.

tl;dr: Come build cool shit, own your own success, and make the world rad.

Focus is my enemy. We battle daily. Every time I think I’ve won, someone tells me that they wish I was better at being focused.

I hate Focus. Focus is for fools. I don’t understand its importance. I hate that its something I have trouble doing. Fuck focus in its stoopid head. I can’t write lists. GTD means nothing to me. I can’t use to-do lists, no matter how awesome they are designed.

But, I finally hacked focus. Ive won.

Here’s how I did it.

1) Using Merlin Mann’s (10+2)*5 hack (Figured if sprints could work in product development, then it can work in my battle with Focus.)

2) Downloaded Concentrate – set up some solid actions around: writing, email, and other fun and exciting activities. (Its funny that music is included in all of my activities)

3) Downloaded Howler Pro – and looped two timers (one for 10min and another for 5min) and run them

BOOM goes the Focus.

Now I challenge myself to do 10min sprints with high degrees of focus. Will I skip breaks? Probably if I get into something fun, but so far, the forced need to take 5 min has been awesome.

Hope it helps.

Oh, and check this article out on structured procrastination. When you have 5 min.

Well, not right now.

Right now, I am doing what I have done every day since I was ten years old. Im sitting in front of a computer banging on the keyboard.

When I was twelve I started participating and hosting BBSes. Standard story of the early 1980s Silicon Valley. I was never a hacker. With or without a Z. I certainly wasn’t 1337, although I did text 80085 a lot.

When I was interviewing at ServiceMagic, I sat down with Rodney Rice (who is still one of the most important mentors I have ever had).

“Why is the internet important?” Rodney challenged me. (If you know Rodney, there was no other way to describe Rodney’s style than one of a constant state of challenge.)

I spent a long pause thinking about it. I thought about my time on the BBSes. The times I sat in front of the Main Frame in my Dad’s office at Stanford. I thought about being the first non-computer science major to have an email address at UCDavis.

“The internet…” I stalled. I thought about how amazed I was using Netscape for the first time and the world it opened up for me.

“The internet facilitates communication and speed information sharing.”

“Exactly,” Rodney smiled. “Exactly.”

Im actually not even close to dead. At least I hope not.

The past year has been an enormous one. For the world things have changed. Really, actually changed.

It feels that we have reached the point where communication and information can’t move faster. They can be optimized and the processes for communicating and information sending and retrieval can be simplified.

And, more amazingly, the breaking down of the communication/information barrier has driven up the demand for transparency. Be transparent; Be real. Its a responsibility, not a right!

That transparency has changed the world. And continues to change it.

But that transparency has also brought to light something that has always existed by like communication and information has been accelerated. Depression.

This year, we had the death of a young entrepreneur. My friend Ben wrote about his thoughts of suicide. Conversations were had, posts written, tweets sent.

But, as the amount of information and communication shared grows, our attention spans decrease. Our mental capacity for data hasn’t grown with the speed of the internet.

Earlier today I read a post my friend Jeffrey wrote in 2008, about how living with a potentially deadly condition has shaped how he looks at life, and tonight I read a post by my friend Dustin. He remarked about how he read a post written by a woman who died from cancer. Her last post.

So I walked in from outside, sat down at my computer as I had done every day for the past 10,950, and decided I would write my last post.

Im not dying of cancer. To the best of my knowledge, I am not dying.

But I wish I would every day.

Well, thats a bit harsh.

I think about what would happen if I died every day. Not in a responsible, how would I handle my affairs sort of way, but in a pros/cons live vs. dying kinda way.

Im not sick. Im not mentally unwell. Ive done it since as long as I can remember. Some days, the positive/negatives are pretty close; other days one truly wins out.

One would think that with those thoughts I would have a clear idea or believe about what happens after death. I don’t. I just don’t know. But the uncertainty of it has never scared me.

I also know I have enough friends and loved ones that if it ever got too bad (it never has) that I would be okay. This post is certainly not a cry for help. I just haven’t said anything because I worried about that potential/current employees, investors, customers, etc might take it incorrectly as instability. Its not, in fact is the complete opposite.

Its my way of saying, “I understand. I get it. Im available.” Its not that life is tough, its that believing in yourself is.

This year I am focused on putting caring at the center of my core (yes, I know that your core is usually your center, so think of it as the center of your center. The deepness of your being). Caring for me; caring for others. I am not sure how I will exactly enact it, but Ill do it.

It will certainly include the setting aside of time; and more importantly reducing my focus on extraneous stimulus.

I am not dead.

And this is only my last post of 2011.