I made a fairly big mistake with my company at the start, I tried to segment functions in the company too fast. Maybe it was my business education, maybe it was books like “The E-myth Revisited,” and certainly it was my lack of management experience, but I tried to keep my area focussed on business development and away from technology for which “I have a CTO.”

But startups don’t work this way and the entire reason for working in a team is that you share the work and hopefully create synergetic effects (1+1=3!) in the process.

And the truth is that even as for non-technologist like myself (I am a geek though) designing products is not so hard.

I had a discussion with an industrial designer (my all time fav. people to hang around with) concerning the term ‘a perfect product.’ Her field understands the term as a product that functions perfectly, I choose to add “for the customer” to that definition.

The start of product design is always to ask: “so is this cool for people?“, meaning will they like it, do they need it, will they pay for it? I don’t think all question can be answered from the start, except the one of “is this cool?”

A very big part of entrepreneurship is sales, and as they say: you have to believe in what you sell. Easier when you already have a product, I’d love to sell Apple computers for a living, but when the product doesn’t exist, you have one of two choices: one, you design the product yourself, starting with “is it cool?”; two, you trust that your CTO can design something cool.

That’s not a problem, except for one thing: is cool something we decide or the market decides? It is of course the latter and one bullet point in an entrepreneur’s job description missing from that of the CTO’s is keeping a close eye on the market.

Therefore, product design is absolutely something entrepreneurs cannot delegate! And on that short note, I’ll leave it.

All my entrepreneurship diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ I don’t write about what we do as a company on purpose, but you can always ask in the comments or via the email address on the right. Picture courtesy of The Esoteric Church (of all places!).

I asked yesterday for a more graphical and intuitive way to plan out costs for products and projects. The reason lies in an essay I co-authored several years ago with Jeremy Fein, co-founder of this blog. I forget the exact title of the thing, but its premise was that good entrepreneurial teams are composed of both brains & brawn (Asterix and Obelix, in other words). It has since become my philosophy towards entrepreneurship and building teams.

Good ideas also reside in intersections between different modes of thinking. I don’t know who made up the idea of the ‘execution multiplier for ideas‘ (Derek Sivers posted it on his blog once), but an idea is worth little without someone carrying it out. Similarly, in Neil Fiore’s book “The Now Habit” (the ONLY self-help book I would ever recommend to people) he writes about the source of good ideas, which often come when you least expect it: on your breaks, your holidays, anywhere which is not work-related.

While productivity is a great thing and crucial to executing ideas, idea-generation itself is actually not very compatible with the productive mind. But it’s not impossible to combine the two either.

Let’s look at a sample workflow from problem to idea generation to product (product meaning the outcome of idea generation, which has to lead somewhere):

1. You have a problem (duh… no really, don’t come up with an idea if it doesn’t solve a problem!)
2. You discuss it with people to try to figure out it’s parameters —what is the true gist of the problem?

This is a good time to get stuck. Where do you go from here? Do you go the left-brained route — the super-rational approach that would e.g. benefit from some number crunching in Excel? Or do you take a right-brained approach — the artistic approach of drawing out the problem further on a white board or an outliner?

It of course depends on the complexity of the problem, but it isn’t time yet to go super-rational all of a sudden. It breaks you out of creative solution mode and gets you into execution mode, which is really brain-dead “getting things done” mode. Before you get things done, you have to define “things” much further.

The next step in my process would be:
3. draw out several solutions, preferably in a group, and discuss them and the logic behind it. Is it an elegant solution to the problem? Does it solve it or does it complicate it? What scenarios are there and what are its parameters?

As soon as you come to scenarios, we come into process mode. And this is where a more left-brained approach of calculating resource-allocation (people, time, money) absolutely makes sense. In my last post, I was hoping that someone would have a good way of making this more compatible with step 3, I am still waiting for someone to come up with a good solution, however.

4. calculate it out. What are the costs associated with each solution, what are the benefits of each solution?

Costs vs. benefits could also be called expenses vs. income on a financial projection for a startup. Solid resource allocation is ultimately the lifeblood of a company, however in an early stage it is also the language to use when looking for funding for your company.

I don’t want to be too rigid about this; I’ve struggled with the process of “problem -> idea generation -> execution -> product” in the past and think that it’s an area that benefits from several approaches and also leads to more-than-several pseudo-suggestions on how to approach this.

Rather, I thought to expand a little on yesterday’s post and clarify why I really do want a more visual Excel (for lack of a better term). If you want to combine right- and left-brained perspectives, a white board alone won’t do it and Excel alone won’t do it. I want software that does both.

(Hi It’s Cecil here. A french version of this blog post is available on Heavy Mental)

The Enterprise 2.0 Forum to be held on 17 and March 18 in Paris at the Meridien Montparnasse will present some case studies. The Swiss Re project is one of them.

So I’ve contacted Jive Software for an interview to check Jive situation today (rather good as the Gartner Magic Quadrant tends to show) but also their view on that project.

I owe quite a lot to Jive. As part of my job, I invited back in summer 2008 Devan Batavia (VP Sales EMEA) to give us a presentation on their product, then Jive Clearspace today Jive SBS (Social Business System).

It was a revelation. All the problems of knowledge management, innovation, productivity in a global enterprise and complex environment, all these problems that I was intimately involved with in my everyday job, all appeared in full light in one of the most relaxed and most professional presentations that I have ever witnessed.

To such extent that it has inspired my own presentation Enterprise 2.0 and allowed me to put order in my ideas and shed light on an irrefutable truth : my subject is Enterprise 2.0.

Devan has politely declined the interview and rerouted me to Nathan Rawlins to answer them. Nathan is Sr. Director of Product and he is in charge of steering the revolution of the Social Business. A bit of Jive promotion of course, but many ideas and comments that are worth visiting … Read more »

Having reached a personal milestone, part 5 of my entrepreneurship diaries, I should mention that it’s very pleasurable and useful for me to write on these topics, and I hope it’s the same for you. In this post, I want to briefly address the issue of uncertainty in early stage technology companies and how that affects management.

As I mentioned before, I was asked to join this company as CEO after consulting them on the commercial applications of this exciting new technology. Joining a year later, we had a good understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the current organisation. During the consulting stage, I wrote a business plan with a fairly clear time line (to me and our sponsor), but it wasn’t being executed upon as required. One of my the deliverables I set myself was therefore to get development back on track, which not only respects the resource boundaries (financial, human, technological) we face, as well as sends out the signal that we are a serious business.

One thing I keep hearing over and over from entrepreneurs is that you have to be comfortable with ambiguity. And that is absolutely true. We continue to iterate on ideas based on changes in technology, customer and partner feedback, and our own ideas, something that would drive any sane man crazy, but we have to keep it under control. The best way that I find to do that is continuing to develop the vision of where we are going (the strongest motivator I can imagine) and maintain a loose type of project management that gets us to that goal.

I call this project management, as it deals with schedules, milestones, and resource allocation over a period of time. Uncertainty is an important factor to consider in this. In a large company, chances are you’re dealing with a predictable environment, in an early stage startup this is not the case. Getting a tighter schedule in place continues to be a challenge we are working on, however I find that being alert, flexible, and adaptive all the time contrasts with the more stable art of project management. Please correct me if I’m wrong, in which case present a solution also! Of course, there have to be thresholds in place, which to me is very much defined by risk assessment.

Regarding risks, let me start by saying that not all risks can be addressed, which is why being comfortable with ambiguity is so important. And second, there are many different types of risk, technology, financial, market, etc., but one usually outlines the thresholds that you have to respect. In my case, I see this clearly as market risk, as nothing matters if your customers aren’t buying… however, this really is not something to take for granted.

In medicine for instance, which is traditionally patent-based and largely dependant on a complex regulatory process, you have a 15 year window, of which you can spend up to 12 years developing your super-innovative cure. Clearly the technology risks outweigh the market ones (note: this ignores the rise of generic, cheap, knock-off drugs). In the web-industry, on the other hand, it’s perfect for rapid prototyping, it’s hard to protect innovations and easy for competitors to clone them, and it makes much more sense to push out your products asap. That means that there can be plenty of competition and the risk lies in grabbing sufficient market share to make a (sustainable) profit.

In our case, we are not as “high-tech” as medicine and not as “high-market” as web-development, in the sense that we face both market and technology risks. However, I see market risks as more important and try to align both market & technology approaches together. As an example, one of the things we did several months ago, was demo our technology to the general public and to selected partners. After the experience, we interviewed them thoroughly on their experience, as well as their initial expectations. We want to make sure that people don’t expect something different than what we deliver and that our product meets and exceeds their expectations. That gives us a clear view of where we want the product to go.

On a technology level, that presents us with certain thresholds in terms of “the experience” and price-points. And whenever we face a technology change, whatever solution is being developed, it has to fit within that end-picture the customer expects. That also overcomes the problem of black-box development, which is not uncommon in technology development.

So, that’s more or less how we continue to develop the vision for our company and the project management that supports it. We started with a lucid dream of producing great technology. We demoed initial versions and tried to align our vision to the needs of our users. And we end up (hopefully) building what our customers want and pay for. I would love to do this in a web-environment, as that really makes prototyping so much cheaper and quicker, but we do the best we can with our not so intangible technology.

All my entrepreneurship diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ I don’t write about what we do as a company on purpose, but you can always ask in the comments or via the email address on the right.

I have been thinking about this topic for a while now. Enterprise 2.0 book from Andrew McAfee chapter 8  (Looking ahead), a nice twitter conversation with @oscarberg, and a New York Times article about Microsoft Creative Destruction : all combine to convince me there was some room for a blog post. Snip from the NYT article :

Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence. It’s not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.

As Wikipedia defines it :

“Office politics is the use of one’s individual or assigned power within an employing organization for the purpose of obtaining advantages beyond one’s legitimate authority. Those advantages may include access to tangible assets, or intangible benefits such as status or pseudo-authority that influences the behavior of others. Both individuals and groups may engage in Office Politics.”

One has to be extremely pedagogic to explain me how on earth this may help the company in being more profitable, increasing customers satisfaction and being a better place for employees, the three goals of any company according to Eliyahu Goldratt.

Read more »

Early Strategies has just released a fresh an extremely useful report on Enterprise 2.0 and the current level of adoption.

This international (FR, UK, NE, US) survey (summary) was conducted between November 2009 and January 2010, targeting Multinational Companies (MNCs) and international organizations (France-Telecom, Cisco, AT&T, Amadeus, IBM etc …). The clear intent was to study change execution.

This report sheds a bright light using real life examples on favorite topics of the Enterprise 2.0 Activists community : cultural values, strategic reasons, change agents, executive champions, management inducements etc …

This analysis is precise enough to distinguish different results depending on the type of company business (B2B, B2C). It’s pretty interesting to see the consequences this difference creates in companies adoption strategy.

The results and conclusion on strategy, maturity, change, policy but also on people daily work and perceived usefulness have priceless value for anyone wishing to embrace the subject of Emergent Social Software Platforms (ESSP) adoption.

Last but not least, the report addresses the ROI issue, the one most E20 activists are the least comfortable with – Andrew McAfee included. Early Strategies approach differs as it distinguishes tangible from intangible ROI. thus provides a completely different perspective on the whole thing.

Together with McKinsey’s and Cisco, probably the most insightful report on the topic I’ve read so far.

Tech It Easy has been lucky enough to have the opportunity of an interview with the person behind Early Strategies : Cecile Démailly. Impressive professional background, real enthusiasm and insight on the ESSP topic, and a charming person : Tech It Easy readers deserve no less …(Note, I’ve bolded+italicize most interesting and valuable parts- there are quite a few). Read more »

Emergent Social Software Platforms (ESSP) are now at the doorstep of the enterprise. The question one may ask is : how does it fit alongside the already existing Enterprise IT systems.

Companies have spent a fortune during the last 10 years implementing business critical Enterprise wide systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM) or Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). Yet another system could be seen as a risk for the balance of the whole company IT strategy.

In his enlightening book on PLM (Product Lifecycle Management, Driving the Next Generation of Lean Thinking) Michael Grieves proposes a map to illustrate the positioning of PLM together with the main business critical IT systems.

This blog post extends this map and propose a perspective on Enterprise 2.0 platforms positioning.

Read more »

Both ’startup’ and ‘entrepreneur’ are terms that immediately evoke an often false reaction from an audience and I would personally prefer not to describe my work using those words. In the following post, I write about three associations in regards to entrepreneurship, one positive, one negative, both somewhat false, and one what I see entrepreneurship as really: just a job. As usual, these diary posts, which I try to write in a short amount of time, are produced with minimal editing. I hope it makes sense. All my entrepreneurial diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ I don’t write about what we do as a company on purpose, but you can always ask in the comments or via the email address on the right.

The popular associations
The word entrepreneur has two popular and a third upcoming association. One association is negative, that of a risk-taker and in some ways a loser—this would be more in a European context where job-security is highly valued. The other is positive, that of a potential Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, i.e. the smart entrepreneur who sees a big opportunity and has the drive, intelligence, and access to other resources to make it very big.

Of these two, the latter is what we are all aiming for, but realistically that applies to less than 1% of entrepreneurs today (using the very broad definition of someone that starts anything from 1-man webdesign company to an ambitious cure for cancer). The first association is also a misunderstanding of entrepreneurship, as entrepreneurs are not blind risk-takers, or at least they shouldn’t be. I would say and hope that it applies to a minority of entrepreneurs also.

The third association: a career-choice
The third association is that of an upcoming trend: entrepreneurship as simply a job. You’ll find plenty of job-adverts with “entrepreneurial attitude a plus” or similar in the job-description, a term I hate just as much as the often mis-used “business development,” standing for just B2B sales.

Added to the job-description part comes that there are plenty of entrepreneurial courses and full academic programmes available to the public, one of which I enjoyed, though I know from personal experience that that doesn’t make a person an entrepreneur.

A third factor contributing to the ‘entrepreneurship is a job’ association is easier access to the marketplace. I’ve had some online discussions with Cecil Dijoux on this blog about today’s technology culture in the context of enterprise software development, and there is as much a democratisation of software-/web-ware development, as there is of other increasingly “low-tech” industries. (As a side note: My definition of low-tech is a technology something has very low barriers to developing it.).

I think that the abundance of resources (not just) in regards to programming, to very well developed (internet) distribution methods for getting products, tangible or intangible, out to customers, as well as more-and-more programmes for funding/assisting startups, means that entrepreneurs have access to a better developed funnel where it comes to their profession of gathering resources and marketing their products.

That doesn’t make it easy, and actually brings other challenges like being one tree in a very large forest, but it does mean that it can be seen as a type of job.

Now, what is there not to like about the word ‘entrepreneurship’?
Maybe it’s a personal thing, but I feel very uncomfortable telling people I meet that I’m an entrepreneur. One, I do see it like a job, a job that I have to do well, and nothing special really. The term ‘entrepreneurship’ makes it sound fancy, which it is not. Two, I’m a European and I do feel the same association that many Europeans have to the word, which is that it’s “less than a real job.” Rationally, I don’t think that’s true, but emotionally I have found myself feeling the following initial reaction more than once when someone comes up to me and describes himself as an entrepreneur:

“Get a job, you hippie!”

Add to this that a startup is not a company until it makes money, and an entrepreneur is not an entrepreneur until he makes money doing what he does.

So I think the term ‘entrepreneurship’ is glorified, perhaps invented to make entrepreneurs feel like they’re doing something special, same as the term ‘Artist’ or ‘Inventor.’ Art isn’t art unless the audience considers it so, and people have invented plenty of mousetraps that are now collecting dust in a garage somewhere.

Suggest something new please
I’d like a new term for what I do and maybe you can suggest one. It should perhaps be related to a startup, which immediately summarises what is happening: A company that is starting up and isn’t there where it wants and needs to be yet.

The problem is that an entrepreneur is not always in the same class as a startup. He can be 50 years old and have a long and successful career behind him. Would you call him a “starter,” a term often used for people fresh out of college applying for a job at Consultant X or Multinational Y? Generally, entrepreneurs are responsible for the activities that happen in a startup in order to make it a success. Their chances of success increase if they have prior experience, resources, and networks to build upon, that make it easier to access the three pillars of “starting up,” as I’ve summarised in the picture above.

In regards to the above, I personally like to describe my work as “I’m running a small company and we’re developing a new product X,” but that is also a bit of a mouthful.

The other side of the coin is that entrepreneurs are in (desperate) need of marketing, where glorification does play a part. I read somewhere that entrepreneurship can be described as the process of developing something irregardless of resources currently in possession. That suggests a pitch is necessary, and perhaps already being termed an entrepreneur helps getting a foot in the door. I doubt it and it would personally bother me if that’s all it took, but I’m smart enough to realise that we “entrepreneurs” need to do whatever it takes to acquire resources, as long as it fits our code of ethics of course.

So, entrepreneurship, yes or no? I don’t like the term, but I may be stuck with it. If I come up with something more apt, I’ll let you know. And same for you please!

This post is part of a series, a diary of starting a business if you will. It follows part 1, the decision of becoming an entrepreneur.

One thing I found out is that it’s hard to put your responsibilities down on paper… there are so many!!! There is of course a basic job-description, which more or less sounds like that of a project manager/pull-the-rabbit-out-of-the-hat magician: “make it happen that we go from this thing on paper to the product in the hands of customers.” “Make it happen” is a super-loaded phrase, which can mean countless things.

There is a continuous struggle between micro-management and keeping the overview. Micro, because it is your responsibility that every (little) thing is carried out by your employees (if you have them). Overview, because You the entrepreneur are The Organisation. There is a third struggle that shouldn’t exist really, that between your professional life and your personal life. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to do this thing well is to focus on it exclusively. Friends, family, love, …blogging… it’s a nice luxury to have, but it comes second place.

The responsibility of an entrepreneur are thus: have a goal and make sure that everything is executed to get to that goal.

In a technology company, there are matters of technology and business (really, in what business except for strategy consulting isn’t there a mix of “technology,” which can mean anything from cooking to software development, and the commercial side of things, which is meant to pay for everything?). What I found was that as someone with a business background, who sort-of-kind-of has an idea about product development, and has a better grasp of business development, I still can’t let go of the reigns of product development entirely.

Product development ties in directly with business development. People are unwilling to pay for something that doesn’t exist and similarly our budget is supposed to last us until we have something worth paying for or investing in. Therefore, as an entrepreneur I have to make sure that product development stays on track. The absolute best way to do this is to have a capable product development manager in charge. The truth of it is that startups by their nature are resource-poor, which includes tripple-A product development managers (probably employed at multinational X or Y somewhere), and there is a lot of learning/training on the job. Learning/training means that the (hopefully) existing product development manager (in our case yes) still has to be managed, through schedules and regular meetings. In any case, product development is in its conceptual stage a very brainstorm-friendly activity, which means the more the merrier. But ultimately, a startup must get beyond this stage, respecting the entire resource-poor situation that a startup usually faces.

So, responsibilities of an entrepreneur as far as the technological product development is concerned: If you have a product development manager, you have to make sure that he works under the realities of the business. If you don’t, which I imagine many 1-person software startups operate under (as well as those lucky strategy consultants), well then you have to do the job of product development as well, keeping a close eye on the business realities.

OK, the business part of things. My role is fairly well-defined here as I come from a business background and approach startups from a business perspective. Assume that role 101 is having a firm grasp on everything that goes on, which can be phrased as “where are resources (people, time, money) being expended at and is it wise to do so.” This entails having a good budget plan and sticking to that.

Role 102 is to build the business, which I call business development, but that often gets confused with sales as that that is what it says in job adverts. Business development is the building of the business, which includes sales, but also includes building the company and all that entails.

So, we are trying to get from point A to point P, how do we go about it? If product development is about turning an idea into a product, business development is building a business plan into a business. Business plans are total BS unless they contain validated information. Some key-chapters in business plans are the market overview, the market approach, the time-line, and the financial need to meet all these objectives. Business plans can serve as a. cannon fodder, b. a plan of approach, c. one of several signals to attract investment. For c. no investor will take a look at your business unless you have a plan of approach (b.). On that plan, there should be a time-line, which you are following (predictability!) and there should be a goal: the market you are targeting and your approach.

The market section of the business plan presents a big problem for technology entrepreneurs. Because (non!) customers often don’t know what they want. I can ask a target group “what kind of air do you like to breathe?” and it wouldn’t surprise me if a significant number of responses would say: “I like to breathe air that smells like perfume.” OK, that’s a terrible question, but what I mean is that people sometimes make up answers that have nothing to do with reality (that said, both the perfume business and the fast-food industry have made lots of money from essentially selling air that smells good. Scent is also plays a very important part in memory, but I digress…)

What I’m a big fan of is validated market data, which is data gathered from actual customer experience with your product or part of it. That brings forth another problem of a bias towards early (and over-excited) adopters, something which the book “crossing the chasm” deals with, but is really not something that I think is realistic to address at an early stage, except that validated market data can also come from experts in the markets you are targeting.

The implication is also that product development is again completely tied in with business development which leads us down the path of rapid prototyping, another practice that works great in software / on the web, not as easily (though not impossible) with hardware. In any case, the experts in this area most well-known today are:

• - Steve Blank, who wrote “The Four Steps to Epiphany” and is currently hosting the excellent Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders seminars (btw. Steve Blank also writes a great blog on customer-focussed development, which I’ve only just started reading.
• - Eric Ries, who authors the blog Startup Lessons Learned and has some great articles on responsible (=lean) development.
• - And Donald Reinertsen, who wrote an incredibly dense book called “Principles of Product Development Flow,” a book which is clearly an authority in the field, but which I cannot recommend to any sensible entrepreneur with a 60hr/week schedule. Those principles, by the by, number in the 100+.

As well as of course Toyota and plenty of other experts out there, I’m sure, many of which are referenced by the people mentioned.

I think that it can safely be said that task 3 or a sub-task of business development is working towards the customer, the lifeblood of a business.

There are other tasks of course, which have to do with human resources, legal work, accounting, etc. Some of which can be outsourced, some of which can be done half-heartedly (oh no, I didn’t say that), some of which are really-really important, etc.

All these tasks, however, require a certain authority. The entrepreneur’s responsibility is to either be an authority on a task level or to be sure to work with authorities, either in the company or in an (informal) consulting fashion, so that they are carried out responsibly.

Task 4 can thus be entitled: be an authority on the tasks that need to be carried out or have access to one.

So, a whole can of worms starting a company can be and it is vital that it does not interfere with the single most important thing that you must do as a human being: be healthy! Health is part sleep, part exercise, part food, part love. There is no yin without yang and vice versa. Thus forget everything I said about personal life being no. 2. The best is if it reinforces what you do in your work. Health leads to happiness and happiness leads to optimism: a key-quality in entrepreneurship if there ever was one.

So the responsibilities of an entrepreneur summarised:

• 100: keep your eye on both sides of the court: the goal & the resources needed to get to that goal
• 101: align Product development with Business development
• 102: always validate your market data by staying close to your customers
• 103: be an authority on the tasks that need carrying out or have access to one
• 104: stay healthy and happy.

This was written in a single session with minimal editing. I hope it kind of makes sense. Part 3 of my e’diary will be on the topic of: can you prepare for entrepreneurship? As I have a master in entrepreneurship, I thought it might make for an interesting perspective. All my entrepreneurial diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ By choice, I’m being mysterious about my company. If you have questions, feel free to comment or write to me via the email address on the right.

Picture courtesy of Be The Dream.

(French version)

The pitch: Enterprise implementation of social networks is the third step of a gradual immersion of the enterprise into the internet culture. This immersion occurs because there is the obvious truth : web works with amazing speed on an amazing scale.

I have been lucky enough to witness from the inside the major changes the IT industry have been going through in the last ten years. What is really interesting within the scope of Enterprise 2.0 is that these changes involve the adoption of tools, solutions and approaches that really came from the internet culture.

As Enterprise 2.0 activists, we keep on wondering where to find meaningful experience of internet culture adoption in our company. The IT department is the place to look because they already been through the first 2 steps of immersion ….

Read more »

It seems strange to keep a diary as an entrepreneur, which is thought to be a career that is all-consuming. But I made the resolution to not get lost in my work, leaving enough space for inspiration and reflection, next to all the getting things done.

Inspiration, aka new ideas or thinking out of the box, primarily comes from taking time to have new experiences and meeting new people. It’s too easy to get stuck in a rut when spending 9 to 5 in an office. Reflection comes some time after getting things done and so my words today will be mostly about stuff that happened some time ago, during 2009 in fact.

You’ll often find pre-/post-/non-entrepreneurs arguing about whether e’ship is something you’re born with. I think it’s arrogant to argue either way. E’ship is the pursuit of opportunity weighed against the opportunity cost of pursuing something else. Entrepreneurs are not formed in pre-school, running a lemonade stand, it just makes sense at a particular time and environment. And in this case… it made sense to me.

Flashback December 31st 2008. I received a call from an inventor that had read about a previous experience of mine in a technology business and asked me to help him with the business plan for a new venture exploiting a similar technology. As it was something that appealed to me I said yes. The project turned out ok, we secured seed funding to develop the technology, and I moved to Luxembourg for a job in finance, while staying on as a silent advisor in the tech startup.

Flashforward 9 months. The startup was finally ready to demo the technology which had so far only existed in our heads. It’s an important qualifier, not only for our business partners and investor, but also for the team and myself. While we had discussed something similar before, it was at this point that I was asked and considered to run this company.

To go back to “what makes an entrepreneur,” you’ll often read about entrepreneurs being a. all-invested in a venture (as opposed to investors, who diversify their risks across multiple investments) and b. Entrepreneurs having to make (relatively) calculated risk decisions. And that is what I did, I made an, as much as possible, rational decision whether I wanted to commit fulltime to being an entrepreneur in this venture. So that was my decision process, which required serious thought, consultation with friends and family, and more.

End of part 1. In part 2, what are the responsibilities of an entrepreneur. You can read all my e’diaries from now on under the tag Vincent’s ediary. If you have questions, obviously I’m pretty mysterious about our business, post a comment or mail me via the address on the right.

I have been reading a lot of Scott Berkun lately, including his brilliant Confessions of a Public Speaker (french review available). A must read for any speaker, professional or not, to make sure you transmit clearly your ideas .

However, sometimes you just don’t have a dedicated room, with people ready to offer you 30 minutes of attention. You don’t have the slideware, you don’t have the projector or your laptop.

No. What you have is just a 30 seconds time frame, where you bump into some executive or very important people in the company. And what you want is to take advantage of this opportunity to pitch people into some Enterprise 2.0 basics.

Scott addresses this point in one of his many excellent blog posts : how to pitch idea.

Now let’s see some elevator pitches to 5 key enterprise persona for 2.0 adoption …

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Dear everyone,

I am extremely happy to start off this new year by introducing a fresh face on Tech IT Easy, Anand Kishore Raju, who will be blogging with us in 2010. His main areas of focus as a blogger will be greening the internet, carbon footprints, energy and power figures of the internet and web2.0.

Anand is currently working as a Research Engineer at Telecom ParisTech (ENST). His area of research focuses on the Energy aspects of the Internet, what the scientific community calls “Green Networking”. His efforts are directed towards making Computer Network Science aware that processing, moving and storing bits has a cost in terms of energy and in terms of the Carbon Emission Footprint.

In the past, Anand had also worked at Collaborative Systems Group (ColSys) at Bilkent University, Turkey, where he developed a taxonomy for user properties, influence factors for feedback quality in web 2.0, existing and novel models for deviation types and their detection. He also holds a degree in Computer Science and Engineering and aspires to join HEC in near future.

Anand joins a smart team of collaborators, some of which also work in green computing and many of which share an interest in this important topic for sure. As such, please join us in welcoming Anand to the team and I hope you enjoy reading his words on Tech IT Easy!

Happy New Year,

The Tech IT Easy team

I’m always fascinated by business models, i.e. at how entrepreneurs and companies put together services in order to make money from them. I’d call it the source code of business if I hadn’t seen the other source code in Luxembourg —legal and accounting—but arguably that’s more like binary code, i.e. 99% unintelligible.

Sarah Lacy writes about SMSONE, a ultra-local news provider in India similar to Outside.IN, a Union Square Ventures funded US-only company that provides news updates via the web. SMSONE does it, as the name suggests, via SMS. And it spreads through a franchising model, working with local entrepreneurs that pay a franchise fee and also collect a share of the advertising revenue from locally focussed businesses. It is able to do this because of something that apparently doesn’t exist in the US (but does in Europe): receiving an SMS in India doesn’t cost the recipient anything.

When reading about this, I was immediately reminded of a similar business model employed by a Dutch entrepreneur in Russia, Ms. Annemarie van Gaal, founder of Independent Media, a company that distributed Russian versions of magazines like Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire en Good Housekeeping (source). When she spoke at the Star entrepreneurial seminar in Rotterdam a year ago, she told us about how she differentiated herself from the competition (paraphrased as I haven’t got my notes with me):

The trouble with getting your magazines distributed in Russia was that you had to pay quite a lot of money (some would call it bribes) to companies that would then take care of it… badly. Instead van Gaal decided to do it differently. She would hire street kids to distribute her magazines, similar to the gold days of newspapers: the newspaper boy.

If you read Sarah Lacy’s account on Techcrunch, you’ll see that SMSONE does it similarly, hiring local kids, often without much education, to take care of distribution. Doing it via official channels is likely a nightmare over there, and centralising distribution kind of defeats the purpose of micro-news.

It’s a different way of thinking, which many of us westerners don’t have. I mean, would you entrust your products to a beggar on the street or to a street musician? Not only is it probably against the law (except if the government does it), we pride ourselves on our super-organised infrastructure, where anything from temp-workers to interns are there to provide companies with a flexible workforce, and anything from printing presses to mobile internet exists to produce and distribute your stuff.

Of course, I wouldn’t just leave you with these two examples. In the beginning of 2008, Boston Consulting Group published a study of “local dynamos”— domestically focussed companies, which use creative business models to capture value from emerging markets that are filled with challenges, like lacking infrastructure and low-income consumers. The map below shows how widespread these companies are.

Some very interesting examples are mentioned, like:

• Shanda, a Chinese gaming-company, that, in order to combat software-piracy, focusses on providing interactive services through gaming, services that are impossible to pirate. And to overcome a lack of a financial infrastructure to pay for online services, they work with pre-paid cards.
• Indian CavinKare, which sells cheap sachets of shampoo through small local retailers, while using educational marketing to teach customers how to use their products.
• Goodbaby, which targets the many 1-child families in China, who are both willing to spend more on their child than multi-child families would, but are also in need of education.
• Amul, an Indian food-and-beverage-marketing-organisation, which collects and pays for milk locally, while tracking all operations via satellite and uses ERP solutions to make analysis based on the data and gauge whether future supply needs to be increased or decreased.
• Wimm-Bill-Dann Foods (Russia), which works extensively with local partners, and has devised leasing schemes for expensive machinery to boost their production and is able to serve 280 million consumers nation-wide.

The BCG, of course, takes the stance of its customers, Western companies, and the study is mainly aimed at how multinational companies (MNCs) can replicate 6 of these dynamo’s advantages, in order to compete with them. They are:

1. Customising to local needs – which involves first understanding these needs, and then meeting them.
2. Devising innovative business models that overcome local challenges – a logical follow-up to the last point, how to make money from the info you gained.
3. Leveraging the latest technologies – meaning that these emerging economies are less burdened with traditional infrastructure and quicker on the uptake of more affordable, newer, and easier-to-spread technology, e.g. mobiles.
4. Benefiting from low-cost labor and overcoming shortages of skilled labor – there’s two ways to look at this; a local workforce will be better equipped to interact on a local level, a highly-trained workforce will be better equipped to run a business. Tough call.
5. Scaling up fast – Russia, India, China, Brazil, etc. are all giants with the promise of huge rewards when you capture them. Many of these dynamos grow quickly through both through acquisitions and building up their network of suppliers and distributors.
6. Sustaining long-term hypergrowth without imploding – this kind of follows on to the last point

Some of the Western companies mentioned, which have managed to compete on a local level, include:

• General Motors, which has adapted its luxury-liners to meet the demands of its Chinese customers, who are usually sitting in the back;
• LG, in China, which has learned that the audio-quality of its televisions is more valued by its customers, who often reside in noisy environments;
• Carrefour, which has started to work with local municipal governments in China, as these don’t meddle in their operations like local dept. stores would, and are able to provide access to prime locations;
• Perfetti Van Melle, in India, a candle/chewing-gum manufacturer, which has found local means to advertise, interacts frequently with local partners, and has adapted its products to local tastes;
• and Yum! Brands, which owns Pizza Hut and KFC, and has adapted its menus to meet local Chinese tastes, started a new food-chain aimed specifically at the market, and uses its international expertise to integrate IT, lean supply chains, and a higher level of food standards into their offering.

It shows the value of out of the box thinking in terms of reaching people, and I believe that traditional “Western” thinking should long ago have been thrown out the door anyway, particularly in light of the troubles that media-, automotive, and financial industries are going through. We are in the flux of disruptive innovation and only those quickest to grasp new technologies and ways of thinking are able to survive another day.

No shortage of lessons on that from entrepreneurs in emerging economies…

Vincent out

We’re all stupid busy and it sucks. Tech IT Easy was started under the guise of studenthood which does not in any real way reflect “professionalhood.” 10-hour days are not uncommon in my line of work and it doesn’t leave much space for reflection–the real currency of writing.

So here’s what I propose.

1. form a group of tech/business enthousiasts (aka regular readers)
2. find a platform (e.g. mail, but I also favour the private wiki where texts can be shared privately and easily edited)
3. share ideas for blog posts and drafts and discuss those internally
4. release, not often, but qualitatively good pieces on technology / business / etc.

Why do I call this the Paul Graham model. Take a look at his essays. Under some of them (e.g. the Ramen profitasble essay), there’s a thank you to people that helped him edit the piece.

I’d like to hear your thoughts. If you’re interested in collaborating, either publicly or anonymously, and/or happen to know a good platform to do this on, leave a comment or send us a mail.

Thanks,
Vincent