entrepreneurs Archives - Page 11 of 80

Reality, Comedy & Venture Capital

Posted on June 13, 2013 by Steve Sammartino

The story of the court jester is an important one. Largely employed by rulers to entertain during medieval times, they served not simply to amuse but to criticize their master and their guests. The jesters position was one within a the power structures of society. Rulers knew that their servants had neither the position or the courage to drop a truth bomb or two, and so this role was outsourced to the local fool.

The problem today, is that most leaders, CEO’s and entrepreneurs don’t have a personal jester to keep them in tow. Maybe we should. It’s also fair to say that the technology and Venture Capital realm could do with an injection of reality now and again. I recently happened upon a video of famed inventor Nikola Tesla as if he was transported from the past directly into Silicon Valley. He was pitching his concepts to a group of VC’s whose responses were both hilarious and predictable. Another classic example which proves we often have more to learn from the Court Jester than the local hero who has already made bank. It seems as though we too have our own Jester, in the form of video spoofs.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zngK13FMgXM]

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3D printing is nothing special

Posted on May 30, 2013 by Steve Sammartino

People who read this blog and know me are aware of my obsession with 3D printing – and the fact that I think it will be bigger than the internet. Recently I had an experience with my 3D printer which was most enlightening. Before I share the story let me share a terrific definition of technology:

Technology – Something that was invented after you were born.

So I was playing with my 3D printer in my home office when my 3 year old daughter entered the room. I asked her if she wanted me to print her something. Maybe a toy or some jewelry. She replied simple ‘Ok daddy’ and seemed pretty excited about it. Who wouldn’t be, it’s a 3D printer for crying out loud. So we picked one of the bracelets from the picture below, and sent the file to the printer. A pressed the print button and it started printing. I was pretty pumped. 3D printing my little girl some personal jewelry, immediately in my home office. I quickly said “Look, Look, it’s printing it.” To which she replied in a nonchalant manner. “Ok, thanks daddy”

Sure she was excited about the jewelry, but not the process. The process was irrelevant to her, she just wanted the thing.

When the print job was done, I called her back in and said “Look, here it is, I printed it for you!!!”. To which her reply was much like the previous one regarding the process. She said “Thanks daddy” and then put it on her wrist and skipped away to get on with her 3 year old life.

3D printing to her is as ‘normal’ as cars, TV, airplanes, computers and microwave ovens. How can it not be, it was invented before she was born. It’s just another of the thousands of normal everyday thing she is seeing for the time. Nothing more or less special that the other technology in our lives.

But the really significant element is that by the time she is 13 years of age, yourself and every person we know will have a 3D printer. We’ll all be printing things in our homes on a daily basis. And if you think that isn’t possible, let me remind you that every social media channel you currently use today didn’t exist 10 years ago, and we already know how much that changed our social and economic landscape.

3D printing is NOW – get on it and don’t regret you let this entrepreneurial opportunity slip you by.

The Zen of being underpaid

Posted on May 29, 2013 by Steve Sammartino

At various times in our life we’ve all had jobs where we feel either overpaid, or underpaid for what we deliver. If we ask any rational capitalist what they’d prefer, you can be certain they’d rather be over paid. Who wouldn’t choose a cosy, comfortable gig with good pay and easy output?

I’ve been in both places personally, and over the years I’ve been thinking about personal economics and relative happiness. I‘ve come to the conclusion that I’d rather be underpaid. Which seems crazy and irrational, but when it is considered in the context of what delivers real happiness it does make sense. My primary view on happiness and contentment in life is that it is not based on now. Rather, it is based on our expectations of our future position. This is most easily explained by considering how I’ve personally felt when I’ve been in these two juxtaposed earning positions.

When overpaid:

While being overpaid we know we are not creating justifiable value for our cost. We feel like we have tricked someone in the system. It feels like we are eventually going to be found out. We know this because the economic system doesn’t support it in the long run. The system loves and rewards efficiency. Which in turn puts us at risk of being, replaced, removed or made redundant. We know this and it starts to effect our psyche. We stress over it and start to worry about our future. And even worse, we don’t progress intellectually, we decline in confidence and effort. Or much worse, we become lazy and complacent – enjoy consumption instead of contribution and start to feel entitled. But in reality, the future looks darker than the present.

When underpaid:

When we are paid below market rates we know we are valuable. We create more than we cost. It makes us feel valued as contributors, even if we know they are getting the better end of the financial deal. But it also makes us hungry to prove our worth. We want to show them or make them realise what we deliver. And in order to do this we work harder and become hungry. It too effects our psyche, but in a much more positive manner. We believe in ourselves, and set on a path to prove ourselves. The Zen part about being underpaid is that we can sleep a lot better at night. We can do this because we know the market needs people like us, and very often pay more for it. So we have clear exit paths if they are required. Our minds and the world open up to the possibilities of our skill base. The future looks brighter than the present.

It’s much the same when we found a startup. We know that we must create value before we can extract it. Which is really what we should aim for in all things we do – deliver more than we take back. In fact, we should be thankful if we live in a perpetual state of over delivery. That way we can ensure that we will always have a valued place in the market.

Can I help you? Why retail customers always say no

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Steve Sammartino

These are the four worst words anyone can utter to a customer in retail. We all know they answer it gets 99% of the time – because we all give it.

“No thanks – just looking”

These 4 words are revenue stoppers, barrier creators, and empathy evaporators. It just says to the potential customer – I’m too bored and uninterested to even use a sentence that isn’t expected, practiced or considerate of the fact that you are the person who pays my wage. But rather than simply pointing out that it doesn’t work, let’s discuss a couple of simple and effective alternatives. And I’ll do this by giving you an example and a retail sales person who gets it.

I was recently shopping for some new jeans in a Myer store in Melbourne. When the sales guy approached me he asked me a simple question:

“Are you after pants or tops today?”

A very smart move. Either answer starts a conversation we he can ‘be help’ instead of simply asking if I need it. If I answer ‘pants’ – we can start narrowing down the selection. Same if I answer ‘tops’. Or he might even get lucky and I say ‘both’. If I say ‘neither’ I just look like a fool, and we can both wonder why the hell I walked into the store in the first place. Needless to say, I told him and he helped me find a nice pair of jeans.

The trick is simple:

First – never ask an open ended question. They don’t solve problems or lead to results.

Second – ask two pronged choice questions for which both answers are good for the sales person.

Third – don’t feel guilty or pushy doing it. People wouldn’t (especially men) enter a store just for the sake of it, they want help.

So next time you go into a store with sales assistants, pay attention to the language they use and you’ll start to notice those who get it and those who don’t. This example might also serve as a good question or test when recruiting business development staff for your startup.

Mobile living

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Steve Sammartino

There has been a lot of talk lately about the mobile revolution. A shift which is here to stay which will forever change communications, commerce and culture. But most people are wrong about this revolution. Yes, mobile living is here, but it’s not about that piece of technology which lives in our pockets. No, the mobile phone is a symptom, not the cause.

The mobile phone is really an inevitable invention. In both the agrarian and industrial era we became less itinerant as a species. We instead invested our time on farms, then institutions and factories. We built suburbs and shopping centers and structured the largest parts of our working and social lives in tiny geographic clusters. We shifted our living structure from itinerant opportunists (think hunter gatherer) to become sedentary factors of production. Widget living within, and upon the industrial machine. Mind you, the machine was a better option than life before it arrived. It made us richer, smarter, taller, warmer, cooler, healthier and less hungry. But the machine (the industrialized world) has now began to set us free to explore again. Which was the wayit always was prior to this 200 year human anomaly. Industrial systems became so profitable and improved living standards so much, that technology has conspired to bring back mobility. Mobility will be a defining life pattern for humans as we move into the next era of our species. Certainly this is the case with developed economies. The exponential deflationary effect of technological developments has created a new form of mobility in many corners of life. Most of which occurred well before the symptom of the mobile or cell phone emerged.

Let’s consider of these examples:

– How much more mobile is your working life? How many offices, workplaces, co-working hubs, conferences do you attend? How often do you change jobs and commence work in a new suburb, city, state or country?

– How often do you eat out? Our parents went out on special occasions. We now eat out a number of times a week and even go our for breakfast or cross town for the best coffee.

– How often do you catch an Airplane? Something that was once the domain of the rich, is now something we do at the last minute to go see a music festival a thousand miles away. Since 1990 the amount of passenger miles in travel has increased 4 fold, while the average price of a 1 hour flight has more than halved.

– Even Space travel is back! Every billionaire worth his salt has started a private space travel venture as the final frontier is even being democratized.

Compare the above examples to how our parents and grand parents lived.

Our lives are becoming more mobile in every way, because we are no longer tied to the factory or the farm. We are now entering the 2nd phase of human hunting and gathering, but this time we are hunting for information, creativity and culture. All the stuff we lost during the standardization that came with the industrial era.

So when we think about the mobile revolution, we owe it to ourselves as entrepreneurs to consider human movement, and not just a single piece of technology we take with us in our pocket.

Retail Apathy: Target

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Steve Sammartino

On the weekend I went into a Target store to purchase an Esky for a pitch presentation I was doing where the reference was brands becoming generic terms for a product. Rather than walk around a giant retail floor, I thought I’d ask a staff member where I might be able to find one. I approached a staff member and asked. He was friendly and attentive. He almost cared and he said:

“To be honest, that is a seasonal line. I know we have them in summer, but I’m pretty sure we don’t carry any stock in winter. But, to be sure let me check.”

He then reached for his internal walkie talky and spoke with a colleague.

“Yeh, like I said we don’t have them this time of year. Sorry man, maybe try Bunnings.”

So while he was civil, approachable and nice he didn’t solve my problem. He didn’t even offer to to walk to me to where these items would be on the shelf during the warm season. (He was very busy fixing a shelf) He suggested I go to a competitor, which can be a valid customer service response, but certainly was not on this occasion and here is why:

I didn’t believe what he told me. In my 40 years I’ve been in enough department stores and discount retailers to know I’ve seen them ‘out of season’. I know enough about how poor Australian retailers are at selling excess stock to think there might just be a few left overs. I’ve also had enough retail staff give me false information over the years to test my intuition and have a look around for myself. So I did that and below is a picture of what I found. A wall of Esky type chillers.

And they got my sale, despite their retail apathy.

But it’s a pretty bad situation when the customers know more about a retail store than the people who work there. It got me thinking about how many times this must happen through the entire store. How many customers are sent away, told an item is not in stock, or don’t even know what product the customer is asking for? Multiply this by 305 retail stores, 10,000 items in store and thousands of uninformed, uninspired staff and it is hard to see this type of retailer competing with on-line options. How can a staff member even know what’s in store as well as a search engine can on line? They simply cannot.

For retailer to survive the transition to online the first step is for them to realise that it’s actually not about product and price point. It’s primary about the experience and how much the people that serve customers actually care. Both of which are deliberate strategies that are not born at store level.

Gadget Control

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Steve Sammartino

We probably haven’t been as obsessed with gadgets the way we are now at any point in history. Every other day there is a new contraption or Kickstarter project spruiking some microchip enabled object of desire. What’s interesting is the shift that gadgets have made in the past decade. Rewind back to gadget innovation of last century – the good old 1900’s and we’ll see a different story from what we see today:

Gadgets from the industrial era invented time:

The washing machine: No need to hand wash, or go to the laundry mat. Set and forget. Go do something else.
The refrigerator / Freezer: No need to go to the market and buy fresh produce.
Gas & electric heaters: No need to chop or collect wood, just flick a switch.
Electric iron: No need heat it up on the fire place.
Clothes dryer: No need to hang the washing on the line.
Dishwasher: Less time needed slaving over the sink.

Gadgets from the digital era steal time.

Now lets take our minds into the gadgets we employ today: ipod, nintendo DS, smart phones, tablets, laptops, gaming consoles, TiVo and so on. Sure, some have extreme utility, yet they tend to take more time away than they invent. They first give a little, then they take a lot. It’s almost as though they takes us into a worm hole of exploration that eats up more than the efficiency they create.

It’s started to make me wonder about the time we give to our gadgets. Do we own them or are they starting to own us? I think the challenge of technology today is about understanding how we use the tools. Are we using them to consumer or create? Will we use them to create output, or be constantly giving them all of our input? For me this is a vital question where time is our most important asset. It’s an even bigger question for entrepreneurs, where the difference we make is largely a function of what we create. And in order to create something we increasingly need to pay attention to the devices around us and ensure we are in control of them, and it’s not the wrong way around.