Embracing the Doomsday Clock

January 9, 2012 by 8 Comments

Today I heard that a friend got a term sheet. “Whew.” he sighed.

“Excited to turn the Doomsday Clock back a minute?”

The Doomsday Clock was invented in 1947 during the Cold War. Set at seven minutes to midnight, it represented how close the world was to global thermonuclear war.

Seven minutes in 1943. A high of 5 minutes in 1984. A low of 17 minutes in 1991. Currently, as of 2010, we are at 6 minutes.

A cold, numeric, non-emotional reminder that as a world we are always that close to complete and total destruction.

(whew. thats pretty emo.)

So many of the founders that I work with and speak to see the financing event as the penultimate indication of success. Its nothing more than the purchase of a lottery ticket (perhaps with a bit of inside knowledge).

Investment lets us turn that Doomsday Clock back a minute. It gives us the time needed to build a business.

The truth is that all startups are dying the moment they are birthed, and its our responsibility to do whatever in our power we can to keep them alive for just another day.

If I have learned anything in the decades I have been involved with startups is that you should apply a Doomsday Clock to everything. Products, people, partners, business plans. Everything. Nothing should be spared; everything should move that Doomsday Clock back a minute.

Imagine if before you signed a partnership deal; started building a product; hired a person, you simply said: “The Doomsday Clock hits midnight if X happens. As long as this partner, person, product doesn’t do that, its a benefit to the company. Push the minute in the wrong direction, and make a change.

Is that evil? Kinda mean? Maybe, but your world, your startup is hurtling towards total global thermonuclear destruction. Perhaps you should do everything you can to stop that.  Maybe.

Even on the grandest stage, time is the greatest gift you can give.

Six minutes to midnight.

Perhaps you should stop caring about raising money, and find new ways to turn that hand back. Understanding and treating fund raising as a distraction as to what is important is the first step.

Build a sustainable business. Or…

Boom.

Filed Under: startups ·

Capturing Dreams

January 3, 2012 by 4 Comments

My grandmother was a storyteller. She wrote 10 or 11 books, mostly of children’s stories, and always had a story to tell. (As she got older, the stories got more fantastical. She worked as a simultaneous translator in the 1950s, and was a spy. Well, not really a spy, but she had to take documents to some shady people.)

Storytelling resonates with me more strongly than any other single sociological/community building concept.

Think about it. The first written communication was a story.

Pictures of deers and hunters with oversized spears (even then, we men exaggerated), running through trees and mountains.

We learn about our world through stories.

Stories are told each night on the news, and people make trillions and trillions of dollars, if the stories are told in just the right way.

I saw the movie Hugo this afternoon, and it was really a story about telling stories. It was about the heartbreak felt by a man, who no longer felt his stories were being heard, yet they were captured in the dreams of a young boy who struggled to find his place in a world that didn’t want him.

Story telling is an art. Its an amazing talent when its coupled with the desire to provide value, real value through the tale itself.

Yet, stories have a dark side, and not just around the campfire, but when we believe that the story is more important than the truth.

The world has been lying to us about what its like to be an entrepreneur.

What do you mean that Zuckerberg and friends worked 24 hours a day for months and months in a smelly small space filled with nothing but nerds? Where was JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE DAMMIT!

We have decoupled the story teller from the story, and apply value to each separately.

I see it happen all the time with entrepreneurs, who believe in “what a founder is” and how “an entrepreneur should act,” that they forget their primary purpose is to build a company and make decisions regardless of the prettiness of the action (or reaction), but based in the righteousness of the conclusion.

Raising money is not the story. It is a step.

Getting press is not the story. It is a step.

You are not the story. You are the shoulders on which your startup should stand for all to see.

Take a moment and think to yourself, what is the story you are telling? What do your employees, investors, customers think of your story?

If your story is not telling the world that your company is 1) adding enormous value; or 2) that it has a deep belief in its mission, then perhaps you are telling the wrong story.

And, most importantly, if you are letting others (including the tech press) dictate what your story should be, you are fucked.

The story of your company should capture the dreams of your users, employees and investors, and I can guarantee that none of them are dreaming about you.

Filed Under: startups · Tagged With: , ,

I Hate Employees

January 2, 2012 by 2 Comments

Lets state for the record, not my employees.  Well, not after we hired them.

When I was a kid living in Mountain View (532 Thompson Avenue!) a rather large, but old tree fell down in our backyard during a storm.

“Geez, Dad, how are you going to get rid of that tree?”

“Remember that bike you wanted, Micah?”

“Of course”

Ive been wanting a multiple gear bike for months, constantly annoying my parents with pictures, magazine articles, strategic walks through the mall, basically anything I could do to get them to take a gawd damn hint.

“Then you’ll be getting rid of the tree.”

My grandmother was visiting from Albion, Michigan, and I turned to her and used the biggest “woah is me” look I could muster.

“Don’t worry about it, Micah,” she assured me in that special Grandmother way, and headed out of the house with my mom.

A couple of hours later, my grandmother returned, and I bounced up from the couch.

“Hey Grandma!”

“Here, Micah, I got you a gift!”

My excitement quickly waned as she pulled a bow saw out of a bag.

“With this, you will make quick work of that tree.”

With that stupid, gigantic tree sitting between me and the bike that I was destined to ride, I hung my head and walked into the backyard, and for the next three weeks cut branches into three foot logs with a bow saw from Sears. Finally, my dad brought out his chain saw and cut up the rest of the tree (lesson I learned? Those with the right tools for the job like to give those without “life lessons.”)

It was then that I decided that having other people do the work rocked, and in every business I ran afterwards, the first thing I did was hire strategically. (The best example of this? High school when I started a pool cleaning business I hired the star football and baseball players. Lets just say I had a very fine high school experience.)

Then as I started to work at larger companies I started to see a trend. Have a problem? Hire a person. Problem goes away? Fire the person. When I was at Kozmo.com, I hired 5 folks to help run our launch marketing. We killed it. Our output was 50-75x of any other city. Yet, once we smashed our goals, I was asked to lay off those 5 people.

Later, when I explored the idea of buying a bar (Running a neighborhood bar has always been a dream of mine), I was talking to someone who had 5-7 bars in the Denver area.

“People are cheap,” he said. “Food is expensive.” He explained that the number one downfall of a bar was serving food. Food goes bad. You can always hire more people.

Over time, as the businesses I built got bigger, and the need for employees grew, it became clear that it was good business practice to understand that people — “head count,” was to be viewed financially and strategically as a renewable resource.

I hate it.

Yes, finding good employees (read: productive — does culture fit really matter? yes. sort of. Have an amazing engineer that has to poop in his own house, so he won’t travel more than 3 days? Betcha make sure he is always close to his own toilet) is hard. Amazingly hard. So hard that an entire recruiting industry has grown up around solving that problem. Companies like BetterWorks exist to help solve that problem. Its a problem. I get it.

But on a balance sheet, employees are no more or less valuable than the rent you pay, and to truly be an effective leader, you have to understand and accept that.

Its why I hate employees.

Know a very common solution to extending your runway? Lay offs.

Know what most corporations do to protect themselves during bad economic times? Lay offs.

An entire industry has grown up around THAT.

By the way, the department of human resources tells you IN ITS NAME what corporations think of their people.

When we started Graphicly, I swore that we wouldn’t run the company by seeing our employees as human resources. I demanded it of myself.

And we don’t.

Have we fired / laid people off? Yes. Its a function of business optimization, and with startups, its often the by-product of pivoting. (Love to pivot? Better love to fire people too.)

We don’t have some ridiculous program or hidden insight, and, frankly, I don’t know if we even get it right.

What we have instituted is a very healthy sense of respect for and belief in each other, and a very open communication path.

Does that mean that we hang out, high five each other and discuss world affairs? Not every day… :)

It means that we respect that we each have ideas, a life, a work style, a high level of ability and an amazing focus on being productive. It means that we ask each other how things are going…and mean it. We treat our little company as a part of the large community we are fostering, and extend the same respect and open communication to that community.

For Graphicly to succeed, it can’t have employees that are building a company; We are just part of a larger community of artists and storytellers that is built on respect and communication.

I hate employees. I hate that we have to hire people who’s tenure with the company is based on the success and direction of the business. Its antiseptic and the opposite of how we as people build communities.

Graphicly stands on the edge of 2012 looking into a future that is filled with amazing tales spun with breath taking art, and as we help creators and publishers get their stories seen the world becomes just a little bit more rad.

We’re looking to build our team. Shoot me an email if you believe you have the technical, product or design skills to build and design the tools that make that world a reality and want join our effort.

tl;dr: Come build cool shit, own your own success, and make the world rad.

Filed Under: graphicly, startups · Tagged With: , , , ,
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