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Tag Archives: entrepreneurship

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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Want to Be Creative? Be Happy!

01 May

creativity

Cognitive science has become one of my favorite non-technical subjects during the last year. For the last few months, I have been reading a ridiculous amount of books and research papers about different cognitive science subjects ranging from psychology to neurosciences. It never ceases to amaze me how a basic understanding of human’s reactions can help us to make better decisions in the business world or influence the culture of an organization. A great example of this are some fascinating studies that a good friend sent me about some of the elements that influence creativity.

Creativity is one of the most important aspects of successful entrepreneurs. The ability to make creative decisions can influence different aspects of a company ranging from a product design to the culture of an organization. However, creativity is rarely constant. Sometimes individuals can make incredibly creative decisions but that creativity seems to dissipate at times.

Influencing people’s creativity is not an easy task and certainly not one that has a magic answer. However, cognitive science teaches us that there is a very simple factor that can help to increase creativity: happiness!

Yes, you read it right. It turns out that there is a direct correlation between being happy and what psychologists call “intuitive performance”. By that fancy term, scientist refer to people’s ability of making accurate, intuitive and creative decisions. As a lot of studies prove, when in a good mood, people are more likely to make intuitive and creative decisions. Following that argument, it’s pretty clear that we can influence people’s creativity by fomenting an environment and a culture that makes them happy.

However, some other unexpected things derivate from the effects of being in a good mood. It also turns out that, while undoubtedly creative, people that are in a good become less vigilant, analytical and more prone to logical errors. A good mood, is obviously a sign that things are going in the right direction in certain aspects which makes the brain be at a “cognitive ease” state on which we are more relaxed but also less analytical or vigilant.

There you have it, happy people are more creative but can also be less analytical!

Hmmm….interesting dilemma…..

Not really!

From a company culture standpoint, I will always pick creativity and happiness every time. I am convinced is a better formula to win in the long run.

 
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Posted by on May 1, 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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Enterprise Software Lessons: Forget About Virality and Focus on Network Effects

17 Jan

In recent years, the consumerization of the enterprise have caused an emergence of a decent number of enterprise software startups that leverage consumer market techniques to acquire customers. However, that phenomenon have also caused a lot of misconceptions among startups about the customer acquisition dynamics in the enterprise. Arguably, the most notorious of all those misconceptions is about trying to achieve viral adoption in enterprise software products.

Virality is one of those concepts inherited from the consumer market that startups keep trying to replicate in the enterprise in vain. Who wouldn’t want to have the viral effects of technologies like Facebook or Dropbox in their enterprise software product. However, the customer acquisition models in the enterprise make true virality (a la Facebook) almost impossible to achieve in the enterprise.

The fundamental principle of viral adoption is that users of a product naturally engage or attract new users. This principle is fundamentally contradictory with the way most enterprises operate. Even if that wasn’t a barrier, the sales cycles of most enterprise software products break any potential viral adoption cycle.

Instead of dreaming about viral adoption, I believe enterprise software startups should focus on a more achievable element: network effects.

The network effects concept was introduced by venture capitalist extraordinaire Fred Wilson in a brilliant blog post published a few months ago. Essentially, a product with network effects have the ability to form “networks” around the technology. A network is a group of connected entities that contribute to the technology. The main two types of networks in enterprise software products are people networks or data networks.

Classic examples of network effects can be strong developer communities, B2B models that make a company naturally engage their partners in the user of a specific product or data marketplaces on which users contribute data sets that can be used by other users.

Whether network effects are really hard to achieve in the enterprise, they provide a very unique defensible market position for an enterprise software technology. If a bigger enterprise vendor attempts to compete against a product with network effects, they don’t only need to provide a superior technology and customer acquisition models but also figure out a way to compete against the different networks established around the product which is almost impossible to achieve.

 
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Posted by on January 17, 2013 in Uncategorized

 

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Startups Get Addicted to Competition

27 Nov

Last week, I was listening to an interview of Internet legend Peter Thiel about his new entrepreneurship course at Stanford University. Among the many interesting arguments cited in the interview, there was one related to the true value of competition in a capitalist society that particularly caught my attention. In his thesis, Peter challenges some of the common dogmas of the progressive nature of a competitive ecosystem can be really good for society in general is not necessarily great for the entities invested in the competition.

After listening to the interview, I started reflecting upon that argument trying to apply it argument to the startup ecosystem. In my opinion, more often than not, the startup ecosystem mistake good competitors with value creators and, consequently we tend to obsess with master the art of competing instead of seeking to provide true value.

While competition is inevitable if you are operating in a relevant and sufficiently big market, those markets also offer enough opportunities for companies to provide value in different areas that don’t necessarily collide with each other. As a startup, is almost impossible to ignore competition. We are constantly reading news, blog posts about how great our competitors are doing and we obsessed used that as a driving force to be better. We take pride about beating our competitors because is a clear testimony that our efforts are being recognized. In the middle of those competitive dynamics, companies become addicted to competition and have a hard time operating without it.

Being a good competitor is an important quality of a startup but it does not directly translate into providing value. Instead of being addicted to competition, we should spend more time thinking about what segments of the markets we can use to create little monopolies. Whereas aggressive competition will benefits the consumers of our products and technologies, finding those monopolies will directly benefit our companies.

 
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Posted by on November 27, 2012 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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Startups are not for People that Think Too Highly of Themselves

17 Oct

I’ve gotten quite a bit of feedback about my past blog post about big-egos and mediocre talent so I figured I will expand a little bit more on it with some specifics. Today I would like to talk about one of the most damaging types of people you will encounter in a startup: the folks that think too highly of themselves.

There are many terms that people often use to refer to people that think too highly of themselves: arrogant, conceited, big-headed, smug, know-it-all, vain, proud, smart-alec etc. One of my favorite terms is based on the Aristotelian philosophy “the golden mean” that refers to the idea that qualities can be overdone and underdone. In that sense, some folks refer to people that think too highly of themselves as the “golden self-esteem” J .

Hiring the right people to build a cohesive and talented team is probably the single most important focus area of a startup co-founder and CEO. Quite often, seasoned entrepreneurs compared the ups and downs of team dynamics in startups to marriages or long term friendships. I try to not use those analogies very often but there are some cases on which it absolutely applies.

One of the mistakes I made as a rookie entrepreneur was too ignore the effects of the “golden self-esteem” syndrome. I really thought that if by focusing on hiring talented people and providing a good culture we could overcome the effects of big egos within our startups. More importantly, I thought that you could leverage “golden self-esteems” as a catalyzer to drive people to achieve relevant things. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Startups are a roller coasters with plenty of moments of failures, rejections, etc as part of your daily life. A good friend of mine and super successful entrepreneur once told me that “if you are not being rejected every day you are not doing your job as a founder”. It’s not a surprised that a lot of entrepreneurs develop a very pragmatic sense of humbleness during their careers: the ones that you can only acquire by failing regularly.

The “golden self-esteem” people can’t operate within the down times. They need someone else to blame for the apparent failures because psychologically they can’t accept the emotional side-effects that come with accepting that the down-times are just part of the process of building something relevant. The “golden self-esteem” people make lousy employees because they will always be more focused on themselves than on the entire team. They will make lousy partners as they can never think on anybody by themselves during the down times and, most likely, they will make lousy husbands, wives or friends as nurturing their narcissism will always more important than the happiness and success of their loved ones.

 
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Posted by on October 17, 2012 in Uncategorized

 

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My Meeting with Ashok Soota: What a 70 Years Young Taught Me

18 Sep

Last week I had the privilege of spending a few hours with Ashok Soota (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashok_Soota). For the ones of you not familiar with the name, Ashok is one of the living legends of the IT services industry and one of the most important figures of the Indian IT revolution. Among his major accomplishments, Ashok served as 15 years as CEO of the Wipro (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wipro) which is currently valued at over $8.5B. After Wipro, Ashok started another crown jewel of the Indian IT industry: MindTree(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindTree) which went public in 2006. Now 70, Ashok is making another attempt trying to revolutionize the IT industry by starting Happiest Minds, an IT services organizations exclusively focused on big enterprise trends such as enterprise mobility, big data, cloud computing, natural user interfaces among other technology movements that are redefining the IT landscape.

I’ve been a big fan of Happiest Minds and they have been great partner to both Tellago and Tellago Studios. However, since reading the first press releases about the company, I was always intrigued by its mission. Are the new technology movements such as social, mobility, cloud, data consumption strong enough to lay out the foundation for the next generation of IT services organizations?  What can possibly motivate a 70 year old with a huge legacy to protect to go back into startup mode? The answer to both questions became apparently clear during my conversation with Ashok.

We spent hours debating the enterprise software market, the IT service industry, new technology areas and many other topics. Every step of the way, Ashok showed a deep knowledge of the different technologies we were debating, the key players in the ecosystem, current market dynamics and how they can influence the IT services business. I didn’t need to ask his recipe for staying so technically current after so many years in the industry as the answer was totally obvious: Ashok has a deep passion for learning new technologies and for exploring ways to leverage those technologies in the enterprise.

The same passion that causes Ashok to stay current in the technology space is what caused him to start Happiest Minds. “These are the most exciting times in the last 20 years of the tech industry” he says. Without hesitation, he firmly states that there is never been a time in the IT industry on which so many revolutionary technology movements are colliding together and therefore the opportunity of disrupting the IT industry is tremendous. Did I mention he is 70?

I’ve found myself revisiting my conversations with Ashok many times over the last few days and, since our last meeting, we have exchanged a few emails expanding in some of the topics we discussed. Despite the many aspects we discussed in terms of technology, the market and even the history of the Indian IT industry I took home a very simple lesson: Passion and knowledge and are not only qualities that can drive your professional career but they can become a way of living. Passion and knowledge can certainly be the forces that disrupt entire industries or that can cause you, at 70, to still get excited debating a geeky technology or to dream about changing the world.

 
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Posted by on September 18, 2012 in Uncategorized

 

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Startup Lessons: The Best Title to Have Is Founder, Not CEO

10 Sep

Last week I was talking to a prestigious venture capitalist about the roles of founders at different stages of a company and how a lot of founders obsess with holding the CEO title as an indication of the level of control they can exercise in an organization. While is true that there are a million stories of founders being pushed out of companies in favor of professional CEOs (Steve Jobs anyone J ), there are an equally large number of stories of founders harming companies by trying to hold to the CEO title in situations that required an operational level beyond their skillset.

The way I tend to think about the startup CEO job is fairly simple: In a startup, founders are typically responsible for laying out the vision for the products or services that the company offers while the CEO is responsible for leading the company towards the execution of that vision. That execution path includes areas such as company culture, go-to-market strategies, operational structure and many many other aspects that complement the company vision. Similarly, the most important job of a startup founders to setup the right team and structure to take your company to the next level and, a lot of times, that team requires a new CEO.

In many cases, particularly in early stages, the roles of founders and CEOs overlap but this doesn’t imply that it needs to remain that way throughout the lifetime of the company. Certainly, in very stages, the company founders are in the best position to execute in the original vision of the company. However, after the company reaches certain level the founder-CEOs need to objectively evaluate the best path and team that can maximize the chances of reaching the next set of goals.

You can train a CEO but you can’t train a founder….

This is very true. As a startup founder, if you are convinced you are the best person to serve as your company CEO, you have the talent and the desire to make it work there are certainly plenty of resources at your disposal to help you become a world class CEO. Having the right advisors can be a determining factor in this stage. Firms like Andreessen-Horowitz have entire portfolio of services solely focused on helping founders become better CEOs. At any point, you have to be convinced that your role as CEO is the best thing for the company and not based on personal ambitions.

You already hold the best title there is….

In the startup world, there is no bigger achievement than founding a company that makes its way to success and changing the world. As a startup founder, focus on always doing the right thing for your company and don’t obsess about remaining as CEO if there is a better person to execute on that role. Always remember that you already hold the best tile someone can have: founder.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
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Posted by on September 10, 2012 in Uncategorized

 

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I am LinkedIn-Addicted and You Should Be As Well

30 Aug

This week during a board meeting, I was helping a fellow CEO with some business development strategies for her company. During the meeting, she was a little bit surprised how I was constantly using LinkedIn to answer most of the questions that were being debated. I never thought about using LinkedIn that way she said; I know, I was there a few years ago, I thought ;)

Despite its remarkable success, LinkedIn remains the forgotten child in the social network platforms ecosystem. A lot has been written about the influence of Twitter or Facebook in the business world while the real power of LinkedIn remains invisible to most people. Even great companies like BranchOut have attempted to build solid alternatives to LinkedIn leveraging the power of existing social connections.

As most people, I used to only use LinkedIn as an efficient way to keep my professional profile up to date and to maintain a decent professional network. However, everything changed last year when I needed to start doing some heavy business development in areas on which I had no prior exposure to. At that time, I realized that the network I had been building for years was my best allied and I became addicted to LinkedIn.

I use LinkedIn all the time. I am a paying customer and a very happy one. Over the last few years, I’ve built a very interesting network that includes tech executives, technologists of all sorts, customers, venture capitalists, investors, analysts, academics among other types of professional profiles that are related to our business. Not a day goes by on which I don’t leverage that network to accomplish some of the tasks at hand and I devote time every week to expand it and nurture some of those relationships.

My LinkedIn network has become the main mechanism to directly connect with potential customers or partners instead of sending cold emails or making surprising phone calls. You would be surprise how responsive people can be when you are approaching them through a known connection. If you have a decent network, you would also be surprised that you are only a few connections away from almost anyone you are likely to be interested on talking to. As your network grows, you will find that you will be able establish a connection with almost anybody you need to as the degree of proximity to that person is likely to decrease.

In addition to the normal networking routines, I also use LinkedIn to study hiring or growth patterns within specific industry segments, analyze where companies are spending money and identity helpful industry patterns. More importantly, I have daily exchanges in LinkedIn with different people about different business or technology topics that help to keep me sharp and current on different subjects. On a daily basis, I receive a lot of help from my professional network and I try to be helpful as well.

As a startup CEO, I would encourage you to put the time and effort to nurture your LinkedIn network. Yes I know, who has time for that when we are all busy dealing with challenges, building dreams and fighting fears ;) but trust me when I tell you that LinkedIn can make a huge difference in the way you operate your business.

 
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Posted by on August 30, 2012 in Uncategorized

 

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