Starting Up a Startup

A diary by and entrepreneur for entrepreneurs tracking the starting up of a startup in the mobile phone arena.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

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.

Thursday, August 17, 2006

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...

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

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.)