Three important concepts for startups

Eric Ries and Steve Blank are two successful serial entrepreneurs and fantastic thought leaders. If you are at all interested in improving you start-ups chances for success check these out:

1. Retooling Early Stage Development - Steve Blank (Stanford audio podcast)
2. Evangelizing for the Lean Startup - Eric Ries (itunes podcast - search itunes Stanford Technology Ventures Program)
3. Minimum Viable Product - Eric Ries (blog post here)
   

I recommend consuming these multiple times and then searching their blogs as well. A ton of great content here. Enjoy.

Reporting on a few personal goals in August

I am continually striving to improve myself and have personal integrity. It’s important to me to set personal goals and work on those. I find being successful in these goals I am more prepared and capable to achieve public victories as well. Here is a great quote:

“…there is enormous power in the principle of keeping promises and honoring commitments. It leads to strong self-esteem and personal integrity, the foundation of all true success (Principle-Centered Leadership by Stephen R. Covey – Pg. 73).”

Each month, I typically set three to five goals and then rigorously record my progress. In an effort to be both transparent and real with how I did, this post highlights my personal victories and/or failures in the month of August.

Here are my simple but foundational goals including results:
Exercise 3 times each week
I exercised a total of 12 times which for a 100% success rate which consisted of:
• Distance running 7 times equaling 19.1 miles total distance (average of 2.73 miles each run)
• Trail run
• Kayaking ~ 2 miles in Santa Barbara
• Mountain biking - twice
• Lifted weights at the gym

Read and study scriptures for at least 15 minutes/day
I studied scriptures 27 days of the total 31 days in August. This means I was close but not perfect. I can still celebrate an 87.1% success rate.

Wake up at 6:30 AM every morning
I was successful at getting up at 6:30 or before a total of 5 times. Resulting in a ~16% success rate or around a 25% success rate if you exclude weekends. My average wake up time was around 7:15 AM. Note: I made it to work on time every day....for the record. See graph below:

Go to bed by 10:30 PM every night
I completely failed this goal and did not do this even once all month. Failed with a 0% success rate! I really stuggle with going to bed at a decent hour because I am either reading or focused on doing something else. It's always something productive but it just keeps me engaged to where I don't want to go to bed. (note: I have had this problem since I was a baby. I still hate going to bed.) See graph below:

Spend 30 minutes either studying to take the GMAT, CFA, or writing a blog post every weekday
I failed this goal too however I did spend about 19 total hours over approximately 8 days studying Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) material. This effort probably amounts to a 50% success rate. After this deep dive, I decided not to go down that path and so my goal in September will be to study to take the GMAT. I only posted one blog post at work and one on this blog.

I am really proud of my exercise and scripture reading goals. Next month, I will need to continue those and focus on these other goals until they are mastered. Sharing my goals and progress made holds me accountable and provides small insights into who I am and what I am trying to accomplish in life. Of course, these are just a few smaller goals. I am a goal junkie so this post would be way too long.

What goals are you working towards now? Do you track your goals? If so, how successful were you in August?

Way to go Netflix

A co-worker shared this presentation with me today and I love it. The power in mastering these values alone would be significant. Enjoy.

Culture

View more presentations from reed2001.

Sometimes I can't help but speculate

I am loving working in the software industry. I simply can't learn enough and I am always, always pushing myself to learn more about emerging technologies and software trends. As of late, "Cloud Computing" has been a big topic of discussion. I would explain cloud computing as data storage and services running in data centers stored somewhere other than your physical location or directly on your PC. For example, QuickenOnline stores your financial information on a servers and databases behind highly secured firewalls and other security devises. Intuit manages or outsources the management of these data-centers to host other services that are accessed via the web browser.

What this allows us to do is to store very little on our computers and have an internet connection. Cloud computing has stimulated a large technological change. For example, the netbooks or mini-computers require few software programs installed or even data storage (i.e.: most commonly called Hard drives). They simply process the browser and you can virtually run a word processing program like GoogleDocs, other applications provided through the browser.

I have been speculating myself about this growing trend to run software in data-centers through the browser without installing software on individual machines and think that one day most if not all software will be run in data-centers in "the clouds". This, of course, has its down falls to which I will explain in a minute. I came to this conclusion by watching more and more software written to be run using a web browser an not installed on individual machines. These browser run programs could be written to run on mobile devise browsers too. Consider iphone applications, browser add-ons linking to web applications, and stand-alone web applications.

Without a ton a research done in this space I blindly assumed that this will be one of the next great technology shifts. However I recently come across some news articles that explain why it may not happen as fast as I think or possible not at all.

Jonathan Zittrain of the New York Times writes the following, "Internet evangelists insist that it's only a matter of time before we stop storing information on our PCs and instead keep it online-or as the geeks say, "in the cloud," said Jonathan Zittrain. At first blush, this seems like a "sensible and inevitable" development. With your stuff in the cloud, it's not a catastrophe to lose your laptop, anymore than losing your glasses would permanently destroy your vision."

But the cloud "comes with real dangers." For one thing, the Internet is far more vulnerable to hackers - just ask folks at Twitter: a hacker who guessed an employee's password was able to snoop through "a trove of Twitter's corporate documents stored too conveniently in the cloud." What's more, thanks to the Patriot Act, federal investigators can track your online wanderings via your Internet service provider without you ever knowing about it. "The FBI's own audits have shown there can be plenty of overreach" in such searches. Now imagine how much more nosy an authoritarian government like China's could be. Some consideration of unintended consequences is in order before "we fly directly into the cloud." (excerpt taken from the Week - July 31st 2009)

This is a fun trend to watch and I hope cloud computing technologies overcome the technical difficulties and go on to expand even more the definition of being mobile. I love the thought of accessing all of my data, services, and applications through the internet. So, we wait and see...

Pixetell: Another exciting technology coming soon

Today I was going through my outrageous unread rss feeds and found this awesome new offering called Pixetell through a VentureBeat blog post. The company name who created and offers this offering is Ontier Inc. I would love to see this be adopted. Here is the demo.

My Personal Mission Statement

Last week I started to write a personal mission statement. Actually, everyone should write a personal mission statement. Lately, the following books have prompted me to be even more self reflective than I already am.

Personally I had never tried to write a mission statement before but I’ve always wanted to. I am a very goal oriented person. In fact, if you were to ask me, I could show you my periodic and annual goals going way back, the metrics I used to track those goals, and how successful I was at accomplishing them. It is amazing to see how much I have achieved just by simply setting goals and focusing my energy.

What I am missing is the over-arching goal, my life’s mission and purpose. Do I have a core purpose from which all my efforts in life are working to accomplish? Such direction would help me stay on track and focused by aligning my various goals and desires with my larger life mission.

It is interesting to me that organizations of all types and sizes spend enormous amounts of money, time, and energy understanding their purpose and mission in the world. I wonder if people spend enough time determining and achieving their mission.

This exercise could take weeks, months, or even years to complete. However, even after it is finished it will remain a living document that will change as I better understand what I want to achieve in life and who I want to become.

Do you have a personal mission statement? How has it helped you?

Don't be a slave to your inbox

This was an efficiency tip of the week in a publication I read...

Don't be a slave to your inbox
1) Step away in the a.m. "Establish your day's top priorities" before ever opening your inbox. Begin with creative or urgent work first, mail second.

2) Give it time. Don't leap to answer every time you hear a new e-mail arrive. "Better yet, turn off the alert sound." If you must check your inbox regularly, choose as long an interval as possible - try 2 two hours.

3) Wait to respond, especially to mass e-mails. Ask yourself, "Does everybody really need to weigh in?" Often, interoffice e-mails "generate more work for everyone."

4) Single-task. To avoid mistakes, give your full attention to incoming and outgoing messages. "Don't email while doing something else."

5) Lie about your whereabouts. E-mail systems allow you to "create an outgoing message that says you're out of the office." You can also use it what you're in the office and just "need an e-mail break."

Source: O magazine --> then re-published in THE WEEK dated November 7, 2008.

Early History of the Internet

Interesting early history of the Internet. (~7 minutes)


History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

4 Main Reasons 2 Hold Mtgs-GIDG podcast

*Share Info(bad reason)
*Decision Making
*Team Building
*Brainstorming

Test

Posting on my blog using my BlackBerry (text message-SMS). Crazy COOL!

Stats

Did you know?

Four Worthy Goals to Strive For...

Dr. Albert Schweitzer was a great philanthropist and devout Christian who left the comforts of affluence to live out his life in Africa. There he provided medical as well as spiritual direction to the poorest people in the world. The only time he returned home was to raise money for medicine to take back to the Africa. At some point he listed the four things that he most wanted to perfect in his life. They seem worthy goals for everyone.

"I have four things to learn in life: to think clearly without hurry or confusion; to love everybody sincerely; to act in everything with the highest motives; to trust in God unhesitatingly."

Work from the Inside --> Out

I enjoyed this (~10 min.) video given by Seth Godin. I thought I'd share. I think its an important concept to work from the inside out. Some other really good principles are taught in this as well.

Blogging about Blogging

My blog sits dormant more often than I would like. People use blogs for many different purposes. I wanted my blog to be a repository of information, quotes, articles, thoughts, ideas, and more. I collect tons of information all the time but I am still trying to find the most efficient way to share it.

I wish I could have a mini-RSS feed or embed a widget into this site that automatically updated new things I am reading and learning across the web. I tag a ton of articles, blog posts, and random websites using Delicious, ReFrame It, & Google Reader. I even add commentary and save for my own personal future reference. If anyone knows how to do this please share. In the mean time, look me up on those sites. I think they will show you the stuff I am tagging, flagging, & commenting about.

I will try and do a better job of posting here too. It is on my ridiculously long list of goals. Those of you who know me well - the RIDICULOUSLY part is for real!

UPDATE: I found a Delicious widget that is now located on the left column of my blog. If you subscribe to Reframe It you will be able to see any comments that I make inside of the articles.

UPDATE 2: Thanks Shannon for the suggestion. Brilliant. Hopefully in the near future I can create a bar graph, or a pie chart, or a line graph... Sounds crazy but it also just might do the trick. (HAHAHA)

Age: Not a Significant Factor

Age 36, Albert Einstein completes his General Theory of Relativity (1915)
Age 41, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue that discovered North America (1492)
Age 51, Ronald Regan becomes a Republican (1962)
Age 53, Walt Disney opens a theme park in California (1955)
Age 72, Albert Einstein takes fun picture by sticking his tongue out on his birthday (1951)
This is just a short list of some things I'd like to refer back to throughout my life. Age should not be a significant factor when considering change, learning, risk takings, etc. I got this information from 03 October 2008 article out of the The Week magazine which highlighted excerpts from Eric Hanson's book titled, The Book of Ages. The article Life by the Numbers (pg 44 - 45) had roughly 50 examples out of Mr. Hanson's book that I really enjoyed.

Its never to late to try something new, be yourself, change, challenge yourself, follow your heart, and the list goes on and on... Age should not be a limiting factor. I think that we limit ourselves from being and doing better. One common excuse we can easily fall back on is "I'll too old for that" or "Maybe if I was your age" or "If I could be young again". Age is just one of many excuses. STOP Listening and go DO something great!

Innovation at 3M

Here is some interesting information I gathered from "Innovation at 3M" a Harvard Business Review article published 23 July 2002. Intuit is working very hard to be a Premier Innovative Growth company. 3M is a great benchmark for Intuit to use because it has been a innovative leader for the past several decades.

Here are some interesting facts:

• 3M inventors motivated by individuals love for discovery and recognition (no royalty sharing)
• All staff given 15% free time to explore new ideas (often outside assigned responsibilities)
• Hosted internal showcases for products & ideas which assisted company-wide collaboration.
• Awarded innovation & provided in-house grants for innovative projects
• One of 3M’s main objectives in the 1990’s was to produce 30% of sales from products that did not exist four years earlier
• Increased emphasis on creating new to the world products instead of line extensions
• 6.5 to 7.0 cents of every sales dollar was spent on laboratory-based R&D (1997 was just over $1 billion)
• Global customer base (operating in more than 60 countries and received half of its revenue and half of its operating income)

One of my favorite YouTube videos

Talk about exciting!

Keep track of PlasticLogic

Here is a video that explains PlasticLogic.

CCRP - Week 2 & 3

Week 2

Monday - 25 August 2008

Stephen Bryant, Gary Curtis, Brian Grove from Tuscon, AZ provided training on QuickBooks Online (QBO) support tools.

Take- aways:

* Intuit products have an enormous amount of back-end support for every product offering (CP3) which include things such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, remote agent support software and tools, product knowledge databases, skilled Intuit employees that are product experts and are very willing to assist the customer.
* Memory Tools:
o 10-24-7 Principle - Review something 10 minutes, 24 hours, and 1 week after learning something new and it will help you better store information beyond your short-term memory.
o Have experiences that assist in the learning process or in other words make the information come alive such as shared group experience, using all 3 sensory channels (sound, sight, action).
+ In class a fictional story was used while others mocked several hand motions that corresponded with some of the words. Later we were asked to tell the same story to our neighboring classmates and we found it helped us remember the major portions of the story by being physically involved. Little did we know we were learning the process of taking support calls (answer, log time, ensure you have the skills, call customer or leave a message, then summarize to the customer your exchange).

This was a less exciting day than in the past but the information will be important information in the days to come.

Tuesday through Friday (26 August - 29 August 2008)

We continued learning the QBO product, learning how to deal with customer issues, and completed dozens of practice modules that instructed us to first input something in the computer incorrectly and then going back to fix it. This will help us in the future assist customers fix some of their issues.

In the middle of the week we had lunch while we meet several leaders from different areas of the company. I had the privilege of talking with the co-founder of Homestead. He was insightful and had a great deal to say about Intuit and were we are headed as a company.

Week 3

Monday - 1 September 2008 (LABOR DAY! OFF WORK!)

Tuesday - 2 September 2008
We continued to be trained on the products and then split up in the morning in to two groups. I took the first customer service call in front of 20 classmates. Scary! When the instructor asked who wants to take the first call, silence ensued. Then after about 2 minutes and a threat by the instructor that he would randomly select someone I responded that I would go first. Luckily, we looked at the customers online question and then tried to anticipate as a group what the problem was and how we could solve it. I call the customer after lunch. Solved the problem in about 3 minutes and its was over. The rest of the day was more training.

On Wednesday we received more training and started more actively taking customer calls. At the end of the day Justin Kitch and many of the Small Business Online leaders came to meet with us over dinner. Prior to mingling, Justin shared his vision of the potential and burden that rests on the Small Business Online to provide significant growth over the next few years for Intuit. We had a Q & A session and then he asked that this be not only a good experience but that we become intimately acquainted with our customers needs, learn a ton about the product, and provide feedback on what we learn.

Action Item - Send Justin an email during this customer support experience saying five things that I learned.

Thursday and Friday we began taking calls in smaller groups and finished our official training with the instructors. Next week, its sink or swim!

On Friday afternoon we headed to play laser-tag with our 50 person group. We played 3 - 20 minute games. We had six teams and kept the same teams for all the games. We would charge indoor obstacles, take over towers, forts, and strong holds. We finished 2nd place overall winning 2 of our 3 games. It was fun to work as a team, develop and execute strategies, and have fun. Laser-tag was a great way to lighten the mood after a crazy week.

I'm still having a ton of fun and love working for Intuit. I'm still soak up everything I'm learning like a sponge and loving it!

CCRP - Week 1 (Thursday & Friday)

Week 1

Thursday - 21 August 2008

Even with a ton of things to write about I still struggle posting about them. Even when I blog I don't do the events and activities justice. I will do my best to reiterate what I did and learned on each of these days.

On Thursday, those who did not have company laptops received them at 8 AM. I was stoked to receive a brand new laptop with all the accessories. Several of the leaders snapped pictures as we ran through the door to find our set up machines. The leaders made it an exciting moment. I logged on and opened my email to find 80+ emails waiting for me to read. I spent a few minutes reading emails, accessing the company Intranet, and then meet up with the entire group in the larger room.

At 9:00 AM the group meet our QuickBooks Online (QBO) trainers who would be training us for the next two weeks about the product, how to use the product ourselves, and then how to help others use the product. QuickBooks Online for those who don't know is an online version of Intuits most successful small business accounting software. QBO is the online version that allows access only from the web and that is were the data is stored as well. This has many advantages to the customer because they can manage their accounting from any where, give access to others easier, and prevents customers from losing their data that might have been stored on one desktop computer when a hard drive fails or other computer failure happens (as they always do eventually).

Without any instruction on how to use QBO we were given tutorials that we individually followed to try and do what a normal business would do when first trying to establish their online QBO accounting. This was very difficult and sometimes painful. Although QuickBooks has done a great deal to simplify accounting software (converting single entry accounting into the more formal double entry accounting), its was a challenging activity. At the end of a pretty stressful day, we had a Hoe-Down BBQ with all the leaders and several of the previous years participants.

I don't have a picture of me at this event but the food was delicious BBQ ribs and fix'ns.

This is about 1/4th the people that were at the Hoe-down. Yehaaa!

Friday - 22 August 2008

We started the day with another fantastic leader presentation. Laura Fjelstul, the Supportability Management Leader explained SBD Customer Care (CP3). Having been at Intuit for 7 years, she said Intuit uses tons of acronyms. Some of them include (this is for my future reference):
O2C - Order to Cash
CP - Core Process
CP1 & CP3 - Product Development & Tech. support
CP2 - Marketing/Sales
HPO - High Performing Organization
GPTW - Great place to work
CTG - Consumer Tax Group (Turbo Tax)
XD - Experience Design
DACI - Driver, Approver, Contributor, Informed
IDEA - Identify, Design, Execute, Access

She gave some helpful advise:
Focus on teamwork, listening skills, and project management skills.

Immediately following the presentation we were split up in groups and given a Business Challenge (case study) to work on as teams. We were confronted with a business case where a decision needed to be made, supported, and defended upon our presentation to the rest of the groups at the end of the day. We were so busy with the activity that when lunch was delivered we picked it up and continued working through lunch. After 4+ hours we had completed the project but still wanted more time to polish. However, we presented our idea and learned a TON from this exercise. I learned the most about project management, leadership, clear communication, and having clear roles & responsibilities.

Being the perfectionist that I am, I struggled with the performance and quality of our groups output. We definitely didn't under perform but I believe we could have accomplished much more with the time given had we better organized our plan of attack and delegated better. I felt one of the difficult tasks was in finding a leader and assigning roles to people that didn't eagerly and proactively seek for things to do. I felt like I didn't want to take charge because the role was not mine to take and because others were equally capable and even desired to assume command. If a leader dictates to team members what element of a project they will work on, then they don't become vested and usually don't perform as good of work. Also, the individual tasks were difficult to divide and then compile at the end. It was a pretty stressful yet stretching exercise. I will continue to ponder this situation for a long time and hope to master the art of team building and project management.

After all the presentations were given, we reviewed the learning experiences of the day and then were sent home a little earlier than scheduled.