Spring Has Sprung
Mar 20 2009

Today is the first day of Spring and it’s an absolutely gorgeous day here in Austin, Texas!   Many of us seem to have Spring Fever at my day job.  I remember when I taught entrepreneurship at the University of Texas at Austin business school how hard it was to get the students to focus in the Spring semester.  Everyone’s minds were wandering this way and that…which is partly the reason teaching in the Fall semester is much easier. 🙂

There is just something about Spring that evokes the strangest mix of feelings in all of us.  So I left a little early today and came home to hang out with hubby and our daughter, who is off from school.  When I came in she was taking a nap on the little futon sofa in the entry way to our house and she looked so adorable that I was compelled to lay down next to her and relish the warmness of her body.  I lay there for a while looking outside the big bay window that faces our front yard.   I watched the greening trees wave slightly against the blue lightly clouded sky.  I heard and felt her breathing.  The world was so peaceful and everything seemed just so right for that seemingly brief moment in time.

When she woke up, she turned to face me, smiled, and started looking into my eyes for a while…not saying anything.  I looked straight back at her and smiled a big smile and told her how beautiful she was.   She then asked me why my eyes were black.  I asked her why hers were brown and she said “I don’t know.”

How blessed I am.

Yes, Spring has sprung.

Building A Web Business After Hours
Mar 18 2009

SXSW Interactive 2009 is now over and what a grand event it was!  It was a nice break from my day to day routine.   I had a few late nights but not later than just after midnight one night and most other nights I was home by 10:30 pm and one night I was even home by 7:30 pm.  I met up with so many cool people…people I already knew in person and people I had met online.   As many of you know I work at the Austin Technology Incubator by day and work on Babble Soft whenever I can (i.e., After Hours).  ATI helped coordinate and sponsor a nightly party called the Entrepreneur Lounge at Fogo de Chao (a Brazilian restaurant) which was a great success.

The panel was extremely well attended and I’d say about 85% of the people in the room were working on a business after hours and 10% were thinking about it.  It was a perfect and very engaged audience!

I had been hearing that the panels at SXSW overall had not been going well.  I experienced a few myself, but I and others kept hearing they weren’t organized, inexperienced people were either running them or on the panels, and people weren’t getting much out of them.  Based on that grapevine talk, I decided to adapt and get a little more formal than we had planned to be.  We originally were not planning on having a PowerPoint presentation but literally hours before the panel, I asked Jeremy Bencken to meet me and we pulled together on his cute and really small laptop a brief presentation as simple as putting our names, jobs, information and key takeaways on separate slides.  As simple as they were, it helped us frame the discussion.  We also decided on some opening questions and remarks as a team while we waited in the “Green Room” before the panel started.

I was a bit anxious beforehand because it’s been quite some time since I’ve spoken to a room of 150+ so I was out of practice but after a few minutes it came back to me.  It’s an amazing and surreal experience to have so many people looking at you to impart knowledge and share your stories with them.  The panelists did an awesome job of describing the ups and downs of doing a business after hours.

Here is a copy of the content on our basic slides:

Aruni Gunasegaram – moderator
Day Job: Operations Director, Austin Technology Incubator
After Hours: Pres/Founder, Babble Soft, LLC
Company Blog:  Babble Soft Blog
Blog: entrepreMusings.com
Twitter: @aruni

David Altounian
Day Job: Co-founder/CEO, Motion Computing
After Hours: Co-founder, iTaggit
Twitter: @daltounian

Jeremy Bencken
Day Job: Co-founder/GM, ApartmentRatings.com
After Hours: Chairman, BuzzStream
Blog: buzzstream.com/blog
Twitter: @jeb512

Elisa Camahort-Page
Former Day Job: 2005-2006: Worker Bees
After Hours: Co-founder/COO, BlogHer Inc
Blog: http://BlogHer.com
Twitter: @elisac

Gretchen Heber
Former Day Job: Journalist, Austin American-Statesman
After Hours: Co-founder, NaturallyCurly.com
Blog: naturallycurly.com
Twitter: @natcurl

7 Takeaways

• Protect your IP from your day job
• 8pm to midnight is a beautiful thing
• Don’t beat yourself up
• Set expectations with your family/friends
• It works for some but not all niches
• Partners rock; get one
• Use care in raising external funding

A Quick SXSW Post – Guy Kawasaki
Mar 14 2009

I just finished my second day at SXSW.  The first day left me a little hung over, tired, wanting a nap.  I got my 2nd wind right about the time I ran into Erica O’Grady in the Microsoft Windows Mobile Blog Lounge mid afternoon.  Ironically enough 95% of the people in the lounge have iPhones.

Erica is so awesome!  She is one of the 25 people selected as the Austin American Statesman’s Texas Social Media Award recipients.  I was also nominated but people like Erica, who are the master-esses of the social media world, truly deserve it.  I don’t think I had seen her since last year.  She’s one of the happiest people I’ve ever met and tweeted with.  When she stepped out of the lounge, I borrowed her pink hat and asked Brian Solis (who Erica introduced me to) to take a picture of me with another social media/entrepreneur great: Guy Kawasaki.

We spoke with Garage.com (founded by Guy) back when we were doing our first high tech start-up and at one point we had a t-shirt our son wore when he was a toddler that said “Garage.com. My favorite letters are I, P, and O.”  8)

Guy is one of the most down to earth tech entrepreneurs you can meet.  He graciously has me and my blog listed in a few places in his AllTop library sites (Mom Bloggers, Twitterati, Startups, etc.).

I hope I and my panelists are coherent by the time my panel – Building A Web Business After Hours – rolls around on Monday, March 16 at 3:30 pm!

A Long Overdue Fortune Cookie Post and SXSW
Mar 11 2009

Blogging will be light over the next several days (I think) because I’ll be at SXSW end of this week, part of this weekend, and early part of next week.   I hope to meet many of you there at my panel called Building A Web Business After Hours.  I’m not really into live blogging but I’ll probably be sending out a few tweets so if you are interested you can follow me on twitter @aruni.

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of my random fortune cookie posts.   I’ve collected quite a few and I thought I’d share them, but before I do go check out some of the posts I did a while back with fortunes from those crazy cookies:

Business (Love) Is Like War; Easy To Begin But Hard To Stop – Nov 2, 2008

Those Who Seek Will Find – Sep 21, 2008

A Dream You Have Will Come True – July 30, 2008

Life Always Gets Harder Near The Summit – July 8, 2008

Look Forward to a Great Fortune and a New Lease on Life! – June 25, 2008

You can’t ride in all directions at one time – June 19, 2008

So here are the ones that have been sitting on my desk or in my purse for a while.  I won’t be writing full posts about these so here it goes:

A lifetime of happiness lies ahead of you. – Ah, that’s so nice to know.  I would be pretty bummed if a lifetime of misery lay ahead of me.

Your ability to trust fuels your ability to love. – Interestingly I have a hard time really trusting people for a variety of reasons, but oddly I love people.

The secret of vast riches begins with a single penny. – True but a bit simplistic, don’t you think?

You are compassionate and fun-loving.  – I do like being compassionate and fun! 🙂

People will find it difficult to resist your propositions. – This is exactly why I don’t make too many hard core propositions!  Understanding what it means if someone does accept your proposition is extremely important to know before you make the proposition…

Now, I’m off to watch Battlestar Galactica (recorded) with hubby who just completed the Landmark Forum and thought it was amazing!  I knew he would despite the fact he’s a rocket scientist and a know-it-all.   I’ll be doing the Advanced Forum in April where we are supposed to discover who we are…and I have a feeling I might be an elephant.

Randi Shade On Success
Mar 8 2009

Randi Shade is a friend of mine and she is currently a member of the Austin City Council.  She and I were both doing our first high-tech start-ups around the same time many moons ago.  I interviewed Randi for The University of Texas at Austin’s alumni magazine, The Alcalde, for an article that was published in the November/December 2005 issue.  My writing partner, Pam Losefksy, and I pulled these articles together and you can see them on the Success Profiles page of this blog.  You can see the full article on Randi by clicking HERE (pdf).

Randi received her BA from UT in 1988 and her MBA from Harvard.  She is currently an Austin City Council member and mother to two young kids.  She founded Charitygift, a company that allows people to make donations to charities via the Internet.  She was then the VP of gift cards for the company that acquired Charitygift.  Previously she was the director of the Entrepreneur’s Foundation and founding executive director of the Texas Commission on Volunteerism and Community Service (now called the OneStar National Service Commission).  Shade was responsible for launching AmeriCorps in Texas.

We started the article with this quote by Randi:

Success to me is living a life that matters. I’ve tried to do that, combining my experiences in government, business, and philanthropy to do meaningful work, but I feel that you never really “achieve” success. You never get to do the touchdown dance, or cross the finish line, because success is a moving target.

She then went on to say.

When I went to business school, there were many people who said, “It’s important to spend the first third of your life learning, the second third earning, and the last third serving,” as if you can cap your career off with service, and it’s something you do in retirement. I completely disagree with that. I think you need to be doing all three throughout your life, simultaneously, and I believe that is a big part of success.

I think it’s true that ‘success is a moving target.’  Once you accomplish something you can savor it for a little bit but then it’s on to the next thing.  Here in the Western world we also define success in more material terms than in other cultures although the Western influence is strong and has permeated throughout the globe.  Other cultures sometimes measure success when one achieves nirvana or a state of being free from suffering and wanting.  It seems to me that both measures of success are fleeting unless you happen to be able to sit under a tree day & night and if you don’t have kids. 🙂

It is important to mix learning, earning, and serving, but I think the definitions of what those mean to different people are as varied as the colors in a rainbow.  I am always trying to learn from my observation of people.  People are fascinating to me so watching them, reading about them, and connecting with them helps me serve them.  I also think serving can be defined not only in the typical community service point of view but also being the best parent you can be to your children.  Ensuring your children are educated and taught to respect others is a huge service to the community and humanity.  I’m sure there are many of us who have seen the results of bad parenting on our society and even if you are not earning dollars while you are a stay at home parent, you are earning huge social capital, in my opinion, by contributing good, productive human beings into society.

All About Business
Mar 5 2009

I have many blog post ideas swimming in my head and jotted down in my little spiral notebook.  Finding the time to get the thoughts out of my jam packed brain into a blog post is hard to do, but some people tell me they are impressed with how much I do post.  I would post every day if I could, but I can’t physically or mentally do it because my life is currently all about business.  The business of work, the business of family, the business of motherhood, the business of writing, the business of management, the business of people, the business of figuring myself out, etc., etc., etc.  It is all busy-ness but I’m fortunate enough to be able to enjoy it when I’m not distracted by it all (which is often).  I’m not sure I would know what to do with myself if I didn’t have something to do.  I’m not sure I would know how to retire, but I wouldn’t mind a week long beach vacation right now!

I get frustrated sometimes that I can’t do all the things I want to do.  I get frustrated that I’m not even really sure what I want (other than a beach vacation).  I feel constrained by mostly my own self-imposed limitations and societal expectations, but I know I’m not the first one on this planet to experience all of this, but I like to naively believe that my experience is unique.

So, it’s all about business, but is it really?  Sometimes it’s just about squeezing and kissing my adorable kids who laugh and flash their heart melting smiles at me or drinking a glass of really good red wine or a newly discovered ginger martini…

The Reader, Zilker Kite Festival, Random Stuff
Mar 1 2009

Since I blog about parenting as well as business here on this oddly unusual and sometimes entertaining blog, here’s what happened this weekend.

The Reader
Last night (Saturday) hubby and I went on a date night.  We decided, given the state of our financial situation, to do dinner & movie at The Alamo Drafthouse, where they serve dinner while you watch a movie and it doesn’t cost you an arm and a leg.  Our original plan was to see the Academy Award winning picture, Slumdog Millionaire, but it was sold out.  So we ended up seeing The Reader (check out this link for the trailer) starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes, one of my favorite actors.  Winslet won best actress for her performance in The Reader and we are both so busy that neither I nor my husband realized Fiennes was in that movie too!

I’ve actually had a long time fascination with Fiennes after his performance in Schindler’s List, despite the fact he played one of the really bad guys in that movie.  He was equally as interesting in The English Patient.  I was a bit annoyed at his performance in The Duchess, mostly because the character he played lacked depth and sensitivity, but after seeing The Reader I’m less annoyed.  I told my husband this and he said something like “All Fiennes has to do is smile that little half smile and you see his piercing blue/gray eyes and he’s back in your favor.”  Well maybe I added the blue/gray eyes part, but I had to smile and nod.  He then told me that Kate Winslet did all of her own nude scenes (of which there were many in this movie), and I asked him how he knew this.  He didn’t have a good answer other than he read it somewhere, but I could tell she did.  I think it’s cool that she’s so comfortable with her body that she even risked displaying a couple of her stretch marks (a.k.a. badges of honor).

The story was set in Germany and starts out with a young 15 year old Fiennes (I don’t know the actor who played him, but he was adorable!) having a summer affair with a much older Winslett.  She asked him to read her all the books he was reading in high school ranging from philosophy to mythology.  He later finds himself a law student observing a trial about the Holocaust where she is a defendant.  He is devastated because he had no idea she was involved in the Holocaust in any way and it deeply affected him and all of his future relationships with women.  It was a pretty good, thought provoking movie, but I wasn’t too happy with the ending because I was hoping for more resolution.  But I guess just like in real life there really never is a good resolution is there?

Zilker Kite Festival
This Sunday afternoon we tried to go to the Zilker Park Kite Festival.  We were supposed to meet up with some friends there but after more than 1/2 an hour of driving around the area, not finding parking, and not even being able to figure out in a timely manner where the shuttle parking was, we gave up.  Our friends were already there so after several calls and her telling me that it was chaos and she’d understand if we don’t come, we decided to bag it and take the kids to another park.  We stopped at The Domain on the way so I could return something.  Turns out the kids weren’t that interested in flying the kite so we hung out at the park for a little bit and then came home.  Hubby and son threw the football around and our daughter rode her little bike.  I threw the ball with our son for a little while, followed our daughter on her bike on the sidewalk for a little while, then washed some clothes, did some work on Babble Soft, and wrote this blog post.

Random Kid Stuff
Earlier today our 6 year old son asks our almost 4 year old daughter if she was in love with some boy named Steven (who is older than she is) at her school.  Steven likes to give her a hug when we pick her up.  She tells him “No, he’s mad.”  My son then asks her if she thought he was cute.  I’m not sure she responded to that one.  I laughed out loud because I thought how innocent that exchange was between them and how much meaning someone would apply to that exchange if they were teenagers or older.

Our son has made friends with an 8 year old girl at his school.  She’s into PokeMon and Bakugan (these toys that change from a ball to a creature and back again) and he sometimes comes home with several little Bakugan toys that he says she gave to him.  I asked him what he gives her and he says nothing, and I ask him how can that be?  He said, she likes giving the little toys to him.  I’ve told him that he must also give her some cards or toys back but he just says “But she likes giving things to me.”  So, I’m not sure what to say to that, but I feel as if I need to coach him to also give her something.  Well, at least he’s friends with a girl who seems to like sci-fi and typical boy stuff – just like his mama. 🙂

Staying Connected With Your Network
Feb 28 2009

Unlike my friend Thom Singer, I’m no subject matter expert on the topic of networking by any means, but I am a strong believer in the power of building and maintaining a solid network of both personal and professional friends.  I’m an extrovert by nature and an ENTJ on the Meyer’s Briggs personality typing test (link to Wikipedia) so networking and relationship building usually comes easy for me, and I enjoy it.  According to Wikipedia, only about 2% of the  population are ENTJ’s (a.k.a. Fieldmarshals.)  When I was getting my MBA, which was when I was last tested, I think about 30% of our class were ENTJ’s.   Only about 20% of our class were women, so it’s probably an even rarer type for women.  I’ve been told by more than a few people that I exhibit some typical male characteristics.  Go figure!

I also believe the time to cultivate and reach out to your your network is not ONLY when times are tough.  I’ve been amazed at the number of people who I haven’t spoken to in years (not just one or two years but five or more) who have been contacting me to help them with their job search.  I mean, come on!  How can I put my reputation on the line and refer them when I have no idea what they’ve been up to?!

There have been people I’ve worked with who I’ve stayed connected with in one way or another over the years who I’m more than happy to help introduce to people I know, but when I don’t hear a word from someone and the first contact I get is “Can you help me find a job?” or “Can you introduce me to so-and-so?” I literally roll my eyes.  I love helping people so it pains me when people don’t get how important keeping up your network is when times are good.

Apparently no one (or no one will admit it) could have anticipated the economic state we find ourselves in worldwide, and despite the inordinate amount of angst I felt before taking on a day job, in hindsight someone (possibly the Flying Spaghetti Monster) was looking out for me and my family.  Somehow I had the foresight (a.k.a ESP) to take drugs beat the angst into partial submission and accept the job which I’m now grateful for.  I’m still trying to figure out how to get to what usually ends up being a good result without beating myself up inside to almost a bloody pulp before I realize the decision was not such a bad one, but that’s a topic for another blog post a whole novel.

There are four professional groups I meet face-to-face with fairly regularly throughout the year that mean a whole lot to me for a variety of reasons and they are:

B2C CEO/Founder Group – A small group of us meet monthly for lunch to discuss the challenges and joys of running a business that sells products to consumers (i.e. B2C), which is completely different than selling directly to businesses (i.e., B2B).  I happen to be the only woman in this group, but in my career that has typically been the norm.  The format is that we share something good and bad that has happened to us both professionally and personally since the last time we met.  I really like this format because it allows us to get to know each other as human beings…not just business people.  This month we discussed all the challenges some of us are facing with money, employees, and finding other creative ways to keep our businesses going.  One person in the group had to put his business on hold for a while due to the economy.  Sadly, he also recently discovered that one of his key technical people committed suicide which really threw him for a loop.  Most of the rest of us are just taking it a day at a time and trying to keep our businesses alive.  When I shared during our meeting last week, they all told me I shouldn’t give myself such a hard time and beat myself up for not being motivated to do some of the things I need to do after my day job and family commitments.  I really needed to hear that because I have a lot of respect for them and it gave me some room to breathe.  Last month we discussed mid-life crises since I seem to be in the middle of one (middle of my mid-life crisis sounds about right) and one guy said the way he dealt with his was to start a business!  One thought he had to be married with kids to experience one but the rest of us who were married with or without kids quickly assured him that was not the case and he then said he’s been experiencing one for most of his life. 🙂

Boss Ladies Group – Another small group of only women about my age (all with small children) that meets monthly for lunch.  When one of us has a baby, we work around their schedule if we can.  We talk about our businesses and balancing our interest in building them while balancing our desires to be great mothers and wives.  One of the women who formed this group invited me to speak to them probably a year or so ago, and I liked the group so much that I asked if I could become a member!  Unlike the B2C and Web CEO groups, most of the women in this group do not have technology businesses.  The businesses range from restaurants, to event planning, to consumer packaged goods, to marketing consulting.

Web CEO Group – This is a larger group that meets probably once every other month and there are a handful of other women CEOs in that group.  We typically meet during a weekday afternoon.  The format has typically been that we pick a topic and present what we’ve learned or questions we have that we pose to the group in that topic.  Topics have ranged from internet marketing, to fund raising, to how to stay alive.  A couple of us in the group have taken on outside jobs to continue moving our businesses forward.

Tuesday Ladies Group –  This is another small group where we tried to meet bi-weekly but after a good start, many of us couldn’t make it consistently so we meet more sporadically.  This group typically meets in the evening so I have a harder time making these meetings given that I’m the only one in the group with small kids.  I’m actually the youngest one in this group with the others ranging in age from their 40’s to 70’s!   Some of the women are entrepreneurs and some of them work for larger organizations but in my mind they are all very entrepreneurially minded.  They have such wisdom to share not only in business but also in life.  I get to hear and feel their life experiences, and I get such perspective from them both personally and professionally!

I had to take a hopefully temporary break from a weekly Blog Mastermind group that I’m involved in that I mentioned in my Giving Things Up post.  Even though the calls are held over lunch I had to take some things off of my mind’s plate and that was one professional group I had to cut.

I also try to stay connected over email or phone with my family and friends when I can because without that support network, I surely would have lost it (more than I have) by now. I would do what I could to help pretty much all of the people in these groups if they needed it, and I’d like to think they would do the same for me.

So for those of you who are still employed, cultivate your network now but please be sincere.  Just like on any of the social sites (e.g., twitter, facebook, linked in, etc.), people can detect insincerity or even desparation.  If you always have a ‘what’s in it for me‘ approach, you won’t get as far as if you have a ‘how can I help you approach.’

Anatomy of a Marketing Survey
Feb 22 2009

We recently finished our first ever marketing survey for Babble Soft.  And we announced the winners on our blog on a post called Babble Soft Survey Winners (yes, I get points for coming up with such an original title!). Should I have done one earlier? Yes, of course.  But what one should do and what one does in an entrepreneurial endeavor don’t always match up…especially when you are doing the business on your own (before I found Nicole Johnson), part time, and/or after hours.  The process went smoothly enough, I learned a few things, and of course I love sharing with fellow entrepreneurs so here it goes…

We first decided we needed to do a quarterly newsletter to our existing users and announce the survey there.  We used Vertical Response to deliver our newsletter because between them and the leading competitor, Aweber, they were the only one who offered ‘pay as you go’ emailing.  Since we only plan to send a newsletter once per quarter, we felt it would be better to pay by the email address instead of signing up for a monthly ongoing service which we wouldn’t end up using 8 out of the 12 months of the year.  I posted the newsletter on this blog and on our new Babble Soft blog where we emphasized the great prizes people would win for filling out the survey that we created on the fabulous free survey tool called Survey Monkey.  We only had 10 questions so we were able to use their free services which I have to say is pretty darn cool.  If I ever had a need to do a more sophisticated survey, I would definitely pay to use their service.  It’s pretty easy to analyze the results.

We received a good response rate but because we also published the link to the survey on what we thought would be a good competition sites for parents, we had quite a few people who filled out the survey who had never used our applications or had even heard of us.  On one hand, it was good additional exposure, but on the other hand, I don’t think it ended up being from the right crowd of people.  However, we did get some good data from existing users and new parents that affirmed some of our current product development decisions.  Overall, I was amazed at how many people are out there who spend their time trying to win prizes!  I was also amazed at how some people didn’t really care who you were, they just wanted their prize.

Key Takeaways

1. It’s a good idea to do a short survey (7 to 10 minutes to complete) from time to time.  Offering prizes guarantees more responses but not necessarily the right responses.
2. Have some independent people review your survey to make sure it’s understandable.  We had a few people review it and it helped us word our survey more effectively.
3. Using cost-effective or free tools like Vertical Response and Survey Monkey will make your life easier.
4. Be really careful where you publicize your survey because if you don’t it’s highly likely you’ll end up with some yahoo’s (i.e., those out for a quick buck) answering your survey.  Then you’ll have to give prizes to people who really have no idea what you do.  It’s kind of painful actually…especially when it’s your company and products that you’ve created from scratch.
5. Don’t do a ‘random winner’ selection.  We did a ‘random winner’ contest.  This may cut down on the quantity of people who complete the survey, but if you can figure out a way to select people who have either used your products or would have been great potential users or end up giving you wonderful feedback, you’ll feel much better.  I’m guessing the quality of responses might increase even if the quantity decreases.
6. Make sure to follow up with the people who respond by informing them of who won and where to see the results.  It can result in additional exposure.
7. I don’t have a 7th takeaway but I like the #7 so if you read this far, thank you.  Plus, I’m annoyed that although I have selected the number button in WordPress when creating this list, it’s displaying bullets in both Firefox and IE.  So you’ll just have to take my word (or count) that this is the 7th takeaway!

We have identified some key users from our survey who we have either engaged with or will engage with to help us with some internet marketing.  This will be a new experience for both Nicole and myself since we will be taking a little bit of a risk because most of our users are not traditional internet marketers…which I’m crossing my fingers that will end up being a good thing!

If you have any experience with marketing survey’s please share your discoveries in the comment section below.

Liz Carpenter on Success
Feb 18 2009

Now for the next highlight of one of the people I interviewed for The University of Texas at Austin’s alumni magazine, The Alcalde, on Liz Carpenter that was published in the March/April 2005 issue.  You can check out the post I did on Mort Meyerson, former CEO of both EDS and Perot Systems, for some background information.

My writing partner, Pam Losefksy, and I pulled these articles together.  You can see them on the Success Profiles page of this blog. The series started as Success To Me and during the middle of last year we changed it to Self Starter to focus more on entrepreneurs.  When we told them we weren’t able to continue due to our other commitments, they brought the series in house.  You can see the full article on Liz Carpenter by clicking HERE (pdf).

Liz received her BA from UT in 1942.  She was the White House press secretary to Ladybird Johnson.  She is the author of several books and uses humor extensively not only in her writing but also in her speeches and day to day conversations.  One of her first books was called “Start with a Laugh,” which was a first hand account of writing speeches during her white house years.   She would be about 88 years old right now and was an active supporter of the women’s movement.

We started the article with this quote by Liz:

To me, being able to use your time, hopefully profitably, doing what you want to do, and finding happiness in it, is success. I think the keys to success are sharing and having a generous heart and a sense of humor. Another trait of successful people is that they are aware — they have inquiring minds.  And finally, people who are successful are committed to taking risks and to walking through open doors. If you don’t trust yourself to take a risk, you’re likely to be left out of greater success.

She then went on to say.

There’s an old quote from the women’s movement: “Men are made anxious by failure. Women are made anxious by success.” I think women have gotten much braver since the start of the women’s movement in this country, and it thrills me that now we are not so anxious with success. We now help each other achieve it.

I agree that many women (myself included) don’t really feel comfortable with success outside the home environment.  I know that sounds strange, but I’m still on the cusp of the generation of women who grew up with mothers (who may or may not have worked outside of the home) who were still ‘programmed’ to think about life, womanhood, wife hood, and motherhood in a certain way.

There have been many changes in society since we were children and as women we have many more opportunities than our mothers had (without having to worry as much about the glass ceiling and with having no help from our spouses), but many of us still struggle with defining our roles.  I imagine the same is true for men who now find themselves much more involved in child care than our fathers were.  With many more women working (by choice sometime during their children’s lives) than ever before, men have to be more involved in the day to day business of house management and child care because we often don’t have the nearby family support system that used to exist.  Our mother’s who had to work or chose to work in many cases had to do everything without much support from their spouse.

So it’s no wonder we sometimes still feel residual anxiety about success because with success comes worry about how we will manage the rest of our lives with kids…because I think it’s already been proven that although we can have it all, we can’t have it all at the same time!

Building A Web Business After Hours at SXSWi
Feb 15 2009

South by Southwest Interactive is just around the corner!  I was honored to have my one and only panel idea selected and it’s called Building A Web Business After Hours.   The idea/thought came to me to submit this topic because I found myself living it when I took on a day job back in June 2008 so in October when they were looking for panel ideas….  If you keep up with my blog, you’ll realize that I get some strange thoughts sometimes and I’ve been known to unwittingly follow them.  This time I got lucky!  It will be on Monday, March 16 at 3:30 p.m.

Many entrepreneurs spend time after hours building businesses for a variety of reasons and let me tell you it’s NOT easy but given this economy, it’s a very viable bootstrapping option.  I have lined up some really credible, fun, and amazing people to be on the panel.  All of them have either built businesses after hours or are currently doing so now.  Here’s the info:

Building a Web Business After Hours
Room 18BCD
Monday, March 16th
3:30 pm – 4:30 pm

Many businesses are built after-hours or during odd hours of the day and night. Join us for a panel discussion by entrepreneurs who built (or are building) their Web/E-commerce/Other business while holding a day job, multiple jobs, or who are currently balancing two+ career options.

Gretchen Heber CEO/Co-founder,   NaturallyCurly.com

Jeremy Bencken Co-founder,   Buzzstream

Aruni Gunasegaram Founder/CEO,   Babble Soft LLC

David Altounian President/Founder,   iTaggit

Lisa Stone Co-Founder & Pres Of Operations & Evangelism,   BlogHer LLC

Please tell all your friends who are attending SXSWi about this really cool panel.  8)

Happy Valentine’s Day
Feb 14 2009

For some reason I felt compelled to write a Valentine’s Day post.  My husband spent most of the day with the new head of school for The Magellan School (bilingual Spanish immersion school he is founding) that is opening Fall 2009.  She flew in from Colombia this weekend to start meeting people and getting ready for the school opening.  I really like her!  She reminds me a little bit of my husband’s sister.  One of the reasons I knew she would work well with my husband is that she grew up with several engineers in her family and knowing how to work with the ‘engineering-type’ is a plus because often I don’t understand how my husband – the rocket scientist – thinks (or doesn’t think)!   They met with interested parents and were interviewed by the local news station KVUE.  The segment is supposed to air on the Sunday night news after the Oscars.  I took the kids to swim class and we joined them for lunch at PF Changs.

We were planning on going to my best friend’s son’s birthday party but he got sick and we had a bunch of things going on here, so after my husband finished up his school related activities, we went to Barton Creek Square mall so I could exchange some things at Nordstrom’s that I had gotten during my recent trip to visit my mother.  And yes, they took back a pair of shoes I had worn once that didn’t end up fitting well.  Now that’s customer service! Given that I usually shop at Target, that was a great experience.

We ended up having Valentine’s dinner at California Pizza Kitchen, where we had to wait 20 minutes for a table.  For being in a down economy, the mall was overflowing with people…especially the Nordstrom’s shoe department!  The kids enjoyed the pizza with fruit and we enjoyed the eggplant pizza with goat cheese and sausage.  I sampled two different kinds of martinis.  [As an aside, I’ve decided to make it a goal to try as many kinds of martini’s as I can this year!]  The caramel apple martini was pretty darn good!

So it was an unusual Valentine’s Day but we have an unusual household so it was not too odd a day (especially after the martini’s! 🙂 ).  Here are some links to some other interesting Valentine’s Day items:

Twitter raises $35 million! (I heart twitter – although I still don’t really know how they are planning to make money, but I have faith!)  You can follow me on twitter @aruni.  Currently I have about 1,700 followers.  There’s another article on TechCrunch about the investment too which is an interview with one of the new investors.

Make your own candy heart message at Cryptogram.  @mikeneumann sent me that link.

I’m not looking for a lover, I’m looking for a portal and stop f-ing with my mind, f with my heart instead cartoons by Hugh (aka @gapingvoid who has more than 13,000 followers on twitter).  I asked him if he was going through a mid-life crisis, and he said he went through his years ago at a very young age.  After I saw one of his cartoons with a naked women, I asked him about it and he sent me a link to one of his cartoons of a naked man…which I won’t link to here to protect the innocent, but it was pretty darn funny!  Then @vicequeenmaria who lives in Miami sent me a link to a cartoon with alligators going to some place called Mango’s that I didn’t fully understand until she explained it, but it is too racy to link to here!

Love at first site by @paisano (he has more than 3,000 followers) where he lists logos that were changed to reflect a Valentine’s Day theme (e.g., Google, Yahoo).

So Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!

Making Breakthroughs In Your Life and Career
Feb 9 2009

Back in December 2008 I participated in a workshop called the Landmark Forum.   It has been one of the most profound educational workshops I have ever taken in my life!  I went in skeptical but willing to learn since I have met one former CNN executive who took the course and read that many other successful business people have taken it as well.  You can read the post I wrote after taking it called A Transformation in Process.   Just as with anything worthwhile in this world, there are no quick fixes.  You get out of it what you put into it.  I can honestly say that participating in the Forum has given me a different perspective on life, myself, and other people.  It has also given me the tools (they call it technology) to have extremely different and highly authentic conversations with people I care deeply about and has helped me be more productive in my two jobs and frankly even more connected as a parent.

After completing the forum, there are a series of meetings that occur weekly or bi-weekly with the same people that took the forum.  In those seminars we discuss what we’ve learned and how we are implementing that learning in our day to day life.  We also formed groups, and I have some pretty cool people in my group…two doctors, one musician/artist, a financial adviser, a person who works at an interesting non-profit, and another mom/professional worker like me.

The one thing I don’t like about Landmark is the sometimes ‘hard sell’ of the program.  As a business person, I understand the business behind why they feel they have to do the ‘hard sell’ but as a participant, the first time I attended an introduction, I was actually turned off by it and decided I wasn’t going to sign up.  Only after hearing about it several times from a person I grew to trust and respect did I suspend disbelief and sign up for the course.  So when our seminar leader, Scott Shirey, said he was going to do something different and break away from the typical ‘bring someone to the seminar and then we’ll take them to another room and tell them about Landmark‘ and instead have a mini-Landmark experience with a known Austin individual, I told him I would be happy to promote that!

If you want to sign up, that’s great but I’ve been assured that no one will be taken to another room and educated about the benefits of Landmark.  New people will have the opportunity to experience the activities and the discussions that occur in the Forum and in the seminar meetings.

So if you are in Austin and would like to find out how you can make breakthroughs with money, the economy, and your career as well as make an impact on your and other people’s lives, please come to our February 16, 2009 seminar meeting.  They will even be giving away a free scholarship to an upcoming Landmark Forum valued at $385.  Honestly $385 is not a lot of money when you take into consideration to the time (a 3 day weekend and the 7 to 10 seminars that are included) that is provided to help you realize results.  I hope to see you there!  Details below:

How to Gain an Edge That Lasts a Lifetime:

Creating Unpredictable Results in Today’s Challenging Times
Breakthrough your concerns with money, the economy, and your success.
Consider this a friendly invitation for an evening of possibilities featuring:

Kirk McDow
Business Coach and Professional Musician
http://www.kirkmcdow.com/inthemedia.html

&

Scott Shirey
Seminar Leader  Landmark Forum in Action Series

7:00 P.M. – 10:00 P.M.
Norris Conference Center
2525 West Anderson Lane
Austin, Texas 78757

Map: http://www.mapquest.com/maps?city=Austin&state=TX&address=2525+West+Anderson+Lane

Because of construction/destruction it is easiest to get there from Burnet (behind Panda Express and Sonic) as the conference center is behind what was/is North Cross Mall.

The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living
Feb 8 2009

The title of this post is a famous quote by Socrates that he apparently uttered while on trial for heresy and for corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens.  For some unknown reason, the past few days this saying kept coming to my mind despite not having read or thought about it for years.  Actually, I have not read much of Greek philosophy although I loved Greek and Roman mythology growing up.  I’ve learned not to question these kinds of thoughts that appear in my mind too hard, and I try to find an outlet for them.   Of course, after the thought appeared a blog post also started to form in my mind.  I don’t think I realized that until I started blogging how much writing has become an outlet for me, and when I don’t get to write consistently, I start to feel a little stuck, ill, and sometimes a little nutty.  Unlike some bloggers who let it ALL hang out, since this is a public blog, I am careful about what I do write about and how I write about it.

Another instance in time that a writing related thought entered my mind was when I was walking my then probably 7 month old son around the neighborhood. Out of the clear blue, I received a thought that said something like ‘write about the Meaning of Life.’  At first I said to myself “What the heck do I know about the meaning of life?”  I sat with that thought for a while and then dismissed it for months.  But it came back to me so I started telling people I was going to write a book about the Meaning of Life.   I even interviewed a few people who would talk to me about such a hard to discuss topic.  Interestingly, the two people I recall being most comfortable talking to me were Kinky Friedman (pdf) (who you may know as the irreverent singer in The Texas Jew Boys band and the crazy guy who ran for Texas governor) and one of my favorite business mentors/advisers Jack Baum (pdf).   I met Kinky on his ranch and the experience of interviewing him while he smoked his multiple cigars and tried to hit on me a few times was enlightening! 🙂   They apparently didn’t care about what people thought about their thoughts on the meaning of life, but most people felt really uncomfortable talking about the topic, so I eventually morphed the project into “The Meaning of Success.” I even created a book proposal because after I changed the topic, I found several people interested in talking to me.

I showed the book proposal to a couple of agents and even a self publisher but then decided it wasn’t the right time in my life to pursue it full force.  [Side note: I just took a quick glance at what I had written and thought to myself that maybe one day I’ll dust it off and show it to someone again.]  So after feeling somewhat of a failure for not being able to bring it to fruition at that time, I reached out to a writer who I had stayed in touch with who had written about me when I was running my first high tech venture, and I asked her if she would like to help me find an audience for what I had compiled.  That conversation resulted in us writing a series on Success for the University of Texas at Austin alumni magazine.  So I hope that by turning the original thought that came to me while walking my son over 5 years ago into that series, we helped someone examine their life and its impact on others.   Maybe, that’s why that thought came to me.  I will never know, but I do know I learned something from each and every person I interviewed, and I hope they learned something valuable from me.

It’s interesting how often thoughts like these enter my mind.  Even before starting Babble Soft, I had a thought about creating something to help new parents, but in hindsight I’ve come to understand that the source of that thought was different than the source of the writing on the meaning of life thought.  I still haven’t been able to understand why I know the source was different but it was.

It’s taken me a long time to be comfortable saying some of my thoughts out loud because sometimes they don’t make sense to me and I start questioning my sanity.  Often I still don’t say them out loud because I worry about what others would think.  But after talking with friends who hear me say these odd things, I discovered that they sometimes made more sense to them at the time than they did to me.   These thoughts also help me examine my life which I do on a fairly constant basis but even more deeply recently than I have ever done before.  Some call it a mid-life crisis.  I call it painful!

Now I actually wouldn’t go as far as Socrates and say “the unexamined life is not worth living” because to me it actually is.  Because for those of us who are examining our lives, tripping on ourselves, and experiencing growing pains, having the opportunity to observe people who don’t examine theirs the same way is profound.  I think everyone does examine their life at some point…but the way they do it is as unique as thier finger prints.

6 Companies Born During A Downturn
Feb 2 2009

Our Bioscience Director, Jessica Hanover, at the Austin Technology Incubator (ATI) sent out the following link today: 6 Companies Born During Downturns.  You may or may not be surprised at the names on the list (IBM, GE, Procter & Gamble, GM, United Technologies Corp., FedEx) but it just goes to show you that if you focus on the negative, you’ll have a hard time finding the positive reasons to be entrepreneurial right now.

I started to reply to her but decided I’d blog it instead in order to share with all of you.  Here were my initial thoughts.

Starting a company from scratch was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done (2^nd only to taking care of little kids).  It almost doesn’t matter if it’s an up time or down time if you are serious about getting your company off the ground.  We started Isochron in an up time but weathered some down times.

There are just some companies and people (when combined in the right space/time) that will make it almost no matter what.  It’s recognizing that elusive pattern that is the holy grail of venture/equity investing. I think we have a few of those at ATI. And just because you recognize it…doesn’t mean it won’t change! But what do I know?  I certainly don’t fit the picture of a stereotypical VC!  Honestly, I think most VCs don’t really know how to see it or look for it.

Maintaining the passion and singular vision to take it through the numerous hurdles is quite a feat.  Anyone can falter on this tough road at any time and therein lies the biggest inherent risk.