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Tag Archives: CEO

Stay Away from Workaholics

17 May

workaholicI find writing this post a bit ironic and I am, without a doubt, a workaholic. Between the rapid growth of KidoZen, leading the strategy side of TelIago and some third-party projects I work around 16 hours during weekdays and another 8-10 hours during the weekend. I don’t complain about it. I have the privilege to be at a point in my life on which I enjoy what I am doing more than at any other time in my career and I am convinced that it takes that kind of effort to make a difference in this highly competitive market.

Having said that, I tried very hard to not encourage that type of behavior within our team. At KidoZen, our teams work fairly regular 8-10 hour days and although, occasionally, we end up putting insane hours at the end of each release cycle, we never encourage or reward that type of behavior. At this point in my career, as I am convinced most workaholics are damaging to the team dynamics.

My reasoning here is very simple: If you are going to regularly work insane hours you need a structure to sustain that rhythm and most people don’t even think about. I can work long hours because I meticulously divide my focus during the day on different aspects that help keep me fresh. Contrary to that thinking, I found that most workaholic behaviors are completely triggered as a continuous and disproportioned response to short-term needs with little strategy or structure around it.

Here are some of the reasons why, I think, you should stay away from workaholics:

  • Workaholism is contagious: When someone regularly work insane hours to accelerate certain delivery, their colleagues feel compelled to do the same even if they are not equipped to do so
  • Competitiveness: Related to the previous point, workaholism indirectly foment a level of competitiveness within a team that can be detrimental to the long term goals of a specific project.
  • Long term performance degradation: Unless you take the time to structure a method that allows you to regularly work long hours, your performance will degrade over time as an inevitable consequence of exhaustion.
  • Burnout factor: Being burnout as a consequence of working long hours ends of affecting the overall performance and attitude of the team.
  • Short-term focus: If you are constantly burning hours focusing on short term objectives, it becomes really hard to keep thinking and contributing to the long term strategic vision of a product or company.
  • Working hard for the wrong reasons: Ultimately, I can live with workaholics as long as they are driven for the right reasons but I found out that, more often than not, you encounter people whose only objective with working long hours is not passion or motivation but a selfish desire to score some points with their management team.

Those are just some of the elements why I fundamentally try to not encourage workaholic-type behaviors within our team. I would be very interested to hear your thoughts about it. More about this topic in a future post….

 
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Posted by on May 17, 2013 in Uncategorized

 

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Dreams Fly High at Venture Hive: The Hidden Treasure of Miami’s Startup Scene

22 Apr

venturehiveLast Friday was demo day at Miami’s startup accelerator Venture Hive. This was the opportunity for the companies in the program to present to potential investors and other influential people in the South Florida business community. For me, Friday represented the culmination of three months of my first role as a mentor on a startup accelerator program. While watching the presentations and trying to revisit all the wonderful memories and experiences of the last few months, I couldn’t avoid but feeling very proud of having had the opportunity to contribute to such an important program to help build the startup community in South Florida.

12 weeks I was introduced to Dr. Susan Amat by my great friend David Walsh was crazy enough to propose me as a mentor for the Venture Hive program. I was very hesitant for the obvious reasons: I didn’t know if I have a lot to contribute in terms of experience to the new companies and I my time was very constrained running KidoZen and Tellago. However, after talking to Susan for a few minutes I was completely dazzled by her passion and big dreams to transform a city known mostly as a touristic spot into a startup hub for the South East of the US and Latin America. To this day, I would never forget David’s description of Susan “Jesus, you really need to meet this person” he said “because she is the only person I know who has more energy than you” J and he was completely right. After meeting Susan and her team, I didn’t know exactly how but I knew I wanted to help.

The rest is history, for 12 weeks I had the privilege of mentoring NightPro: a company that is disrupting the nightlife event management scene and which platform is being used by some of the most prestigious clubs in the world. The founders: Juan and Francisco are the core of a super talented team that never seems to stop working and have managed to capture a segment of the market which has escape to the powerhouses in the space like EventBrite or TicketFly. Week after week I worked with that team trying to help in the few areas I knew I could contribute such as technology readiness, raising capital, strategic alliances, etc. Even when I was traveling all over the world, we managed to have online meetings at 3am to make sure I stay on the loop on NightPro’s current activities.

During my time at Venture Hive, I witnessed the evolution of the different teams from small technical solutions or ideas to companies with an structured vision, execution plan and, in some cases, sophisticated technology solutions.

Living in a highly competitive environment, it’s gratifying to see how the different startups managed to compete and yet collaborate intensively in order to make everyone better. That’s the secret of Venture Hive: everyone pulling together to achieve a bigger dream. Obviously, a lot of the startups in the program are going to fail but as long as some of them succeed (and they will) Susan’s dream will continue on and Miami will be able to open its doors to those entrepreneurs from the South East of the US and Latin-America that are dreaming to change the world.

 
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Posted by on April 22, 2013 in Uncategorized

 

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I Want Control, I Want a Pretty Tittle, It Makes Me Feel Happy

11 Apr

controlThe story sorts of goes like this:

One of your employees continuously express the desire of leading or managing specific activity and have more control over certain decisions given their particular expertise on that specific area. After months of hearing this argument, you finally decide to promote that person to that management position to implement some of his ideas. Immediately, you realize that, even though your employee is very happy with the new “title” or position he constantly struggles to make any decision and is constantly asking for the involvement of his superiors to address some of the tasks that fall under his new role.

Sounds familiar?

As recent research studies proves, the sense of control is one of the elements that contribute to people’s true happiness. The ability of influencing the outcome of a situation based on our own actions gives us a sense of comfort and confidence that ultimately becomes an important factor in our happiness.

If we extrapolate this to corporate environments or startups, is not strange to find people who constantly request greater and greater levels of controls for no apparent reason other than to feel important or appreciated. Contradicting with that addictive desire of acquiring control, we must acknowledge that most people have no idea how to exercise control effectively. Quite the contrary, most people struggle when making decisions and going through the pain of taking ownership and responsibility for specific situations.

Even though most capable people like the feeling of having control over specific outcomes, they are constantly challenged by the responsibility that comes with any level of control and start making erratic decisions that affect the rest of the team or, sometimes, making no decisions at all. However, there is no doubt, that people are genuinely happier when they feel in control over specific situation. To address this contradiction, most big organizations create all sort of vague mid-management titles like “Director of X” or “Manager of Y” titles that gives employees the illusion of control in very constrained environments that prevents from causing any harm.

During his days at Opsware, Silicon Valley legend Marc Andreeseen famously said something around the lines of “if titles make employees happy, give them titles….”.

Whether you agree with that philosophy or not (I personally don’t ), there is no doubt  that granting the right levels of control to the right people is a continuous challenges for most Sr. managers in organizations. The easiest answer to that challenge is to hire really talented people that are also solid team players and granting them the right levels of ownership and control so that they can also influence the rest of the organization.

Easier said than done though :)

 
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Posted by on April 11, 2013 in Uncategorized

 

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Most Enterprise Software Analysts are Useless: Find the Right Ones

11 Mar

During last week’s trip to Europe, I received a call from the CIO of a fairly large organization whom I met last year, soliciting some advice on a technology evaluation process they were conducting on the mobility space. Needless to say I was a bit surprised by the sudden call given that this trip to Europe was exclusively focused on a couple of speaking engagements and I hadn’t scheduled any customer or partner visits. When I inquired a bit more about the causes of their request, the customer explained that they have been increasingly disappointed by the results of their technology evaluation efforts with a very prestigious analyst firm and needed a (in their own words) “more hands on opinion”.

As I started reviewing the analyst recommendation, it turned out our customer was absolutely correct in their assessment. The entire research reflected a very high level technology viewpoint of the different products as focused almost entirely in the support for some well-known buzzwords. While clearly frustrating, this experience is far from being an isolated incident. The fact of the matter is really hard to find enterprise software analysts with the hands-on knowledge about the technologies they evaluate, the technology knowledge and the market perspective to offer a pragmatic analysis about a specific technology trend. Most analysts in large firms, they have little or no practical experience developing products or solutions in the enterprise and they focused their analysis in large customer surveys. Also, these group of enterprise software analysts always seemed to be disconnected with the investment trends taking place in the venture capital or private equity communities which fosters a lot of the innovation that eventually impact the enterprises.

As a result, a lot of organization pay large amounts of money for receiving some very basic and often wrong advice that almost always tends to favor the most established players in the market.  A solid research in an enterprise software space should be a combination of a solid understanding of the current technology but also about the vision behind the product, market conditions, etc.

Obviously, my opinion about enterprise software analysts is far from being a generalization and you can still find some very talented analysts that come from a product engineering background who tend to go very deep in their researches in terms of the technical capabilities of a specific product of technology. I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with some of those rarely talented analysts and received some very valuable advice.

I know my thoughts about this topic can come across as very blunt, but I find it incredibly infuriating every time I see organizations being affected by relying on research materials that are completely disconnected from reality. My advice to enterprise customers to always do the correct due diligence when interacting with analysts. It’s not that hard to determine when you are interacting with an analyst with a solid understand of the space and your current needs or whether you are dealing with a someone who just likes to play to be an expert.

 
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Posted by on March 11, 2013 in Uncategorized

 

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Finding the Foil in Your Story

22 Feb

In literature, the Foil is a character type that used to highlight the qualities of the protagonist by highlighting a strong contrast. Arguably, the most famous foil of all times is Sancho Panza, the famous Don Quixote squire who continuously contrasts with the protagonist both morally and physically and serves as a constant reminder to Don Quixote’s mission. Notice that the foil is not necessarily a negative character.

Just like in literature, missions in startups are better described and accomplished when there is a Foil in the story. In this context, a foil can be a large competitor, a situation in the current macroeconomic context of a particular industry or even a type of customer. Regardless, by presenting the characteristics of your foil you will highlight the benefits and vision of your company, product or service. It’s not that hard, if you are working on something relevant just look around and you will find many many Foils :)

 
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Posted by on February 22, 2013 in Uncategorized

 

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Inspire With Your Vision Not With Success

14 Feb

At dinner last night, we had a very interesting debate about different strategies for building great teams. While hiring well is, undoubtedly, one of the most difficult elements of startups, the winning formula seems to be very clear: Hire great people that work great together and are inspired by the company’s vision. The first two factors of the equation need no further explanation; great people that can work well together is a winning formula to build great things. However, great people and great teams are not enough to build great companies; you still need an inspirational vision.

In the early stages of a startup vision is everything. When you don’t have a lot of traction or financial success, only a great visions can inspire people to join your team and help to make your company better. However, after the company grows a little bit and achieves some success, I’ve found that a lot of startups stop emphasizing their vision as the cornerstone of the company and, instead, they focus on inspiring employees with their initial success.

Success can be projected in many ways: industry awards, financial rewards, killer offices etc. Some of those versions of success can definitely attract people to join your company as most intelligent people prefer to join a successful venture than an unsuccessful one. However, success is rarely a factor to inspire people to do great things. When a successful image becomes the center of your company instead of an inspirational vision, you are likely to attract people that are only there in the good times and that can only execute in short term goals. It’s not a surprise that a lot of companies go through a transformation process after they achieve an initial wave of success in order to find their soul again.

As a founder and/or CEO, your MOST IMPORTANT JOB is to clearly articulate your company vision to the key players in your company so that they can communicate it within their teams. A solid vision will keep your team together and focused during the difficult times and it will serve as the inspiration to take your company to the next level during the good times. Financial success, a fun culture, awards are important but rarely inspirational. Selling a great vision can help create successful companies but selling success will only help you to create mediocrely successful ones.

 
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Posted by on February 14, 2013 in Uncategorized

 

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A Startup is Like Mass “God Gets Mad if You Don’t Show Up”

21 Nov

Ernest Hemingway used to write every day. Obviously, the majority of his writing efforts didn’t translate into the great parts of his novels but he still attempted to write every day. The great writer used to say “Writing is like Mass. God gets mad if you don’t show up” :) In addition to his talent, I think his incredible consistency and perseverance made Hemingway one of the great writers of all time.

Tracing a parallel to the startup lifestyle we can probably say that “Startups are like Mass. God gets mad if you don’t show up” ;) Maybe this seems obvious from the outside but startup founders can agree with me that is not always that easy to show up to work when times are tough.

Perseverance, consistency and resiliency are essential elements in the success of a startup but the first step is always to show up. When times are good, you can’t afford to relax and need to keep pushing your company to the next phase. When times are difficult, you need to show up to continue leading your times through the challenging times.

Realize that most of the big success, ideas don’t come as a sudden inspiration but are rather the result of a series of experiences and efforts to take small footsteps towards the end goal. Regardless of the current status of your startup, remember that the main step to success is to ALWAYS SHOW UP!

 
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Posted by on November 21, 2012 in Uncategorized

 

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A Recipe for Failure: Big Egos and Mediocre Talent

11 Oct

A lot has been written about how big egos are one of the most harmful aspects in teams and companies. Typically, people associate big egos with individualisms, selfishness and all sorts of other elements of not team players. In my experience, the truth is a little more complicated than that.

While I agree that big egos can almost always be somewhat harmful to team dynamics, I think they can be used as a catalyzer for many aspects of the team if they are backed by the right level of talent and accomplishment. On the other hand, I’ve always find that the most harmful and vicious type of big-egos are the ones coming from mediocrely talented and not accomplished people.

My reasoning here is very simple: For the most part, talented and accomplished people have high aspirations and don’t get let their egos get on the way of small things that might impede them to accomplish great things (that can in turn bust their egos even more J ). Under the right conditions, highly talented folks can use their egos as a motivator and drive the rest of the team with them.

Contrary to this group, you will often encounter people that are not very talented, haven’t built or accomplished anything worth talking about in life but still manage to nurture a big ego related to some minor achievements that, sometimes, are relevant to people that share their same limited vision of the world. I find these types of people the most harmful in a team environment. As anyone with big egos, the mediocrely-talented folks would love to be successful and accomplished but lack the talent or vision to do achieve that by themselves and also the character to rely on more talented people to lead them. Instead, mediocrely-talented people operate in a sort of small distortion field and always try to drive attention to themselves related to not important things.

If you are working on a team environment, you are likely to easy identity the mediocrely-talented people with big egos. They are the ones arguing about the non-important things and constantly highlighting how hard they are working on that problem that nobody cares about. They are the people that think that everyone else around them is an idiot but still can’t manage to deliver anything great and always have someone else to blame for their failures (most likely the rest of the team). I’ve certainly encountered a few of those in my professional career and so have you.

Whether you are building a business or delivering a great project that you care about, my advice would be to, without hesitation, get rid of the mediocrely-talented big egos around you. They will only cause harm and, like any other mediocre soul, they will always find pleasure working on some other non-important thing that they can take all the credit for.

 
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Posted by on October 11, 2012 in Uncategorized

 

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Enterprise Mobility is About Mobilizing Business Capabilities, Not Applications

03 Oct

I was having a conversation about enterprise mobility with an executive of a large enterprise participating in the private beta of our new enterprise mobility backend as a service platform (www.kidozen.com ). In a very concise and clear way, our customer was articulating their vision around enterprise mobility. In his opinion, they have established a very simple strategy to mobilize some of the business capabilities of their existing enterprise system into different mobile applications. He was very emphatic about the fact that enterprise mobile apps should expose almost atomic and independent business capabilities in their simplest representation and remove all the extra features that impede a good mobile experience. A very simple vision but yet so profound.

In my opinion, a vision like our customer was exposing could be the difference between a success and a failed enterprise mobility experience. By definition, mobile applications are about simplicity and most enterprises tend to ignore that simple fact and keep thinking about creating mobile representations of existing enterprise applications.

While conceptually might make sense, implementing a mobile version of existing enterprise line of business applications will, almost unequivocally, produce unusable mobile applications. Instead, enterprises should focus on exposing mobile representations of specific business capabilities in a very simple way that can maximize the productivity of the end users. This might entail sometimes breaking up a specific enterprise application in various mobile apps in order to protect the end user experience.

In a nutshell, to build mobile you need to think mobile.

When building enterprise mobile applications, stop thinking about your existing enterprise applications and focus on exposing atomic business capabilities via very simple to use mobile interfaces. The apps might look trivial functionality-wise but this approach will tremendously improve the user experience and effectivity of your enterprise mobile apps.

 
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Posted by on October 3, 2012 in Uncategorized

 

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When Comes to Enterprise Software Markets Old and Hot is Better Than New and Hot

27 Sep

A few days ago, I blogged about the tangible benefits an enterprise software startup can experience by operating in a competitive market. While competition is certainly good, it can take different shapes or forms depending on the characteristics of the target market. Probably two of the most distinctive types of competition an enterprise software startup can experience are determined by the maturity of the specific markets related to the product.

While is always sexy and exciting to try to provide interesting solutions in brand new markets, an enterprise software startup stands significant better chances of being successful and differentiating from its competitors by operating in an established market going through a transformational process.

Let me try to explain….

Any new hot enterprise software market will, by definition, produce an initial number of that will not only provide software solutions in the space but will also influence the direction of the market. In a new enterprise software market, any startup will face the challenge of competing against new and innovative companies, convince customers about the relevance of the new market and the value proposition of their new enterprise software product.

Despite of the fact that any new enterprise software market produces early adopters, most enterprises are typically cautious when investing in a new technology space. Traditionally, enterprises acquire technologies based on customer references, analyst researches and all sorts of other elements of a well-established industry segment but that are really hard to establish in a new and emerging technology market. From the competitive standpoint, there are no legacy players in a new market; every solution is, by definition, innovative and customer will make decisions based on a somewhat immature understanding of that specific industry segment. All those factors combined make the task of competing in a new enterprise software market an incredible challenge for most startups. The good news is that the rules apply to every player in the space and typically the best team-product-execution combinations will end up dominating that market.

We can find a current example of this phenomenon in the enterprise big data technology space. While big data is one of the hottest enterprise software trends, the space is overly crowded and there are no clear dominant players. Customers are really confused in terms of which technologies to adopt startups are fighting really hard to standup in a large group of innovative technologies and solutions.

Contrary to playing in a new and hot enterprise software market, I firmly believe that enterprise software startups have better chances of succeeding when tackling a well-established market going through a transformational process. A classic example of this model could be the emergence of the CRM online space with players such as Salesforce.com or SugarCRM a few years ago. From a competitive standpoint, the CRM online players were mostly battling against the traditional on-premise CRM vendors such as Siebel, PeopleSoft, etc. In that sense, the incumbents were tackling a well-established market with customers that clearly understood the value proposition and capabilities of CRM technologies but that needed a simpler and more effective delivery model.

In a well-established enterprise software market, startups have the opportunity to differentiate themselves against the legacy technologies in the space; they have access to a mature customer based and they can build on the experiences of the previous market leaders.

As an enterprise software startup, it is important to clearly understand if you are playing in a brand new market or in an existing market going through a metamorphosis. Regardless of the scenario, competition in the enterprise software space is always brutal. However, if you are playing in a hot and large market, sometimes old is better than new ;)

 
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Posted by on September 27, 2012 in Uncategorized

 

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