Marcelo Calbucci

 

    Last week I saw an interview on TV that triggered my brain to question, why I Democratic candidates resonate better with me than Republican candidates?

 

    First of all, I don't hate republicans, like many democrats do.

 

    To be honest, a lot of Republican principles are very sound to me, like less taxes, less government (moderately less), conservative budget spending, drilling offshore or Alaska (yes, I think it should be done), etc.

 

    But I cannot see myself voting for a Republican, not now, not ever. Why is that?

 

    I did some deep soul searching and I was fortunate to find the answers, and it boils down to one word: Tolerance.

 

    A lot of the cultural elements of the Republican "school" is about their way, not your way.

 

    Until not so long ago, Republicans were very much against black people voting or riding the bus with whites. Republicans up to this day don't think gays are allowed to have a life like everybody else. Republicans want you to have a choice, as long as it's not have an abortion. Republicans want the bible to be taught in school.

 

    It doesn't feel like Republicans are very tolerant of other's opinion.

 

    Now, before any flame comments, I must say that not all republicans fit the bill and there ar probably a good number that are tolerant.

 

 

 

    Glenn Kelman from Redfin wrote about how MSFT people are upset about one of the job posts on Redfin that has the phrase "You don't need big money to do something big. Don't apply if you've worked too long at Microsoft, Amazon or an agency" for a Marketing job post.

 

    Do I agree with Glenn? For a Marketing, Biz-Dev or Sales person I wouldn't hire someone from Microsoft that was more than 2 years there. So, the answer is yes!

 

    For engineering, PM'ing, testing I'd be open to someone that has worked 20 years at Microsoft, as long as they didn't work on a single product while they were there. I even wrote about this last month.

 

    So, is it bad if you worked too long at Microsoft?

 

    Well, it depends, if your next career move is to join a startup or found your own company, yes it is. Me and dozens of others ex-Microsofties that left have felt the pain first hand. First, you have to go through detox to learn a lot of things again. Then, you have an uphill battle with the entire startup community (other entrepreneurs, investors, potential employees and partners) to prove that you know what it takes to execute on a startup environment.

 

    Now, if you plan on joining Google, Amazon, Yahoo or another Fortune 500, having worked at Microsoft for a long period of time is an immense amount of prestige and an invitation card into those jobs.

 

    The answer to the title of this blog post, like for many things on life is: maybe.

 

 

    Danielle Morrill just blogged about she being or not an entrepreneur. I've been meaning to write this blog post for a while, and she just triggered my writing hormones.

 

    Let me get philosophical (and maybe pathetically wrong) about the question itself: Is entrepreneur a temporary or a permanent state? Can someone ask themselves "am I an athlete?".

 

    For the few who knows about it, I'm Jew, and while my wife was converting for our wedding, one of the first classes at the synagogue the rabbi asked "What is a Jew?". Don't focus on Judaism, but think of any religion out there. What is a Catholic? What is a Buddhist? The first reaction of anyone is to say "someone that follows that religion". Well, what if I don't follow some aspects of the religion (or almost none) and say that I'm a Jew. Does that make me a Jew?

 

    So, if you use the "lose religion principal" above, you can say that you are an entrepreneur even if you are not practicing entrepreneurship but describe yourself as such.

 

    But that's good for the spirit and self-assurance. We need outside validation. We live in a society after all.

 

    The Wikipedia definition of entrepreneur is wrong, IMHO. Here is my definition:

 

    An entrepreneur must start something from nothing. Must create value out of thin air, either by creating a product or service, directly by his handy work or by aligning the right people to do so.

    Risk is just a consequence and not "causation".

 

    In my definition you are not an entrepreneur if you join a startup or an existing company. Entrepreneurs found companies. If you are #2 at a Startup you are entering a moving train, maybe slowly, but moving. When you found a company you have to build the train first.

 

    Two more thoughts on entrepreneurs:

 

    First, I think you stop being an entrepreneur if you stop founding companies and creating values. Which means I believe "entrepreneur" is a temporary state.

 

    Second, entrepreneurs love to believe they are special and genetics plays a fundamental role on them being this way. I'm not sure that's true. I'm not sure people cannot be trained to be entrepreneurs (or they were educated to not be one). To think is most genetics is a very elitist (may I say "Aryan-like") view of a population.

 

    I know entrepreneurs (by my definition) who are very incompetent and will certainly fail. They have the spirit, but lack the skills. I also know people that have the skills and lack the spirit. But above all, I know people that were not entrepreneur, but became one, and people that were, but went back to corporate life.

 

    So, if you want "to be an entrepreneur" you have to act like one.

 

 

 

    Last week I heard another entrepreneur saying she is an "80% person". The context is that she has a hard time following through on the last 20%. It resonated so well with me because I also think I am an 80% person.

 

    I'm very productive in creating the initial 80% of a product, but I struggle at making it 100%. Just to be clear, no product ever gets to be 100% because that is not good business since the cost as you get closer to 100% grows exponential.

 

    The realization for me is that I struggle to take the last 20% because I'm not good at it. Wait, I actually suck at it.

 

    The interesting aspect is that there are people that are good at taking the product to the 96% level, so, ideally I would partner with someone like that, that can take a feature or a component, and make it cleaner, better, smoother.

 

    I belive most entrepreneurs are more like me. They like to create something from nothing, but struggle at following through.

 

    What do you think?

 

   

 

    There are two killers of (startup) productivity. The first one is procrastination. You know what needs to be done, you just been busy doing something safe or more interesting. The second is lack of focus on what's important and urgent.

 

    The fix for both of those is a "NOT TODO" list. Things that you should not be doing on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, no matter how attractive they seem. On startup-land, if it's not urgent, likely it should be postponed, and if it's not important you shouldn't even be spending brain cycles on it.

 

   

 

    A few days ago while having a distribution channel discussion, the topic of brand dilution came up if you don't sell directly to the customer and somebody said "you lose control of your brand"... And an automatic trigger fired on my head... "you don't have control of your brand!".

 

    I'm not a brand/branding expert, but I read enough books, talked with enough branding experts and went trough enough pain to know a thing or two about branding. If you think your brand is your logo, tagline, font style and corporate message, then yes, you control it, but you are wrong about what a brand is.

 

    Brand is the perception that people have on their head of what your company, products and services represent. Unless you have a mind-control device, you can't control exactly what people think about your product. Case in point: GM. Do you think GM wants to have a brand of poor-quality, gas-guzzlers cars? But that's people perception.

 

    The only thing you can do is to influence how people see your brand. It takes time and a lot of effort to shift that perception from point A to point B. It's much eaiser to start from zero than from an existing perception (if done right).

 

    The last thing I can say about branding is that actions speak louder than words. Translation: Your product/service will build (or ruin) your brand much faster than any marketing campaign.

 

 

    I've been working for the last several weeks on the new look of the Seattle 2.0 blog. First of all, Seattle 2.0 is being moved out of the Sampa platform. Sampa is a family-oriented sharing service, so it made no sense to use it to create a tech-focused blog.

 

    I'm also releasing the Seattle Startup Index for August where Sampa just moved an inch to position #30.

 

    There are a lot more changes to come to the Seattle 2.0. Stay tuned.

 

    After 7 years at Microsoft I grew a phobia of integration. Integration meant integrating MSN Search w/ Encarta, Office, Messenger, Internet Explorer, etc. It looked great on paper and it was pretty hard to argue it wasn't the right thing to do for the customer and for the business.

 

    The problem of integrating products (and sometimes even features) is that exponential cost of doing anything. There will be miscommunication issues, there will be bugs on both ends that nobody knew before and it's not just a line of code to fix it, and the result is going to be short of the original goal by a lot. Hey, but there is next version where we can fix things...

 

    My core advice to startups is that you should not try to integrate with external partners/services until you really, really understand the cost and benefit and it stacks above everything else you can do alone.

 

    I think the first computer magazine I read in 1984 used metaphors to explain something in computers and software. Through out my life, in college, in the workplace and even today, we use metaphors to explain everything from very simple to very complex concepts, ideas or problems.

 

    Friday we were having a discussion about Photo Albums on Sampa, and, you can imagine the metaphors: Shoebox, Photo Books, Coffee Table letter photo albums, wall frames, etc.

 

    On the individual context the metaphor that was being used worked, but it didn't extend to the tens of details of a web-based photo album. The problem comes when it does extend, but it doesn't work on the web, yet, you picked your favorite metaphor to go with it.

 

    I say, use real-world objects to give examples, but don't try to make them metaphors of anything. If people cannot think in a virtual context and in untangibles they probably are not creating the next paradigm your web-based startup needs.

 

 

    [I'll keep political posts to a very low rate]

 

    I see all this debate about experience, first about Obama and now about Palin. I absolutely believe you don't need experience to be an effective president or governor. You just need to surround yourself with people that do have experience in their area. What you really bring to the table is vision, values and you have to be great a "selling" those. That's it.

 

    Now, that's not true for a Mayor, for a City Council, for a Senator, etc. Experience matters because your individual contribution will be much more important on the bottom line.

 

 

 

    We did some bold moves over the last few days and will continue it over the next few weeks. Basically, we are migrating to the latest on the Microsoft stack.

 

    Last week we moved our development platform to VS 2008, followed by the move of Sampa.com website to .NET 3.5 and this week we moved the Sampa site to .NET 3.5 as well. Tomorrow we'll be moving our SQL Server to 2008 running on Windows Server 2008.

 

    The migration from .NET 2.0 to .NET 3.5 was orders of magnitude less painful than going from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0, where there was a bunch of incompatibilities.

 

 

    Another browser in the market. That's going to be great to competition and hence to customers, right? Well, from an economist point of view that's how it works, from somebody building a web-based startup, Google Chrome with its own Javascript engine only means one thing: One more incompatible browser to support.

    No matter how much efforts browsers make to be standard-compliant, the only get so far.

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