SXSW Interactive Days 2 and 3
Mar 14 2010

Although I didn’t get in too late last night, I figured I’d wait until today and do a post about both days.  For those who know me, I’m usually all about ‘the plan.’  I like to have a plan, know the plan, and resonate with the plan.  Not having a plan heightens my anxiety level above its usual anxious state.  But for SXSW Interactive, I had no real plan other than to show up and see what happens and that’s what I’ve been doing.  To every rule there is an exception and that exception was attending Austin Technology Incubator‘s Entrepreneurial Lounge the last three evenings.  And quite honestly, that event has evolved into the ‘place to be’ for entrepreneurs at SXSW Interactive!  Bart Bohn did a post about the Entrepreneurs Lounge for the ATI blog at  Entrepreneur’s Lounge at SXSW Interactive – March 13, 2010.

I attended a Porter-Novelli (PR firm) event, crashed a Women in Tech Digitini event at the top of the tallest building in Austin, and attended a couple of parties but didn’t stay too late.  I hung out at the blogger’s lounge sponsored by Microsoft with the irony being that 80% of the people in there had iPhones.  At the blogger’s lounge there was a woman giving out free jewelry and she gave me a nice turquoise bracelet from Charming Charlie (there’s a location in Austin’s Domain) that matched the shirt I was wearing.  I’m just not a late night bar hopper kind of person.  Now if there was dancing involved, I’d be more interested.  One party sponsored by Microsoft/TechSet had two women dancing in what looked like black/red lingerie near a guy who was playing the guitar.  Just goes to show you how male dominated the tech industry still is.

Today, I went into a SXSW Film panel where Jeffrey Tambor was giving an acting class.  He and two amateur actors were on stage with him.  He was coaching them through a scene where this man and woman were broken up but the man wanted her to pretend they were still together while they had dinner with his brother.  She refused and he was supposed to try to get her to do it.  It was a marked difference between how they first did the scene and how he pulled out the emotion in them to show the scene in a different more touching way.  The actress, in my opinion, was much better than the actor.  The actor wasn’t convincing when he tried to get her to pretend to stay together.  It was like he was trying to get her to do something more out of fear rather than love and because of that the actress reacted accordingly.  He was so non-believable, no woman would have been convinced by him.  It’s obvious he didn’t feel it.  Jeffrey tried to get him to be more playful to pull out the residual love the actress still felt.  It was a fascinating workshop because I could see how you could apply his same techniques to people management/coaching.

The weather has been gorgeous here.  California weather.  Tonight was especially nice.  I thought briefly about staying out longer but as I was walking back to my car from the convention center, I breathed deep and was glad I was going home to see my kids, do some laundry, have some quiet time to finish writing this post, maybe watch Grey’s Anatomy, and then go to bed.

Only two more days left…

SXSW Interactive Day 0
Mar 11 2010

This evening I went down to the Austin Convention Center to pick up my badge for South by Southwest Interactive and check out the Big Ass Twitter Happy Hour at Frank Hot Dogs and Cold Beer.    I got the Chicago dog and a cranberry vodka because I don’t drink beer.  The hot dog was pretty good but the drink tasted well nothing like cranberry or vodka.  I got there kind of late and realized that since I’ve been so out of the social media scene this past year and rarely tweeted, that I really didn’t know a whole lot of the new twitter crowd.  There were a few of us early adopters there, and I caught up with them before getting my badge. I thought briefly about going to the Austin High Tech Happy Hour but by the time I drove by where it was, the crowd had thinned so I drove on by and came back home.  It was an early night.

SXSW interactive doesn’t officially start until tomorrow, but they opened registration up tonight and it’s a good thing because the line was already quite long.  So it was an uneventful Day 0.  Tomorrow should be more interesting since I have some business meetings set up for the morning, more people I know would have flown in, the bloggers lounge should be open, and I will get to drink a caipirinha and eat some cheese bread on the roof top of Fogo de Chao (Brazilian Churrascaria), where the Austin Technology Incubator hosts the invite only third annual Entrepreneur’s Lounge.

Recent Entrepreneurial Events in Austin
Mar 6 2010

What I want to do with this blog is evolving, but I’m pretty sure my posts will generally still fit my tag line of “babbling about business and parenthood.”  Pretty much everything falls into those categories except for maybe marriage and love.  But you can feel married to your business, in love with it, and close to unconditionally in love with your children so yes, even marriage and love are fair game for this blog known as entrepreMusings.

On this post, I’m going to mention a few events that I’ve been involved with or attended recently here in Austin, TX that had to do with entrepreneurship.

Back on February 17, 2010 I had the honor of being a table moderator at a local event hosted by the Austin chapter of Texchange, a group that brings entrepreneurs together to network and discuss things that are of concern to entrepreneurs.  This event had a panel of 3 CEOs that recently had successful exits of their companies.  The panelists were Joel Trammel of NetQoS, Rod Favaron of Lombardi Software (an Austin Technology Incubator alum through it’s now defunct parent called OpenPlus), and Craig Malloy of Lifesize Communications.  For their full bios, check out the post on AustinStartup called Meet CEO’s With Major Recent Exits.  It was great to have in the same room, 3 CEOs who have had positive exists from their company.  I believe 2 of them even had all cash deals!

On March 4, 2010 I participated in 3 events and took away something from all of them.

The first was an Semantic Web Austin event hosting Mark Greaves from Vulcan Inc. (Paul Allen’s asset management group – www.vulcan.com) to discuss the opportunities in the semantic web space.   This event was hosted by the Austin Technology Incubator (ATI) and Bart Bohn, our Director of IT/Wireless division coordinated it.  I have to say that most of it was over my head since I’m not a tech head – my degrees were not in technology.  The key takeaways for me were that there are languages called OWL and RDF that are used in creating Semantic Web apps,  and we are very early in understanding the semantic web and how it can be used as a basis of a profitable company.  It seemed to me like the next level in search querying.  In google you now would type something like ‘white elephant’ and get some links to sites that discuss white elephants but it’s based on how many people link to that site.  With the Semantic Web, you can ask things like “How many white elephants are there in China who belong to people making over $10K?” and get back more descriptive results.  To me it sounded a little bit like what Ask Jeeves was/is trying to do in a more sophisticated way.  Mr. Greaves mentioned companies in this space, including Zemanta, which I have wanted to try on this blog for a while now but have been wary about the learning curve.  An interesting applications he discussed was one aimed at pharmaceutical/medical companies that need to search tons of research data to get at specific points of data to continue research for other drugs.  I couldn’t quite get my mind around it, but like people didn’t really understand the social web 5+ years ago, we are probably at that stage right now for the semantic web.

The second was a RISE panel I sat on that was held at at TechRanch and the topic was “resilient start-ups” Suaad Sait was on the panel with me and he’s done several companies the most recent being Reach Force.  It was a fun panel in an intimate living room type of setting where the audience seemed to really get engaged.  I learned a few new things from the other panelists, but I think my biggest takeaway was that although my most visible entrepreneurial experience (venture backed) was just about 10 years ago, the lessons I were able to share still seemed relevant today.  Even though, I ended up transferring ownership of Babble Soft to my partner and didn’t end up raising money, I learned things about social media and a consumer business from it.  I sometimes forget that there are not that many people who have the experience I and the other panelists have or are living through right now.  I realized how easy it is to forget the unique value any of us brings to a situation based on our life learnings even if some it happened a decade or so ago which seems like an eon in Internet time.

The third event I attended was a CleanTX Foundation event on called Other People’s Money – The New Funding Landscape for your clean energy startup.  These events are run by Melissa Rabeaux, ATI’s Marketing/Communications Manager.  There were probably close to 150 people registered for the event!  The topic was interesting with very experienced speakers on the panel.  I learned how Xtreme Power, an ATI alumni member, got funded as well as about other sources of funding for clean tech companies.  I also learned that some people actually think you can bootstrap a clean energy company which is very hard to do given the research, tools, equipment one needs to have to build something in solar, wind, or alternative fuels.  Unlike some web companies that can be built by the sweat of your brow to prove viability, clean energy companies generally don’t operate that way.

So there are many things going on in Austin.  Check out the ATI blog for updates on what is going on in and around Austin and the ATI community.

Gapingvoid Cartoons – Love and Entrepreneurs – Part 2
Feb 25 2010

So now to part 2 – the Love series by @gapingvoid.  Check out Part 1 on Entrepreneurs.   In this post, I’m linking to some of Hugh MacLeod’s daily newsletter cartoons that highlight my favorite of his Valentine’s 2010 love series.  These particular cartoons touched me.  He has a way of taking words and using color, lines, space, and feeling in a unique way.  Please click on the image to go check out how to buy a print.

I liked the first one because it made me think of term sheets and love at the same time.  As an entrepreneur, when you raise money, you are presented with a term sheet (or create one yourself) and you negotiate terms until you come to an agreement with the person giving you money.  This cartoon to me represented yearning with a clear stated desire of wanting to be with someone while being vulnerable and trusting enough to let them name their terms.

The second one rings true to me because you know when you meet someone who is passionate about what they are doing or the story they are telling, you feel the love.  The stories and the people who you tend to remember most exude passion and love.  All great stories and works of art have love involved. What would the human condition be without love?

As for the last one, I just thought it was very cute and reminded me of being young, shy and having a school girl crush on someone.  As a little kid, I was naturally outgoing but was shy as a pre-teen and teenager, but I have always deep down been a very passionate person.  I never felt like I could express my passion legitimately through my writing and singing when I was younger for a variety of ‘life logistics,’ support, and inspiration reasons. But now I’m discovering that not feeling safe to express it, pretending to be someone you are not, or going through the motions for so long leaves one empty and longing for more.  I became less shy externally as I got older, but that shy girl is still in there and she’s working on being brave about love!

Gapingvoid Daily Cartoons – Love and Entrepreneurs – Part 1
Feb 23 2010

So some of you may know Hugh MacLeod who is the guy behind @gapingvoid.  He started a series of original cartoons via his daily newsletter at the beginning of this year.  I’ve found several of his cartoons so appropriate for entrepreneurs and passionate people in general.  You can buy prints of his art.  In this post, I’m linking to some of his cartoons that highlight entrepreneurs.  Please click on the image to go check out how to buy a print.  In Part 2, I will share some of my favorite in his Valentine’s 2010 Love series. Be still my beating heart. 🙂

I know that many entrepreneurs feel delusional at times.  I certainly do and I have found myself doubting recently whether I am really an entrepreneur given the characteristics mentioned in my Are Entrepreneur’s Born or Made post.  Plus, I seem to be in between entrepreneurial gigs right now.  We have to believe against all odds that what we are doing is going to work when in the vast majority of cases, it doesn’t work out the way we expected…but we keep trying and in many great cases the stars align and the people appear to support you and it does!

I also believe that entrepreneurs are artists.  They take a blank page and create something that didn’t exist before that often ends up employing other people to share in the dream.  Entrepreneurs and artists come in all shapes, sizes, and vocations from technology, to cartooning, to non-profits, to singing, to painting, etc.

Are Entrepreneurs Born or Made?
Feb 22 2010

Am I back to consistently blogging?  I’m not sure yet.  Believe me it’s been hard not to write.  I’m still sorting out a lot of personal stuff.    But I’ve run across a few blog posts on this age old question recently and felt compelled to do a post about it.

Fred Wilson did a post called Nature vs Nurture and Entrepreneurship and he says “WEP is run by Professor Raffi Amit and as we were making our way from one meeting to another, I said to Raffi that “you can’t teach people to be entrepreneurs but you can teach entrepreneurs business.” He replied to me that his research into the topic suggests that “there are no unique and defining characteristics of entrepreneurs” which leads him to believe that you can in fact teach people to be entrepreneurs.”  Fred lists his characteristics of an entrepreneur.  The post currently has 278 comments.

The topic of women entrepreneurs was raised by Rachel Happe by her comment below and many others had a discussion around her comment.

“At the risk of making this a feminist position… which it’s not really, I would like to add the female perspective because I’ve been a woman on management teams a couple of start-ups and am now starting my own thing. I have to say, I find that the whole VC/young entrepreneur vibe makes me roll my eyes a lot. A lot of older, richer men with money stroking the egos of a bunch of younger men who have an idea and think a lot about themselves. Ugh – turns me off of the entire VC model. So I offer an alternative set of characteristics that I feel more accurately portray me (and I think may be generalizable):

1) A stubborn belief in an idea or alternately a stubborn belief that there is a much better/more efficient way of doing something

2) Confidence (I actually think arrogant people are some of the least self-assured people I know but I digress)

3) A belief that the reward vs. risk of starting a new venture is higher than the reward/risk of working for someone else.

4) An ability to see and articulate a solution

4) An ability to construct a vision and sell it to many others

5) A magnetic personality – to attract talent, partners, investors, etc.

Just my 2 cents.”

I left the following comment:

“Having taught entrepreneurship myself at the UT Austin McComb’s school of business and falling into the entrepreneur category myself (2 tech start-ups), I tend to agree more with ‘you can teach entrepreneur’s business’ rather than you can teach people to be entrepreneur’s as you define their characteristics. There are many entrepreneurs out there in high-tech, to restaurants, to non-profits, to retail, to motels, to singers, to artists that limiting them to the characteristics as you define them is limiting. I think your characteristics of entrepreneurs tend to define those in high-tech.

Now I think that all of those people in those different industries have a drive to make a difference or an impact on their world and that is, to me, a defining trait. Whether they are confident or arrogant or otherwise doesn’t really matter to me. Confidence comes with practice which helps with one’s belief in oneself.

As for the gender discussion, as I mentioned earlier make it a goal to invest in more women led businesses whether in tech or not. Hire a women venture partner. People hire, work with, and are attracted to people who are similar. Once women were more accepted in the medical profession, there has been a drastic increase in women doctors. In the accounting profession which used to be mostly men, now at the mid manager and lower level it’s almost 50/50 women…women still have a harder time getting to partner because of the lifestyle.

I’ll be interested in reading about your research into this topic.”

I then happened upon a post on TechCrunch by Vivek Wadhwa called A Fix for Discrimination: Follow the Indian Trails.   He discusses how Indians have managed to achieve success in Silicon Valley, and he starts the post by saying:

“Women, Hispanics and blacks have always been underrepresented in the ranks of the Valley’s tech companies.  A new analysis by the Mercury Newslast post on the dearth of tech women shows that from 2000 to 2008, the proportion of women tech workers in Silicon Valley dropped from 25.3% to 23.8%, and that the national numbers dropped from 30% to 27.4%.  In 2008, blacks and Hispanics constituted only 1.5% and 4.7% respectively of the Valley’s tech population — well below national tech-population averages of 7.1% and 5.3%. It seems that the problem I highlighted in my is actually getting worse, particularly in Silicon Valley.  And it’s not just the women who are being left out, but also important minority groups.”

He later says:

“Thirty years ago, there were hardly any Silicon Valley firms with Indian-born founders.  UC-Berkeley’s AnnaLee Saxenian documented that 7% of tech companies started in 1980–1998 had an Indian founder.  A survey conducted by my research team at Duke University found that this proportion had increased to 15.5% from 1995 to 2005. My team also determined that in this period, Indians started 6.7% of the nation’s tech and engineering firms.  These are pretty astonishing numbers considering that according to the U.S. census, in 2000 less than 0.7% of the U.S. population and only 6% of the Silicon Valley high-tech workforce was born in India.”

So whether people tell you that you have entrepreneurial characteristics or not, if you want to do something and make a difference…JUST DO IT!  You may make it, you may not but you’ll never know if you don’t try.

Once In A Blue Moon – It’s Complicated
Jan 1 2010

Last night, December 31, 2009, we had a blue moon.  Most years have 12 full moons but every 2 to 3 years we have an extra full moon and it’s called a blue moon.  We saw it coming back from the airport after a really nice visit with my cousin and her family.  On the way out, after getting up at 3:30 a.m. to make a flight that was 3 hours delayed, we ended up being almost 7 hours late getting to our final destination because of an issue we had leaving Austin having to do with de-icing our plane.  Just before they had us get off the plane to wait it out, my son said loudly “I knew we should have flown Southwest!” which caused all the people around us to laugh.  He doesn’t even have to try to be funny…this wonderful kid of mine. 🙂   This was the first time I traveled by myself by plane with the kids, and they did really well.  I told them how happy I was with them because despite the delays, it was one of the least stressful times traveling with 2 kids that I’ve ever had.  We even had a 4 hour layover in Memphis, TN and by a stroke of luck some of my long time family friends who live there (who I hadn’t even told we were flying through Memphis because we were only supposed to be there for 45 minutes) interrupted their plans to come hang out with us for a couple of hours at the airport!   I was so happy to see them…kind of like seeing land when you’ve been lost at sea for a while.

My favorite aunt and uncle (we spent summers and other times with them growing up) were supposed to have left earlier in the day from my cousin’s place, but they waited for us before driving back to their city a couple of hours away.  I was so grateful that they waited…kind of felt like a pilgrim lost in a fog coming home.

So back to the blue moon.  It’s a rare event and thanks to Erin, who picked us up at the airport, it was probably the first time in my life that I was aware we were having one.  He had seen something about it on CNN, so I looked it up on my trusty iPhone.  The moon last night was uncharacteristically huge and bright and to me seemed full of hope and promise.   I started singing the song Blue Moon by Ella Fitzgerald (lyrics) and thought about the upcoming new year and new decade that was upon us.  Although I was invited to a friend’s New Year’s eve party, I was so tired I called it a night at 10:30 p.m.  Lame I know, but I figured it was best to start the new year rested so I could think about whether I should make some new year’s resolutions.

So today is the first day of the new year and last year I made non-resolutions:  “So my non-resolutions for 2009 are to sing more, laugh more, write more, make more funny faces at my kids, be less repressed, empower people, unashamedly love people, continue to take yoga, find a purple hat (any suggestions?), make some life changing decisions (I already got my hair cut short), and move the ball forward one day at a time on Babble Soft and at ATI.”  The funny thing is that I think I achieved all of those to varying degrees with various outcomes and some I didn’t even do consciously (a higher power at work).  I guess I should be careful what I non-resolute!

One of my friends, Julie Fergerson, who happens to be a leading expert in identity theft, got me a purple hat.  I transferred majority ownership in Babble Soft to my fabulous partner, Nicole Johnson, who I finally got to meet in person while visiting my cousin because she lives in the same city.  My cousin had met her before I did.  Nicole also runs the Baby Sleep Site and our online meeting has got to be a case study (GigaOm) in successful partnerships between two people who have never met in person.  It was like we were old friends catching up when we met with our kids at a nearby mall.  As far as writing more, I didn’t write more on the blog, but I wrote song lyrics and did a lot of personal journaling (I’m already on my second spiral notebook).  My daughter likes to hang out with me when I write in the mornings and, of course, add her personal touch to my pages. 🙂 Maybe she’s a budding writer despite not being able to even read yet…

So I think I’ll stick with most of the same non-resolutions for 2010 and maybe add something about making upward progress in my career and doing more cardio exercise.  I’m not planning to eat black eyed peas or kiribath (rice cooked in coconut milk – yummy), a Sri Lankan new year’s tradition for auspicious occasions, so I’m throwing caution to the superstitious winds and hoping for the best.

And in case you are wondering why the title of this post includes the words “It’s Complicated.”  Well it’s because I saw the movie today with my movie buddies Michelle Ewalt (a great business/life transitions coach) and Cindy S. (she’s an offline kind of gal).  We see a lot of movies together and our next one might be Sherlock Holmes.  It’s Complicated was hilarious and included fabulous actors and actresses including Meryl Streep, Steve Martin (so cute & funny), and Alec Baldwin.  It was much better than the Alvin and the Chipmunks – The Squeakquel movie my cousin and I suffered gladly sat through for the kids.  While watching “It’s Complicated,” I kept thinking, while laughing out loud, that although my life seems complicated, thank God it’s not as complicated as that!

Happy 2010 everyone…

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year
Dec 22 2009

I couldn’t end the year without at least one more post!  It has been quite a year, and I needed to take a break so that my off blog/real life wouldn’t bleed too heavily into my online blog life as it seemed to start to do.   For those of you who are writers, you know how hard it is not to let your real life affect your writing even if it’s only subtly profound.  For those of you who are writers (or creative people), you know how hard it can be not to write.  It’s like holding back the tears or your laughter when you want to cry an ocean or laugh uncontrollably.

Not only did I cut down on blogging (although I am the main blogger for the Austin Technology Incubator blog in case you really miss my blogging), but I also significantly cut down my twitter usage (probably by 90%) so I tweet maybe once every couple of weeks but they haven’t been very inspiring ones. 🙂  However, I do find myself on facebook every couple of weeks which is up from every few months.  Maybe 2010 will be the year twitter and facebook figure out a winning business model?!

I hope to be blogging more in the new year about one of my next entrepreneurial endeavors which currently involves music.  In lieu of blogging, I have been singing more.  I continue to take voice lessons from my great voice coach, Gene Raymond at Octave Higher.  He is so encouraging, and I know my voice and singing confidence have improved significantly since I started taking lessons from him some 6+ months ago.  Singing is such a personal journey that to find someone you feel safe enough to miss a note, croak, or fall flat occasionally is priceless.

I was introduced to Gene by Scarlett (who is featured on his home page), who I met when taking the Landmark Forum.  Being involved in Landmark was the beginning of me finding my inner voice and facing my fears, and I wrote about the forums in a couple of posts called A Transformation In Process and Who I Was Being Was Not Exactly Who I Am.  I also took a course recommended by one of my business advisers/mentors and his wife called The Search Within, which was much more music, heart, and soul based, that totally knocked my emotional socks off!  As I re-read those posts, I am reminded of how much has changed in my life since a year ago this month when I took the first course.  As a child who experiences growing pains, the pains are just as real when you are an adult but it’s not in your bones…it’s in your mind, heart, and soul.  There are too many changes to list here, but suffice it to say I will be heading in new directions in 2010!

So you’ll probably see more entrepreMusings about my musical endeavors next year and maybe more purple hat wearing.  I’ve been writing lyrics and Gene introduced me to another student of his who plays guitar and wants to collaborate in songwriting.  To me, lyric writing usually comes easy although I have no idea if they are any good or not.  I’ve never written music but according to Gene and the guitar player, the lyrics are the hardest part and to me the instrumental is the hardest part.   I don’t know how to play an instrument so if the easy parts for them are the instruments, then we just might create something!

My boss introduced me to a fabulous musical guy called The Fat Man who hosts jam sessions from time to time.  Oh how fun and uplifting they are!   I feel so honored that they include me.  I can’t always keep up because my voice is comfortable in certain vocal ranges and they play some songs in keys that don’t work for me as well as play songs that I don’t know…like for example written by the Rolling Stones.  I can imagine some of you rolling your eyes.

Anyway, that’s a long winded way to say Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!  May the entrepreneurial road(s) for you and/or your loved ones lead you to peace, love, and success.  May you find an IDEA that is worth fighting for as much as this mother fought for the life of her successful son who is 27 years old and should have died 26 years ago.

“To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must cultivate our personal life; and to cultivate our personal life, we must first set our hearts right.”
–Confucius
from Jeffrey Fry’s Potent Quotables

About Laughter
Oct 28 2009

This post called About Laughter came to me while I was in the shower the other day.  I guess I was thinking about About Sleep, About Writing and About Car Paint when the word “laughter” popped into my head and then a blog post started forming.

Laughter is the best medicine is an age old saying and according to: Laughter is the ‘best medicine for your heart on the University of Maryland Medical Center, Laughter is the Best Medicine on HelpGuide.org, and Laughter is the Best Medicine on Science Daily, laughter can help prevent heart attacks, help the terminally ill, create great working environments, make your employees think you are more effective, relieve stress & anxiety, etc.  A good laugh probably activates some feel good stuff (e.g., endorphins) in your body.

I have some funny people in my family.  My late grandfather had this mix of British and Sri Lankan humor that had a high occurrence of bathroom (or lack thereof) references.  Us kids thought it was gross and funny at the same time.  Even after he had a sextuple bypass at the Cleveland Clinic as well as on his death bed a decade or so later, he was still being funny and irreverent about life and religion.  I never could figure out if he was agnostic or not because he would quote the Bible, know hymns by heart, and later in the day make some funny derogatory remark about God, religion and some of his hyper religious relatives.  My mother has a similar sense of humor.   She also makes up words and describes people in caricature-ally true and funny ways.  She even has animal nicknames for all of us kids.  Sri Lanka was a British colony for quite some time and had a strong British influence for decades afterward and if you’ve ever watched Monty Python or Blackadder you know what I mean.

I also work with some funny people and a day doesn’t usually go by without a laugh or two or three.  Our office manager and I have a similar sense of humor, so she and I send some pretty funny emails around that others can’t keep up with sometimes.  We find many of the same things funny and find ourselves laughing at the dumbest of things.  We also sometimes cross some lines but fortunately we work in a laid back environment.  I have to say that I have met at least one of my 2009 non-resolutions which is to laugh more.  I feel like I have laughed a lot more this year than in past years.

When I interned in college, I worked with a great bunch of interns and we were all in stitches often.  That’s where I met my friend who I went to the beach with back in June.  He, I, and others in our group would come up with practical jokes, say the weirdest things and email about roller coasters and bowling and how they related to life and certain parts of life that most people aren’t comfortable talking about.  I remember laughing so much that summer.

Laughter is so important and can help through even the toughest of times.  We just can’t take things too seriously in life, start-ups, and margarita’s.   Maybe one day I’ll feel comfortable enough to show more of my humor on this blog, but I’m just not sure people will get it and then I’ll feel more stupid than I sometimes do!

An entrepreneurial endeavor without fun, social time, and laughter is not a place I want to be.  To me any good company culture has to include smiles, jokes, and many LOL’s.  😀

Now go make someone laugh and if you find yourself laughing until your belly hurts, you can tell people you exercised and did some sit-ups/crunches too!

About Sleep
Oct 22 2009

Now for the third post in the “About” series.  The first was About Writing and the second was About Car Paint.  This one is About Sleep or the lack thereof.

Sleep is so important but for entrepreneurs and parents it’s often hard to come by…and not from lack of trying.  I consider my two kids two little ventures and I often say, I’ve now been involved in 4 start-ups, 2 being my kids.  Kids are unique and require special attention and you definitely don’t want to screw them up.  You can’t file bankruptcy on, sell, or shut down your kids!

There’s the physical sleep deprivation that comes from the newborn days and even as they grow older and wake up with a bad dream or just like us they sometimes can’t sleep.  I’m a light sleeper so when they come to my bed I usually can’t get back to sleep very easily.  There’s also the mental sleep deprivation that comes from trying to make sure you keep everything straight while your mind is exhausted from thinking about all the things you need to do.

I know many an entrepreneur even without kids who does not sleep well because they have so many things to think about from money to employees to product development, etc.  Now add worrying about your kids on top of that and it can be overwhelming on little sleep.  I see how tired some of the entrepreneurs are sometimes in the companies we have at the Austin Technology Incubator.  I sometimes want to tell them to take several deep breaths, take a walk, or take a break.  But most entrepreneurs (myself included) don’t hear that kind of advice.  I also see how elated they are win they get a big win which makes up for the long periods of time of spotty sleep.

I’ve seen entrepreneur’s mess up meetings with investors or customers when they haven’t had enough sleep because the words they mean to say don’t always come out coherently.  I know I certainly mix up words when the neurons aren’t firing correctly when I haven’t had good sleep.

The entrepreneurs and people I know who sleep well usually feel good about where they are in life, their company is doing well, or they are taking some serious drugs!  I’m actually amazed at how many people these days take sleep medication.  It’s actually quite common in my peer group and comes up often in conversation as we all try to manage the tons of responsibilities and information that comes our way.

I’m more amazed at how well many of us keep it together on such little sleep and present to the world an image held together sometimes with invisible glue, coffee, Red Bull, fake smiles & laughter, and quite often fear.

I wonder how much more productive we would be if we were all forced to take a nap just like babies and little kids do?  Or if we could go to bed when our kids go to bed around 8:00 or 8:30 p.m. and somehow by some miracle not wake up until 6:00 a.m. ish the next day.

It’s too bad there aren’t adult sleep sites like there are great baby sleep sites!  I wonder if there are positioners, pacifiers, or people who can rock adults to sleep. 🙂

Ah to sleep, perchance to dream...

Subtle Yet So Profound
Sep 12 2009

Photo by my very talented 5 year old niece.  She saw this shark outside of her window while they were driving on I-405 in Southern California and quickly took a picture of it!

I was talking to someone I admire the other day, and we were discussing how people are affected by certain things in their lives.  Sometimes there is no easy explanation as to why things happen the way they do.   There is no 1 + 1 = 2 with everyone nodding knowingly in agreement which can sometimes make post mortem analysis of situations and business projects complicated.  She said the things that happen can be subtle yet so profound.  Those words resonated with me.  It can be very subtle, little things that over time have a profound effect on you.

The effects can be positive and negative.  On the positive front, in the right company culture people can achieve more than they knew they were capable of.  In those environments the positive reinforcement can be obviously observable or subtle, which is most often the case.  The people often don’t realize the difference until months or years later when they look back and see what things they were able to achieve and observe how they feel about coming to work.  It can even positively affect their home lives because if they are happy at work where they spend most of their waking hours, they take home less stress.

On the negative side, a friend of a friend of mine was recently telling me about an experience she had at work in a large organization where for three years she worked for a manager who yelled at her occasionally when something wasn’t going quite right.  Since it didn’t happen frequently, she thought she would just take it and move on, but it took a huge toll on her psyche and her energy was drawn elsewhere making it hard for her to do her job as effectively as she would like because she never knew when he would start criticizing her.  She started to be able to tell him that he should not talk to her that way, but it took a lot of her energy to deal with it.  Even after leaving it took her a couple of years to get out from under the berating until her self confidence was up enough to find a job she really enjoyed and performed well in!  I was proud of her for doing the work on understanding how she needed to build back up her self esteem.

One of my stay-at-home mom (I still hate that term and she calls herself a zoom-around mom) friends and I were discussing how our children’s behavior can affect our mood.  She was telling me how she woke up one day feeling good and then her toddler was in a terrible mood most of the day and it affected the rest of her day.  Of course that’s not so subtle but if there aren’t enough smiles and laughter to offset the “I want to pull out my hair” days then you find yourself depressed.  And more importantly you find that you subconsciously establish a way of relating to your child or other people in your life based on the subtle and not so subtle cues you send to each other.  If it’s not more positive than negative, then more often than not one or the other doesn’t want to be around the other and if it’s really bad they end up on the Dr. Phil or the Montel show.  🙂  This can happen at work or at home.

You often don’t even notice the effect of these little things until later.  They can deeply affect your psyche and how you relate to the world.  That’s why it’s so important to focus on the proper culture in the workplace and at home because if there is no one paying attention to the subtleties, you might just find yourself in a sharky situation.  Yes, I know that was a lame attempt to tie the photo taken by my neice to the content of this post, but I thought it was so interesting that I had to find a way to use it in a blog post! 😎

Lessons on Sales Management
Aug 29 2009

Below is a post written by Laura Benold, ATI’s Marketing Associate about a recent Lunch & Learn we held at Austin Technology Incubator.  It was originally posted on our new ATI blog and called If You Don’t Close Sales, Your Company Won’t Survive.

ATI’s Lunch and Learn panel on sales management on August 12, 2009 began with a question: “Who in here sells?”  A roomful of arms stretched upward. Everyone sells.  Whether on a sales team, to prospective employers, or as the acting “every man” of a start-up business, the act of convincing others escapes no one.

While 40+ ATI member company CEOs and Founders, ATI staff, and TechBA company CEOs and Founders ate lunch in the Alamo Room of the WPRC Building on Braker Lane, the three panelists introduced themselves:

Michael Osborne (left) is the Senior Vice President of Sales for BazaarVoice: a company that makes word of mouth marketing work by enabling services and technology to gather, respond to and amplify content.

Janice (Jan) Ryan (middle) has worked in technology for 28 years and came to Austin to become the founding VP of Sales for Vignette, an early internet enterprise software company.  She is currently the CEO and Founder of Social Dynamix, a new company in the social media space.

Mitch Jacobson (right) has worked just about everywhere the last 29 years in sales from Tandy Corporation to Dell to Tech Data Corporation.  He started at A.B. Dick and says that, “if you can sell with a name like A.B. Dick behind you, you can sell.”  He founded Eyes of Texas, an angel investment firm, and is currently the co-director at the Clean Energy Incubator advising ATI’s clean start-up companies.

Over the course of the Lunch and Learn, panelists spread significant words of wisdom. Here’s what they said:

Jan:

Results-oriented selling.  Remember you’re not selling a product, you’re selling the results that a customer wants to achieve.  Slide to the other side of the table and look at the process from their viewpoint.

Paint a ‘zebra.’ Include all the stripes of an ideal customer in profiling who really needs your product (like  Morphine, not aspirin).  Understand exact needs that would cause him to write a check.  All else is secondary.

Hiring – Hire people who know why they’ve been successful.  They’ll be able to repeat that process in a new situation.  When you hire sales leadership, don’t assume the highest ‘pedigree’ translates to an early stage venture. Their hunger is more important.

Find the maverick.  In early stage sales, there’s always someone who wants to look good in the company.  Find the maverick in your sale that wants a personal win. Study what his win will be, and shape your strategy around it.  Help him succeed, and you will too.

Michael:

Sales should be enjoyable experiences. “Sure, there are contracts and money involved, but it’s an enjoyable experience,” and those have been the greatest sale cycles, he says.

Look for intelligence, passion, and an ability to communicate when you hire. Sales experience previous to the job doesn’t necessarily matter; but intelligent people can answer questions or find answers, passionate people are likeable, and good communicators can drive the deal forward.

All salespeople are motivated differently. There are trailblazers, road builders and truck drivers.  Trailblazers are motivated by ego, for example, and truck drivers by cash. Evolve your hiring process based on the current company needs.

Identify your target customer’s persona to increase sense of urgency. Innovators want to be first.  Those who are behind want to catch up.  Some work internally and think it’s about time for change. Others have a deadline.  Find the pain.

Mitch:

Be persistent. In the early 1980s Mitch sold copiers. One day, while on a pitch, the copier jammed.  “I was taught to say, ‘I’m glad this happened, so I can show you how easy it is to fix’, but it I couldn’t fix it,” Jacobson says.  Ultimately, he made the sale because he came back later that week to follow-up.

Spend a day in the life of your customer. Someone might really need what you’re selling, but they don’t know why and you don’t know why, because you haven’t walked in their shoes.

Although you have little money to spend at the early stage, you have resources to find knowledge.

Keep track of your wins and losses. Repeat what you’ve done well and learn from what hasn’t worked out.  Create and distribute ‘how the deal was done (or rejected)’ documents.

The Group:

Know when to draw the line. If you pick the wrong customer and get mired down in the details, it can kill you.  That’s worse than waiting a few more months to get the right deal. “When a sale becomes a negotiation and you feel like you’re buying a car, it’s a good time to walk away.  A lot of the time, they’ll come back at your price, not theirs,” says Mitch.

The pipeline is a set of stages. The stages must be easy to understand, such as “meeting scheduled, prospect, opportunity, will close” or “cold, warm, hot, closing”.  Evaluate the stages of a deal daily as an individual and weekly as a team.

A deal isn’t ever really closed. It closes on some level for you when the customer signs or gives you money and for the customer when your product is implemented and they’re paying.  However, good salespeople retain customers, so the cycle never really ends.

Social media creates connections that are not work-related. It allows you to “learn about the prospect and connect via a legitimate connection,” says Michael.

The session ended one and a half hours later with networking and knowledge sharing.  If you’re interested in learning more about Lunch and Learn events, or how you can sponsor one, please contact Aruni Gunasegaram, director of operations.

Lunch and Learn events are an exclusive offering for ATI, ATI member companies and ATI affiliates.  Speakers must be entrepreneurs and business people who can share their valuable experiences with ATI member company Founders and CEOs.

by Laura Benold, ATI Marketing Associate

First Week Of School
Aug 23 2009

School starts next week for most kids here in Austin – public or private.  Many parents are in a flurry getting ready to get their kids back into a routine if they haven’t had one during the summer. For dual working parent families, like ours, who probably had our kids in summer camps it’s probably a shift back to more stricter bed times and potential looming home work days.

For us this is a very special first week of school because our kids will be attending the new Magellan International School (MIS) founded by their dad, Erin Defosse!   It is Austin’s FIRST multi-language (Spanish, English, Mandarin), International Baccalaureate, Primary Years Programme school (pre-K to 2nd) ever and has already set the record for enrollment numbers for a new private school with about 45 students on Day One!  Most private schools start with significantly fewer students.

They will be offering art, music and physical education as part of the standard education and will be teaching using the ‘units of inquiry’ model.  You’ll have to go to the site to learn more about how that model works.  As a person who is rediscovering her passion for singing, offering music is well ‘music to my ears!’

The kids have been involved in getting the school ready from helping to paint, potting plants, running errands, and assembling furniture.  It’s been a great experience for them to see how something that never existed before comes to life.  They might just get the entrepreneurial disease bug.  🙂

As an entrepreneur, it’s amazing to see how much has happened from vision to fruition.  In March 2007, we moved our son to the Austin International School (AIS), a wonderful school whose primary language is French.  Erin grew up in Mexico so he had a strong desire for the kids to be fluent in Spanish.   We really enjoyed the environment and teachers at AIS but given that neither of us knew French, Erin began searching for different alternatives and didn’t find anything suitable so in the Spring of 2008 just before I took the steady, day job, he decided to look into creating one.

Since that time, he along with someone he hired to help him get things off the ground by finding the right Head of School, not only found the perfect Head of School, Marisa Leon, from Colombia but also 3 great teachers – one from Spain, one from Colombia, and one from Chicago.  They all have very sweet personalities and awesome backgrounds.  I’m excited about the kids getting to work with their respective teachers.  It will be interesting to see how they all adapt to living in the United States in a city that’s had over 100 degree temperatures for quite some time now.

So 20 or so months ago, MIS was a vision in Erin’s mind and now it is reality.  I know it will positively effect thousands of kids who will surely go out and make a wonderful difference in this world in not only one language, not even two, but three languages.  As a writer, I have come to appreciate the power of language both written and oral in changing one’s own world and the world at large.  Oh to have such power in more than one language…what a gift to our kids.

So cool! 8)

The Dangers of Multitasking
Aug 3 2009

We’ve all heard about the pluses and minuses of multitasking.  We’ve also heard that women tend to be better at multitasking than men.  I think it depends on the person.  I’ve worked with some men who have been excellent at juggling many things, but overall I think women are wired to be better at it because of having children.   Children, especially more than one (I can’t imagine having 3 or more), tend to pull you in 5 directions at once and if you don’t have one eye on a kid, he could fall into a lava pit or a crocodile could eat her.

I’ve always been fairly good at multitasking or should I say serial tasking.  I can jump back and forth from thing to thing and get most things done timely.  It’s probably somewhat of an ADD trait that I’ve heard many entrepreneurs confess to having, but there’s a point when it becomes counter productive (see Dilbert comic below).

I’m dealing with about 5 really big things right now and each has its own complexities.  Way beyond what one person should advisedly handle at one time.   And because I can’t focus fully on one thing, everything seems to be suffering or shall I say I’m not executing 100% or able to play my A game at any of them.   I even published a blog post I didn’t mean to publish and I’ve never done that in the over 2 years I’ve been blogging!   There are constraints (time, money, stamina, fear, etc.) that seem impossible to work around in the near term and ‘impossible’ is a word that I usually smile at.  And in between there are birthday parties to plan and bills to pay.

I remember dealing with so many things when I was founding CEO of my first start-up from customers, suppliers, investors, board members, to employees, etc.  Each area needed special attention and invariably one or more suffers at some time or another.  You had to have your shit together when facing each constituent even if you felt like everything was just a hair away from falling apart.  You have to play the part superbly (no room to mess up your lines) and make sure your customers know you aren’t going to disappear tomorrow.  And you have to make sure your investors and Board haven’t lost faith in you and can see that the customers still have faith in you.  And you have to keep morale up with your employees and assure your suppliers you’ll pay them.  So many entrepreneurs get lost at times like these because it is hard to keep all those balls up in the air while at the same time making sure you take care of yourself (i.e., minimize the fast food and lack of exercise).

So what do we do?  We get up.  We put our pants/skirts on and we show up.  We put a smile on our face because we have to, and we know no one really understands how we sometimes feel like we are free falling with no safety net and no parachute.  Of course, if you aren’t anti-social, you have friends and family to listen to you when you feel like crying or punching the wall, but unless they’ve also walked a mile in your shoes, they can’t fully understand the sensations or lack thereof that you are processing.  And sometimes they let you down because they don’t know how to be there for you like you need and that hurts.  Or they think they are trying to be there for you and instead they inadvertently hurt you.  And most of the time when you feel like punching that wall, you can’t!  So you put your game face on.  You hide and fake it until it eventually turns around.  It does eventually turn around but it feels like a hurricane while you walk through high winds putting one step in front of the other.  As an entrepreneur, you have to be optimistic or at least optimistically pessimistic or is that pessimistically optimistic. 🙂

And if you have kids, they can all of a sudden give you a reason to keep on going as my son did today.  One of my good friend’s father died last week and they are going to miss my son’s upcoming birthday party.  They have a son a year younger who he loves playing with, and I took both kids over to visit them this evening.  I told my son, let’s bring him one of the little Hot Wheel cars that we got for your goody bags since he can’t make your party.  He said, “Let me look for the best one…my favorite one.  I want to give him the best one.”  He knew his friend’s grandfather had died, although he doesn’t really know what death means.  He showed me the car he wanted to give him and it was the special one he had chosen for himself, and I started to cry.  I hugged him and told him how proud I was of him for doing such a nice thing and how special it was to show how much he cared for his friend during this time.  He hugged me back because he saw how happy I was with him.  My daughter asked me why I was crying, because I never cry in front of them (or cry often for that matter) and I told her I was happy that her brother was so thoughtful and she hugged me too.  I thought to myself “I guess I’ve done at least something right to have an almost 7 year old son with such a good heart.”

On the car ride over I told him to play with his friend and make him happy and laugh.  And he said “Just like I do with my sister when she’s upset?  I do this and that to make her laugh.”  They both started laughing in the car and I said “Yes, just like that.  It’s nice to make people smile in hard times.”  Then I cried some more silent tears of sadness and happiness at the two beautiful kids I have been blessed with.

So the moral of this post I guess is Don’t over multitask.  Have kids.  Although kids are a big cause of over multitasking, they help you keep things in perspective and give you the reason to wake up in the morning, put your pants/skirt on, put your smiling game face on, and figure out how to do the impossible! 😀

How Did We Get Here?
Jul 27 2009

Do you ever wonder how people get to where they are?  What are the daily things that happen or don’t happen that contribute to where you are right now?  It’s often hard to piece everything together, but I found myself wondering that recently when thinking about friends, myself, and other entrepreneurs.

An older gentleman came in to pitch his company to the Austin Technology Incubator recently.  He had an interesting concept having to do with wireless technology but it was as if he was living in a different time dimension.  He actually presented using transparencies on an overhead projector that we happened to have because we are part of the University, but I daresay that projector has sat mostly unused for over a decade.  He had over 40 transparencies and we asked him to skip most of them.  When I asked him why he chose to use transparencies instead of a PowerPoint presentation, I don’t think he really understood what I was asking him.  He equated transparencies to being more technical.

His point of view of his situation and why he wasn’t able to raise money for his venture for the past 9 or so years was so far off from our points of view, that it seemed too far a gap to bridge.  He would have to have a spontaneous shift in being and thinking that would probably take someone a lot of time to help him achieve.  A true paradigm shift (business buzzword of the 90’s) would have to occur.

It made me think about how we all view our worlds a certain way and how some people have such far gaps to bridge to see another person’s or group’s reality.  It made me wonder about myself and how my perception might be skewed in certain situations in my life/business and conversely how I could be trying to relate to someone or a group, but they can’t relate because they are living in a transparency world and I’m living in a PowerPoint world.

I’m guessing that this happens in a less obvious way in many start-up companies but many of us entrepreneurs are just too blind to see it or really can’t see it because we don’t know how and don’t have the right glasses to help us see the light.

Maybe I’m just being too philosophical and thinking too much, which is quite possible.