Brad Feld's Blog, page 170

Go Fill Up Some Gas Tanks Today

I’m spending the day working at Yesware. I’ve been an investor from inception and love what this company is doing. I also love the culture – I wrote about it in my post The Monastic Startup. If you use Gmail and Salesforce and are not also using Yesware, take a look at email for salespeople right now.

It’s an atypical day for me. I was supposed to be in DC all day today and tomorrow. I had full days of meetings, including two Startup Communities related events – one with the World Bank and one with a Congressional Caucus on Innovation. I had a few company meetings along with some stuff I was exploring. And I was going to drop in on 1776 and check it out.

Congress decided to shut down for the week because of the pending snow storm so the two events I built my trip around (the World Bank and the Congressional Caucus) were cancelled. So I decided to punt on going to DC and stay in Boston. I decided to have a “work at one of the companies I’m an investor in” day and get caught up on some stuff.

Last night before dinner I had a phone call with someone who gave me a great metaphor about “filling up your gas tank.” We were talking about the introvert / extrovert dynamic and how always being in “give / support mode” drains an introvert like me. He suggested that I make sure I do things on a daily basis that fill up my gas tank. Yup – that makes sense. But then he said something that was a new thought to me.

“Encourage everyone you work with to put some gas in someone else’s tank every day.” 

It’s totally consistent with my give before you get philosophy, but it’s got a nice twist. Rather than being random, be deliberate about doing it, but random about how you do it.

For example, when a friend of mine had testicular cancer last year, I called him every day for 60 days during his chemo regimen. While I only talked to him every two or three days, I always left him a message. I was filling up his gas tank a little each day.

Another example is that I try to randomly call a different CEO of a company I’m on the board of every day. I don’t manage to do this every day, but I try. These are short calls, often voice mails that just startup with “Hey – thinking of you – no need to call me back.” I then often offer up an observation about something positive I see going on.

I like to be impulsive when I’m on the road. After lunch (I took out the Yesware team and yes, I paid) I stopped by Kinvey‘s new office on 99 Summer which is around the corner from Yesware. Kinvey went through TechStars several years ago and while we didn’t participate in their venture financing, I love the company and especially the CEO Sravish. I surprised him, gave him a hug, got a tour of the place, grabbed a few tshirts and some stickers, and headed back to Yesware. He sent me a link to a new post they just did titled The Boston Startup Map: Visualizing the City’s Tech Scene so I could do more random drop ins if I wanted.

These aren’t programmed, scheduled calls in that I’m being deliberate in advance. They are just me filling up someone else’s gas tank with some random positive feedback in the midst of an otherwise chaotic life. And it makes me feel good.

So – go fill up some gas tanks today. And tomorrow.

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How Is Your Q1 Going?

Now that we are in March, you should have a pretty good view of how your Q1 is likely to end up. If you are a revenue generating company, you’ve probably got a formally approved 2013 plan by now (if not, why not?) Your board is paying attention to your performance against plan, and you and your management team are executing based on the plan you had approved, which likely includes both a revenue plan and an expense plan.

If your sales and revenue are not on or ahead of plan, it’s time to take a hard look at what is going on. Q1 is the easiest quarter to make since you just created the annual plan. If you miss Q1, especially in a recurring revenue, services oriented business, or adtech business, there is almost no way you will make it up over Q2 – Q4. Sure – it’s nice to think something magic, special, and happy will happen, but it almost never does.

Step 1: Put on the brakes right now on discretionary spending, especially headcount. You are probably spending at plan. If sales / revenue / MRR are behind plan, you are just creating a bigger problem for yourself.

Step 2: Do an aggressive root cause analysis of why you missed Q1 so far (January and February). Use the five whys approach and keep digging until you actually understand what is going on. Don’t let your sales organization wave things off. Don’t assume it’s all going to come together on 3/31. Don’t assume the high level metrics you are looking at tell the story. Go deep as a management team. Get everyone on the management team in a room for the day on Saturday 3/9, and figure it out. Yeah, I know some of you are going to SXSW – figure it out. It’s important.

Step 3: Keep playing through on your plan for all of Q1 other than discretionary spending. Be surgical about what is going on. Use this as a wakeup call that you aren’t executing well yet, or at least to the plan you put out there. Do you have confidence you’ll make it up in March? If you do after you think hard about it, then you’ll know in a few weeks. But don’t wait for those weeks to pass to get your mind into the issue.

Step 4: Re-forecast Q1 and the rest of 2013 based on what you expect the actuals for Q1 to be. Again, go deep. You just created an annual plan so the process and the numbers should be fresh. Use it to re-forecast based on the new information you learned in January, February, and Step 2. Get it in shape so that after you know the score for Q1, you can quickly put it in front of the board.

Step 5: Call a board meeting for around April 15. Make this a Q1 review and Q2 – Q4 planning meeting. As part of this, get a new 2013 plan approved that takes into consideration what you learned in Q1.

Don’t panic, but don’t be caught off guard. Assume you won’t make things up and get ahead of them by figuring out what your real trajectory is.

Oh – and if you are beating your Q1 plan, then start thinking about how you can accelerate and grow even faster!

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What Do You Do On The Weekends?

Chris Dixon has a good short post up titled What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years. He wrote it on Saturday so it’s got a delightful self-referential twist to it now that he’s a partner at A16Z.

I’ve always thought this was a great interview question. I’ve used it with founders of companies I’m looking at investing in, TechStars founders, and execs for early stage companies. Basically, anyone who I’m trying to understand what they are thinking about long term. The variety of answers is fascinating, often deeply personal, and occasionally very confusing to me. But they are always enlightening.

My answer for a long time has been “write, read, spend time with Amy, run long distances, catch up on what just happened the previous week, and recharge myself to go back into the fray on Monday morning.” Amy likes to look at me on Sunday night and assess whether I’m patched up and ready to go again for another week. Unfortunately, there have recently been too many Sunday’s where her assessment is that I’m not and need another day, which I rarely have.

The idea, and execution, for all of the Startup Revolution stuff came out of what I do on the weekend. A lot of thinking about it rolled around in the back of my brain during long runs. While I wrote Startup Communities during two months last summer, most of my work on Startup Life was done between 5am and 9am during the weekend and over the weekends during September and October. And Startup Boards seems to be following the same pattern for me.

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Why Am I Forbidden From Using My iPhone In US Immigration Areas?

I’m in the Little Rock airport on my way home. After having an abysmal travel day yesterday that started off at 5:30am with me being detained By U.S. Customs and Border Protection in the Toronto airport, I finally got to Little Rock around 4pm, made it to the Startup Arkansas event around 5:30pm, and did two hours of open office hours, a Startup Communities talk, and general Q&A. When I got back to my hotel room around 10:30pm  and crawled into bed after hanging around with the entrepreneurs at a great after party, the crappy US CBP experience had been washed off of me. I had a great evening, and, like entrepreneurs everywhere, the people I got to hang out with in Arkansas are optimistic, fun, excited about what they are doing, and building the future. And they like beer, which I needed after a very long day.

I had two separate bad dreams last night about being detained. The first was a strange, complex one that is now fuzzy in my head, but happened in a futuristic, very dark setting. The second is still fresh – I was with Dick Costolo (Twitter CEO) somewhere in San Francisco and we were detained by military people who put us in a room, took away our iPhones because they were afraid Dick would start a revolution since he controlled Twitter, and made us sit silently back to back. I woke up before that dream resolved.

When I woke up from my second dream, I realized I was wondering why you are forbidden from using your iPhone in US Immigration areas. I notice this all the time when I enter the US – you go through a door into where the giant immigration room is and you are bombarded with the universal “no phone” sign. Then, when you break this rule and tweet a photo of the “no phone” sign, one of the CBP people inevitably comes over to you and tells you that you can’t use your phone there.

Yesterday, after I ended up in what I have been told is called the “secondary” room, I quickly send Amy and Kelly and email telling them where I was. I then tweeted that I had been detained by CBP. This took about 30 seconds, at which point one of the CBP agents very aggressively told me that I couldn’t use my phone in this room.

I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask why, nor do I think it would have been particularly helpful. I’m sure the formal reason is something like “you are on government property and we get to set the rules on what you do” and then there is – if pushed – some separate justification about security. But I’ve used my iPhone when I was in the White House, I’ve taken a photos of Obama with it, I check in on FourSquare at various government buildings, and I have spent many mindless minutes waiting on a line for some government service somewhere using my iPhone. And some very creative people have videoed their own experience with CPB and DHS agents doing ridiculous things, making absurd statements, and demonstrating what happens when they don’t understand civil liberties and our constitution as well as the people they are trying to question.

Why am I forbidden from using it in an Immigration facility? Are they afraid of people videoing what they are doing? Are they worried that I’ll rally a twitter mob to break me out of the secondary detention area. Or are they just enjoying exercising their ability to eliminate my ability to communicate with the outside world?

I’m clearly still riled up about yesterday, although I’m mostly just sad about it. It’s horrifying to me how, as a government, we treat non-US citizens who are legally in this country. It’s also disgusting to me how difficult we make it for people to come into this country and startup businesses, which ironically is the foundation on which much of this country has been built. And now that I had a very direct and minor taste of it, I’m sad that we’ve let things get to this point.

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The Joy Of Being Detained By U.S. Customs and Border Protection

I’ve had a shitty morning.

After a really fun day yesterday in Waterloo at Communitech, which is really impressive, I woke up at 4:30am to make my 6:30am flight from Toronto to Chicago on my way to Little Rock, Arkansas where I’m speaking at the launch of Startup Arkansas. I was going to run the Little Rock Marathon on Sunday but I’m undertrained and – while I could get it done – decided I wasn’t ready to deal with the physical and emotional recovery cycle given all the work I’ve got going on. So I bailed on the marathon, but since they’d organized the Startup Arkansas event around my schedule and managed to procure me a number for the sold out marathon, I decided to go ahead and fulfill my commitment to that.

At 5:30am after checking in and getting my boarding pass, I slammed into the wall of US CBP. I’ve been through the Toronto checkpoint a few times and it’s always a long line that moves slowly. I got to the front by 5:45am so I felt like I had plenty of time to make my 6:30am flight.

As I waited for my turn, I noticed the CBP agent whose line I was in was moving slowly. The guy two people in front of me took about three minutes to clear – he had to take off his hat, then his glasses, and had to do some fingerprint thing on the scanner that I can’t remember ever having seen used before. I didn’t really think much of it, but I noticed it.

When it was my turn, I said a polite hello to the CBP agent, gave him my passport and customs form, and waited patiently. He handed me back my customs form and said “Put your correct address on this.” I looked down and noticed I had written my P.O. Box in Eldorado Springs as my address, since that’s my address. I responded “That’s my correct legal address.” He responded, “Do you live inside a P.O. Box?” I said, as politely as I could, “No.” He then said “Is your house inside your P.O. Box?” I said, “No, I have a house a mile away, but the P.O. Box is my address – at least that’s what the US Postal Service says.” By this point I realized he wanted a street address and not a P.O. Box, so I said “I’m sorry, I’ll write down the house address I have” which I proceeded to do.

I stood there quietly for about a minute as he typed stuff into his computer. He then handed my passport and my customs form to me after scribbling something illegible on it, handed me a yellow card, pointed at a room, and said, “Go into that room.” I asked whether there was a problem and he said more forcefully, “Go into that room.”

I did. It was a bigger room with about 10 CBP people. There were about 5 non-CBP people. No one acknowledged me as I walked into the room. I went up to one of the CBP people and said, “I was told to go to this room – can you tell me what I need to do?” He responded, “Give me your documents and go sit down over there until called.” This time I asked “Can you explain what’s going on?” The response was “Go sit over there until you are called.”

At this point I got anxious. I went and sat down. I sent Amy and my assistant Kelly an email telling them where I was. I tweeted that I had been detained by CBP. I started looking up flight information on my iPhone and a different CBP agent barked at me, “Sir, you must turn off your cell phone in this room.” So I did.

I looked at the clock. It was now 6:00am. I resigned myself that I was going to miss my 6:30am flight. At 6:15am I heard someone from the other end of the room call “Feld.” I got up, took my bags, and went to where that person was. He told me to put my bags down and stand in front of him. He proceeded to empty out my bags and go through them carefully. After he packed them back up, he typed a few things into the computer, asked me a few routine questions, including where I lived, which I answered more precisely this time with a house address, explained that the postal service wouldn’t come to deliver to my house, so I had a P.O. Box as the US Post Office that I used as my address. He stamped my forms, handed them back to me, and pointed at a door and said, “Go through there.”

I had no idea whether things were about to get better or worse. I asked him politely, “Can you explain why you are detaining me.” He responded with “Because you are traveling to the US.” I said, “I was asking why you’ve detained me for 30 minutes.  Specifically, what was the reason?” The CBP officer said, “Because you are traveling to the US – we don’t have to give you a reason.”

I quietly picked up my stuff and went through the door he had pointed at. It led me back to the security area, in front of the long line to go through the xray machine, but behind the CBP checkpoint. So apparently I had now cleared customs, but still had to go through security.

It was 6:25am at this point. No way I was going to make my flight. I took a deep breath, realized my heart rate was high (probably over 100), and I was extremely anxious. I went into mellow shut down mode as quickly as I could, just soldered through security, and got to my gate. At the point the normal absurdity of air travel took over and even though I was on a United / Air Canada codeshare, the gate agent for the flight I missed (Air Canada) wouldn’t help me, the United Global Services people couldn’t figure out how to change my ticket, and ultimately I wandered over the gate that I figured out with the United Global Services person was my replacement flight, where the gate agent there was very helpful and soothing for the first time this morning.

I’m now in Chicago waiting for my flight to Little Rock. Given the flight times, I’ve got a lovely three hour wait, which I’m filling up with a long blog post to empty my head, all the phone calls that Kelly scrambled to reschedule, and some email time.

I’ve been awake for 7 hours. I’ve managed to get from Toronto to Chicago. My heart rate is back to normal. I feel fine but the 45 minutes of CBP stress, which was minor compared to what I know a lot of people face, sits with me in a very bitter way. CNN is in the background with the talking heads blathering on about sequestration and all the problems it, and our government, are creating. And I remember that getting into Canada on Wednesday took me literally five minutes, was pleasant, and welcoming.

What a shitty morning.

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PATANG (The Kite) – An Award Winning Film by Prashant Bhargava – Comes to Boulder

I don’t invest in movies. Unless a long time friend, like Rajat Bhargava, asks me to join him for fun in an investment. Several years ago Raj asked me to invest with him in a movie a cousin of his – Prashant Bhargava – was making called Patang. I wrote a modest check without thinking twice. The result of Prashant and the work of his team is a beautiful movie. And it will be in Boulder for a few days - 2/27 – 3/2 – at the The Dairy Center for the Arts.

Following is the story of the movie from the director, Prashant Bhargava.

The seeds for the movie Patang were based on the memories of my uncles dueling kites. In India kite flying transcends boundaries. Rich or poor, Hindu or Muslim, young or old – together they look towards the sky with wonder, thoughts and doubts forgotten. Kite flying is meditation in its simplest form.

In 2005, I visited Ahmedabad to experience their annual kite festival, the largest in India. When I first witnessed the entire city on their rooftops, staring up at the sky, their kites dueling ferociously, dancing without inhibition, I knew I had to make this film in Ahmedabad.

Inspired by the spiritual energy of the festival, I returned the next three years, slowly immersing myself in the ways of the old city. I became acquainted with its unwritten codes of conduct, its rhythms and secrets. I would sit on a street corner for hours at a stretch and just observe. Over time, I connected with shopkeepers and street kids, gangsters and grandmothers. This process formed the foundation for my characters, story and my approach to shooting the film.

I found myself discovering stories within Ahmedabad’s old city that intrigued me. Fractured relationships, property disputes, the meaning of home and the spirit of celebration were recurring themes that surfaced.

Patang’s joyful message and its cinematic magic developed organically. My desire was for the sense of poetry and aesthetics to be less of an imposed perspective and more of a view that emerged from the pride of the people and place.

Seven years in the making, Patang has been a journey which has inspired and brought together many.The key theme of resilience of family is reflected by the bonds between all of us who gave our hearts to make the film.

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The Ebb and Flow of Work and Life

The phrase “work-life balance” is a vexing one. Some people think it is impossible. Others strive for it. Many entrepreneurs, and pundits about entrepreneurship, reject it as impossible. Others believe that figuring out how to balance work and life is a sign of a more enlightened entrepreneurial perspective.

In Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur Amy and I talk about many of the tactics we use to integrate work and life, which Amy loving refers to as “all the time that I’m not working.”  We don’t often use the phrase work-life balance as we aren’t striving for a balance between the two, but rather an effective integration of them. I’ve been using the word “equilibrium” lately which feels different to me than the word “balance”, but I know many people will equate the two.

The challenge is that we are dealing with a very dynamic system that ebbs and flows continually. It’s early Saturday morning – I’m at the John Wayne Airport waiting for my flight home. I have an absurd amount of email backed up from the week. I’m currently on top everything in my portfolio, so I feel good about that, but I’ve got a long writing backlog. And there’s a bunch of things I’d like to explore. So I have much more work than I could possibly do this weekend, even if I spent the entire weekend working.

On the non-work front, I haven’t seen Amy (except for several times a day on Facetime) since early Tuesday morning when I left for Seattle. I miss her and Brooks the wonder dog. We have dinner with my brother, my partner Ryan, and their wives tonight. I have a 2:10 hour run on Sunday morning (I have a marathon next weekend) and a massage in the afternoon. And I want to watch last week’s episode of Scandal.

There’s no way to “balance” all that stuff or achieve any semblance of balance. But I can get to an equilibrium where I’m happy, Amy is happy, and I have fun. Sure – I’ll work some, but I’ll rest some also. I’ll spend some time by myself (mostly during my run) and I’ll get to go to bed and wake up with Amy each day. I’ll be in Boulder, a town I love, with friends who are dear to me. And I’m sure I’ll spend some time laying on the couch snuggling with my dog.

Next week will be completely different than this last week. Next weekend we are in Arkansas and I’m running a marathon. Amy will be there. Then I’ll be off to Boston for a few days. then DC, then NY. Alone again. I won’t be striving for “balance”, but I’ll roll with the ebb and flow.

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Revisiting Median vs. Average With Accelerator Data

US Median Income – 1947 to 2007 – 20th, 40th, 60th, 80th, 95th Percentiles (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was in a board meeting yesterday at BigDoor where we were benchmarking our current numbers against a couple of recent studies on SaaS-based companies including the 2011 Pacific Crest Private SaaS Company Survey. Several of the things we looked at were averages; the Pacific Crest data was presented as medians. I subsequently had a short conversation in the evening where someone asked me about what I thought the mean was across our investments on a particular metric; I responded that the mean was meaningless – we should be using the median (which I then gave the person asking the question.)

I see people use average all the time when they should be using median. I also find people constantly confusing average, mean, and median. Most of the time when people say “mean”, they mean (oops – I couldn’t help myself) “arithmetic mean” which is the same as “average.”

The Accelerator Data presented on Seed-DB is a great example that entrepreneurs should be able to quickly relate to (unlike the image I included in this post, which I find completely impenetrable.) Seed-DB presents both Average and Median. If you sort by Average $ raised per company, you get one picture. If you sort by Median $ raised per company, you get a very different picture. Now, there’s a lot of missing or estimated data for many of the accelerators, so that impacts the validity / accuracy of the data set, but it’s a great example of how average vs. median changes what you see.

As an entrepreneur, I encourage you to think hard about whether the right thing to compare a particular metric to is median vs. average. While average can be useful, I generally find median to be a much more enlightening number.

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TechStars London Calling

Jon Bradford and I have known one another since before the development of the Mentor Manifesto. Today we’re bringing Jon and his team at Springboard in London into the TechStars family as they re-brand to become TechStars London, our first international program. We have every confidence in them as a high-quality extension of the strong ecosystem we have already built here in the US.

Springboard has always been focused on helping entrepreneurs and TechStars’ support and expertise provides UK and European entrepreneurs the best opportunity to improve their likelihood of success. Our priority is to support great companies from the region in London (accepting applications from everywhere) and there’s no requirement or expectation that the companies will need to relocate to the US. We will build on the mentor network that Springboard has already started in London and supplement it with mentors from the broader TechStars network in the States.

Any and I are going to spend two weeks in London this summer during the program. I lived in London for a summer when I was 16, worked for Centronics (the creators of the parallel port), wrote dot-matrix font creation software for the Apple II, got paid with a Centronics 351 printer, learned how to drink a lot of beer, watched Pink Floyd The Wall for the first time, and spent a week wandering around in Paris in August when no one was there. I’ve always felt super comfortable in London and am looking forward to hanging out with the newest members of the TechStars family, while drinking a lot of beer.

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Don’t Tell Me Your History In Chronological Order

I meet a lot of people. I hear a lot of people introduce themselves. I interview a lot of people. Sometimes I want to hear their story; most of the time I don’t.

I’ve realized recently that I’m tired of hearing histories. And I’m tired of telling mine. It’s easy to find out most by a simple search on the web. Or a scan through LinkedIn. Or listening to one of the video interviews I’ve done where someone has said “tell me your story.”

I was thinking about this especially in the context of any interview. I don’t care where you went to school (I never have). I don’t care what your first job was. I don’t care what happened 15 years ago. I care what you did yesterday, and last month, and last quarter, and last year. That’s probably as deep as I want to go in the first five minutes of our interview. Sure – I’ll go back further in specific examples, but I don’t need to spend the first fifteen minutes hearing your story from beginning to today. It lulls me into a false sense of complacency, making me feel like I know you better because I now know your version of your history, when in fact I don’t know you at all.

I’ve learned a lot about interviewing people over the years. I used to be terrible at it. Now I’m pretty good. I don’t enjoy it very much, so I force myself to do a good job. I only interview senior execs and I separate clearly between evaluating people for the role and evaluating them for culture fit with the company. But in both cases I feel like I have to grind through the process. Some of it is my introverted nature; some of it is just not enjoying the interviewing a person thing.

I’ve realized that spending half of an interview listening to someone tell me their story is a total cop out on my part.  It lets me shift out of evaluate mode and be passive during the interview process. And, while a lot of people love to listen to themselves tell their story, it’s not doing them any good either since my goal is to make a recommendation as to whether or not they fit in the role and the organization they are interviewing for. I should be more focused on what they have learned over their career and how they apply it today, not the path they took to get to this point, which I can read on a resume or on LinkedIn.

I’m no longer interested in telling my own story. Each time I do it, I realize I am wasting another 15 minutes of my life. By starting with the now, and not worrying about going backward, I can get to the meat of whatever I’m communicating, or want to communicate. I’ll more quickly engage whomever I’m talking to – making the conversation immediately active instead of passive. When I need to reach into the past for a story to support an example, I will.

I’ve decided that going forward I’m telling my history in reverse chronological order whenever asked. I’ll start with what I am doing now. I’ll go backwards as relevant to the particular context. I’ll skip stuff that doesn’t matter, and I’ll stop when it’s time to go on. I expect my introductions will be a lot shorter going forward. And I’ll be less bored with myself. And that is a good thing, at least for me.

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