PicoBusiness

A selection of great quotes, printed in Wired.

Here are some of my favorites:

“It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing.”
– At age 29, in Playboy, February 1985

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
– BusinessWeek, May 25 1998

“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.”
– Fortune, Nov. 9, 1998

“We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.”
– Jobs, on Mac OS X’s Aqua user interface (Fortune, Jan. 24, 2000)

“It comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much.”
– BusinessWeek Online, Oct. 12, 2004

“I’m the only person I know that’s lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year…. It’s very character-building.”
– Apple Confidential 2.0

The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.”
– Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company, by Owen W. Linzmayer

Phillip Greenspun writes an article about his ideas on what makes a good startup.

It’s not very long, but I’ll summarize it for you anyways:

• Knowing how to make a certain set of customers happy is more important and valuable than the technology or easy access to money. (agreed!)
• Don’t go for VC money until you don’t need it (He puts a lot of reasons out here, all of them valid.)
• Your Board of Directors should all have strong business experience. (Question, why do you need a BoD if you’re not raising VC money?)
• Don’t bring in outside managers too early

Having read Phil’s stuff for a while, I can hear the bitterness in his voice when he wrote this list, especially the last three points, all of which blew up in his face a while back. In any case, he’s doing a public service by providing some of the things he’s learned the hard way.

Charlie, an analyst for Union Square Ventures, demonstrates the latest in blog accessories - an animated version of himself. Bizarre, yet also eerie and disturbing

Jared Diamond wrote a fascinating article in 1999 about how to get rich. The kicker is - he’s talking about societies, not individuals.

But the lessons are still there for entrepreneurs.

The key point that Dr. Diamond makes is that the reason that European civilization “conquered” the rest of the world instead of China or Japan is that Western civilization was fragmented, but not too fragmented. In other words, the centralization of authority in China and Japan made bad decisions far more costly than in the much more balkanized west.

He gives some great examples - China scrapped their navy because the new Emporer didn’t believe in ships. The Japanese Shoguns forcibly prevented guns from being manufactured because it messed with their Samurai ways.

For modern business, the points are the same - bigger enterprises with more central authority increase the likelihood that bad decisions will linger, and ultimately cost the enterprise dearly in the long run.

Consider, for example, all the ongoing efforts we see to merge and grow through acquisitions, “streamlining” businesses and making them more efficient. Have we seen significant success from this tactic? I’d say no, and I’d say the reason why is that it reduces competition, which in turn stifles innovation. Hardly anything new to capitalism, but nowadays this is true even within large companies. They are growing and “efficienting” themselves into future oblivion, because at some point, they will make a decision that at the time will seem minor, but will blow up in their faces as the rest of the world’s businesses pass them by.

There’s a way to avoid this, of course - keep your businesses balkanized. Don’t focus on efficiency by forcing your business units to align themselves to a command and control hierarchy. Leave them alone, out in the field, fighting the good fight. Sure, you may not have the most efficient organization, but you’ll have a more innovative and more responsive one.

I’ve noticed that a few shows are starting to get a big following because of Bittorrent. Some have asked if Bittorrent is the “wave of the future” for content.

I certainly enjoy Battlestar Galactica, and I did enjoy the new episodes of Doctor Who that I watched last night (both of which have been distributed heavily by a Bittorrent-enabled fan base).

But it works for them because they have an existing brand name. Small, independent offerings don’t have 30-40 years of brand awareness to build up on. I watched Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who when I was a kid. I didn’t bother to watch the new Battlestar Galactica, until I saw recommendations from others that it was much better. So now I watch.

But some random show, let’s call it “Space and Time” that I’ve never seen - it would take a significant word-of-mouth “rah rah rah” kind of cheerleading to get me to go to Bittorrent and download and watch it. Much more than it took for me to watch BG or DW.

I think its still about the brand - a well-known brand name will bring you distribution opportunities that good content alone will not.

Seth Godin describes a woman who refuses to experiment with a new foodstuff.

He talks about how little cost it would be to her to eat it. I suspect that he simply has different values for the cost of getting sick, the cost of feeling like an idiot because you ate something called a “fungus” and then got sick. Different people feel shame and embarrassment far more deeply and easily than Seth does.

But that’s not why I wrote this. On the way in to work, I was musing over this topic and I realized - what if, instead of being called a fungus, it was called a mushroom? I know that I would hesitate to eat something called a fungus, simply because Athelete’s Foot is the first concept I associate with fungus.

Mushroom? Much more familiar. No one would think I was an idiot for trying out a tortilla filled with mushrooms. If I called my dad from the hospital and said “I got sick from a mushroom tortilla”, he wouldn’t respond with “Well, I guess you shouldn’t have eaten something with the word ‘mushroom’ in it, huh?”.

Hugh is going to start producing new Gaping Void shirts on a more regular basis. I was waiting patiently for the existing shirt designs to sell out, because none of them appealed to me.

Happy day.

Now, I bet he could probably up his sales by a fair amount by promising to link to every customer’s blog URL, or add them to his favorites, etc. Just another way to seperate his product from the masses.

• Bad things usually happen right after you give up trying to prevent them because they haven’t happened yet.
• People will do just about anything in order to make sure their children are fed..
• People will claim that they were ‘trying to feed their children’ in order to justify just about anything they do.
• People will lie to you about just about anything, mostly to make themselves seem more important.
• Husbands without a timeconsuming hobby will cheat on their wives.
• When someone is mean to you, it is almost always because they are jealous.
• Most people trust anecdotes more than they trust statistics.
• Consultants and Evangelists shade the truth or leave out contradictory facts in order to keep their message clean.
• In any list of ten or more things, one of them is not true
• While it is true that even-tempered, easygoing people rarely make history. most angry, unreasonable people don’t make history either, and they end up bitter, depressed and alone.

This is a great article on why people won’t start their own businesses.

My first observation is that I think you can remove “Young” from the title and it still works. People are afraid to make big risks, regardless of how old they are. And in the modern world where “40 is the new 30 and 30 is the new 20″, the fear of “not knowing enough” continues to dominate you for a very long time.

Here’s one thing I do know - the young people who start successful businesses generally have no idea how to do most of what they want to accomplish. Grad school doesn’t prepare you to start a business. Even an MBA’s value is questionable, targetted as it is towards consulting and management. These people had no idea what they were getting into, and they did it anyways. And they often failed.

I was once told an anecdote about Sam Walton - how did he make Wal Mart so successful - “I made a lot of good decisions” he answered. “How did you learn how to make such good decisions?” “I made a lot of bad ones.”

But how are you supposed to learn from your mistakes if you refuse to let yourself be put in a position where you make mistakes? Do you really think that minimizing mistakes is the way to get ahead in this world? Because I think that a moments consideration of the world around you indicates that very few of the great success stories of our lifetimes have come from incremental change (that’s one thing I do feel comfortable stating as a general principle).

If you’re a lawyer or a doctor, there’s no doubt that you want to minimize the mistakes when working with your clients. But what about minimizing the mistakes in how you bill your clients, or how you acquire new clients? Isn’t there room for you to grow and experiment there? Do you really think that putting your business’s name on the side of a bus is a way to stand out and create big success?

Will you get burned? Will you upset a potential client, or inadvertantly hurt a friend’s feelings in the process? Probably. I know I have.

But I learned from those mistakes.

In an article that should have been titled ‘Don’t quit your day job’, but was instead titled ‘Why Businesses Fail‘, Mark Taw discusses starting a business, expenses, channelgesin the business and a bunch of solid suggestions at the end, not all of which I agree with.

I liked the article, it was well done, but it seemed overly pessimistic. It does, however, suggest a PicoBusiness approach to your entrepreneurial endeavors, so from that perspective, Huzzah!.

Some quibbles:

• Few businesses would show the kind of income curve (especially for the first 75 months) that he suggests. In fact, it’s this assumption that makes his case seem so awful.
• Starting a blog is not necessarily a way to help you focus on your business. Trust me on this!
• His estimate that 1 out of 1000 businesses succeeds is lacking in statistical rigor, and doesn’t make sense. If people don’t bother to incorporate or note the businesses on their taxes, it is doubtful that they consider them anything more than experiments. Failures during experimentation are both expected, and important. They shouldn’t be lumped in with “hard core” entrepreneurial efforts.

Looking Busy.

Consistent with what I’ve wrriten before - you should only be “really busy” when you are doing something you have a great passion for.

Whenever I find myself really busy working on something that I dislike, I ask myself some questions:

• Am I doing this because it needs to be done, or for appearances?
• Am I going to benefit in some meaningful way from doing this?
• Will anyone really care if I put it down and pick it up again tomorrow?

If I can’t find a good answer to those questions, I put the work down, and do something else I would rather be doing. It’s easy to get caught up in someone else’s priorities. Especially when you work for yourself or have dreams of establishing your own success, letting someone else steal your time from you is essentially letting them steal your dreams as well. Don’t let that happen!

A gentle introduction to RSS.

The only comment I would make is to use Bloglines instead of a local client feed reader. That way, you can use it even when you’re away from your favorite computer.

Digg.com - perpetual news story ticker. The front page alone is full of breaking news, and, in general, you can see new stories on Digg before you see them on Del.icio.us or blogs or Google News, etc.

The New York Post’s Page Six gossip column reports that cable network Showtime has picked up 26 episodes of the canceled cult sitcom Arrested Development. The show was axed by Fox after three seasons of Emmy-winning hilarity due to perennially low ratings. Neither network had anything to say officially.

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