disruptorMonkey

What Happened?

As you probably noticed, a lot of time has passed since my last post.

Unfortunately, recent events combined with the state of the economy have put the company in an untenable position.  We are unable to continue moving forward.

The corporation is being dissolved and the founders will be going their separate ways.

Obviously this is not the outcome I had hoped for. 

Since the first ideas popped into my head in early 2006, the idea has grown and expanded.  It took some time to find our voice (something I'd like to blog about in the future) and our lack of financial resources meant that the dev process could never proceed at a rate we were happy with.

We started pitching at CED's "Startup Speed Dating" event in April 2007.  It was a great way to learn what made sense to people and what parts we were lousy at explaining.  By October we had a prototype we could demo and I hit the road.  Since then I've pitched 23 VCs either in person or by phone.  By January, we had enough of a product to start signing up beta testers, and we finally got into the due diligence process with a potential investor.

But then the wheels came off and it is time to call it quits.

I'd like to publicly thank our supporters.  We didn't get far enough, but without them we would have run out of steam long ago.

Thanks to our advisors: Gary, Manoj, Peter, Sam, Scot and  Steve.  A huge thank you also has to go to everyone at Square 1 Bank for their unwavering support, Brooks at HPG and John at Wyrick Robbins.  Greg D. deserves a shout-out too.   The support from friends and family has been incredible.  Last, and by no means least, I'd like to thank my wife for her unique combination of humor, sassiness and unwavering support.

In the next few days, I'll find a home for the content from this blog (this site will disappear soon).  Based on the response I've had to this blog, I plan on continuing to write and I'll post the new venue here when I have it.

And that, as they say, is that.

Blackberry schmackberry... Redux

I mentioned a while back how I had become a very reluctant Blackberry user.  Well, the used 7290 I bought apparently had a sensitive soul: it upped and died very shortly after I wrote that post.

Since I still need one, I had two choices.  Buy another used Blackberry, or buy a new one with a cell phone contract extension...  I couldn't bear the thought of being chained to AT&T for another two years, and eBay didn't work out so well, so I turned to that trusty alternative bastion of used goods, Craigslist.

[A quick diversion.  I'm with AT&T because the idea of not being on a GSM network in the 21st century strikes me as crazy.  I go home to the UK often enough & have been a GSM guy for long enough, that the idea that my cell won't work over there strikes me as just plain dumb.  For reasons I don't fully understand, T-Mobile don't operate in North Carolina.  Suncom do, but when I needed a phone plan, they were very expensive.  Since I moved here, T-Mobile announced that they are acquiring Suncom, so by mid-summer, I should be able to get T-Mobile service here too...and my contract with AT&T ends in the fall.  Since T-Mobile actually give a damn about their customers, I cannot wait!]

I ended up buying a more or less new 8800 model.  I know not from whence it came.  And I'm never going to ask.  But the price was right.

It's all shiny.  Ooooh.  The backlight comes on when you use the keypad.  Aaahhh.  The screen rivals any handheld device I've used, and the weird nubbly trackball thing more or less works.  They put the call end key in a much better place, and generally this thing feels less like a UI designer's nightmare.

Possibly most sexy, it has a built in GPS.  You can run the free Blackberry Maps application and it works with Google Maps too.  Not bad for a directionally challenged individual like me.

All in all, it's a big improvement over the 7290.

But I still have a number of issues with it.  Still no inbox/sent sync unless I'm running Blackberry Enterprise Server (although I hear rumors of an app called BBerrySync that may save me).  Still no looping on menus, so if you get all the way to the bottom of a list, your only choice is to scroll all the way back up.  And the weird trackball thing highlights anything on screen, not just links/items you can click, which seems like an obvious UI flaw.  As with the 7290, the way it handles attachments is stupid too.

But at least it looks pretty.  All in all, I'd say the 8800 is the phone equivalent of a cliched trophy wife (or trophy husband, depending on your point of view) and I moderately embarrassed to be seen in public with it...

Reflections on SEVC...

I spent Wednesday & Thursday last week at the Southeast Venture Conference (also known as SEVC).  The event started last year and was held near Washington DC this year.  It's primarily for VCs, but a few entrepreneurs attended the event.

You never quite know if these kind of events are going to be worthwhile.  The SEVC folks were kind enough to offer some starving-entrepreneur pricing (thanks Eric!) and DC is an easy drive from Raleigh, so it seemed worth the risk.  One of my favorite bloggers was also listed as a speaker and I had arranged to meet him, although unfortunately he had a conflict and had to back out.

All in all, it was a very worthwhile trip.

Most important news first.  We raised our first VC dollar!  Sadly, it was only one dollar, but the first one is supposed to be the hardest, right?  I had a great catch-up conversation with a VC I pitched last year.  His firm passed, but we've stayed in touch and he's been great at giving straight feedback (if you find a VC like this, hang on to him/her because they are a VERY rare breed).  The subject of customers came up, and I mentioned that we had a couple of folks that had been willing to pay at least a dollar.  He promptly pulled out a dollar of his own and handed it over.  We'll be framing it and hanging it in our lobby (when we have a lobby)...

There was a great panel that included Scot Wingo (CEO/Founder of ChannelAdvisor) and Jim Steele, (President of Salesforce.com).  I've known Scot for a little while now and always enjoy seeing him on a panel -- he's adept at keeping things simultaneously humble, entertaining and informative.

There was also a classic "Oh no he didn't" moment at the end of the panel with a very VERY pushy entrepreneur who spent 3 minutes introducing his company and 5 seconds on his question.  When he didn't like the answer Jim Steele gave, he actually proceeded to berate him.  As a fellow early stage entrepreneur, I'd be a little more reluctant to tell the President of a $7B company that he's a dumb ass... especially when in front of a room full of VCs.  I thought Jim handled it very gracefully.

Jim had another presentation later in the day.  Salesforce are branching out into web services with their "Platform as a Service" concept.  The basic thinking is similar to what underlies Amazon's web services -- "We've built all this infrastructure and can package it up so you don't have to".  In principle, I think it's a great idea.  From what I saw, Salesforce is a little more oriented towards application developers.  What they offer appears to be more "finished" than Amazon's offerings, but there are clearly pros and cons to both approaches.

What impressed me most about Jim was that after both his panel and presentation, he hung around answering questions until every question was answered.  I talked to him for a few minutes about the 'Monkey and picked his brains about channel strategies.  When we were done, he readily handed over a business card.  I've met a lot of executives from much smaller companies that wouldn't be so accommodating.

There was also a fascinating presentation by John Sculley (ex-Pepsi, ex-Apple, among other things).  He started off pretty slowly.  Since lunch was being served, I have to say that my attention was elsewhere.  But when he got going, I was hooked.  Much of his presentation was about virtual supply chains.  Doesn't sound interesting, I know.  But he talked about mass customization (ordering online and getting a customized product shipped from China to your door in 48 hours... at a profit!!!) and the new breed of companies working with wholly virtual supply chains.  Another company he mentioned was able to prototype a new consumer electronics product for a major cell carrier in 45 days!  The product will be launched later this year at 36,000 retail points-of-sale (those kiosks in the mall).  Back in the day, I did a lot of work with some major toy companies.  Their assembly/supply timeline was measured in calendar years, not days.  The toys for Episode 1 were regarded as a major security risk as they were being shipped from China 6+ months before the release of the movie (and were in manufacturing for many months before that).

I spent a few minutes in an elevator with Frank Bonsal.  Mr. Bonsal is regarded as one of the Godfathers of the VC industry and was a founding parter at NEA.  I was, of course, wearing a disruptorMonkey button.  The big news is that Mr. Bonsal liked the name so much he asked for an overview of what we do and my business card.  Take that, Monkey Haters!

I also chatted with some very interesting folks from the IPO group at NASDAQ.  Clearly some very  smart people working on some very interesting stuff.

On the negative side (you knew I couldn't keep up this happy stuff for too long, right?), some of the presentations were between average and lame.  I was surprised at how many of the company presentations managed to break every rule of presenting -- way too much info per slide, no rehearsal and getting cut off before you're finished because your timing sucks.  Notable exceptions were local boys  Neal Page of Inlet Technologies and Ben Weinberger of DigitalSmiths, both of whom did an excellent job.

So all in all, it was a productive and useful few days. 

Thanks as ever to the folks at Square 1 Bank for numerous introductions.  Thanks to the folks at Hutchison Law Group too.

Southeast Venture Conference

Posting will be light (again, sorry!) today and tomorrow because I'll be up at the SEVC conference in/near Washington DC.

You can read all about the conference here.

If you happen to be attending and would like to catch up, post a comment or send me an email.  I can be reached via the "Contact Us" link on the disruptorMonkey home page.

The Only Time I've Wished for an American Muscle Car...

Growing up in the UK, I have that reptilian hind brain (sorry, I couldn't find a good link to explain that one) that inexplicably draws me towards teeny tiny cars that get great gas mileage, like this one.  I think most ride-on lawnmowers here have bigger engines than my first car...

When I see Hummers, Suburbans or other oversized vehicles, my flight instinct kicks in and I switch off.

So as you can imagine, I'm generally not much of a fan of American muscle cars (with the possible exception of this one).

What the heck does that have to do with anything?  Well, let me tell you about the first time in my life I seriously wished I owned a big old clunky beast...  And it's all thanks to being an entrepreneur.

My wife drives a VW Jetta.  It's a lease, and the lease contract is almost up.  Since we're stretching every dollar (and my credit has been repeatedly ambushed, mugged, abused and thrown in the gutter to fend for itself), we decided to buy the thing.  We got an okay deal, much lower payment, and all in all it's a better deal than buying a car we don't know the history of for the same amount of $$$.

The Jetta is coming up on 40,000 miles and the warranty runs out soon, so I took it to the dealership and had them fix a bunch of odds and ends.  They were very keen for me to have the 40K mile service, so I dug in to see what they actually did for the $500 they wanted to charge me.

Oil, oil filter, air filter, fuel filter, spark plugs and a bunch of walking around.  For $500.

Jeez.

So my "cheap alarm" went off and I declined the service.  I had them change the oil, oil filter and fuel filter (had a bad experience with one of those once) and resolved to do the rest myself. A day and $60 in parts later (I bought new wiper blades too), I had everything I needed to do the job.

The air filter was easy.

But the spark plugs?

Some idiot designed the engine so that the entire exhaust manifold is on top of two out of the four spark plugs.  For those of you that aren't car inclined, rest assured that unbolting the entire exhaust manifold is neither fun nor wise.  Especially when you're armed with knowledge that's easily 15 years out of date and a set of tools that MacGuyver would laugh at rather than try and use.

It took all of 10 minutes to replace two of the plugs.  It took another 2-3 hours to do the others.  And at the point of my third major bit of skin removal, it occurred to me that there's probably a bit more room to swing a socket wrench on a big old SUV.

So there you have it.  Years of prejudice re-evaluated thanks to the wonderful world of entrepreneurship...

Blackberry schmackberry...

For various reasons I won't bore you with, I've been playing with a Blackberry lately.  I bought one used and unlocked on eBay and have been messing with it for about a week.

I don't get it and I really don't see the reason for all the hype.  There are things the BB fails to do that my crummy old iPAQ PDA would do back in 1999, and I'm really not kidding.

Now admittedly, I'm not running Blackberry Enterprise Server.  Running BES may dramatically improve your user experience, but without it, this thing is lame.

First of all, it's hard to use as a phone.  The form factor is horrible -- you have no choice but to dial with two hands while looking directly at the keypad.  Not to mention that the "end call" key is EXACTLY where your fingers rest when holding the phone to your head.

The UI is pretty clunky too.  You access everything through the scroll wheel, but no part of the UI allows looping, so if you've scrolled all the way to the last menu item to find something, you have to scroll all the way back up to access a different menu item. Slow slow slow.  Not to mention that functions are oddly separated -- no way to easily search your contacts when in the "recently dialed" page.  No real ability to set up my own shortcuts.  Call voicemail is buried in the phone menu...

And why on earth is the backlight in no way connected to user actions?  You have to press the backlight button (which is tiny and hard to find in the dark) to activate it.  That's just dumb.  There is an app you can download that solves this for you, but jeez...

Now the thing the device is famous for is email and desktop integration.  When I plugged it in to Outlook, the sync worked flawlessly -- my first and only visit to a Blackberry happy place.  I got my POP3 email account set up on the device and sure enough email just started arriving.  Feeling the potential for some excitement, I send myself an email with an attachment.  Oh.  Attachments aren't handled by the device itself.  The BBSS (big Blackberry Server in the Sky) parses the attachment, fiddles with it, and sends a text version to the Blackberry.  But only after you try and open the attachment and wait for a few minutes.

Hmm.  Must be a better way.  So I download an app for the Blackberry that claims to let me preview and edit Office documents.  Only to find that it works the same way.  Doh!

Oh well.  But still, kind of nice to get real-time push email, no?  Well actually no.  For one simple reason: there is no way to synchronize the inbox and sent folders with your desktop.  Yup.  You can sync your tasks, your contacts, your calendar, even your stupid notes.  But you can't sync your inbox and sent folders.  Come on!  Active-sync could do that in version 1.0 on an otherwise crummy Windows CE device. 

So now I have to either not use the BB to reply to important emails, or jump through a bunch of silly hoops to make sure I have a copy of my response on my desktop.  Not to mention that the mini-qwerty keypad just ain't that fast.

Prior to getting my Berry on, I used a Sony Ericsson W810.  Small candy-bar format, good menu system and with a bit of hacking you can restore SE's basic POP3 email client.  For those with a itch to be in contact, you can even set the email client to ping the mail server every 5 minutes -- no re-routing through BBSS required.  I also find the T9 predictive text to be faster for most short messages than the Berry's qwerty keypad.  I can use it one handed without looking directly at the phone and it has a pretty good built in camera.

I'm sure newer Berries have some improvements over the 7290 I'm trying to use, but trading my phone for a second-rate closed-system PDA with issues is clearly not for me...

The UK's Space Program...

One of the TV shows that always makes me laugh is "Top Gear".  It's nominally a car show, but that's a very loose framework within which they have a lot of fun.

Case in point, an episode I saw a few weeks back where they tried to turn a small car into a low budget Space Shuttle...

Enjoy!

Part 1:

 

Part 2:

 

Hazardous Chemicals...

I was a nerdy kid ("Noooo" I hear you cry).  Had a hand-drawn periodic table on the wall, took apart anything I could get my hands on and had a number of toys that apparently you just can't get any more because they're "not safe".

One of my favorites was the Thomas Salter Chemistry Set.  These things were available in "Levels".  Level 1 contained some water, iron filings and probably little else.  But by the time you reached Level 7, you had most of the periodic table, a dash of plutonium and enough odds and ends to do start some serious fires.  Well, okay, maybe not plutonium, but you could have some scarringly good fun with any kit beyond Level 4 or so.

Sadly, if Wired and other sources are to believed (and I think they can be), such danger has been removed from the lives of today's kids.  And that's a real shame.

I distinctly remember some random combination of Salter chemicals that bubbled up and out of the test tube, melted the test tube holder and made a fair sized hole in the various layers of newspaper etc protecting the kitchen table. Now that's what I call an educational toy -- I gained far more respect for chemicals from my Salter-inspired misadventures than I ever from what we did in school.

Knobs & Dials...

I was talking with a friend of mine the other day.  He's a former tech exec who now works in real estate development and his business has been a bit beaten up by the state of the economy.

We got to talking about the current state of things and a couple of notions dropped out that I thought I'd share.

I've never taken an economics class in my life, so of course I'm thoroughly qualified to be an expert on the topic.  In general it seems to me in general that the economy does best when the government leaves it alone.  Ideally, the government should ignore it all together -- the further they are from tweaking it, the better I feel about the health of the economy overall.

And I'm really not kidding about that.

Why?  Well whenever I hear someone talking about the economy at large, they make frequent reference to agriculture numbers, manufacturing output, volume of durable/white goods etc.  Is that really what drives the US economy at this point?  Doesn't seem so to me.  Not to mention that the unemployment figures are so massaged, filtered and tweaked at this point as to be meaningless.

Viewing the economy as a machine that can be adjusted to "work right" is all very well in theory, but as I put it to my friend during our chat, :

"I'm just not convinced that the dials they are reading are connected to the knobs they're twiddling"

After I said it, it occurred to me that I'd stated a rather common entrepreneurial problem too.  We have a lot of metrics that we informally pay attention to (do people like the product, is dev moving forward, do folk get what we do etc), and we make changes to what we do to get the outcome we want to see.  But it's easier than you'd think to connect an outcome to the wrong input...

So before you make changes in your business, especially big changes, you really need to dig in and see if the outcome you think you're going to be altering is _actually_ connected to the change you're making.

Case in point:  our pitch.  We thought the lack of success was driven by the fact that we couldn't demo much of what we were talking about in a pretty product.  It turns out that is only partly true.  Having a sexy demo definitely helps, but speaking exactly the right language about where we fit in the corporate eco-system has proven to be equally important.

Fiddling with the product would have only gotten us so far.  If we hadn't realized that the outcome was being driven by more than that, we wouldn't have made any progress...

The dangers of pitching while on cold meds...

As I mentioned, I was half-dead last week with some kind of MTD (miscellaneous toddler disease) I picked up from my daughter.

Last Friday I had a meeting I didn't want to cancel, so I dragged my Nyquil-soaked butt to the meeting.

This was a meet and greet, not a serious pitch.  And thank god the guy we were meeting with had a sense of humor.  I repeatedly referred to the Opera browser as the Oprah Browser (the one product she doesn't seem to promote yet) along with a number of other mumbley nonsensical statements...

So be warned... Pitches and Nyquil are not friends.  Proceed with caution.