Life after changing the world

The biggest problem entrepreneurs have is focus. When you’re an idea factory it’s unsurprising that even when deep into a startup you are passionate about the ideas don’t stop coming. Personally I cope with this by having a notebook and new ideas go into the back of the notebook not to be pursued until the current one has run its course.

So I don’t have any doubt that I will achieve the goal of building something great. Something impactful. But I do like to remind myself what I’d do afterwards - as part of the broader question why.

Rooftop Cinema: Big Trouble In Little China

There are many, many cool things about living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Of course if you are a high-tech entrepreneur and are compelled to do startups for a living, driven by a passion to change the world, there’s nowhere like Silicon Valley (whatever the dreams of so many pretenders around the world).

One of the coolest new things, for me: A small gathering of movie enthusiasts on a North Beach 5th floor roof, with the panorama of the city spread out in front of us as the backdrop to a projection screen, on which we watch movies once a month. Kim was invited to the first showing, last month and kindly got me invited too. That was Blade Runner and I’ll post about it as a follow up to this.

Is reliability a fatal issue for the PC industry?

My mother’s laptop started having power issues a few weeks back. I told her I suspected it was the battery as I’d had similar issues with a previous laptop. She took the advice of the Fry’s man that in fact she just needed to buy his new power adapter and all would be well. It seemed so for a little while but it’s seriously malfunctioning now. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that she was sold a power adapter at the wrong power with the wrong current, but it’s been a long time since I did any Electronic and Electrical Engineering at university, so what would I know?

Never interfere in a boy and girl fight

“People often ask me if I have any words of advice for young people. Well, here are a few simple admonitions for young and old: Never interfere in a boy and girl fight….”

— Words of advice for young people, William S. Burroughs

I tend not to give advice nowadays. I listen. I will express an opinion sometimes (okay, often). But I won’t tell you what to do. The reasons are simple. People will do what they will do. They will have a complex set of reasons and stimulae behind their actions, and some degree of agency in them (just how much is in interesting topic for debate in another forum). However if they act in alignment with my suggested course of action and they arrive at a position they’re unhappy with, they will always blame me for telling them what to do. If things work out hunky-dory they will celebrate their decisive genius.

William S. Burroughs knows no such restraint and in his wonderful little riff “words of advice for young people” that I have an on old CD somewhere he leads off with the great advice I can buy into:

“Never interfere in a boy and girl fight”

It amazes me how people in Silicon Valley have so much difficulty following this.  If you’re an entrepreneur focus on building a great company and changing the world. Whether Arrington or Calacanis is right really isn’t of concern to you and you can never know. Whether Conway or McClure is right is irrelevant to you if you don’t build anything that either of them is interested in hearing your pitch on.

The 4 waves of the PC era - what's coming next?

I have been noodling for a while over this post by Om Malik: http://bit.ly/bNwuUP

WHAT’S HAPPENED? WHAT’S COMING?

I wanted to throw my own oar into the pond on this one, as it’s a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about over the last year or two, as we’ve turned our vague ideas about where “Apps” were going into a beta-product allied to a bold vision for the future.

You can slice and dice trends in many ways. The truth is there’s something fractal about the nature of trends - the closer you look at them the more they splinter into smaller and smaller fibres of subtrends, movements, products etc. People are eager to jump from the neatly titled Web 2.0 into something they can call Web 3.0 while labeling the dot.com boom some sort of Web 1.0. This is fundamentally wrong because the web was only part of why so many people suddenly wanted the Internet - indeed for most just getting an email address was the initial intent. All schemas to describe the complexity of technological progress are inherently flawed in their omission and simplification, but I have found it helpful is to think of four waves.

Yahoo! Mail - can it be saved?

It pains me to see Yahoo! becoming the butt of jokes in the start-up community, particularly as for so many of us they were an inspiration, once upon a time.  But, sadly, common wisdom round these parts is that they’re walking dead, losers, a place good companies go to die.  I sincerely hope they can claw back from that.

Like almost everyone who’s been online for more than a decade (two decades for me) I have a Yahoo! Mail account.  But I hate using it.  It stays alive as the repository for old messages I don’t want to lose and as a place where various signups and memberships still contact me.  Indeed I use it still as an address for signups I fear may be spammy.

I was wondering how Yahoo! Mail could win me back as a user.  It won’t replace GMAIL but maybe they could still be a genuine secondary mail account for me.  The conclusion I came to is simple.  If they provided a good tool to easily sort through and file old messages, weed out spam or unwanted membership communications, it could regain utility.  I don’t mean wading through page after page and trying to sort and select and delete.  There must be a better way to do that.

I cannot be the only person who looks at 17,000 unread emails and closes down again thinking it’s not worth fighting with.

Live blogging Startup Lessons Learned Conference #sllconf

Good breakfast done. Eric Reis up on stage….

…great opening - Eric Reis dismantling all of the myths and misconceptions around lean startup

• lean startup is about learning
• lean startup doesn’t mean small
• lean startup doesn’t mean cheap
• lean startup doesn’t mean bootstrapped
• lean startup does mean disruptive

All serious entrepreneurs should apply for Open Angel Forum

It’s been a while with our heads down at Team AppWhirl, with no time for blogging as we got the product out the door.  But there couldn’t be a better time to get back to blogging the startup than when reflecting on Friday night’s Open Angel Forum Silicon Valley.

As a regular listener to This Week In Startups, and as supporters of Jason Calacanis’ drive against pay-to-pitch (some would say exploitative) investment forums we have followed the Open Angel Forum.  We applied to present to the OAF Silicon Valley.  After being shortlisted we interviewed with Tyler and were accepted in.  It was a very efficient process and respectful of Founders’ time.  We were thrilled.

Why the games industry has less to fear than the music & TV industries, in moving online

I was intrigued by the title of this article - skeptical of gaming following other media online.  But I think it doesn’t follow that because the TV & Music industries have done so badly that gaming will struggle to find their feet too.

The reason gaming will work in a move online is that it’s gaming developers themselves doing it, the creative is moving online.  With TV and music big intermediaries sat between the creative and the consumer.  This made them slower to respond, more brittle.  They broke.  They were too slow to respond to customer demand and ended up losing control of the consumer (in music’s case to either piracy or Apple).

The Lady Gaga Post

I love Lady Gaga.  I didn’t want to at first.  I was expecting another frothy pop bimbette. But I was wrong. Lady Gaga is a performance artist the likes we haven’t seen since perhaps Madonna in her most creative phase.

She understands her audience to an unparalleled degree - you’re not telling me the refrain “I’ll follow you until you love me, papa” is a lyrical accident in Paparazzi, appealing as it does on a subliminal level to a broad swathe of fans with difficult parental relationships.  The blatant sexuality of Poker Face is in line with the attitudes of these times, as is the ten minute soft core lesbian porn that is the Telephone video.  (Again, a groundbreaking masterpiece of pop art.)

Entrepreneurs Collapse The Wave Function

I’ve come to a satisfying analogy when it comes to an important core-skill of entrepreneurs.  True entrepreneurs collapse the wave function.

I am a physicist by training.  But long before I ever studied Physics at the University of Leeds I was gripped by quantum mechanics.  The picture of the world painted by quantum mechanics, and verified to incredible levels of precision, is famously counter-intuitive.

In quantum mechanics everything exists in all possible states at the same time.  One represents everything, even the reader, by a “wave function” which takes into account all of these possible states.  It’s only when one takes a measurement that anything takes on a single observable value.  This observation itself “collapses the wave function” from a particle being in all possible states simultaneously into being in one specific observable state.  The example ofSchrodinger’s cat is often trotted out here, the poor beast trapped in a box, subjected to a random event that can either kill or not kill the cat, causing it to exist in a peculiar limbo until the box is open and the dead/notdead cat is observed.

Breakfast is back... at least in Silicon Valley.

I arrived here in Silicon Valley in 1999.  Dot.Com boom roaring all around me.  This was the time of “Breakfast at Buck’s”.  Literally.  There’s TV evidence to back me up!  I was followed around for three weeks for a BBC Documentary (titled something like USA.com) with a scene in the finished product filmed as I had a meeting at a table in Buck’s.  I remember domains-guru Andrew Naylor and I driving up there for breakfast at the table right behind the CNBC anchors as they broadcast “Power Lunch” from Buck’s.

Handling external factors as an high-tech entrepreneur

This is a rambling personal entry, and may not be hugely interesting to a lot of you…

Building a company is a lot of hard work.  There’s lots of great input out there from experienced entrepreneurs like Eric Reis, Dave McClure, Sean Ellis… basically all the folks on my Startup Helpers google reader list.  And there’s a lot of great insight to be gained on the Venture process nowadays, from the blogging VCs - the must read list of VC bloggers is here.  But it’s still about working hard, working smart and being resilient.

I don’t write this entry as a way of saying look at me haven’t I had it tough - I want to make the point that EVERY startup entrepreneur has their challenges outside of the job.  Part of what makes you a successful entrepreneur is dealing with them.

How To Build A Successful Sales Channel

Mark Suster posted about channel sales today.  Nice post, as always - I think of all the VC blogs I read his provokes the most desire to respond, so he clearly picks topics well.  If you don’t read him you should.  Or just subscribe to my VC blogs list on Google Reader.

I’m English originally, so sharing success stories can seem a bit like unseemly bragging, but it’s relevant.  Channel building is hard.  I think the main problem is the belief that the sales people in the channel give a crap - not only about your product, but about what their biz dev folks tell them.