...and another thing:

Never interfere in a boy and girl fight

“People often ask me if I have any words of advice for young people. Well, here are a few simple admonitions for young and old:  Never interfere in a boy and girl fight….”

— Words of advice for young people, William S. Burroughs

I tend not to give advice nowadays.  I listen.  I will express an opinion sometimes (okay, often).  But I won’t tell you what to do.  The reasons are simple.  People will do what they will do.  They will have a complex set of reasons and stimulae behind their actions, and some degree of agency in them (just how much is in interesting topic for debate in another forum).  However if they act in alignment with my suggested course of action and they arrive at a position they’re unhappy with, they will always blame me for telling them what to do.  If things work out hunky-dory they will celebrate their decisive genius.

William S. Burroughs knows no such restraint and in his wonderful little riff “words of advice for young people” that I have an on old CD somewhere he leads off with the great advice I can buy into:  “Never interfere in a boy and girl fight”

It amazes me how people in Silicon Valley have so much difficulty following this.  If you’re an entrepreneur focus on building a great company and changing the world.  Whether Arrington or Calacanis is right really isn’t of concern to you and you can never know.  Whether Conway or McClure is right is irrelevant to you if you don’t build anything that either of them is interested in hearing your pitch on.

The truth is you can never know the detailed interplay which goes into any relationship between two third-parties.  You can know how they’ve dealt with you and what you’ve observed and that is it.  

• Arrington produces a great product (TechCrunch) that has been a huge help to me and other startups.  We owe him and his team a great debt of thanks for that.  Further I’ve enjoyed wonderful parties, movie premieres and an awesome 24 hour coding Hackathon, all courtesy of Arrington’s decision to give back to the community (yes, I know, all part of building the brand).  The closest I have come to meeting him in person was sitting right in front of him at the Star Trek premiere when he seemed like an engaging and fun guy.  He is honestly passionate about startups and entrepreneurs.  He’s on our side.  He’s one of us.  


• Jason Calacanis has never been other than gracious and generous to me.  His This Week In Startups podcast is a very good thing for the startup community. Reducing information asymmetry. Listen the whole archive for great insights into startups and the funding process. Sure, he’s a provocateur and you don’t have to agree with him on everything (particularly as he sometimes changes his mind, as people have the right to do). But he doesn’t demand that you agree with him on it all.  I joined him for lunch when he tweeted out that he was in Palo Alto and he was wonderful company. He was in town to speak at a Founder Institute event to which I didn’t have a ticket, and with no agenda he arranged my free attendance. His Open Angel Forum is unquestionably a good thing. I attended. He asked questions that were tough and left me pissed off. Pissed off because I should have been better prepared with better answers. If you’re an entrepreneur you have to know, he’s on our side. He’s one of us.


• I have merely bumped into Ron Conway at a couple of events, never at times when a pitch would be appropriate. I have no idea why so many entrepreneurs suddenly have an opinion on him that is anything other than positive. I was in a major VC firm last week where he and Maples were the only two angels they had positive things to say about. Everything I have read and heard from people who I respect points to him being a genuine friend to the entrepreneurial community.


• I have met Dave McClure a couple of times. As Sacca said in his email about Angelgate, McClure would take a bullet for his startups. The work he’s put into the Lean Startup movement. His blog. His really helpful presentations on startup marketing for pirates are must-reads. He’s a genuine friend to the entrepreneurial community.

The point is you - as a fellow entrepreneur - don’t have to take a side on this stuff, you don’t have to post a comment to suck up to someone who will never see your comment and doesn’t care. These guys will either kiss and make up or they won’t. Either way, hopefully they’ll all keep doing the great things they have all done in recent years to make this the best time in history to be doing a startup.

Let me say that again:  All of these people have contributed to making this the BEST TIME EVER TO DO A HIGH-TECH STARTUP!

Everyone likes to have an opinion.  Everyone likes to have an opinion on the opinions of others.  Everyone seems to have an opinion on what my opinion of the opinions of others should be.

Sure, I have an opinion on Angelgate - my experience at Open Angel Forum is that afterwards the angels there all chatted for a good while after the pitches about how deals could be better structured to lower costs and friction, and make things better for the entrepreneurs. The pitching startups were still in the room at this time. There was no secrecy or nefarious nature to this. ‘Let’s get together and keep talking about this’ seemed to be the net result and that’s probably what the Angelgate dinner was all about.  

These guys are on our side as entrepreneurs.  

People love conspiracy theories. They’re convinced any time people get together they’re plotting. I went to the Bohemian Grove last year as the guest of a good friend. If you google it you’d think it was some secret society where the rich and powerful plot to rule the world. It’s not. It’s a really nice pleasant place for people to retreat from the world of business and enjoy the arts and a bit of culture in pleasant surroundings among friends. But you’ll never convince the tin-hat brigade of that.

Similarly a journalist will be (rightly) skeptical of prominent people in the industry he covers getting together privately, and there will always be a constituency of embittered entrepreneurs ready to believe investors have it in for them.

In the end though, I don’t have to take a side in these fights. I am too busy. I am grateful to all of these people for making my very-tough job a little bit easier. I don’t agree with all of them on everything:  

• I think some of the TechCrunch writing has got weaker (while a lot is still top notch we all know that there’s a big range in terms of writing quality). And I think Arrington was wrong on Angelgate.


• I think Jason can get too personal and is a bit too aggressive in his anti-Facebook stance (Zuck deserves far more respect than he is often given IMHO, but has made some mis-steps like we all do).  


• I think Conway is wrong with his statements about when Founders should take liquidity (it’s not the same to say a Founder should get paid off the same time the engineers who came in later and always had a paycheck, and you can get a misalignment between later VCs and Founders if you don’t let them take feed-the-family money off the table).  


• I love the new angel movement but I think the emphasis on social proof is a mistake and is dangerously leaning towards a cool-kids funnel (which could end up as bad as the post dot.com crash trend of VCs falling back on just funding their MBA buddies which delivered such poor returns). 

But those are just my opinions.  I wish my industry wasn’t becoming the soap opera it is, but I think it’s a trend that’s not going to reverse any time soon.  If you’re serious about building something great and changing the world as an entrepreneur it’s fine to rubberneck at this stuff if you find it entertaining, but, to break my no advice rule, stay out of it.  It’s not your business.  Stay focused.

“Never interfere in a boy and girl fight”

The Lady Gaga Post

I love Lady Gaga.  I didn’t want to at first.  I was expecting another frothy pop bimbette. But I was wrong. Lady Gaga is a performance artist the likes we haven’t seen since perhaps Madonna in her most creative phase.

She understands her audience to an unparalleled degree - you’re not telling me the refrain “I’ll follow you until you love me, papa” is a lyrical accident in Paparazzi, appealing as it does on a subliminal level to a broad swathe of fans with difficult parental relationships.  The blatant sexuality of Poker Face is in line with the attitudes of these times, as is the ten minute soft core lesbian porn that is the Telephone video.  (Again, a groundbreaking masterpiece of pop art.) 

Importantly though, Lady Gaga understands the changed media landscape.  While record labels struggle to understand the new reality and their looming irrelevance, Lady Gaga understands that the modern media world is about monetizing the audience not the content.  Her Twitter stream one day points her followers to a nicely written academic piece dissecting the Telephone video and its imagery, the next it points to the Telephone video on her website.  (Warning NSFW)

Notice the product placement in the video itself, both a commentary on commercialism as well as monetizing the audience through the same product placement.  Notice the ads at the bottom of the web page.  Again, monetize the audience not the content.  The ad seems consistent, well played, not jarringly interruptive.  Notice her leveraging the virality of Twitter and Facebook with simply placed buttons for sharing via each, at the top of the page.  

I love Lady Gaga.  I hope this intense creative fire doesn’t burn out too soon.  I hope she doesn’t get too sucked into the big-media bubble and lose her edge.  Most of all I cannot wait to see what she does next to push the envelope, to challenge us, to take her art form firmly into the 21st century at the same time that so many in her industry still wish we were back in the 20th.

Entrepreneurs Collapse The Wave Function

I’ve come to a satisfying analogy when it comes to an important core-skill of entrepreneurs.  True entrepreneurs collapse the wave function.

I am a physicist by training.  But long before I ever studied Physics at the University of Leeds I was gripped by quantum mechanics.  The picture of the world painted by quantum mechanics, and verified to incredible levels of precision, is famously counter-intuitive.  

In quantum mechanics everything exists in all possible states at the same time.  One represents everything, even the reader, by a “wave function” which takes into account all of these possible states.  It’s only when one takes a measurement that anything takes on a single observable value.  This observation itself “collapses the wave function” from a particle being in all possible states simultaneously into being in one specific observable state.  The example of Schrodinger’s cat is often trotted out here, the poor beast trapped in a box, subjected to a random event that can either kill or not kill the cat, causing it to exist in a peculiar limbo until the box is open and the dead/notdead cat is observed.

As we work on the rapid iteration of AppWhirl, in six broad cycles making up two core themes - optimizing for virality and optimizing for economics - it occurs to me just how much uncertainty entrepreneurs juggle with.  I have to manage this complex picture when presenting to prospective investors.  The further out one goes in the strategic plan, the more uncertainty there is, because with so much uncertainty there are many many branching points in the decision tree.  This leads to quasi-chaotic levels of uncertainty.  

Non-entrepreneurs, coming into start-ups from the safer environs of “big-corporate” are often paralyzed by this.

Again I use a physicists understanding of the word chaotic - as in complex systems.  And in complex systems there are still often broad patterns.  Chaotic is not the same as random.  It’s these patterns those much-maligned VCs attempt to discern from the countless pitches they endure day-in day-out.  More importantly true entrepreneurs have vision, they see these patterns, identify the trend lines, ride on the tides of the future.  This is why it is so important for an entrepreneur to have big picture view, a deep understanding of where the space in which they are iterating is going.  

One thing that concerns me about some folks practicing the “lean startup” approach, as we are at AppWhirl, is they seem to conflate lean startup with small ideas.  FNACs.  Lean startup doesn’t mean small vision.   It is merely a set of techniques and methods to manage the uncertainty and de-risk the business prior to ramping for scale.  Identify the product/market fit using rapid iteration and robust customer development.  Where appropriate focus on the viral coefficient and generating a viral feedback loop.  Ensure your economics work - first in principle, then in practice, finally at scale.  

As one looks out to the future, and how one’s product will impact the market… as we look out from AppWhirl at how our vision can change the world, disrupt a multi-billion dollar industry, and build a company that truly matters on a global scale… the further out one looks from today the fuzzier the details of that future are.  The wave function that represents the evolution of the company stretches out.  I can see where it goes, broadly.  M y job as an entrepreneur, as founder & CEO, is to keep options open through cycles of iteration.  Don’t assume I am smarter than the market and instead listen to what customers are saying.  But when the time is right it falls to me to collapse that wave function.  Fast.  To make  a decision.  To settle on one path to the future for one particular milestone.  Then to start all over again.  Make sure my feet are still firmly on the ground then look ahead again, where once more the uncertain, fuzzy path reaches out to the horizon.  

Employees and investors are not subatomic quantum particles.  They need to exist with a degree of certainty in order to gain confidence in your vision and your ability to deliver on it.  Don’t sweat the decisions you’ve made.  Look up and see how many more are in front of you on the tree of possible options.  If you don’t get one right the opportunity will be ahead to course correct.  

But you cannot keep all  your options open forever.  You have to make your path.  You must keep collapsing the wave function.

It is what makes life what it is.

Bootstrapping Christmas - an entrepreneur’s tale

So, when you start a company and you’re trying to build something really special but in a disciplined Lean-Startup/MVP/CustomerDevelopment kind of way, you spend long periods unpaid.  Perhaps another post for another time is to discuss financial planning for an entrepreneurial career, including strategies for periods of both feast and famine.

That means being careful with the family budget when it comes to things like Christmas.  I guess I have been hearing a lot of fellow entrepreneurs bitching about unpaid periods recently and should add this to a series called “quit bitching or quit startups”.  Well, I’m an entrepreneur, but far more important than that, I’m a dad.  This Christmas Ethan, who’s an airplane nut, wanted “a Huge Airport”.  Not just an airport.  Nuh-uh.  A Huge Airport.  This is the story, in pictures (click on picture for full size version), of that huge airport, and how I bootstrapped Christmas:

1.  First I went to a website (cannot find the link now) of an airplane enthusiast where I downloaded a set of airport plans in PDF.  I printed out each element.

2.  Then came the painful task of cutting out each piece - literally (my neck and back ached after hours of doing this).  This had to be done with some precision.

3. I laid out all the pieces on the table to make sure it’d all fit together properly

4. Foam board was sourced from the local hobby shop and in a very messy process I glued each piece to the right spot

5. I tried spray lacquer and it was a disaster - by the next morning every piece had lifted from the baord as the lacquer dried and was strong enough at curling the edges to overpower the glue. So after a second gluing session I went with outdoor brush-on varnish. That worked so it was on with the modelers grass.

6. Voila. One huge airport.

7. Being enjoyed on Christmas morning.

8. In it’s place in Ethan’s bedroom.

9. “Look Daddy, Singapore Airlines taking off!”

What does it mean to be an entrepreneur?

I liked this quote from Mark Suster’s post on Venture Hacks:   “being an entrepreneur is really sexy… for those who have never done it.”

It’s so very true.  I think for most entrepreneurs you don’t do it because it’s sexy, you do it because you’re driven and cannot imagine doing anything else with your life.  It’s intangible, it’s hard to put your finger on, but in your gut it’s what you have to do.  It’s hard.  It’s at times exhiliarating, terrifying, rewarding, heartbreaking.  But it’s not easy.  It’s not a career path to choose lightly.

I came out to Silicon Valley in 1999.  I should probably have come out about six-months-to-a-year earlier.  However, at the end of 1998 when I was pondering the move, I was headhunted away from HBR to an Enterprise Management Consulting gig at a well-respected niche consulting firm in London.  I spent six months getting paid stupid amounts of money for having shiny fancy shoes and a well groomed haircut.  It was great for the bank balance - and very hard to leave in the end.  They offered me a whopping pay rise, a team of my own, and even to let me spend some time trying to build my start-up in London on the side before risking the move to Silicon Valley.  I resisted.  I think it was in leaving London and coming here that I realised by inner entrepreneur.

Background:  In 1992, my best friend Stephen Brown and I started a company, imaginatively called JB Computer Systems.  We sourced computer parts imported from the middle east and built & sold computers for students and local businesses.  It gave us a great standard of living at university.  In the 1993-1994 academic year we decided we tried to start an Internet Service Provider, which would have been one of the first in the UK.  But we needed money.  We were laughed out of every meeting as “two young techies that didn’t know business… what is this internet thing anyway?  it’s an American fad that’s going nowhere… etc.”.

I really didn’t like that.  Some time in late 1995 or early 1996, while in my first post-college job iirc, I bought a copy of Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure by Jerry Kaplan and from then on my eye was on Silicon Valley - with a business idea I’d been mulling over with friends for years.

So, mid-1999 I arrived in Silicon Valley naive, armed with a working demo (thanks Steve), a great idea, way way way way too early for the market (think DropBox in 1999!).  It was a tough learning experience.  I think part of the reason for the anti-VC feelings prevalent among many entrepreneurs that Fred Destin talks about, is based in part on people arriving in Silicon Valley, as I did, with little idea of how it works, how funding works, and too short-a-runway to figure it out in time.

Of course, after turning down some early angel money in 1999, in early 2000 everything collapsed and InfoVault was put on the shelf.  I spent the next few years working for other people’s start-ups trying to understand how the process works.  Learning to get product out - I’ll blog about the Xora GPS TimeTrack launch another time, but creating a product and taking it to market leadership from scratch, teaches you far more than any other experience.

The hardest thing was when I had to take a few years out of Silicon Valley, mid-decade - when my son got old enough for his condition to be recognized and eventually diagnosed, and with a second small baby my wife needed to be close to her family.  Though important to do, it was a difficult move.  Houston is not Palo Alto.  But, we got Ethan on a solid path.  A project I was working on with some friends had started to take shape as a potential business.  Unable to stay away, Silicon Valley drew me back again.  This career.  This start-up thing.  ”Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

I was rusty.  I made mistakes getting back up to speed, and I knew I would.  But I just had to come back.  Not because I think it’s sexy.  Not because it’s easy.  It’s neither.  I do it because I have a burning passion to deliver something amazing.  As Steve Jobs would put it, something Insanely Great.  If you have to, not want to, have to change the world.  If you have a vision of the future and you want to help us get there.  If you have something inside that makes you an entrepreneur whether you like it or not.  If all of these things drive you even when you know all the risks, the downsides, the challenges, how hard it will be.  Then maybe you’re an entrepreneur.

If you are one, don’t underestimate what you can do in the long term in favour of overestimating what you can do in the short term.  Learn. Learn. Learn. Listen, and learn some more.  The most important takeaway from the Suster column is that you have to be able to deal with the dark lonely nights, when the cards haven’t fallen in your favour, and break through into the daylight beyond.  I run into a lot of other founders in my day to day life.  Many of whom are true entrepreneurs, but many of whom I feel for.  They don’t seem to have known what they were getting into, and in many cases still don’t get it.  I think you can pick up from people whether they’re resilient enough, and those that aren’t are going to be in for a painfully rough ride.

From his column, I think he’s saying that this is part of the intangible set of impressions a VC will take away from a pitch, when they have to decide if yours is the company they’re going to fall in love with, and you’re the entrepreneur they will spend 3-5 years of their lives helping make it.

Sounds about right to me.