Add comment November 10th, 2008 09:10am skmurphy
Athol Foden of Brighter Naming was a very well received speaker at a Bootstrapper Breakfast in December of 2007 and we are planning to bring him back next year. If your naming questions can’t wait you can catch up with him tonight at the SDForum Marketing SIG. The events starts at 6:30pm at DLA Piper at 2000 University Ave in East Palo Alto, CA 94303
Add comment November 9th, 2008 05:18pm skmurphy
From a recent interview with Malcom Gladwell by David Hochman in Reader’s Digest on Gladwell’s new book “Outliers: the story of success” (links added).
Hochman: Is there such a thing as an overnight success?
Gladwell: No. And that’s my concern with a show like American Idol. It encourages the false belief that there’s a kind of magic, that you can be “discovered.” That may be the way television works, but it’s not the way the world works. Rising to the top of any field requires an enormous amount of dedication, focus, drive, talent, and 99 factors that they don’t show on television. It’s not simply about being picked. Which, by the way, is why very few of the anointed winners on American Idol have gone on to true success. Most have flamed out and gone away. That should tell us something.
Hat Tip to Peter Ireland
Add comment November 3rd, 2008 04:16pm skmurphy
Mark Duncan is our guest speaker this Friday in Palo Alto, he will be talking about the sales process for new products from an entrepreneurial perspective. He will also take some volunteers through an exercise in developing a simple customer qualification flowchart. In keeping with the tradition for speakers at Bootstrappers Breakfasts he has a few minutes of prepared thoughts and then he will answer questions and take a few volunteers through the process of developing a potential customer qualification flowchart. It’s a very useful technique that helps you to focus your efforts on prospects that are most likely from your product or service–and therefore best able to close.
Mark and I exchanged several e-mails to compose a short get acquainted interview for those considering attending on Friday.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about your regular work experience
A: I’ve worked in two successful startups, Tandem and Imagen; and founded another startup, Syfx that failed. While I started out as an engineer, I got into marketing over 20 years ago, when I was continually assisting non-technical marketing people with technical products. Truth be known, it is much easier to educate an engineer in marketing, than to teach engineering to a non-technical marketing person.
Q: And that has led you to a mix of consulting and startup activities. Can you share some lessons learned from some of the startups you’ve worked on?
A: When founding a startup, it really helps to have as founders, people that you have worked with before. If you do not have personal work experience with someone that you are trying to recruit, you need to do considerable work to make sure that they are the right fit. It is very much like a marriage, and the wrong person can doom your startup. Three key questions I like to see answered “yes” are
Q: Knowing what you know now, what, if anything would you have done differently or will do differently on your next startup?
A: In helping other startups, I’ve observed that each has its own unique needs. Some are solutions in search of a problem, whereas many others simply have “holes” in some portion of their product / marketing / sales that results in poor sales, and ultimately running out of runway if not correctly in a timely fashion.
Q: Can you talk about your consulting practice?
A: As a consultant, I try to identify the holes, than participate in filling them. This has resulted in everything from positioning, competitive analysis, writing white papers, identifying potential customers ô in essence doing whatever it takes to help them achieve success.
Q: What experiences led you to develop your “potential customer qualification flowchart”
A: The potential customer qualification flowchart evolved from a need to communicate quickly to sales people, both the factors that made for an ideal customer (where you are solving a need) and those factors where they have requirements that you simply are not able to address well (show stoppers). Sometimes startups are like a drowning person, any potential customer is a good prospect. But if you can’t wind up with a happy customer that will provide a good reference, or you are losing your shirt on the deal; it typically is better to focus on other opportunities.
Q: At the breakfast you are going to ask for a volunteer to two and actually take us through how a startup might build one?
A: Depending upon time and interest I hope to have two or three volunteers go through an abbreviated analysis for a simple qualification flowchart. I will have handout available for everyone who comes, but I find if you work through it interactively you obtain much more understanding of how to develop and use one.
1 comment October 29th, 2008 10:00pm skmurphy
I mentioned Sequoia Capital’s “Good Times RIP” at the last breakfast and elaborated on it in “Full House in Sunnyvale This Morning” posting, adding pointers to commentary from Hacker News, 37 Signals, and Venture Hacks.
I was delighted to discover Ho Nam’s Altos Ventures Musings blog and his “RIP Good Times? A Different Perspective” posting about a presentation he put together for an entrepreneur conference last week in Reno. His slideshare presentation is here: RIP Good Times? A Different Perspective
Slide 10 contains some good recipes for Bootstrappers (links added, not in original):
What we look for beyond Capital Efficiency and Hedgehogs
As bootstrappers we focus on growth enabled by organic profit until and unless we have a business model that deserves outside investment, not outside investment, but I have to say I like the Altos Ventures philosophy. Another partner, Anthony Lee, had a great post about two weeks ago “Don’t Worry Be Scrappy” that also embodies a bootstrapping perspective. Here are some key excerpts but read the whole thing.
The Bad News Let’s first understand that things will be bad – really bad. In fact, this downturn will almost certainly be deeper and longer than the post-Bubble “nuclear winter” of 2001-2004 that so many of us struggled through as entrepreneurs and investors.
The Good News As an entrepreneur, there are a lot of factors that figure into your success or failure. Some you control and most you don’t. Macroeconomics is one that you certainly don’t. So if, like me, you believe in worrying only about the things you can control, then this is a great time to get focused on building your business and stop fretting about the economy (see Focus on the Controllables).
In fact, a recession is probably the best time to start a company. Great companies like Disney, GE, HP and Microsoft were all started during recessions. Why? Bad times can build good DNA. A down economy does not leave room for entrepreneurial sloppiness. It forces entrepreneurs to be honest about how good their products are. It mandates financial discipline. In other words, it is a perfect time to get focused, get real and get lean.
The Rules
- Don’t run out of cash.
- See Rule #1.
Add comment October 27th, 2008 07:56pm skmurphy
Len Sklar has been a guest speaker twice this year, in March and August. He is the author of “The Check is Not in the Mail” and an expert in managing collections and accounts receivable. He was kind enough to share an article on “Collections Made Easier” he recently completed. Here are a couple of tips that any bootstrapper with a slow paying or delinquent customer will find useful.
2 comments October 21st, 2008 04:40pm skmurphy
We’ve added a Bootstrappers Breakfast Meetup Group to complement this blog, the LinkedIn group, and the CentralDesktop private workspace (the latter two are available to folks who have attended two meetings). It brought a number of first time folks to this morning’s breakfast: we ended up with 16 folks around the table at Coco’s. We had a nice comment from one first time attendee named Beena who was exploring how to start a non-profit to address the needs of the spouses of immigrants to Silicon Valley:
Anyone who has a high tech start up can attend this meeting. Depending on which stage of your business, you will get useful inputs from other members based on their experience that can help you improve your situation.
There was some good news from a returning member who had just landed a contract with the Army for documentation generation and management tools and was staffing up and another who has reached a level of business that has gotten the interest of several early stage VC’s; his team has started some second round interviews despite the downturn. It was a broad ranging group discussion and a number of one on one conversations after our 9am wrap.
I mentioned Sequoia Capital’s “Good Times RIP” presentation during the breakfast, it’s available here:
Comments from three posts plus some interesting follow on discussions on Hacker News as well.
1 comment October 20th, 2008 12:51pm skmurphy
When you are invited to a roundtable on “How to Manage the Downturn” that’s held at the Stanford Park Hotel in Menlo Park and put on by folks who until recently were focused on “get big fast” you have to wonder. It’s unusual to have to spend $189 to get advice from a VC in a crowded room.
That same $189 will pay for more than a year of breakfasts at the restaurants where we meet, and you can compare notes with other entrepreneurs who understood how to manage their cashflow before it was trendy. See you tomorrow morning in Sunnyvale.
1 comment October 1st, 2008 02:49pm skmurphy
I had been an early user of the Writely beta and was impressed with the browser based document editor that a team could use to all edit a document in real time. I was not surprised when Google snapped them up, but was pleasantly surprised when I found myself at the same table with Sam Schillace, one of the founders, at an Under The Radar conference on “The Business of Web Apps: Where the Web Goes to Work” in March of this year.
He was still sporting his Google badge and I asked him how happy he was there. He told me that it was the first large company that really agreed with him at tissue match level, he didn’t get the same creative antibody reaction he had encountered at some earlier large firms he had worked at, and he was enjoying his engineering director role immensely.
I invited Sam to speak with other bootstrappers and he was interested, the challenge has been to fit it in with his travel schedule. We did a short interview via e-mail to help set the table for Friday’s roundtable discussion on bootstrapping, cloud applications, and getting acquired by Google (before and after).
Q: Can you talk a little bit about what you and your co-founders were able to accomplish with Writely?
We had a vision for real time collaboration on a document that we were able to develop and deploy in production use. After Google acquired us it made a substantial contribution to Google Apps: in particular Google Docs offers the same shared real time edit of a document that Writely did on a more scalable platform.
Q: When you started Writely were you bootstrapping or did you take outside investment? How did you make that decision?
Bootstrapping, all the way. Best decision we ever made, because it gave us time and space to understand the market and pick the correct strategy (partnering with Google).
Q: How did you and your co-founders make the decision to be acquired by Google?
A long debate, actually, but we finally decided that there was a very big and fast-moving market, and Google was the best possible partner–the global brand and visibility was a great asset and would help us achieve what we were interested in, namely changing the nature of application development and deployment, now known as “cloud computing”.
Q: What is the most surprising thing about working for Google now that you have some perspective?
The scale–even if you understand that it’s going to be massive scale before you get there, the scope and ambition of the scale is really incredible. Also, the amazingly high level of expertise, intellect, and creativity you run into on a daily basis when working there - it’s really a geek wonderland. I’m happy with the outcome.
Q: Thanks for your time.
For more information on Writely, the Writely–The Back Story by Peter Rip makes for interesting reading, key extract:
I’ve known Sam and Steve for about nine years. They have been in the application software business for nearly 20 years. Two important themes arise from this. First, they aren’t generic applications software guys. Every major product they have shipped has been about “documents” but on successive platforms.
- They were the authors of FullPaint and FullWrite — the largest selling third party word processing and painting apps on the original Macs.
- They developed the first cross-platform (Mac, Windows) WYSYG HTML editor which came to market as Claris Home Page.
- They developed the re-design and built the underlying platform to Macromedia’s re-write of DreamWeaver.
- Now they have built Writely.
I’ve seen them build two major sources of expertise in this concentration. First, they understand the user problem so deeply that they can blend the advantages of each new platform with ‘document authoring problem’ to really build a platform-native solution, not a clone of someone else’s work. Second, before tackling the development of the application, they develop a library of services and tools that they know will be required to bang out the kinds of features and performance an authoring application requires.
Sam Schillace is our featured speaker this Friday in Palo Alto, please register if you would like to attend as the room only hold 12 people.
Add comment August 17th, 2008 09:21pm skmurphy
Seth Godin had a good post today “Like Your Hair Is On Fire” where he urged his readers to
Assemble your team (it might be just you) on Monday and focus like your hair is on fire (I have no direct experience in this area, but I’m told that hair flammability is quite urgent).
I would like to be able to say that SKMurphy has one project we will kill, but our plan is to wound several and agree on a “Big List” for August that will determine our priorities for the balance of 2008. Anyway, I would suggest that as a theme for our breakfast next Tuesday at Coco’s in Sunnyvale:
If you are on vacation then we will see you in September, otherwise please join us Tuesday and let us know you are coming.
And, as always our regular format will also prevail so if you have other issues you would like to put on the table please bring them.
Add comment July 22nd, 2008 04:22pm tshafer
You are cordially invited to join us for an upcoming “Bootstrapper’s Breakfast.”
It will start at 7:30am and end at 9am. Your cost is your meal + 20% tip; we get the “back room” to ourselves. The other attendees will all be in early stage technology start-ups, it will be a chance to compare notes on operational, development, and business issues with peers.
We have several featured guest joining us. They will make some introductory remarks for about five minutes and answer questions and offer their perspective as a part of a roundtable discussion. Please bring your questions.
August 1: Robert Dang, Attorney at Fortis General Counsel, http://www.fortisgc.com who are start-up friendly and endorsed by attendees. Rob came last year and we had a very practical discussion about common legal issues that boostrappers face: sign-up and bring your questions on Friday August 1, 2008 at Hobee’s Palo Alto.
August 8: Len Sklar will make a short presentation on “The Check is Not in the Mail” and answer questions on effective approaches to getting paid in full, on time, at less cost and without losing valued customers. Len came to our March 7 breakfast and facilitated some very well received interactive exercises, where several bootstrappers in turn took the role of a delinquent customer and Len demonstrated a variety of low key techniques to move beyond a current deadlock. Sign-up and bring your questions Friday August 8 to the Omega Restaurant in Milpitas.
Sept 5: Sam Schillace, co-inventor of Writely the collaborative word processor (now known as Google Docs) will discuss “Lesson’s Learned from the Invention and Sale of Writely.” He continues to explore collaborative and publishing application projects as an Engineering Director at Google. Sign-up now for this September 5 event at Hobees in Palo Alto.
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