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Its all ball bearings - and it starts with a conversation

Its amazing to me what power a simple conversation has.  Conversations can build an incredibly powerful company culture, Conversations can lead to life-changing decisions.  Conversations can turn into fist fights.  Conversations can make your sales number for the year.

Its pretty simple when you think about it.  It all starts with a conversation.  The first time I really heard this was from John Dragoon (CMO at Novell).  John is one of those great presenters that can stand up on a stage in front of 1000 people and give a kickass presentation with nothing but slides with pictures and no words.  You come away remembering exactly what he said, what the point was, and what you can take away.  It feels like a conversation, I think, because he makes a connection with the audience that is authentic.

I read a lot, and recently a lot of that reading has been to understand the industry perspectives and trends as they relate to digital advertising, social content, and media.  As I write this, I'm attending the OMMA Global conference in NYC.  Much of the talk here is about the scarcity of attention and the need to engage in the conversation.  Conversations and authenticity matter in marketing and sales and in running a company.  Even if a conversation is brief, as long as its authentic and honest, that works for me.

What its not:

Its not a conversation if no one participates.  Check your tweet views, blog comments, or bit.ly stats if you want third party confirmation.  Now for those of you with tons of the above: filter out your groupies and then look again.

Wasted conversations are like the plague.  Improve actors and sales people know this better than anyone.  Ditto for conversations that have a contrarian participant being that way just to be contrarian.  Wasted time and energy sucks.

What it should be:

An opportunity.  Every interaction is a chance to have a real conversation.  Sometimes they're short (messaging service).

1st CX race weekend of the 2009 season

Drove ~2hrs down to Colorado Springs on Saturday morning to hit the Pike Peak Supercross #1.  Chilly but it stayed dry.  The course had a couple of killer run-ups including the one below (that Greg made look easy).

Sunday was a lot more of a technical course at the Velodrome here in Boulder.  A couple of fast straights right into tight switchbacks, railroad crossings, and a gnarly little mud crossing/run-up.  They even ran us inside and through an obstacle course at the indoor track wich was cool.  I think the twisty and technical courses suit me better.  I hung on for 13th which wasn’t too bad given a fast Boulder 35+/4 field of about 60.  Super-fun first weekend of racing for the season.

Don’t over-think it

My experience in most things is that simpler is always better.  Whether that's a business deal, investment terms, or training for a cycling event.

Eddy Merckx when asked about his secret to being the best bike racer of all time was simply: “Ride Lots”.

When things work, they generally are super-simple, easy to understand, obviously of value to their constituencies, and most of all easy to explain to others.  Maybe best expressed in Occam’s Razor for those of you who like the philosophical or ‘intelligencia’ version of Keep it Simple, Stupid.

WTF are they thinking…?

An article / post caught my eye this morning.  I typically read / skim the MIT Technology Review’s daily email and from time to time Brad Feld (a Lijit investor) writes a piece.  This morning he has a good one on the failure of marketing spam in Twitter.

A very similar story is in today’s Ad Age although this one points out a social email flap.

Each of these stories represent a trend that is likely to continue and will absolutely get worse before it gets better.

At Lijit we live in the world of hyper-engagement and conversation.  Our search widget is primarily installed on both blogs and commercial sites that engage readers in very deep and specific contextual ways.  The engaged audience of internet readers is increasingly moving away from glossy mega-sites like CNN, NYT, USA Today and more into where the real conversations are occurring.  These sites for example include: Mommy Blogs, VeloNews, MLB Trade Rumors, and on and on – all places where real people connect and converse about real interests – in real time.

Conversational sites like these leverage not only their respective websites, but also outlets like Twitter, Flickr, Digg, YouTube, and so on.  Each of these are fantastic audience engagement tools and techniques.  And of course they offer marketers a level of interaction and presence they’ve never had before.

The challenge for Marketers is that they can royally fuck it up.  Yes the audience is engaged and yes the audience is ripe for the message, but the sensitivity and attention doesn’t suffer fools as Brad points out in his piece.  The “how” is becoming at least as important as the “when” and “where”.

Being a dick doesn’t help

Interesting article in Business Week recently about how jerks consistently make bad business decisions.  To be clear – non-jerks make bad decisions too, but at least they don’t alienate colleagues or the counterparty. 

The VC audience

Understanding your audience as anyone who’s in sales, marketing, or speaks frequently will attest is probably the single largest factor when preparing for and then having success.  Its really no different when it comes to understanding and raising money from venture capitalists.  In fact, its probably one of the most important (and overlooked) things you can screw up. I’ve been thinking about this lately as I talk with fellow entrepreneurs who are looking for investment capital and want advice or opinions on who they should talk to and what their best line of attack should be.

In my experience, no matter how a VC gets onto the career path to partner, they tend to always gravitate into 1 of 3 types of lead investment criteria.  I think this understanding is generally not well understood by companies seeking to raise capital.  Understanding the primary drivers of your audience results in less time wasted and less frustration for both.

1. The Market or Theme-driven investor

At Lijit, our primary lead investor, Foundry Group, falls squarely into this category.  These investors seek out a major market theme and then learn everything there is to know about it.  They are connectors, filters, and learners.  They meet with everyone that covers, invests in, or tries to build a company in their particular focal area.  If they’re right about the market and they do their job right of meeting everyone and looking at everything, then they have an obvious advantage over other investors pursuing the same market – and – they give their portfolio companies a huge boost with connections, partnerships, business development assistance, economic modeling, etc.

2. The People-driven investor

We also have one of these as a lead at Lijit, Boulder Ventures.  This type of investor bets primarily on entrepreneurs that have track records of demonstrable success.  Over time, they form a “stable” of these entrepreneurs.  Tracking, following, keeping in contact with people they want to back.  They make good and focused use of their EIRs to start something and then they invest in that something.  Oftentimes these investors will pass on a deal that has what could be phenomenal market potential, simply because they don’t like or don’t have any experience with the management team.  Conversely, they will take on more market risk with a known and trusted management team with the driving belief being that the team will figure it out and create success.

3. The financial-driven investor

More often than not this group comes from investment banking or other professional investment backgrounds.  They look for deals where they can apply some sort of financial leverage as the leading criteria for weighing whether or not to do a deal. The portfolios of these investors have a more private-equity look and feel.  Portfolio companies that are capital intensive businesses, service driven businesses, roll-ups, and the like might also be there.  Down-rounds are opportunities to consolidate positions, and creative use of leverage is common in their deals.

Obviously the successful venture investors apply all 3 of the above when making an investment decision, but understanding the primary criteria of your audience will make both sides lives easier and more productive.

Admit One.

Step right up.  Get your one-way ticket to ride the ride.

At the close of every quarter we do a review with the entire management team.  Typically these meetings are a chance for everyone to share their successes, how they or their team performed against their goals and get collaborative feedback on what did and didn’t work.  Its also an opportunity to set goals and discuss tactics for the upcoming quarter.  In general I think everyone gets a lot out of it and its a great level-set for where we are as a business.

At this last review we started off with a presentation called: “Ticket to Ride”.

My thesis was simple:

1. You each have a ticket.

2. The ride is going to be up – down – and definitely twisty. 

3. It will be really fun and possibly really scary at times.

4. It may make you light-headed, queasy, disoriented, and possibly you might even puke all over yourself.

5. You will not exit the ride the same as you entered the ride.

Punchline: you have the choice whether or not to take the ride. 

But.. if you go through the turnstile, understand that there will be too much to do, in too little time, with not enough resources.  We’re going to do things that we’ve not done before and in ways that we don’t yet know how exactly we’re going to do them.  Some of you might not make it out alive.  Those that do, will, at a minimum, never be the same again…

Everyone on our team grabbed their ticket.

Would you?

Goals, even macro ones, keep me going in the right direction

I haven’t been posting on my blog very much recently..  Things got a little crazy at work and the time (priority?) just hasn’t been there.  I do think about it, but simply haven’t gotten the spare minutes to do it.

We’re going through those growing pains that all companies do when they hit a certain size.  Priorities shift toward execution, revenue generation, and a general maturation of getting bigger, needing to move faster, and with more precision.  The great part about where we are is that our network is growing so damn fast that our market opportunity is there for the capturing – which gets me back to the ‘time and priorities’ place I started this post.

I have managed to get out and ride recently.  Below is a heart-rate and altitude snapshot of the Triple Bypass ride I did a week or so ago from Evergreen to Avon (120 Miles and 3 mountain passes).

I try and make a point to do this ride every year.  This was my 5th time out on course.  Its a great way to break up the summer (it occurs every year in mid-July).  I like it because its something to build toward, and keeps me honest as far as my riding goes.  This year I caught up with Andrew Davision, Jeff Schafer, Rushton McGarr, and Steve Frank.  A 7:50 ride time is still fairly respectable, and I’m glad the above crew (who are all much stronger/faster than me) didn’t mind me drafting wheels a good part of the way.

Back to the point of the post..  I enjoy writing on my blog and I’m glad I tuned into the medium for a variety of reasons.  I can’t write everything I want to write, but at least I can carve out 15 minutes once in a while.  Sort of like my putting the Triple on the calendar every year, it gives me something to shoot for.

Firecracker 50 - - 2009 edition

Last weekend I rode the Firecracker 50 in Breckenridge.  As a friend put it: had they pre-ridden the course before they registered, they never would have registered.  The site even says that there is a strict time-limit and the DNF rate is in the 25% range.

         

Even more, people that I ride with that are way stronger and faster than me said it was over-the-top hard (and fun).  Below is the course profile, which pretty much tells you why he gave the sage advice..

Best advice I got was from Beeker (aka Greg Keller): ride the first lap and then, if you feel good, race the second lap.

My first lap, I took his advice and just settled in.  Warm-up was the climb out of town and up Boreas Pass road.  Result: I had a freekin’ blast!  Riding it like a fast, fun ride was clearly the way to go.  Never pushing the limit avoided a potential blow up.  Moreover – no mechanicals, no flats, just steady riding.  The only major near-miss, was a crazy sliding “almost” crash I somehow made it through on a long and steep descent.  Still not exactly sure how I stayed upright, but thankfully I pulled it off at 30+ mph!  Too bad no one was around to see it.  I must’ve looked pretty funny flailing at that speed and somehow keeping the rubber side down.

Riding within myself on the first lap was definitely the key to a fun rest of the day.  My first lap time was 2:39.  Slightly slower than I wanted, but a decent time for a rookie.

Next lap I tried to turn up the pace, but also kept within myself.  I finished strong with a total time on my computer of 5:30 – a full 30 mins faster than my goal going into the race.  I’m certainly not claiming that it was a blistering pace (I came in 23rd in my category and I think the winning pro time was just under 4 hours) but fast enough to finish feeling good and whooped at the same time.

Next year? Absolutely!

RP’s wedding in Quogue, and the ‘tie-on-the-head’ guys

This past weekend I had the honor to be a groomsman in one of my best friend’s weddings.  RP was my college roommate all through Boston College (except for the first semester when it was Pete Keller, but he got kicked off campus because we both did a lot of ‘bad’ stuff that first semester).

I re-discovered running in the rain.  Jenn and I got to Quogue a day early and it was pouring rain.  Golf outing was ruined, so I went for a long run.  After the first 10 minutes and once I got warmed up, I realized there is nothing like running at the beach in the rain.  It was awesome and I highly recommend it.

Connecting with my college friends was equally awesome.  I don’t think we’re quite as obnoxious as we used to be (wives and families have that equalizing effect) but ‘that guy’ is still inside there somewhere.

Congratulations RP and Lauren.  You all are so obviously happy together. 

Thanks to Lindsey Wolfington for all the great pictures – even the ‘tie-on-the-head’ guys….