Entrepreneur Spark

The Counterfeiters and What It Takes to be a Great Technical Leader

2009-10-28T15:39:00.000-07:00

Counterfeiters is a film centered around a Jewish counterfeiter, Salomon 'Sally' Sorowitsch, who is coerced into assisting the Nazis during World War II to execute Operation Bernhard, a secret plan to destabilize the United Kingdom by flooding its economy with forged Bank of England currency. It won the Oscar for the best foreign language film.

As I watched it, I realized that Sally epitomizes the ideal Technical Leader every startup can’t live without. Here is why:

Reputation – everyone in the counterfeiting world knew who Sally was and that he was the best – that enabled him to be perceived as a leader by his team. We don’t need a brand name all the time, but following a great leader is easier than an unproven one.
Technical Abilities and Skills – Sally had both the technical skills to counterfeit and the know how to solve unprecedented technical problems when others couldn’t (or wouldn’t for moral reasons as was the case in the movie). In a startup when the organization is more flat than vertical, the leader needs to know how to roll up their sleeves and start coding like the rest of the team.
Team Player – Sally never betrays his team members (even the ones that refused to collaborate with the Nazis and were sabotaging the project) and subsequently the rest of the team had more respect for him and followed his lead.
Understanding of Social Structure – when Sally lands in a concentration camp, he pulls aside the Capo – the leader of the block, and threatens him. Instantly, he gains respect without the Capo loosing face. Sally knows enough about social structure to do that and do it immediately – otherwise he may be killed. A good Technical Leader knows how to navigate the politics of the company and shape an environment in which they will succeed.
Upward Mobility – Sally quickly realizes that in a concentration camp playing by the rules results in death. So, in an effort to secure himself protection at the camp, he turns his forging skills to portraiture, attracting the attention of the guards and subsequently the camp commander, who commission him to paint them and their families. The key however was the first picture he makes, one of Nazi soldier that he hangs on the door for the guards to see. He makes it at night in between excruciating day labor, with frozen hands, and one pencil. Oftentimes the Technical Lead may find themselves coding to death while the organization grows, and the Technical Lead is seen more and more as a programmer and not a Leader. Having the Upward Mobility instinct motivated the person to work at night to show the upper management that they are different from the rest and have what it takes to Lead.
Survival Mode – the fact that Sally was in a concentration camp helped him make better decisions, if he didn’t he would have been killed. A good Technical Leader understands that the company is in survival mode and his decision can mean the difference between a financially viable business model and one that isn’t.

There is only one thing that this type of person lacks that makes him a Technical Leader and not a CEO of the company: a great vision. Sally was perfectly content forging small bills and living it up during the war. It was the Nazis that brought the vision of destabilizing British economy through counterfeiting to him. Of course they coursed Sally into participating, but in some sense the good CEO does the same. A good CEO offers the Technical Leader an opportunity to partake in a grand vision that the Technical Leader would not have the resources to do alone.

Thinking Big

2009-09-28T15:24:00.000-07:00

I have great respect for Aaron Patzer and the courage with which he walled himself up for seven months and built a platform that took on and beat Intuit and Microsoft. For me, Aaron is a source of inspiration because he is an entrepreneur who was not afraid of thinking big. The motivation to create Mint.com grew out of a desire to manage his own money with ease. In that quest he solved some of the biggest hurdles to money management, not the least of which was data integration.

When I learned about Aaron’s story, I instantly tried to put myself in his shoes. They are a bit big, and after some reflection I realized why. My motivation to become an entrepreneur came from egoism: I enjoy giving myself orders more than taking them from others. I also enjoy being responsible for my success and accountable for my failure. But mostly, I knew a few people who were successful entrepreneurs, and I thought since I was no worse than them, I could be one too. The problem with that thinking is that it led me to build a run-of-the-mill consulting business, when what I wanted to create was a business that ranks among the best in the world. What I realize now, is that I can’t build a great business until I take on a challenge that is not only personal to me, but one that is big as well.

I recently met another entrepreneur, Glen Laughton, who founded SynergyConscious.com, a company that gives people the ability to measure and reduce energy consumption. When I asked him why he started the business his answer fascinated me. He told me to imagine a gravestone that instead of an epitaph had a counter that constantly increased with the number of kilowatts that were saved through use of his software. That is a powerful legacy and I wish him the best of luck in making it happen.

Get Defiant!

2009-09-10T09:38:00.000-07:00

Defiant! is an e-book authored by Rajesh Setty filled with practical tips of what you need to do in order to thrive in tough times. As you may have guessed it will not only put your mind at ease if you are worried about losing your job, but give you actionable advice that will help you either secure the job you have or find a better opportunity in no time.

The interesting part about Defiant! is not only how practical and easy to read it is, but that it was written with the contribution of 50+ people including Seth Godin, Mark McGuinness, Phil Gerbyshak, and this humble entrepreneur.

Defiant! is being given away for free, so please download your own copy and spread the word.

Six Existential Affirmations

2009-08-11T02:42:00.000-07:00

Recently, I have read "The Courage to Be" by Paul Tillich, a German born theologian and philosopher. The book is basically a two hundred page survey of existential dilemmas that plagued western society from its Greek origin to our time. It also explores how various philosophies and religious systems addressed those fears. The three basic fears Tillich identified are:

Fear of death: it is a rather subtle fear that is inherent in everything we do as human beings whether conscious or not. The fear of death also implies the fear of our fate – not being able to identify what our fate is or not being able to fulfill it. In other words our fear of death creates an even greater fear of life.
Fear of meaninglessness: this is the fear that forms the basis of most modern existential dilemmas. We all want to live a life full of meaning. After all if there is no point to life, what is the point of living? So we fear never discovering our purpose, our convictions, and our values.
Fear of condemnation: not quite the fear of being condemned for our sins, but a deep rooted fear that we are condemned to lead a meaningless life that will culminate in death. In this fear lies the fear to affirm ourselves, our fate, and our purpose.

I’ve spent the last month thinking about the three basic fears. I have experienced them all quite acutely within the past few years from imagining my death to crawling under a blanket during the day and not knowing why I am alive and what to do with myself. After reading Tillich's book, I realized that I needed to create my own set of affirmation to help me control and accept these fears. I wanted to share them here:

Death is the greatest incentive for us to make the most of our life. When we are afraid of death it is a subtle reminder that we are afraid of life and that we are not living to our full potential. We are not afraid of death. We affirm death is a natural part of life.
Our fate is our choosing. We affirm the responsibility of determining what our fate is, the ability to make choices, to make mistakes, to correct them. The worst choice we can make is to allow ourselves to be afraid to choose.
The meaning of our life is waiting to be defined. It can be defined only by us.
We are not empty. The universe is too abundant for us not to be able to fill ourselves with meaning.
We are blessed to be alive. Life is not a condemnation or a curse but an opportunity to create meaning and shape our fate.
We affirm ourselves, our fate, our passions, our convictions, our values – the meaning and the person we create.

I invite everyone to write out their own set of affirmations and reread them often. Please send them to me or post them here. I think we would all be inspired by them.

Career Planner

2009-08-10T16:08:00.000-07:00

As mentioned in the previous blog entry, while I was trying to develop a personal brand I realized that I cannot do it without first understanding the larger missions I want to accomplish in life. A personal brand is fluid; it starts in one place and evolves – so it is imperative for us to know where we are going as well as to take stock of the tools we have in our backpack that will help us get there. Tools may be the wrong word – I prefer to call them passions because often times our true passions are developed into our strongest skills or tools we have at our disposal.

To help everyone identify the passions and mission we care about, I am working on a tool to make the process a little more seamless and intuitive. In this blog I wanted to share the first take with a dual purpose of helping people who are asking themselves the same questions I am as well as gathering feedback on how to make this tool more useful. The goal of this tool is to enable people to leverage all their passions and skills to help fulfill all the missions and causes they care about in life. In order to do that, the tool will ask you to take stock of your past accomplishments, current opportunities, obstacles, your personal network, as well as identify and create plans for next-step initiatives all in terms of your passions and life missions.

The link to the tool is here: http://www.slideshare.net/borisglants/career-planner

There are some specific questions I am looking to answer and would very much appreciate your feedback.

Is it a valid assumption to say that our deepest fulfillment can occur when we are able to leverage all our passions to fulfill all our missions?
To whom can this tool provide the most benefit? Under what circumstance?
What improvements to layout and flow would you suggest to make it better?
What content would you add/take away from the tool to make it better?

Everyone, thanks again for your support!

Building a Personal Brand

2009-07-13T21:47:00.000-07:00

Recently, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the meaning I want to create with my life. It was mostly an introspective process as ultimately I am the one who will decide if I made the right choices and to what degree I was able to succeed. Along the way I've gotten a lot of help from mentors and friends. This past week I've spent my time thinking about my personal brand and ended up asking Rajesh Setty for advice through his new Thinksulting blog. You can read the complete question and answer that Rajesh provides on the link below:

http://www.thinksulting.com/how-do-i-approach-building-a-personal-brand-w

After thinking about what Rajesh suggested, I realized that I need to identify one key strength/passion that is related to a skill through which I can view the world and pursue the rest of my interests. What I mean is that if I am passionate about computer programming, I can use that as a leans through which I can view and involve myself with the rest of the world. With programming I can be involved in non profit work, in medical industry, etc. As an example, my good friend Robert Henderson is getting a PHD in linguistics. Through his passion for linguistics, he co-founded Wuqu' Kawoq, a nonprofit that runs medical clinics in Kachikel (Mayan) and supports indigenous practitioners such as midwifes. This project not only helps Robert with his own research of Kachikel, but gives something back to the community that is far more valuable by changing the culture of Guatemalan healthcare. I look at Robert and in my mind he exemplifies the perfect way to slowly and intentionally build an organic personal brand that is rooted in one singular but ever-expanding interest.

To help myself and others figure out exactly how to structure my own personal brand I am refashioning a strategic accounts planning tool into a personal brand planning tool. In particular I am fascinated by the idea of creating a matrix to plot personal passions/skills vs. life missions/causes, to help people better understand where their foundation of work experience lies and how they can leverage it to fulfill all their life's missions or strengthen their passions and skills for missions where they are already strong. I expect to finish this tool sometime next week and post it on my blog to get feedback on how to make it better. Look out for it in the coming week!

The Call of Duty

2009-06-28T19:57:00.000-07:00

Over the past three years, during many prolonged conversation with my friends the topic of starting a business invariably came up. Most of them had a few ideas they had been thinking about. I always asked what prevents them from going forward and executing them. The answers I got were variants of "I am afraid of failure" to which I invariable gave the same advice I had been given that helped me get started:

• It is better to fail than to regret that you have never tried to succeed
• Collect 6 months of cash in the bank, set a 4 month financial goal and go for it; evaluate where you are in 4 months, then either stick with the business or find a regular job

Despite the fact that this advice has helped me, it failed to move most of the people I have talked to. There was something missing in that recipe and I could not figure out what.

For the past six months as I have been exploring what business I want to be involved in, I have evaluated dozens of opportunities some originated by my unimaginative brain as well as others thought through by seasoned businesspeople I have met. There were some brilliant opportunities on the table that I invariably passed up or thought I wanted to be involved in and just failed to "show up" for. The reason why was simple – I did not care about the problems the businesses were designed to solve.

Two weeks ago during another one of those conversations with one of my friends, the "I want to start a business" line came up, shortly followed by the "I am afraid of failure" line. Instead of giving my caned advice as usual, I told my friend a story that I would like to share:

Both my grandparents fought in World War II in the Soviet Armed Forces. Miraculously they survived. And I say miraculously because they were the ones that thought it was a miracle. Neither one of them expected to live through the ordeal. When they first told me at a very early age that they both thought they would surely be killed in the war when they were drafted, my immediate response was, "Then why did you go?" Their answer was comprised of one word: "Duty."

To this day I am completely in awe of that one word that conveyed to me the feeling that there was something out there in life more important than life itself, something worth fighting for, something worth dying for. Later, in America, I would learn the words: "Liberty or Death!" and remember what my grandfathers had told me.

Yet, my grandfathers were not courageous men. They did nothing extraordinary with their lives. But they were not cowards either. They did not shirk their duty, try to blow of their toes to be discharged from the front, but instead ingested their daily ration of 100 milliliters of vodka and kept "showing up" to the battled. They were no different from most people who wake up and go to work every day because they have to, because it is their duty. What was different about them was the circumstance they had found themselves in. Objectively speaking, what they did was heroic by every sense of the word – for four years they risked their lives for an ideal – they believe the world would be a safer place for their children without the Nazis.

Now what does that have to do with starting a business?

Simply put, the easiest way to overcome our natural fear of failure which is akin to our fear of death is by finding our call of duty, our mission that we feel is so important to complete that we are willing to risk our lives for it. The businesses that we start better fulfill that mission.

Life is full of cliches

2009-06-22T18:38:00.000-07:00

Recently I had a conversation with my mentor about writing. I complained that while working on my novel every correct decision I discover, whether it is related to word choice or scene structure, I do so only after I make every mistake it is possible to make. His reply: "that's a sign of progress. That means you are finally working on something that is completely unique." I promptly asked him to point me to a book or a person with whom I could talk, a model that already exists that I could learn from that could help me complete my novel quicker. "There is no book or model that can help you – you are inventing your own book. You are in the dark and you must grope your way to the right answers, and when you touch them you will know." I wondered what he had meant. All our earlier conversations had always ended with him suggesting a book I should look at or a person I should talk to, that would help me figure out how to solve one problem or another.

Then I realized that for the first time, I was writing something that wasn't a copy of something else, that it was my own and truly, I had to figure out a unique way of writing it. The funny part is that my mentor's conversation was applicable to my life in general, to my business ambitions, my dance partnership, and personal relationships I have with family and friends. I was tired of living a life full of clichés and had been for the past year or so tinkering with the components of my life to truly make it unique.

I think too many of us live lives full of clichés. Our relationships are cliché, our work is cliché, our hobbies are cliché. There is a reason for it. Clichés work! They do – they are proven paths of achieving a certain objective – paths so proven that everyone uses and overuses them. I then pondered, what does it take to not live a life full of clichés? And the answer was very difficult to both articulate and accept:

A work of art, a life-changing relationship, a trend-setting business, have only one unique form, which is built out of a countless number of sub-choices. One wrong choice can completely alter the outcome. The probability of making a wrong choice is millions to one.

I don't think it takes a genius to make all the right choices. It takes persistence and a willingness to make mistakes. The good news is that despite the fact that most of us make wrong choices, life gives us ample opportunities to correct them.

Gerhard Gschwandtner - The Importance of Role Models

2009-01-17T11:30:00.000-08:00

Not many entrepreneurs have role models from a very young age. Gerhard Gschwandtner was fortunate to spend time with his grandmother who managed a small country inn in Austria – an entrepreneur at heart she made her inn into a social hub for the locals: people came to the inn and talked about their problems (someone needed a tractor; another person was selling a horse) and made connections to a point that even the mayor and the priest would frequent the inn on weekends.

It wasn’t long before Gerhard picked up the entrepreneurial bug. An American Colonel came to the inn complaining that he had spent the whole day fishing at the river that ran behind the inn and failed to catch a single trout. Like a good salesman that he already was at six years of age, Gerhard asked the Colonel what bait he used and when he heard that the Colonel was not using warms he offered to get him a matchbox full. For that service he received a shilling and the Colonel spent a day catching many a trout. The next weekend the Colonel returned with his friends and Gerhard was ready with more matchboxes of warms.

The thrill of doing a person a favor and making money in the process never left Gerhard. He went on to create Selling Power, the foremost magazine geared for sales people and executives. When he became a sales trainer, he quickly discovered that when he was delivering a seminar he couldn’t sell, and when he was selling he wasn’t making any money. To solve that problem he founded Selling Power in 1981, a magazine that has grown to one hundred twenty thousand subscribers in sixty seven countries, and is still growing and expanding into new mediums like Selling Power TV, a videocast on iTunes that has sixty four thousand monthly viewers.

His sole advice for entrepreneurs is don’t mistake your own fears for reality – when you feel you are ready, do it.

Roger Boor - Managing Risk

2009-01-14T10:45:00.000-08:00

Roger Boor’s passion has always been music. He started out as a manager and lighting designer for bands on the road. Handling the bands merchandize introduced him to sales and marketing, and gave him his first taste of entrepreneurship. When he felt that it was time to settle down and leave the roadie lifestyle behind, he quickly realized that running a business was the career for him. Today, Roger is the CEO of New Business Consultants; a company that helps startups create financial accountability, processes, and growth planning.

To Roger, the most challenging aspect of running a successful business is about managing risks. It is easy to be either very conservative or to go all-out. You may want to take a huge risk, because you have a good vision and can almost taste the rewards. Or you may be risk adverse because your money and livelihood or on the line. Instinct plays a big role in helping Roger decide which way to lean. If something does not feel right or does not appear to be a good long-term investment, it is better to walk away, rather than to force it.

Another challenge: patience. If you have a good vision, the right team, and the money to make it happen, you tend to be impatient about achieving it. This can lead to inappropriate or overly aggressive risk. It’s important to remember that you still have to build your business solidly, brick by brick. No shortcuts.

This is a message that Roger passes along to clients and new companies who are seeking funding: there are more qualified, fundable businesses this year than ever before. To succeed, you need to be able to have a compelling story and articulate it well. And finally… network. In the Bay Area, there is a networking event happening every night and you can find most of them on workit.com.

Roger recommends the book, The Dream Manager, a book that has inspired him to help his employees and associates achieve their dreams. A sign on his desk reads “Dream”, a symbol of a program he instituted inside his company that is based on the book.

Des Cahill - The Ultimate Cheerleader

2009-01-14T10:21:00.000-08:00

In grade school, Des Cahill created a publishing empire out of a free newsletter which recast school events from a more comic perspective. It not only garnered a ton of attention from his classmates, but enabled Des to discover and harness his intelligence, curiosity, and extreme restlessness – the key elements that now constitute his entrepreneurial spirit and drive. Des, who just sold Habeas, an emailer reputational certification and identification manager, to ReturnPath says he still doodles during long meetings.

Before Des founded Habeas, he honed his marketing skills at Apple and AOL/Netscape Netcenter. The transition from a large company where mistakes of individual employees do not have a large impact on company performance, to leading a five person startup where a wrong move can tip and sink the startup rowboat proved challenging. But Des quickly grasped that the job of the CEO is to be the ultimate cheerleader of their company mission. The CEO can never show any doubt about the company’s ultimate success and vision to investors, customers, partners, or employees. Yet the CEO has to be a realist, constantly analyzing the state of the market, team and company performance, and be able to ask and answer the tough questions. Answering the tough questions is always a private matter, and the ability to execute on the answers is the true challenge of leadership. Bringing the team, the investors, and the customers into the loop is sometimes a difficult and rocky process. The dissemination of information needs to be managed carefully to avoid misinterpretation as you can’t empower all people with relevant information and expect that they will always do the right thing with it.

Des’ net-net for entrepreneurs is: pick your partners extremely carefully and document all the agreements you make. Be cautious about from whom you take money and when, manage the cash, and make well thought through hires – your team can make or break your organization.

Gary Veselka - There is Always a Better Way

2008-12-11T18:20:00.000-08:00

For Gary Veselka, co-founder of Ayuda!, there is no such thing a status quo. "There's always a better way." This is an epiphany that Gary had at a very early age. Growing up relatively poor, he couldn’t help but notice that some of his friends lived in better houses, drank soda, and ate sugared cereal. Gary chose to find that better way, and worked full-time at a machine shop while attending high-school to achieve it. He made a deal with his boss to let him work from 3:00pm to midnight, if he could carry an A/B average – and he did.

Gary's career spans many entrepreneurial undertakings. His first, at age 20, was a business that sold aquariums. His second business, Design Concepts, was a consulting practice he ran part time for almost 10 years while working full time for an architectural firm.

Throughout his career, challenge and the excitement of the unknown kept Gary motivated. From them he learned his life’s lessons. He faced his greatest challenge when running his next company, a business that bought and re-sold semiconductor equipment. The dot-com bubble had burst. Rather than laying people off, Gary and his partners decided to work without pay. They were able to retain the relationships with their employees and treat them as human beings not just numbers on a spreadsheet. When the economy turned around, they were able to jump back in.

Currently Gary runs Ayuda!– a strategic consulting firm that focuses on reducing costs associated with phone, internet, IT hosting, and wireless communication inefficiencies that he co-founded with Tina Burke. The ability to ask meaningful questions helped Gary build Ayuda! into a recognized brand.

Gary’s advice to starting entrepreneurs is to attend conferences and participate in environments where successful people share ideas and ask them as many meaningful questions as you can. When you stop asking questions you become stagnant and tend to forget that there is always a better way.

Fred Yee - Just Do It

2008-12-07T21:59:00.000-08:00

Fred Yee could spot a business opportunity ever since he could remember. When Fred was twelve, one of his friends used to buy a lot of new comic books that he would never look at after a first read. Fred quickly proposed selling the used comic books for a commission. In six months he had sold hundreds of volumes. At fifteen, Fred would go to the local recreation center and play poker – for money. A little bit of an edge was enough to accumulate more wins than losses, and Fred was not only good at stats, but could quickly gage the behavior patterns of his opponents. Some would get silent, others would get talkative during critical moments of the game, but mostly Fred would imagine what he would do if he were them.

Fred went on to become a star in sales while working for others and since the late eighties has been running his own businesses. He currently runs two online businesses: ActiveConversion, a SaaS lead intelligence tool for B2B sales that helps companies identify who is ready to buy their solutions now; and FoundPages, an online marketing and advertising solution provider for companies that want to put the web to work for their business.

Fred’s advice to entrepreneurs is to just do it. And if you fail, fail fast and fail cheap, and move on to the next idea. The biggest limiting factor he sees in people is not brains, but actually moving from idea conception to planning to execution. He is also a strong believer in the mastermind theory, an offshoot of a mentoring group. It is always better to solve tough problems with a group of people; the different perspectives other people can bring to the table are invaluable.

For inspiration Fred regularly reads Jim Estill's Time Leadership Blog and recommends the following books:

Passion First, the Rest Will Follow

2008-12-06T12:28:00.000-08:00

How many times have we heard, follow your passion and the rest will take care of itself? Plenty, but Max Shapiro is a living incarnation of the adage. Max had loved basketball ever since he could remember; he loved it so much that while he was in middle school, he volunteered to work as a water boy for the St. Louis Hawks (now the Atlanta Hawks). It wasn’t long before he became the youngest talent scout in the history of the NBA, serving as Chief Scout for the San Diego Rockets. From there he followed the entrepreneurial spirit of his ancestors (both his grandfather and father owned businesses) and founded a company that ran sports camps for children and baseball and basketball fantasy camps for adults. Some of the greatest names in sports helped direct his camps – Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Pat Riley, Magic Johnson, John Wooden and Billy Casper, just to name a few. He sold the business in six years.

Max’s career spanned many other ventures, some as eccentric as reselling vintage Levis to the Japanese market. He held the first denim auction in Japan and sold a seventy-five year old never used pair of Levis jeans for twenty thousand dollars. In 1999, Max went back to his roots of talent scouting and founded PeopleConnect, a full service high-tech executive search firm. After the high-tech bubble burst in 2001, business dried up, but Max saw an opportunity – there were a lot of seasoned executives willing to work for options and a lot of companies who needed to build a solid team before securing the next round of funding. And so PeopleConnect created the Employees without Paychecks service, weathered the storm, and has been prospering ever since.

After more than thirty years of entrepreneurship, Max’s advice boils down to this: be passionate, prepared, persistent, creative, and flexible, but most of all, be thankful that you live in this incredible country with unlimited opportunity for self realization.

Here are some books that helped Max along his path of entrepreneurship:

Don Gootee - Build a Solid Company and Let the Chips Fall Where They May

2008-11-20T15:37:00.000-08:00

A lot of entrepreneurs start companies with a vision of millions of dollars in revenue and a goal to sell in five years. Few achieve it; even fewer start out as individual consultants and end up building a solid services company that makes the Inc 500 fastest growing private companies list and results in a lucrative sale. But that’s exactly what Don Gootee did. He was at the right place at the right time, when companies were just starting to run their businesses using applications in the early 80s. Don started out implementing Ask Computer Systems and eventually the company he formed, Core Technology Group, with his partner went on to become one of Ask’s largest nationwide implementer. The company was built on its own cashflow, and after Ask was acquired by CA, Core Technology Group went on to become one of Oracle’s first implementation partners. Once the company made it to the Inc 500 list, the phone calls from Wall Street about going public kept pouring in. The company was sold in 1999 and the rest is history.

But how did it all start for Don? Like a true entrepreneur, his career started with a life changing decision to move to California. He took a chance, and went for it. During his fourth day driving out, he had to sleep in his car in order to have enough money for gas to reach San Jose. But he reached it alright and soon with the help from his friends he was on his feet. Don believes that it was his experience in the Air Force – simple things like going through basic training that gave him the confidence and knowledge of his abilities that he needed in order to trust his decisions and ultimately succeed.

Don’s advice to entrepreneurs boils down to this: know what your strengths and weaknesses are and don’t act like you can do everything. Just focus on building a solid company and let the chips fall where they may. After all that’s how he succeeded and he is doing it again at Solution Partners Inc., where he is currently working on building an on-demand consulting practice around a sales compensation application called Xactly and several CRM applications such as SalesForce.com and LongJump.

Peter Lee: Engineer – Tinkerer – Entrepreneur

2008-11-18T11:38:00.000-08:00

Ever think that taking apart a radio and putting it back together is like analyzing a business? Peter Lee does. An engineer by training, he likes to take gadgets apart to see how they work. "Starting a business is like building a motor," he says. "It often requires tinkering and always leaves you with spare parts." That's why Peter refers to himself as part entrepreneur, part engineer, and part tinkerer.

Peter started out as an intrapreneur at Infoseek. He saw that the majority of the company's revenue came from online ads, while engineering was focused on search. The pain was clear: Infoseek needed their engineering talent focusing on new advertising products and Peter put together a business plan and formed and managed the "ad-gineering" group.

Peter went on to co-found VoiceIndigo, an entertainment content company that is exploring ways to push digital entertainment media to mobile devices. He also actively consults with start-up companies, and is currently a Technical Advisor for Upwardly Mobile, a company that helps people advance their careers by tapping the career paths and proven networking habits of successful professionals.

Peter has two pieces of advice for young entrepreneurs, particularly those who like him began their career as engineers: First and foremost, forget the details and think from a business point of view. If you need to indulge yourself allocate the time accordingly: don't spend more than an hour per day on details and dedicate the rest of your time to working on your business. Finally, keep your work, family and social life balanced. Unfortunately the social life is the first to go, but if you play your cards right, you can piggyback social activities on business activities. Say you have a networking event from 6:00 to 8:00 then arrange to get a beer with a friend from 9:00 to 10:00. Your wife expects you to be out for the evening, so stay out a little later. (I just hope Peter's wife isn't reading this).

Peter recommends the following books:

You can see Peter's executive biography at his web site.

Tina Burke - Go Check Things Out

2008-11-10T19:37:00.000-08:00

Tina Burke is curious about life. She likes to check things out. How else would a college graduate jump into a seafood delivery business without knowing anything about seafood or delivery? A friend of Tina’s was looking for someone to help him drive a thirty-six foot long refrigerated truck. He told her that women had never driven trucks before – and that was the only invitation Tina needed.

The responsibilities of the business were huge: inventory, vehicles, bankrolling and marketing all had to be managed. Routes had to be planned and the truck had to show up in the same designated location every six weeks. She worked in the business for four years until an injury prevented her from doing heavy lifting, such as unloading and loading the trucks. She left the business with enough financial independence to go and do what she wanted, and the knowledge that business is about curiosity, engagement, interaction, fun, and the willingness to do unusual things to satisfy market demand. Now the business no longer exists -- Costco and Safeway dominate the market -- but for Tina those years created some of the fondest memories of her life.

Tina went on to become a national sales executive at a large telecom, and then transformed the knowledge of how telecoms operate to co-found Ayuda!– a strategic consulting firm that focuses on reducing costs associated with phone, internet and wireless communication inefficiencies. The ability to have a conversation with customers helped Tina build Ayuda! into a recognized brand.

Tina's advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is simple:

do something you enjoy and can be proud of
work with a great business partner
identify the people who are not emotionally involved and can be your trusted advisers
but most important of all: get comfortable with uncertainty, and just go check things out

On Tina’s list of mandatory readings for entrepreneurs are the following books: