Silicon Valley Himalayan Expedition

Ask the question you don't want to ask

A friend has just left Yahoo! to start her own thing.  We've been talking a lot lately about start-up life, especially hiring new people.  We agreed that it is one of the hardest parts of the early stage start-up because you want to acquire resources to execute against the plan immediately, so any negative aspect of a prospective employee tends to be overlooked or downplayed.  She made the comment "Sometimes you don't want to ask a question because you're afraid of the answer." 

Where have I heard that before?  Everywhere, not just in hiring.   It doesn't matter if you are a CEO, an executive, a manager or on the front line of the company, there is a tendency in our business lives to try to steer away from uncovering information that might get in the way of our immediate objectives.  It is particularly acute in sales, where there is a lot of pressure placed on sales results from the Board of Directors down.  So a sales rep who comes out of a great first prospect meeting will often optimistically forecast a deal for the end of the quarter, which at that time might be 80 days out.  He probably starts to realize with 30 days left that the deal is looking less likely to happen that quickly, and now has to decide what to do.   Asking the obvious question "Are you going to buy from me this quarter?" is the right thing to do, but getting a negative answer has so many negative consequences personally and for the organization,  it never seems timely.  Likewise, managers up the line fail to ask if the "in this quarter" question has been asked for the very same reason.

Don't think it just happens in sales or hiring.  As a lawyer, I saw in action a VC anxious to get one of his first deals through the investment committee  failing to ask ordinary due diligence questions of the target company.   There was no doubt the VC believed in the business, but it was also obvious to me during the process that there were certain things the VC really didn't want to know the answer to, like was that amazing multi-million dollar deal actually a signed contract (which it wasn't). 

This post may be obvious, but I bet you've steered yourself away from getting an answer that might impede your immediate progress at least once.  It is always better to have complete information, however.   If you don't ask the tough questions, it is almost certain that any progress you do make will either be undone or at least waste a lot peoples' time.   The test of a tough question is easy:  ask the question you don't want to ask.

Russell Beattie Notebook - Helping the Mobile Mashup Discussion

Link: Russell Beattie Notebook - Helping the Mobile Mashup Discussion.

Russell Beattie is helping guide the discussion at today's Mashup Camp.  Thanks Russ! I'll try to raise some of these points (and counterpoints) in the mobile discussion if no one else picks them up.  And as far as the Amazon mobile mashup goes, Mozes plans to demonstrate that today at some point so I'll let you know how that goes too!  (Here's my first trackback to you - I am still bummed you turned off comments).

Are you an entrepreneur?

Let me acknowledge first and foremost that entrepreneurs are of many types, so don't take my question or answer the wrong way.  There are entrepreneurs who will totally relate to the things I have gone through, and others who may think I've got it all wrong.  I ask the question because a lot of people are impressed when I tell them I started a company.  They say things like "boy, you have kahunas", "I wish I could do that" or "that's amazing", and I am surprised because I believe there are many more entrepreneurs among us than are actually credited for being one.

I for one subscribe to Jeff Hawkin's theory (outlined here thanks to Niall Kennedy ) that succeeding as an entrepreneur means transitioning out of that job into a success.

A few weeks ago I met a friend of a friend who was thinking about starting his own company after spending close to ten years at one of the big Internet companies.  He wanted to know what it's like to be an entrepreneur and I did the best that I could to tell him from my perspective.  Here's some of what I said.

First of all, it has to be in your gut to start a business, not your head or your heart.  It won't be because a spreadsheet is telling you to do it, or that you've written a business plan so beautiful that the Harvard Business School Press would publish it.  It won't be because your lifelong dream has been to start a company or that you know you will feel like you are pursuing the American dream.  All of those things may be true or none of them may be, but unless there is a feeling sitting much lower inside of you, one that tells you that you don't exactly know what you're in for but you're up for it anyway, you may not be the right person to start a business.

Let's assume it is in your gut and you make the leap.  You won't notice it right away, but in a few days you will begin to realize that there is not a single person in the world who really cares about what you are doing except you.  Sure there are lots of people who  care about you personally.   Colleagues at your last job will ask about it, your friends will take some more time to understand it, and if you're lucky like me you'll have an amazing spouse who will really get behind you.  But there's no one else who will really want to take a second of their time to know what you are doing.  No one is going to randomly call you during the day and want to partner with you or want to buy from you or want to work for you.  Clearly part of the formula behind creating a business is that you will create those inbound connections quickly, but you had better be prepared to be lonely for a fairly long time.

And in those times of isolation, be prepared to experience random moments of feeling like the smartest person and the dumbest person in the world on a fairly routine basis.  Sure the smartest person times are fun, you get a ton accomplished and you really understand why you are doing what you are doing.  You know you will be successful.  But the dumbest person times really, really suck.   The business plan you crafted will seem so obvious and plain that it will dawn on you why no one else is doing what you are about to try.  In those same moments, people will tell you that what you are doing has been tried before and failed miserably.  You will question everything about your business and your very own answers will make you feel like you are making a huge mistake.  If you believe that you have to be doubtless to start and run a business, then it is your first doubt that will cause your business to fail.

The only way to survive the tough parts of independence and self-doubt that accompanies entrepreneurship is to choose to be relentless.   You must spend almost all of your shrinking waking hours thinking about how you can make your business better.  You must pursue all avenues of success if you are going to experience even a small taste of it.  You must believe in your gut in what you are doing despite what your head and heart will question many times along the way.  Choosing to be relentless means overcoming almost every inclination to slow down or take the time out that we humans tend to prefer in the normal course of our lives.

A friend recently asked if I regretted my decision to leave a high paying, secure job to run for 7 months with no salary and a hefty personal $ investment in Mozes.   "No way.  I'm an entrepreneur," I quickly answered.  "But  I sure hope that I'm not one forever."

 

Are social networking sites just like bars?

When I was at university, my friends and I would hang out at a few bars now and then.  The popularity of any one bar over the years was not guaranteed - the hit bar one year was not necessarily the hit the next.  Hearing that a bar changed owners, subsequently declined in popularity or just shut down was never really news.  What was guaranteed however was that every popular bar  in succession was usually owned by the same guy or guys who ran the last one.   "This new club  is cool," I would say.  "It reminds me of Barneys. "  And my friend, much more in the know, would say "Yeah, well that's 'cause Barney owns it."

Rafat points us to the new company from a founder of Friendster:

Socializr's Raising About Half a Million Funding: A new stealth social network, Socializr, founded by Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, is raising about $0.5 million seed funding, and has raise about $0.35 million out of that, a birdie told me at the conf.

Friendster was cool once, but it continues to decline in popularity even in the hands of new owners.

So the big question for me is whether social networking sites have staying power, particularly those going after the fickle younger market.  The idea of social networking sites as bars was introduced to me by a good friend at one of the big media software companies, who tells me he's had intense internal debates with colleagues in the strategy group as to whether the analogy has merit.

On the one side, arguments can be made for the viral nature of the sites and, where mountains of user content is generated, enormously high personal switching costs associated with porting data elsewhere.  Even hosted blogging sites make it a pain to move plain text.  On the other side, an 18 year old may not always relate to the stream of content they posted at one spot when they were younger, like, say, 17.  They might just choose to shut down their page altogether and move on, especially if a cool friend decides to do it first, or they hit college and meet the Facebook.  Ads seen all over the web from Tagworld make the point for anyone regardless of scholarship:  tired of MySpace?

I don't think we have seen a complete cycle of social networking sites to know the answer for sure, but the fact that one guy named Tom can host 778256 comments on his blog - pretty much all positive and screaming that they love him - may give a few hints.  You have to wonder if, in addition to snapping up the property itself, companies like News Corp should be structuring their deals to lock up people like Tom and Barney for a very long time.

What is happening?

So Zillow.com launched today, an anticipated real estate site that has now publicly released data on some 60 million homes.   As you know, this isn't the blog for breaking company news but early this am in New York I was probably one of the first to check it out while running through morning mail.

First, I was delighted at what Zillow thought about our home price since we bought it 16 months ago.  From where I sit, Zillow is already a winner.

Here's what I don't get: the site  went down while I was visiting it.  Now I didn't think much of it at the time, but here in Starbucks 5 hours later I decided to check it out again (to see if my home price had fallen any) and got the same message.

A Mozes team member and I were talking about Gmail lately and its slowness.  In a separate email exchange,  a smart friend confirmed he'd heard similar things (but as he said "Maybe [he baffles] it with all [his] Greasemonkey scripts!").  Combined with scale problems of lots of different companies profiled on Techcrunch (example here) , and even the phrase itself of being Techcrunched,  there just seems to be lots and lots of problems with handling web traffic these days.   I don't get it.  What is happening?

To be even more specific about Zillow, we're talking about a Benchmark backed company with the same founding team as one of the busiest all time travel websites of all time in Expedia.  Is it really possible that an email blast and a few high profile blog mentions can wreak this much havoc on a team on the first day of go-live?  It probably not  economical to plan for the exception (i.e. the day people flock to see the site the first time) as opposed to the rule (the steady state of web traffic a site like  Zillow will attract in the coming months).   But messages like the above sure leave a bad first impression, and I'm pretty certain we're not talking about that much traffic.

Famous last words I'm sure.  As we get ready to launch Mozes publicly I definitely don't want to be using Gmail and Zillow as justification, but I'm sure going to ensure our team does everything we can so that we don't have to.

(No one seems to have come up with a better site down message than the Fickr Massage message - shame on me for thinking we should even try).