The best thing I learnt after 8 years and what you can too... In one.

A couple of months back, I had my Great Marketing Works work anniversary. I know this as lots and lots of people congratulated me on LinkedIn. Which I am forever grateful for.

But it all got me to thinking? After 8 years what had we done? So I started looking at it all.

How – the big question. 

How many clients? More than 100.

How many training sessions and talks. More than 500.

How many consultancy gigs. More than a 1000.

How long did clients stay for ? Between 1 talk and 8 years!

Which sector did I get client from? More than 70% of our clients came from the education and training sectors. Ironically, for us,  they were also the worst paying sector per client. But I do love education so...

So… How much a day? From £50 (once) to £5000 (once.) But with the public sector paying less and less each year. And the private sector paying more and more.

All interesting stuff BUT…  None of this really informed me about me. It was just the business.

The What’s. The bigger questions. 

But then I found an old piece of paper. On it I had written down answers to an exercise my mentor had set me many moons ago. I had kept this piece of paper on my wall but never really looked at it and I now had the chance to do the exercise again and compare and contrast my answers.

Was I really on track?

My simple suggestion is that you write down the answers to the questions below.

And then in a year or two (probably not 8) come back to them and do it again. Have you changed? Are you on track? Should you take a day off to celebrate or commiserate?

My mentor questions. 

1. What activities do you like to be doing? 

2. What skills would you like to be using? 

3. What impact would you like to make? 

4. Who would you like to work with? 

5. What would you like to learn about? 

6. What values would you like to live out? 

7. What environment do you want to work in? 

8. What would success look like to you?

These are my answers separated by the 8 years since I started Great Marketing Works. 

1. What activities do you like to be doing? 

2009:  Talking, writing, doing tech stuff with big screens.

2017:  Inspiring people. Talking with people. Being inspired myself.

2. What skills would you like to be using? 

2009:  NLP, public speaking and teaching.

2017:  My talking skills, writing, marketing strategy around startups.

3. What impact would you like to make? 

2009:  On my bottom line and become slightly famous.

2017:  On my family / personal life and health.

4. Who would you like to work with? 

2009:  Honest people, proactive people, front runners, creatives.

2017:  People I like and respect and can go for a beer with.

5. What would you like to learn about? 

2009:  Google, PPC, Social, Mailchimp and Salesforce.

2017:  Myself. How to raise my daughter well. AI. Probably coding and tech. And finances.

6. What values would you like to live out? 

2009: Love, Respect and Creativity.

2017: Love, Creativity, Respect, Integrity. Kaizen if possible.

7. What environment do you want to work in? 

2009:  A fun one, a high tech one, a stable one.

2017:  A warm one. A dry (ish) one. A safe one. A progressive one.

8. What would success look like to you?

2009:  2 houses, 2 offices, family living near the beach with a stable work environment.

2017:  Living abroad, warm and safe, with a happy family, with no real money worries.

So had I changed that much? 

Should I take a day off to celebrate or commiserate?

To commiserate: From the last 8 years. 

- We never moved to the beach. But we did live near one for 4 months.

- I didn’t work with many front runners. But had some very cool clients.

- I got "ripped off" - a lot – so not all my clients or business partners were honest.

To celebrate: From the last 8 years. 

- Became a paid public speaker and trainer.

- Touched the lives of over 50,000 people.

- Became an expert at digital marketing and social media.

- Co founded other businesses like Follogro and FFFlip.

- Went on the BBC many times – heck – so perhaps I became slightly famous.

- I did at one point have 2 houses and 2 offices.

- With my clients now I have a stable work environment.

So today I took the day off. 

A HUGE thanks to all those who have been on the journey with me. Some of you as clients for Great Marketing Works. Some as friends and peers. Many of you as both.

All you have been part of it.

Thanks. 

And thanks to you for reading this too. Now get something from it. Copy and paste the above questions and quickly do the exercise. Write down the answers to the questions above. Come back to it in a year and thank yourself for doing it.

How could use Disruptive Innovation to advance your thinking and your career?

A really nice blog from Jeff Shuey

Jeff is an expert in the Enterprise Content Management industry. He brings over 20 years of Channel Sales, Partner Marketing and Alliance expertise to audiences around the world in speaking engagements and via his writing. 

He has worked for Microsoft, Kodak, K2 and Gimmal. Follow him on Twitter @jshuey or on LinkedIn: in/JeffShuey

The blog is all about how could use Disruptive Innovation to advance your thinking and your career?

It's quite funny as without realising it - I have been doing this for years. Now it has a name - I will double my efforts by doing it consciously, see below ... 

"First, let’s think about what Disruptive Innovation (otherwise known as DI) means.

A disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a newmarket and value network ~via Wikipedia

Using DI thinking can certainly impact long held business models. A few business that have been impacted by Disruptive Innovations are listed below and followed by some of the businesses that stepped in to replace them.

• Tower Records –> Napster (now Pandora, Spotify, iTunes and many others)
• Blockbuster –> Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc.
• Travel Agents / Agencies –> Expedia, Kayak, et al

In the first example the original disruptive innovator, Napster, has already been DI’d by new entrants. Which only proves the point that DI thinking is an effort that never ends. Very much like your career. You need to constantly be on the lookout for a different way to do something.

You could argue that Uber - the DI of the taxi industry is going to be DI'ed by Justaxi - the Manchester cheeky up start / start up. 

However, the same principles can be applied to your Career Development. For example:

• In education: Instead of 4 years for university –> Consider MOOC’s.
• (Which is what I did to learn about gamifaction with University of Penn) 
• Instead of climbing the corporate ladder –> Create your own ladder
• (Which is what I am going to do with my own mobile games company) 
• In lieu of solving the same old problems –> Develop new ways of thinking that focus on higher value customer needs
• (Again my plan for mobile games - that can become gifts for people....) 

First, seek to understand the business you are really in. Make no mistake… a career is a business. It’s the most important business you will ever invest your time and energy into and you’ll be doing it for a long time. So, make the most of it.

To understand your business and to think a little more sideways you should start by asking different questions, experimenting with new models, and looking for different ways to add value in ways that have not been considered.

For example, if you went to school to become an engineer:

• What are you actually creating?
• What benefit are you really delivering?
• Are there different ways you can deliver value to the customer?

These same questions can be applied to almost any career. Whether you studied accounting, drama or zoology.

Seek to Out Innovate Yourself

This may seem like an oxymoron, but when you think about it you need stay ahead of the competition. Where the competition is not necessarily the person in the cube next to you. The competition is yourself. 

You want to do more tomorrow. But, you don’t always need to work longer hours. The old cliché is true here… you want to Work Smarter, Not Harder. When you do your ability to brand yourself as an innovator will be preceded by your ability to think differently, ask tough questions and deliver stellar results."

Wise words Jeff - which is why I popped then up here... 

£10,000 prize for the best growth idea! @lawrencelnt is giving it away - to that I say fair play!

Now here is a man who is putting his money where his mouth is...and probably getting some great PR because of it - so it qualifies as #greatmarketing too. 

Lawrence Tomlinson, Serial Entrepreneur in Residence at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, is giving away his £10,000 salary to whomever submits the best growth idea.

So do you have a good idea to boost growth in the UK? If your idea is the best you’ll win £10,000!

If so then Lawrence wants to hear your innovative ideas, big or small, on what practical steps the government could take to generate growth.

In return, alongside the £10,000 prize, you will receive mentoring from Lawrence on your own business aspirations. Lawrence will then bring your idea to the attention of Business Secretary Vince Cable.

The competition will run until the end of Global Entrepreneurship Week when the winner will be announced on Friday 22 November 2013. 

To enter visit www.lntgroup.co.uk/competition.

Follow Lawrence on Twitter: @lawrencelnt

Fair play to Lawrence is all I can say - someone putting up the prize money for a great idea - very very Richard Branson. 

 Not only is this great to get PR but it shows his own brand values in a very positive light, it does the opposite to what most people in the public sector are doing, and pretty much means that he will be a legend for BIS. 

All together what great marketing should be about. Something remarkable, something that has integrity, something that over delivers and something that makes people change their thoughts on something. Fair play to BIS is all I can say - it's about time they employed some people with some skills in entrepreneurship. 

Can your business say the same thing? Are you willing to take risks? Even personal ones? Would your employees put their wages on the line? Would you let them? 

It's an interesting world we are living in. I don't think that EnterMobile (brandable mobile games) would qualify to enter the competition but you never know.

A great post about which investors might invest in you and when

Someone who is a LOT wiser than me in such ways - blogged the below - and so I pop it here to remind me.

I get asked a lot by founders which investors might invest in their startups (as I'm sure most investors do).

There are two sides to the answer.

The first side is what investors are right for you? I'm not going to cover that side in detail here because it is a big topic and I want to cover the other side, but know that side is just as important. You want people that can help you but also that you really want to work with for many years.

The second side -- which investors will actually invest in you -- depends on your traction.

Traction is of course in the eye of the beholder (and that's one problem with using the word itself). Generally speaking though, the more sustainable growth of engaged users/customers you have, and eventually the more sustainable growth of revenue/earnings you have, the more investors will be willing to invest in you.

The smaller your perceived traction the more you have to focus on investors that would invest in your idea and team. OK, so who is that?

When you're just starting out and have just an idea on a napkin, you're really asking people to invest in your team. There is so much risk in the execution of your idea (which may likely change dramatically) that investors are more making a bet on you personally.

There are currently two groups of investors that regularly invest only in teams:

1) Friends and family; in other words, people that really know you. I'm surprised how little I see founders take friends and family money (including their own money). It actually sends a very positive signal to the next series of investors even if it is a smallish sum of money, say 20K. You had enough conviction to put in your own money and put your reputation on the line with your family.

2) Accelerators. There is one or more in almost every major city now. This relatively new funding source dramatically opened up early money to teams, but you generally can't get too far on it alone.

A third category is also emerging in crowd funding.

After you get your team moving and have started actually building something (but don't have any real traction yet), you open up the investor universe just a little bit further to include investors who really buy into your idea.

Who is that?

Those are people who generally have deep expertise into what you're trying to disrupt. Look for investors that invested in the same general technology area (e.g. search) or previously sold a company similar to yours.

It is very hard to to convince investors when you have no traction. Your story itself is either going to click or it isn't, and it is much much more likely to click if the investor deeply knows the background to what you're doing already. Think about it. If the investor doesn't have the knowledge to see the obvious disruption that you see then they'll have to educate themselves on all that background knowledge to get to the same point you are.

Once you have some traction, the universe opens up further. But even with a lot of traction the universe of investors that will actually invest in you is still small.

Investors have investing theses -- these can include a whole host of factors like geography, market size, technology area, valuation, amount invested, ownership requirements, control requirements, etc. When you match your company to these investing theses, most investors get excluded even for companies that have a decent amount of traction.

Luckily the investing theses are pretty well-known. A quick proxy is to look at companies an investor has already invested in; that is, their portfolio. If these seem to match you then you're probably in the right area.

Another way to look at this whole question is risk. When you start out you have a lot of risks in different areas, e.g. team, technical, market, financing, etc.

As you de-risk these areas with actual traction, more investors will want to invest in you simply because the deal is less risky. You also get valuation bumps as a result.

Your friends and family don't need traction to de-risk the team because they already know you. Knowledgeable investors (in your specific area) need less traction to de-risk technical and market risk because they already know your area.

As a corollary, if you're out raising money and people think you're crazy, you don't have enough traction yet to be talking to those people.

The main takeaway is to make sure you are focusing your efforts on raising money from the investors that might actually invest in you.

The strange psychology of getting funding through the crowd

Am thinking about crowdfunding my next project / app - so this is interesting...

The strange psychology of getting funding through the crowd... as setting a higher goal doesn't mean you get more money :)

Campaigns that set their goal to be between $50,000 – $75,000 raise more money on average than campaigns that set their goal to be $100,000.

This happens for two key reasons:

First, a lot of evidence shows keeping campaign momentum up is a high driver for success:

85% of campaigns that reach their goal receive their first contribution on the first day of their campaign.
The probability a campaign will reach its goal quadruples once it reaches 10% of its goal.
Campaigns that reach their goal usually raise 1/3 of their goal in the first quarter of their fundraising deadline.

Setting what seems like a reasonable goal and reaching it at an exciting rate can be more psychologically invigorating to your fans, friends, and followers. Having too high of a goal slows this down, often at the campaign’s misfortune. Raising $20,000 in one week when your goal is $50,000 is exciting- raising $20,000 in one week when your goal is $150,000 is much less so.

The second reason is that 87% of campaigns that reach their goal exceed it, and 45% exceed it by more than 10%. On average, they exceed their goal by 31%. The closer you are to your goal the more credibility your campaign has. People who might not have been inclined to participate early on, might feel compelled to contribute when you are closer to your goal, or even after you have exceeded it. Telling people what you plan on doing with the additional funds after you reach your goal can direct and justify these post-goal contributions.

The Dark Potential’s First Miniatures began trying to raise $10,000 to create a humble starter set for a miniature war game. As they quickly approached and exceeded their goal, they added extra perks and bonuses for their funders. They were able to design and produce many more miniatures than they initially set out to, and even created an illustrated history for their game. They exceeding their goal by almost nine times raising $89,894!

Angry Video Game Nerd initially set out to raise $75,000 to cover a small portion of the production of their film. Once they hit their goal, it became evident that their fans wanted to cover a larger portion of the film production! They also wanted a lot of the unique exclusive perks that were offered after the goal was reached. They ended up raising $325,927 – more than 4 times their goal- making Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie the 2nd highest online, fan funded film of all time.

Young start ups and then grey hairs - is this the only way to do it?

All the below is taken from If, Why, and How Founders Should Hire a “Professional” CEO written by the legendary Reid Hoffman from Linkedin / GreyLock etc and it wonderfully answers a question a friend and potential client asked me the other day.

"Who should we hire next?"

20 years ago, the classic startup model was to have young founders start a breakthrough company, then bring in “grey hair” in the form of experienced executives once it was time to scale the business. Key examples included Cisco, Yahoo, eBay, Google, and many smaller companies. In the last decade, however, that common wisdom has shifted, at least for consumer internet companies. The new received wisdom is that the best entrepreneurs can stay CEO through the entire growth cycle of the company. Think of Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, or the late Steve Jobs. My partners at Greylock and I have invested in a number of young founding CEOs who match this pattern and are doing a fantastic job leading their companies through hypergrowth, such as Brian Chesky of AirBnB and Drew Houston of Dropbox. The question is, why has this shift occurred?

Last year, Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz articulated a well-thought-out philosophy on why he prefers to back Founder-CEOs and keep them in charge as the company grows. His essay, “Why We Prefer Founding CEOs” lays out three key ingredients that great founding CEOs tend to have, and that professional CEOs often lack:

Comprehensive knowledge
Moral Authority
Total commitment to the long term

Ben’s point is that without these three key ingredients, a CEO won’t be able to maintain the rapid product innovation that is a prerequisite for success in today’s startup world. Ben cites Google and Cisco as rare exceptions where a professional CEO helped steer a company to market leadership and that the evidence is “one-sided and overwhelming” that you shouldn’t bring in a professional CEO. In other words, Ben asserts that bringing in a professional CEO should be a last resort for a founder.

And yet, many of the greatest success stories of the internet era involve founder/professional CEO partnerships. During the dot com era, Yahoo!’s Tim Koogle helped build Jerry Yang and Dave Filo’s startup into the world’s most valuable internet company. Meanwhile, Meg Whitman helped Pierre Omidyar’s eBay become the second most powerful ecommerce company in the world (trailing only Amazon). The Web 2.0 era provides successful examples like Joe Kennedy and Tim Westergren at Pandora, and the current social era provides even more, including Dick Costolo at Twitter and Tony Zingale and Dave Hersh at Jive.

Sure, there are plenty of cautionary tales about how VCs have ousted founders in favor of “professional CEOs” who run companies into the ground. But it’s hard to call the evidence “one-sided and overwhelming” when there are so many strong counterexamples.

Noam Wasserman of Harvard Business School has been studying what he calls “the founder’s dilemma” for nearly a decade. In his academic paper, “Rich versus King”, he looked at 460 American startups from the 2000s. His statistical analysis showed that, paradoxically, founders maximized the value of their equity stakes by giving up the CEO position and board control: “The results show that, controlling for company size, age, and other factors, the more decision-making control kept (at both the CEO and board levels), the lower the value of the entrepreneur’s equity stake.”

In another study of 212 startups, Wasserman found that it was rare for Founder-CEOs to run their companies in the long term; less than half were still CEO after 3 years, and less than a quarter of the CEOs of the companies that reached an IPO were Founder-CEOs.

I only now personally a few myself, but I know many founders who stop being the CEO before the IPO. I truly believe that you may just need to be a different kind of beast. Reid continues with a great personal example.

Given the evidence that bringing in an outside CEO can often pay off financially and, more importantly, in terms of overall scale and impact of the company, it’s important to explore the possibility—even if it isn’t your first choice. I speak from personal experience, since I hired and partnered with a CEO, Jeff Weiner, very successfully at LinkedIn five years after co-founding the company.

Once you decide to evaluate the option of bringing in a professional CEO for your start-up, the real questions are, “Should I replace myself?” If the answer is “yes,” then “How do we make the transition?” And once you make the transition successfully, “How can I play a constructive long term co-founder role at the company?”

How do I know when to replace myself?

I love the early stages of building a company. The small team, building a brand-new product, out-innovating complacent incumbents…not only is the experience fresh and exciting, it also focuses on the things most founders love—especially technical ones: Solving interesting problems, developing new technologies, devising a unique strategy. But if you’re successful, the job of being CEO shifts dramatically over time. All of a sudden, you need to focus on a different set of challenges and concerns like establishing standard procedures and managing a large number of employees.

To remain successful, you have to be passionate about that kind of work as well. Ask yourself, “What am I focused on? What am I world-class at? What am I really committed to?” The answers will help you determine if you should bring in a CEO.

In my experience, CEOs need to derive satisfaction from the nuts and bolts of building a company, not just building product and articulating the vision. They need to be passionate about leadership, management, and organizational processes as the company scales.

To be a successful growth-stage CEO, you need to be ready to manage a 1,000 person organization and devote substantial time to time consuming things like running meetings and other business process. You can’t just do the exciting stuff like making the final call on product and speaking at conferences, while shuffling off everything else to the mythical COO who loves doing all the dirty work and doesn’t want any of the credit.

I went through this self-examination while I was still CEO of LinkedIn. I have always been passionate and committed, both to the company, and to its mission. I want to enable individual professionals to have more successful careers and to increase the productivity of mankind across entire industries and countries. I want a company that lives up to the original standard that Hewlett-Packard set for Silicon Valley—a great place for high-quality people to work that provides an experience that would continue to benefit them even after they move on to other things.

But as we scaled from a handful of people in my living room to dozens of people at an office, I saw the job of the CEO shifting. At 50 people and beyond, a CEO increasingly has to focus on process and organization, and that wasn’t what I was passionate about. For example, I didn’t like running a weekly staff meeting. I could do it, but I did so reluctantly, not enthusiastically. I’d rather be solving intellectual challenges and figuring out key strategies, not debating which employees should get a promotion, or configuring project timelines.

I co-founded LinkedIn in 2003, and by 2005, after asking myself the key questions about my passion, focus, and commitment, I knew I wanted to bring in a CEO. When I brought this up with my main VC, David Sze at Greylock, he had the same reaction I suspect I would have had: “Are you sure? Couldn’t we just hire a COO and have you stay as CEO?”

I had thought about the COO option, but I knew that the company needed someone who felt like they “owned the ball.” And I was confident I could partner well with a CEO, given my experience partnering with the various CEOs of companies being on the board. What’s more, the kind of person who has the capacity to be a great leader usually wants to be CEO, not COO. Sheryl Sandberg is one of the few great leaders who has been willing to be COO, and even then, she’s a unique COO.

At the time we began the search, I wouldn’t have believed how long the process would take.

After more than a year of searching, we brought Dan Nye in as LinkedIn’s new CEO at the beginning of 2007. Dan Nye came to us as CEO with a strong organizational background, having been a general manager at both Intuit and Advent, where he had responsibility for organizations many times the size of the early LinkedIn. In addition to strong capabilities, Dan is also perfect on integrity and culture. My idea when hiring Dan was that I could handle the product, and he could handle everything else. Dan helped us evolve LinkedIn from a product-focused startup into a complete company. During his time as CEO, he built a real sales department, rebuilt the executive team, and doubled the size of the company. But after a couple of years, I realized that as we continued to make major changes to the product, we needed a CEO who would “own” product as well.

My mistake was thinking you could divorce product strategy from the CEO role. It was a mistake related to the broken “grey-haired supervision” approach to professional CEOs. 20 years ago, you could count on product cycles lasting years, which meant that constantly developing new products and refining the vision was relatively less important than aggressive execution. The “professional” CEO back then just had to be a superb executor for the founder’s vision. The rise of internet time has reduced product cycles to months and weeks. As such, a CEO can’t focus solely on scaling concerns—today, the CEO has to be involved in the product.

So I decided to step back in temporarily as CEO and tried to find a new CEO with consumer internet product experience and organizational experience at scale. (Dan went on to continue being a very successful company builder, becoming the CEO of Rocket Lawyer and, among other successes, quadrupling its revenues.)

James Slavet, a partner at Greylock, introduced me to Jeff Weiner. James and Jeff had worked together at Yahoo!, and Jeff at the time was also an executive-in-residence at Greylock. As I got to know Jeff, I became convinced that he was the right choice to LinkedIn. I believed that Jeff’s experience at Yahoo! could help us by spreading a deep focus on consumer product insight and strategy throughout the entire company.

We named Jeff CEO of LinkedIn in the middle of 2009, about four years after I first approached David Sze about replacing myself.


How do we make the transition?

If it’s ideal for a CEO to have the knowledge, moral authority, and commitment of a founder, the answer is simple: Your transition process should bring the new CEO in as a co-founder of the company, not as an “adult supervisor.” Jack Dorsey has said as much: “Companies have multiple founding moments. I consider Dick Costolo to be a founding member of Twitter.” Dick wasn’t named CEO until 2010, four years after the company’s official start.

Think back to the list of all the successful Founder/CEO pairings. With almost no exceptions, four things were true:

1. The decision to step back from being CEO is a function of self-realization. It doesn’t work if the plan is being externally imposed by investors, for all the reasons Ben H. outlined. If you’re passionate about the nuts and bolts of building your company, and your VC simply thinks they know better, it’s probably a mistake to acquiesce.

2. The outside CEO was brought in early, so that he or she could play a real role in shaping the product, business, organization, and culture of the company. There is one exception to this pattern, which is when a company has lost its way, and the new CEO is essentially re-launching the company. The classic example here is Lou Gerstner, who transformed IBM from a failing hardware company to a services powerhouse.

3. The original team of founders was a small group of two to three people, making it easier to form strong co-founder bonds. Being able to build a trusting relationship is critical. In the cases of both Yahoo! and Google, Jerry/Dave/Tim and Larry/Sergey/Eric built warm and trusting relationships that lasted for years.

4. The new CEO had prior experience running a large organization. The whole point of hiring someone from the outside is to bring in skills and experience you don’t have, which will help scale the company. Here, Sheryl Sandberg represents the classic example—her management and people skills were brought in to complement Mark Zuckerberg’s great product vision and strategy. Notice how even as COO rather than CEO, Sheryl is accorded co-founder status, and is the lynchpin of the company’s management team and strategic decision-making.

Yahoo! presents a particularly fascinating example of these principles at work. When Tim Koogle came in as CEO in 1995, all four principles applied: The founders knew they wanted a CEO, Tim came in early, he formed a tight management triumvirate with the founders, and he had experience running large organizations from his time at Motorola. Later Yahoo CEOs failed to follow these principles, largely sidelining the founders until Jerry Yang’s return.

More recently, Marissa Mayer joined Yahoo at the Lou Gerstner phase—everyone acknowledges that Yahoo! needs to be remade. While her success is far from certain, if she does succeed, she will be viewed as a re-founder, not just a management caretaker.

My own experience bringing Jeff Weiner into LinkedIn stuck pretty close to these four principles.

1. As I’ve already detailed, the decision to bring in a professional CEO was one I initiated back in 2007, after a lot of self-examination.

2. While LinkedIn was already six years old when we brought Jeff in, it was still a relatively small company. Jeff was our 338th employee, and helped us launch our Talent Solutions business, which is now a key revenue driver for us.

3. Thanks to our strong mutual connections via Greylock, Jeff and I were able to bond and build a relationship both before and during the process of bringing him on to the team.

4. When Jeff was an EVP at Yahoo! he ran a 3,000-employee division. Not only was that far larger than LinkedIn at the time, it’s about as many employees as we have today!

What long term role can I play in our company?

I wanted to make sure that people made the shift from looking to me for answers to taking their cues from Jeff. Bringing in a CEO is like performing a brain transplant—you need to wire in a whole new set of connections. If the founder is still in the building, it’s all too easy for people to keeping checking with him on every decision, rather than with the CEO.

When Jeff came in as CEO, I booked a hefty amount of travel for his first 6 months. When employees tried calling me to double-check a decision, I replied, “Sorry, I’m in Rome, talk to Jeff.” Jeff needed build up his own connectivity within the organization. By the time I returned from Europe, those connections were hard-wired.

For Jeff’s part, he went above and beyond to immerse himself in the company. For example, just a few months after Jeff joined LinkedIn, several engineers were sitting around at midnight in between bug fixes for what ultimately turned into a very late night product launch that extended into the wee early morning. One of the engineers decided to pull a graph of their new CEO’s login activity on LinkedIn.com. People were shocked: the only time period during the launch when Jeff was not consistently logged into the site was between 3:30 – 4:00 AM. It turned out he was obsessed with the product quality — just like a true founder. To this day, Jeff is renowned for being one of LinkedIn’s most active users and is known for his ability to catch bugs before our developers.

Today, as Executive Chairman, my office at LinkedIn is next to Jeff’s, and when I’m not on the road or at Greylock, I’m on the LinkedIn campus most of the week. I enjoy helping the team on strategy, corporate and business development, and product vision. The most important thing I do, though, is sync up with Jeff every week about what’s on his mind. In our catch-up meetings, I’m able and willing to challenge his ideas. It’s hard for a CEO to get honest feedback and candid advice; so, provided you do not undercut him or her in the organization, as a founder you can play a uniquely helpful role in this respect. (And any CEO you hire should be eager to accept your honest counsel.) When it works, it makes the loneliest place in an organization—the CEO’s corner office—somewhat less lonely and potentially a lot more effective.

Of course, it might be that you’d rather transition out of a regular role after hiring a CEO. This can work, too. After bringing in Meg Whitman to run eBay, Pierre founded the Omidyar Network to make philanthropic investments, and returned to his native Hawaii where he’s done wonderful work for the community where he grew up. He’s still actively involved in eBay as chairman of the board, but he’s not at the office every week.

Conclusion

20 years ago, venture capitalists were in a hurry to bring in professional CEOs. Today, many of the same VC firms are busy touting their support for long-term Founder-CEOs. Both approaches can work, which means that as an entrepreneur, you should focus less on what’s fashionable, and more on what’s right for you. This is a highly personal decision, and the right answer depends on you and your team—including your co-founders and your VCs. You might be a Steve Jobs, or you might be a Pierre Omidyar. As an investor, I’m willing to back you, even if you’re not sure which one you are yet. In every investment we make, we hope that the Founder-CEO will be able to lead the company to success, but if not, and if you realize as I did that you want to bring in a professional CEO, we’ll work with you to find someone who is a true partner.

So as it turns out, Ben was right. You always do want a Founder-CEO. But that person doesn’t always have to be the Founding CEO. Being there at the start isn’t the only path to being a founder. “Founder” is a state of mind, not a job description, and if done right, even CEOs who join after day 1 can become Founders.

The Kinetic Organisation

The Kinetic Organisation - a really interesting piece from Andrew Mason - well worth a thing about on

http://www.flexibility.co.uk/flexwork/general/andrew-mawson-09-12.htm

The 21st Century alternative to hierarchical organisations - it is my goal to make my next business based on the below principles (a big thanks to Phil Jones from Brother for showing me the light....)

Have you ever wondered how traditional, hierarchical organisations actually work on a day to day basis given all the frustrations of working in them?

Well, earlier this year with the support of our sponsors Regus, AWA’s research team undertook a programme designed to investigate the inefficiencies of traditional organisations and design an organisation better suited to the needs of owners, citizens and society. We have called this the ‘The Kinetic Organisation’.

So what’s actually wrong with ‘traditional organisations’ ?

Layering – Layers of expensive managers act as communication and control nodes, translating, checking and sometimes ‘air brushing’ messages - all adding cost and slowing change.

Creativity - Well qualified middle managers demonstrate their ‘value’ by intellectualising decision-making. They create work and through their desire to ‘protect’ the organisation, make innovation by others difficult.

Silos - Power, investment and resources are deployed in top down ‘divisional’ silos, creating a vertical and downward focus when many processes run across organisations. This makes working and processes sub-optimal.

Contracting for skills – Given economics and market changes, companies' offers of ‘evergreen’ employment contracts is unsustainable. This leads to many broken promises, loss of knowledge and self-confidence.

Change – ‘Change’ is driven by the need for profitability and not the desire to make all processes and operations perpetually competitive, leading often to unemployment and broken promises.

Offices and support services – Commitments to long term, inflexible office leases and support contracts are regarded by leaders as an inevitable cost of doing business, with little concern for business manoeuvrability.

Information Technology – IT is preoccupied with keeping core systems running and protecting the organisation from security risks and doesn't focus enough on personal productivity.

Legacy – ‘Live for today’ leaders focus on maximising profit ‘on their watch’. This involvves making commitments that look cheap but which limit the manoeuvrability of the business for future generations of managers.

Risk – Every business/division with an organisation is treated the same regardless of its specific activities, risk profile and needs. Consequently units can be burdened by process and policy that make no sense.

Time – Organisations don’t really understand what their people are spending time on or the cost of it: time is in effect treated as a ‘free’ resource.

Our conclusion….that the traditional organisation is no longer fit for purpose and that was universally the view of the 70 leaders that took part in the study.

A new model: The Kinetic Organisation

Using the combined input from our community of leaders (focus groups and surveys), our knowledge of the future through our 2020 Visions research programme, our experience of applying alternative models for work, place and organisation in large organisations and our intimate knowledge of running a ‘hierarchy-less’ organisation for nearly 20 years, we have defined ‘The Kinetic Organisation’.

From our study we first nailed down a set of ‘ 6 Fundamentals’ These are a set of organisational design requirements from which everything else flowed, as follows.

The Kinetic Organisation must:

Allow the enterprise to ‘turn on a dime/sixpence’ changing without pain to adapt to new threats, opportunities and economic conditions.

Be well placed to meet its promises to clients, shareholders and people.

Maintain a flexible cost base and infrastructure so that it can ‘inflate’ and ‘deflate’ its operations without incurring penalty costs.

Create a ‘safe’ environment in which people feel able to contribute and share their knowledge and innovation. This includes constructively challenging the way things are done so as to achieve a better end.

Constantly keep its products, services, people skills, capabilities, processes, infrastructure and costs under review to make sure every element of the business always remains fresh and competitive.

Allow elements within each structure to be treated and structured in different ways depending on their risks, activities and the markets in which they operate.

The 20 Operating Principles of the Kinetic Organisation

We drew on lessons from sport, terrorism, academia and nature to build 20 Operating Principles. These are the rules by which the Kinetic Organisation would operate in relation to Infrastructure, Cost-base, Structure, Leadership, People and Culture, Management Information, Environment and Risk.

Replacing hierarchy

In order to maintain order, you need to attain an alternative structure. In the Kinetic Organisation, a natural ‘molecular’ structure replaces command, control and hierarchy. A series of cells are linked together and effectively ‘loaded’ in free space to deliver the organisation’s outcomes.

A network of new roles ensures that each ‘structure’ in the organisation operates effectively to maintain its energy without diluting the organisation's inherent manoeuvrability. This means that it can evolve with ease to meet the changing demands of its customer and labour markets.

Kinetic Organisation –The 10 roles:

Executives – The people who actually perform the acts of productive work.

Leaders – The people who lead groups of Executives to deliver a pre-determined outcome.

Owner – interested in long term well-being of the enterprise, sets direction and articulates the purpose and mission in language that people can engage with emotionally.

Wise owl – brings wisdom so that the organisation doesn’t re-learn old lessons.

Recruiter/Coach – recruits appropriately cultured and skilled people on contracts consistent with the organisation's ability to promise tenure, ‘places them’ within the structure, ‘owns’ them, and manages their skills development. People are on loan to the structure.

Agility Controller – makes sure that decisions and commitments made by individual cells do not impair the ‘agility’ of the enterprise in the long run.

Rule-maker/referee – Makes sure there is fair play between cells in line with the rules that have been developed for the effective running of the organism.

Connector – Pro-actively seeks to make links between cells for the benefit of the enterprise -sharing knowledge and making sure that effective interworking takes place.

Workplace infrastructure deliverer – provides all hard technology and soft infrastructure and training to help cells deliver their best performance.

Work loader – Acts on behalf of the owner to load the cells, adjudicates over conflicts in tasks, and monitors the quality of output as seen by the receiving cell.

Over the coming years the developments in technology will eclipse anything we have seen to date. This provides organisations with the opportunity to strip away hierarchy and deliver organisations that are more effective, energetic and efficient.

The issue is a simple one. Which organisations will be brave enough to pioneer these new organisational models to provide confidence - and evidence - to less brave leaders to demonstrate that it is ‘safe’ to part company with the old, traditional ideas associated with the traditional organisation and move to new models?

Mobile, gaming, education, and augmented reality!

I have been away to Singapore and thinking, talking and meeting people and organizations in there about mobile augmented reality. So interesting to find out that whilst I was there that researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) say some students taking part in a trial have shown an improvement in retaining information after playing an iPad-based game.

So mobile, gaming and augmented reality - all my favourite things :)

According to the University, a group of 36 Secondary One students from Outram Secondary School showed a 22 per cent improvement in learning outcomes after the game. Which could be great news for a couple of companies I spoke to last year who wanted to bring in augmented reality to education - where I think it would work as well!

The game, based on a chapter in the Secondary One History syllabus, makes use of augmented reality (AR) to bring history to life for students.

The game, "The Jackson Plan", is named after Sir Stamford Raffles's town planner Lieutenant Philip Jackson.

His plan of the Singapore River in 1822 forms the game's storyline.

Raymond Koh, research designer at Keio-NUS Connective Ubiquitous Technology and Embodiments (CUTE) Center said: "Lieutenant Jackson actually designed a segregation plan for the population of immigrants. And we looked at the sort of activities that these people did at the time to motivate narrative and game structure."

Under the trial, students were shown a fragment of the map of old Boat Quay.

Their task was to find the missing pieces of the map.

"They have to learn to analyse, to organise all the information so that they can find out who is the one who stole the map," said Deidra Wong, social science researcher (education) at NUS.

Along the way, students learn more about history with the help of AR.

"AR is basically representing virtual content in physical spaces. So you can interact with these sort of information in real time," said Mr Koh.

Talks are already underway for a licensing agreement to use "The Jackson Plan" as a supplement for students.

Dr Henry Duh, co-director of Keio-NUS CUTE Center said: "Since the project is quite successful and it proves to be quite effective, we hope we can work with other schools to roll out and deploy such mobile AR education tools and to help the students to learn about their neighbourhoods and engage them in their community."

Designers and researchers at the Keio-NUS CUTE Center took three-and-a-half months to come up with the game. Which doesnt seem like tooo long. Perhaps worth looking into for Great Marketing Works as well as some of our clients as well.

I have just joined a new business. Blippar - the world's best mobile augmented reality company (in my eyes...)

I have just joined a new business. Blippar - the world's best mobile augmented reality company (in my eyes...)

Which is one of the reasons why I have joined them - the other was the culture of the place - so exciting and inclusive...

It's a great feeling to be part of an exciting family with a great vision to change the world. It has made me very happy.

So it was with happy interest I read the following this morning

"Happiness--in your business life and your personal life--is often a matter of subtraction, not addition."

Consider, for example, what happens when you stop doing the following 10 things:

1. Blaming.

People make mistakes. Employees don't meet your expectations. Vendors don't deliver on time.

So you blame them for your problems.

But you're also to blame. Maybe you didn't provide enough training. Maybe you didn't build in enough of a buffer. Maybe you asked too much, too soon.

Taking responsibility when things go wrong instead of blaming others isn't masochistic, it's empowering--because then you focus on doing things better or smarter next time.

And when you get better or smarter, you also get happier.

2. Impressing.

No one likes you for your clothes, your car, your possessions, your title, or your accomplishments. Those are all "things." People may like your things--but that doesn't mean they like you.

Sure, superficially they might seem to, but superficial is also insubstantial, and a relationship that is not based on substance is not a real relationship.

Genuine relationships make you happier, and you'll only form genuine relationships when you stop trying to impress and start trying to just be yourself.

3. Clinging.

When you're afraid or insecure, you hold on tightly to what you know, even if what you know isn't particularly good for you.

An absence of fear or insecurity isn't happiness: It's just an absence of fear or insecurity.

Holding on to what you think you need won't make you happier; letting go so you can reach for and try to earn what you want will.

Even if you don't succeed in earning what you want, the act of trying alone will make you feel better about yourself.

4. Interrupting.

Interrupting isn't just rude. When you interrupt someone, what you're really saying is, "I'm not listening to you so I can understand what you're saying; I'm listening to you so I can decide what I want to say."

Want people to like you? Listen to what they say. Focus on what they say. Ask questions to make sure you understand what they say.

They'll love you for it--and you'll love how that makes you feel.

5. Whining.

Your words have power, especially over you. Whining about your problems makes you feel worse, not better.

If something is wrong, don't waste time complaining. Put that effort into making the situation better. Unless you want to whine about it forever, eventually you'll have to do that. So why waste time? Fix it now.

Don't talk about what's wrong. Talk about how you'll make things better, even if that conversation is only with yourself.

And do the same with your friends or colleagues. Don't just be the shoulder they cry on.

Friends don't let friends whine--friends help friends make their lives better.

6. Controlling.

Yeah, you're the boss. Yeah, you're the titan of industry. Yeah, you're the small tail that wags a huge dog.

Still, the only thing you really control is you. If you find yourself trying hard to control other people, you've decided that you, your goals, your dreams, or even just your opinions are more important than theirs.

Plus, control is short term at best, because it often requires force, or fear, or authority, or some form of pressure--none of those let you feel good about yourself.

Find people who want to go where you're going. They'll work harder, have more fun, and create better business and personal relationships.

And all of you will be happier.

7. Criticizing.

Yeah, you're more educated. Yeah, you're more experienced. Yeah, you've been around more blocks and climbed more mountains and slayed more dragons.

That doesn't make you smarter, or better, or more insightful.

That just makes you you: unique, matchless, one of a kind, but in the end, just you.

Just like everyone else--including your employees.

Everyone is different: not better, not worse, just different. Appreciate the differences instead of the shortcomings and you'll see people--and yourself--in a better light.

8. Preaching.

Criticizing has a brother. His name is Preaching. They share the same father: Judging.

The higher you rise and the more you accomplish, the more likely you are to think you know everything--and to tell people everything you think you know.

When you speak with more finality than foundation, people may hear you but they don't listen. Few things are sadder and leave you feeling less happy.

9. Dwelling.

The past is valuable. Learn from your mistakes. Learn from the mistakes of others.

Then let it go.

10. Fearing.

We're all afraid: of what might or might not happen, of what we can't change, or what we won't be able to do, or how other people might perceive us.

So it's easier to hesitate, to wait for the right moment, to decide we need to think a little longer or do some more research or explore a few more alternatives.

Meanwhile days, weeks, months, and even years pass us by.

And so do our dreams.

Don't let your fears hold you back. Whatever you've been planning, whatever you've imagined, whatever you've dreamed of, get started on it today.

If you want to start a business, take the first step. If you want to change careers, take the first step. If you want to expand or enter a new market or offer new products or services, take the first step.

Put your fears aside and get started. Do something. Do anything.

Otherwise, today is gone. Once tomorrow comes, today is lost forever.

Today is the most precious asset you own--and is the one thing you should truly fear wasting.

These wise words came (not from me) but from Jeff Haden who learned much of what he knows about business and technology as he worked his way up in the manufacturing industry. Everything else he picks up from ghostwriting books for some of the smartest leaders he knows in business. @jeff_haden

Definately made me think - as perhaps I spend a little too long doing a couple of these bad things from above. It is my new goal to not :)

Some well read wisdom about start ups

This is SOOOOOO good I feel a little ashamed that I have no input into it - ok a little bit later on. So I mainly pop it here so I will not forget it.

Those of you who are launching a business...............

................. especially a techie business, will love this.

Life in the “Trough of Sorrow” all works credited to Andrew Chen as he wrote it.

In the life of a startup you get to a place called the Trough of Sorrows. See below.

Ok not a bad thought. But the real Question is that whilst you’re in the Trough of Sorrow, what do you do? How do you beat it?

This is something we sadly failed to do with goAugmented even after winning awards - so we lost our developers and lost our way. And lost the company in the end...

Traditional business literature won’t help you solve it- most of that stuff is focused on life after product/market fit, after the Trough of Sorrow. A lot of startup stuff is focused on the initial phases, when you don’t have a team, idea, or investors.

What happens when you have a team, an idea, and investors, but it’s not quite working yet? What do you do there?

I have some notes from my personal experience, and from others who have beat the Trough of Sorrow, and wanted to share them. First off, there’s both an emotional component as well as an analytical one.

Dealing with the emotions

Let’s start with the emotional first. First, a couple important things to remember:

Getting to product/market fit is hard, and even though you feel like you’re uniquely failing, you’re actually not. Turns out every startup has to go through this, but not every startup survives it. Entrepreneurs will blame themselves for failing, but it’s OK, this is hard and we all start the journey by failing a lot.

A corollary to the above is, expect to face the Trough of Sorrow. It’s hard to avoid. Quitting, starting over, executing a “too big” pivot, and other avoidance strategies won’t keep you from hitting a difficult point again, it’ll just delay the inevitable. Instead, just figure out how to work through it.

Expect to fight with your cofounders. When things are going great, cofounders tend to go along since the focus will be on keeping the momentum up. When things are mixed or going badly, there will be meaningful disagreements about what to do next!

Quitting is your decision. There’s a huge spectrum of tools you can use to fix up a broken thing. You can change the product, switch customer segments. You can recapitalize the company, reset the team, and fire your cofounders. You can (usually) find a way to keep going if you want to. Whether or not you want to quit, that’s up to you, but don’t think that quitting and starting a new thing will let you start something up without passing through this difficult phase.

Churning customers, employees, and cofounders isn’t failing. While you’re going from one iteration to the next, people will fall off the wagon. It just happens. That’s OK! That’s part of what happens, and even though it’ll feel like it’s a failure, don’t let it discourage you. The question is, does the new strategy make more sense than the old one? You only fail when you fail.

An additional thought on quitting: It’s ultimately the entrepreneur’s personal decision to quit, because there’s always some alternative scenario, as unpleasant as it might be. You can always dilute yourself more, raise more capital, or reduce the burn rate. It can add more time to the clock, which might be unpleasant, yet it might save the company. Is it always logical to do that? Maybe, and maybe not! But it’s worth considering that there’s always another move, and an entrepreneur shouldn’t ever feel like they’re somehow “forced” to quit.

A lot of entrepreneurs quit when they hit the Trough of Sorrow, struggle for 12-24 months, and face up to the reality that they’ll have to raise another dilutive round. Is this a good time to quit? Maybe. But given that the majority of startups go through this kind of stage, I’d actually argue that it’s just part of struggle to being successful. Sometimes it just takes 3 years to get through the Trough of Sorrow, but on the other side is something that might really be worth the pain. Maybe :)

I find that when I spend time with startups as an investor/advisor, a lot of my time ends up being about the above issues. Probably 80%, actually. If you can minimize the emotionality of feeling like you’re failing, you can try to keep the team together and get to the problem solving part.

Dealing with the problems

If you can hold everything together, and keep the team productive enough and the runway long enough to try to make a run at the problem, then here’s a few wild unfounded generalities on how to proceed. It’s super hard to generalize here but here’s an attempt.

Identify the root problem. Is the product working? Does the onboarding suck? Or is execution on growth lacking? You can figure out the main bottleneck by trying to understand where it’s working and where it’s not. If the problem is high retention and high engagement, but not a lot of people are showing up, just focus on marketing. If the product is low retention and low engagement, you probably have to work on the product. More marketing and optimizing your notifications won’t help there.

I find that much of the time, startups take too much product risk, and that’s why they aren’t working. Most of the new products I run into aren’t at the phase of “we’re product/market fit, just add more users!” Instead, most of the time, the products are just fundamentally broken. They are asking users to do new things, they exist in new markets with no competitors, and as a result, it’s unclear if the customer behavior is there to support their product. Instead, try to take a known working category and try to invent 20% of it, rather than 90%. Apple didn’t invent the smartphone, the MP3 player, or the computer, and yet they are super innovative and successful. You don’t have to invent a new product category either, and it’s easier to get to product/market fit when you have a baseline competitor to compete against.

Resist the urge to start over. There’s always a feeling that if you just rebooted, you’ll somehow avoid the Trough of Sorrow. Not true. Trust your initial instincts in your market and in your product, and figure out how to guide it into a similar place. If smart people invested in you and in the market, there’s probably something there, but you have to find it.

Get your product to be stripped down, focused, and so easy to understand that it’s boring. Look, you’re not in this to impress your designery friends, you’re in this to communicate your product’s value prop in simple and focused terms. The closer you are to that, the more boring your product will sound- that’s a good thing!

Money buys time, and time buys product iterations. This is why there’s a school of thought that says, raise as much money as you can at every point- before product/market fit, raise the max amount so that you have as many iterations as possible to ensure you get to P/M fit. After P/M fit, raise as much money to maximize the upside. Something a few steps back from that extreme is probably the right one :)

Pick up small tactical wins. Even if you do something in the product that doesn’t scale at first, it can be worth it- like prepopulating content, inviting all your friends, doing PR, etc. These small wins build momentum, raise team morale, gets you incremental amounts of capital, and makes it so that you can keep going. Over time, to scale, you can figure out how to systematize these processes or they can end up bootstrapping bigger and more scalable ideas.

Small teams are great. They move faster, way faster. If you plan to do lots of product iterations, you don’t need to communicate all the changes and get buy-in from everyone. Conversely big teams have lots of chaos every time there’s a bit pivot. Build out the team afterwards to create the complete featureset, but until then, consumer product teams can just be a few engineers/designers and the product leader. That’s <6 people. As you can see this is quite brilliant and just what I wanted to read before we start Entermobile - a new platform for brand your own mobile games and apps.


Think of wordpress but for mobile games and customer engagement rather than for blogging and websites. It could be really rather cool for mobile marketing and the like. But already we are looking into the worry of the trough of sorrow.

Which if you think about it is very much like the Trough of Disillusionment which features in Gartners the Hype Cycle. Also worth a look or two.

Got a GREAT idea - but need funding - Get it CrowdFunded first...

Looks like my charity app idea might be a starter.

So was thinking - how do I get it funded? As happy to give some money and time but cannot fund it all.

So what about Crowdfunding.

Something I hadn't thought about at all.

Well after looking into it - there are pros and cons. But not many cons for the me. Especially as the charity app idea I was going to give away anyway ;)

(If you haven't heard about the idea - click here to have your say on it...)

Anyhoo, there are lots and lots of these crowddfunding sites out there for ideas. Be they a new mobile phone game, a new app, a ecommerce site or actually pretty much anything.

Each has its good and bad points. A little like business inncubators. Each should have a niche but not all do. Each has a different culture and a different USP.

So here is My Top 12 List of Crowdfunding Sites for Entrepreneurs' like US:

1. WeFunder (I have already signed up to this one.... for MassMob - the new ecosystem for mobile game developers...)

A crowdfunding site for startups.

We’re all waiting to see which crowdfunding site is going to pull in the most investors since the law has passed. With more than $12,000,000 already committed in their beta, WeFunder might just take the lead and win hands down.

2. Startup Addict

Crowdfunding for….well…startup addicts.

The Startup Addict crowdfunding website still appears to be fairly new, but unlike the others we’ve seen…it doesn’t have a particular niche focus other than helping Entrepreneurs get their business launched. Which I think is a bit pants.

3. Believers Fund

Crowdfunding Website for New Mobile Apps (LOVE IT and signed up for charity app)

Now I don't know the Believers Fund’s lot, but they are a favorite of mine. They’ve narrowed down into the niche of crowdfunding new mobile apps, and have strong partners behind them like Microsoft BizSpark. Believer’s Fund also seems to have a much healthier following of “believers” (ie: funders) compared to other crowdfunding websites. All of this is good. But I do wonder whether other ideas I have would be save on it. (Will get back to you on this....)

4. Rockethub

A leading Crowdfunding Website for Creative Projects. (Has the best marketing...)

Rockethub has definitely gotten a large following from a lot of media exposure. Because of that, there’s a lot of activity happening over there…and hey, there’s actually funders! Probably down to it's greatmarketing...

5. Quirky

A Crowdfunding Website for Inventors (Which DOES THINGS DIFFERENTLY...)

Quirky really fits it’s name, it’s a new crowdfunding website for the quirky types: inventors (ie: engineer types). Back in August, the three-year-old product development network raised $16 million in Series B and today is adding more coin to its coffers with a sizable $68 million series C round, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Kleiner Perkins is also a “significant participant” in the round and is joined by previous investors Norwest Venture Partners and RRE Ventures.

So why all the excitement from VCs? Quirky is building a platform that intends to redefine product development by pairing inventors and creatives to its growing in-house team of product designers, engineers and manufacturing and retail professionals. The startup’s team focuses on two ideas each week and helps their founders bring the ideas to market. Which I think is the clever bit.

And it works as since 2009, according to tech crunch, the team has developed over 200 products that have made it into stores like Target, Staples, OfficeMax and Bad, Bath & Beyond and its community has grown to over 250K-strong. The average product has 800 contributors. Nice.


6. New Jelly

A Crowdfunding website for Artists.

New Jelly’s crowdfunding website focuses on helping artists and films get up off the ground. An industry that’s suffering more and more everyday, I’m glad to see someone like New Jelly reach out to them. Perhaps they could link with Etsy?


7. CoFolio

A Crowdfunding Website to Help Fund Local Small Businesses.

This one seems to be new, so it may be a little while before we see it really take off. None the less, I love what they’re doing. It’s all about keeping things local here, and helping the small businesses. It doesn't make any sense to me at all - unless they were doing it to help new bars open or local resturants... which is a great idea.... which I should write down... :)


8. Kick Starter

A Crowdfunding Website for Creative Projects (THE BIG MAMMA....of them all.)

Kickstarter holds the lead as the world’s largest crowdfunding website for creative projects…including: artists, journalists, inventors, and film makers. A quick review of the front page explores crowdfunding projects for a comic film, a museum, and a documentary. It is quite simply the coolest of them all - and these year it's all been about the gaming industry and especially mobile games in particular which has spurred some of my interest in Massmob :)

The only gutting thing is that often you have a new cool idea. Go on Kickstarter and find it's been in prototype for a year and just got $10,000 funding...

i.e. Last month, we were chatting about choose your own adventure books.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1181171727/defender-of-the-realm-0?ref=live


9. Start Some Good

A Crowdfunding Website for Social Entrepreneurs (I LOVE IT)

Start Some Good is a new crowdfunding website for social good initiatives to raise funds through a community of supporters. There are many non-profit Entrepreneurs here, but also for-profit socially responsible Entrepreneurs.

10. Peerbackers

A Crowdfunding Website for Entrepreneurs and their Dreams.

Peerbackers seems to be doing pretty well, and has a lot of ideas close to their funding goal. It also leverages social media to help you fund raise through peers, as well as strangers. Nice, clean interface. Not used it all yet. So no idea.

11. Eppela

Eppela is a new crowdfunding website out of Italy. This crowdfunding website supports social projects, art & entertainment, as well as lifestyle & technology businesses. So it's niche is the place - which is odd - why doesn't Britain have one then?

12. Indie Go Go

Last but not least, Indie Go Go…the world’s largest and earliest (founded in 2008) crowdfunding website. They have helped to raise millions of dollars for over 30,000 campaigns, across 194 countries. Personally, I don't like their marketing and think that other sites will simply run over them in being more professional and looking more web 3.0. But I would say that I am a mobile marketing geek...

How much does the first hour of every day matter? As it turns out, a lot.

It can be the hour you see everything clearly, get one real thing done, and focus on the human side of work rather than your task list.

All of which will make us happier human beings... rather than human doings (or human goings...sic Bart Simpson)

Ask motivational speaker Tony Robbins, career writer (and Fast Company blogger) Brian Tracy, and others, and they’ll tell you it makes a big difference.

Here are the first items on their daily to-do list.

Don’t Check Your Email for the First Hour. Seriously. Stop That.

Tumblr founder David Karp will “try hard” not to check his email until 9:30 or 10 a.m., according to an Inc. profile of him. “Reading e-mails at home never feels good or productive,” Karp said. “If something urgently needs my attention, someone will call or text me.”

Not all of us can roll into the office whenever our Vespa happens to get us there, but most of us with jobs that don’t require constant on-call awareness can trade e-mail for organization and single-focus work. It’s an idea that serves as the title of Julie Morgenstern’s work management book Never Check Email In The Morning, and it’s a fine strategy for leaving the office with the feeling that, even on the most over-booked days, you got at least one real thing done.

If you need to make sure the most important messages from select people come through instantly, AwayFind can monitor your inbox and get your attention when something notable arrives. Otherwise, it’s a gradual but rewarding process of training interruptors and coworkers not to expect instantaneous morning response to anything they send in your off-hours.

Gain Awareness, Be Grateful


One smart, simple question on curated Q & A site Quora asked “How do the most successful people start their day?”. The most popular response came from a devotee of Tony Robbins, the self-help guru who pitched the power of mindful first-hour rituals long before we all had little computers next to our beds.

Robbins suggests setting up an “Hour of Power,” “30 Minutes to Thrive,” or at least “Fifteen Minutes to Fulfillment.” Part of it involves light exercise, part of it involves motivational incantations, but the most accessible piece involves 10 minutes of thinking of everything you’re grateful for: in yourself, among your family and friends, in your career, and the like. After that, visualize “everything you want in your life as if you had it today.”

Which is odd as this is what I do - but at the end of the day - perhaps I will change that.

Do the Big, Shoulder-Sagging Stuff First


Brian Tracy’s classic time-management book Eat That Frog gets its title from a Mark Twain saying that, if you eat a live frog first thing in the morning, you’ve got it behind you for the rest of the day, and nothing else looks so bad.

Combine that with the concept of getting one thing done before you wade into email, and you’ve got a day-to-day system in place.

Which is all very well - but how do you actually do it. I know my frog already. It's been sitting looking at me from my to do list for over 6 months now.

Here’s how to force yourself to stick to it: Choose Your Frog

"Choose your frog, and write it down on a piece of paper that you'll see when you arrive back at your desk in the morning, Tripani advises."If you can, gather together the material you'll need to get it done and have that out, too."

Ask Yourself If You’re Doing What You Want to Do


Feeling unfulfilled at work shouldn’t be something you realize months too late, or even years. Consider making an earnest attempt every morning at what the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs told a graduating class at Stanford to do:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

“Customer Service” (or Your Own Equivalent)


Your own version of customer service might be keeping in touch with contacts from year-ago projects, checking in with coworkers you don’t regularly interact with, asking questions of mentors, and just generally handling the human side of work that quickly gets lost between task list items.

I love all the above - so watch out world. Tomorrow morning I am going to call some people, get my book up on Amazon and finish off the websites ;) Now that is quite some FROG :)

Worth thinkg about after a training session with New Directions - 7 Ways to Disrupt your Chosen Industry

I just finished a rather lovely trainig half day with MMU and some fine students who wish to take a New Direction in life and maybe start their own businesses.

I was, of course, talking mainly about guerrilla marketing and the amazing changes that digital marketing and mobile marketing are bringing to the world.

I then read the below from Fast Company - and loved it so much - I had to pop it below. So there you go.

To all of your reading this blog from New Directions - congrats to you and good luck with the new year ahead.

Just remember... Massive disruption is coming, and the only question is whether your idea is going to cause it or fall victim to it. Disruption is not easy--either to create or to confront. We have no illusions about that.

But in the spirit of helping established firms best serve their customers, we offer seven ways your firm could disrupt its own industry, raising the standards of customer experience and creating new opportunities for growth:

1) Totally eliminate your industry’s persistent customer pain points.

Each industry has practices that drive customers crazy.

Technology providers drive customers crazy with technical support that often requires long waits on hold and hopelessly complex interactions (“Just find the serial number on the back of your device and type that into the space provided along with your IP address and the exact wording of the error message you encountered”).

Unsurprisingly, this is the exact type of practice that causes customers to believe a company is behaving stupidly.

What practices exist in your industry that drive customers crazy? How do all companies in your industry behave stupidly? Identify these types of practices, and wipe them out.

Think: can we turn our process or perspective around, to look through the customer’s eyes as though they were the company and we were the customers?

2) Dramatically reduce complexity.

As we write this in November 2011, a company we have been tracking for some time--Simple, formerly known as BankSimple--is trying to take a machete to the insanely complex and confusing world of consumer banking.

Recognizing that banks do a pretty good job of managing money but a poor job of managing customers, Simple has been designing vastly simpler customer interfaces and tools.

Simple plans to partner with, not compete against, established banks. They’ll manage the customers while their banking partners manage the money.

The more complex the processes and practices in your industry, the greater your opportunity to gain competitive advantage by simplifying them. Yes, doing so will be very hard. But that’s the whole point; the first firm to do so gains tremendous advantages.

3) Cut prices 90 percent (or more).

Incremental change doesn’t disrupt an industry; radical change does. Radical price reductions require radical new processes and business models. Smartphones and tablets create numerous opportunities to identify these. Recently we replaced a $500 marine navigation unit with a $20 iPad app that works better.

You don’t cut prices by 90 percent through marginal improvements in existing products. You do it by asking, “What problem are we trying to solve for the customer, and how do these disruptive forces create opportunities for us to solve it in a far more efficient manner?”

4) Make stupid objects smart.

We didn’t think this one up. The race is on to make everything smart, and the dumber your products were to begin with, the greater the opportunity to make them smart.

Think of a garbage dumpster that calls central dispatch when it is full, eliminating the need for the customer to do so or your office to send a driver out unnecessarily. That same dumpster could warn the customer when it is overweight, and point out that it would be cheaper to empty it now than to further overfill it.

No offense to dogs, but their collars could alert owners when the dog wanders away, barks excessively, or jumps on the furniture.

Light bulbs could flash before they burn out. Baseballs could announce how fast they were thrown. Plants could politely request water when they are too dry, or shout out when you try to overwater them.

Take every product you sell, and make it smart…or accept the fact that you must forever more compete on price and accept low margins.

5) Teach your company to talk.

Apple's Siri personal assistant on the iPhone allows you to have a conversation with your phone. Your iPhone can now access the Internet as well as the information it stores, both understanding and responding appropriately to your statements.

Flash-forward two to five years from now. What if your company could talk to customers? We don’t mean that your employees talk on behalf on the company. We mean that a digital, computerized persona speaks on behalf of your firm.

It takes orders. It provides support. It answers questions. It upsells. It issues refunds. All of this, and more, in response to verbal requests by customers.

The toughest part of this challenge is not technical, although a few problems still need to be solved.

The tough part is knocking down the walls that separate your databases and departments. It’s deciding whose product gets cross-sold, who gets “credit” for sales, and who “owns” the customer.

Our view is simple. No one owns the customer, and you either do what’s best for the customer or you will lose him. But the real question we want to put forward is this: what happens if your competitors’ companies talk, but yours doesn’t?

6) Be utterly transparent

Think: not just no secrets, but also no spin.

The concepts of social influence and pervasive memory will make it increasingly difficult for companies to hide from dissatisfied customers, negative reviews, and faulty products.

What if your company didn’t simply try to stop hiding, but instead radically embraced the truth? How might it impact your culture to decide that your firm would be the most powerful force in your industry making certain that every speck of the truth was obvious to every customer, analyst, and reviewer?

Would it change your reward systems? Would it impact employee motivation? Might it cause changes in the kind of employees you attract and retain?

We’re pretty opinionated in this regard. The truth is coming, and there’s nothing you can do about it. But most firms won’t recognize this until it happens. Better to get far out in front while confusion reigns.

7) Make loyalty dramatically easier than disloyalty.

According to Don Clark writing in his Wall Street Journal blog, Intel executive Mooly Eden once asked an audience how many had cellphones, and then how many were married.

Then, he asked if any of the married people would be willing to hand over their phone if their spouse lost his or hers. None would. “That is my point,” said Eden. “That is personalization.” By definition, when companies act smart they are personalizing the way they interact with and serve customers. Once you start delivering personalization, you create immense opportunities to make loyalty more convenient than disloyalty:

You can store customer preferences, and act on them.
You can save the customer time, money, or effort--especially by eliminating repetitive tasks.
You can provide auto-replenishment of needed supplies.
You can monitor products remotely, and service them before they break instead of afterwards.

Think about every major purchase decision your customers face in your industry. How can you make it easier for customers to remain with your firm? Now, think even bigger. Can it be five or ten times easier? Subtlety can be lost on today’s customers.

The challenge is to make loyalty so much more convenient, so radically easy, that customers won’t even consider switching to a competitor. Ever.