Entrepreneurship

Windows Phone 7 Series app built

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I had a few minutes after lunch today to look at the new tools for building apps for the upcoming Windows Phone 7 series.  Literally five minutes after starting the free version of Visual Studio 2010 for Windows Phone, I was able to hack this together.

Windows Phone first app

It's a toy app, but I'm impressed with how quickly the tools installed and how it just worked.  My programming skills are pretty rusty, so just getting something to compile is impressive.  :-)  Now the question is when can I get a real device to play with?  I've got some ideas for how we might be able to extend our enterprise speech apps out to the Windows Phone.

I’m hiring a VP of Engineering

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(2/22/2010 – we've hired our new VP of Engineering and he started this morning.  Thanks to everyone who emailed or helped in the search.  I do appreciate it!  — Terry)

How would you like to start the new year with a new job?  I'm looking for a VP of Engineering to join us at Gold Systems. Our expectations are high, because we don't trust our people to just anyone who walks through the door.  It really does start with people – we have a great group of people and the new VP has to understand that we have to treat them right if we expect them to treat our customers right.  Customers expect us to deliver the very best technology and software that always works and is easy to use.  (And when it doesn't work, they expect us to fix it fast, whether it ends up being our bug or theirs.)  They also expect us to deliver on time and to fit in to their way of building critical applications. 

I'm looking for someone who has written code and met deadlines, and who understands that software is some part art and some part science.  You should be comfortable sitting down with a couple of smart engineers and brainstorming with them about how to solve a problem.  And you have to be humble enough to understand you probably aren't the best coder in the group, but that it's your job to look out for and then find more of the best engineers.  You'll have some customer contact too, so you've got to be able to switch from low-level techie talk to high-level overviews that reassures the customer that they are in good hands.  (Many of our customers are very, very technical, so you can't be too quick to assume who knows what.)

Having a bit of the entrepreneur in you wouldn't hurt either, because everyone at Gold Systems is involved in the business and everyone on the leadership team is a part of making it work.  It's OK if you don't understand how to read an income statement, we can teach you that, but you do have to want to understand the entire system at some level, not just the software development piece.

Gold Systems is known in the industry for IVR and speech recognition applications, but our market is expanding as we do more Unified Communications.  The last time I looked we had 11 of the Fortune 20 as customers.  We were one of the first companies to partner with Microsoft on UC deployments and now we're one of the first to build UC applications.  One of your jobs will be to think about the kinds of applications we can create for customers and to help the engineering team expand their capabilities.  You're probably going to need a white board wall in your office – and yes, everyone at Gold Systems still gets their own office.  No cube farms here.

If you think you have the right mix of engineering abilities and leadership skills, and you believe that a company can have a good culture and still do well as a business, then email me your resume.  If you do email me, mention this blog post and I'll respond and let you know that I received it.  Thanks!

Terry (tgold@goldsys.com)

(For everyone who knows Matt, he's decided to step back into a pure technical role.  He's done a great job of leading the team through some tough economic times and he's ready to let someone else take it on.)

Speaking at High Road Connections entrepreneur event

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HighroadsJPG 

A good friend of mine recently introduced me to Chris Lucerne, co-founder of High Road Connections.  Chris and her co-founder Nancy Stubbs have created a business forum for entrepreneurs, business owners and people who are thinking about starting businesses.  The interesting thing about the forum though is that it is focused on doing business in an ethical way – in other words people who are trying to take the high road.

Chris asked me to speak at the next event, which will be December 17th at 7:45 AM at the Boulder Center for Conscious Living.  For more information, and to sign up for the event, go to their website at http://www.highroadconnections.com/events.html Tickets are $15 in advance and $20 at the door.  Check out their website for more on the event.

600 to zero emails in five hours – how to empty your inbox after vacation

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I'm back on-line today after taking an eight day vacation and a nearly complete break from technology.  I didn't get around to scheduling a vacation last year, and with the economic downturn I didn't want to walk away even for a week during the worst of it.  I'm seeing a nice improvement in business though, so the time was right to slip away.  The truth is, getting away for some rest and perspective is a good thing even in bad times and I should have done it sooner.  If as an entrepreneur you are "too busy" to take a vacation, you probably need to take a vacation.

 

Since I didn't even look at email while I was gone, I thought I would share how I went from a very full inbox this morning to an empty inbox in time for lunch.  I believe that inboxes with hundreds or thousands of read and unread emails are terrible stress inducers, and I've been much happier since I worked out how to manage my inbox.

 

Having an empty inbox starts with choking off some of the flow of email before it even gets to your inbox.  We use Microsoft Forefront as our spam filter at my company and it does a great job.  (With a fair amount of help from our IT folks I will quickly add!)  If you are getting more than a few spam emails a day, or you are getting any emails that you wouldn't want your kids to read, you need to reevaluate your anti-spam strategy, because it doesn't have to be like that.

 

Next, think about all the emails that you receive that aren't quite spam, but maybe are newsletter lists you either subscribed to or got on accidentally and now you just delete them when they arrive.  I started unsubscribing to email lists I don't care about as part of my 2008 resolution, and it's worked.  Don't keep deleting emails that you don't read, make them stop.

 

Even so, I had around 600 emails waiting for me when I first looked at email.  I first sorted them by the From column, which grouped all of the remaining email newsletters that I subscribe to so that I could quickly scan the subject lines and then delete each group.  I'm pretty brutal about it too – I don't get sucked into reading each one.  If something important happened, I'll hear about it without reading each and every IT News or whatever email that arrived while I was gone.  I delete them and move on.

 

That left a lot of individual emails, and again I quickly scanned for emails that I could read and delete, or read and file.

 

Next I sorted by "Subject" and that allowed me to delete quite a few more emails, keeping only the last email in the thread of conversations.  By the way, Outlook 2010 will group conversations for you, but I haven't installed it yet.  I guess I could have used OWA, which has that feature now, but I didn't have that many to deal with.

 

By mid-morning I had it down to about 75 or so emails that needed more attention.  If I could do a 30 second response, I responded and moved on, but if it was going to take more than that, I just drug the email onto my task list.  The point here is to get everything on the task list so that I can sort it and prioritize it, rather than just working on things in order of receipt.

 

Be careful though about being so focused on an empty inbox.  It's easy to fall into a "quick response" mode and not give people a truly thoughtful response.  While "Great!" maybe a perfect answer, sometimes people need more than that.  If you need to think about it, put it on the task list.

 

If you are an entrepreneur and you get back from vacation only to find a bunch of problem emails waiting for you, then you might consider whether you have the right team around you, or that maybe you've managed to convince them that only YOU can handle problems.  I work with a great group of people – when I'm out of town (and even when I'm not) people handle problems and they don't just sit on things until I return.  I love getting emails that say, "This happened, and I handled it like so . . ."

 

If you are in a position where you don't have people covering for you, and you really do have work piling up while you are gone, then I can only suggest that you keep it in perspective.  You can only do what you can do.  I'll save that thought for another post . . .

 

Now I have an empty inbox and a task list that I can move items around on according to how urgent and important they are, remembering at all times that the MOST IMPORTANT things are almost NEVER URGENT.  Now I have all afternoon to start knocking things off my task list . . .

Interview with W3W3 about Conference Server

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Last week Larry Nelson from w3w3 dropped by the office to interview me about Gold Systems' new Conference Server product that's based on the Microsoft Office Communications Server.  We talked about the new product, but I tried to not turn it into a commercial and spent a fair amount of time talking about what we're doing to make it easier for companies to say "yes" to new purchases.  Now more than ever as entrepreneurs we've got to take the risk out of purchases.  In the interview I listed a few specific things to do and talked about how the new product was designed to be "easy to buy."

I can't seem to find a permalink at w3w3.com, but the interview is on the page for August 2009 and shouldn't be too hard to find.  There is a picture of me in front of my bookcase and speech-enabled crank phone.  By the way, has anyone ever seen Larry without a camera?  He likes to joke that one source of revenue for w3w3 is people paying to have their pictures removed, but I'd have to say he's a pretty good photographer.

You can also read the w3w3 blog at http://w3w3.blogs.com/

Thanks Larry, it's always fun to talk to you!

Hiring sales managers and Channel manager

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Gold Systems is looking hire a couple of Regional Sales Managers and a Channel Manager.

The first Regional Sales Manager position will be on the West Coast – we're flexible about exactly where you live, but you have to be a great hunter-sales person AND fit our values and culture.  One or the other isn't enough, but if you are the right person I think we have a good opportunity for you.  Check out the Gold Systems website at www.goldsys.com to get an idea of what we do, and this link http://www.goldsys.com/about/careers/ to read about the jobs. 

The Regional Sales Manager job description is posted now, and the Channel Manager position should be posted next week.  The Channel Manager position is heavy on customer/partner relations and technical ability, and is NOT a pure sales position.  This position will be in the Redmond, Washington area. 

Email me directly and tell me you read about this on my blog and I'll send your email and resume right to our VP of Sales.  No recruiters, please.  Thanks!  — Terry

Update #1

Here is a link to a page about Gold Systems, and here is the link to the Channel Manager position and the Regional Sales Manager position.

Jim Collins and Steve Martin arrive today

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Describe the image

What an interesting day!  The new book from Jim Collins arrived today and in the same box was Steve Martin's new Banjo CD.  I got in a chapter or two at lunch and I expect I'll finish it tonight. "How the Mighty Fall and Why Some Companies Never Give In" is available now and looks really interesting.  It seems to be trying to answer the question, "What happened to the companies mentioned in Built to Last and Good to Great that have fallen from greatness?  Where did they go wrong, and what lessons might we learn from them?"

I think I might cut out the quote from the back cover and stick it on my wall.

 


Describe the image

"Whether you prevail or fail, endure or die, depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you." — Jim Collins

And what about the Steve Martin reference?  Everyone knows that Steve Martin is a funny guy, and some people know that he plays banjo, but not many people know that he's a REALLY GOOD banjo player.  He's also a friend and student of Boulder's own Dr. Banjo aka Pete Wernick, and he's just released his first serious music CD.  Pete played on some of the cuts as did Dolly Parton, Vince Gill, Earl Scruggs, Bela Fleck, Tim O'Brien and Mary Black.  You might remember that Pete is the Banjo Player for Hot Rize and Tim O'Brien is the mandolin player, so there are a couple of Boulder connections.

The Crow: New Songs for the 5-String Banjo is available at DrBanjo.com and other fine music retailers.  It comes with a nice set of liner notes (is that what they are called now?) and I'm looking forward to getting home and listening to it while reading Steve's comments about how he wrote the tunes and who was playing on each one.

The Crow cover 

Here's a Youtube video of the title cut. 

Saturday is the last day for TechStars applications

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Now is a great time to start a company.  One source for some funding and a lot of great connections and mentoring is TechStars, and Saturday is the last day to get your application in for this year.  You still have time!  If you do start a business, you'll get much less realistic time frames from customers and partners, so as Jim used to say in a slightly different context, "Get used to it."

You can find everything you need at Techstars.org.  And don't forget, they've expanded to Boston too so if you can't stand the idea of spending part of your summer here in Boulder, Colorado then I'm sure the Boston entrepreneur community will welcome you too.  If you do apply and get accepted, give me a call when you get to town.

Everything’s amazing, nobody’s happy

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Lois C.K.

My good friend Marty sent me a link to a video clip of comedian Louis C.K. doing a bit on Conan O’Brian where he talks about how amazing things are now.  I sometimes have to keep my optimism in check a bit, because I know people are hurting and worried about the economy, but this is good for a laugh, and it’s a reminder of how much things have improved in just the last 50 or 100 years.  As a phone geek, I got a laugh out of the reminder of how phones worked not that long ago.

I would imbed the video, but the comments are interesting, to a point, where it just turns into a flame-fest.  I will say this though – the more I learn to appreciate what I’ve already got, the happier I become and the less stress I feel about the things that aren’t going the way I want them to go.  I still want still want a new guitar and the next cool gadget, but I now know that happiness is NOT defined by or provided by – stuff.  It’s often a choice and it’s about actions and relationships.  Seriously.

Click here to see the video.

Have a happy weekend!

Ask the VC live in Boulder

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Jason Mendelson, Managing Director for the Foundry Group, will be speaking at a public event in Boulder, Colorado on February 24th.  This is a great chance to hear about how VC funding works from somebody who's investing in new companies and who is very open and honest about how it really works.  If you have any interest in raising money for your startup, you should also be reading Jason and Brad Feld's blog,  Ask the VC.  Here's a link to the event.

Investors are in the game too

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Yesterday I ranted a bit about the politician who said, “We’ve got to make sure that we are stimulating investors, entrepreneurs and small business people to get back in the game.”  I intentionally didn’t comment on “investors” because except for my 401k, I don’t consider myself an investor.  I started to speculate on how investors are feeling right now, but decided to not talk about something I really don’t know much about.

I woke up this morning to see that Brad Feld is calling himself an Venture Optimist after reading a New York Times story titled Maybe We Should Call Them Venture Pessimists.   Go read Brad’s own take on venture investing and human innovation.

I thought I WAS in the game

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Driving to work this morning I caught just a piece of an interview with Congressman Eric Cantor, and what he said gave me one of those, “What did he just say?” moments.  He said, “We’ve got to make sure that we are stimulating investors, entrepreneurs and small business people to get back in the game.”

I’d say I know a fair number of entrepreneurs and small business people, and with just one exception they are working harder than ever.  None that I know are saying, “I’m going to sit on the sidelines until things get better.”  I know one person who sold his company just before things turned down, and he’s itching to “get back in the game.”  He’s the one exception.  And you know what he’s doing while he figures out his next venture?  He’s going around helping other entrepreneurs with introductions, brainstorming sessions and a lot of encouragement.   Everyone else that I know is putting in longer hours and they are working harder to get through the downturn and to even get AHEAD while the big guys are worrying about their stock price.

Don’t get me wrong, I know that there must be a lot of businesses that have failed, and I’m very sorry for those entrepreneurs and small business people.  I’m especially sorry for all the people who lost their jobs in the process.  I know from experience that it is gut wrenching to be working hard and not seeing the results you want.  I’ve been there, and I feel for them, but to suggest that entrepreneurs and small business people “need to get back in the game” is ridiculous.  I will bet that this period will spawn more new entrepreneurs than the dot.com boom, and that the businesses that get created will be better because this time around they are in “make money or die mode”  not “get rich quick mode.”

If you’re reading this, you might just be thinking about getting in the game yourself.  Come on in, there’s room for more.  This is a great time to start a company.  And if you are already an entrepreneur, keep playing hard – I know you are in the game 24 hours a day and NOT sitting on the sidelines waiting for things to get better.