Posted: July 16th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: New York City Startup |
As I prepare to leave San Francisco to fly back east to New York City, I prepare as usual with a Grande Coffee Drip at Starbucks availing myself of the free AT&T wireless. The trip was a “success” as measured by what we set out to accomplish by coming out to San Francisco in the first place. No, not a junket masquerading as a business trip or a chance to eat at In & Out Burger which though I did, was just a benefit of me being where they are for a change. It was a way for the principals of Jittr to mix it up and truly focus and commit to the norms necessary to have a fighting chance in the exciting but fiercely competitive landscape that is the Web Startup space whichever particular domain within it one may inhabit.
- It was about long evenings bleeding into night and dawn hashing out our core value or meaning that is the reason for forming and committing to Jittr.
- It was about the timelines we see as necessary to hit to be relevant in a time perspective.
- It was about what we excise from our core product idea to be able to hit a date to as I call it , have a debutante coming out in front of the skeptical masses; masses being those in the same or similar business and their press consorts.
- It is about not freaking out with discovery of every competing site or press release of someone in a similar space getting so much Series A or B or Angel funding
- It is about nurturing our combined personal networks and coming clean and often about our ideas, what we are doing and then listening to the feedback and if warranted, factoring in some of the gems we glean.
Posted: July 3rd, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: New York City Startup, Technology |
I have been wanting to write my observations about the state of Technology Development in the Organization for some time now. What is that ? You ask! Well, nothing to do with actual bits and bytes. That would be too droll and in the end development groups have been writing code and growing old together with their favorite languages since the advent of the computer and will do so until we figure out how engineer a button that produces code that magically fleshes out the requirements that a customer wants,thinks he wants or is what he needs but doesn’t know it. If the scent of Pizza permeated the hallways leading to the room where the meeting was held the voluntary on-time attendance increased markedly. In other words, it is worth the cost to buy pizza to attract the team.
Open Door policy
Of course having an open door policy so that your staff can pop into your office without the administrative hassle of calendar events is a good policy in any context. What I did in partnership with the Business Owners was institute the same policy cross functionality with business owners themselves. Open Door is a cliche and it was a mindset that included going to someone’s office as well as email communications. The point was to create an environment with as few walls as possible , the optimum being no walls between the Business people and the Technologists.
It’s mostly about Trust
In many instances, the root problem in most instances of Technology and Business relationships is about trust , mostly lack thereof. Trust is hard to build , work to maintain and easy to destroy so the practices to have it permeate the relationships between groups is an never ending process. Technology development has the additional difficulty that we practice a craft that sometimes appears like Black Magic to the lay person. Though I always made it a point to vociferously make the point we are not “car mechanics”, there is a certain resonance to the Car mechanic analogy. For most folks that are not familiar with the inner workings of your typical automobile, the rite of car maintenance especially when some expensive repair has to occur always has behind it the doubt one is being taken advantage of because of their ignorance.
By the way, the photo is out of context of what I am writing about but it does mirror my state of mind at the moment. It is a sweeping view of Key Biscayne Beach down in Key Biscayne, Florida of course. They call it “Island Paradise” at least in the entrance to the Village of Key Biscayne.
No, this post will attempt to be more sociological. It’s something I have experienced directly and indirectly and though I have not dedicated myself to doing thorough research on it, based on my experience I believe it is prevalent. What it is , is the difficulty organizations have setting and managing expectations .
The direct part of my experiences are of course both as a developer and over time as a manager and executive managing larger and larger teams. The teams have been in various disciplines such as Search , Publishing , Integration Services, Video etc but in the end it doesn’t matter or change the expectation challenge one iota.
The indirect I would categorize as more then anecdotal but which I have not experienced directly. It represents those where meeting with a company , say a recruitment exercise , the depiction of the challenge for the candidate is explained.
It generally goes something like this – Our development team doesn’t engage with us like a full fledged member of one team. They rest too much on process and though they may execute on what is asked, they don’t take an proactive interest in contributing ideas or to summarize, they are not innovative.
Though this is not a good organizational state to be in and I will go into how I have solved these problems in the past, let me first say there is a glimmer of goodness in it at least for the optimist like myself. I believe strongly it directly hints at the perception which is also true that Technologists are inherently innovative and that any deviation from that behavior is viewed as a problem to be solved. Even though all human activity and roles have plenty of room for innovation, there are some roles that have a greater perceived expectation and where the mantra “just do your job exactly like I asked” is not enough.
Though there are probably as many ways to successfully solve the predicament as there are people tasked to solve the predicament I will lay out the steps I have taken in terms of consistent and simple communications to the Technical Team I recently led while at AOL. To provide a little context, at a high level , I was tasked with leading a Technology Development team supporting two business units. The teams had previously been broken apart through different management chains that we inane to say the least. Now at least the structure made sense with all the roles needed for success under one accountable executive (myself).
As I lay this out I am not sure if they will be in order of importance but here goes anyway.
- Though we are technologists with our own lingo, we need to become conversant with speaking as business people.
No, that does not mean becoming BS artists or such which most business people are not but instead concentrate on the clear, non acronym and technology laden prose. We are here to solve business problems using technology as our craft and most business problems can be clearly stated without delving into the innards of some esoteric algorithm or programming language construct.
- We are Business People first or at least as much as our Business Partners
Related to the above or actually perhaps supercedes it and should be first but anyway the point is, we have the ability and the obligation to think in business terms, like what consumer value or utility is being addressed by what we are doing? Are we doing it in a way that aligns with the time constraints of the marketplace? Yes as Technologists some of the answers to basic business questions will devolve into technical choices but that doesn’t mean we can’t think through them at a more concrete business level and one that connects us in mindset with non-Technologists.
- The Customer is always right but our business/product partners are not customers in the conventional sense.
Back in my high school and college days I made ends meet by being a New York Deli Man. Cutting deli meats for the most demanding and fickle customers known to mankind or at least to me based on my life experiences. If you wanted Baloney cut paper thin or in quarter inch chunks or put through a grinder, well that is what you got though sometimes with a snicker; try to slice 1 pound of paper thin pepperoni and see what I mean. The point is the customer got what they wanted regardless of whether that was the optimum cut and whether they enjoyed it or gave it to their pets was immaterial. The customer is always right in the Deli scenario because there is no inherent interest in the use of the product once is has been procured by the customer. That is a valid mindset for most transactions (I am stretching the point, there are many instances where the use of the product is controlled of course but I hope I made my point).
The required relationship a technology development team must possess with the rest of the organization that consumes it services is a partnership relationship , not a standard customer relationship. The technology team has to feel a vested interest in the absolute utility of what they are being asked be a part of. It’s as though I was cutting the baloney not for some anonymous customer but for myself or a Monday Night Football party I have having at my place.
- Regular formal forums with the business owners
Though I am not a fan of meetings for their own sake and God knows, neither are people who make their living writing code, bi-weekly or monthly formal open forums with the key business owner was something I instituted especially while at AOL. Admittedly if we were in a crunch I would either give a pass to the group that was under some deadline pressure or I would push the meeting to another week. These forums though allowed a discourse centered on business metrics tying it directly to the largely technical activities of the Development team. If the scent of Pizza permeated the hallways leading to the room where the meeting was held the voluntary on-time attendance increased markedly. In other words, it is worth the cost to buy pizza to attract the team.
- Open Door policy
Of course having an open door policy so that your staff can pop into your office without the administrative hassle of calendar events is a good policy in any context. What I did in partnership with the Business Owners was institute the same policy cross functionality with business owners themselves. Open Door is a cliche and it was a mindset that included going to someone’s office as well as email communications. The point was to create an environment with as few walls as possible , the optimum being no walls between the Business people and the Technologists.
- It’s all about Trust
In many instances, the root problem in most instances of Technology and Business relationships is about trust , mostly lack thereof. Trust is hard to build , work to maintain and easy to destroy so the practices to have it permeate the relationships between groups is an never ending process. Technology development has the additional difficulty that we practice a craft that sometimes appears like Black Magic to the lay person. Though I always made it a point to vociferously make the point we are not “car mechanics”, there is a certain resonance to the Car mechanic analogy. For most folks that are not familiar with the inner workings of your typical automobile, the rite of car maintenance especially when some expensive repair has to occur always has behind it the doubt one is being taken advantage of because of their ignorance.
View from the roof of the “new” New York Times Building in New York City looking towards the Bank of America NY Headquarters in the background.
Roof of New York Times Tower
Posted: June 4th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: New York City Startup, Startup |
As the title states, this is from a very specific and personal (me) perspective on some of the things I have learned , usually the hard way in the past few months as I work to boot strap my own startup.
It isn’t just me , I am doing this with a ex-colleauge from AOL and we kicked around the idea for many a late night before we (actually more myself took the gamble.
- I am accountable at 100% not just the area of primary concentration
Basic truism and one that is key as otherwise it is easy to get resentful when things don’t go quite the way you want them. As the Chief Technology Office (A highly pompous title for the person who is responsible for the technical architecture and software engineering of the product), I have to accept; and I do; accountability for all other areas of the process that go into providing utility to a user that will help establish out startup. ie Product requirements, Design aspects , monetization potentials.
- Irrespective of 100% accountability, you can’t do it all
Self explanatory but a high risk especially for those in the technology wing that are seduced into thinking that Technology acumen can solve all problems. It can’t because there is more to a business, even one with Technology at it’s core for building new Products, then the bits and bytes that give life to the product.
- “Get the right people on the bus”
I believe this is from Guy Kawasaki’s Art of the Start which a bunch of us enterprising sorts read and re-read circa 2006 when we were seriously contemplating leaving the womb of a big company and going off on our own. Like a real bus at least in the City of New York, there are plenty of stops along the route to let people on and often times more importantly let people off. Also don’t turn a blind eye to those that try to get on the bus without paying the fare either sneaking in through the rear door or by excuses they left the fare home while entering through the front.
- Move on quickly
Don’t dwell on things too long, maybe a nano-second is enough. If a path chosen (a potential partner, product idea, a development tool, etc) doesn’t pan out as originally envisioned , change direction and don’t beat yourself or them over it afterwards.
- Reconsider previous decisions based on new circumstances
Even though you want to move on quickly, it is also often true that new circumstances change the dynamics of why a path originally taken and ditched now seems like a worthwhile path to take again. Risk of waffling in this of course but it should be straightforward to recognize over time that you have fallen into a rut of zig-zagging from one path to another and back repeated ad-nauseum.
- Don’t pack it in and give up at the first , second , nth roadblock
Almost everyday (except days off) will bring up scenarios that make you question having gone out on your own instead of staying within the womb of a more established gig. It may be a subtle form of self hypnosis , but itemize and remind yourself of the points why your chosen path has benefits over the more traditional , comfy established route .
- If you can’t itemize some compelling points from above, then all likelihood you shouldn’t be out on your own
Posted: April 19th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Mobile, New York City Startup |
Well, back from our sponsors -
What does Foursquare have going for it
- Engagement! The apparent leader in the Location based checkin realm. Being the leader here is still about relatively small numbers. I heard they may be around 1 million registered users but equally if not more important is how many of them are actually truly engaged on a regular basis checking in their whereabouts.
Notwithstanding the normal privacy concerns that surround things of this nature that are new, as the capabilities to do more accurate location targeting and the spreading of smartphones that can take advantage of that capability and the utility becomes real, people will adopt it. To stretch an analogy , using E-Z Pass for automated toll collection provides a government entity with your presumed location assuming you are driving your own car for the benefit of passing through a toll without the normal wait at the manned toll booths. Not quite apples to apples comparison but there was a hesitancy at it’s outset related to the Big Brother aspect.
- Tendency for more limited network. Though there is nothing that stops one from having a Foursquare network as vast as the typical Facebook Friends network, the tendency of users to limit the number of friends that know where they may be at a moment in time acts as a braking factor on the size of an individual network of friends. You can assume that could make a individual’s Foursquare social network a more valuable artifact.
- Budding commercial relationships With the likes of Starbucks, NYTimes and others. I can imagine the behavioral targeting if the location specific data could/would be merged with business establishments, Can imagine Gevalia increasing their upsell to me seeing I am the mayor of various Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts. Of course I would not agree to a syndication of my distinct detailed personalized whereabouts but perhaps there is a way to make utility of the aggregated view including Badges and Mayorships.
- Simple Web Service APIs. A must for 3rd parties using the platform to integrate with Foursquare. The more 3rd parties integrate and provide twists and functionality to the inherent proposition of Foursquare, the greater the likelihood of Foursquare becoming the de-facto standard for a a location specific Social Network.
Of course we can see a replay of the situation with Twitter and 3rd parties where after 3rd party developers move the ubiquity along for Twitter as a platform, the business needs of Twitter itself force the cannibalization of much of what the 3rd parties developed.
What’s Going against Foursquare
- Low Barriers to entry. Location services are baked into the smartphone devices themselves with well defined interfaces. The Venue data can be and is licensed from aggregators. Search indexes that provide proximity searches are relatively simple to setup using Open Source packages like Local Solr based on Lucene.
- Utility for the user. Yes, the Gaming aspect is fun especially if your network of friends gets vicarious thrill of winning mayorships and badges. Medium-term for an individual the fun wears out without a commensurate return of some value. This is where the budding relationship with businesses may accrue benefits for the users as inducements and true rewards for loyalty to an establishment become the norm. Perhaps Foursquare can become the de-facto standard for loyalty programs especially for the large number of small and mid sized establishments that currently do not have the capability to have one of their own. Of course there is still a lot to do technically to prevent gaming of location and visits.
- Stability of the Application. By this I mean the predilection to crash especially on the iPhone where I most commonly use it. Typical of the fast moving Web space is that applications/sites are mutating so fast that a proper testing regime is not followed and buggy code is pushed out. So far it has been a minor inconvenience for me mostly because I am biased understanding the price you pay for rapid iterative development where your users are the ultimate testing ground. Most users outside of Technology won’t have such a forgiving nature.
What do I think of the valuations floating around upwards of $125 Million? I feel that at the moment, the scale of that number is obscene. Now if I knew the future with absolute clarity and could see that 1 or 2 years from now Foursquare would be the standard platform for location based services and have a user footprint in the space approaching Twitter’s 50 million users , the current floated valuation would pale in comparison. Michael Arrington has a good post in Techcrunch arguing against their selling out at the moment. Nevertheless having that sum of money dangled in front of you for what amounts to about 1 year’s worth of work of a small team with a relatively small investment of $1 .5 million, the discipline to stair it down and roll the dice on your own would be prodigious.
Posted: February 26th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: New York City Startup, Startup |
For two hours on Wednesday evening February 24th, I and a group of other interested and hopefully entrepreneurial folks were treated to a discourse on Angel Investing – the when and how to ask for money from an Angel by David Rose, a dean of the art in New York City .
For those that have an interest in the presentation, here is a link to the audio.
The event was hosted by New York University’s Stern School of Business and the packed house seemed to be filled with mostly young and hungry NYU business students. The invite was not limited to just students but open to all that could reserve a spot which is how I got in.
I did take a front row seat with my polished Apple , spitting distance from Mr Rose and plopped myself down for what ended up being an enchanted two hour presentation.
The crux of the presentation was tailored around the protocol of enlisting angel funding for a startup. I won’t redact the entire two hours into this post , what I will concentrate will be on what I got out of it as singularly important.
- Have your elevator pitch
As the saying goes, you should be able to describe what problem your business attempts to solve in the short period of time that you may be in an elevator with someone, Ok, let’s assume you are in a New York City high-rise but notwithstanding, you have 30 seconds or at most if you are lucky 1 minute to provide the thrust of what your business strives to accomplish and be.
That is much harder then it seems and takes considerable thought and work to get it right and then practice to be able to deliverable at any time planned and most importantly unplanned. You never know when you will be presented an opportunity to deliver the pitch. For example , at the tail end of the 2 hour presentation, 3 people were selected at random to deliver their startup pitch to David Rose. The ground rule was you got two minutes and nothing more to present. Being concise but thorough enough to enlighten someone you have just met with the pretext of your business so that they come away with a general understanding and more importantly a desire to learn more is key if you want to successfully navigate the avenues of angel funding Remember, though quite naturally one is the most important person in their own universe or mind, the full universe is full of countless others who feel the same and thus the competition for attention is intense. Get your message tight and have it fit within that veritable 30 second window. imagine you were given 30 second spot during the Super Bowl.
- Craft a Business Plan
Even though David Rose admitted the likelihood of an angel spending time combing through a business plan was low, the strong expectation is the entrepreneur would expend the time and energy tailoring a business plan with a time horizon of 3 to 4 years. Anything out further then 4 years is dismissed as pure fantasy.
There is a recognition that even a 3 to 4 year horizon will be liable to be off and require constant recalibration. Nevertheless the act of preparing the plan gives evidence to a necessary discipline that is important for the budding business itself as well as an artifact that demonstrates to those you want money from that you have applied a degree of rigor to how your business purports to operate.
- Personal investment is key
It’s your business! If you don’t put some of your own funds on the line, how would you expect someone else to take a chance?
That seems very self evident but was hammered home at length. The absolute amount of personal investment is not the key factor as that will depend on multiple factors. Are you actively investing your own capital? How about Friends and Family who are the people who know you best? Even better, is there already a revenue stream from customers who are voting affirmatively using your services or products. If the answer is no to all above, fat chance you will have a willing angel investor.
These represent some of the things I took away from the two hours. It is a major distillation of what was a broad based educational presentation of how to interact with a potential angel investor if that is the path that makes sense for your startup.
Now that I have gotten myself on a magical listserv, I was also invited to an event this coming Monday March 1st 2010 to review the finalists of NYU’s Stern Business Startup Showcase. Starting with over 170 entires, the group has been whittled down to 40 semi-finalists in a content to garner from a pool of over $175,000 in capital for the winning ideas. I suspect I will be privy to a slew of more social networking or aggregation sites which seem to be in abundance as startup ideas but I hold out hope that doesn’t end up being the case.
