THE DREAM IN ACTION

I’m here at MKE DevHouse2 and I’m one of the first few people here. I just received a tour of the entire facility of Bucketworks from the founder James Carlson. He is incredibly inspiring when talking about his vision for Bucketworks and the collaborative creativity that he strives to promote here. As people begin to arrive and decide what they are going to work on at the event I will get some pics, vids, interviews and such. Look forward to it.

Update: Check out the video of MKEDevHouse2 on Viddler via Ryan A Graves.com daily vids. 

I started thinking about having the right tools a few months back. It started with a burning desire to spend $1792 for a refurbished Mac Book Pro, so, yes this post is a result and a justification for that purchase.

As an entrepreneur having the right tools is critical to your success! As I began to try and figure out what those right tools were I realized they come in all shapes and sizes. The following are some of the tools that I’ve found critically important to an entrepreneur’s tool belt.

Mentors: This is a personal favorite because this process is fun. This is the process of getting to learn from someone who has blazed the trails before you. As an entrepreneur you are always talking about and pitching your business to different people (or at least you should be). This is an opportunity to shut-up and listen and learn. If you choose the right mentor then you will always be able to learn from that person no matter what stage of the game you are in, or what stage they are in. For more info on how to get mentored read my friend Larry Chiang’s post on Found|Read.

Founders: Rarely can you be the only one. During the process of founding and building a company your chances of success will significantly increase if you have a co-founder…the right co-founder. There is so much to be done in such a short period of time for an entrepreneur that having 2 or 3 team member is almost a must. Plus, again, this is the fun part. Having the change to create an incubator for ideas and the opportunity to share in successes (and failures) is sometimes the best part!

Computer: Lets be honest with ourselves for a moment. Every business now-a-days needs a good website. Whether that work is contracted out or developed by the entrepreneur it is a must. The cost of developing that portal to your customers is significantly cheaper to develop yourself. Every business also needs good communications to its customers or community. Having the right computer “tool” can help so much in this process. I’m not here to push my newly developed Apple bias on you but please take a look at this before buying a new machine.

I finally got a 15′ MacBook Pro about a week ago and it is definitely the right tool.

Tenacity: Literally nothing can stop you. If you are the track runner who hits his knee on a hurtle and stops running the race, you’re done. Having the ability to fight through ANY situation that you are faced with is the single most important tool to have in your belt. Even if you have the perfect co-founder, funding, mentors, computer, or idea, you will go absolutely no where without the tenacity to fight through the times that people say, “that idea sucks”, or “you haven’t sold any this month”. I feel so lame typing this but, never ever give up.

Purpose: When it comes down to it you need to be able to answer only one question. Why? If you can’t answer that question your passion will dry up. The drive for the business won’t exist and you won’t have the fuel to power that tenacity tool. Before you write an executive summary, mock up a prototype, or call a VC, you must be able to answer the question, why am I doing this?

With those critical tools under your belt you will be able to pull the right tool at the right time and leap “almost” any hurtle. What are other tools that you have found important to your success in business or as an entrepreneur?

This post is from my friends blog NewlyCorporate.com :

A blog, a small business, a hobby, a service organization; all of these things result in side projects. We all have them, the projects the we undertake outside of our regular business tasks. They can be fulfilling or they can just drag you down if you don’t manage them correctly. Here are three ways I stay on top of my side projects:

1. Harness your passion… immediately! You have probably heard the old saying “waste not, want not” while, it holds true when it comes to your passion for a side project just as it does elsewhere in life. If I don’t seize my big ideas and apply them in specific actions to my side projects, I lose them and progress stagnates. When the spirit moves you, capitalize on it or you will lose it! At the very least, write it down.

2. Clearly define each project. I keep all of my projects separate with different Outlook folders, Gmail labels and folders on my computer. I take basic notes in a text editor and track my to dos for each project separately with the most pressing ones on my daily to do list. If you let projects just mush into each other, things drop through the cracks and the wheels quickly fall off.

3. Fight through fatigue by building your team. I was talking to a friend the other day about one of his projects and he said,

“This is alot of work, I didn’t realize how much time this would take and I am getting tired of it”.

His project was definitely worth it, he provides a great resource but, he was just getting tired. You need other people to keep you in it and keep you fired up! If you are in a group, you feel committed to the group and they notice when you fall behind. So, if you start hitting a wall, grab someone else to help you over!

How do you stay motivated and work through your side projects?

This is my roomate Tad. He’s glad I got a Mac.

This weekend I’ll be headed down to MilwaukeeDevHouse. They aim to be the premier regularly scheduled hackathon event that combines serious and not-so-serious productivity with a fun and exciting party atmosphere.

If you’re a coder, designer, or just someone who enjoys software and technology development MilwaukeeDevHouse was made for you. MilwaukeeDevHouse is intended for passionate and creative technical people that want to have some fun, learn new things, and meet new people.

If you are interested in MilwaukeeDevHouse2 it will take place on:

Saturday, May 31st, 2008 at Bucketworks (time TBD)

This conversation started with a video comment from Loic on Techcrunch.

Loic Lemeur

Me

Loic Lemeur

This conversation started with a video comment from Loic on Techcrunch.

Loic Lemeur

Me

Loic Lemeur

A few months ago I met with the founder of ThePoint.com Andrew Mason The Point and had a great chat about ThePoint and how he got started. As I entered into the process of system spec’ing and prototyping I needed advice on PHP vs. Rails, how funding works, and other early stage questions. Andrew was a huge help and very encouraging.

Recently, he did an interview with a friend of mine Dave Cohn on Dave’s blog. I’ve decided to post Dave’s interview of Andrew because it gives a great background into what ThePoint.com is doing and where they are heading and briefly talks about Dave’s non-prof start-up Spot.us.

Good luck to both Andrew and Dave in their ventures. Let me know if I can help!

David Feinleib at Mohr Davidow Ventures pens a piece called, “Why Startups Fail.” Here are his four reasons with my thoughts below. Keep in mind I’ve not yet gone through the entire process…

1. Spending too much on sales & marketing before they’re ready.

Every thing I know says focus on the product. It makes sense that if the product doesn’t work really really well then what is marketing going to get you. Specifically on the internet, everything is viral. If you can’t utilize that energy to spread the word on your product you’re basically screwed.

2. The market outpaces the startup’s ability to execute.

This point is awesome. I’m ready The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki and he starts his book talking about positioning. It is so important to be ahead of the market. Or at least find a market that still has plenty of growth potential. If you’re late to the game, find another game because the profit is probably already squeezed out of this one. Sorry.

3. There is no Entrepreneur

This is really encouraging for me because I’m the entrepreneur. I’m not the “hacker” so I’m the one who is ready to lead, make decisions and tell people “no”. Focus on the business and the business will work.

4. The market takes too long to develop

I believe that you have to develop the market. Seesmic is doing a great job of this one. Loic Lemeur is out there everyday making biz dev deals and finding ways for his product to infiltrate new markets. Don’t wait for the customer to go to you. Drag the customer to your product. I love Loic, he’s a great example of entrepreneur and great biz dev, just look at the new Disqus partnership!

(One other thing)

Have fun, rock out and focus on culture. If you’re putting in 100 hours a week you might as well love it, right?

As much as I’m a fan of Seesmic and and of the entrepreneurial process, I thought I would post this video that highlights both. This is Loic’s explanation of how he went about raising money for Seesmic and how he will continue to go out evangelizing Seesmic. There is a lot to learn from this guy…

This is, yes, another post on Twitter. There are a few things I have read, thought, or have been released since the last post that should be shared. First, the Twitter folks publicly admit they don’t know what the issues are. Isn’t that something that they should have identified by now? Haven’t these issues happened repeatedly? Like I said in another post, I’m relatively new to Twitter so I don’t want to be to critical but it seems they should know by now what is up.

Driving to work this morning my roommate and I were discussing a possible infrastructure that would support the scalability that Twitter so desperately needs. Then today I read a very interesting blog post with a similar solution to Twitters problems. The post is called “A Detailed Five Step Twitter Scaling Plan” posted by Hank Williams. I really like the simplicity of his diagram in his proposed solution.  I don’t want to just repeat his post here but I encourage you to read it.

This is Hank’s simple infrastructure diagram:

His five steps to solve Twitters problems are…

1. Automated CPU provisioning
You really *do* need the ability to provision resources more or less on demand.
2. Denormalization
Every user’s outbound tweets should be stored in a separate database from their inbound tweets
3. Sharding
In the above diagram you see that we have separated users into clusters.
4. Shard Splitting
In the real world each database should continue to grow until it starts to be over burdened. Then you “split the shard” into two databases.
5. Distributed User Lookup
Storing a lookup table for each user that indicates where their inbound and outbound data servers are.

This plan to fix Twitter seems very simple to me. It would be cool if we could get a conversation going in the comments around what other infrastructure solutions people think are viable for Twitter. Also, why do you think the are experiencing so many problems? Let us know.

Seth Godin, author of many great business books, most recently The Dip, wrote a ‘how-to’ that I found interesting and useful on his blog. His premise is that a business book is not like a cook book. It’s not just a recipe, its a recipe for 2 or 3 pages but the rest of the book is the convincing or motivating that needs to occur in order for the reader to act on the recipe. If you are looking at a business book as a how-to, you’re wasting your money. Here is Seth’s recommendations on…

How to read a business book:

1. Decide, before you start, that you’re going to change three things about what you do all day at work. Then, as you’re reading, find the three things and do it. The goal of the reading, then, isn’t to persuade you to change, it’s to help you choose what to change.

2. If you’re going to invest a valuable asset (like time), go ahead and make it productive. Use a post-it or two, or some index cards or a highlighter. Not to write down stuff so you can forget it later, but to create marching orders. It’s simple: if three weeks go by and you haven’t taken action on what you’ve written down, you wasted your time.

3. It’s not about you, it’s about the next person. The single best use of a business book is to help someone else. Sharing what you read, handing the book to a person who needs it… pushing those around you to get in sync and to take action–that’s the main reason it’s a book, not a video or a seminar. A book is a souvenir and a container and a motivator and an easily leveraged tool. Hoarding books makes them worth less, not more.