entrepreneurship Archives - Page 60 of 235

What matters more?

Posted on November 22, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

Being involved in the startup scene, or any business environment, there is a constant pull between the forces of production. A pull for power and control. The desire for one party to feel as though they are the input that matters, the major resource of creating something cool, desired and valuable. The idea creator, versus the coder, versus the salesman, versus the marketer, versus the capital provider… they all have a unique and special relationship with the output that makes them rightly feel as though they are the input that really matters. The input that makes it all possible.

But here’s an allegory worth considering.

We plant the seed of a lemon tree. We place it in the soil. We ensure it’s in a place that will receive enough sunlight. We water it frequently. We give it mulch and fertilizer. We stake it for stability to avoid the strong winds from breaking it. We attend to it daily. We are patient. We hope it bears fruit… Actually, we are certain it will bear fruit. For this belief enables us to find the energy to keep attending to our investment.

So what is more important? The seed, the soil, the nutrients, the sun, the water or the attention? None of them.

Without all of it, there will be none of it.

Instead of making claims to being the catalyst of creation, we should be thankful that we are part of a rich eco-system. A system from which he output we can all benefit from.

Consumer is a dirty word

Posted on November 21, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

For a long time I’ve hated the word ‘consumer’. It has very little to do with marketing, let alone delighting people who give you their custom. After a recent tweet about it – I was asked by Marketing Magazine to write an article about it.

Click here to read the article I wrote about it. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this dirty word.

A message for misfits

Posted on November 19, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

This is a really interesting piece from the late George Carlin – who, despite all his success took the best part of 35 years before he thought he found his place. While all of this 4 minutes is interesting, and it isn’t so much for entertainers, but really appeals to the spirit of any entrepreneur or employee with the entrepreneur wanting to break out. The bit I find most compelling is when he discusses the choice he made at the age of 30. That he was living in the middle of a generation gap and had to choose a new audience – a new young crew who got it, or an older crew who bought into it. We too need to choose our audience carefully. Should our audience be a bunch of senior managers in company XYZ who believe in the status quo, or should it be a new breed of entrepreneur / intrapreneur whose enthusiasm might be the missing ingredient to change stuff?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZGo6mWjk4Y]

– thanks to Ender for inspiring this post.

Invention vs Innovation

Posted on November 15, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

When the personal computing era started to thrive in the mid 1970’s it was juxtaposed against a strong anti-corporate counter culture. Many hippies saw computers as tools of oppression designed, built and used by large corporations. But there was another angle, another truth about the invention of this technology, and pretty much every other technology. If the technology has enough utility and importance it will eventually end up in the hands of the people. And if we are luck the invention will eventually be used to disrupt the bad parts of the world that invented it. And so crossover groups and communities like the Homebrew Computer Club emerged to fill that void. It happened with the PC and most forms of digital technology, where the people are now the major beneficiary as major legacy corporations scramble to survive.

For this type of thing to happen we don’t need more inventors, what we need is more innovators. Innovation is about taking an idea or concept and executing it. Making it usable. Introducing it in a way that makes it both accessible and desirable. Technology only really becomes valuable when it is distributed and omnipresent. If we want to create value through a startup or any business for that matter our focus should be on allowing people to easily ride on our vehicle, not the vehicle itself.

Top 10 tips to learn a language

Posted on November 12, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

When it comes to starting anything new, including learning how to speak a foreign language. So here’s my top 10 tips on how to hack the language learning process using the web:

Watch free youtube lessons on speaking your preferred language. They’ve got ’em all.
Follow native speakers of that language on twitter. Here frequency & brevity is your ally.
Comment on blogs in that language to practice your written form.
Makes friends on-line with people from that country who want to learn English.
Organize skype chats with your on-line friends to practice each others language together.
Download one of the many free apps to practice in down time or while waiting for people.
Offer free on-line English lessons to speakers of the language you desire to learn.
Watch kids shows (cartoons etc) from your home country that have been translated on-line (see youtube)
Set your browser, mobile and web apps into the language you are learning.
Bonus Analogue tip – go to local restaurant and practice with waiters…

There’s never been a better time to start something worth starting.

the big job

Posted on November 9, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

I was having a discussion with a colleague about staffing at the most senior level of an organization. Non technical, Director and CEO level jobs. In fact the discussion I was having was with a CEO himself. What he said actually surprised me, especially given the level he is at in his personal career. First let me give a brief summary of what transpired.

We discussed a potential candidate for a role in a large corporation at 2 levels below the CEO. I retorted that this particular person we had in mind, was above that level, too senior and ready for a CEO job himself, and so he wouldn’t be interested, and that I thought he was ‘better’ than the role on offer. He disagreed. He said that this person wasn’t ready for a CEO role as he had not even held the role of director and it was too much of a leap…. the discussion kind of went around in circles as to what qualifies a person for the most senior job. His view was that the very top job in large companies was really only the domain of a special few. My point was that who the special few are is really an arbitrary decision made by the people who have the power to put people in positions….

In the qualitative arena of corporate positions there is no such thing as being qualified. Every time a person steps up or gets the opportunity to step up, is because someone in power handed it to them. Sure, they may have done well before but it’s not a guarantee of future performance. In fact, there are probably more examples of CEO’s doing bad jobs than there are of those doing terrific jobs. Especially given that most CEO’s didn’t build the business they are managing, they ‘inherited the corporate wealth’.

As far as I can tell it’s rather simple, and there are a few things that enable and facilitate people getting that big job:

The person needs to be good at speaking, presenting & selling the future, not necessarily making it happen.
The person needs to be smart, good at influencing others, but not necessarily a hard worker.
The person needs to ‘look the part’ – seem like they belong. Present and dress well.
The person needs to have seemingly ‘relevant experience’ in the same or a juxtaposed industry.
The person needs to look good on paper, be a justifiable choice to the decision maker(s).
The person needs someone to have had faith in them earlier in their career, promoting them to senior gigs before they look too old, or even when they looked surprisingly young – they need to be ‘picked’ and promoted. It makes them look more special or talented than the other people.
The person needs to play a good internal game, this matters much more than their actual output.
The person needs to not stick out as risk to the organisation, that way the decision makers wont be blamed if they turn out to be not so good.

Notice how none of these things actually guarantee the right person will get the job?

In fact, every job someone gets is based on the previous job someone else decided they deserve. Corporate climbers know this and leverage this through their entire career until they break through the glass barrier. They often then go on to earn millions for years to come trading themselves to various corporations, fooling the world that they are better, more qualified or more deserving to be in such positions. It’s just a game, but it’s not like football where the persons performance can be easily measured.

I’ve met plenty of great CEO’s (in fact the person I’m referencing at the start of this post, is the best I’ve ever met) and I’ve worked for plenty of duds too. So don’t ever let someone tell you that you are not ready, or qualified for anything. Remember that everyone who ever made that level didn’t get there because of how good they were, they got there because of how good people thought they might be, or who their friends were. An entrepreneur on the other hand, gets to where they deserve entirely on their own performance.

The truth about crowd funding

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

Most web tools that are re-shaping commerce are doing one thing, handing over control to the users from the producers. They are democratizing the factors of production so that anyone with access and ideas can now play. They do this through cutting out two things that existed and thrived in the industrial era: middle men and gate keepers. The power of collaboration has been touted as a revolution consistently since the the word web 2.0 exited the mouth of Tim O’Reilly. I think it is entirely justified. This is particularly the case with the latest disruptor to emerge – crowd funding. The reason that funding our projects from the crowd changes everything, is because it doesn’t really change anything.

All things have always been funded by the crowd, we just didn’t know it before.

To bring this idea to life let’s consider a couple of examples:

Debt funding via banks is a form of crowd funding: They take our deposits, assess and carry the risk of ‘sub-letting’ our deposits on margin. Essentially banks make money from crowd funding projects and managing the organisation of it.

Capital raising via VC firms is a form of crowd funding: They take large portions of their venture money from Superannuation or 401K funds which has been allocated to ‘high risk’ investments. This is typically between 1-5% of the total asset allocation. Again, our money is being allocated in our behalf from which transaction profit margin is made.

The point is that pretty much every type of investment that involved aggregated money, has always been the money of the ‘audience’ hidden within a structured system. A system which we are now re-structuring with deomcratised tools so that we can organise our capital amongst ourselves. So that we can access each others funds without permission from financiers. So that we can decide what is worth funding. So that we can make the margin available on float capital. And this is just the start of the inevitable changes to the financial system.

The very truth about crowd funding is that before it arrived in its current ‘web organised’ form – we got locked out of the system that our money funded. And it feels like crowd funding of micro projects is just the begging of something much bigger and more important. The question for aspiring entrepreneurs is how can we disrupt the finance industry further with newly connected commercial eco systems?