“Tell the entrepreneur what you really think (in private) week”: June 19-25
You know an entrepreneur. She(/he) is struggling, working hard to get her company going. She asks you: “So, what do you think?” What do you say?
Yes, of course. You say “It’s great, very promising”. There! You just betrayed your friendship, did the worst possible thing for her, and I thought you were a good friend!
Entrepreneurs live on feedback, thrive on feedback, die for feedback. If they cannot handle feedback, they should give up and go get a job on in a big corp where they can sit in a cubicle preparing TPS reports. Feedback makes them successful. Saying “It’s nice, great, bla bla” makes them fail, doesn’t help them.
Unfortunately people think they are being nice when they hold back their real opinions. But no more. This week is the official “Tell the entrepreneur what you really think (in private) week”. Tell her in private or send an email. Tell her all the things that were going through your mind when she made you sit through that pre-pre-alpha demo.
He will thank you for it. I know I would.
Top 9 Business Advice from the Founder of Sony
Akio Morita’s “Made in Japan” is an excellent book which was recommended to me very highly by a friend of mine. Here’s top 9 advice from the book:
1) Positioning and finding the customers: When Sony came up with their first tape recorder which was the size of a suitcase, they were baffled by why nobody was rushing to buy them. Then, Morita-san, an engineer, forcefully realized: having a unique technology and being able to make unique products are not enough to keep a business going. You have to sell the products and to do that you have to show the potential buyer the real value of what you are selling. So, he knew that to sell their recorder they would have to identify the people and institutions that would be likely to recognize the value in the product.
They realized, at the time there was an acute shortage of stenographers, so they went to the Japan Supreme Court and they sold 20 machines almost instantly!
2) Adding value: It’s ok to license or use someone else’s technology if you add value on top of that. Sony licensed the first transistor technology from Bell Labs. It was ground-breaking at the time, but it was not enough. They came up with the ingenius idea of trying the negative-positive-negative configuration for the transistor, hence making the transistor faster since negative electrons move faster than positive ones. Along with trying and perfecting the “phosphorus doping” method which Bell Labs said was unusable, they came up with the first commercially-feasible transistor in their transistor radio.
3) Perseverance and vision: Texas Instruments was the first company to put out a transistor radio but TI gave up the product without putting much effort into marketing it. As the first in the field, they might have capitalized on their position and created a tremendous market for their product as Sony. But they apparently misjudged that there was no future in the business of small, portable radios and gave up.
4) Value of the perception of the company: Morita-san believed that a trademark is the life of an enterprise and that it must be protected boldly. A trademark and a company name are not just clever gimmicks-they carry responsibility and guarantee the quality of the product.
5) Marketing is almost everything: This advice is for the entrepreneurs coming from a technical background. Marketing is really a form of communication. It’s educating the customers to the uses of your products. Without this, the company will surely fail.
6) Innovation vs Market Research: This advice is a bit controversial. Sony’s plan from the beginning was to lead the public with new products rather than ask them what kind of products they want. Morita-san believes the public does not know what is possible. So instead of doing a lot of market research, Sony refined their thinking on a product and its use and tried to create a market for it by educating and communicating with the public. Examples: Walkman, Betamax, Consumer video cameras, etc. Morita-san asserts that no amount of market research could have come up with Sony Walkman idea or predicted that it would be so successful.
7) Trust your vision: When Sony came up with their first small pocket transistor radio, Morita-san came to New York to sell it to the American market. At the time they were desperate for cash and were barely making their payroll. The people at Bulova loved the product. They said “We definitely want some of these. We will take one hundred thousand units.” Morita-san was stunned, it was an incredible order, worth several times the total capital of Sony at the time. But they said there was one condition: Sony would have to put the Bulova name on the radios.
That stopped Morita-san. When he started Sony, he had vowed that they would not be Original Equipment Manufacturers(OEM) for other companies. So he refused the order despite everyone around him thinking he was crazy. Bulova told him nobody knew Sony’s name but with Bulova’s name on the radios, they would be sold like hotcakes. Morita-san said: “I am now taking the first step for the next fifty years of my company. Fifty years from now I promise you that our name will be just as famous as your company name is today”.
Management: Morita-san always looked for people who can be persuasive, can make people want to cooperate with them, for management positions, as management is not dictatorship. Also the performance of a manager is measured by how well that manager can organize a large number of people and how effectively he or she can get the highest performance from each of the individuals and blend them into a coordinated performance.
9) Employees: The business does not start does not start out with the entrepreneur organizing his company around the worker as a tool. He starts a company and then he hires personnel to realize his/her idea, but once he hires employees he must regard them as colleagues or helpers, not as tools for making profits. There has to be mutual respect and a sense that the company is the property of the employees and not of a few top people.
NYU ITP Spring Show 2008
The NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program Spring Student Show was great yesterday. The student projects were all very impressive, and this was one of the best shows in recent years.
The main theme this year was physical objects connected, networked, interacting with users and software. Waves of Leaves was one of my favorites for combining art esthetics with interaction:
Loyalty, WiiDraw, Funji, Blogicks, Moving Parts were all project combining physical setups with software and very impressive. Another interesting project:
There were also some very interesting software projects, for example Virtual Curator, imightlikeu, HanaHana, PostFort, Claymation for Curriculum (watch a claymation movie made by 9-year olds!). ITP is definitely feeding the New York technology companies with great talent. The projects were so good that later in the day, when I made it to the NY Tech Meetup, I felt like it was the continuation of the same show 
The new “exit strategy”: quit…very publicly
Getting bought out, IPO and now there is one more exit strategy for startups: quit. give up. shut everything down. But do it very publicly.
Startups running low on funds, not getting through to the investors’ mindset, lingering on and on without traction or any real prospects can attract lots of attention from the media by quitting very publicly.
Take, for example, Mowser. Russell Beattie’s comments on his blog drew so much attention from the media and public that he says he got multiple offers to acquire his assets the same day. So Mowser was sold to another company pretty quickly. I don’t see how this could have happened if Russell Beattie had kept on going, thinking he is surviving The Dip and just forging ahead. Of course Seth Godin suggests also considering quitting as another smart option but he should have added “if you decide to quit, quit very publicly”.
Another example is Eran Hammer-Lahav who I know and admire personally. He quit working on his startup recently and due to his involvement with open standards such as OAuth and his visibility, he joined Yahoo as an open source evangelist. But again, Eran was smart enough to do his quitting very publicly and sharing his experiences very openly with the New York startup community, he was all over the media, which might have helped his prospects for his new highly-visible position.
So, all startups out there, not surviving The Dip, quit today but with fireworks.
Share your real location with your friends for free
There are some things that set Unype apart from other location-based services:
1) Tight integration with Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Ning, Bebo, Friendster and Orkut. You don’t have to register, you don’t have to tell Unype your name, you don’t have to re-enter your friends list in Unype. Unype knows everything from your social network, so it just lets you use that information inside Unype.
2) Unype lets you communicate with users from other social networks in real-time. You can even add them as a contact in Unype if you want to keep track of them. For example, a Facebook user can add a MySpace user as a contact and then see that user’s Unype event stream.
3) You can go around the world in Unype on the map or in Google Earth and interact with people in different locations. We call this your ‘virtual location’.
4) You can also set your ‘real location’ to share with your friends in Unype using:
a) Twitter. Activate your twitter account in Unype. Then update your real location from Twitter. Example: “d unype Having lunch L:350 Broadway, New York, NY”
b) iPhone. (Soon) Go to m.unype.com. No downloads. Works in the browser. Accept to share your real-location with your friends. Walk around. Unype will share your real-location on the map only with your friends.
c) Web client. Go to unype.com or go to your social network’s Unype client. Select ‘Mark real location’.
5) All this, is free. No signup. No monthly fees. No “You are on Sprint, I am on Verizon” problems.
Soon, you will be able to see your friends’ real locations and send them instant messages inside Unype from Twitter, iPhone or the web. And yes, it will still be free. So you will see that your friend is at a cafe and message him/her directly from Unype on the map or Google Earth.
