Someone at a meeting I was in a few weeks ago made a statement to the effect that he valued management (sales management in particular) following this mantra.

I couldn’t disagree more.

While it makes for a great VC cliché it seems to me that it’s not a good plan to set an expectation with companies that you work with that you want them to essentially lie to you about the results they expect. Following this down the management line – from board to CEO to VP of Sales to Sales Manager to Salespeople – and you’ll completely cloud your view of what’s really happening in a business (where at every step of the way each person tries to set up an expectation that is lower than what they actually believe they deliver).

Instead, how about setting a realistic expectation for performance, lay out the factors that influence success and then try like hell to beat the number.

That sounds like a better plan to me.

I’ve received a few lengthy emails recently that contained the following:

IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE READ THIS SECTION

While I suppose one could argue that this encourages the reader to skip over the rest of the email, I disagree.  I think it’s brilliant. Each email was full of information – the kind that takes a good chunk of time to parse through and think about. They were the kind of email that ends up in your “read later when you have time” folder which would have been fine assuming that you 1) got back to it at all and 2) got back to it in a somewhat timely manner – they each required a response. The “READ THIS NOW” section was a single paragraph that summed up the information that I could now go through at my leisure as well as the action required in response to the email. Well done!

I’ve generally avoided political issues on this blog, but this isn’t something I can keep my mouth shut on.

Yesterday Meb Keflezighi became the first American to win the New York City Marathon in 27 years. Born in Eritrea on the east coast of Africa, Keflezighi moved to the US when he as 12 (more than 20 years ago), is an American citizen and has raced for the US Olympic team.

Still, there are some who are calling his achievement diminished because he’s not “technically” an American by virtue of having been born outside of the United States – chief among them Darren Rovell of CNBC.  Rovell writes:

It’s a stunning headline: American Wins Men’s NYC Marathon For First Time Since ’82. Unfortunately, it’s not as good as it sounds. Meb Keflezighi, who won yesterday in New York, is technically American by virtue of him becoming a citizen in 1998, but the fact that he’s not American-born takes away from the magnitude of the achievement the headline implies.

This is appalling (not to mention racist). I know I’m particularly sensitive to this kind of bigotry because two of our three children were born and lived for a time outside of the United States (not that far from where Keflezighi was). They are not any less American than our oldest daughter who was born in Colorado. It’s amazing (and sad) to me that people really think this way. By Rovell’s definition many of America’s Founding Fathers weren’t “technically American”.

This is  a nation that was founded by immigrants and built on the promise of equal opportunity for all those that come to this country. The vast majority of Americans are only a few generations from their immigrant pasts.  It’s unbelievably disturbing that we’re losing sight of what’s made our country great. From the basics of our immigration policy to how we handle foreign-born workers looking for jobs in America we’re increasingly becoming a nation of xenophobes.

Darren Rovell probably doesn’t think of himself as a racist or a xenophobe – and therein lies a large part of the problem.

I’ve had this running debate with a handful of friends – I’d love to throw it out there for comment. The questions at hand are 1) whether companies should offer a “free trial” period for their software/web service; 2) if they do, how long should it last; and 3) what information should you ask for before starting a trial (specifically should you ask for credit card information up front).

Here are a few thoughts. I’d love to hear your opinion.

While you know that your web service is the greatest thing since sliced bread, it’s really really hard to convey the chocolaty goodness that is your product to the average consumer. You have to pull them in and offering a dry run of what you do is a good way to do this (maybe you have a free version of the service as well, but even so, you’re saving the best features for your paid users and you need to show them what can do).

Now on to the question of how long your trial should last. While avoiding the obvious cliche answer (“as short as possible”) I’d point out that many (most) companies default to 30 days. I think this is a mistake. If you can’t show value in a week or two you’re doing something wrong. And by waiting 30 days you’re just extending the number of people in your trial funnel and making more work for everyone involved (not to mention stretching out the trial and potentially losing customers). Your product should be designed to quickly get people up and running and to show value right away (see some ideas on that here). I believe your trial period should have three parts: 1) onboarding – quick and as painless as possible; 2) show value – make sure you’ve designed what you do in a way that you’re in front of your customers immediately after they input information; 3) ask for the conversion to paid – once you’ve shown them what great value you add, ask them to fork over the dough. Most companies err in all of these categories. Onboarding is too difficult. Value comes over time, not right away and the product forces users to remember to come back to it rather than the other way around. The “ask” comes too late, after people have forgotten what the service did in the first place.

Lastly open for debate is the question of how much information you should collect up front. On the one hand are people who believe that you should collect as little as possible – probably just and email – and get people into the system and up and running. On the other are people who believe that since you have their attention you should grab their credit card information up front so you can start charging if they don’t opt out. I’m in the former camp. I couldn’t find any scientific study on this, but in my experience asking for a credit card (or even having a two page sign-up form) significantly drops the number of people who get from the beginning to the end of the sign-up process. In one case, asking for credit card information resulted in 9 out of 10 people who started the free trial process dropping out.  That’s not worth the back-end trade-off of having the information to charge them later (plus the opt out thing isn’t cool in my opinion).

Your thoughts are welcome/encouraged!

As you know, I’m no fan of AT&T.

With that in mind I couldn’t help sharing this piece of news: AT&T is now offering customers the ability to pay up and purchase a 3G Microcell to use in their homes (since no-one it seems actually gets descent service at home). The device supports both voice and data usage (presumably the latter is only marginally useful since most consumers with data devices connect to their home wifi networks in house).

For the privilege of better coverage at home (and the added benefit to AT&T of presumably offloading traffic from their cellular network to customer’s internet providers) you’ll get charged $150 for the device (ok – that seems fair) and $20 additional monthly service fee (what?!? – an additional monthly charge for helping AT&T clear traffic from its network, shift cost to your internet provider and extending coverage where Verizon and other carriers already have it?).

Rock on AT&T!

(hat tip Jeff Kohn for the pointer to the news)

I was recently talking to someone about an issue in one of their portfolio companies (this was not a Foundry or Mobius company). The issue was pretty serious (it related to safety standards at the company that were being ignored and a resulting accident at the business) and the person relating this story was (understandably) pretty worked up and asking me what I thought they should do.  My advice?

I can’t say that I come by this naturally (I can be pretty excitable) or that I was a particularly good practitioner of my own advice earlier in my venture career, but I’ve managed to reign myself in and strongly believe that the priority in any interaction is simply to not panic or over-react. Every situation is better viewed from a calmer perspective and without question your judgment is more solid and reliable when you’re thinking with a clear head. It’s not just that things are often not as bad as they seem (in the example above I think they were actually worse than they originally appeared) or that everything will eventually work itself out (sometimes it doesn’t) but rather that with a little perspective and by giving yourself enough time to assess the situation and consider your options you’re almost always going to make a better decision.

Brad, Jason and I are going to try something new in Boulder starting this fall – Community Hours at the TechStars bunker. We’re all fans of "random meetings" – taking meetings from people that have been referred to us or have taken the time to write to ask to get together – but sometimes struggle to fit them into our schedules (I’m particularly poor at this – scheduling them generally at random and breaking up many days with too many meetings and not enough time at my desk). 

With this in mind the three of us are going to try to set aside some concentrated random meeting time. We’ve set up a self-service wiki for people to sign up. The rules are pretty simple – set up an account and then pick a date and time slot. Fill in your name, email address and a description of what you want to talk about. These are intended to be introductory meetings, so don’t let the short time be a deterrent – there’s plenty of opportunity to follow up (and I imagine the days will be pretty flexible as well to allow for more time as necessary).

Let me know what you think.  See you at the bunker!

One of the companies I work with recently sent the following email to the CEO’s of a number of similar companies (I’ve redacted the email a bit to preserve the privacy of the company):

I’m the CEO of [really cool portfolio company]. We’re a [insert company attribute/industry here] company as well I have been talking to a number of other [attribute/industry] players and I think we all are facing some similar issues as we try and both mature our businesses and the [attribute/industry] industry at the same time. I’m pulling together a private discussion group for a select set of these businesses where we can have open conversations with each other about issues we face and how we are dealing with them. I feel like we’re all treading a lot of the same ground right now. For example, how do you [list of things that we're dealing with].. I feel like CS industry is a bit where the Open Source industry was 5 years ago. Lots of standards to learn still.

I’m focusing on high level members of these companies (CEO, a CTO, your community manager, or some combination that makes sense) to participate in this group. It will be informal but have basic no-blog rules as a backdrop to it.

The result has been amazing. There are over 30 participants now in this email discussion group (that has only been up and running now for about 10 days) and the pace and depth of the discussion has been remarkable. My favorite email started with "I’ve never taken longer to reply to an email" – this group is extremely engaged and is tackling topics that are similar across all of their companies and sharing the results of their respective efforts. We’ve taken some of the topics off-line at our portfolio company and had in depth discussions about how what we’re learning from the group is changing our thinking about certain product features and informing how we’re tackling a handful of sticky problems, etc.

There’s no magic to doing this. It just took the initiative of one company to start to pull together a core group (which has now expanded as the initial participants have brought additional people into the fold).

Over the last 6 months I’ve noticed a large number of business plans that are incorporating some form of “crowdsourcing” into their business models. Crowdsourcing, popularized by James Surowiecki excellent book The Wisdom of Crowds, seeks to harness the power of the masses with the idea that the “crowd” can often produce a better result than any given individual (in the classic crowdsouring example a large group tries to guess the number of gumballs in a jar; typically the average guess is closer to the right number than any individual guess – the crowd as a whole is better than even it’s smartest individual member). 

There are some great business ideas around this – particularly ones that truly take advantage of the wisdom of crowds (as opposed to those that just take advantage of the brute force of having large numbers of people at your disposal to push through a repetitive task – these can be interesting businesses as well but aren’t exactly what I’m talking about). I’ve been working on a business that uses these principals in some unique ways which I’ll write about soon (although for now the company is keeping the specifics of its business close). I’m curious what other crowdsourced ideas people have seen and liked out there.

Years ago I wrote a post about M&A negotiations in which I stressed the importance of using listening in the negotiation process. Last week I was talking about the importance of listening with Micah (not in the context of M&A – just in the context of life in general) when he said to me that he felt that listening, like many things in business, was an acquired skill (i.e., the harder you practice it the better you get).

I couldn’t agree more. There’s a real art to listening effectively and completely – one that’s harder to do effectively than it seems but can be pretty obvious to everyone around you when you’re not. I had a colleague once who had a very specific verbal tick – he’d start saying “right, right” when someone else was talking – a sure indication that he had something that he desperately wanted to say and that he had completely shut down listening. Eventually I figured this out (and even mentioned it to him) – and stopped talking when he did that as I knew I was just wasting my time until he got to get whatever it was he felt he needed to say off his chest.  It really sticks out to me as a reminder of both how clear it is to those around you when you’re not listening and how important it is to stop getting ahead of a conversation, shut down your need to respond to every point in real time and to listen to what’s being said around you.