HighEndBuzz

Digging is done

I finally had a chance to dig myself out of my hole at the office. 

SAP, Market Lead Under Pressure, Says Oracle `Misleads' Clients

Doesn't look like these guys ever made-up.  Original Article on bloomberg.com

By Benedikt Kammel and Kenneth Wong

                        

      Sept. 20 (Bloomberg) -- SAP AG, under pressure from Oracle Corp. to maintain its top position in the business-management software market, said the U.S. company is ``misleading'' customers with comments about SAP's product strategy and acquisitions.         

      

Remarks from Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison yesterday ``continue to be inconsistent and misleading,'' Walldorf, Germany- based SAP said in a statement on PR Newswire. It's the first time SAP has directly responded to Oracle's comments on earnings.         

      

Redwood City, California-based Oracle spent almost $20 billion in two years to peel away at SAP's dominance. The German company, the biggest producer of software for functions such as billing and human resources, said in July software sales in the second quarter missed expectations and conceded it lost market share to Oracle and Microsoft Corp.         

My first startup

Funny how things come full circle.  The first "startup" I went to was a little payment processing company called Litle & Co.  We sold the company to First USA Bank in 95 and I joined Tim and Tom at LitleNet (which didn't work out as well as the first).  But now they're back and back on top, #1 in Inc 500.  I hope they continue to succeed.

Full Story

Nokia and Siemans

Talk is cheaper for merger partners

By Andrew Parker in London

Published: June 19 2006 19:27 | Last updated: June 19 2006 19:27

Nokia and Siemens hailed their planned joint venture as creating the world’s third-biggest supplier of network equipment to telecoms companies, while analysts predicted more consolidation.

The move follows the merger agreement in April between Alcatel, France’s telecoms equipment maker, and Lucent, its US counterpart, to create the world’s biggest network infrastructure supplier. Last October, Ericsson, Sweden’s telecoms equipment maker, bought most of Marconi of the UK.

“Consolidation is the name of the game, therefore we believe it is the right move for us,” said Klaus Kleinfeld, chief executive of Siemens.

The telecoms carriers that are the network equipment manufacturers’ most important customers have been leading the consolidation charge. In March, AT&T, the US telephone company, announced plans to create the world’s biggest telecoms group by buying BellSouth, its smaller rival.

Vonage IPO...

I wrote about this impending doom in February.  Vonage was never ready, nor did it have a good model to get profitable.  On with the lawyers.  Can't say I didn't warn you.

 Vonage IPO Woes Continue
By   Ed Sutherland
June 5, 2006

And now come the lawsuits.

First came Vonage's IPO, which was followed by a 30 percent tumble in the price. Then Vonage threatened to sue customers who got cold feet on buying into the IPO. Now the embattled VoIP provider faces a class-action lawsuit charging customers were "crammed into the Vonage IPO regardless of their suitability."

Investors were damaged by mistakes made by Vonage (Quote, Chart) and the IPO  underwriters, according to the lawsuit filed on Friday in a New  Jersey federal court. The lawsuit alleges a desperate Vonage and  underwriters, motivated by millions in fees, violated stock security rules.

Oil Profits

OK, I've been extremely negligent in my posting and growing a business is not an excuse...I'm sorry.

Back to the story at hand.  I just read that Exxon announced a Q1 $8.4Billion (with a "B") profit.  Excessive, probably.  Wrong, no way.  I only dream of a day where I can run an 8 Billion dollar profit.  Of course the public, the government hacks and the media are blowing this out of proportion.  Now my car drinks the expensive stuff, 93 to be exact, so I complain just like the next guy, but if the government really wants to do something about the price consumers pay for gas, they should just repeal or lower the tax on gas, even for a month or two.  The federal and state government make a bigger profit on a gallon of gas then the greedy oil companies.

Where I live for example (MN), I pay 38.4 Cents per gallon to the government in taxes (18.4 federal, 20 State).  Who's greedy here, the government or the oil companies?

You can't force companies to lower prices, but couldn't the government lower the burden on their constituents by repealing the gas tax?

Of course, why would they?  They've been sucking on that breast for to long to care.

Ouch!

This doesn't really fit in this blog, but I'm posting it in the off chance that it can make a difference.

At what point does it come to this? 

From Beyond Robson and Church of the Customer

Positioning and Counter-positioning

You'd never think the mobile GPS market would heat up.  However, the folks at Garmin are under the Soccer-mom assault from TomTom as I recently posted.  Have you seen the dummied down commercials for the Garmin StreetPilot?  Garmin is now taking an active role in attempting to attract that "gps for idiots" market.  Garmin is not just for bass fishermen anymore.  This should be interesting.

TGIF!

Gesundheit!

Not that it matters when you're the founder of a small company, but I'm pretty glad it's Friday.  We've been really busy at Blu and are in the middle of building a demo of our new offering; so in fact the week isn't quite over.  I'm sure I'll be hacking together some bits and pieces for another 10-15 hours this weekend.  I need to be in a position to show this on Tuesday.

It's amazing how little you accomplish and how much was on your list in the first place.  I just got through writing a "to-do" list (for Monday)and pinning it to my board.  It's got 4 sections:

1. Calling list (prospective clients) 10 names
2. Demo's 2x next week
3. COMPLETE NEW PRESENTATION (I call it PowerPoint, but I actually use Keynote)
4. Updated content of the website...it's really out of date. (this one has been slipping for some time now).

I'm really tired...Maybe I'll take my son to a high school football game tonight.

The funny thing about Adwords

I currently use AdWords and AdSense.  For those that are uninitiated, AdWords you pay and AdSense you get paid (kind of).  What I'm starting to figure out is that I still haven't figured it out.  Needless to say, Google is making a ton of money and I must say that AdWords, although it hasn't paid off yet for my company is about as effective as direct mail.

There are 2 kinds of campaigns you can run with Adwords.  The first consists of "pay per click".  This is where you get charged a nominal fee every time someone clicks on your ad.  Since Aug 31, 2005 I've had 14 individuals "click" on my ad based on the keywords I setup in my campaign.  Those clicks came from 6,018 impressions (times my ad was displayed).  It cost me roughly $0.40/click.

The second type of ad I ran was the "cost per 1000 impressions" ad.  This is much more expensive to run, but can be targeted at specific sites, (fortune.com, etc.) based on your marketing requirements.  I didn't run the ad as long, but ended up paying (for the test) about $38 to reach 6,400 impressions.  30 people clicked on the ad which cost over $1.25 per click.  Cost per 1000 impressions was $5.90.

In essence, I dropped over 12k mail pieces for about $43 of which 44 people opened the piece and threw it in the trash.  Not a good measure of success by any standards.

The questions I have are simple, yet complex moving forward. 

1. Is it more effective to target an ad (cost/impression) or allow an ad to "appear" based on perceived need, i.e. topic on a blog, search engine, etc?
2. Are ads becoming the new "white noise" on the net?  Where they already?
3. Does it make sense to continue any of the programs?

I know most of this requires some insight into what we do and our market, ad quality, etc., but I'm sure marketers and CEO's everywhere are struggling with this issue.

The final question:  Is anyone making money on Ads, specifically on blogs?  For any average blogger the thought of making money off of advertising via AdSense is a pipe-dream, for me it's an experiment as a couple bucks a month don't equal revenue.

Tipping at Caribou?

Alright, someone help me out here.  Every day I go to Caribou coffee (I live Minneapolis and do believe it tastes better than Starbucks) and purchase a large (none of that Venti crap, another pet peeve of mine.  Just call it a large for Christ sakes, don't correct me at Starbucks when I say large.  "you want a Venti latte?", no I said LARGE you tool!)  Vanilla latte.  The cost of said latte is $4.10 which is a lot for a cup of coffee and steamed milk with a shot of flavor.  I figure that I'm paying for the service as well.  Right?...Wrong.  They, along with every other coffee shop in America feel the need to add a tip jar at the register while I'm ordering.

There are two things wrong with this picture:

1. I'm paying $4.10 for coffee and milk.  I'm going to assume that service is part of that price, why are you begging for more?
2. Tipping is a very American thing, one that I really appreciate and one that makes this country very unique.  I tip the barber, waitress, cabbie and on holidays the mailman and garbage collector.  What should stand out to the average reader is that unlike coffee shops, tipping in this traditional sense happens only AFTER you receive the service.  For example, you order a beer for $3.00 and pay with a $5 bill.  The bartender gives 2 ones change and you leave him a $1 tip AFTER he gives you the beer.

Why is it that people selling coffee should receive a tip at the point of sale regardless of the quality of their coffee at any particular moment?  Why not leave a tip jar near the exit?  Let me decide if this 4buck cup of Jo is worth the extra $.90.  Could it be that these are typical liberal establishments that see no problem begging for money prior to delivering a product or service?  Someone help me out here? 

BTW, I never tip at a coffee shop...

A New Kind of Wireless Company

I recently read that Cingular and Sprint got some of the lowest marks when it comes to customer service.  I wasn't surprised with Sprint as I'm a home customer (DSL only), but I was a bit disappointed with a company that claims to be on the forefront of technology like Cingular.  Especially since I was about to change my service from Verizon (no love there either) to Cingular prior to reading the article.  I'm having second thoughts now (Word-of-Mouth at work).

A new kind of company needs to take a book from the NEW airline industry (JetBlue and Southwest) and simplify the very lucrative wireless world.  I predict it will happen in the next 18 months (you heard it here first).  With the advent of free WIFI (Google comes to mind) and innovative approaches to handsets (802.11b compliant like the Nokia 9300) paired with great services like Skype I see some creative company taking this fat cow by the udders.

There are, however, barriers to this, call it 4G convergence.

1. Handsets with enough processing power ( not to mention software)to switch from 802.11b, GSM, CDMA networks dynamically (and not burn your ear off).
2. Peering of the various carriers (not to mention technologies) involved
3. Billing systems to divide the pie and charge the customer
4. A big-box retailer to push the brand
5. Early adopters

Finally give consumers easy plans (not US Tax code complexity) and great customer service.  Essentially do the opposite of what the big carriers are doing.  Wouldn't that be a change?

Any takers?

Bad Behavior After the Bubble

As stated earlier, up to the point the Internet bubble burst IT people were in my opinion some of the most talented individuals in business.  They truly cared about their customers both inside their respective companies and outside the fold.   

Then the layoffs began.  First it was the contractors, some would say they were the engine for the growth of the Internet economy.  Everyone wanted to be a consultant in those days.  I turned down a technology strategy consultant gig that supposedly paid $350/hour.  That would have been very short lived.  I remember during the hiring process of a Jr. Network Administrator I joked with the VP of HR to find me someone who "had a heartbeat and could spell IT".  That's how desperate I was to fill all of the open headcounts.  Talk like that these days should lead to your dismissal.

Once the ax started to fall, I noticed some very disturbing behavior from IT managers.  They retreated back to their IT bunkers and settled in for the long war.  Gone were the days of collaboration and innovation; back were the days of policy enforcement and locked-down standardization.  The new thinking (which is very prevalent today in IT) was that added complexity and procedures led to job security.  While we were trying to simplify access to IT resources and dumb down infrastructure complexities during the bubble, the fallout after the crash scared these guys so much they increased the complexity. 

Ask someone in 1998 and the answer was "...piece of cake, I can have that hacked together in 2 days.", in 2005 you'll get "...I'm going to need you to submit your requirements in writing, I'll have an estimate in 2 weeks and will need to consult our feasibility committee and change control counsel.  How does next quarter sound?"

Now I'm not opposed to process and procedure, but if the procedure interferes with the building, marketing and selling of your particular product and service,  you need to fire the tool that got you in that mess.  IT people mean well and are still very talented, the majority of IT managers are lazy protectionists who have retired themselves into their silicon silos.  There are talented managers out there, but they don't last long in those environments.

NWA Woes...Again.

Again, more woes for Northwest Airlines.  Living in the Twin Cities I don't have a choice but to be concerned about NWA's imminent bankruptcy.  They have a nice strangle hold on the Sky's in this area although the latest expansion of the HHH Terminal has provided the upstarts with ample gates.  Unless you live under a rock you should know by now that the NWA mechanics union went on strike after refusing to give in to managements request for additional concessions. 

"Northwest has been trying to wrest $176 million of annual labor savings from its mechanics in an effort to cut overall labor expense by $1.1 billion and end four years of losses. The company, which is the only airline among the five biggest in the U.S. that hasn't won concessions from most of its unions, has secured $300 million in givebacks from pilots and managers and is still in talks with flight attendants and bag handlers."

This statement is not true.  Years ago all of the employees of NWA made concessions to management.  The problem is that the company never kept their end of the bargain made in those days and are now asking for additional cuts from the workforce.

Now I'm no fan of Unions.  They're corrupt organizations that feed on corporate America at the expense of shareholders.  They do next to nothing for the people they represent.  This strike goes to show that they would rather NWA went out of business than to give in to the airline.  I watched the news as one union official stated "we would rather NWA went out of business than give into any more concessions"...you may just have your wish.

There is an easy albeit high level (uninformed about the airline industry) answer to this.  Look at the examples of the low cost (new airline) carriers.  Build some of that model into your legacy business model over time.  Here's my solution:

1. Cut back you number of flights (use less fuel, less maintenance, etc.) Cost side of the equation.  If you're losing money flying certain routes, don't fly them.
2. Go from 7 different aircraft to 3 like you competition.  Fly 737 or 757 domestic, 777 to Europe (like partner Continental) and 747 long-haul.  (substitute these aircraft for Airbus version if you want, I don't care).  Sell of the rest of the fleet.  This will reduce maintenance costs significantly by cutting the number of maintenance workers you need.
3. Outsource major overhaul operations (like Southwest).  Spin off your maintenance facilities in Minneapolis and Detroit.  It alone could be a profitable business with all of the upstarts needing these services.
4. Improve the quality of your flight experience.  Until recently, I always flew NWA.  But my experience over the last few years with flight attendants and ground staff has left me wondering if NWA even cared about it's customers or if they simply look at us as cattle.  Fly AirTran or JetBlue, not to mention Singapore Airlines and you'll understand the difference.
5. Speaking of flight attendants.  Get rid of those old, crusty, mean flight attendants.  I'm not advocating ageism, but they act as though they are doing me a favor by my being on their flight.  Get some younger flight attendants that are excited about a new career in the Sky's, not some crusty old woman who's ass hits you in the head because her hips are so wide she has to go down the aisle sideways.  Didn't there used to be standards?
6. Leg room.  No further comment.

I obviously don't have all, or any of the answers.  However, the trickle down effect of not giving a shit is pretty apparent at NWA.  Management doesn't care about the workers, the workers don't care about the airline and the airline definitely doesn't care about its passengers.  In the end I why should we care with all of the new choices.  Pan-Am, Northeastern, TWA, Branniff, and now NWA...Good bye.

 

Moved...almost

We moved into our new office space today.  It's more of a technology incubator than our own suite.  There are several other startups in the building and you can tell there is a lot of energy in the place when you walk in.  We still have to move printers, books, etc., but all of the paperwork is signed, key card, alarm code, and phone system is configured.

Time to close more business.

Million Dollar Infrastructure for $100 a month...

In my previous life (before starting BluIntelligence) I was/am an IT guy.  I was Director of Enterprise Software Development at my last company prior to their acquisition and Head of Global IT at a software company prior to that.  My life since 1991 revolved around developing and deploying large infrastructure projects.  Siebel, Oracle, JDE, SAP and Microsoft tools are all in my bag of tricks and I have an extensive network of contacts at all of  these companies, not to mention the scores of former employees I could call upon to help with projects.

So in January of this year when I decided to start my own company you'd think I would rely on what I learned from deploying all of these solutions wouldn't you?  The truth is, I did.  I chose none of them.  The secret to my Million bucks worth of infrastructure is not to make the mistakes I helped others make at both start-ups and fortune 500 companies.  For those of you starting your own company, here's my little secret.

Let someone else run your shop...sounds simple doesn't it?

I'll get into more detail in future posts, but this is what our infrastructure consists of today:

1. Email:  Hosted through ActiveHost.  We access our mail either pop3 or web-mail.
2. Web Hosting:  Hosted through ActiveHost
3. Application Hosting:  Hosted through ActiveHost.  Our application we run our business on is hosted at our same provider.
4. Customer Extranet:  We use BaseCamp.  Awesome tool to provide our deliverables and communicate with our customers.
5. Internal Applications:  For everything else we use JotSpot, my personal favorite (a Wiki).  It has our CRM system, our requirement management, our team project deliverables, and our primary collaboration tool.

As a start-up we have the same application any larger company would have without the servers (we do have a file server for local files), application management, data center, or network infrastructure.  We also consider ourselves more agile due to our environment choices.  We're moving into our new office space this week, which means we're moving printers and laptops, not an entire computing environment.

I've personally purchased and deployed all of the enterprise solutions mentioned above and can tell you from experience we have all of the functionality in our hosted products (out of the box) as we would have had if we had purchased Siebel, Oracle or SAP (out of the box).  Just to put the cost into perspective, at my last company I paid $264,000/year in maintenance to run Siebel and had a team of 5 developers who made between $70,000 to $100,000 a year.  On top of that the production environment had 13 servers (test had 6) and was running on Oracle databases and EMC storage.  (And that's just one application)

Joe Kraus (yeah, the Exite guy) who is the CEO of JotSpot makes the point very clear in his blog.  I'll take it one step further though, it's teams like Joe's and Marc Benioff at Salesforce.com who are driving our start-up costs and companies like ours down even more than what they're experiencing.

My most important point in all of this is that outsourcing your infrastructure and application needs to a company whos sole business is to manage them will allow you to get on with your core business. 

The key question is:  "If this is so great why aren't more companies doing this"?  The answer is very simple, FEAR.  I'll answer this in more detail as well as give you some insight into what has become of the IT profession since the bubble burst in future posts, it's shocking. 

10 People I'd like to have lunch with

I had a conversation with an old friend (over lunch) that led to the question: Who would you like to have lunch with more than anyone else?  We ruled out dead people and Jesus...Here is what I came up with.

1. (Sir) Richard Branson:  Who wouldn't, but for me this is the person I want to meet and have a one hour lunch with more than anyone on the planet.  I would ask him how he did it and how he keeps doing it over and over again.  How many CEO's do you know have a fan club???
2. George W. Bush:  Whatever your politics, he's the most honorable man to hold office since Ronald. 
3. Dennis Prager:  Talk show host I respect more than any.  He's got great insight into god, media and current events.
4. Lance Armstrong: Don't even need to explain that one.
5. Tiger Woods:  I don't play much golf anymore, but I do think it would be interesting to speak with him for a bit.
6. Bo Peabody:  Remember Tripod?  Yeah, that guy.  I read the book and since I recently started my own company I do have some questions.
7. Ann Coulter: Fire and brimstone.  I'd love to have a rant with her. 
8. Matt Drudge:  It's a bit unfair to put him this low on the list, but he would be my "new media" numero uno. 
9. Marc Benioff:  Just to apologize to him for minimizing his Salesforce.com product and choosing Siebel all those years ago.  He's on the right track and is one of the "new" visionaries.
10. Bill Gates:  Who wouldn't want to meet Bill.  He's the reason we're all doing what we're doing.

Word of Mouth

I'll be attending the Word of Mouth Marketing Association's (WOMMA) latest event in Chicago, "Measuring Word of Mouth".  This will be my first WOMMA event and I'm pretty excited as I'll be attending with one of my customers.  What got me excited about this event is that measuring what people say (not to mention what impact it has)and think about a particular company, product or service is the foundation of what we do at BluIntelligence. 

This should be good.

Website is launched

To us it's a big deal although in the grand scheme of things, our simplified website launch isn't going to move any mountains.  Our goal was to clearly state our value to our clients and then highlight our core services with the end result hopefully leading to a call or email.  The guys at Olive & Company did a great job in a short timeframe.

This officially takes us out of "stealth" mode (actually warm market only mode) and moves us into the game.  Can you tell we're excited?  We completed a very important POC with a client who recently signed a deal for the entire year. 

What Shade of "Bling" is your Parachute?

Carly got $21M for running 2 companies in the ground on her way out the door.  I don't get it.  I'm all for paying top CEO's millions for successfully leading companies.  I'm really against giving away money to those who fail.  What did she actually do to earn $21M?  Now, I don't think she should give it back, I'm actually happy for her...god bless her if she can get it.  I'm questioning the decision of the board to give her that type of package, or even worse inking that deal when she came on board (which may have happend).  Time to shuffle the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Ask Acquires Bloglines?

I'm not surprised these guys were acquired, but I am very surprised by "who".  Ask Jeeves...Come on.  First, I can't believe these guys are still around, or that anyone even uses Ask anymore.  I'm not going to be critical of the service that Ask provides because they do have a nice clean interface and as far as a search engine goes, I'm going to assume they do a good job.  My question would be, "Where are they going with this?", not to mention "what the heck were the guys at Bloglines thinking?".  I'm a big fan and user of Bloglines.  I only hope this doesn't impact the quality of the service.   No details were given about the terms of the deal.  I just hope they didn't give it away for a few hundred chickens or 20 head of cattle.

Business Un-Intelligence

I attended a meeting on business intelligence yesterday only to be thoroughly disappointed in the state BI is currently in.  I guess I feel like I was a bit setup by the primary vendor, Cognos.  The initial meeting request was an invite to a round table discussion by Ziff Davis so I naturally thought that they were attempting to gain some insight into where we thought BI was heading...I thought wrong.

I arrived about 15 minutes late and the group of about 20 were in the middle of introductions...I'm Joe Blow, CIO...and my biggest challenge is standardization...  I immediately recognized Tony Winkler (a former Adaytum, now Cognos sales rep and a friend of mine) and the Head Marketing Geek from Cognos corporate.  It's then I knew I got setup, I didn't know this was a Cognos event.  Since I was already there I thought I would make the best of the situation and participate in the "discussion"...

Then it was my turn...my biggest concern about BI:  Reporting is useless.  How can you run a company on 10000 lagging indicators a month?  Every time a BI sales rep (software sales rep) comes by he's pimping the latest product.  There is never any talk about moving toward real BI.  BI vendors are experts at reporting and reports.  That's all.

Needless to say, I didn't get a very good response from the Cognos marketing guy.  He's a smart guy, I've met him, but he and his company still have no domain expertise in anything other than reporting and generating reports from data warehouses or data-marts.  Now the Ziff Davis "moderator" keys in and disagrees with me "I disagree, I think quite a few people at Cognos have domain expertise in areas other than reporting".  Great, so where are these guys?

I could tell they were confused, however, the rest of the people around the table were nodding their heads in approval.  They were either a bit timid about blasting a vendor while he was in the room, or they were so frustrated at the state of BI from the vendors perspective that they believed it was a futile point...I let the snake out of the bag.

My point wasn't that Cognos was a bad company, they're in my opinion the best company in this space.  However, they don't even get a passing grade when it comes to Business Intelligence.  You can church up reporting all you want, it will never become actual business intelligence that will allow you to measure and react to changes in conditions based on leading indicators.

Cognos purchased Adaytum because of the product and the domain expertise.  Adatyum, and now Cognos planning group, sold to the office of the CFO.  My final question was why does the rest of Cognos continue to pimp their product to IT guys?  If you want to provide real intelligence to Sales, wouldn't you talk to the sales organization?  I'm not getting it...I don't think they do either.

It's All About the Touchdown Dance

Being that we're in the middle of the NFL playoffs, I thought I would write a tribute to football (actually a football analogy for business).  I had a great conversation with a colleague last week about how more so than ever people are more concerned about getting credit than getting the job done.  I don't know if it was because of the bust, but ever since then, some IT departments are on perpetual hold...more like hide.  Almost 2 years ago I had a conversation with a CIO where she told me that people (her employees) should be "happy" and "fortunate" to have jobs at all.  You could say I was shocked (glad she doesn't use that in her pep-talk). 

Since then, what I've noticed from her organization is quite a bit dancing, and not a whole lot of production.  A great example of this was the recent acquisition of their largest competitor they decommissioned a legacy CRM system they acquired.  This included moving over 300 users to Siebel at a cost of over $300k.  Long story short...they convinced their Sr. Leadership that they are able to save $25k/year as they don't have to pay maintenance on the legacy system.  During a company meeting they celebrated the "ROI" with no mention to the costly Siebel system that now does all of the heavy lifting.

...just like some football players, it's all about the dance.

I sure hope this changes in 2005.

Vonage

I've been using Vonage for over 2 months now and must say I'm very impressed with the service.  Don't get me wrong, quality of service could be better, but then we're talking about calls to Grandma.  I'm willing to suffer just a little for a total cost of $25 vs. the cost of a local service (plus features) and the costs of long distance.  If I had to rate the service I'd give it a 3.5 out of 5.  The only problem I currently see is that when I'm working on-line in my home office (as I am now), there is a noticeable deterioration in the quality of service (minimal however, but noticeable).  Once they figure out the quality of service issue, this will be a great business quality service.  I wouldn't want to be the "Bells" at this point.

Taxi

Getting ready to launch our product (even more so a startup) is like getting a jumbo jet to taxi onto the runway...a monumental task if you really think about it.  It's amazing how the little things you don't want to worry about initially (accounting, email systems, communications tools, expense reporting system and even this blog) seem to consume half of my time, not to mention the fact that we need to launch our website in the next couple of weeks. 

I realize I'll appreciate all of the work we put in to get the wheels on the car, but don't we all just wish it were easier.

Keep your eye on the prize

I learned quite a bit from my last boss; actually I learned most everything (important) about business from him.  He was the CFO of Adaytum during my time there who orchestrated the sale of the company to Cognos for $160M.  Late one evening (we all worked late in those days) Dan Mayleben  called myself, a sales rep, and the head of product marketing into his office to discuss "the prize". 

The prize was why we were there.  It was the reason I left my previous company and went to what was essentially a start-up.  The conversation revolved around a pending (2/3 years out) IPO and what would happen if we worked hard, kept expenses low, hired the right people and hit the big time.  We were all loaded down with stock and the prospect of $80, $90, or even $120 per share price was something everyone constantly calculated and recalculated.  That was the prize...or so we thought.

We sold the company and everyone made money in the deal.  We didn't make $80/share, but I can't complain about the way it worked out.  The boom, after all, was over.  It was good to see the rank and file make money on the deal.

...but what about the prize?  Now that I've moved on, I realize that "the prize" was working with some of the most talented people in the business.  We still get together on occasion, and I was able to take some of my team with me to new opportunities, but I still look back at those days and really appreciate the fact that everyone at Adaytum was an "A" player.  We all reflect on those times; the fact that we didn't always get along, didn't always agree, but when the bell rang we all pulled together and got the job done regardless of personal issues, resources limitations and budget constraints.

I still get together with Dan on occasion, as well as with many of the other Adaytum alumni.  He moved on to High Jump software and helped sell the company to 3M.  We now secretly refer to him as Dan "the man" after doing 2 deals in 2 years.  He was right about keeping your eye on "the prize".  It's just that "the prize" means different things to different people.

...what about Cognos?  They gave away the prize.  They thought that the product was the driver behind the success of Adaytum.  They learned to late that it was the people.  It was the 300 people around the world that would run through a wall at the end of the quarter to get it done that  continued to changed the company and the market space.  The Prize is in your human capital.  Keep them happy, productive and most of all involved and they'll take you across the finish line on their shoulders.