How Do You Know When You’ve Made The Right Decision?
Jun 29 2009

I don’t usually know if I’ve made the right decision (business, personal, kids, etc.) until after I’ve made it.  And then even after making it, I sometimes wonder if it was the right one.  But usually I feel a huge sense of relief for some time until, of course, the details have to be worked out.  But life is a series of decisions.   Some are small ones like when to do the laundry, what clothes to wear, what to eat for dinner, etc.  Some are big ones like what house to buy, whether to sell your company, who to marry, whether to have kids or not, how many kids to have, where to send those kids to school, where to go on vacation, what job to take, etc.  But I guess whether a decision is big or small depends on who you are and where you are.  Looking back, when I ignored my gut instinct the outcome was not so great.  When I voiced my opinion, knowing I was right, and was ignored only to prove myself right, I was vindicated but still it sucked.

I think we often let others make decisions for us in business and in life.  I know I’ve done this several times in business as a young entrepreneur.  We think other, older, experienced people know more, but sometimes they just don’t because they can’t see the things you see.  Sometimes we don’t even realize we are doing it.  We might politely express our opinions but not push hard for what we really want for fear of something happening (e.g., not being accepted, looking bad, not being validated, hurting other people, feeling like we don’t deserve what we want, or our outstanding innate power).  Yes, I do think many of us are afraid of our power and being our true selves.

But then we wake up one day to realize we are living a life and business decided by others and not ourselves.  I know many a mother who finds herself in that position in her life…living a life that someone else (family, society, job) dictated to her and she passively accepts it.  I know a few fathers who feel that way too.  I know far more business people who wished they had spoken up and made different decisions.  In the world of entrepreneurship, we call those learning experiences scar tissue!  A necessary rite of passage to prove yourself.

I’ve learned that knowing your boundaries up front helps you make better decisions even in times of crisis or joy.  For instance, if you know you will never lie, cheat, or steal then your decisions of course are going to be different than a thief who doesn’t have those boundaries.  But if you are not careful, you can end up like that proverbial frog in slow heating water who doesn’t realize he is in danger until it’s far too late and he’s boiled to death (e.g., Enron and other financial scandals that involved otherwise good people).  I think most of us make the decision to jump out, turn the temperature down, ask for help, or change the rules of the game of the pot we’re in and earn our scar tissue and badges of experience in the process.

Making a decision to do something, accept something, not do something, or not accept something can leave you with images of the road not taken.  Not following your gut instinct, can leave you with many more decisions to make that might have been avoided or replaced with other decisions…not to mention heartburn and anxiety.

Oh, if we only could get away with not making any decisions and end up being rich, happy, healthy, and fulfilled… 😎

I wonder if someone has invented a pill for that?

In A Music State of Mind
Jun 28 2009

The entrepreneurial journey is full of interesting twists and turns.  Even the most successful entrepreneurs I know struggle with what success means.  I was recently meeting with a two time successful (multi-million dollar exits) entrepreneur, and he said after a few months we’re all back to our miserable selves and looking for the next thing to do.  It’s funny how many people I interviewed for the Success Profiles sort of said the same thing.  They would achieve or fail in one thing and then it was on to the next with something to prove.

Are we ever content?  I’m not sure if it’s an entrepreneurial trait, a mid-life characteristic, an MBA grad fate, or something else.  But as I continue to tweet about and reach out to my contacts about finding a good home for Babble Soft, I find myself turning to music as I have often done in the past during times of transition.  There’s something about music that pulls out the emotions in me and lets me process them in a way that can’t be processed in silence or even with close friends.

Since I started taking yoga last year, I’ve seen the benefits of certain meditation and quiet times but music – the combination of words and instruments – pushes buttons in me that make it OK to to feel things that intellectually my mind tells me not to feel.  The mind just says focus on this task, get it done, and move on.  The mind doesn’t want to be bothered with stuff that affects the heart and soul.  Music reminds me that to be human is to feel because other humans are singing about their life transitions and it reminds me how kind of normal some of these feelings are.  And sometimes we need to give ourselves the space to feel and really listen to what our body is telling us instead of just our minds to make the best decisions.  Instead of feeling isolated in silence or the sometimes deafening noise of two kids incessant chatter, music brings me softly into the river of humanity.

So some of the music I’ve been listening to lately is by Billy Joel (hence the title of this post), Indigo Girls, Simon & Garfunkel, Neil Diamond, Michael Jackson (mostly because of his recent death), Sarah McLachlan, and oddly enough Book of Love.

May the music be with you…

The Impact of Michael Jackson
Jun 25 2009

I debated whether to write this post tonight since it’s late and I’m kind of tired after a long day of telling people about finding a new home for Babble Soft.  I still have many more people and twitter friends to tell.

It was a weird, weird day for me today.  I was extra sensitive with many things happening at once.   I came home after hanging out with a girlfriend of mine to find out Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett had both died today – June 25, 2009.

I’m not sure yet if I’m ashamed to admit this or not, but I was a BIG Michael Jackson fan.  I even had his Off The Wall and Thriller albums in vinyl (yes I’m that old).  I loved his songs and even had his poster on my teenage wall.  I would buy every magazine I could find with him on it and even wrote him a fan letter.  I guess I had a teenage crush on him but that was when he looked somewhat normal and before he did a bunch of inappropriate things with kids.  He was so talented and it’s a shame he became so weird and reclusive.

His childhood was stolen from him and was it worth the price?  I guess his adoring fans think so.  I think having all that attention at such a young age gives one a false sense of reality.  Having an abusive father didn’t help either.

Some of my favorite songs of his are: (Michael Jackson song lyrics)

She’s Out Of My Life – I would cry every time I heard that song

Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough

Rock With You

The Girl Is Mine – with Paul McCartney

Billie Jean – loved that beat!

Human Nature – one of my all time favorites at the emotions this one evokes

Remember The Time

After those albums, I kind of lost track.  But I think many of us remember The Jackson 5 and little Michael singing “ABC-123.”

Yes, he was a big part of my short teenage life and had an affect on me and the world that will live on for a long time.

Babble Soft Looking For A New Home
Jun 22 2009

This is a hard post for me to write, but there are times in life when the best way to handle hard things is to just deal with it head on.  I had some time and space to reflect during my recent beach vacation.

Babble Soft, an idea that I started tinkering around with after my first baby was born in 2003 (our first beta web app release was in 2007 and iPhone app in 2009), has reached a point where my partner, Nicole Johnson, and I can’t do it justice and build it to the company it could be.  We just don’t have the monetary and time resources that a consumer web and mobile (iPhone) based product Baby Insights and Baby Say Cheese require to become a household name.  I’ve been working on Babble Soft part time while balancing kids, the house, etc. for most of the company’s life.  I spent a few months full time on it just before I took a day job about a year ago and now the time has come to find a new home for it.  Nicole has been working on this part time, after hours, as well.

We are both discovering that Building A Web Business After Hours is hard to do with two small kids around.  And doubly hard when two ventures are trying to get off the ground in one household: my husband is starting the pre-K to 2nd grade Magellan School that’s scheduled to open this Fall and our resources are also being tied up with that and our kids will be attending the school.

Nicole and I both believe in web applications to help make parents of newborn’s lives easier, and we want to find a good home for Babble Soft with someone who can take our vision to the next level.  We will continue to support our existing customers and any future customers so please don’t worry about that.  We have a high bar set for customer service!  We just can’t take it to the level (with all the exciting new applications we have planned) where we know it could be right now in our lives, but we know there is someone or some company who can.

If you know of someone who might be interested, please email me at blogger(at) babblesoft(dot)com to discuss further.  Please pass a link to this post to everyone you know!

Motherhood is not always peaches & cream and being a mom entrepreneur adds a little extra challenge to the process so sometimes it’s the hard calls that can make the difference in a company’s and person’s success.

Thanks to all of you readers for your continued support and sticking with me through my unusual parenting and entrepreneurial journeys!

Aruni Gunasegaram
President/Founder
(512) 961-6002

Nicole Johnson
VP Product Development
(512) 961-6002

The Waves of Life
Jun 21 2009

The kids and I just got back from a fabulous beach vacation in South Padre, TX with some friends of mine.  This was the first time I had ever been to a Texas beach and I’ve lived in Texas for a very, very long time.  It was a really nice beach…certainly not better than the beaches I’ve seen in Cancun or Cozumel but perfect nonetheless for this week long trip.

We had a blast!  We even made it to the small Schlitterbahn park there.  I’ve mentioned Sandy Blanchard in several of my posts in the past.  She’s the one that takes those fabulous nature/flower pictures that I use in my posts sometimes.  To the left is a picture of our feet in the sand. 🙂

They also have two kids and our kids had a great time playing together.  I’ve known them for almost 18 years now and there’s something about hanging out with people who know you, that makes things so easy.  You can mostly be who you are and we can all laugh about ‘way back when’  before kids.  I met Sandy’s husband, Jay, at a company we interned at back in the summer between our junior and senior years in college.   They were high school sweethearts and still dating at the time.  I remember laughing a lot with that group of interns and Jay always tried to pull one over on me with his ‘underwear sticking to walls’ apartment mess, but I got him good a time or two.  Plus he reminded me he had to help me take my car to get fixed about 5 times that summer.  It was a used car my dad had given me that turned out to be a lemon and turned me off of ever buying a Volkswagen.  Sandy chaperoned us when I beat him at a drinking game at Bennigan’s restaurant (he’ll deny this one) and at a jalapeno eating game in another restaurant in front of his parents and my mom (he doesn’t deny this one).

On this trip, he and the boys were driving in one car and Sandy and I and the girls were in another.  As we were pulling up to border patrol on our way back, he all of a sudden gets on the walkie talkie and starts saying things like “Aruni, make sure you throw that weed out the window right now.  You don’t want to get caught.”  I laughed and said something like “Oh no.  I’m throwing it out the back window right now and you better hope they aren’t tapping into this wireless channel or we’ll all go to jail.”  Fortunately, they weren’t tapping the lines, but they did ask us if we were US citizens and I had to tell them I wasn’t born in the US but I was a naturalized citizen, and that the crazy dude behind us had my son in his car.  Of course Jay told me later he told the patrol guy he had no idea who we were.  Then because we were laughing at our narrow escape, I had to play “Sweet Emotion” by Aerosmith and blast it through the walkie talkie so he could hear it.  The walkie talkies on occasion made us sound like the teachers did on Charlie Brown and Jay would go around saying “wah, wogh, wao”…guess you just had to have been there.  😀

But back to the ocean, there is just something about the sound and motion of the waves that help put things in perspective.  Seeing all the seashells and grains of sand reminded me of how we live in a blip of time and in a hundred years most of us will have been forgotten.  Yet we stress and live like everything is so important when most big things in life are out of our control except for those things that are.  We make choices every day and we choose whether or not to live a mediocre life and as Seth Godin, my favorite entrepreneurial, marketing blogger just posted:

On the road to mediocrity

Posting Will Be Light While I Contemplate the Universe
Jun 8 2009

It’s been almost a week since I last posted.  And yes, I hate doing the ‘posting will be light’ post since it’s so ‘been there done that,’  but while I sort through a bunch of varied things and go on a much needed vacation sometime in the next few weeks, posting will, in fact, be light.

So until the next unpredictably timed post, please enjoy this photo taken and image created by my good friend, Sandy Blanchard (click this link to check out her cool photography site).  She sent it to me in email back in April 2009 with the subject ‘you are special’ and a note that said “A little something for you” and it made my day!  I was touched, honored and reminded of what great friends I have been blessed with.

Chocolate Covered Raisins
Jun 2 2009

I have about 10 things I’m working on or should be working on from home stuff, bill stuff, to work stuff, to life stuff, to kid stuff, to sanity stuff and I’ve been just a wee bit scattered lately.

I have an ‘in progress’ post on books that’s been ‘in progress’ for a few weeks now, but I end up staring at it and not being motivated to finish it so I exercise my ADD traits and move to something else to stare at for a while.  I’m going to create another page on this blog eventually with links to the books I’ve read in the past that I highly recommend and maybe some of my current ‘in progress’ books.  I’ve got half finished poems, half finished song lyrics, and 1/4 finished books floating around in my computer, in my head, and on my nightstand.

So in order to distract myself further, I eat chocolate covered raisins from Costco (link to a picture of some random guy holding a tub of them).  It’s a big tub and it’s almost finished!  They are delicious and partially nutritious.  I like most things covered in chocolate… 😀

I will have to hold myself back from buying another tub the next time I venture to CostCo…I’ll just distract myself with the wine collection.

Year End Performances
May 31 2009

I’ve heard that the fear of public speaking is one of the top fears in the world.  According to Speech Topics Help, Advice & Ideas the top fears are:

1. Fear of public speaking (Glossophobia)
2. Fear of death (Necrophobia)
3. Fear of spiders (Arachnophobia)
4. Fear of darkness (Achluophobia, Scotophobia or Myctophobia)
5. Fear of heights (Acrophobia)
6. Fear of people or social situations (Sociophobia)
7. Fear of flying (Aerophobia)
8. Fear of open spaces(Agoraphobia)
9. Fear of thunder and lightning(Brontophobia)
10. Fear of confined spaces(Claustrophobia)

So it’s amazing to me how little kids pull of their year end school performances.  I was so proud of my two kids this weekend.  They had their year end performances this past Saturday.  They go to the same international school so they both got up in front of a crowd of tons of parents and kids at the University of Texas at Austin JJ Pickle Center and sang songs, acted out skits, and read poems in French, Spanish, and English!

Both of our kids in the early days seemed to always have a meltdown when they performed.  Our son went to Montessori school and invariably he would freak out, not say a word, or get pissed off.  Of course it was quite embarrassing for us parents plus we felt bad for him.  Our daughter did the same thing.  She would be totally fine before the performance but then all of a sudden when she saw the crowd of people she would shut down and get shy and embarrassed.  She would then cry afterward because she felt she had let us down.  Of course we would hug them and tell them they did a great job and it’s OK to get nervous sometimes.

But this time was different.  They both preformed and sang with gusto!  I was so proud of them.

It’s funny how these performances bring back the memories of when I performed as a kid.  I’ve probably blocked out some occasions, but I do remember totally blanking on what came next in one of my piano recitals.  I think I even forgot words during a voice recital.  I felt horrible and completely embarrassed for days.  I can’t remember what my mother said to me but I probably didn’t hear anything over my internal dialogue of ‘you are such a loser.’  But for some insane reason, I kept on trying different things.  I guess it’s sort of like getting back on that horse after they buck you off (which happened to me quite a few times – once I even broke my arm in a horse riding incident).  The fear is still there but each time you get a little bit more used to it.

The same is true for trying new things in business and life.  Sure you get hurt and bucked off from time to time, but you have to get back on and try different things.  No sense in beating your head against the same wall and getting the same undesired result.  You should try beating it at a slightly different angle or just get off the horse and try a different one.  😀

Anyway, I’m thrilled they did so well and had a good time.  Our daughter rewarded us by getting sick today.  Hopefully she’s better by tomorrow.  Maybe if she watches enough Dora the Explorer she’ll be peachy keen by tomorrow…one can only hope!

I hope all of you other parents out there survived your school’s year end performances!

Have You Discovered Your Passion?
May 25 2009

Everyone has heard the word passion.  It’s written about in business books, in fiction books, in poems, in romance novels, etc..  It’s shown on TV and in the movies when people find their true loves or their calling in life.  But what is it?  In the world of entrepreneurship, people tell you in order to be successful you must be passionate about what you are doing.  I’ve run into a lot of people who appear passionate about what they are doing but they don’t always succeed in the way they expected.  Passion ebbs and flows in most everything in life.  Sometimes you are in love with your business and sometimes you aren’t, but in order to survive like Microsoft, Dell, Apple, etc. the passion must be there, the underlying love for your products, people, and company must be there and the gaps between must not be long.

They say true passion can be traced back to childhood, when everything seemed possible.  My son is passionate about soccer and hanging out with his good buddies.  If it was up to him, he’d be kicking around a soccer ball all day long.  I often have to tell him not to kick the soccer ball in the main part of the house.   If we’d let him, he’d probably sleep with his soccer ball.  If you mention one of his friend’s names, he will incessantly ask us when we are going to see him next.  He’s a bit of a socialite like his mom.

I can’t tell what my daughter is passionate about yet, but I think she has an affinity for music and lip gloss.  We have a keyboard in our house that my father gave us and she tends to gravitate to it and punch the keys from time to time.  And she likes to play the bowling game on the Wii.

My husband is passionate about starting the multi-lingual, international Magellan School here in Austin.  He is passionate about his kids learning Spanish since he is fluent in Spanish and wants them to have the gift of multiple languages that was given to him.  He is also passionate about biking and exercising.  He set a goal to do the Shiner Bash – 100 mile ride and he did it.  He exercises every day and he says he’s in the best shape he’s ever been in his life.

What a blessing it must be to discover your passion and find yourself being able to realize your goals.  It’s even better when you can make a living at it.  It seems like most people can’t turn their passion into making a living for whatever reasons whether it be timing, market acceptance, encouragement, money, health, ability, skills, etc.  Many people try to keep their passion alive on the side or after some time, we forget what it was we were passionate about.

Right now in my life, I’m most passionate about my kids.  I am passionate about helping people achieve more than they thought they could.   When I look back upon my childhood, I remember the passion I had for music.  I think my father actually started taking us to piano lessons when I was about 9 years old when we lived in Albuquerque, NM.  When we moved to Lubbock, TX , I sought out my own piano teacher who lived nearby and I would walk to her house for lessons.  It was hard to find time to practice and hard to find time to continue since it was just me, my mom, and my sister.  My grandmother studied piano in Oxford University in England so I must get some of my passion for music from her.  Sadly, I can’t play the piano today, but I can sing.

I sang in church and actually did a solo in front of the entire church in my early teens.  I sang in high school choir.  I sought out my own voice teacher and when I went to college at UT Austin, I took voice courses for two semesters.  I knew I was reasonably good, but not great.   I never envisioned myself singing in a musical or singing opera so I guess I thought what’s the point and continued on with my business degree.  In grad school I sang a few songs in a couple of bands.

I also remembered that I liked to write.  In my early teens, a few girlfriends and I would start this notebook with a story and each of us would have to write the next part until we ended up with a full story.  I hate to admit this, but I think Michael Jackson and his glove showed up a time or two in those stories. 🙂  I wonder what happened to those notebooks.  I would also invariably get high grades in creativity in my English classes but very low grades in grammar.  The concept of grammar didn’t click for me until my freshman English class in college for some reason.

I also didn’t have anyone around me encouraging me, connecting me with people, giving me feedback, or showing me the way to nurture those creative right brain activities I was drawn to.  So I did what any respectable child of two doctors would do….I got an Accounting degree and then an MBA, which has served me well and odds are has resulted in a much more lucrative career than if I had pursued writing, singing or horse back riding (another younger days hobby of mine) as a career.

So now here I am in mid-life.  Too old to start up regular horse back riding again for fear of breaking my bones…well not really, but not enough time to go to a barn and take care of a horse.  It’s highly unlikely that I can make singing a financially rewarding career at this point in my life, but I am enjoying my voice lessons and relish any time I can make it to a jam session.  I do enjoy writing in my blog.

So that leaves me to figure out how best to blend my passion for working with people, with a product I’m passionate about, with a path to millions of dollars….

Any suggestions?  How did you discover your passion?

Board Management
May 22 2009

On May 20, 2009, we held a board management Lunch & Learn at the Austin Technology Incubator.   We hold these monthly or bi-monthly.  Our next one is going to be on Building A Great Corporate Culture.  It was a very productive meeting and our companies learned a lot.   I served as moderator and the people on the panel (with the exception of Janice because she got struck by swine flu sick) were:

Richard C. Benkendorf, Co-founder/Managing Principal, Technology Impact Partners (TIP)

Dick, through his role at TIP, serves on the Board of Directors or Advisory Board of both private and public firms as well as investment partnerships including Wave Max, Open Scan, Care Data Systems, Revelation, Concentric Equity Partners, AllianceTech, Adtron, State Street, Murphree Ventures, Facilities Technology Group and CMIT Solutions as well as not for profit entities such hospital charitable or civic organizations.  Other current or very recent investees of TIP include @security, Globalscape (now public), Voxpath Networks, Pointserve, Tobin, Dwight’s Energy Data, Advent Networks, Liberty Fitness, Facilities Technology Group, American Telesource (now public), Reunion Ventures, and Affinegy.

Previously, Dick was a Senior VP of Ameritech and prior to that spent 16 years at IBM.  He founded The American Software Company (TASC) and was President of Telemed and Chairman of Execucom.  He founded T/D Technology, a private equity firm that acquired and operated software and information technology firms.  He also founded ISSS Ventures, a $155M venture capital fund.

Bob Bridge, Entrepreneur In Residence, Office of Technology Commercialization

Bob has been in management, marketing, and engineering roles at semiconductor and system companies for 33 years, including serving as founding CEO at three technology companies. One of those companies, Zilker Labs was sold to Intersil in December 2008. Bob has also served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Austin Ventures, vice president of marketing at Agere (a network processor IC startup), and vice president and general manager for communications ICs at Crystal Semiconductor/Cirrus Logic. Additionally, Bob has held engineering and management positions at Motorola, AT&T corporate headquarters and AT&T Bell Labs. Bob holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin and a bachelor’s degree in Mathematical Sciences from Rice University.

Janice Ryan, CEO and Chairman of Social Dynamix

Janice Ryan has a 27 year track record of growing profitable sales organizations and venture-backed startups.  She is currently CEO and Chairman of Social Dynamix, an early stage venture focused on tools for social media performance measurement.  Prior to this, she was CEO of Sigma Dynamics, a predictive analytics software company in San Mateo, which under her leadership was sold to Oracle (ORCL) in August of ’06.  Prior to Sigma Dynamics, Ryan was the founding President/COO, of ROME Corporation, headquartered in Austin, Texas.  She was also a member of the founding executive team that launched Vignette Corporation (VIGN), an early internet enterprise software company which experienced one of the most successful IPOs of 1999.  As Vice President of Sales at Vignette, Ryan established the company’s sales infrastructure and management team, and was responsible for driving Vignette’s revenue through all channels worldwide, including direct sales, telesales and a network of systems integrators and resellers.

Ryan has served on several high tech Boards and Advisory Boards, and as an Interim Executive for multiple venture-backed companies in Texas and California.  Early in her career she held a variety of senior sales and leadership positions at IBM, Lotus Development, Filenet Corporation and ViewStar.  Active in philanthropic causes, Ryan has also served on various non-profit Boards, currently serving with the Center for Child Protection.  She earned her BBA degree from Baylor University with distinction in the fall of 1977.

Brian P. Wong, Director, Intersil Corp.

Brian was the President and CEO of D2Audio Corporation, a leading audio semiconductor and software company, which he recently sold to Intersil, a public company in August 2008.  He is currently running the D2Audio-Intersil business as part of Intersil Corp. Mr. Wong has more than 26 years experience as an executive and general manager in the sales, marketing and the development of semiconductors, firmware and software.  Market sector experience includes digital media, consumer, IT and computing, telecom, and storage.  His technology experience includes power management; digital audio, optical and wired datacom; data converters; semiconductors; optical, firmware/software.

Brian has closed over $130M from Venture Capital funds and corporate strategic partners.  He has formed Strategic Partnerships involving investment and/or licensing with AMD, Intel, Intersil, Delta Electronics, MediaTek, and Form Factor. Previously, Mr. Wong was CEO at Primarion Inc, a company focused on I/O and Power Management ICs, which was acquired by Infineon.  Prior to that, he was a senior manager at TRW and ran the Mixed Signal IC business, which included data converter, Clock/Data Recovery, PLL, and high speed digital ICs. Mr. Wong holds a BSEE from University of California, Los Angeles, a MSEE from University of Southern California, has taken graduate management classes at UCLA Anderson School of Management. He is the Chairman of The Austin Technology Council, sits on the Advisory Board for the UC Davis ECE Department, and served on the board of Integral Wave Technologies, a power management company.

The key takeaways were:

• Pick and interview your board members carefully.  Pick people with skills that complement yours.
• Make sure there are no surprises on the day of the board meeting, unless of course they are good surprises!
• Equity compensation for board members ranges from .25% to 1.00% and is granted up front or vests over time depending on the board and the company
• Sizes of the board ranges from 3 to 5 people at the very early stage.  Any more it becomes unweildy and unproductive.
• Boards in small, start-up companies usually meet at least once per month.
• After a successful board meeting, everyone should know the financial state of the company, people/equity grants, milestones achieved, and milestones to be achieved.

It was great to hear the war stories and I contributed some of my own.   They are truly battle scars.

Connecting The Dots
May 21 2009

Sometimes the dots connect and sometimes they don’t.   Sometimes you connect them and a nice picture emerges.  Sometimes you connect them and a mess shows up.  Some seemingly random dots are showing up in my life right now and I’m not sure if and how I should connect them or if there is any connection at all.  Here they are:

I recently received the new & improved purple peacock hat I mentioned that I wanted in my New Year’s Resolutions post that my good friend Julie Fergerson, VP of Emerging Technology at Debix, got me for my birthday.  The one she got me was too big for my small head so I sent it back and the designer, Sharmon Hardin, created me a new one that fits great and even has peacock feathers!  She was so friendly and easy to communicate with. Every hat someone buys from her she makes another for St. Jude’s.  I think I’m going to submit Sharmon and her hat business for inclusion in Seth Godin’s new book.  Now I have to wear it to lunch with my friend one day!

My daughter made me a beautiful bracelet for Mother’s Day that I wore to work yesterday and got many compliments on.  Of course, I was shoving it in people’s face to look at it so they were forced to say how pretty it was whether they liked it or not. 🙂   But it is quite lovely.  I’ve been noticing her personality starting to show more.  Sometimes when she says something, I’m taken aback at her sophistication and the signs that she’s growing up.  I smile at her confidence and beauty.  She’s starting to drop her baby words but I still tell her she needs to get her ‘swim soup’ when she’s going swimming.  She had so many cute words that will probably hang around in our family’s vocabulary forever.  I used to come up with words when I couldn’t say something properly and my mother still reminds me of those or says them in sentences when she’s talking to me.  I had words for elephant (my favorite animal), apple, sweet things, etc.

My son made me a wonderful card with a picture that he drew of himself on the front and he wrote “I love you mommy” in French inside the card.  I have it on my desk at work and several people have remarked how cute they thought it was.  The only word I remember that he used to say was ‘mimi’ for milk otherwise he seemed to pretty much learn a word and say it right.

Our roof was damaged in a recent hail storm and even with insurance coverage it will cost us $3 to $4K out of pocket.

My husband’s car was practically totaled by the hail storm with windows blown out and body damage that will also put us out of pocket some money.  The windows are fixed so he can drive it but he still has dents all over his car.  His car is jinxed because so many things have happened to it.

Interesting opportunities are presenting themselves for me and Babble Soft making me wonder how I should deal with them.

I’ve had a surge of creativity recently around writing song lyrics, singing, and writing in general but no consistent time and space to get it out.  It’s all bottled up and I feel sometimes like I’m literally going to explode.  I’ve never experienced this before, but it’s a form of torture (not water boarding).  I also don’t generally hang around people who get that or who I can share what I’ve been able to write, which makes me a little sad sometimes.  It helps that I work in weekly voice lessons over lunch.  We are working towards recording a few songs for demo purposes.  I tell my voice instructor that I consider our lessons therapy sessions!

I am tired from burning the candle at both ends as they say.  The whole Building A Web Business After Hours is taking it’s toll.  I’m home sick today just feeling worn out with a scratchy throat.  The upset tummy has disappeared for now.  I will hopefully be fine tomorrow.

The new school, The Magellan School, that my husband is founding is going really well and set to open this August 2009.  Many families have already signed up and donations are coming in.  The first years are always challenging so it’s going to be tight around here for a while.

There’s a bunch of other dots that I either can’t write about or I’ve forgotten but needless to say I am living in interesting times and it’s seems like it’s exactly where I’m meant to be to deal with what lies ahead…

How about your dots?

4 Steps to a Server Non-Migration
May 17 2009

And now for a guest post by my business partner, Nicole Johnson, who is the VP of Product Development for Babble Soft on the topic of moving servers.  She shares the ups and downs and great learning experiences of our recent attempt to move servers from a dedicated to shared environment.

****

Recently, we decided to attempt to migrate our Babble Soft site from our own dedicated server at Rackspace to a shared server hosted by Mosso, which was spun out of Rackspace. It turned out to be a time-intensive process and in the end, didn’t work out. We thought it would be a good idea to chronicle what we went through just in case you are thinking about doing something like this, too, just to keep a few things in mind.  Although it didn’t work for us, it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work for others.

1. Server Assessment
The first step in our migration was to make sure the new environment would work for us. We had to make sure that our applications would work which are written using Microsoft’s .NET programming model and our main site and blog would work, written in php on the same server. After reviewing the “Is it a good fit?” guidelines, we deemed it should work. It would be a transition to go from having your own server to sharing: No more remote connections and no more SQL Server Profiler (among other things, but it would be for the benefit of the company to reduce costs.

2. Test, test, test
The second step of server migration is to test your application and website on the new server. We set up a new account and installed everything on the new server WITHOUT updating our domain host to the new location, yet. Mosso makes things VERY easy to test your website. In addition to that, the live chat tech support is invaluable!  All of the techs were very knowledgeable (some more than others, but all good) and very helpful. They were very eager to help me and did a great job.

One trouble spot was that when I tested the blog, it did not work. It’s a WordPress blog and moving Aruni’s blog, entrepreMusings, over was a breeze, but not our Babble Soft corporate blog. I couldn’t easily go to wp-admin because it kept trying to go to the domain, which was on our old server. After talking things over with the Mosso techs, we determined it might just be because we were “testing” and it would be fine when it came over. Wrong, but that’s just how technology goes sometimes. I’d later spend a good part of a whole day on a Redirect Loop Error that would only be solved by installing the Disable Canonical URL Redirection Plugin that both one of the Mosso techs and @clecompte gave me at almost the same time. I still have no idea why it worked on our server and not on the Mosso server, but c’est la vie, and I didn’t have time to figure it out. The blog still didn’t work after that due to our server having a default IIS configuration and blog posts don’t end in .php to “tell” the server that it should handle them as such, but I’m probably getting into too much tech talk now, so we’ll end that there. I would have gotten it to work, eventually…had we really finished the transfer.

3. Plan the downtime for the move
The third step to our migration was to take our applications down in an organized way. In our quarterly newsletter, we warned our users the site would be down for maintenance the week of May 11th, Mother’s Day. Aruni and I are both mothers, but, it would be a good day for the site to be down since most of our customers are moms, too, and they would likely be doing Mother’s Day “things”, so we “took one for the team” and planned to work that day. I had everything ready to go, so Aruni put our application and purchase page in maintenance mode and submitted for the DNS change at the domain host. They proved to move the site quickly and I was able to bring our application back online within a few hours (would have been faster if I hadn’t been a mom that day, but that’s what happens when a company is run by two moms). Unfortunately, it was not that simple to bring the purchase page back up as there was a database connectivity issue, but being the work-a-holic that I am, I worked on that until 2am and then part of the next day and fixed it. We were on our way. So, what went wrong?

4. Know when to cut your losses
In the grand scheme of things, had this been what I do full time all day, I probably didn’t spend THAT much time on this whole project, however, in a working-part-time-on-three-jobs kind of way (five if you count being a wife and mom), it proved to be almost “3 weeks” of work. So, when I was putting the finishing touches on everything, trying to make it 100% functional and the Mosso techs (by now we’ve become fast friends and all) let me know that Mosso was going to medium trust security level on all servers, it became a deal breaker. It’s not because medium trust is a bad thing. In fact, I think it might be a scary thing they weren’t in the first place, being a shared server and all, and it’s a good thing they are changing that. But, now I just spent “3 weeks” testing and moving an application on a server that is not configured like the final environment and our application doesn’t work in medium trust “as is.”

This is not to say that we couldn’t make it run in medium trust and who’s to say that it wouldn’t be just a day’s work, but the way technology is, it could be a day or another “3 weeks.”  At this point, we have now lost too much productive time on this project to make this worth it. Taking Seth Godin’s advice, we decided to ignore sunk costs and determined that my time moving forward would be better spent on one of my primary job functions, product development. So, we went back to our dedicated server and decided, instead, that we’ll just have to become wildly successful to offset the savings and see that it was a blessing in disguise because our needs would far surpass what a shared server could give us in a year anyway.

In the end, this was a really good learning experience and Mosso definitely seems to offer a great service, but it just ended up not being the right fit for us.  Had we known about the medium trust issue earlier on, we might have either saved time or been able to work on it, but one of the main “issues” of a shared environment is we have to adapt to their changes and we just learned it way faster than I thought we’d have to. We’re staying with Rackspace as our hosting provider, who offered us fabulous customer service throughout this whole process.  Many businesses would do well modeling their service levels after theirs.

ATI Bioscience Open House
May 14 2009

Last night I attended the first ever Austin Technology Incubator Bioscience Open House!  I’ve been extra busy this week since the previous night I also served as a panelist at the TiE Austin Funding Forum.

The open house was a HUGE success with close to 150 people in attendance at the AT&T Conference center located on The University of Texas at Austin campus.  The event was held in an outside area and despite the wind, everyone seemed to have a great time.

The event brought together entrepreneurs, VCs, healthcare professionals, and hospital representatives.  It was was partly sponsored by Seton Family of Hospitals in Austin.

The open house was the brainchild of our fabulous Bioscience Director, Jessica Hanover, and was pulled off flawlessly by our Marketing Communications/Events guru, Melissa Rabeaux (who I mentioned in a post I did about her work pulling together the Clean Energy Venture Summit late last year) and her intern team:  Stephany Puno (@StephanyPuno) and Laura Benold (@lbita).

I was feeling a little anti-social last night for a variety of reasons including information and emotional overload, so I was more than happy to hang with Stephany and Laura eating tortilla chips, 7 layer dip, and mini-hamburgers…oh and drink a couple of glasses of vinto tinto.  🙂   They kept me entertained, and I helped with registering people and even validating parking from time to time.   Being near the check in process, I got to meet most everyone who came and went anyway.

I ventured out into the crowd to say ‘hello’ to a few people I hadn’t seen in a while, make some key connections, and to see Jessica speak.

ATI Bioscience is a fairly new program (about a year old) and is definitely building a great foundation to help grow Austin’s Bio community!

TiE Austin Funding Forum
May 13 2009

Last night I participated in annual event put on by TiE Austin called The Funding Forum.  I participated last year as a reviewer to help teams prepare for their pitches and as a last minute panelist to review pitches.  This year I was a panelist listening to pitches but was kind of a moderator too.

The companies rotate tables and pitch their ideas via their PC or hardcopy PowerPoint slides to a few potential investors.  Many angel investors, VCs, entrepreneurs, and members from the technology startup community are present.

At my table, we had 4 different companies.  One of them had already come in to the Austin Technology Incubator to present so I was familiar with them.  Two of them had very nice, well thought out presentations and a did a good job presenting their ideas.  One of the presenters was not very well prepared.

It’s a great place for new entrepreneurial teams to practice their pitch and get advice from experienced individuals.  Some take feedback gracefully and some don’t.

One of the investors at my table had funded a company he met at a prior Funding Forum so it seems to work, on occasion, as it’s designed to!

I left just after the company pitches ended for a variety of reasons, with one of them being that I started to wonder if I was truly in the right space-time continuum.

TheFunded Now Has A Founder’s Institute
May 5 2009

I just heard about this and it sounds pretty interesting.  You don’t have to relocate to take advantage of this program.

***

TheFunded Founder Institute is a new founder-centric incubator that trains new and seasoned entrepreneurs the best practices for building next generation companies. The unique 4-month program offers remote participation, the industry’s most founder-friendly terms, focused mentorship and training from renowned CEOs, resources from leading service partners, fundraising opportunities at fair market value, and shared equity upside among all participants in the companies formed. Passionate Founders can apply today at www.FounderInstitute.com – registration for the Summer 2009 Semester ends on May 10^th, 2009.

Why was the Founder Institute Created?

The National Venture Capital Association recently reported that VC fundraising dropped nearly 40% in Q1 of 2009. In these dire economic times, only the highest quality, most disciplined new businesses will proliferate – and The Founder Institute was created from the ground up to create such businesses. Our focus on quality is evident in our process;

–        Institute Founders receive guidance from renowned, experienced start-up CEO Mentors.

–        The Institute’s unique equity-sharing model aligns incentives and ensures maximum effort from all parties involved. When one of the Institute’s companies does well, all of the participating companies benefit – and when the Institute’s Mentors help the participating companies, they share in the upside as well.

–        The Institute focuses Founders on non-abstract, critical company-building assignments that build successful businesses in a weekly, step-by-step fashion.

–         The Institute helps Founders secure investment at market rates and under the best possible terms – instead of forcing a valuation or equity purchase at a premature stage.

–        The Institute does not require Founders to relocate or live on reduced incomes.

–        The Institute sets up regular meetings with investors and the public throughout the company-building process to increase quality and focus.

–         Institute Partners provide discounted or free services, so Founders can focus more time and resources on building the business.

Great Founders are often overlooked by the current entrepreneurial ecosystem, and innovative startups have a dramatic positive effect on the global economy. TheFunded Founder Institute aims to help the global economy by helping smart people start new, high-quality businesses.

For more information, visit www.FounderInstitute.com, or contact jonathan@thefunded.com.