How to Change the World

MajikWidgets

For the past few weeks I’ve been using a widget to enable readers to rank my postings. The company that created it, MajikWidgets, is now open for business. So far, there are three widgets:

• Ranking
• Polling
• Opening a new page from a link

An example of a ranking is at the end of this posting. Here’s a poll:

The company uses a novel “credit system” involving paying a credit for each instance of a widget’s use. You get a bunch for free to try stuff, but eventually you have to buy credits.

We also came up with the concept of “linkware.” This enables a blogger to add a link to the blog of the person who thought of the widget. So, for example, if you use the ranking widget (which I requested from the company) and like my blog and want to help me with a link, you just check a box prior to the generation of your the MajikWidget code. Shareware, freeware, now there’s linkware!

By the way, if you want to ensure that your link is counted, please ping Technorati here.

Here’s an early review of what MajikWidget is doing.

Please check it out. I love what they’re doing...cool stuff from cool guys!

Book Preview: iWoz

Gina Smith, the co-author of the upcoming autobiography called iWoz, provided me with a copy so that I could read it and provide a blurb. The book is slated for shipping in November, 2006, but there’s nothing wrong with a little pre-release publicity. After all, it will probably be out BV (Before Vista), and everyone has heard of Vista already.

First, here’s the blurb that I provided Gina:

Every engineer—and certainly every engineering student—should read this book. It is about the thrill of invention, the process of making the world a better place, and the purity of entrepreneurship. I, Woz is the personal computer generation’s version of The Soul of a New Machine. It is, in a nutshell, the engineer’s manifesto. I hope that the so-called “innovation experts” and MBAs choke when they read it.

I didn’t work directly with Woz in my tours of duty at Apple, so much of the material was new—and fascinating—to me. I loved the book because it isn’t the typical theoretical tome written by an expert or consultant (i.e., someone who can’t do but can write).

Instead, the book takes you inside the mind of someone who was truly instrumental in one of the great revolutions of our time. After reading it, I was even more proud of having worked for Apple. Also, I swear that Woz doesn’t use the word “strategic” once in the book—how many business books can you say that about?

In particular, if you’re an entrepreneur, the first time some expert tells you that you need to conduct market research, run your design past focus groups, and set up offshore development to India or Russia, you should give him this book. For your enjoyment, here’s a list of the top ten things that I learned by reading I, Woz.

1. Woz is now, and always has been, an Apple employee.
2. In the sixth grade Woz scammed gubernatorial candidate Richard Nixon with a certificate from the school’s ham radio club. The certificate was made with crayons just before the ceremony, and Woz was the only “member” of the club.
3. The Apple IPO made the most millionaires in one single day in history up to that point in time.
4. Woz and Jobs worked as Alice in Wonderland characters at shopping mall in San Jose.
5. Woz didn’t return to the University of Colorado after his first year because he ran up too much computer timesharing costs.
6. Woz tried to call the Pope by impersonating Dr. Henry Kissinger. He almost got through except that the Vatican called the real Dr. Kissinger to verify the call.
7. Woz and Jobs got robbed of a blue box at gunpoint in Sunnyvale.
8. The statement that convinced Woz to leave HP to start Apple (uttered by Allen Baum) was, “You can be an engineer and become a manager and get rich, or you can be an engineer and stay an engineer and get rich.”
9. Woz lost approximately $12 million in each of the two US Festivals that he put on.
10. Woz taught computer technology to elementary school students for ten years.

The book ends with Woz’s thoughts on being a great engineer:

1. Don’t waver.
2. See things in gray-scale.
3. Work alone.
4. Trust your instincts.

When is the last time your manager told you to work like this?

Anyone interested in engineering, Apple, personal computers, technology, and entrepreneurship should read this book.You’ll find it compelling because it is so unlike most books about innovation and entrepreneurship. As I said, it’s the engineer’s manifesto.

You can pre-order one by clicking here.

Another font story

Here is the story of Lucerna, designed to make the Bible printable on fewer pages for Tyndale House Publishers.

Then check out this interesting blog about design by the creator of Lucerna. It contains the best definition of design that I’ve ever seen:

Design consists of creating things for clients who may not know what they want, until they see what you've done, then they know exactly what they want, but it's not what you did.

By the way, this is what it’s like to blog while in Alesund, Norway. :-)

The Top Sixteen Lies of CEOs

At the suggestion of, and with the help of, Glenn Kelman, here are more lies. These are the lies of CEOs running a companies that are beyond the startup phase. Startup phase lies you’ve read here before.

1. “Working together, we’ve established our goals.” In other words, these are the goals that the CEO decided will make him look good. Few managers believe that these goals are doable, and yet they are the ones who are going to have to accomplish them. But that’s what working together means: the CEO decides and the workers do.

2. “It’s like a startup around here.” This could mean that the place lacks adult supervision; capital is running out; the product is behind schedule; investors have given up, and employees are paid below market rates. Sure, it could alternatively mean that the company is energized, entrepreneurial, making meaning, and kicking butt, but just be sure to double check.

3. “Your project will be a skunkworks reporting directly to me.” This means that no one else at the management level buys into the idea. The CEO might protect you—as this lie implies. Or, you may be fighting for your life against the naysayers when the CEO moves on to the next brilliant idea du jour.

4. “I wanted to do this, but the board wouldn’t let me.” This is a cop out. A good CEO tells the board what she wants to do. She doesn’t seek permission—forgiveness maybe, but never permission. So this statement means one of two things: the CEO didn’t really try her best to get something approved or the board is losing confidence in the CEO.

5. “I expect you to figure this out.” This is a loaded, supposed backhanded compliment. It’s supposed to mean, ”I have such confidence in you that I know you can do this.” Sometimes it does means this. Most times, though, it means that the CEO has no clue and is praying that you can save his butt.

6. “Our sales pipeline looks good.” This means that the vice president of sales leaned on the regional sales manager who leaned on the regional sales rep to pump up the forecast because the CEO doesn’t want to look bad to the board of directors.

7. “We will be profitable soon.” After leaning on the sales organization and it “came through with a great pipeline,” the CEO could then ”reliably“ predict profitability. He never did check with the CFO, though. If the company isn’t profitable, then it’s the fault of the vice president of sales or CFO anyway.

8. “The stock price is not important; what’s important is building a great company.” There are handful of visionary CEOs who mean this when they say it. However, you don’t work for one of them. If one could get an honest answer out of CEOs, most would tell you that they’d rather have a rising stock price than a great company. Very few have the courage to build a great company and trust that a rising stock price is a natural outcome of this accomplishment.

9. “I’ve never worked with a better group of people.” The career limiting comeback to this is, “Well, I have—starting at the top.” This can be a legitimate morale boosting statement when it is infrequently made. However, if a CEO spouts this off more than once every five to ten years, and you know there are clearly bozos on the team (often protected by the CEO), then you know that he’s playing you.

10. “I’m open to new ideas.” The CEO must have recently read a book by a management guru. She’s certainly open to his own new ideas. She’s probably open to new ideas from the consultants that she hired at $10,000/day. Maybe she read a new idea in a blog, God help us. The relevant question is whether she’s open to new ideas from the rank-and-file employees who really know how to fix the company.

11. “I want to hear the truth; I don’t want yes-men around me.” Maybe this is the truth: he doesn’t want yes men around—he wants yes women. But I doubt it. It could be that he’s so arrogant that he believes that he’s always right so there’s nothing to disagree with. But I doubt that too. The most likely situation is that he’s just lying, and he wants people to always agree with him.

12. “I will gladly step aside when the time comes.” Sure, with a $10 million severance package, who wouldn’t be glad to step aside?

13. “This is how we did it at (name of previous company he was fired from), and it worked.” And that’s why the company let him go. And that’s why the employees at the previous company rejoiced when the news spread. And, unfortunately, that’s why the directors of this company hired him: because he was a senior-level packaged goods guy who was available, and the board thought that your tech products should be sold like laundry detergent.

14. “I don’t need to understand all that whiz-bang stuff to be a good CEO.” Absolutely. Your customers aren’t that smart. Neither are your employees, vendors, and partners. The CEO just needs to stand there: tall, white, and gray haired, and let everyone kiss his ring.

15. “I don’t need to rehearse my speech.” This is because he’s not to going to gauge audience reaction since his limo is waiting to whisk him away. He’ll simply ask his handlers, Trixie and Biff, how they think he did. And they will tell him that the emperor has very fine clothes indeed.

16. “We are a customer-focused company.” If only the CEO had appended two additional words: "this quarter." Because next quarter the company will be an innovation-driven company. And the quarter after that a Six Sigma driven company. And the quarter after that the company will be producing purple cows. And the quarter after that it will be evangelistic (depending on whether the CEO reads my book or Seth's first).

Bonus: “I can telecommute and still keep my house on the golf course in Carmel.” The CEO should be living and dying with the company. If anything, he should be there more than anyone.

Rather than these lies, here are four things you’d like your CEO to say:

1. “I don’t know.”
2. “Thank you.”
3. “Do what’s right.”
4. “It’s my fault.”

Written at: Alesund, Norway

There Must Be a Better Way

It’s been a challenging week for me. The easy part was “outing” myself. That hard part was...I’ll come to that soon, see item #3. I’ll have a more contentive (content + substantive) post in the next few days.

1. Not sure what to make of this. Not trying to show off. But this is an interesting analysis by iNDi Business Solutions of how Guy Kawasaki is kicking Kawasaki’s butt on the Internet. At the very least, it shows what one Guy with a big mouth and a blog can do. Perhaps I should complain to ICANN that Kawasaki Motors is squatting on a domain that I should rightly own. :-)

2. The guys at Jajah have been busy. They just added a FireFox plug-in. With this plug-in, phone numbers that are on web pages are automatically detected and highlighted. When clicked, Jajah initiates a phone call from your phone—landline or mobile—to the desired destination.

3. This was the hard part of the week. Call me clueless. Call me pathetic. But for the life of me, I cannot figure this out. All I want to write my blog entries (while offline) in a more or less WYSIWYG mode. You know, where bold looks bold; italics look italics; ordered lists look like ordered lists; bulleted lists look like bulleted lists; you create hyperlinks by selecting text and adding the URL; and there are automatic smart quotes and em dashes. Then I want to copy the text and paste it into TypePad as HTML without funky stuff happening.

   I spent hours this week trying to find something to do this. I don’t want to learn HTML—this is 2006, so on principle no one should have to learn HTML to do what I want to do. I have tried about ten different programs—all the obvious choices that VersionTracker reveals. Let’s just say that my experience could be a Clint Eastwood movie called, “The Good, the Bad, and the Buggy.”

   This posting, believe it or not, was done this way: drafted in TextEdit, saved as HTML, opened with TextEdit Plus (which is a fabulous little editor), cleaned up, pasted into TypePad, and posted. What the shiitake am I missing? As Steve Jobs would say, “There must be a better way.”

   I know that Word can save-as HTML, but have you seen the resulting file? It would make a posting like this look like War and Peace. For example, the sentence, “There must be a better way” has twenty one characters. The Word HTML file with only the “display information” (that is, less stuff) has 1,122 characters! As Bill Gates would say, “There must be our way.”

   Please send suggestions. I’m so desperate (and I’m so impressed with Parallels) that I would even consider a Windows application to do this. God forbid.

4. Check out this great story about iStockphoto at Wired. It’s called “The Rise of Crowdsourcing.” I love iStockphoto; it is a role model for every startup because it’s outside of Silicon Valley, and it took no outside capital. The picture that you see in almost every posting is from the company (did you think I already had a picture of a jarful of shiitake mushrooms?). If nothing else, “crowdsourcing” is a very clever term. Almost as clever as the new spin on “linkware” that you will learn about next week.

The Top Ten Lies of Guy Kawasaki

1. “I already have a meeting at lunch.” This isn’t a lie if you consider talking to people on the bench between shifts a “meeting.” What can I say? One of my great joys in life is playing hockey, and some of the best games are at lunch time during the week. So if I tell you this lie, it probably means I’m playing hockey that day.

2. “I think what you’re doing is interesting, but it’s not something for us.” The first half of this statement is the lie; the second is the rock-solid truth. I tell this lie when I’m presented with an idea that I don’t think can succeed. I use it because I am chicken shiitake/soft-hearted. The good influence of my wife prevents me from being a total orifice and crushing people by saying, “You have a stupid idea.”

   In the past I experimented with telling people why I thought their idea wouldn’t succeed, but this only caused long, often hostile, conversations. To this day, I struggle with how to say “no” to entrepreneurs in a respectful way without giving reasons and getting into a long discussion. I cannot provide an explanation every time, or I’ll never have time to blog. :-) Please provide suggestions as comments.

3. “You need me more than I need you.” In order to become a venture capitalist, one has to swear that you believe this. It’s called the Hypocrite’s Oath. We may never actually utter this lie, but it permeates every aspect of our existence: what we drive, where we eat, how we dress, where our kids go to school, and especially how we communicate with entrepreneurs.

   It’s total bull shiitake. We need entrepreneurs as much, or more, as entrepreneurs need us. We need you to help us raise our next fund; we need you to pay for our lifestyles; and we need you to reinforce our delusions that we add value to companies and “make” kings.

4. “It’s a pleasure to speak here today.” Many speakers say this when they begin their talk. Sometimes I do too. The truth is that it’s probably not a pleasure because I had to fly out on Sunday to get to the East Coast for a Monday morning speech at 8:00 am Eastern (but 5:00 am for my body). But you can’t start a speech by saying, “It sucks to be here” and expect to be successful. :-)

   However, this isn’t a total lie because about thirty seconds into a speech, the audience lifts me up and takes me to “the zone.” Then, no matter how far I flew, how little sleep I’ve had, and how shiitakey I feel, I go to a place that is outside my body, and a force takes control. At that point, speaking is truly a pleasure--as I hope my audiences can tell.

5. “I can help you partner with Apple.” If I ever tell you this, just kick me in the nuts. I’ve been out of Apple for nine years, so I have few connections there. When Apple comes out with new stuff, I stand in line and pay full retail just like anyone else. When my computers break, I wait in line at the Genius Bar. I certainly don’t have the juice to make any kind of big deal happen with Apple. (I wonder if Jack Welch has to buy his light bulbs at Home Depot.)

6. “I don't care about making money with my blog.” I wish that I could be a full-time blogger. I love blogging because you get to be writer, editor, designer, publisher, and sales manager. It’s like being a mini media company--GuySpace? You set your own editorial agenda, deadlines, and ad rates. How cool is that? You find me a blogger who says he doesn’t care about making money blogging, and I’ll show you a liar.

7. “It’s not the money.” While we’re on the topic of money, I tell this lie when asked to write, speak, or consult for low fees. But it is the money. I have four children and a wife, and I hate to travel away from them. If a for-profit organization wants me, it has to pay. I don’t care how prestigious the event is or what beautiful resort it’s in (all I’m going to do is answer email from my room and speak anyway), I simply won’t do it.

   I’m more of a pushover for not-for-profits; the test in these cases is whether the organization is changing the world, and I believe I have a moral obligation to help out. But no cause is more important to me than my family.

   Incidentally, ingenuity does count. For example, I’ve spoken for vastly reduced sums during the NCAA Frozen Four in Columbus, Ohio and Milwaukee, Wisconsin as well as the Heritage Classic in Edmonton. Hear that St. Louis?

8. “We don't have a position at Garage or in our portfolio, but I'll keep you in mind.” This is a lie of duration. At that instant in time if I can think of a relevant position, then I help. But I don’t have the bandwidth/disk space/chip speed to keep the candidate in mind very long. Usually I refer people to a portfolio company of ours called SimplyHired which aggregates about five million job openings. The interesting thing about this lie is that many people are very thankful for even this response; I think it’s because most recipients never respond to such emails at all.

9. “I didn’t mean to slash/trip/board or knock you down.” This isn’t a total lie. It’s simply a ”shading.“ I didn’t mean to do all these penalty-inducing things, but people sometimes get between me and the puck, and I am goals-oriented person.

   As Henry James, brother to William, once said at the end of a long essay about the rules of writing, the only rule is, “Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.” Two out of three isn’t bad for me.

10. “Macintosh has lots of software.” This is a lie that I told in my sordid past--circa 1984-1987. It is closely related to the lie I told software developers: “You can make a lot of money writing Macintosh software.” What can I say? Guilty as charged. I was young and less moral then. Not that this justifies anything, but I believed what I was saying.

Bonus: “I don’t care about my Technorati ranking.”

I care a lot about my Technorati ranking, and it’s important for you to know why I care. I believe that the number of links is a proxy for the quality of a blog: the more links, the higher the quality. (Clearly, this isn’t true for all blogs, but this is how I look at my kind of blog.) Therefore, caring about my ranking parses to caring about the number of links parses to caring about the quality of my blog. And I take great pride in the quality of my blog.

While I’m at it, there’s another reason that I care so much about my ranking. I want to show the closed “club” of A Listers that that someone can come out of the blue, not play their petty, hypocritical games, and rise to the top because of good content. Even more important, I want to encourage the 45 million other bloggers out there to do the same--or better. Hence, I have a particular fondness for organizations like BlogHer.

After the Honeymoon

Much of my blog, and other information for entrepreneurs, focuses on creating new products, raising money, and building a successful startup. The advice stops there, and everyone lives happily ever after. Guess again.

Here’s some information about what happens after the honeymoon is over when the shiitake hits the fan. There are three parts to each section: the problem, how you got to this point, and what to do now.

1. Problem: A founder isn’t delivering.

   How you got here: In the early days of many organizations, the primary qualifications for key positions are being present and believing in the story. For example, your college roommate became “chief technical officer” because he was the only programmer that you knew. However, now that he has to build a scalable product and implement serious engineering discipline, he’s lost.

   What to do now: You could simply get rid of him. This isn’t very humanitarian, but neither is keeping him around until he tanks the company. Let’s keep termination as a last, desperate step because losing a founder is usually traumatic for everyone.

   Until then, let’s assume that he is good at some functions. The thing to do is to move him into a position where he can succeed. This usually involves a demotion, but that’s tough shiitake for him and a good precedent for everyone else to see. If he doesn’t want to make this transition, then it’s aloha oe. Remember: Founder status affords a person equity, not immunity.

   Here’s a news flash. The founder may be happy to change position with fewer management responsibilities. Perhaps all he wanted to do was code, and a “management” role was thrust upon him. Changing his role could be win-win for everyone.

2. Problem: The product is late.

   How you got here: It could be because you hired your roommate :-) The other common reasons are inexperience; wishful thinking; and knuckling under to the real or imagined pressure of investors to ship by a certain date.

   (By the way, an experienced engineering manager (usually not the founder/visionary) would not have let you get into this situation. And an experienced investor would have added six months or doubled the time to completion—whichever is greater—to your initial prediction.)

   What to do now: Several things: (a) Gather the team and have a “come to Jesus” about the real status of the project. (b) Ruthlessly decide on any changes in roles of people. (c) Scale back the scope/complexity/coolness of the product. (d) Plead guilty to your investors—that is, admit that you screwed up. (e) Sandbag the investors—that is, tell them a shipping date that you know you can beat. And I do mean “know” because your neck is on the chopping block. (f) Shut up and get to work.

3. Problem: Sales aren’t meeting projections.

   How you got here: Let’s assume that you can completely lay blame on the shipping schedule—that is, even if you were shipping, there aren’t orders to fill. Most likely you’re in this position because you’re too close to the product, so that you thought that customers would leap to adopt your curve-jumping, paradigm-shifting, patent-pending innovation.

   In fact, your greatest fear was the ability to ramp up and scale volume. :-) You never anticipated that customers wouldn’t demand an unproven product from a thinly capitalized startup in the middle of a buying cycle.

   (By the way, an experienced sales executive would not have let you get into this situation. And an experienced investor would have divided your initial projection by twenty five to be conservative and by one hundred to be truly safe.”

   What to do now: Sales needs to have its own “come to Jesus” meeting with the goal of determining what’s truly happening and what the correct roles are for everyone. Other gurus would recommend staying the course and pursuing the big, strategic reference accounts. This guru would tell you to get any kind of sale that you can. My reasoning is that (a) you never know who will turn into a big account; (b) closing smaller, easier accounts is good practice; (c) these little successes build confidence in the sales organization; and (d) beggars can’t be choosers.

   The clock is ticking. You need to prove that the dogs will eat the food. Sure, you can try for the AKC champion German Shepherd, but I would recommend finding a few hungry mutts.

4. Problem: Our team is not getting along.

   How you got here: You’re in this position because this is how it always goes. Companies don’t ship on time, watch sales go the roof, go public, and kick back. Startups are messy. Things go wrong. People don’t get along. If it was easy, everyone would do a startup and be rich. Welcome to the real world.

   What to do now: You work things out. You keep talking. You try to get an experienced outsider to provide a fresh perspective. There’s no magic bullet to fix this—it simply takes time. The same time, by the way, to finish the product and achieve sales because not getting along is the flip side of poor sales. If sales were booming, believe me, you’d probably be getting along—if not euphoric.

   One thing you don’t do is lynch people because you want to (a) set a precedent; (b) show everyone you can make tough decisions; and (c) get it over with. You should give people a second chance. Maybe even a third chance. Focus on the positive: how people can help an organization, not how they are hurting it.

   You have a moral obligation to give everyone a chance to change their ways and to succeed. If you don’t fulfill this obligation, then the unintended message that you’ll send through the organization is: “Anybody could be gone, so don’t piss me off.”

5. Problem: We are getting slammed by the press/analysts/blogosphere.

   How you got here: Arrogance is the most likely cause: believing that your product is so great that you’re going to make Google look like a lemonade stand. When you start believing this crap, you draw a nice target on your chest.

   What to do now: The first thing you need to do is improve your reality. Ship your product. Fix it so that it’s good. It makes no sense to seek press coverage if your product sucks.

   The second thing you need to do is focus on customers, not the press. If you make customers happy, the press will always come around. They have no choice. For example, Apple currently gets great press because its customers are so happy. When Apple’s customers are not happy, the press will turn on Apple like a pack of starving hyenas.

   The third thing to do is to suck up the press (unless you are Apple). I don’t want to get into a new debate about the art of sucking up, but the people who disagree with me on this seldom get good coverage. :-)

6. Problem: VCs are micro-managing us.

   How you got here: First, let’s set the record straight: VCs don’t want to micro manage. We’d love to make an investment, show up for a brief monthly board meeting to hear how great things are going, help select an acquirer or investment bank for an IPO, and cash out. You’re in this position because you either did something wrong or something out of your control went wrong. But it’s not like a VC wants to be in your face.

   What to do now: Ship. Sell. Achieve success. The VC will be more than happy to declare victory and move on to the next squeaky wheel. Until then, there’s no simple, cosmetic fix for this. You dug yourself into a hole—now you have to dig yourself out.

7. Problem: VCs aren’t helping very much.

   How you got here: There are two likely reasons. First, you’re gullible and believed the VC when she told you that she’s a real “roll up the sleeves” investor who will be by your side. Second, you’re not asking enough.

   What to do now: You can’t do much about the first reason. What you got is what you got. However, whether it’s the first reason or the second, you’ve got to ask. Maybe you don’t want to be a burden, but the only thing that’s worse than asking for too much help from a person who’s unwilling to give it is to ask for too little help from a person who is willing to give it. So ask. And keep asking.

8. Problem: Our PR/ad agency/consultant is not delivering.

   How you got here: Let me guess: you were in a rush so you interviewed a grand total of one or two agencies. You “really liked” Trixie and Biff because they gushed about how great your product is. You didn’t check references because you’ve “always been good about judging the quality of people based on a gut reaction.” Plus, you’ve never worked with an agency before but you insisted on selecting and managing it.

   You’re acting like an idiot. What can I say?

   What to do now: I bet that whoever is working with the agency on a day-to-day basis (a) knows more about marketing than you do; (b) has a good understanding of the agency’s capabilities; and (c) knows how to get more out of the relationship.

   This is usually your vice president of marketing or director of marketing. I would make it clear to the agency that this person is now running the show—including the ability to change agencies.

   Let’s say that you don’t have this person. Then you have to come up to grips with the fact that generally speaking, there are more lousy clients than lousy agencies. It’s your job to understand how to be a good client. I will try to cover this in a future posting.

9. Problem: We are going to run out of money before we can raise more.

   How you got here: This is the perfect storm of entrepreneurship: the product is late, sales are less than hallucinated, and money is running out. You got here because your product delivery schedule was totally out of whack—a quality that it shared with your sales projections. To add fuel to the fire, you scaled up your infrastructure because you were afraid of too much sales swamping your systems.

   What to do now: This is a tough question because each situation is different. However, here are actions to consider. (a) Freeze all hiring—no matter how strategic a position may be. At the very least, you make a one-for-one trade: if you hire one, you fire one. (b) Cut marketing expenditures. You’re probably wasting money on stupid things anyway. (c) Get interns from local schools. They have something you want: free labor. You have something they want: real-world experience. (d) Cut the pay of the management team. Merely symbolic? Too little too late? Cut early and cut hard, then. (e) Get the co-founders to put more money in the company as a bridge loan to the next round of financing. (f) Do some non-recurring consulting work to increase cash flow. (g) Try to get some beta sites to pay for a pilot implementation.

Do you see any magic bullets in this list? I don’t either. Here’s the lesson: Don’t get yourself into this position because there is no easy way out.

Take whatever capital you have and make it last as long as you painfully can. I have never seen a company fail because it couldn’t expand fast enough. I have seen many companies die because they “invested in the future” and “spent ahead” to avoid missing an opportunity.

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"Why It's Better Not Being CEO" by Scott McNealy

As reported in the San Jose Mercury News. You’ve got to love Scott McNealy’s sense of humor. He’s a very good hockey player, by the way.

10. “I don’t have to apologize for stuff I say to Wall Street.”

9.  “I’m no longer on the most overpaid CEO list.”

8.  “I just say, ‘See Jonathan on that.’”

7.  “I read The Hockey News without guilt.”

6.  “I shave even less often.”

5.  “I don’t have to sign the SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) certification anymore.”

4.  “I have someone to blame now.”

3.  “I can sell my last business suit.”

2.  “Jonathan doesn’t golf, so I guess I gotta do it.”

1.  “My new office is VERY close to the men’s room.”

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Venture Capital Panel MP3

This is an MP3 recording from the venture capital panel at a Garage event called The Art of the Start. In this panel, five prominent venture capitalists from Silicon Valley firms discuss entrepreneurship, fund raising, and market sectors. The panel occurred in 2005 (that is, after the dotcom implosion), so the information is still highly relevant to startups raising capital.

Click here to download:

Download Vcpanel.mp3

Moderator: Mohanjit Jolly, Garage Technology Ventures

Panelists:

• Arati Prabhakar, U. S. Venture Partners
• Steve Baloff, Advanced Technology Ventures
• Bill Green, Vantage Point Venture Partners
• John Callahan, True Ventures
• Steve Jurveton, Draper Fisher Jurvetson

The Top Twelve Sins of Marketing Gurus (and Their Books) by Uri Baruchin

Oy vey, Uri calls out marketing gurus with this top twelve list. By my count, I’ve committed at least five of these sins, but I won’t reveal which five. :-)