The Post Money Value

An Important Read - Monitor 110

[via Brad Feld (thanks!)]

It is a rare moment when you get to hear about a failure without having to wade through piles of venom, personal attacks, and other distracting stuff. Roger Ehrenberg, one of the co-founders, has put together an excellent post on the end of Monitor 110.  The lessons learned is a must read checklist for all of us.

Go here and read it.

Thanks for doing this, Roger.

News Flash - I'm Stupid Adjust Accordingly

Live from an Air Canada middle seat.

I like to think of myself as a very accessible person.  I've been saying for 7+ years, that I'll take meetings, listen, answer emails, etc.  I do it to go against the grain of "You have to know somebody that knows me" or other nonsense. I process, on average, 450 or so emails a day, thankfully 2 voice mails a day (hint), and I'm hanging in.

So, with that, I'd like to believe given the open nature of this offer, people would use it judiciously. Given the latest rash of stuff flowing in, most with the 'saw your blog' openings, I thought it would be helpful to point out a few things.

• Assume I'm busy and I'm blowing through your stuff at lightening speed.  I speed read, try to find the nugget, the question, pound an answer and I'm off to the next one.
• Assume I'm a stupid, attention deficit, english is my third language, Luddite, goofball with a checkbook.   This outlandish commentary is my admittedly over the top, melodramatic, not so polite way of saying you have to get to the point in a reasonably targeted way given your audience, me.  I am a VC trying to turn one dollar into ten. Or more. You have to focus your email/note to the point. To what I'm doing.  I'm not Dragon's Den, not recruiting for America's Next Top Model or American Idol.

Problem/Solution/How we can all make money is my simple three part mantra.

Unfortunately, the process can just grind down. Here are three email exchanges which I've changed slightly to protect the people/product, etc.

First up: I'm the only one who can do this.

Them: "Rick, your blog is amazing, you are the only one who does it right. As it happens, I too am the only guy who can solve a serious data integrity transfer integration problem between mobile devices, cloud computing services, and peer to peer interactions.  How can I get you to come by my lab and see this"

Me: It's difficult for me to justify a flight to AUSTRALIA from Canada without some additional information, like perhaps , an executive summary, PowerPoint, or web site where I can play with this cool stuff.

Next up: I'm too busy

Them: Mr. Segal. Love the newsletter. We're three people with extensive video compression experience and want to get money to start selling our product.  Our compression engine allows HD movies to be streamed over a dial-up Internet and CDMA mobile phones.  What's the process to get money or sell this to Mark Cuban? It's worth 100 million but we'll take $16.5 million.

Me: Sounds interesting. I need a plan of some type, demo, summary, slide deck, etc, to better evaluate what you have.

Them: We're way to busy to do any of that. If we can get some money, we'll hire somebody.

Last Up: VCs suck, do you?

Them: I've read your blog and you appear to suck less than other VCs. I have an idea to crush Microsoft and Facebook all at the same time. If you do suck less than the rest of your ilk, I'll share my plan.

Me: Actually, I suck more.

On the last one I almost lied just so I could see what a Microsoft/Facebook crush em combo sandwich would be.

Bad Practice Alert: Backcheck.net

Recently, I've gotten a couple of notices from an outfit called Backcheck.net.  They are a division of something called Checkwell Decision Corporation. They have concerncheck.net and exitcheck.net.  Back in an airplane so no links, sorry.

Consider how this process works:

First, I get this email (names, etc, redacted, this privacy thing going around):

"Hello Rick Segal,

BackCheck has been contracted by [] Inc. to conduct a pre-employment reference check on [], who has provided us with your name as a reference. A member of our HR Interviewing team will be calling you within the next 24 hours to request that you answer a few questions about []. This step is vital to []’s potential employment with [], and we greatly appreciate your assistance.

We respect that you are busy and may not be available when we call.  As a result, we would like request that you contact us at your earliest convenience.  Please call us at 1-866-xxx-xxxx or 604-xxx-xxxx.

Thank you in advance for your assistance in completing a reference for []."

I'm not going to pick on the 'we would like request' because I ain't perfect with grammar, spelling, etc, but I'm just saying..

Here's the suck part. I'm massively busy and while I love these two people, would hire these two people, recommended these two people, this is just a friction heavy way to close the loop on getting 15 minutes of my time.

This is why I'm counting on Tungle to hunt down companies like this and fix this. "Dear Rick, we know you are busy, please click here to pick a time that works for you and we will call."  And, lord, how hard is it to set up an IVR to do this. Please tell us why you like this person, press pound when done with this question. Press one if you'd hire this person again, etc, etc. 

Lesson for you? Friction free, folks, friction free.

Opportunity?  It seems to me that somebody could go all Guy "12,000 dollar web company" Kawasaki, Open Source, Web 2.0, Y-Combinator on these Backcheck people and kick their bureaucratically inefficient butts up into a mainframe drive pack. 

(I get this way when I'm in a middle seat.)

Bonus observation: Here's why search isn't finished yet.  The reference above to Guy will never come up in a search engine today because of the blurb in the middle of the first and last name.  Solve that problem, you're the next Google.  It's about analyzing the sentence, etc, blaah blaah.

Break Out Your Weapons

[Up here at 36,000ft catching up on a zillion blog posts/email/business plans, etc]

Seth Godin has an observational post up about small vs. big business.  A good quote:

"Small is a weapon, not an excuse"

In the my reader, there is a post right after it from the folks at berryreview.com talking about a change in Gmail.  Ignore the issue and take a look at this quote:

"I am glad Gmail has caught on to this gripe. If you actually liked the auto add feature there is sadly no way to enable it anymore. Guess you can’t have your cake and eat it…"

Small, fast, reliable, customer focused.

Gee, amazing ideas, eh? Try em, you'll like em.

Lessons from Apple

I was building a blog post on all the fun lessons you can learn from Apple's iPhone adventure this weekend. It would have been good but Seth Godin's post is superior to anything I would have written.

Go here and read it. 

What he said.