Who to employ first?

22 February 2010

For a startup business, its one of the biggest questions, risks and costs – who do I employ?

In any small business everyone wears a few hats, so it would be great to find someone who can do a variety of things.  But does that mean they are going to be expensive?

The good old rich vs king argument says you should employ senior people if you want to be rich (but lose control because you don’t hire someone with experience and ignore them) and you employ less senior people if you want to be king.  I’d rather just have someone with a hunger to learn, a can-do attitude and a good fit for the culture I’m trying to build.

So, here’s the first three people I want to work with:

#1 has got to complement my skills and since we’re building web applications – that means I need interaction design, graphical design and a CSS/JQuery guru.  That might sound like three people – but like I said, you’ve got to wear a few hats so lucky I know just the person and between us we can cover the entire process end-to-end and build some stunning software.

#2 there are a lot of possibilities here, but the best is someone to focus on my weakness(es) – which is the operations side of things allowing me to focus on development and running the business.  I’ll never forget one of my best customers saying to me, “I love your product, but the only time you ever talk to me is to chase money – so I’m going to switch to this other product”.  Without good operations, its so easy for things to spin out of control – so having someone to take care of this side of things will be massive.

#3 is to replace me.  I want to run the business, so I need to replace myself as a developer.  I also want to have time to learn about the parts of business that I don’t have so much experience in, so I figure I’ve got to make myself redundant as a developer.  Not that with 2 developers I’ll exactly be redundant – but at least we can deliver software without me getting in the way.

I’m really pleased to have found great people for the first two roles – people who share my values and excitement for what lies ahead.  #3 will have to wait a little longer, but if its you then I’d love to hear from you.

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Posted by Andrew

The first 10 things

27 January 2010

Today is the first day of starting a new company (the name of which is yet to be decided) and this is by no means a top 10 things you should do when starting a company, but here are the first 10 things I’ve done – in no particular order.

1. Seed capital
First things first, cash is king so got to sort out some cash to get things going.

2. Xero
I’ve spent the last three years building the best accounting system ever, so I’m really looking forward to finally getting to use it for real!
http://www.xero.com

3. Life chair
After sitting in one of these for the last three years, I just had to get one.
http://www.formway.co.nz/Products/Life.html.

4. Server
I thought long and hard about what to do for a development server and in the end was really impressed with Erin from Unleash who offered me a perfect ex-lease server with very reasonable hosting.
http://www.unleash.co.nz

5. Accurev
I met these guys in Boston 18 months ago and was well impressed with their SCM system.  They are the smartest agile guys I’ve met and I’m really looking forward to using their system.
http://www.accurev.com

6. Employee
Its great finding someone who’s skills complement your own and it means that the projects are pushing forward even when I’m out schmoozing over coffee.

7. LiquidPlanner
Like it or not, my company will be doing timesheets.  Partly because we’ll be doing some chargeable work, but mainly because I want to know what I’m investing into every product & idea.  LiquidPlanner has very nice project planning and prioritisation and employees get a nice to-do list which they can estimate against and track their time and progress.
http://www.liquidplanner.com

8. Pray
Yep -  church doesn’t have a monopoly on God so I want to know how God & business mix and I want to experience stuff like this: “But the people who know their God shall be strong, and carry out great exploits”

9. Intranet
Managing and sharing information is key, so getting an intranet in place is a top priority.  In this case, I’ve started building my own … who knows – maybe one day I’ll productise it.

10. Office
Sitting in the sun in the garden at home, drinking Tuatara Pilsner is nice, but I’ve got to be in the CBD – so the great guys at Mindscape have agreed to let me crash on their couch (so to speak) for a while.  Thanks!  http://www.mindscape.co.nz

Now for the work to begin, I’ll share a bit about my first few projects soon(ish).

4 Comments | Business, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Andrew

Words are cheap

16 October 2009

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We all know that a picture speaks 1,000 words, but even more important than pictures are actions.  Actions speak louder than pictures and words.

You could write and talk all day about doing something, but its worth nothing until you do it.

That’s one of the reasons why I like the Agile Manifesto:

  • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  • Working software over comprehensive documentation
  • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  • Responding to change over following a plan

peoplematter432-copy1-300x182

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Posted by Andrew

On the road to high performance

10 August 2009

The culture at NetFlix, explained in this slide deck, is nothing short of inspiring.  Its not their values that I admire, but the fact that they also run the company by the same values that they expect their employees to work by.  Having shared values is important because it defines what you celebrate, what you get angry about, what you flight for, what you look for when hiring and its what screams out at you when someone has to go.

I really like that a big part of NetFlix’ culture is to preserve the culture.  I also like their very frank policies of, “if you wouldn’t fight to keep someone if they resigned, then fire them now” and “if you would offer someone a payrise to keep them if they resigned, then offer them that payrise now”.   Culture and values definately come from the top, so the only way to spread these values is to run the company on them too.

A big focus at Netflix is on finding and keeping high performing, motivated people.  Naturally, we all wonder if we’d meet their standards and as a person who’s on the learning curve with my sights set on being a high performer – it seems to me that being high performing doesn’t start with a degree, or with the right experience, job or boss – but with the right attitute.  An attitude that is determined to learn and push the boundaries.

The lowest form of excellence is having the disclipline to push yourself and learn.  Only from this do you start to gather knowledge through experience and upon that knowledge can come a level of proficiency that is necessary to be high performing in some area of expertise.  At this point, you deploy yourself into something that you’re passionate about or into an opportunity that comes your way and this is where things come off the rail.  Opportunity (no matter how great) without passion will always lead to medioricity.  Passion (no matter how great) without opportunity will always lead to fustration (if not for you then for everyone around you). To reach the next level where you start to inspire others into excellence and high performance requires both opportunity and passion.

Like I said, these are the thoughts of someone on the learning curve – not someone who has arrived, so I might change my mind on all this in the future.  However – I still think its interesting to look at this simplistic model and ask yourself the question – which box is my career currently in?

PassionOpportunity

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Posted by Andrew

Booming in a down economy

3 July 2009

Thanks Andy for the link to David Greer’s article on 11 strategies that will make your company boom.

There are plenty of articles saying the same stuff about surviving a recession, but I really liked some of David’s practical advice.  If it takes a recession to kick-start us into doing these things, then we just have to remember to keep it up when times are better.  Some quotes from David:

On leadership
In crisis situations, leaders often feel the world on their shoulders, especially if you are the entrepreneur or business owner. All those employees. All those customers. You can’t support the whole world. Do you usually go to the gym three times a week? Go five times a week in the crisis. If you don’t have peak physical performance, you can’t have peak work performance. Do you go to yoga once a week?  Go more, both for the physical and mental aspects. Look after yourself, so that you can be there for your families, your friends, your employees, and your customers.

On strategy
The changes in the market have been so large and so fast that pretty much every plan needs to be thrown out the window. It’s time to start with a clean piece of paper and rethink the whole strategic plan for the business. It’s time to reevaluate your positioning, competitors, services, products, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
On customers
Provide outstanding customer service. Treasure and value your customers and let them know you value them. Ask for testimonials and referrals. Word of mouth from your existing customers can be one of the most effective ways to generate leads.
Talk to your customers and ask them where they see the most value in your
products and services.  Create a customer focus group of your key customers and run webinars with them to get feedback on your product positioning, your quality of service, and future product roadmap direction.
On innovation
Inspire creativity in both product development and in customer interactions. Would a customer be willing to pay for a developer or engineer to work on site as a consultant for a week or month? Being at a customer’s for a length of time is one of the best ways to increase understanding of customer needs.

On strategy
The changes in the market have been so large and so fast that pretty much every plan needs to be thrown out the window. It’s time to start with a clean piece of paper and rethink the whole strategic plan for the business. It’s time to reevaluate your positioning, competitors, services, products, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

On customers
Provide outstanding customer service. Treasure and value your customers and let them know you value them. Ask for testimonials and referrals. Word of mouth from your existing customers can be one of the most effective ways to generate leads. Talk to your customers and ask them where they see the most value in your products and services.  Create a customer focus group of your key customers and run webinars with them to get feedback on your product positioning, your quality of service, and future product roadmap direction.

On innovation
Inspire creativity in both product development and in customer interactions. Would a customer be willing to pay for a developer or engineer to work on site as a consultant for a week or month? Being at a customer’s for a length of time is one of the best ways to increase understanding of customer needs.

1 Comment | Business, Strategy | Permalink
Posted by Andrew

Hi, I’m Andrew

25 June 2009

I thought I should introduce myself again – its been over three months since I last posted on this blog.  A lot has been happening – the highlight of which was a 5 week trip to the UK to visit friends and spend some time with my wife and two boys.

Since March, we’ve also been flat out at Xero working on one of our biggest releases ever: multi-currency.  There were a few ways we could have done this and, of course, we opted for the hardest – but the most powerful option.  For the first time – small businesses can now track their FX exposure (realised and unrealised) automatically and have their foreign currency invoices & bank accounts revalued live.  There’s no reason to be looking at out of date numbers and there’s no need to spend hours making adjustments to your accounting system.  To make multi-currency seamless in Xero, we built FX support deep into the transaction engine and general ledger and updated our report framework to natively support foreign currency reporting with automated rates, footnotes and currency codes.

Here’s a short interview I did with Stephen Nicholas from Openside.  Yes, I’m nervous.  No, I’m not being held hostage.

http://www.viddler.com/explore/teamxero/videos/148/

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Posted by Andrew

Something good is going to happen

20 January 2009

Three weeks in and 2009 has that feel about it – that something good is going to happen.

Sure, there’s plenty of talk about how down things are – but that just means there are even more opportunities. There’s also plenty of people and companies struggling – but there are just as many new companies emerging and even more that are on the brink of something very exciting.

2009 is looking more exciting than ever for Xero as we start to break through the accounting and look at all the good stuff that can sit on top of a very solid platform.

2009 is also looking full of opportunity for Catalyst90, founded by Tom Reidy late last year in Wellington. With the current economic mood, there is a need more than ever to grow sales and that’s what Catalyst90 is all about – helping companies to establish sales and marketing protocols to fuel and sustain their growth. Catalyst90 is a 90 day program and is backed up by the CatalystQUE online quote and sales manager.

Something good is going to happen in 2009. Here are some tips to help you make it happen.

2 Comments | Business, Marketing, NZ Companies, Sales | Permalink
Posted by Andrew

Expect the Impossible

19 October 2008

“‘Impossible’ is a big word thrown around by small men and women who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary” – Muhammad Ali.

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Posted by Andrew

Success is more complex than failure

6 October 2008

Well said Hugh.

“How long, you simple ones, will you love simplicity? For scorners delight in their scorning and fools hate knowledge.”

2 Comments | Business, Technology, Vision | Permalink
Posted by Andrew

Business of Software Highlights

7 September 2008

The Business of Software conference was a real success – thanks to Neil and Joel and all the people behind the scenes for organising it.

Some highlights for me were:

  • Meeting so many top software entrepreneurs from around the world.
  • Lots of discussion about pricing software, with agreement on one point: ‘Pricing software is hard.  Pricing software is very hard.’
  • Lots (and lots) of discussion about agile, with not much agreement at all except that the common perceptions of Agile are plain wrong and simply copying what worked for someone else is likely to fail.  There is a huge appetite to improve productivity, quality and correctness and people are looking to Agile for answers.
  • Seth Godin talking about ‘Ideas that spread win’
  • Eric Sink’s comparison of product management with parenting
  • Steve Johnson gave the big picture of product management including explaining the difference between inbound marketing (understanding buyer/user problems and opportunities) and outbound marketing (communications and messaging etc).
  • My favorite quote, ‘Friends build products, enemies only build documents’ (Steve Johnson)
  • If you’re interested in some research on founders and succession, have a look at Noam Wasserman’s blog.
  • Steve Krug’s definition of usability: ‘useable for its intended purpose‘.
  • At least two of the speakers told us that we’re in the fashion business!

Overall a great week and thanks everyone for being so open to discussion.

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Posted by Andrew

Business of Software conference

3 September 2008

I’m in Boston this week for the Business of Software conference which kicks off tomorrow.  Boston is pretty cool with a lot of history.  I did a tour today including MIT, Harvard, the Cheers bar and a harbor cruise.

I’m really looking forward to the conference which is jam packed with software business heros and gurus.

1 Comment | Business, Software | Permalink
Posted by Andrew

Tuned-in

8 August 2008

I’ve just finished reading Tuned-In, by the guys at Pragmatic Marketing and its a must read for anyone involved in productisation.  

When developing good software, we focus the design and usability on the users, but we need to focus the roadmap and marketing on the buyers.  The tuned-in approach draws your focus to understanding who your buyers are and making sure that you’re solving real problems that exist for them.

Even if your users and buyers are the same, the problems that lead them to buy your software are different to the problems they will experience while using your software. 

How do you know if a problem is worth solving?  It will be urgent enough for people to pay to solve and prevalent enough to give you a profitable market.

It makes me think of many ideas I’ve had and heard, including plenty that people were in the process of committing years of effort into, all of which solved a problem, but none of which solved an urgent or prevalent problem.

Its pretty simple stuff – and the authors have applied their own advice to how they wrote the book, so read it!

2 Comments | Business, Marketing, Software | Permalink
Posted by Andrew

Agility vs predictability

31 July 2008

Steve McConnell makes some good comments re-enforcing that your development methodology needs to be driven by your business goals.

“Whether agility or predictability is more important depends both on what a business’s customers are requesting and on how long-range the request is. Customers say, “I want this capability.” In an ideal world, the business will be able to say, “OK, here it is right away.” Being able to say “here it is right away” is what agility is all about.”

“But the lack of comprehensive requirements combined with an emphasis on “embracing change” just enabled the company to move more quickly in the wrong direction”

Finding the right blend of predictability and agility is important and requires good leadership and planning as opposed to just a good methodology and processes.

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Posted by Andrew

Zoho’s end game

29 June 2008

Some interesting comments from Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu over on Gopal Shenoy’s blog.

On the Zoho suite, we have believed from the beginning that a lot of the value of collaborative productivity is integration across the products. Traditionally database oriented offerings (such as CRM) and document-centric offerings (the office suite) have existed in their separate silos. We believe the key to next generation productivity is integration across these silos.

Salesforce seems to agree, because they have partnered with Google for the Office suite part. Before that partnership, they tried to acquire us, which tells you what they would have liked to do, but we politely said no because we didn’t believe there was a cultural fit. They even tried to get us to drop our Zoho CRM, in return for a “deal” to integrate our office productivity apps with their CRM suite. It is our diversified business & product mix that allowed us the freedom to resist such unfair demands.

So, its about the integration more than the collaboration & other SaaS goodness.  This comes through not only in the integration within their own apps, but in the integration model they offer with third parties.  I’ve had a play with their spreadsheet integration and they allow it to be run as an embedded spreadsheet within another app.  Data can be loaded from and saved to the third party app with no Zoho account required.  This is quite powerful, but wouldn’t be nearly so interesting if their apps weren’t online and quite good too.

1 Comment | Business, SaaS, Software | Permalink
Posted by Andrew

Leaders create chaos

18 June 2008

Good leaders are visionaries.  They articulate their vision, recruit well, think strategically, initiate change, disrupt the continuum and create chaos.

Good managers turn the chaos into order.  You need both.

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Posted by Andrew

Rewarding effort

6 May 2008

We live in a country that rewards effort and this applies to business as much as anything. New Zealand workers are among the least productive in the OECD.

I once asked my accountant a simple question and they came back with an answer … and an invoice for 2 hours of research. There’s this attitude that you pay for the time it takes, not for the value added.  Contract Law doesn’t help either because in B2B contracts, there are no protections about getting what you paid for.

Hard work is good, but smart work is better.  Hard work would be chopping down a tree with a hammer.  I’d rather be the lazy guy who brings a chainsaw and chops down 10 trees then goes home.

Working smart is about being diligent.  Today I read this and it inspired me:

“Diligence is a learnable skill that combines: creative persistence, a smart working effort rightly planned and rightly performed in a timely, efficient, and effective manner to attain a result that is pure and of the highest quality of excellence.”

The bottom line is being able to measure our outputs, not our effort, because how do you reward something if you can’t measure it?  

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Posted by Andrew

You can’t smell email

4 May 2008

This has been said many times and I just read it again that communication is:

  • 55% body language
  • 38% voice & tone
  • 7% words
So, every time we send an email we waste 93% of our communication power. If you use the phone you waste 55%, but talking to someone face to face is the only way to be 100% effective in our communication.
.
On the other hand, emails do have tone & ‘envelope’ language, so maybe its just more like this:
  • 55% words
  • 38% tone & language
  • 7% envelope language (single recipient vs group email, order of recipients, cc’ed, bcc’ed, subject, priority etc)
It can be quite efficient to put the emphasis on your words and off your body language, so its a trade-off that we can use when it suits our purposes. Here’s my Sunday night communication scale to put it all in perspective:
.
Face to face communication Like enjoying wine with a few friends and some good food.
Telephone Like drinking alone.
Email Like tasting a wine with no sense of smell
Software Documentation Like drinking from the bottle
Blogging Like pretending you can taste the red fruits of the forrest underpinned by savory dried herbs.

1 Comment | Business, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Andrew

Business of Software Conference

21 April 2008
The Business of Software Conference in Boston this year is looking good.  The list of speakers reads like my RSS list …
  • Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek software, author of several books and the man behind the joelonsoftware blog
  • Seth Godin, Business Week’s “Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age”, is the best-selling author of 7 books (including Permission Marketing and Purple Cow) as well as the most popular eBook of all time.
  • Eric Sink, founder of SourceGear, author of “Eric Sink on the Business of Software” and the person who coined the term “Micro ISV”
  • Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing and winner of last year’s Software Idol competition
  • Richard Stallman launched the development of the GNU operating system, now used on tens of millions of computers today. Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer award, and the the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment
  • Paul Kenny is one of the UK’s top sales trainers, consultants and speakers. He has worked with many customers in three continents, including IBM, Perot Systems, The Guardian and tens of others.
  • Dharmesh Shah is a geek, serial entrepreneur, founder of HubSpot and blogger at OnStartups.com
  • Jessica Livingston is author of Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days and a founder of Y Combinator
  • Jason Fried is founder of 37signals (developers of Basecamp and Ruby on Rails) and Signal vs Noise blogger

1 Comment | Business, Software | Permalink
Posted by Andrew

I don’t know.

6 April 2008

I’m currently reading ‘Fooled by Randomness’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who has some interesting ideas on the randomness of life and business.

He says his major hobby is “teasing people who take themselves & the quality of their knowledge too seriously & those who don’t have the courage to sometimes say: I don’t know….”.

I’m probably guilty of taking myself too seriously … Solomon (the wisest-guy-ever) also said not to rely on your own knowledge and understanding. So what should we rely on?

If you keep reading, the answer lies not in your knowledge, but in understanding your domain well enough to know what you don’t know and to know how to find answers. Your ability to generate knowledge is more important than your knowledge.

Solomon said that developing good judgement and understanding is the smartest thing you can do – and is more valuable than wealth. Ie – the ability to generate wealth is more valuable than wealth itself. Likewise, the ability to generate knowledge is more valuable than knowledge itself.

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Posted by Andrew

Entrepreneurialism

29 March 2008

What defines an entrepreneur? Wikipedia says, “An entrepreneur is a person who has possession over a new enterprise or venture and assumes full accountability for the inherent risks and the outcome.”

Technically, this is true, but its also meaningless. I think that a true entrepreneur is someone who is able to see a pain that is shared by a lot of people, then identify and deliver a solution to that pain. Entrepreneurs are motivated by creating value and serving people.

Most companies start off being entrepreneurial, but plenty gradually become the opposite – exploitational. Exploitational businesses (and people) are interested in their own gain above their customers. They are looking to make money without necessarily creating value and without serving people.

I’ve seen some companies where the culture was exploitational (and culture always comes from the top) and this came through in every facet; the way staff were treated, the way sales were made, the way priorities were set, the way customers and suppliers were treated. No value was created – it was only taken.

Xero is a good example of a company that is led by an entrepreneur and has a culture of entrepreneurialism. Everyone at Xero, whether they’re building the software, selling it or providing service (or most likely all three) are all entrepreneurs in the sense that we’re motivated to find, solve and deliver solutions to the pain that small businesses and small business owners experience today.

We know that we can’t create value for our customers and shareholders until we deliver innovative software and exceptional service and actually resolve that pain. Its a pleasure to be part of a team that is so motivated by creating value for the ~25% of the work force whose life revolves around their business.

BTW: Xero are currently hiring.

Leave a Comment » | Business, Software, Vision, Xero | Permalink
Posted by Andrew

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