My predictions My thoughts and predictions on technology and business, and sometimes strong ones at that

For some time I’ve always felt there was value in having a mentor. Though over the course of my life I’ve seldom setup a formal mentor, though looking back I supposed I could nearly consider many people such a person. Rather than just stress the value of having a mentor I’d like to look at the value such a relationship can provide. Whether you get those pieces of value in a formal mentor situation or just through dinner with people the key is to grow.

1. Find someone to learn from

The obvious first step you should take is to get face time with those that are more experienced and have done it before. This is usually something that younger people that have not been out of school long steer away from approaching those with experience. Perhaps its intimidation, perhaps its that you feel they don’t think it would be worth their time. But from my personal experience I’m normally more than happy to help anyone that asks, and likewise anytime I’ve asked someone I’ve gotten positive results. This is usually as simple as can we get dinner/lunch/coffee sometime?

It should be pretty obvious who you may want to spend this time with. If it’s not then start simply take a boss, teacher, or some manager/supervisor in a lateral department.

2. Articulate the input you want

In unusual cases you may have someone that just naturally helps people grow.  But it’s usually hard to get guidance and direction on the areas you want without articulating that those are the areas you care about. Even if you’ve got the right person, they need to know how they can help, if they don’t know this you’re chances of it being effective are almost non-existent.

There’s a couple of ways to go about this, the first is to simply say ‘I’m looking for someone to mentor me in areas, x, y, z’. Or you could more simply have some idea of the areas you want more feedback on, and in these cases it may make most sense to get more direct answers to what you are seeking. Each has their benefits with the former you may get new insights that you had never considered. Whereas with the latter you are guaranteed to get some form of answer you are looking for.

For a tangible example, if you were considering a new job. The former question might give an answer of career path options, but no insight into whether you should accept the new job. The latter might give you a direct answer on their opinion of if the new job is a worthwhile venture, but is likely to make you less self sufficient in steering you’re own career. Both have their time and place and should be equally balanced.

3. Engage in the conversation

If you simple sit back and take notes after answering a question, then you’re no different than a freshman student sitting in a lecture class. Half the value of a mentoring relationship is the relationship, it’s not just about soaking up information, it’s about the relationship you build. If you want straightforward how-tos go read a book. The value in the relationship works on both sides, it’s a rewarding experience to mentor someone and see them grow. So engage with the person you’re looking for guidance from, they’re normally more quick to offer support in areas outside strictly advice in these cases.

Having spent most of my early career in consulting and now being at a software company I’m realizing there were a lot of principles I picked up that I now readily apply in my daily happenings. As I find myself interacting with most of my colleagues, many of whom have only been in software companies, these principles are as evident.

1. Listen to the problems not the solutions

Often times in early interacting with a customer people will ask what do you need. As a consultant I would never ask what they needed, if they knew this I wouldn’t be there. Instead, I ask about their problems. It’s then my job to take what they tell me about their problems, their environment, and then steer them in the direction of an appropriate solution. While very basic this is the key to consulting, asking the right questions to steer your customer so you can provide value.

2. Take ownership of the process

If you develop on a project and follow exactly what the customer tells you, spending the time they tell you on each feature, but in the end have no single full functioning piece the customer is likely to hold you at fault. Even if they do not, they’re not going to exactly be happy and have a successful project. Once you’ve listened to their problems and gotten an idea on the solutions there has to be careful management of this process. A customer is going to be wanting every potential feature to be delivered, it’s up to you to ensure each early stage feature is delivered with quality and value. It’s better to deliver 80% of the features at 100% completion, than 100% of the features at 80% completion. Again, a simple concept, but a tight rope to walk when the customer wants you to simply follow as they say.

3. Don’t talk about the solution, talk about the value

Perhaps this is only because where I’m currently at is very engineering centric, but I hear so many times the discussion about the particular implementation. In consulting finding value in something was extremely simple, in fact I believe I learned it in one of my very first business courses. If it doesn’t make something better, faster, or cheaper, you’re not going to be successful with it. It’s your job to determine how you take the implementation and arrive at the value, but when the customer is getting down to the details of implementation there’s a good chance you’re not making best use of their time. It’s absolutely true at a point you’ll want to discuss all of the implementation details, but don’t do that until you’re absolutely required to, your first job is to sell them on the value.

While all of these are very basic principles, actually enforcing them is something that comes very gradually over time. Every interaction with the customer is going to be very unnatural to what you’re already doing. However, you’ll find yourself in more control of the full process, and having more satisfied customers when you follow these steps.

Google doesn’t understand social or collaboration. There’s not much more to it than that, though for the sake of making this a an actual blog post I’ll explain a bit more.

Blogger was huge, it was the place to go if you were creating a blog. There weren’t many www.mybloghere.com, many of the largest most popular blogs on the internet were on blogger. People had accounts, people registered to post comments, people had full fledged profiles that could have easily preceded a facebook profile page. Google bought blogger and had more than enough resources to grow blogger into a sizable social community. But if you visit it looks much the same as it did 5 and almost 10 years ago. 

Google spreadsheets is one of the best online spreadsheet programs, and you can even collectively work on a spreadsheet with others at the same time thousands of miles away. Who do you know that uses google spreadsheets that isn’t some form of a techie? It likely has a user base of under 1% of users of spreadsheets, and its not because it’s missing the power features of pivot tables and such. If you re-brand it as a collaboration tool when working and throw chat/video/whiteboarding in the same application google would have an instant growth 10 fold of users, but they don’t understand that a user seeing the same thing on a spreadsheet and seeing what the other types in a single document isn’t collaboration!

To jump ahead of the curve, counter arguments I’ve already heard are around ads and gmail. Gmail, google didn’t improve email, they simply give you lots of space for free, if gmail were to cease to exist tomorrow users would simply jump over to yahoo or microsoft. Ads, google changed the ad industry by making search effective, they’re good at algorithms and such, but they don’t get users and collaboration, and at their current rate they never will.

Wave isn’t meant to just improve email, it’s meant to be a tool for collaboration, to view a conversation as an entity, and google just doesn’t get the conversation part.

Due to many recent events, which I’m sure I’ll disclose later, I’ve been in an interesting situation of a good bit of leverage. While leverage can of course be taken advantage of and misused, it also plays a very fair role in business. When hiring a new college graduate in most cases you take the offer you are given, some are able to negotiate for a higher salary, but most are quite unsuccessful. This is because they don’t have any leverage. If you ended up walking away from the job offer they would simply hire another college graduate. While yes you may have a lot of potential, it’s only that potential and not proven.

Additionally within a corporation, the company will often do just enough to keep an employee there. If a company does a great job, an employee gets a pat on the back. If an employee is indispensable (though no company will ever admit to this), they may get a noticeable reward, but it still doesn’t usually cover the value the individual is actually providing.

This responsibility to get what you are truly worth usually lies with the employee. The hard part of this, is knowing when and how to use your leverage. First you must actually have leverage, this commonly in potential revenue you would bring in, or internal knowledge that you may have. Though I’m sure others have varying experiences, mine have been to make your dissatisfaction with a situation known, but in a light manner. Meanwhile make it visible that you’re open to other opportunities as they may come along, this can be via twitter, blog post, or water cooler talk. The final thing, and hopefully this is an easier one, is make it clear that you have the leverage, the sale should be a big one, or the internal knowledge should be costly should they lose it.

The most unfortunate part of all of this is that, in my experiences the leverage is typically needed to get a fair deal. And the single point of requiring leverage no longer makes it fair, but at least knowing this ensures you’re not left out in the cold.

Twitter has finally hit mainstream, it was bound to happen and with Ashton, Oprah, Shaq, among many others it’s now going to be around for a while. This means a lot of interesting things for twitter such as scalability to handle this new massive growth which will be much more regular unlike the more sparse spikes they would see before. But as user of twitter it means something far different, it means twitter is about to run out of usefulness. Before twitter was a nice resource to be able to regularly communicate with micromessaging, now it’s quickly going to become one of the noisiest things on the web. This would be a fine case, IF there were ways to manage the noise. However with twitter you either get really focused drops or the entire firehose, there is no medium in between. Sure twitter searches can be nice, but this requires maybe 20-30 constant searches to be up to date on what you care about.

If someone is able to find some way to manage the firehose of information it will prove as valuable tool as twitter itself. But if that doesn’t happen in a respectable time, twitter is going to get really exciting to a lot of people, and just as quickly turn a lot of people off.

I’ve learned a great deal since being out in the valley, first, is the confirmation that I do love the atmosphere. Second that I really miss the fall, but more importantly I’ve learned a lot that I feel is useful in a startup environment. The startup environment and business model is a very unique one, especially in recent years. It seems to not require a business model to get someone just to give you $10 million and hope you come out with one at some point. And in some cases it works, I mean it did for google, but well the failure stories are a lot more abudant than the success ones.

Here’s a quick run down of how I think one can build a successful startup in any economy, and why I feel our current state is prime for someone following these steps.

1. Have a business model. Yeah, it’s less glamorous that a facebook that has millions of people log on to it each hour. Take for example the guys at 37 signals, they’re probably happy to get a million uniques in a month, or perhaps even a year. But per employee, per their cost, their revenues are at least 10x if not 100x of facebook’s. And they most likely see that in revenue per employee as well. Why is this the case? Simple put, they have a business model. They have some product they build and people want it, not want it in the sense that they will spend hours of time aimlessly using it if its free and convenient. It accomplishes some actual goal, and saves people time and makes their lives easier. Oh and something I’ve probably said too many times on here, but ad’s isn’t a business model, unless your specifically an ad company.

2. Get competent employees, I want to even take this a step further and say to get employees that believe in the technology but also in the business. Its one thing when your at a large company to have someone that’s extremely specialized. But at a startup everyone wears a variety of hats. Your secretary could land a big lead on a sale, your intern developer could come up with your future marketing slogan, and because of this everyone you bring on board needs to be fully on board with every aspect of your business. If you’re growing slower than you hoped it’s fine, and worth it to be short rather than over inflated.

3. Part of the reason you’d rather be short than inflated is you don’t want to take on capital. To quote someone else I’ve recently come into contact with, ‘you want to get off the tit as fast as possible’. To give a little more explanation, most startups take sizable investments from VC’s or other parties to get going. The problem here is that you then have to answer to them, if you’re the one with the idea, with the vision, why would you want to give up any control of that. And the fact is you shouldn’t, going back to point 1 and 2, if you have the business model it shouldn’t be long before you see revenue, and if all your employees believe in the company, they wont expect a high cushy salary, they’ll take ownership in the company as part of their compensation.

4. Keep your employees happy, the easiest way to do this is pizza and beer. It’s simple, but works. If you have happy employees enjoying what they do they’ll work harder and longer. The smaller you are the more poisonous it is to have employees that don’t fit in and embrace your culture. Sure diversity can be a good thing, and you do need some balance of it. But more than that you don’t want to ruin the atmosphere and comraderier that comes along with a startup. In addition to keeping your employees happy those small things help, pizza and beer for 20 to get an extra hour of work and the intangibles of helping build relationships that allow them to work better is far cheaper than paying them extra dollars to work late.

5. Don’t overspend, this may seem in contrast to 4, and often times poeple go with one extreme or the other. Pizza and beer makes sense, Lobster lunches do not, I don’t care if you are google, they still don’t make sense. If you are doing extremely well and want to give back to employees give it with cash, they’ll appreciate it more. Bsimilar search for John McCain shows a normal pro-McCainut order in lunches every day and pool tables are no necessary expenses.

If there’s enough response I’ll follow up with some of the more tangible ways of making this happen, but for now, enjoy these big picture take aways.

As I watch the news and posts roll in each day with new layoffs in the valley, ranging from large corporations such as HP and EA, down to the small guys such as seesmic, imeem, searchme, and zillow to name only a few, there still seems to be a demand for certain job skills. While as I look down the list some of these I dont feel are any longer demanded skills, and others will soon be there. In part I want to call attention to facebook first. While everyone and their brother, when launching a website wants to build a facebook app to deliver some of their content on to facebook, the time and effort put into this is no where near the return. The market has become so flooded the penetration you will get is quite trivial. Futhermore cpm’s have already plummeted for advertising on facebook, ranging in some cases around .10-.15.

Meanwhile iphone developers are still rushing to get their idea into the app store. While a decent idea, and I more than support new applications, so that I can use them on my phone, a 10 million person marketplace is still extremely small, especially if you’re not a mainstream application. It used to be that one million users on your website was the golden point in social networks when you could really go for significant funding, or you could start talking a selling price. But thats not the case anymore, much less to reach that on the iphone you would have to be somewhere between the top 10 and top 25 elite apps. 

So sure, you might not have that many users that download your app right? But theres ad revenue possibilities. Well that works right now, the iphone is seeing insane cpm’s in some cases as high as $50. This is simply not sustainable. While some claim that mobile advertising is the holy grail of ad’s, that only works if you can capture user intent, which in contrast isn’t so simple. It works for search, because well when I’m searching for something that usually captures my intent, not so for when I’m using my phone. I strongly suspect that as these new hot markets calm down, companies will do proper analysis of ROI and no longer want many of these niche skills.

In these cases I think there’s going to be able more smaller bubbles bursting and a lot more niche developers searching for something more than developing the occasional website for the store down the street.

I recently attended part of the recent Techcrunch 50 conference, and when I wasn’t there I was watching much of it online. For probably 80% of the companies when it came time to ask about their business model, they said ads. Then they talked about cause they have all of this great information about the user they can advertise better than they used to. The problem is they’re forgetting all about user intent. This is why ads on facebook simply arent working, with some CPM’s being as low as .05. 

Ads work on search because users are looking for something, and if you place an ad for it they’re fine with it, because they didn’t want to stay on the search page. When a user goes to facebook they want to stay on facebook, not leave. When a user is in an application they want to stay in the application, as long as the site or application is a destination or resides on a destination it will not make great revenue from traditional ads. Yeah, theres oppportunities for newer creative advertising, but this form of ad’s will not provide the same revenue yet as others. If you’re launching a product or site, actually consider how your worth making money, just saying ads in most cases is not a business model.

Forget the benchmarks, forget whether its truly faster or slower, forget whether the market share is 30% for non-IE browsers (though is this only for US or internationally). Google Chrome evolution or revolution, whatever you want to call it, it makes me actually want to stay in the browser. I just want plugins, that function as well as the browser alone does. Yeah theres rendering problems, and some oddities, but the browser as a whole is smooth. I actually feel thus far its the best of IE and safari melded together. The only problem I see right now is the lack of plugins, which my guess is will come VERY SOON. Meanwhile firefox when having the plugins I want enabled can be sluggish, if Chrome plugins are of equivilant quality then I can’t see how the browser wouldn’t be at LEAST as smooth.

Chrome really is a win for Google, whether they can monetize it or not. It helps them to keep people off the desktop and in the browser. I could go on for hours about bad moves they’ve made, such as picasa, but Chrome was actually a good one.

As I currently work at a startup I have a small stake in the company. When talking with one friend of something I have been working with someone with on the side, the question came up over if this was a conflict of interest. I was actually quite shocked to hear the question at first, not only did I expect them to do likewise, as I know many that do. The full on conflict of interest statement just shocked me. Being at a startup it does make it slightly more of an interesting statement, but I received similar comments sometimes at my former Fortune 100 employer. I’ll start with that place and then migrate to the startup environment.

I could not disagree more being an employee at some place, and working on additional things being a conflict of interest. In short you are an employee, not property, your best interests lie with yourself. Sure its great if you believe in the company and what they do, but in our generation you are not attached for life to the company you work for. The company has claim on what you do between 8-5 with regards to work, sure if you do things that may damange a company brand or your effectiveness to do business its fair for them not to retain you, but simply doing additional work in your spare time? Hardly!

Now as we move on to the startup atmosphere, where it’s pretty standard that when becoming employed you receive some amount of equity in the company. In most cases with not being a founder this stake is of relatively small size. Sure you could consider Google where I believe it was over 400 employees that were made millionaires by their IPO, but these situations are very rare. The equity receive normally vessts over a period of time, and from my perception is simply equivilant to a portion of your pay no more no less. Sure it does make you feel more of a sense of ownership, but does not extend to the full extent of the business owning you.

As an employee you’re being paid to perform a job, they don’t have full claim to what you do on your time.