Entrepreneur Ship Quotes

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Boat tile copy
 
I had dinner with a friend a few weeks ago, and he emailed me today and asked for the "Ship Navigation Quotes" that I have on my desk.

I've always loved the water and I enjoy being on it, in it and under it.  My first memory in life, I think, is of my first swimming lesson.  Mr. Epling said he would give a penny to the person who could duck their head under the water the longest.  My memory is of him lifting me out of the water by my bathing suit because I wasn't ready to come up.  I won the penny.

So – the quotes are really about life and entrepreneurship and they relate so well to what I've experienced since Jim and I started Gold Systems.

The picture that I started this post off with is of a ceramic tile that my wife brought home from the Netherlands for me years ago.  It says "De beste Stuurlui staan aan wal" which translates to english as "The best steersmen are ashore."  It's really easy to stand on the dock and tell the sailor what they are doing wrong, but it gives you a whole different perspective to sail into the storm and to be responsible for the ship.  If people are shouting advice from the dock, they might have good advice, but remember their perspective and that ultimately you and the other people on the boat are responsible for bringing it home safe.

The next one reminds me that good times are easy.

Anyone can hold the helm

"Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm."  According to the fortune cookie, Publilius Syrus said this in the first century B.C.  The next quote gets to that idea from another angle.  "A ship is safe in harbor – but that is not what ships are for."  by John Shedd.  The dates don't quite match the John Shedd from Chicago, but I'll bet it's him.

A ship is safe in the harbor

Too many boats (and people) spend their life in harbor because it is safe.

I am not afraid of storms

I've looked to that last quote a lot, especially in 2001 and again this past year.  "I am not afraid of storms for I am learning to sail my ship." by Louisa May Alcott. I'm not suggesting we should sail into storms just to become better sailors, but if you find yourself in a storm, try to learn from the experience and you'll be better prepared for the next storm.  You may still not like storms but after enough of them, you at least gain some confidence that you'll get through them. 

Before quiting my nice safe job (HA!) I thought that if I was in charge, things would be different.  Some are, some aren't. When things get tough I remind myself that THIS is what I wished for and I'm right where I wanted to be all those years ago.  If I ever cross an ocean in my own boat, and I find myself in a storm, I'll try to remember then that "I'm living the dream!"

(When typing in the tags for this post, I noticed the word EntrepreneurShip.  Coincidence?  I don't think so.)

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 . . .

Mobile phones are not very good phones

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I'm going to tell you something you probably already know.  Most mobile phones are not very good phones.  It is amazing to me how bad mobile phones are at being – phones.  My phone, an aging Samsung device, is a great email and task management device, but give me a choice between it and an old-fashioned land line for an important call, and I'll chose the land line every time because I don't want my call dropped, faded or otherwise mishandled.

 

And don't blame it my particular device, because I hear how most people answer their mobile devices.  "Hello, hello, can you hear me?"  This article on Gizmodo reportshow a reader took their iPhone into the Genus Bar and was told that "a 30 percent dropped call rate is average" in the New York Area.

 

I find it amazing that our phone service was once considered to be so important that the network was designed to withstand a nuclear war.  Remember the bomb shelter signs that used to be on some buildings?  Many of those buildings were phone company buildings, though I'll bet if the bombs had started falling we would have found that 1) the doors were already locked from the inside and 2) nothing survives a nuclear bomb.  Thankfully we never found out, and bomb shelters, in the US at least, are historical oddities.

 

Anyway, it is strange to think that we went from a world where not getting dial tone when we picked up the receiver was considered an emergency, to one where 30% of our calls failing is considered normal.

 

A few weeks go I received a press release from Spirent, a company that does test systems for communications platforms, including wireless networks.  They've written a white paper about testing they did using six of the popular smart phones and how they put them through real-world test scenarios.  The results are even worse than I would have expected, with some phones having high failure rates under extreme conditions such as the user walking around the block while talking on the phone.

 

Spirent made a couple of good points in their paper.  One is that when people go to the phone store to buy a new phone, they are typically focused on everything but voice quality, and if they do care about voice quality and call reliability, it's impossible to get data that would allow you to compare two different handsets, much less two different networks.

 

Also according to their paper, there are huge failure rates in certain scenarios with every device tested.  One device had almost an 80% drop rate in a particular scenario.  No, you won't hit that scenario every day, but when you do, 80% of the time you're going to have your call dropped.  Again, it's amazing to me that we put up with this.

 

I know it's not cool to actually talk on the phone now, but I still think the killer mobile app is this – voice calls that only disconnect when I press the little red button on my phone.  If you have a mobile phone that never drops calls, feel free to leave a comment.  Or if you just want to rant you can leave a comment too.

Another Social Center Demo

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It used to be that people could tell how busy I was by how long my hair got between haircuts.  Now you can by how long I go between blog posts.  The good news is that I've been very busy this past few months, and at least from where I'm standing, it looks like the economy is improving and enterprises are buying again.  We've already beat our sales goal for the quarter and now we're trying how much we can beat it by the end of the month – that's a good feeling.

I've recorded another demo of our Social Center concept software, and we're starting to roll it out to more users inside Gold Systems.  Internally it's like "Twitter for the enterprise" in that as people change their presence and notes I can see those changes appear in the order they happen.  Already I'm feeling better connected to the people I follow.  Sometimes it is work related but not always – for instance I found out that one of the people I'm working with is having twins, which is pretty appropriate for her to announce it that way, because she introduced me to her fiance a few years ago using Microsoft OCS video conferencing.

You can watch the demo here – www.youtube.com/goldsys  If you are interested in this sort of thing, Opus Research also just wrote a piece about what we're doing and that's available on the Gold Systems blog here – http://www.goldsys.com/blog/news/gold-systems-makes-ocs-more-social 

WiFi Scales can weigh and tattle at the same time

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Every week a couple of people search for "WiFi Fridge" and end up at my blog postabout the LG refrigerator that has a video screen in the door.  It doesn't really have a WiFi connection, but that's what I was thinking about when I named the post back in 2006.  (Maybe I should build it since I have the number one or two spot in Bing and Google with that post.)  LG seems to have discontinued the refrigerator, though you can buy a wireless TV from them now.

Recently I discovered the Withings WiFi connected scales, which you've got to have I think if you are getting an WiFi refrigerator.  Not only are the scales wireless, they have an easy-to-use programming interface so all sorts of interesting applications could be build.  I could build an app for instance that would send a message via Twitter or Facebook if my weight went above (or below) a certain number.  Surely someone will build this into one of the sites like dailyburn.com that help people track their exercise and match their progress with friends.

The scales aren't available in the U.S. yet and hopefully the price will come down before it arrives.  At almost $200, that's out of reach for my toy budget.

Wifi Scale

Social Networking in the Enterprise

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I talked to Dan Miller from Opus Research this week, and when he blogged about our conversation I realized that *I* had not yet blogged about this. 

Dan and I talked about how Microsoft's Office Communications Server can be extended and even embedded into other applications.  At the Worldwide Partner Conference this year in New Orleans I was doing a demo of how we had created "Twitter for the Enterprise" using OCS, and on the last day of the conference I recorded this live demo.  I was sitting in the U.S. Partner area, which of course included a Starbucks.  If you listen carefully you might hear the barista in the background.

Today Unified Communications and Office Communications Server in particular are getting attention because enterprises see the technology as cheaper than buying and maintaining legacy phone systems.

If they get some productivity improvements, which can be tough to quantify, then that's just a bonus.  But to me that's like replacing typewriters with PCs in the old days.   The future potential of the PC was far more valuable than the incremental costs savings that were gained by improving word processing.  The same thing will happen here.  Applications of great value will be created that simply aren't possible with today's communications infrastructure that is based on hardware more than software.

Enterprises will not buy phone systems in the future, any more than they buy word processing systems today.  Communications of all types, not just voice, will be a part of all of our applications and it will be because today we are rebuilding the infrastructure using software, not silicon and copper wire running to each and every place where we need to communicate.

Windows 7 RTM Installed via upgrade

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Windows7RTMWallpaper

Microsoft released the final RTM version of Windows 7 to partners via MSDN last week.  I have four computers, and I just finished upgrading all of them to RTM.  Microsoft recommends a clean install from the test version, but that is a LOT of work and I decided I would risk it and do the unsupported upgrade.  I've had a great experience with Windows 7 and I would recommend upgrading to at as soon as you can.  My experience, and benchmarks that I've seen, seem to indicate that it is even faster that Windows XP.  I have had very few issues and have been off of Vista and XP since the day the first Beta version of Windows 7 was available.

After finishing the last machine tonight, I wrote these notes up for a few people at Gold Systems who are also early adopters.  Remember, Microsoft recommends a clean install, and I recommend backing up your systems in case anything goes wrong.

I decided to upgrade all my computers to Windows 7 RTM, rather than do a clean install.  I found this website telling how to do it, and it really was easy.  Basically,

1.    Copy the DVD to your hard drive

2.    Edit an ini file to set the minimum version required to upgrade.  The file is 3 lines long and you just change a number

3.    Run setup from the hard drive

Here’s the link:

http://www.7tutorials.com/how-upgrade-your-windows-7-test-version-final-release

It seems to be working just fine, but here are the gotchas.

Because of patch Tuesday I think, my machines needed a reboot before I could install RTM.  The installer doesn’t check that until 5 or 10 minutes in, so you should start with a  reboot of your machines to make sure your patches are installed before starting the install.

RTM won’t install with McAffe virus software (my version)  installed, so uninstall it and reboot before starting.

On one machine I had an old SoundBlaster card that was listed as incompatible, but I went ahead with the install, and Windows update was able to find a good driver after the install was done, and it seems to be working now.

Once the installation gets going, you don’t have to do anything so you can just let it run.  I think it took 2 or 3 hours per machine.

The background wallpaper is new, and the stock tracker gadget has disappeared which is strange.  Other than that, I don’t see any difference.  Oops, I just noticed my printers on my laptop are gone.  And my homegroup is gone, which I’ve found to be useful, but it will be easy to set that back up.  Outlook, Communicator, etc. all seem to be working fine.

I hope this helps and saves you a few false starts.  Ned and Steve – THANK YOU for being so tolerant of me insisting on being on the bleeding edge!  J

Terry

P.S. – one of the computers is the FJ Car Computer, a strange piece of equipment if there ever was one.  The initial install and upgrade of Windows 7 worked flawlessly.   

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.