Entrepreneurship

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Meet Goldum, my Nabaztag WiFi Rabbit.  I was looking for a simple, USB controlled lamp for a project that I am working on and I happened to find this instead.  He’s about 10 inches tall when his ears are standing up.  He connects to my WiFi network and then  receives messages over the Internet.  There is a growing community of people who have Nabaztag and send each other messages, and there are services that you can subscribe to for free.  Services such as weather reports, poetry readings and news reports. He (or she as the case may be) can even deliver your RSS feeds.  He speaks English and French right now in a variety of voices.  I just heard that the next version will include speech recognition and VoIP support.

I know it sounds strange, but he’s a lot of fun.  I also think that we’re going to see a lot more interesting devices such as the Chumby that will sit in our homes connected to wireless networks.  Nabaztag is made by Violet, a French company, and you can get one in the U.S. at ThinkGeek.com. I’m still looking for a simple, cheap USB controlled lamp if you have any ideas.  I want a lamp that I can turn off and on via software.  Thanks for any pointers.

Video: Goldum the Nabaztag WiFi Rabbit

Demo checklist

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Brad Feld wrote about one of his portfolio company’s having a bad demo day.  Today he followed up with Panda Mating – More on the Demo.  I’ve had a draft of a post on doing demos for a couple of weeks, ever since one of my own demos tanked because I didn’t follow my own demo rules.  Brad swears he’s not writing about my demo.

The posts are well worth reading, as are the comments, but I’m going to add to them with a Checklist for Doing Great Demos.  I’ve posted it over at the Kauffman Foundation’s eVenturing blog.  (I still held my breath when I hit "submit" and I still can’t believe that they let me post directly to their site.)

FJ Car Computer update and more

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Whether you care about car computers or not, there may be something interesting for you in this post.  A couple of days ago I installed the latest StreetDeck software on my Infill T3 car computer.  Yesterday (I’m back now) I had to drive to the airport for a quick customer visit, so it was my first chance to experience the new features.  It’s still in beta, but – Wow!

I have an always-on high-speed Internet connection using a Kyocera KR1 Mobile Router in the FJ Cruiser, with a Verizon EVDO card plugged into it.  Not only does the car computer get high-speed Internet access, but so can anyone else who’s nearby or wants to plug into one of the four Ethernet ports.   When I got to my destination today, I parked, pulled out my laptop and within seconds it was connected wirelessly too.  I was able to answer and sync my email, check something on the web, IM a question to someone back at the office and within five minutes I was ready to walk to my gate.  I could have done all of that on the car computer, but I did it on my laptop so that it would be up to date for the trip.

Speaking of my laptop, I wrote a little Vista Gadget this weekend to tell me at a glance if I have any new voice mails or missed calls.

As you can see, no one wanted to talk to me today.

Here’s what it looks like if I have voice mails or missed calls in my inbox.

If you are running Vista and you can get your voice mail in your Outlook client (or you want to), email me and I’ll send you a copy of the gadget to play with.

One of the new features that was added to the StreetDeck car computer software was Internet Radio, using the Yahoo LAUNCHcast player.  Except for a few places where I lost my wireless signal, I listened to streaming radio all the way to the airport.  Yahoo has over 200 channels available, but in case that isn’t enough, you can create your own channel.  As you listen, it learns what you like and then it inserts new artists into the stream that you might like.  You can easily rate the new songs and artists so that you’ll get more, less, or none of the new stuff in the future.  It makes me wonder what the future of paid satellite radio is going to be.

The wizards at StreetDeck also added an option to turn on Virtual Earth on the navigation screen, which means satellite images are overlaid on the GPS mapping software.

This is just the beginning of something interesting I think.  Maybe someday soon I’ll be able to go to Starbucks.com and install an overlay for all of the Starbucks along my route.  Maybe I touch the Starbucks icon on the screen and it routes me there and then sends a coupon to my phone for fifty cents off.  (Click the photo of the map to go to mp3car.com)

Same thing for my bank – I’ll drive out of my way to use one of my bank’s ATMs and save a buck or two on the transaction fee.  It should be easy to add that overlay to my car computer’s GPS screen.

My FJ Cruiser started out as a concept car that Toyota created to show what a modern-day Land Cruiser might look like.  It was such a big hit at the car shows that they rushed it to production with very few changes.  I guess that’s what I’m doing – playing with communications and mobility concepts in my spare time, thinking about what might really be practical in the near future.  I’m having a great time too!

I’ve created a "Friends of the FJ Car Computer Project" to acknowledge the help I’ve received.  A lot of people have contributed so far, but this group has made a big diffence.  Thanks!

Update to the Update:  Driving home from the airport tonight – 45 minutes through a rural part of Colorado North of Denver – the Internet Radio skipped three times when I first started out from the airport, but only for a couple of seconds and then it never misssed a beat.  Amazing.

First post for the Kauffman Foundation and a quick update

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I just made my first post to the Kauffman Foundation’s eVenturing blog.  If you are interested in entrepreneurship, I hope you’ll subscribe to their feed.  Ken Berlack does a daily post of interesting articles, blogs and news about entrepreneurship, and he just did a series of posts about his time last week at DEMOfall ’06.

I’ve made some more progress on the FJ Car Computer project.  Streaming Internet radio (lookout XM!) and Virtual Earth satellite overlays on the navigation screen.  More details later.

Last week I went three days straight without touching my keyboard, except to login first thing in the morning.  The rest of the time I used the new speech recognition capabilities built into Microsoft Vista, the next version of Windows.  I answered all of my emails, wrote a couple of documents, installed software and (get this) even edited my computer’s registry – all with my voice.  I can still probably type faster, but it would be a close race.

Finally, this weekend I wrote some code for the first time in a long time.  It was a lot of fun and it might even be useful.  More on that in another post.

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

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If you are an NPR listener, you might recognize the name Ewing Marion Kauffman.  If you are a sports fan, you might know that Mr. Kauffman brought major league baseball back to Kansas City by buying the Royals in 1968.  You might also know that he was a great entrepreneur, starting Marion Labs in his basement.  The company began with $36,000 in revenue the first year, and was doing almost a billion a year in revenue when it was acquired by Merrell Dow thirty-nine years later.  Mr. Kauffman believed that the best way to improve the world was to educate people and create jobs, and he felt an obligation to do just that.  I imagine he would rather I mention that the company employed over 3,400 people and touched the lives of countless others, than to reduce it to stock-market terms of revenue and return on investment.  Long before his death in 1993, Mr. Kauffman planned for the foundation that would survive him and continue the work of educating people and encouraging enterprise (to create jobs) through entrepreneurship.  Today that foundation is the 26th largest foundation in the U.S. with an asset base of approximately $2 billion dollars.

Every entrepreneur should read this article that Mr. Kauffman wrote about his inspiration for starting his company, and the beliefs he held that made it great.  I first became aware of the Kauffman Foundation as a struggling entrepreneur when I met Katherine Catlin, Jana Matthews and Bill Payne.  Katherine was the first person to talk to me about culture and values and how they fit in a business, Jana helped me understand growth and leadership, and Bill has helped me in so many ways that I can’t describe.  They are all great supporters of entrepreneurs, especially struggling entrepreneurs, and they are all connected to the Kauffman Foundation.

And now I get the chance to pass on some of the support that I’ve received directly and indirectly from the Kauffman Foundation.  I’ve been asked to contribute on a regular basis to the Kauffman eVenturing website.  I’ll be giving the “working entrepreneur” perspective on a variety of topics, and I have to say that it is an honor, it is exciting, but it is also very scary.  I expect to do my first post within the next week or two and I’m already nervous about it.  Maybe I’ll start just by telling some of the great stories I’ve heard about Mr. Kauffman and about how his foundation is carrying on the good work to help make the world a better place.  I expect to be cross-posting most articles here, so stay tuned and wish me luck.

Help me, help you

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Here is a good rule for entrepreneurs, sales people, and really just about anybody.  Make it easy for other people to help you.

There is a salesperson at my company who is particularly good at this.  He wants me to call one of his prospects and help assure them that the Gold Systems Password Reset product is the best choice for their company.

I’ve replace any identifying names with CAPITAL LETTERS.  Here is the email request:

Hello Terry,

I’d like to ask a favor of you.  Please contact MR CUSTOMER at BIG COMPANY in SOME CITY.  MR CUSTOMER is a Decision Maker on a BIG COMPANY Password Reset opportunity.  He is on the SOME DIVISION side of the house.  Your message to MR CUSTOMER would be:

“Hello CUSTOMER, my name is Terry Gold and I am the CEO and Co-Founder of Gold Systems.  I understand you have been working with ONE OF OUR PARTNERS and my team here on our voice based password reset product to eliminate a business issue of resetting passwords.  I just wanted to give you a call and open up another line of communication for you.  I understand OUR PARTNER and OUR REGIONAL SALES MANAGER and OUR PRODUCT MANAGER here at Gold have been assisting your team, but, I just would like to offer up my phone number to you if you should have any questions surrounding our technology or our company.  BIG COMPANY is a very important customer to us and you actually have another one of our products, the V-Dialer running.  Thanks again CUSTOMER.  We use it ourselves, so feel free to call me and say “Terry Gold on his mobile.”

Terry, this opportunity is at 70%.  Just as a side note, we do have professional services built in to the bid to reset OTHER PASSWORDs in case, in the odd chance, that comes up if you happen to catch him live.  THE GOLD SYSTEMS DEVELOPER WHO HAD A MOHAWK IN COLLEGE worked with their folks, mainly THEIR TECHNICAL GURU, to prove out this model a while back.  Please let me know if you should have any questions before you call.

Many thanks,

SALESGUY

So, there are a couple of lessons here.  As an entrepreneur, don’t underestimate the importance of your title whether it is CEO, President or whatever.  Big companies work with little companies all the time, and for the most part they like the idea that they have the attention of the CEO/President/Founder.  (They may worry if you are also taking the support calls, but hey, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do in the early days.)

The other lesson is that SALESGUY made it really, really easy for me to help him.  He emailed it so he didn’t have to try to catch me in the office, so if I was traveling, I could still help him.  He copied my assistant too, and she knows that CUSTOMER is the magic word at Gold Systems, so even if I didn’t see it, she would track me down and make sure I made the call.  He anticipated the questions I might ask and gave me the answers, so I didn’t have to go back and dig for more information.

If he had just stopped me in the hall and said “Would you call MR. PROSPECT?” I would have, but I would have had to look up the person’s number in our CRM system, I would have to review our history with BIG COMPANY and then maybe go back to SALESGUY to make sure that I was hitting the important points.  I would have done all that, but I wouldn’t have made the call as quickly.  By the way, I don’t really use scripts but if you listened to the actual call that I made, you would hear that I did hit all the points that SALESGUY asked me to hit and then I threw in some of my personal touches.

Make it easy for people to help you.  Be clear about what you want, give them the details they need, anticipate their questions and be concise and respectful of their time.  SALESGUY is a master at this.

Starting a new company and installing a car computer

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No, I’m not starting a new company, much less one that installs car computers.  But as I was installing my new computer in the FJ this weekend I couldn’t help but think about how it was a lot like starting a new company.  With this post, I’ll give an update on the FJ Car Computer project and hopefully shed some light on what it is like to be an entrepreneur in the early stages of an idea for a company.

It all begins with a vision.  For the FJ project it was something like, it would be fun to install a computer in my car.  There might even be benefits to my company because someday all cars are going to have computers, they will play a big role in how we communicate, and I need to understand how that all might play out.

For my company, it was something like, It would be fun to work at a company that doesn’t treat developers like cogs in a wheel – one that understands how important customers and new technologies are to the success of a company.  There might be benefits like financial security, flexible hours and a freedom from bureaucracy.

In both cases it started with a dream, and then I began justifying acting on the dream by figuring out what the benefits would be if I could achieve the dream.  I figured out if I could handle the worst case scenario.

Once the dream takes hold, the research and feedback phase begins.  For the FJ project, I looked for sources of information from people who had done it before.  There were a few books available on installing car computers and there are many hobbyists who share their knowledge publicly and offer help to the newbies.

It is easy to get information on starting a business, especially now that we have the web.  There must be thousands of books written a year on the subject and entrepreneurs are generally helpful to newbie entrepreneurs, if approached correctly.  And because entrepreneurship is seen as an economic driver (we create jobs), there are a lot of organizations such as the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation that provide support to anyone wanting to start a business.

The feedback phase is different.  For the FJ project, the near universal reaction from people I talked to early on in the project was Cool, can’t wait to see it.  The Person Who Prefers Not To Be Blogged About said Why would you want a computer in your car?  And a few others just politely changed the subject, but generally I got a lot of support from people who thought it would be interesting to watch me hack a brand new car – that wasn’t their car – to see if something interesting would come of it.

The feedback phase for starting a new company though is much less supportive, in my experience, especially for first-time entrepreneurs.  Family, friends and total strangers will tell you that 90% of all new companies fail.  (Not true) They will tell you about their cousin on their ex-wife’s side of the family who started a company, lost everything and ended up killing himself.  Occasionally you will hear a positive story about someone who got a company going and was happy in the end, but it is usually told with the same tone as you would tell a story about a person on the edge who wins the lottery and lives happily ever after.  It happens, but it ain’t likely is what you hear in their voice.

As a first-time entrepreneur, you are probably not connected to the community of entrepreneurs who have been through the fire and can tell you that it can be done.  Better yet, they can and will share their experiences.  Most entrepreneurs that I know are good people who are happy to give a hand, so seek them out.

So . . . the big day comes.  You order the car computer/quit your job.  (I’m still trying to tie these stories together)  It feels great!  After months/years of planning and dreaming, you are on your way.  That feeling lasts a couple of days and then the reality of what you’ve committed to sinks in.  In the case of the car computer, the box arrived and I excitedly opened it.  Whoa, no installation guide and no one available at the moment to tell me what to do next.  What have I done, and what am I going to do to keep this from being a big mess?  Send it back?  No, the vision is still strong and besides I’ve told too many people that I’m going to do it. 

It was the same when Jim and I started the company.  Once we realized what we’d got ourselves into, we were too proud and stubborn to quit.

So you keep the vision in mind, do some more research and then charge ahead. And now back to the car computer project update.  I snapped some photos during the install, mostly so I could figure out how to put it all back together again.

I can remove the dash in 2 minutes flat now.

The Pioneer is going on eBay . . .

Now just unplug the old wires . . .

Make a minor adjustment to the mounting bracket . . .

And then figure out where all these wires go.

Everything’s wired up, hopefully correctly.  I had to guess on a couple of the wires.

Ready to test.  Having a backup plan is always good.

Test early and often . . .

Button everything up, and then put the power to it one more time . . .

Success!  The FJ is now running Vista!  Like starting a company, this project will be a roller coaster.  You’ve got to have the attitude that roller coasters are fun, and that ups almost always follow downs.  I’ve got a lot more to do (at my company and with the FJ Car Computer Project) but I’m making progress and enjoying the roller coaster.

That was quick! But does it spellcheck the title?

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I just installed Windows LiveWriter and this is my first post.  If it works, it only took about 5 minutes to install and configure to work with typepad.  And yes, it does check the title of a post when I run spell check.

Web interfaces are great for a lot of applications, and I still think an application running on my personal computer can be best.  In the early days of typepad, it was too easy to accidently hit the back button on the browswer and lose my entire post.  At least now they warn you that it is about to happen.

Just to test it out a bit, I’m going to see if I can insert a map into this post. 

Looks like it worked.  Next I’ll see if I can control it with speech recognition!

Former Gold Systems building for lease

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Some of my fondest memories of Gold Systems are from when we were located at 4865 Riverbend Road.  Long before starting the company I used to drive by the office park and think how cool it would be to work in those buildings, and it actually happened.  4865 was the second building we were in, and it was brand new at the time.  Jim and Jeanne Fetterman designed and built two of the buildings in the office park and they did a great job.  Our building had several balconies and it was a lot of fun to have meetings outside.  More than one snowball fight was started from the balcony too.

I don’t care for Class A space, but I want people to feel good about where they work and it helps if it is interesting too.  This building was reasonably priced but very nice.  For a small company the building couldn’t be beat.

Jim just emailed me and said there is space available again in the building, and the one next to it.  If you need about 3,000 square feet or less in Boulder, Colorado, be sure and check it out.  It’s great space and Jim was a wonderful landlord.  He was always quick to do maintenance and when we broke the water line pulling fiber between the buildings and had to backhoe up his brand new parking lot, he was very gracious and understanding – but that’s another story for another day.

Embellishing Resumes

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One of the headlines at MSN.com today was "Resume Tricks – 6 ways to embellish without lying"

I see a lot of resumes – I don’t read a lot of resumes – but I see a lot of resumes.  The resume has to be special, or from someone that we’re seriously considering hiring before I will take the time to actually read it.  At best, I scan most resumes quickly.  If I have no reason to care about the resume, and that applies to most of the resumes I see, a typo or spelling mistake will generally cause me to hit the delete key.  (The only time I look at paper resumes is if someone at my company or the candidate hands it to me.  Mailing me a resume is a waste of paper I’m afraid.  Also, I’m a terrible speller.  My fourth grade teacher said I’d never be a success if I didn’t learn to spell.  The jury’s still out on that, but I do proofread and I always use spell-check, and I expect people who want to work here to do the same.)

The article referenced above is better than the headline suggests, so I’ll give the author the benefit of the doubt.  A special headline editor probably wrote the headline to grab attention, but for me it was negative attention.  I have two problems with their choice of words.  "Resume Tricks"  I don’t like it already.  According to dictionary.com, a trick is "An act or procedure intended to achieve an end by deceptive or fraudulent means."  Given that definition, if I have the slightest suspicion that a candidate is trying to trick me, I move on to the next person.  The consequences of hiring a dishonest person are too great to even take a chance on someone who might otherwise look good on paper.

"Embellish without lying" is an interesting phrase.  It might be possible.  Again according to dictionary.com, one definition of "Embellish" is "To make beautiful, as by ornamentation; decorate."  People rarely ornament or decorate their resume, so maybe I have the wrong definition.  (Tell you what, I’ll carefully read the next decorated resume that I get – I promise.)  Perhaps the better definition and more common understanding is "To add ornamental or fictitious details to: a fanciful account that embellishes the true story."

Fictitious details could be degrees that weren’t really earned, as the story mentions, or the more common kind of detail such as "saved the company $2.4 million."  How much is a person worth who saved a company $2.4 million – let’s see – $2.4 million, probably more?  So why do I have their resume in my hand, surely they know we don’t pay THAT well and the individual offices at Gold Systems are nice, but that will buy you a great HOUSE, even in Boulder.  My guess is that if they didn’t just make up the number, that they were part of a TEAM who saved the company that kind of money.  When I see a resume that sounds like the person thinks they did it all by themselves, I hit the delete key.  More likely they were standing NEAR the team that did they real work, and they bailed when the project was done.

I LOVE seeing concrete assertions.  Why?  Because then I can check them out.  If you say on a resume that you worked for the fastest growing company in the world, I’m going to do a quick search and see if it’s true.  If I don’t think it is, I’m done, because I figure if you will lie on your resume, you’ll lie on your expense reports and you’ll lie to our customers.

As I said, the article wasn’t that bad, but the headline was terrible.  It isn’t OK to trick or embellish on a resume.

Marketing Blog

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Sam Decker writes a blog about Marketing and I’m regularly finding interesting posts and links to other good marketing ideas.  I usually read blogs via a NewsGator RSS reader, most recently the beta version of NewsGator Mobile, so I don’t often actually visit the websites of the blogs I read.  I happened to go to Sam’s site tonight and noticed that he and I have similar tastes in books.  I was really surprised to see that he lists my blog as one he reads – thanks Sam!