Continuations

Fred wrote about tenacity this morning prompted by a post from Mark Suster about tenacity being a key trait for an entrepreneur.  As per usual there is a long comment thread on Fred’s post and also quite a few comments on Mark’s.

There is, however, only a limited discussion of the potential conflict between tenacity and the ability to “fail early and often” (before and after this comment).  With the low cost of operating many startups these days, it should probably be called “iterate early (and often)” instead.  I have seen quite a few failures that resulted from the entrepreneur being too tenacious in pursuit of something that is not working.  When you google for “define:tenacity”, the first definition offers up “doggedness” as a synonym.  For someone with tenacity only and no flexibility it is very easy to err on the side of simply continuing without making a change.

In fact, I am beginning to think that one reason why it is so hard to be successful as an entrepreneur is exactly because some of the traits required are almost contradictory in nature.  Here is another example.  Successful entrepreneurs build great teams.  That requires attracting talent, which in turn requires making people feel valued.  But it is also important for an entrepreneur to be able to rearrange the team, which may mean letting go of valued people, if there is no logical place for them as the organization grows.

Yesterday I went to get a second opinion on my ongoing dental pains. I went to a specialist in the matter (implants), presented the history and asked for his opinion and advice. The whole process was incredibly useful. First, it made me focus on what was fact versus interpretation or emotion. Second, I got a perspective from someone who has no stake in the outcome and who is looking at it with fresh eyes. He quickly came up with at least one alternative explanation that my existing provider did not think of. He also offered a clear rationale for his recommendation of staying the course (and because he has no stake in the outcome I felt I could put more weight on that rationale). Getting a second opinion is something I had to learn in life - I started out too action oriented to have the patience for this. But I highly recommend it for any difficult decision whether medical or professional! In a startup, the board should be able to provide a second opinion on many issues faced by the team. But there will be issues where some board members’ interest diverges or interferes. For such matters every entrepreneur should have trusted advisors they can go to for a second opinion. If you don’t have that, I strongly recommend you develop some relationships before you need them. It will make for better decisions and for a less lonely (and stressful) experience.

I am going through an annoying dental crisis following an implant that has somehow developed an infection. Having worked at or with startups all my life I have on several occasions pushed forward even at times when it was detrimental to my health. I know many entrepreneurs who do the same — including some recent instances in our portfolio. It is a reflection of the will to create something from nothing and one of the reasons why entrepreneurs often succeed where big companies fail. But it is easy to take it too far. At the end of the day, you only have this one body and your health is not something to play games with. As I have gotten older and have (not so little) kids at home I have definitely become more aware just how precious health is. So this time around I have postponed meetings and I am even considering canceling a trip to San Francisco this week. As a board member too, I am increasingly finding myself telling entrepreneurs and others working there to back off a bit if I get the sense they are running themselves ragged. Hoping that this longer term perspective will benefit everyone in the end!

I have written about privacy on this blog several times before.  This week the topic seems to be front and center again with Eric Schmidt stating in a CNBC interview that “[i]f you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place” and Facebook introducing new privacy settings, which default to sharing with everyone.

I love how this topic keeps coming around and believe it will continue to do so for a long time.  The reason is that the personal expectations and social norms around privacy will take at least one if not two generations to adapt to the dramatically changed technological capabilities.  In the meantime, it certainly will help to keep educating people about how the net and services like Google actually work, e.g. here is how “suggest” works in the Google Chrome address bar: “When you type URLs or queries in the address bar, the letters you type are sent to Google so the Suggest feature can automatically recommend terms or URLs you may be looking for” (from the Chrome privacy policy).

For the past couple of days I have not posted for two reasons.  First, I was in London and tried to sleep as late as I could before my meetings (still effectively getting up before 4 am).  Second, I was reading up on “Climategate.”  In case you have been completely offline and have not even watched my favorite fake news source, The Daily Show, here is a one sentence summary: Several climate scientists committed the cardinal sin of tweaking data in an attempt to make a case stronger, thereby actually making it weaker, when — inevitably — the tweaking came to light.

It turns out that trying to understand whether there something meaningful here, as opposed to simply having a knee-jerk reaction based on one’s existing believes takes some time.  I encourage everyone who cares about this topic to really dig in.  At a minimum, I recommend reading the coverage on the RealClimate and ClimateAudit blogs (for two opposing view points), including the super extensive comment threads, such as this one with 699 comments!

If you don’t want to do this work but are interested in my conclusion, here it is: what the scientists did is annoying because it was entirely unnecessary.  The basic theory about how greenhouse gases affect the climate is summarized neatly here and it is still the most likely theory after you allow for the omitted and adjusted data.

I am not aware of a theory in which adding CO2 to the atmosphere would result in cooling.  Instead, the competing theories tend to be about either (a) human-made greenhouse gases causing very little warming and/or (b) other factors (e.g. solar activity) playing a vastly stronger role over the same time frame.  To have a scientific basis against a reduction of greenhouse gases, you have to conclude that the evidence sufficiently supports one of these alternatives to the point that the cost of doing something (that cost itself being subject to reasonable debate) outweighs the cost of doing nothing (or very little).

Now consider two graphs, neatly reproduced on ClimateAudit.  The first shows temperature using tree ring data and highlights the portion that was omitted, which shows a decline.  The second shows the first curve embedded in a comparison chart of several data series.  Even if you add the decline, you see that only one of five series considered shows a decline and that the most important curve — the one that measures temperatures directly points steeply upwards.  Now even if you reduce the slope of the measured temperature curve because it too has had some potentially questionable adjustments made to it, it still is incredibly hard to see how you can turn that into a firm support for (a) or (b) above.  And that is before you consider evidence such as the melting of the North Pole, the reduction in the Greenland ice sheets, and so on.

There are two things, however, that are quite disturbing about Climategate and that I intend to cover in future blog posts:  first, the widespread disregard for the scientific method and rational argument (sadly even among scientists) and second (and related), the potential for balkanization of dialog on the Internet.

Saturday night I arrived late at our house having taken our older son to his first tennis “tournament.”  Everyone else was already asleep and the house was dark.  I tried to turn some lights on, only to discover that we had a power outage!  After some back and forth, I finally managed to get Con Edison to dispatch someone.  A ConEd guy showed up at 1am and determined that the main circuit breaker in our house had somehow decided to stop working for no apparent reason.  Not ConEd’s problem.  Since I was super tired, I decided to get some sleep.  Up at 7am the house was freezing and I started dialing for an electrician (grateful for having a UPS to power my cable modem!).

That’s where the fun really started.  I first called our regular electrician and got voice mail.  Left a message to have him call me back.  Then I must have dialed at least a dozen of electricians — every local ad that promised 24x7 emergency service.  I got either nothing, a voice mail, or in one case a hopeless answering service.  Huh?  Definitely anything but 24x7!  I had skipped one unattractive ad — but now went back to that.  Ring, ring, then slightly groggy “Hello, how can we help you?”  Knowledgeable and courteous owner on the phone, he immediately dispatched one of his guys and one hour later I had someone at the house working on the issue.  Another 30 minutes later we had partial power back and most importantly a working furnace!

Never heard back from our regular electrician, who no longer is that (I left a follow up voice mail).  The guy who answered will get all my business going forward.

This little episode really brought home (so to speak) how important responsive service is for anything that’s mission critical.  It’s OK for my gardener to take a message, but definitely not for my electrician.  The same is true for web services and software.  It’s OK if my personal blog is down for a short time and I can’t reach Tumblr, but if Etsy can’t connect to PayPal then lots of individuals stand to lose sales.  I am mentioning PayPal because, much like other Internet giants, they are not necessarily known for responsive service.  At least though from my London hotel room a google search for “paypal customer service” brings up the PayPal site as the first result — not so for google itself! Often there is no choice of course (e.g. PayPal, Google), but when there is, it’s definitely a good idea to keep service responsiveness in mind when choosing a provider for anything mission critical.

Yesterday, I tweeted “welcome to the googlenet” and was asked to explain what I meant by that.  My tweet was about the announcement of Google DNS.  With Google DNS, you can now run pretty much entirely on a Google stack.  You fire up Chrome OS (or maybe just the Chrome browser), point DNS to Google, get your content from Google (e.g., music integrated into search results or driving directions), work with Google apps and other applications run of Google servers via Google AppEngine, and so forth.  Potentially, even doing so with new Google developed protocols.  This is a totally vertically integrated single source solution to the Internet.

Now in theory, at no point are you actually boxed in and everything is supposed to be open and standards compliant.  But the temptation to cross the line and give Google owned properties an unfair leg up and start pushing aside rivals and startups is huge.  It will take so little to go from “creating the best possible Internet experience” to “creating the best possible Google experience.” The company itself is publicly traded and a lot of employees wealth correlates directly to the price of Google stock.  On the margin, I believe that drives behavior more than any corporate commitment to not be evil.

Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that anyone at Google is actively setting out to take over and control the web.  I am, however, worried that the cumulative effect of all the initiatives, combined with economic incentives for decision makers, amounts to an important threat to the open Web.

I am excited to be speaking at the NYU Stern Entrepreneurial club later today about working at startups. Apparently, all the big banks and consulting companies come through the school (via Finance club etc) and extol the virtues of working at big companies. I look forward to providing an alternative view. Some of the points I plan to cover include: (1) Right and wrong reasons to want to work for a startup (2) Understanding the career implications of working at a startup (3) Finding a startup to work for (4) Making a startup work for you. Would love to hear questions that I should address or insights that I should make sure to mention.

Yesterday, Fred wrote a post titled “Stuck In The Middle With You” about his continued support for President Obama.  I feel the same way.  I was excited early on about Obama’s campaign, felt that he made smart choices then, and was thrilled to see him elected.  Obama took office under some of the most adverse circumstances of any president, with two wars in progress and an economy headed into free fall.

Now we find ourselves not even a year later and the beginning of a withdrawal from Iraq has not resulted in complete chaos there, the economy is showing signs of stabilization, and there is a good shot of actually getting some level of healthcare reform passed.  I think it is easy to find some degree of fault with each one of these, but if this were a company and I was on the board, I would feel the CEO is doing a good job as a leader.

The ultimate responsibility of a board member is to replace a CEO.  That is also the role of voters.  As such, it doesn’t matter what I think about the details of any particular decision (most of that would be second guessing with a fraction of the information), but rather what I believe about the overall effectiveness.  I sure wish more people would take that view, but in the meantime, I am glad that at least the President seems to think that is more important to be effective than right (or in this case: popular).

This morning I am meeting with the principal at our kids’ elementary school.  I am hoping to convince him that touch typing is more important for the kids to learn than good hand writing.  When I look at my total output these days, a tiny fraction of it involves pen and paper.  But I do write a lot every day on a computer keyboard.

I find that writing blog posts, answering emails, putting together presentations (and most of all coding) all benefit greatly from my ability to touch type.  I did not learn it in school in Germany, but lucked out when I came to the States and had my host family there suggest that it would be a useful skill (I learned on an IBM Correcting Selectric type writer, the one with the ball head).

It is of course conceivable that keyboard input too will become antiquated.  I grant that possibility, but until then, touch typing is amazingly useful.  There are now a number of free learning to type programs online.  The one that looks best is TypingWeb, although I would love to find one that was more like a video game.