Peripheral vision
One of the great challenges of business in general and smaller, fast growing businesses in particular is figuring out the balance between near term focus and long term vision. While all companies become slaves to the calendar (striving for quarterly sales targets, specific product release dates, etc.) too many never look up to see where they are really headed. I’m not talking about making sure you have the latest IDC report on your industry on your bedstand, I’m talking about having a meaningful understanding of your business, you competitors and spending real time focusing on how and where you are going to take your company. …
June 19, 2007· 2 min read
Random ramblings
A few things that individually aren’t a full post but that I wanted to point out. First – there are a lot of idiots on the internet – at least 409 of them (the fact that this number matches the most annoying accounting/tax regulation is pure coincidence, I’m sure…). Second – My dad’s take on my assessment of the patent situation (including where he disagrees with me – thanks for reading dad!). …
June 7, 2007· 1 min read
The start-up office revisited
A little while back I wrote a post on how much I love start-up office space. It’s messy, it’s small, it might not have a window and it might smell a little bit funny, but it’s the best office space you’ll ever have. I received a bunch of emails, comments and pictures from people with whom the post resonated. I really liked the following picture sent to me by Darrin Husmann who has a start-up company making intelligent irrigation systems with offices in both Oklahoma City and Baghdad (“Strange how war can bring two people from across the world together to work on sprinklers, eh?”). …
June 6, 2007· 1 min read
Patent sanity
Brad has a nice series running on patents which I’ve enjoyed a lot (I think the existing patent system is completely hosed, totally ineffective and open to blatant abuses of power – see this post from Jason for the perfect example). Well today, there’s a glimmer of hope that change may be on the way as the administration and it’s head patent policeman Jon Dudas announced the intent (note the gap between intent and action, but at least it’s a first step) to reform the patent system. While I generally like the idea of requiring patent filers to include more information on why their invention is ‘novel’ the gem for me in today’s announcement is the idea of opening up patents to more of a peer review. What a novel idea – have people who are actually in a particular field help determine whether an idea is truly novel and therefore patentable. In a system where the average patent is looked at by an examiner for about 7 hours before being approved (and where the default behavior seems to be “assume this is novel until proven definitively otherwise) far too many patents which are both obvious and not particularly original are being issued. …
June 6, 2007· 2 min read
Twittering away
I have to admit that when I set up my Twitter account I thought I’d be turning it off after a few days for lack of interest. Instead I was calling up T-Mobile ordering a higher volume sms package. I have to say there’s something addicting about it – I like the short message format; I like hearing what my friends are up to; I like the record of my day that it creates for me and for people that are following me; in short – it’s just fun. My Twitter ID is Sether (www.twitter.com/sether) if you want to see what I’m doing. …
May 30, 2007· 2 min read
Is title inflation an acceptable recruiting/retention technique?
I’ve had a few people ask me about this recently and it felt “blog worthy”. At issue is the question of whether it’s ok to use title as an incentive to either keep someone at a company or attract them there in the first place . . . is playing to someone’s ego an acceptable employment practice? I know some people who get really bent out of shape about this stuff, but my view is that using title as part of a ‘comp package’ is ok –in certain circumstances and with a full understanding of the potential pitfalls. Most importantly, this can only be used in “bubble cases” where someone is truly on the line between senior manager/director or senior director and vp (the most common case in my experience where this becomes an issue – getting a vp title is seen as a big step). Promoting someone too early or hiring someone in at an inflated level where they are clearly not up to the standards of the rest of the team at that title grade is a mistake – people see through it and it causes an internal mess. Along those lines, titles like CFO, COO and President are not to be thrown around lightly – it sends a very specific message to an organization, investors, clients, etc – and a decision to hire at this level (vs. a VP of Finance or VP of Operations, etc.) is too important to play around with. That said, bringing someone in as your “VP” of Engineering when they are on the bubble of accepting an offer and where the issue is your desire to call them the “Senior Director” of Engineering shouldn’t cause you any heartburn. And while your first move should probably be to convince someone to take the tile you think is fair and review and promote them later (I’ve had great success with this in many of the companies I work with), when title becomes a real issue in a comp negotiation I think it’s ok to use it to your advantage. …
May 14, 2007· 2 min read
$1
Would you work for $1? Here’s a few people who do.
May 10, 2007· 1 min read
Wanted: Information
I don’t know what happened to Google alerts, but I’m not getting anything from my alerts these days. I have maybe 60 alerts set up and get maybe a one alert every other day – I know I’m missing just about everything that’s really being written out there, but can’t figure out why. While they say that ignorance is bliss, I’m feeling less utopic than just uninformed. I was going to switch everything over to Yahoo! alerts but I thought that before I did that I’d poll you to see if anyone had suggestions on alternatives. Any ideas?
May 8, 2007· 1 min read
Your social meter
Check out socialmeter. It gives you the link count for any site (any specific URL actually) from Bloglines, Del.icio.us, Digg, Google, Rojo, Shadows, Technorati and Yahoo. It’s a bit blunt and it would be useful as a widget (rather than taking you off the page you’re visiting and to the socialmeter page) – not to mention if it had a way to actually parse the link sources – but it’s both fun an interesting. …
April 5, 2007· 1 min read
Personal traits
I had lunch with someone last week who truly personified a quality that I admire – humbleness. I was surprised by this, not only because most people simply aren’t very humble, but also because despite being young (I’m not exactly sure his age, but it was likely 24 or 25) he had actually accomplished quite a bit – founding a finance firm, raising some capital and finagling his way into a handful of really interesting late stage deals (of course his perspective was that he really hadn’t done anything yet . . . but that was just him being humble). …
April 3, 2007· 1 min read