September 15th is always a rough day for me. Today would have been my dad’s (Pops as we called him) 64th birthday. Although it’s been 6 years since he passed, time doesn’t really make things go away, it just puts lots of other distractions in the way.

On the way to the cemetery this morning, I was thinking back to the complicated relationship I had with my dad. It started quite early in life I suppose. I was the one he placed the most hope in. He was set on me being a doctor and I played that game right up until the very last minute, then squandered it all. It just wasn’t for me.

I suppose, that was the pivotal moment where potential turned to expectation. My dad was an awesome salesperson - he used to hold the record for the most houses sold in one year for NY (50+ in the 70s). Not bad for a guy who stopped school at the 8th grade and made the jump from Guyana to America with essentially nothing to tow.

It’s a wonderful story really, and one I take inspiration from. I often awe at how much they were able to do with so little. I’m more often ashamed at how little it seems we can do today with the same. I think it’s part of the immigrant work ethic, but everyone’s got a dream and they work hard to pursue it. I’m no different now.

It’s ironic that my dad would be surprised that I would end up running my own business. For my entire life I was surrounded by one of the most enterprising families I’ve ever met. We didn’t have a lot when they first came here and that made it even more rewarding I suppose. From the ripe age of 8 or 9, I already started “working angles” and figuring out where there were business opportunities. It’s in my blood, what could I do?

So the best lessons learned were to be ambitious, be persistent, and be charming (my dad could sell ice to eskimos if he had to). I’ve picked up all of those attributes, at least I think. I don’t know how to NOT do that stuff actually.

The B-side to this tale is also really important. I was thinking today how it’s equally important to realize what you’re NOT, when comparing yourself to a role model. Sometimes, the things you don’t like might be more insightful.

For all my dad was, he was also largely absent. In fact, my grandmother, rest her soul, was the one that raised my brother and I. My parents were out fighting the good fight and that takes a lot of time and sacrifice. It’s no surprise to me that now I’m outright scared of starting a family - I don’t want to be absent.

He was also severely focused. My dad knew all kinds of interesting things - I just wasn’t old enough to share in most of them. The biggest shame really was that when I finally was old enough to “hang” with him, he was taken from us. It’s important to know how to relate to the people you love - that almost always means taking an interest in many things that are directly in front of you. Again, I’m not surprised I’m like this too.

Perhaps the biggest difference between he and I was in our views on the world. My dad had a good heart (the spiritual kind). He did his share of charity and was involved with his church. At the same time, he was a no-fooling kind of guy when it came to business. Unfortunately, that often lead him to the path of most revenue, regardless of what it meant otherwise. I’m the complete opposite and it’s what drove the friction between us.

My focus in the past has largely been on “building”. Perhaps I’m just more socially-minded, or perhaps I just don’t have that killer instinct, but I’ve always cared what the other parties were getting as well. My dad would be able to measure me using a calculator - it all depended on how much I was making. I can’t measure things on that alone. It’s valid in lots of contexts, but it’s not what life is about.

So that’s the short version. The moral being that for everything good we see in people, it’s important to remember where they’re coming from and what drives them. If those motivations are different than yours, maybe it’s actually not the best advice - especially if it comes with too high of a price.

Last night, I came across a really great quote from a familiar name, Bill Reichert:

If you examine the DNA of the New Entrepreneur, you will see many traits that characterize the earlier versions: the desire to do something different, the boldness to follow a different path, and the persistence to follow through in spite of extraordinary obstacles. And you will also see some new traits: The New Entrepreneurs are more battle scarred, less innocent, more realistic, less delusional, more bootstrap-oriented, less dependent on traditional venture capital, more operational, and less IPO-focused. They are less naive and have more business discipline and savvy. This business savvy comes not from getting an M.B.A., but rather from living through the last 10 years and trying to launch new businesses during the dramatic rollercoaster we experienced. The entrepreneurs we see today are, frankly, more capable than they were in the 80s and 90s-and they have to be.

The New Entrepreneur reflects the new requirements for success in the new environment in which companies are being created and grown. First of all, there is no such thing as a lone entrepreneur in a successful high-tech startup. Although individuals become the icons for companies and entrepreneurship, the real story is that every successful company is truly built by a team. This has always been true: Packard had his Hewlett, Gates had his Allen, Jobs had his Wozniak, Yang had his Filo. Today, it is even more true and more necessary.

Source: Larta.org, “The New Entrepreneur” via Business Opportunities Weblog

I first met Bill at one of the now infamous Garage.com Bootcamps many years back. That was when the DotBomb landgrab was still very much alive and inexperienced me wanted to learn about the process. More recently, however, I had the pleasure of working with Bill during the Art of the Start Conference - the first event we recorded Sparkcasts for.

The big difference was about the 6 years in between those meetings. It’s a difference Bill quite succinctly characterized above. I’ve had to express this many times recently as I’ve been recruiting my team. One thing I’ve mentioned is that now feels like the first time I have all my ducks in a row. Perhaps most telling is that this education didn’t come cheaply. Roughly speaking, I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn what I know. Though there’s almost always more failure to talk about than success, I wouldn’t change a thing. The VCs weren’t the only ones to lose their shirts.

Are you a new entrepreneur or just an old one with new clothes? Your answer might surprise you.

For the last few weeks, I have had a keen interest in the work the Ojos guys have been doing. If you haven’t seen it yet, then I highly recommend checking it out. Of course, I can’t really say WHY I am interested just yet, but that’s all in the works.

As part of my interest, I’ve been subscribed to Munjal Shah’s (the CEO) blog, Recognizing Deven. I guess in many ways I commiserate with Munjal as we’re in similar situations in terms of what we can and can’t talk about regarding our businesses. If you don’t read his blog now, I recommend it for any entrepreneur in the software side of things.

I could probably write about every post he’s made with a similar experience, so I’ll start with one from today. In Seeing Is Hearing, he writes:

Frankly hearing the feedback was just too personal for me. When I build a product like this one it is an extension of myself. When I was at Andale (the last company I co-founded) people told me there was an issue with the product, I always felt that I let them down. When they told me they loved it I was elated.

The truth is, no one who has ever invented anything can handle criticism all that well. In countless conversations with people about business and entrepreneurship, I’ve uttered the words “This business is an extension of me”. It’s not surprising that there’s little to no distinction between personal and work time in my life (as sad as that may sound). My happiness is woefully tied to the ultimate success of my business.

Of course, it’s hard for me to rationalize it out of the picture either. For anyone who’s heard my Pessimist pitch, you know my fuel tank analogy, if you haven’t - here’s the 15 word primer: “Running your own business is like driving a car, you need gas to keep going”. There’s the obvious financial metaphor there, but for me, it means the will to fight it out.

I’ve met too many entrepreneurs that can’t manage the Pessimists well enough. Pessimists pretty much are the forces that consume gas (your friends, family, co-workers, competitors, and the like). What ends up happening is this fuel quickly gets depleted and people simple don’t have it left in them to continue.

Uncovering the things that drain your tanks is useful. Discovering ways to refuel it is priceless.

We’ve been working on the release of a new project for longer than I can remember anymore. It’s hard sleeping at nights thinking about just how much needs to be done and worst working through the days hoping something new will be ready soon.

This secret project is probably the biggest thing I’ve ever challenged myself with (and I’ve dreamed up some doozies in my time). It all started 2+ years ago and I’ve been refactoring those ideas for the entire time. I’ve walked down many pathways, written many versions and revisions, and had more than my share of false starts. Perhaps the light at the end of this tunnel is my wonderful team.

Building a team is really an organic experience. Putting a bunch of bright people together in a room is certainly no recipe for success, though it isn’t that bad either. When I was in college stocking up on sociology goodies, one of the more interesting concepts was that of limerance. If you don’t know, it’s describes that initial period in new relationships where you’re floating on cloud 9 and have no worries in the world. Of course, we all know what generally happens to that -
it comes crashing down.

The lesson to be learned here, of course, is that while it’s easy to fall in love with individuals, the more important part is their love of the team. When I first assembled the team I am working with, I was quite intentional to over-populate. It’s always been my experience that despite the inital love affair with a project, for some people there’s not much time for limerance. Just like relationships, team members can quickly fall out of love too.

While I was in Utah last week, Duane and I had plenty of time to talk about all sorts of things. One conversation that I remember was regarding the team members. I told Duane I only want to work with people that have passion for what we’re doing, nothing less would do. Why? Without passion, it’s just a paycheck. And in a startup, sometimes paychecks are hard to come by.

People with passion, they’ll hold out as long as possible, people on the job take the money and run. The people I am working with, I know they enjoy what we’re building. Can you say the same for your team? How do you keep passion levels up?

I’ve been here working with one of my partners on our secret project. It’s been really interesting getting to work in person after collaborating online for about a month now on various things.

I don’t care what anyone says, technology just can’t replace good, old-fashioned face-to-face work (well not yet at least). We’re getting so much more done now that we can quickly pass through things that take hours to type out.

The best tool to have, 2 whiteboards and an Edirol. We’ve been using two whiteboards in the meeting room. It’s great to have the main board as your focal area - the main discussion is there. Of course, then you need to figure some other nugget out so you can jump to the second board to do that.

Once we’re done, we snap some pictures of them and are posting them up to Basecamp for the other developers to see and comment on. It’s really powerful to work this way.

In addition, I’ve got my Ediorol R-1 sitting on the table as well. It’s got great microphones and we’re getting the entire conversation recorded as well so you can follow along based on the audio and photos.

The last tool - a stack of index cards. We’re getting down to using these today. some of them are for sketches. However, our main goal is to define larger tasks and then to break them into smaller tasks - giving us the opportunity to tear up those old ones when they’re done.

At the end of the day, we’ll map those cards into To-Do items in Basecamp, assign them to folks, and be on our way.

It’s almost scary that it’s actually fun!

After a rather annoying late flight out of JFK, I finally arrived in Salt Lake City this morning at 12:30AM. It took me about an hour to get setup, downloaded, and tucked in. But all is well and good.

I’m off to Provo in an hour or so to meet with one of my new partners to do a coding retreat for the next few days. We’ll be locking ourselves in the hotel and finalizing out specifications before jumping in and getting the project out the door.

If anyone is in the Provo area and would like to meet up, please drop me a comment here or send me an e-mail to greg AT sparkcard DOT com. If you’re a Ruby/Rails head, I’d really like to meet up.

Last week I was meeting with my friends over at Corante. We were engaged in a day-long session on how we will be rolling out new technology and services to the public over the next few months.

One of the topics of discussion, of course, was the availabilty of APIs for other developers to leverage in their own applications. I raised the case to the gang that RSS was indeed our first layer to the API. It provides a static, yet up-to-date method for accessing the site’s data. This was the strategy I took with the Sparkcasting.com site as well - the entire site renders from the RSS that anyone can use.

Of course, Hylton plants a nice pointer on me today that talks exactly about this:

RSS is like an API for content. RSS gives you access to a web site’s data just like an API gives you access to a web site’s computing power. Most important, RSS gives you access to your data that you have locked up on a web site.

Source: Nivi, “RSS is an API for Content”

Are you using RSS as your API? Can you point to some examples?

There’s a time to keep secrets and there’s a time to shout it from the tops of buildings. I’m good at keeping other people’s secrets. Hell, I’m good at keeping my own secrets - except when it comes to my ideas.

I’ve always believed that ideas need to breathe a bit. I’ve gotten very protectionist as of late as we’ve seen many things co-opted, borrowed, and outright stolen from our quiver. And let me tell you - nothing hurts more than hacing something precious taken from you.

Funny exchange with Pete this morning drives at the point:

MadMonkNYC: i think my appendix is gonna burst soon if I don’t announce my site

MadMonkNYC: haha

pc4media: yeah. when is it launching?

MadMonkNYC: we’re actively building now

…

MadMonkNYC: sneaaak.

MadMonkNYC: http://youwish.com

pc4media: oooh oooh

MadMonkNYC: http://iwishmore.com

MadMonkNYC: i thought you’d like that ;)

See now I can afford that little release since Pete can keep a secret too. And ya know what, it felt good to show it to someone for the first time!

UPDATE: We’ll be getting our blog up and running today. Still have to do some writing for that, but it’s a step in the right direction.

If you’re like me, you probably were right in the middle of all the madness during the dot.bomb days. It was difficult as an entrepreneur back then to sit still while companies were getting mega funding for completely trivial ideas (anyone need some dog food delivered?).

Of course, it only served me the better. Post.bomb, I managed to walk away without injury and could demand higher rates simply because I actually knew what the heck I was doing. I still would have taken the millions, mind you.

Lately, it feels like redemption is near. 9 years ago, I knew about 1/2 of what I needed to know and 1/4 of the people I needed to know. Today, I get what was missing then. Web 2.0 - I like the concept for many reasons. Perhaps my favorite, however, is it’s also the next generation of me.

I smiled when I saw this yesterday (thanks Charlie):

“The focus on “eyeballs” sounds like 1990’s bubble investing, but the difference is that bubble investors valued eyeballs no matter how expensively they were acquired (since capital was free). We are looking for organic growth–the kind that’s easy even bubble-scarred for VC’s to mentally extrapolate into a large capital-efficient business.”

Source: Who Has Time For This?, “Consumer Investing (2)”

I smiled because I’m hopeful that it means this time, the right things will see the light of day.

If Web 2.0 was all about the technology, the world would be run by geeks.