Do Happier People Work Harder?

Great article from NY Times. Abstract: worker autonomy, sufficient resources and learning from problems = happy workers. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/opinion/sunday/do-happier-people-work-harder.html?smid=fb-share

Mastering Change: Lessons on the Pivot

I spoke today at a Churchill Club Event: Igniting Innovation and Mastering Change. 

My fellow panelists were:

• Randy Komisar, partner at Kleiner and author of Getting to Plan B
• Ujjal Kohli, CEO, Rhythm NewMedia
• Sudhakar Ramakrishna, EVP & GM of Unified Communications Solutions, and Chief Development Officer, Polycom

The panelists and the subject matter were wonderful. A few insights follow:

• Intellectual honesty
• All the panelists agreed that mastering change and pivoting requires intellectual honesty. The courage to confront hard truths, face challenging topics head on, and to share the truth up the chain is fundamental.
• Given that businesses are funded on Plan A, Randy noted that too many teams and boards hide the truth in fear of admitting the fallacy of plan A. The expectation, he noted, should be that Plan A is simply an hypothesis and that is is to be expected that a Plan B will be required.
• Ujjal noted that team members are too oft afraid to share bad news across departments and that too many CEOs fear telling the board the truth
• Ujjal made the excellent point that Series A investors need to build a culture of absolute trust with the CEO and to stress to him/her that the truth is paramount and no one will ever shoot the messenger.
• Agile, data driven, rapid cadences
• All the panelists stressed the need for speed and agility. The movement from water-fall to agile development is driven by a need to quickly incorporate real-world feedback and signals into the product, strategy, and company.
• Randy noted the need to ask the right questions and to validate or disprove hypothesis as quickly as possible.
• Processes, cultures, etc that thrive on agility, metrics, and clearly stated assumptions win.
• When to Pivot
• Randy stressed the need to avoid waiting for a near-death experience to change. Change should be assumed and too often it takes a disaster to shake a start-up from complacency and intellectual dishonesty.
• Pivot early and avoid running the cash balance, team morale, and credibility with the board down to zero.

I really enjoyed participating and it reinforced my conviction that the entrepreneurial process demands comfort with ambiguity, agile execution, absolute intellectual honesty, and a process of vigorous debate, insight, and, vitally, realignment across the team.

Envelope for Risk: What's the Mindset of Your Investors?

Just got off the phone with a CEO friend of mine. He'd just finished a board meeting that left him exasperated and frustrated. Yes, I played therapist.

The root cause?

His investors are surprised by pivots, are focused on the downside, lack political will in their partnerships, and inject insecurity and fear into the company rather than serve to relieve it.

I am very lucky to have investors (Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Hummer Winblad, NCD Investors) who are committed to building durable, stand alone businesses, who recognize that all overnight successes are born from years of hard work, persistence, and obstacles over come, who are comfortable with a large envelope of risk and volatility.

Too many venture investors focus on plan A and are shocked to hear there is a need for a plan B - the best are surprised if there ISN'T a plan B or a need for one. Too many investors shrink from risk and encourage safety and certainty over ambiguity and daring.

Mindset...find out the mindset of your investment syndicate and recognize that their ability to live with risk, ambiguity, and change may well be a key determinant in whether you create a stand-alone, enduring business or are forced into a quick sale or, worse, liquidation.

The Next Step in Disrupting Venture Capital: Emerging Manager Funds

The Venture Capital industry is ripe for disruption. Too many firms, too few returns, and an industry predicated on investing in disruption that fails to disrupt itself.

Over the last few years, super angels offered new capital to the market and groups such as Y-Combinator provided young entrepreneurs new avenues to success. The venture industry, however, lacks a very common model that the hedge fund industry has mastered - the emerging manager strategy.

Emerging managers are young, smart, and successful analysts or portfolio managers who cut their teeth with a major hedge fund. After 3-5 years of stellar returns and performance, they often leave and raise small funds from their former employers, hedge fund leaders, or limited partners who specialize in identifying and seeding up and comers.

For example, Julian Roberston is not only the founder of Tiger Management, but he is also the "father" of the so-called Tiger Cubs. Many of today's hedge fund leaders got there start working with and then being seeded by Julian Robertson - including, John Griffin, Lee Ainslie, Andreas Halvorsen, and 40+ others. Paul Tudor Jones, another leading investor, continues to seed deserving managers, including Two Sigma.

Why don't we see a similar model at play in the venture industry? Having spent six years in venture, I know there are many talented young investors chafing to rip up the playbook and disrupt the market. 

Sadly, it is virtually impossible for them to raise capital. Why?

Venture returns take years to produce, while the hedge fund industry is marked to market daily and over a year or three, one can build up a track record and demonstrate "alpha," the holy grail of alternative investments. Moreover, given venture investments are illiquid, redemption and getting your money back is much, much harder than in the hedge fund asset class.

Recently, I had the pleasure of visiting Tiger's NYC offices and spending time with a senior executive. Tiger, you see, does not solely rely on alpha. Over the last twenty years, all hires and prospective Tiger Cubs have been given a IQ, personality, and logic test. With twenty years of results, Julian is able to benchmark any new candidate against the industry's very best. The combination of investment strategy, results, test results, and in-person interviews allow him to allocate capital to an emerging manager with a system and then to measure and watch.

So, in order to pull of an emerging manager strategy, one would need to be able to identify talent independent of cash on cash returns and solve the redemption problem. I believe that both limitations are solveable.

We all know who the rising stars are in the industry and I am confident that a decent share of them would be willing to hang their own shingle and create their own destiny. Moreover, with the rise of secondary markets and innovations that I can only imagine exist, the liquidity/redemption issue seems workable as well.

Will we see an emerging manager strategy work in venture? Will a lion of the industry emulate Julian Robertson and seed the next generation of top firms? There is a capital allocation problem in venture today - bad firms are getting allocations at the cost of new firms starting with hungry GPs ready to kill it.

Until the industry can allocate capital to the future stars and not to a 10 year old investment track record, I don't think we will see the disruption in our asset managers that the technology industry deserves. 

Thoughts?

What Every Social Media Marketer Should Know About Flite - SocialTimes.com

What Every Social Media Marketer Should Know About Flite - SocialTimes.com

Iowa Straw Poll

How broken is politics in this country?

After weeks of reading about Iowa and the Republican Iowa Straw Poll, I wondered how many people actual vote in the poll.

Pick the right # from the list below

• 1,600,000
• 160,000
• 16,000
• 1,600

Any takers?

The absurd amount of press coverage for Michele Bachmann suggests a hugely important event. As the winner, she won 4,823 votes out of a total of ~16,000.

Read that again, 4,823 votes.

The fact that 4,823 mid-west voters are able to massively and disproportionately shape the debate regarding Republican Presidential politics is not only undemocratic but also absurd.

Why do we allow such small numbers of people such undue influence?

While I have nothing against NH or Iowa, I believe we have a fundamentally skewed process for selecting candidates and one that rewards extreme positions that cater to an absurdly small number of people.

Bachmann won less than 5,000 votes. This is a non-story and yet another example of how bizarre our political and news cycle systems are and how little they map to the reality the vast majority of us live.

Flite Interview with Robert Scoble

How Publishers Can Stay Relevant in today's Digital Media World

http://emediavitals.com/content/staying-relevant-world-ad-networks

Guest post on eMedia Vitals regarding how publishers can compete and stay relevant in today's digital media landscape.

Moonlight Breaks by Rich Price

Google+, An iPad Moment

iPad. The word evokes a magical product experience that opens up the mind to the possibilities and utility of technology - elegant, pleasant to hold, and a window to a world of applications and content.

For me, using Google+ hit me just as hard. Within an hour of using the service, I began to recognize not only the power of Google's social offering but value in the social layer over Google's incredibly rich product offering set - mail, calendar, video chat, IM, documents, search, photos, blog platform, Android phones, netbooks....

The + circle metaphor maps brilliantly to a world I know alt-tab between: LinkedIn, Gmail, Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, etc, while allowing me to design the appropriate filters and groupings of people I know, admire, keep to update from, etc.

Moreover, Google+ instantly changed my sense of Facebook's value. Prior to the + launch, Facebook's ascendancy and victory seemed written in stone. 100s of millions of users, no competition, brands flocking to Fan Pages, etc.  In my first + session, I realized how easy it is to switch from Facebook to + - outside of my contacts and the occasional photo, leaving behind Facebook, just like I left Blackberry behind to go to the iPhone, proved a no-brainer and truly easy.

Google+ serves to further bind me to Google - mail, calendaring, photos, blog, social communication, video chatting...and when they tie in Google Apps, I will have my work colleagues, family, friends, and extended social circles all on a single platform. + makes me much more likely to buy a Nexus phone and dramatically increased the amount of time I spend with Google each day.

As with my first iPad session, I fell in love with + on first sight and it opened my eyes to the power of Google's product portfolio and to Facebook's precarious position in our lives.

Finally, I think + will put a major hamper on Facebook's IPO prospects, while revealing in a very tangible way how shitty Twitter is from a product perspective. Twitter is now in danger of being a $7bn company with a product offering virtually identical to the day it started.

Flite at the IAB Future of Display Event

I am grateful to the IAB for giving me the opportunity to present at The Future of Display Event in NYC during Internet Week. The videos of my presentations follow.  Flite's ability to bring the full power of the Internet to bear directly in ad units  - sight, sound, and motion with social underpinnings - were on full display and 100% aligned with the industry's vision.


Demoing Cloud Ads

Click here to see the ads in action

IAB Interview

Product Marketing

My good friend and old boss, Richard Walker, first introduced me to the Product Marketing schematic below.

The diagram is an excellent architecture of how to think through Product Marketing's key deliverables.

iMedia Connection: Flite delivers a cloud-based dynamic ad platform that may help restore the "big idea" to marketing

Yahoo! Scene: Ad Banners Becoming Miniature Website Destinations

A Wonderfully True Quote Re the Vulnerability Creativity Demands

Powerful quote from Sim's Little Bets - 

" I think it's necessary," Pixar Director Pete Docter says about the inevitable self-doubt that accompanies any creative process. "On Monsters, Inc, I really wore that. I would come home at the end of a difficult day in story and I would think, I'm a fraud, a failure. I don't know what I am doing. And now I realize, well, that's the way it is."

Amen, the creative process forces one to confront the prospect of failure, a sudden lack of orientation where one is not sure what comes next. 

The Luck Factor: Do We Create Our Own Luck?

I recently came across Richard Wiseman's book, The Luck Factor.

Wiseman, a UK-based researcher, wanted to better understand why some people are lucky, while others appear to be doomed to poor luck and missteps.

The distribution of luck follows: 50% think they are lucky, 36% neither luck nor unlucky, and 14% self-proclaimed unlucky.

The book details the findings but here are a few concepts:

• lucky people tend to be open to opportunities or insights that come along spontaneously 
• unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine, fixated on certain specific outcomes
• lucky people are open to mingling at parties, while unlucky people tend to cluster with like-minded people
• lucky people have open, inviting body language, smile twice as often as unlucky people, thus drawing other people and chance encounters (ie luck) to them
• lucky people invest in a network of luck - lucky people are effective at building secure, long lasting attachments. They tend to be easy to know and easy to like and form close relationships based on trust. This network helps promote opportunity in their lives - ie luck

He concludes, "I discovered that being in the right place at the right time is actually all about being in the right state of mind."

If you consider chance a numbers game, he argues, then extroverted people simply have more chances to hit a winner.

Google's 11 Rules for Better Management

Learning How to Sell - Premature Pitchalation and Other Sins

In a prior post, I explored why so few MBA's go into sales.  The ability to sell is a skill of the highest value. In start-ups, sales is key to finding product-market fit, raising venture money, recruiting the best, driving revenue, pitching the press....

After three years at Flite, I am acutely aware of how important it is to sell and how poorly prepared I was for the challenge. I recommend a great book on sales to anyone eager to learn more : The Sandler Rules: 49 Timeless Selling Principles and How to Apply Them.

The 49 rules provide a framework and approach for better understanding the sales dynamic, process, structure, and path to more systematic success.

Here are a few mistakes that I continue to make and how I am working to improve.

Rule 2: Don't Spill Your Candy in the Lobby
This rule is classic - "have you ever shared too much information, too soon?"  In my rush to prove my credibility and the value of my product, I often jump right into an overview of what we do, why, how, who we do it for...all before we have even made it to the conference room. Another term: premature pitchalation - the prospect has no time to lay out their needs and asks and is bombarded by information overload independent of context. Needless to say, I am working hard to slow down and to let the prospect talk in order to allow for better fact-finding and qualification. Spilling your candy threatens to see you blabber on about features, functions, and issues of potentially no interest to the prospect.

Rule 14: A Prospect Who is Listening Is No Prospect At All
This one mirrors rule 2 , as Sandler asks, "are you selling or are you telling?"  I pride myself on being articulate and able to explain a value statement well. To often, I believe that if I can lay out an axiomatically perfect argument, then the prospect, by dint of my logic and persuasion, will buy right away. While I believe strongly in being able to express myself well, I am working hard to listen, to ask questions, then more questions, and to make sure that the customer's problems and goals are well matched with our offering.

Rule 17: The Professional Does What He Did As a Dummy - on Purpose
Here Sandler encourages the professional sales executive to ask simple questions, embarrassingly simple, questions to tease out information and to make sure there is total clarity. Are you comfortable with asking simple questions and leaving long periods of awkward silence? I am not, and I am working hard to allow silence to fill the room and for the prospect to fill it with information rather than for me to fill it with nervous energy and output.

Rule 30: You Can't Lose Anything You Don't Have
I've been guilty of spending far too much time on accounts that are failing to close.  Am I worried the customer will turn to another vendor, that the deal will eventually close if I just keep humping it...?  Sandler advises that one either close the sale or close the file - I need to do that better.

Rule 32: Get an IOU for Everything You Do
Often in start-ups, we are missionary sales people. We feel a huge need to prove ourselves worthy in order to break into large accounts. Accordingly, in our early days, I found myself doing lots of "free work" on the come. Sandler recommends that sales, by definition, does too much free work. The professional makes sure that the customer realizes that you are providing free service and that the IOU helps win future business.  One of Flite's major learnings is that we don't need to do as much free work as we thought, that asking for clear understanding that the customer will commit to buy if you we validate x, y, or z through a pilot works. If the answer is no deal no matter what you deliver, then why do it?  Get an IOU and be sure that any work on the come is tied to clear commitments to buy.

I learn more every day as I sell and found Sandler's book a tremendous reference for putting into words and simple rules problems that I encounter every day along with useful solutions for how best to handle them.

Watching the Wheels - Texting, Surfing, Emailing While Driving

In 2009, the NHTSA reported 5,474 deaths on the US streets and highways caused by distracted driving.  An additional 448,000 motorists were injured by drivers who were using cellphones and texting.

For the record, I am guilty of distracted driving. Today, I read about Bob Okerblom, who lost his son, aged 19, to a texting driver. His son, Eric, was a molecular biology major at Cal, National Merit Scholar, and all round great kid.

There but for the grace of God go I...

What?

Having texted, emailed, and surfed the web at the wheel, it could easily of been me who struck Eric.

Erik's family started a foundation in his honor - http://www.eofoundation.net/. His Dad biked across America reminding us all of the risks and losses we face when we drive distracted.

Starting today, April 22nd, I pledge not to text, email, program Pandora...etc, while I am driving.

Join me, if you like, in avoiding future tragedies.

Unusually Excellent: Skills Required for Leadership

Tony Zingale, CEO of Jive Software, recently sent me a copy of John Hamm's Unusually Excellent; The Necessary Nine Skills Required for the Practice of Great Leadership.

Hamm breaks the nine skills into three core segments:

1. Credibility, or a matter of character
1. Authentic
2. Trustworthy
3. Compelling
2. Competence, or a matter of skill
1. People
2. Strategy
3. Execution
3. Consequence, or a matter of values
1. Decision making
2. Communication
3. Impact

The book reminds me a great deal of Bill George's work. George is currently an HBS Professor and served as the long-time CEO of Medtronic. George wrote two wonderful books on leadership. You can follow Bill George on Twitter here. 

George's central argument is that mission-driven, rather than profit-driven companies, generate greater shareholder returns. Moreover, mission-driven companies require leaders with a True North, ie a moral compass/center of gravity that anchors not only the leader, but also the company. Hamm extends that concept and underscores the value of authenticity to leadership.

The moral compass proves its value in times of stress and ambiguity - it is the spirit of the law, not the letter that governs leaders with a True North.  As Hamm's model notes, competence is only 1/3 of the battle. Self-awareness, trust, a compass to navigate challenging decisions, the ability to share and empathize...are all EQ level traits. Pure competence, IQ, is not enough.  Lehman, Enron, AIG....all companies full of high IQ people who lost their way and operated without a compass.

My favorite book that speaks to the power of self-awareness and authenticity is Thich Nhat Hanh's The Art of Power.  Yes, a Buddhist monk wrote a book on business leadership! It is a brilliant read that reminds us not to let fear control us, not to focus on the wealth at the cost of well-being (golden handcuffs), and of the importance of living in the moment rather than in a guilt-addled past or a anxiety-laden imagined future.

The common abstraction of all these books is self-awareness. Who are you? What makes you authentically who you really are? Do you act out of fear? Do you act out of a desire to please others?

Why are you working where you work now? How did you end up here? What compromises have you made about who you really are? Are they worth it? What's stopping you from....?

The Journey is the Destination

Three years ago today, I left my MD role at Hummer Winblad to join Widgetbox. While Widgetbox grew into Flite, the leader in cloud-based advertising , I too have grown in ways I could not imagine.

While a VC, I worked on a deal that focused on testing wafers. The state of the art was to test the circuitry of a quarter wafer. This new company offered the promise of a full-wafer test.

The metaphor is meaningful to me. The CEO role tests one's skills, leadership, tenacity, and self-awareness in ways not possible in other jobs. Through each test, each challenge...hidden parts of who you are, what you are made of...reveal themselves.

The last three years have tested me in ways I did not think possible. The journey of company building, restructuring, and scaling both deepen who you are, while simultaneously revealing how you react to challenge, how you exploit advantage and insight, how you handle the good, the bad, and the ambiguous.

Three amazing years. Three years of better learning who I am.

Widgetbox Raises $12m from General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, and HWVP. Rebrands as Flite

I am thrilled to announce the close of our $12m Series C. Neil Sequeira and General Catalyst led the round, with participation from our existing investors Sequoia Capital, Hummer Winblad, and NCD Investors. In addition to the funding, we also announced a new company name, Flite.

With the rebrand we have firmly positioned ourselves as the leader in cloud-based advertising. The Flite Platform allows advertisers, agencies, and publishers to create, serve, and measure ads that are as dynamic as the Web—delivering up to a 10X increase in ROI with ads developed in 1/10th the time.

The new company rebranding and platform-as-a service approach to advertising will empower advertisers to increase brand recall and purchase intent, while allowing our publisher partners to win more business and deliver more marketing value.

In addition to the rebranding and new company name, we have launched a new interactive site www.flite.com. Here we’ve highlighted our available services, solutions, and platform features. The new site also includes case studies, insights, and a new Ad Gallery that showcases how leading brands are using Flite to connect with consumers.

Finally, please find below coverage from of our funding and rebranding announcement.

TechCrunch
Sequoia-Backed Widgetbox Rebrands As Flite, Raises $12M For Rich Media Ad Serving Platform
by Leena Rao
http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/09/sequoia-backed-widgetbox-rebrands-as-flite-raises-12m-for-rich-media-ad-serving-platform/


VentureBeat
Widgetbox becomes “cloud” advertising company Flite, raises $12M
by Anthony Ha
http://venturebeat.com/2011/03/09/flite-widgetbox-funding/

Wall Street Journal Venture Capital Dispatch

The Daily Startup

http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2011/03/09/the-daily-start-up-incube-parts-ways-with-dfj-network/?mod=google_news_blog

Paid Content
Widgetbox Rebrands As Display Platform Flite, Raises $12 Million 
by David Kaplan
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-widgetbox-rebrands-as-display-platform-flite-raises-12-million/

MediaPost
Widgetbox Rebrands As Flite, Lands $12 Million 
by Mark Walsh
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=146312