Archive for 2016

“We’d love to have you advise our start-up” said the supposedly well-heeled investor from Europe. “Maybe you could jump on a call for a couple of hours, two or three times a week.” He said.

“The start-up has these stand-ups at 9AM each day and it’d be super helpful to have you in on those too.”

Remember this is a European start-up, so about 2AM my time. I had hardly gotten a word in edge ways.

“You think you could do a review of the code too? And fix some of the bugs you find there? Work some of that magic and make it go faster?”

Me: “I thought you were just looking for a 15 minute call and some free advice. This sounds like work. I can introduce you to my agent and he can negotiate a pay rate.”

Investor: “We’re just looking for advice. We don’t pay for people to just be an advisor. We’ve found it to be a waste of money.”

At which point I impolitely hung up.

Fuck purpose.

Fuck passion.

Fuck the ideal of putting a dent in the universe.

Not one person who ever made a difference, truly, honestly believed any of that.

They believed in themselves. They did whatever the hell they wanted. And they didn’t give two figs about what anyone else wanted. They took their idea and turned it in to a product.

And then they shoved that product down your throat and told you that you wanted it.

And you believed them so wholeheartedly that you now parrot back “this is what I wanted and needed all along.”

That was their purpose and passion.

What’s yours?

We know about MVP (Minimum Viable Product). This is what we tell start-ups to focus on.

The acronym we need now is MEN (Minimum Effort Necessary) for enterprises.

MEN is something to be avoided when hiring people to compete with (or forming teams that compete with) agile start-ups that are trying to eat your lunch.

Six degrees of separation fails to take in to account that you are connected but you will never be introduced.

Customers will pay extra to be treated with dignity.

The art of the memo is dead.

I think business leaders in the past twenty years have not been appropriately educated on this useful tool and so instead we suffer foolish, all-hands meetings that consume half a day of productivity.

Just because I gave you my email address on LinkedIn it did not, by extension, give you permission to spam me.

Good investors realize that they might not like it or use it but that the idea is worthy.

Third quickest way to get yourself un-linked on LinkedIn is to add me automatically to your newsletter/mailing list.

Tried signing up for an account with a fancy new app an earnest entrepreneur really wants me to try out.

The app can ask one of two secret questions for account recovery.

“Which school did you attend?”
“What is your pet’s name?”

Normal stuff.

I tried the school option.

Except… I went to a Welsh school in Wales.

With a Welsh name.

Which the form rejects because it isn’t an “English” word.

Okay… It’s a v1.0 of the app. We can forgive it for now.

Let’s use my pet’s name instead.

Which the form rejects, because my pet’s name must be between 6 and 32 characters in length.

This is a valuable teaching moment.

Your iPhone app with no traction doesn’t get to dictate to me how long my pet’s name is.

And the iPhone app got closed and deleted right in front of the entrepreneur.

“Bad user experience. I think you need to work on that.”

I think he will be informing his development team to create two new Jira tickets before the day is out.

You get one, very slim chance to hold on to your new user. Don’t waste it with arbitrary rules.

You wouldn’t value the opinion of any intellectual property lawyer that only charges you $12/hr.

You sure wouldn’t hire an accountant to do your difficult and adversarial IRS defense filing for $12/hr.

Why would you think it is acceptable to outsource to software developers who are building your core product at those rates?

Experienced workers make doing the hard and difficult work look easy.

But we don’t understand the work.

Yet we immediately try and hire less experienced people to do that easy looking work. And then are left disappointed, confused and ultimately poorer when the results are less than stellar.

Is it easy because it is easy?

Or does it look easy because the person doing the hard work is good enough to make it look easy?

“I’ve got all these ideas that need building but everyone I talk to about building them just keeps wanting money.”

How do I put this…

My wife and I have a deal.

I will work with the same number of pro-bono clients as she works with non-profits.

It is a check and balance against either one of us getting out of control by giving away unfettered access to our time.

Always do excellent work for your good clients.

Don’t ever do poor work for a bad client.

Just say “No” and move on.

Entrepreneurs are the children who stuck forks in to light sockets even though they had already seen the results of someone else doing it.

I am a great believer in this way of thinking as it leads to exciting times for all involved.

And occasionally the entrepreneur will burst in to flames and we all benefit from the energy they are generating.

You’re worried I will steal your worthless ideas, but you give no thought to stealing my valuable time.

You cannot hire extraordinary people to do ordinary jobs so please stop your search.

From experience and observation I would say your specialist to generalist software developer ratio should be around 18 to 1 in any mature organization.

In a start-up, if you only have a specialist, you have a problem.

Fearful engineers are why you cannot hire more engineers.

Talent shortage my arse.

$70K for a senior C++ programmer with 5 years of experience in the Bay area has absolutely nothing to do with “talent shortage.”

The problem with Senior Engineers is they don’t think they’re Senior Engineers.

And the problem with Junior Engineers is they don’t know they are Junior Engineers.

I have often said “Show me a finished game that you made and I will hire you on the spot.”

The key word that most people overlook is “finished.”

Sat at bar in SF Marriott.

Well-dressed guy slid up next to me with his drink, all creepy-smooth.

“He’s going to be disappointed,” I think to myself, “I am straight and married.”

“You look like an engineer,” he says, “I’ve got this really hot start-up that needs mobile devs.”

“Retired lawyer.” I respond.

“You sure? You look like an engineer.”

“Retired lawyer.” I insist, “I like to surf.” explaining away how I look.

“Here’s my card.” he says.

Didn’t think it was possible to be creepy when handing someone your business card, but this guy did it.

For most work, the pursuit of perfection is the perfect excuse for procrastination.

More than once I have had to turn down a client because they were not a good culture fit. You would not believe how upset this makes them.

I have come to learn that people, as a general rule, do not handle rejection well, no matter what shape that rejection ultimately takes.

Today I friendzoned a client.

“Oh, I don’t think of you in that way. I mean, I like you guys, but I could never see myself working for you. I really wish I could find a company like this that could be my client, just not this company.”

If you’re a perfectionist and you need to delegate something, don’t expect to get it done cheaply.

“Oh we would never want to hire an engineer with long-hair, it’s just so unprofessional.” said the female HR manager with full arm tattoos sat across the desk from me.

Alrighty then, I guess you just removed about 60% of the engineering candidates from your search.

It is better to say “No” to a bad client than to say “Yes” to their money.