Fits and Starts

The Rules

Caution: this post contains cussing and some consider that distasteful. You were warned.

This post isn’t about starting a software company, or selling products, this one has more to do with my personal operating system, and the way I live my life, and who I will live it with. I did not write this post to tell you, the reader, how you should live your life, but am choosing to share a simple articulation of how I’ve chosen to live mine.

These are the Ten Rules that have allowed me to outlive setbacks, find the right opportunities, and stay true to who I am in the process.

1. Break the rules
The rules are made to keep people and ideas organized and thus controlled. If you want to live an exceptional life, you will have to be willing to be unpopular to those that enjoy the safety of an ordered and predictable outcome. In the process of doing anything important, you will be told that the things you do break some rules or culturally acceptable norms. You will have to examine your life to find those rules you’re following simply because everyone else does. These are not those rules that bring order to potentially harmful chaos, but are the ones that have for one reason or another outlived their time or relevance, yet still are being adhered to out of tradition. Break them immediately and purposefully. (Caveat: always obey the law of the land, or those designed to keep you and others safe from harm)

2. Don’t be a pussy
Exactly what it says. If you’re scared, that’s OK, it isn’t the fear, it’s how you respond to that fear. Do you run from anxiety filled decisions and situations and get lost in the lights and wilt or worse, run and hide, or do you step up in the moment? Continuously and perpetually stepping up and beyond natural fears is maybe the biggest factor in living the life that you chose.!

3. Be yourself (no matter what)
This dovetails from point two. The only way to reach your potential, is to reach YOUR potential. People who you are scared to be yourself around, are people you will eventually disappoint. Life is time. Don’t waste any of yours creating personas that you think people will like. Be who you are and this will allow you to build a network of friends, colleagues, and mentors that will stick for life and that you will be comfortable growing with. The opposite is also true, it will ward off assholes from becoming a part of your life.

4. No excuses
Excuses are the gateway to weakness and softness entering your life. The only way to reach your goals in your academics, business, family, morals, spiritually, and health is to eliminate weakness and softness. Excuses are like carbon monoxide poisoning. They sneak in with no odor and kill you by slowly putting you to sleep unawares. Work diligently to identify when you are making excuses for yourself and counter act it with honesty and counteractive measures. When you screw up and wrong someone (and you will) you must own it. Don’t lie to yourself, but keep it real. Your apology isn’t in words but the actions that follow.

5. Think big
If you don’t think big, and I mean really fucking big with everything you do, imagine or envision, then it’s hard to work towards creating the necessary conditions where exceptional opportunities and experiences can happen in your life. Mindset is always, most of the battle. The belief in very big things will change your odds. This is not motivational speaker bullshit.

6. Discipline yourself
As my mom said to me, there are no free lunches. Be hard enough and tough enough - Be willing to work harder, and endure tougher shit than anyone else. Do the extra rep in the gym, work the extra hour, take the meeting. Discipline your diet, your intellectual habits, your intentional relationship management, your exercise habits, your spiritual management etc. this discipline will produce a code, and this code will set you apart from your peers and create a moat around you and those you are building a future with.

7. Get yours
Understand what’s supposed to be yours and take it. if you have discipline, think big enough and are not scared, then this should produce healthy and balanced ambition in you. There is such a thing as unhealthy and misguided ambition, and you do not want that. Many times, when people are handed too much too early, they exhibit signs of being misguided and spoiled. In this case pigs get to eat, but hogs get slaughtered. It’s OK to be a pig, but don’t even hang out with hogs, once you recognize them. Hogs are dirty people with no code, and their ambition will turn on you. If you love right, and for the right reasons then it’s ok to go and get yours!

8. Give back
Again, there are no free lunches. If you’re doing the above, you will likely be successful. I do not measure success in dollars, but yes money is one of many well known byproducts of success. The fruits of success are however not success unto them-self, or we’d be living life as a means to an end, and of course, we aren’t. Your responsibility to success, whether your fruits are money, love, or power, is to give back and to give back in a way that seems to exceed where you are in each of the three aforementioned areas. giving back, also includes forgiveness. Be big enough to let it go. Some grudges actually need to be held onto, in cases of unmet justice, that’s for you to decide. In most cases this isn’t true, and giving back will include letting your beef go.

9. Remember
This is where your soul is! You are the how’s, who’s and where’s of where you come from. Even if you had to burn the boats that got you to shore for good reason, create balance and intentional tribute to those places and people. Keep where you come from at the forefront of your remembrance every day.

10. Laugh
Never forget that no one will get out of this life alive, so don’t take it all too seriously and have fun. Make humor, practical jokes, and fun a focus of every day. You will live longer. If you’re loving right, you should be laughing a lot.

Where The Hell Are We Going?

“ride to it, ride to it
cause you never know
when the bullet might hit
and you die to it die to it
die to it, die to it
Live your life, live it right
be different, do different things
Don’t do it like, he did
cause he aint what you is
but we can win, wait
lets get straight to the point”
-Kush & Corinthians - by Kendrick Lamar

The opening quote is a shout out to my friend and mentor Ben Horowitz. I’m bitin’ his style here, quoting good music. It’s the most effective emotional device there is, and this post is laced with emotion.

To the question, where in the hell are we going? Starting a company is hard. It’s damn hard to avoid the high fail rate but not impossible with the right recipe. Uncertainty creates a zigged and zagged path. The fight is for clarity and it’s a ferocious fight. This aint for the weak hearted. Alot of advice for startups typically focuses on the technical and procedural rigur of building a small thing into something valuable and important, but a startup isn’t an assembly line, it’s an apple orchard. It’s not mechanical, it’s organic. Which is why I love the way Ben Horowitz explains startup skills and needs (reference his blog post on psychology here: http://bit.ly/f9ll2w)

It’s numbers and psychology, churning like a cyclone in a race against time. I always explain to the employees at AgLocal that a startup isn’t a business it’s a conversation about a business. A high stakes healthy argument for clarity. Everyone with sleeves rolled, brawling, fighting for what they believe in. Customers, employees, advisors, investors. Everyone has to be in the conversation, so we work together at AgLocal to intentionally build the most productive conversation we can have. To do this, the psychology inside of the conversation has to be managed and focused.

As of late we’ve had some leaps forward internally in gaining clarity about what AgLocal is going to be. In the fight to determine where we’re going, I first as the CEO have to know who I am and why I’m going where I’m going in the first place. There are three principles that drive this:

Bravery, Committment and Soul

Soul (Who The Hell Are We?)
Dr. Seuss , as everyone knows, wrote great books for children. His stories are now considered some of the most culturally important ever published. Overlooked as childrens stories only, and sometimes as statements on society in general, his books have helped me take emotionally complex management and leadership concepts and break them down into simple and concise terms. Clarity.

When I think about having a soul, it’s about my core. What will I stand for and what will I stand against. There’s a Seuss story about the Bippolo seed. A duck named McCluck finds the silver box of Bippolo seeds. The seeds can grant any wish when planted. McCluck decides on his wish but gets interrupted by business minded cat who has entrepreneurial ideas for the seed. McCluck even admits to the smart cat “I aint thought much about money until now”. The cat goes off on a tangient with suggestions until eventually McCluck joins in the madness and loses the seed due to his diverted attention. The duck meant well. McCluck just didn’t know what he stood for and who he wants to be. Thus he didn’t have any conviction or focus. All things were interesting but nothing was important to him most.

If you have a core mission that infects every part of your company, internally and externally, “ride to it, ride to it, die to it die to it”. You may change the plan and pivot, but your soul is more than just the plan, it’s the whole damn war. If this were a game of Risk, the plan is a single dice role, your soul is how you see yourself once the game is over. If you don’t know your final destination, you don’t have jack shit, and you and the smart cat should go hang out the startup networking event to get your next idea and leave the serious to their work.

Committment and Bravery (Why The Hell Are We Doing This?)
Horton Hatches The Egg, is a Seuss story about an elephant (Horton) that gets pitched by a bird to sit on his egg while the bird goes on vacation. Horton agrees and climbs up into the tree. The bird leaves on vacation to go have a good time. Horton stays, and does his part. He sits in the tree through danger, bad weather, etc. After months away the bird comes home to check on Horton coincidentally at the same time as the egg finally hatches. To everyones suprise a baby elephant with bird wings hatches. Horton feels a sense of purpose and relief that his work was worth it but the bird is pissed off. This story is the perfect illustration of what I’m talking about here. A startup team is unequipped to be doing what they do, but strangely more uniquely qualified to start the companies they start. CEO’s have to find and build a team of Hortons. Authentic love and courage, to a point that they can stomach climbing up a tree with the real risk of the branch breaking underneath them, for the irrational belief that they can hatch baby elephants from a bird egg. It’s committment that powers both the courage and conviction through any weather. Anyone can do what the bird did. It’s easy to pitch and then start an idea. Not easy to be Horton.

I mean, what the hell are we doing? It starts with the meaning of life for us. We have to own this, by defining it, articulating it and then connecting it to the higher purpose of AgLocal or our work will be soulless. AgLocal is building what will become the most important company in food in the world. I believe this. So do the employees and the investors. So do our family members and some of our friends. In Shogun Assasin, one of my favorite movies, a Samurai stands in front of his infant son asking him to make a choice that he couldn’t possibly comprehend. He asks the boy to choose between a ball or a sword that he has placed in front of him. He tells the child that if he chooses the ball he’ll have to join his mother in death. This is innovation in a messy environment. Making choices that could have wonderous or catastrophic effects with near ignorance and not enough time to build the literacy needed to make that decision. It’s a gut feel and some contextual matching to other emotionally difficult decisions you’ve made in your life. I’ve lived through some objectively difficult times and have a good size library to call on here.

These are the unending hard choices we will be forced to make. The employees and I face these choices continually and they test our committment to building the most important food related company in the world. This will not be easy for us or on us. The ball and sword dillemas will be presented in perpetual cycles. As the company meets it’s customers and as those customers get more comfortable being less polite we learn the truth and then the needs of the company change and so does its plan with it. Without reiteration of the emotional committment to the importance of each other, and our work jointly, we will lose our way. If you run a startup or a part of one and Samarai stands in front of the company, be prepared that some may not always choose the sword. You will have to continue the imprtant work, because there simply isn’t enough time to wait when this happens. The company must move on or be mired in confusion and apathy.

When these principles get transferred to a team it can build a culture and an operating system to do important work in my opinion. We’ve got a long way to go, but we know who are and where we’re going.

Nait

Innovacation

Innovacation -noun [in-uh-vah-cay-shuhn]  -

1. The act of using unorthodox and counter intuitive ways of acquiring sources of insight and inspiration.

2. Using rest and diversion from the studied problem in order to solve the problem creatively

Ever hear the dumb term “you’re too close to the situation to see it clearly”, well, it does ring true in some cases.

Entrepreneurs, we love to read the latest hot book on innovation or startups to get inspiration on our model. We delude ourselves into thinking that if we would just follow these steps, and follow that new and fresh methodology that the secret sauce will appear in front of us. The truth is very opposite to our long held beliefs. Innovation doesn’t come from someone else, in the books about that very subject. It comes in the form of abstract and non related exterior and peripheral influence.

 Well if that’s the case, why do we get burned out while working our hardest. Why doesn’t that mentors advice always resonate and cause add on ideas? Why don’t we always get this inspiration when we are “cranking” our hardest ? It’s usually because as entrepreneurs we’re working hard, burning the midnight oil from both ends and we’re looking for it instead of receiving it. Irony is that the very work that we’re doing is causing us to miss this inspiration.

I titled this post with the word I made up because I think it sums up the inspiration to innovation cycle that gets ignored. I have surmised that nurturing of the things you love outside of your work will ultimately feed purpose to the work and generate inspiration. When you get time to love what you love most something happens, you find yourself clear, able to see it. I’m currently in Florida vacationing with my family. I admit that I felt guilty about this at first, very guilty. I mean with the demand of funders, sales, product development, SXSW coming up, new employees, and the rest of the jazz that comes with starting up.

Right around the third day here, getting hugs from my little girls, laughs with the family, the beach, good meals that 18 hour startup days don’t afford, something strange happened… … . . I started getting more done. How is that possible? While separated from the family I had 16-18 straight hours a day to work, but yet being unplugged except for hour bursts here and there was suddenly providing much more meaning production.

I started to realize how important this awareness of what was happening was. Next time when it gets tough and I feel at an impasse, maybe the answer isn’t the stare at the screen like I’m waiting on the last train home. Maybe the best thing is to do is jump in the car and drive into the mountains, or to the beach, catch a flight to spend a couple of days with family. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating laziness. I’m fairly sure I’m headed right back to those 16-18 hour days, and rightfully so. But I will do so now with the full understanding of the important role that rest, and love plays in innovation and problem solving.

Are you grinding hard without an end in sight? Not getting anywhere except to regenerate items on a list of entered entry’s on a self healing check list that seems to never die? Unplug and go do something that speaks to your life away from your startup. Surprisingly, it will tell you a ton about your startup as well, and when you do plug back in, your understanding of meaning and your refreshed state will create solutions and advance your ideas in ways you didn’t quite see clearly.

Go take a innovacation

The Founders Challenge

This post is a little bit of a shape up or ship out post. Sort of a shrinks couch for founders type post. It may not help every founder, but it may help some, as I suspect it will. Let’s face it, the hyper dramatic and chaotic life of a founder can get murky and needs serious reflection. As I sit here my family’s hideaway in beautiful Florida refreshing with the kids before I travel back to the hustle of silicon valley, I’ve gained a little perspective and I thought I’d share this little bit of wisdom with some other founders out there.

As a first time or even second time founder there’s really nothing that can prepare you for the inevitable ups and downs, spins and turns that come along with your first venture. The volumous amount of academic papers, startup books, YouTube videos, scans of Tech Crunch and rewatches of “The Social Network” just won’t do it. This is mainly because starting an idea, any idea, is full of chaos that is uniquely and expressly yours.

There’s a challenge faced by founders, and that’s to learn how to filter information. Everything you read, see, hear and feel is telling you something. Don’t panic, it’s there to steer you, guide you, stop you, and start you again. The key is to maintain the proper perspective and to make decisions. Don’t freeze up. Not making a decision is still making a decision.

Start-Ups are just like the womb a baby rests in. What goes in the body of the mother will affect the baby’s development, and the environment around the mother will impact the personality and health of the baby, even if it’s in small incremental ways. The start-up is the baby and the eco-system around it (Funders, co-founders, friends, family, mentors, partners, buyers) is the womb.

It will at times seem that you’re on top of the world, and other times feel like the world is on top of you. Here’s the point I’m trying to make … . . neither are true. Ever! Everything you communicate will set off a chain reaction in the ecosystem that can have a lasting impact on the company you build and launch or even on whether you launch it at all.

Before hitting “send” on that email or text message. Before spilling the beans about something negative at a dinner with that influential person and before bragging about how awesome things are with those friends of yours that are also founders, remember, you’re feeding the eco-system of your start up something. Is it something that you want to be feeding it? Remember, you are the voice of this “baby” and anything you say will set off a chain reaction of falling dominoes, one way or the other. You have to say something as the voice of the company, just make sure that’s it’s filtered for the time, place and audience.

The challenge is to stay measured, even keeled and right in the middle of it all, cool and composed (even when your guts are churning). You want to go crazy in celebration, salute your team and those that helped and then move on and know that there’s work to do. There’s always work to do. You want to quit and go back to working for someone else at a safe job with a set of easy daily tasks  … . . well, ya, just think about that for a second? If you’re an entrepreneur, the very thought of that should be enough to stop you in your tracks.

Take the challenge. Inventory your startup and everything around it. What do you have, what do you need, and importantly, where are you going? That my founder friend … . is vision, and this vision of yours is the only thing that will allow you to sail through the challenge with relative ease.

Death has its advantages

Being that this is my inaugural post, I’m going to smash the champagne bottle on the hull of this ship with a little bit of snark, but hopefully some substance as well. To be honest I wanted my first post here to be a boring little lesson to startups about the importance of consumer side economics in their model. However, being the rat I am, I couldn’t ignore this stinky little piece of cheese seen here: http://www.adweek.com/internet-week-blog/rip-apps-132406 . What set me off specifically? I’d say it is the “(native) mobile apps are dead” quote.

I’ll deal with two subjects briefly here. One, the ritual penchant and fad in tech circles to proclaim the death of things, which has come to almost be a right of passage for any piece of technology as it matures and second, to document if not archive my opinion in a time capsule in regards to the future of mobile and device specific native apps. My prediction: Mobile and device specific native apps will not only survive but eventually overtake HTTP as the primary presentation layer for all media consumed within the next ten years and will replace all old revenue models for content distribution. I’ll expand on that later but first to the article written on a panel discussion that inspired this post.

To paint the picture, the article linked quotes a panel which had Seth Sternberg on it. Seth is the CEO of a social media sharing company named Meebo (seen here: http://www.meebo.com/ ) Seth’s company has created a pretty cool tool which allows sharing of media in a very friendly and easy to use way. I love Meebo and love their startup story immensely. Seth however is also the person attributed to the “is dead” quote in the linked article.

Saying things are dead, … . .  is dead. For the most part saying things are “dead” in technology is shorthand for signaling that the hype is over and that investors and paying users are very soon going to suddenly flee from the technology. That the market is going to become irrationally risk averse to the technology to the same degree that they are irrationally exuberant today. Sometimes it’s said so that the quote can become stinky bait for page hits (guilty here). In either case what it really means is that the technology is becoming mature, which is a good thing. As technology matures the early wide eyed adopters are disillusioned because it didn’t cure cancer right away as was promised by technology prophets from on high at their panels in conferences. They flee and serious development begins. Years later the initial claims will actually start to be met and we will add the ill advised “2.0” to the end of its name, signaling that it is again cool to be associated with and startup companies with said technology. What has really happened is that the technology has gone through development cycles that are stringently managed by real market demand and not hype, thus producing the original promise.

To document the things are dead movement, remember in late 2008 when Tech Crunches Steve Glimor claimed that RSS was then being replaced by Twitter and Facebook. Um, ya, that didn’t exactly happen now did it? The road is littered with “dead” proclamations. If true Apple would have been dead in the nineties, Google done in the early 2000’s. We all heard how desktops were supposed to be dead by now. The claims go on and on and on. So to startups considering a mobile app, take heart, because as history and tradition would have it you’re coming in at exactly the right time.

My prediction is thus. The trend of democratization of content will continue and accelerate (see HBO’s new mobile service HBOGO for a foreshadowing) and broken into consumable pieces. In the next five years most media electronics devices will deliver content specific to what that user wants specifically and only what that consumer will pay for, freeing us from the set top cartels, and old school model publishers. Brand will then become more important as content gets decoupled from distribution companies and content packages, then I believe the Apps will become the superior presentation layer to the HTTP presentation layer. This model will be adopted more and more as televisions become all in one connected computing devices along with the move to decouple content. With the margins on electronics and chips shrinking to sub 5% I believe the revenue model for device manufacturers will be exclusives on popular apps and hence apps will represent the dominant media experience for most consumers in the next ten years.

To say that mobile apps are going away is to say that mobile computing is going away, after-all, an app is merely an automated command with a graphic user interface for the less technical inclined. I think what our friends in the article are trying to say is that the ill conceived vaporware apps of today, the ones with empty business models that are receiving hype dollars from the private equity folks merely for having the word “social” or “gaming” in their title will go extinct along with the hype dollars funding their starts. In this case I agree. But to the broader point, Apps are not only here to stay but will become the primary presentation layer for all media and content  in the next 10 years.

Hopefully my prediction doesn’t die.

Nait