Archive for 2016

No, I do not want to “catch up”, “have a chat”, “discuss synergies” or “find out more about each other.”

Have an agenda and let me know what it is.

Then I can decide whether I want to spend my limited amount of time on this Earth talking to you.

If we applied this philosophy to more parts of our life I believe we could achieve so much more.

In a start-up environment:

Individual contributors are people who get paid to give good answers.

Managers are people who get paid to ask good questions.

People who get paid to not do either should be considered overhead and treated accordingly.

There are two types of products your customers are interested in.

And as a general rule of thumb you can assume that large enterprise customers and small business customers or consumers are sat at the opposite ends of the product type spectrum.

The small customers and consumers want to see a tangible and significant and immediate benefit to any product they acquire.

And if your product lacks that tangible and significant and immediate benefit, your product will fail almost universally.

Enterprise customers sit at the opposite end of the spectrum where they want to see huge gains in accuracy and efficiency over a long period of time, are usually willing to wait for those huge gains to appear, and will pay handsomely for them.

“Nobody cares how you solved it. They just care that you solved it.”

And if they do care how you solved it, they might (not always) be caring about the wrong things.

I’m always willing to shoot for the product that has a million customers each paying me $5 a month than 100 customers each paying me $50,000 a month.

The marketing cycle is harder and takes longer in the first instance, but the sales cycle is easier and quicker.

The marketing cycle in the second instance is easier and shorter, but the sales cycle is harder and longer.

Each lost customer paying $5 a month allows us to correct our product or behaviour before it becomes a crisis.

Each lost customer paying $50,000 a month can quickly take away 10% of our monthly revenue before we even notice.

Some of the best work I have ever done for myself is when I gave myself permission to fail.

Talking with an entrepreneur at a recent networking meeting:

“We’re looking for a SysAdmin who knows Java, PHP, Neo4j, database architecture, SQL, Jabber, and MongoDB.”

The only bit they missed is they probably want to pay a few bucks an hour.

Yeah, we call those unicorns and your company logo isn’t fucking rainbow coloured so you don’t get to hire a fucking unicorn.

A decade of writing code does not a Senior Engineer make.

You would believe that it does, because… “EXPERIENCE!”

Time served is not equal to experience. I thought that used to be the case, but over the past decade of hiring, I have come to realise time has little correlation to experience.

People who seek constant validation from others rarely make for successful entrepreneurs.

The problem is that most people don’t see what you see.

It is irrelevant of whether your idea is the next best thing since sliced bread.

Or just a half-baked flight of fantasy that is technically and financially impractical.

People cannot see inside your head.

And until you are successful, they won’t let themselves see inside your head.

I have turned down all brain-picking meetings, catch-up meetings, synergy meetings, or exploratory meetings for the past six months and it has felt GOOD.

I am going to continue this for the rest of the year and see how it affects my inbound leads.

Demanding a concrete dollar figure of how much an app will cost to develop after an eight minute conversation, and then stating “You should know this number cold” is a guaranteed way to make me want to get off the phone.

It’s not a “job” if you cannot “pay” me.

There’s no good way not to offend someone when you turn down the opportunity they gave you to work for free for them.

No matter how polite you are, there are some people who will just get offended by the rejection.

Entrepreneurial Persistence: Knocking on a thousand doors expecting to hear the word “No” 999 times and not caring which door will be the “Yes.”

Entrepreneurial Nuisance: Knocking on the same door a thousand times believing you will eventually hear “Yes” if you knock long enough and loud enough.

Every software engineer should wire up a piece of electronics at least once in their life.

Every software engineer should learn the valuable lesson of what you don’t know can cost you a lot of money if you aren’t paying attention.

Minimum.

Viable.

Product.

Do not lose sight of any one of those three words.

You are always overpriced to somebody.

They are not your target customer.

Never treat your specialists as more valuable than your generalists.

I take a consultative approach to my mentoring.

I ask questions: “Where does it hurt?”

I make suggestions, “Have you tried not punching yourself in the face quite so often?”

But I rarely say “Do this. Then this. And finally this.”

I have learnt over many mentoring sessions that people, no matter how explicit the directions, will do the exact opposite unless they “figured it out for themselves.”

Most of my job is making you believe you arrived at the answer yourself and stopping you from hurting yourself.

If you have a start-up of just two co-founders with nobody else, and your CTO is in a purely advisory role, that person should be neither your co-founder nor your CTO.

You need to be hiring for tomorrow, not today.

There are magical tools, software and hardware, that make the easy things easier.

But the hard things are just as hard.

Never, ever believe that just because you can hire someone with less experience to do the same job as the experienced, because there is now a magical tool, that you will get a large productivity boost.

The hard things are just as hard as they ever were.

I was at a network meeting a little while ago and talking with another engineer I know quite well.

We got around to talk about some of our latest personal research with usual buzz-laden acronyms and keywords sprinkled liberally throughout.

Deep Learning.

Node.

Elliptic curve cryptography.

Autonomous agents.

It got bad enough that two business-type entrepreneurs that were eavesdropping on our conversation I am sure visibly wet themselves like eager young puppies excited over a new toy.

An interesting article in the Chicago Tribune detailing why it pays some coders to freelance instead of taking a regular 9-to-5.

Why it pays some coders to freelance

I’ve freelanced an awful lot of my career, and I am happiest when I have the freedom to work with who I want and how I want.

That said, freelancing isn’t for everyone. And I have taken a few corporate jobs over the years.

“I’m not really an asshole” said the entrepreneur sometime after showing up to the lunch meeting 35 minutes late and calling his four previous technical founders a failure, a loser, a jerk and a douchebag in that order, “I just act like one because people won’t give me what I want.”

I laughed and said “That is the very definition of asshole.”

He was surprised I didn’t want to work with him by the end of the meal.

I have noticed a lot of CTOs throw around a lot of technical buzzwords in the same way that an engineer throws around a lot of legal or medical terminology.

Neither one knows what they are talking about really, but they are usually talking fast enough that you don’t notice until it is too late.

“Do you ship to California?” I asked.

And the response was “We won’t ship to California. We’ve never done that.”

And then they hung up.

You don’t?

Or you won’t?

Or you haven’t?

Don’t, won’t and haven’t are three words you need to purge from your vocabulary when talking to customers.

Customers always go with “Do. Will. And we’ll figure it out.”

What is it I do?

I cure pain.

And for that, I get paid very well.

I gauge how foamy the entrepreneur ecosystem is by number of NDAs I receive per month.

Foaminess leads to bubbles.

“My start-up is in stealth mode” is a euphemism for “my invisible company that doesn’t have a product.”