wireless startup & investment money

Here's an interesting comment I heard at a recent wireless roundtable sponsored by the Alliance of Angels: if you're creating a wireless application and you're off to raise capital, Dan Shapiro of Ontela observed that, in order to work with carriers, you should seek VC financing.

The days of independent developers getting their products to market on the backs of carriers seem to be behind us. Dan Wright of mporia agreed, noting that it took them about a year and a half to get a carrier involved.

On the other hand, if you are not planning to work with a carrier - that is if you plan to go "off-deck" and deliver directly to the end-user - then you may be able to forge ahead with angel financing.

observations from serial entrepreneur

Okay, I'm a bad blogger. I kept a journal when I was backpacking in Africa - same thing. I just trailed off...not that nothing happened - I just never seem to make the time to blog. There just aren't enough hours in a day to do a startup - doubling the team size only doubled the workload. Resolution: blog regularly. Fortunately, I can wait until New Year's to put the resolution in action :)

Anyway, some good thoughts about human resources from serial entrepreneur, Michael O'Donnell, the founder of iCopyright and many others. He calls it the 1:3 Rule. Basically, you can divide your employees into thirds. A third of them are the stars and performers; they do two-thirds of the work. Another third are coasters - they do their share of the work: a third and no more. The last third are the slackers. They contribute nothing.

Startups can't afford the slackers or even too many coasters like big companies can.

So far, nothing really profound. Now here's the point that I thought was interesting.

Mike noted that stars tend to slide down at least to slacker levels if not worse. To counter this he posts an ad on Craigslist for the star's position every six months. The result? The star rises back to star quality!

The verdict is still out for me as to whether this is something I would adopt but it is definitely something to keep in mind.

Burger on the go

I am happy to announce that Bob Burger just joined Positive Motion as Chief Operating Officer. Bob has over 24 years of experience in the wireless industry and comes to us, most recently, from Surewest Wireless where he oversaw operations as Senior Vice President and COO for seven years and took the company from a startup to $35mm in revenue. We're excited to have Bob on board and look forward to working with him as we shift into high gear for the new academic year.

motor-mouth podcast

Hmmm...now I know what those folks meant by saying I should talk slower (see previous post). Sometimes hearing your own voice is the strangest thing and I've had the frightening experience of hearing my own voice - eeeek! I was approached by the Chris Pirillo Show to do a spot for their podcast. This is a great show and Chris is a funny and effective interviewer. They get about 50,000 downloads for every interview, which is impressive.

Unfortunately, the day they wanted to do the interview was the day I was on a long trip - from Seattle to San Francisco for a meeting in the morning and then to L.A. for an afternoon meeting. The only chance I had was to do the interview from a car in a parking lot in L.A. where there were a lot people of all sorts walking by and peering in at some guy yelling into his cell phone while balancing a laptop on his lap.

So, with spotty signal at best and not knowing the questions beforehand but knowing there was a time limit I switched into motor-mouth mode. They did a great job of making me sound somewhat reasonable but I definitely need to work on my act. I used to do quite a bit of public speaking, having led the Phi Beta Kappa Association of New York (and that was a lot of blabbing) - but I guess it's one thing to be able to control your timing and quite another to feel like you need to get everything out before they cut you off.

I guess I need some training on this. The Northwest Entrepreneur Group has a pub night (which I just returned from) where selected folks are given 3 minutes to present everything or the gong lady strikes the gong. But it is a pub night and, given the atmosphere, folks are encouraged to go overtime so the gong can kick in. I think I'll shoot for that to get some practice in next time...

a company in five minutes

I did a little breakfast presentation recently for NWEN - I was given five minutes to do a PowerPoint for the attendees before the main show went on (Mike Davidson from Newsvine, who was really good). Five minutes is not a lot of time to cover everything but I was able to get everything out there. I just got the feedback today- a lot of folks thoughtI talked too fast. Heh heh. (Actually, the feedback was overwhelmingly good, which made me happy.)

The paranoid entrepreneur

A couple of friends asked me about non-disclosure agreements last week, the favorite document of a startup entrepreneur. It must be that time of summer when the ideas are flowing. Here's a quick summary of useful tidbits:

• Have one ready - either get one from your lawyer or, if you don't have one yet, tailor one to your needs (e.g., start with something like Nolo and go from there)
• Work out what you can say without an NDA - you may want to ask folks to sign the NDA after you've started a dialog to initiate a formalized relationship
  
• Do's and do-not's - potential partners/employees should sign them, do not ask VCs to sign them (they see too many deals that may overlap with your idea)
  
• Protect yourself in other ways - mark sensitive material as "confidential" (e.g., include disclaimer at bottom of your e-mails); this could be really handy if disputes occur later
  

A bit of paranoia in an entrepreneur is a good thing - the buzz and adrenalin beats any caffeine in getting you to pull those extra all-nighters to push things out even sooner.

But don't get too carried away - I've seen this one guy at a number of conferences who kept asking anyone who would listen about how he could raise money for his amazing idea that he can't reveal. I even overheard him ask the president of an angel group to sign an NDA. I wish him luck but, so far as I can tell, he hasn't gotten anywhere but he has turned more than a few people off...

Thoughts about Privacy

Someone recently said they wouldn't want to enter their telephone number on-line to get Mobile Prep delivered to their cell phone because they worried about getting unwanted text messages, etc.

That's a reasonable concern so I should first note that Positive Motion will not use, sell or otherwise do anything with the telephone number except to deliver user-initiated downloads (and to troubleshoot the download if necessary).

That said, the reason the number is requested is because most folks do not know how to get applications for their cell phones. It may be as easy as pointing the browser on the cell phone to the right web site but most folks do not know how to get to the browsers on their phones. The recent AP/AOL poll indicate that less than a third of cell phone users access the internet on their phones.

There are few things more annoying than getting unsolicited ad text messages. The FCC has issued a ban on such spamming so you should definitely make sure you're not on any list you don't want to be on. The trick is to make sure that you're not agreeing to be on any lists as a result of the fine print in the Terms of Use agreement. Most folks don't read these agreements so do be careful. If you tend to skip these as well then, to set your mind at ease I'll say again, Positive Motion does not use your telephone number for any reason other than to facilitate the delivery of our application to your phone.