Responses to A Hard Lesson

August 30, 2012 by Leave a comment

A couple of weeks ago I posted a blog entitled A Hard Lesson: Getting the best out of Professional Advisors.  This has provoked more response than anything else I have written, and I thought it was worth collecting some of those responses in a separate post for everyone’s benefit – especially as a number of clear themes emerged.

I also want to apologise to those who felt they weren’t represented appropriately, and to those who felt I was attacking their profession as a whole.  Neither was ever my intention, and I am sorry.

I said I was posting from the perspective of the founders as it was the perspective I was closest to, and I felt it would be most useful to others this way.  I had the permission of the people I worked with to post (I NEVER post client stories otherwise).  Of course I also had to anonymise it and leave out some detail to make a blog out of it.

With all these compromises needed, perhaps attempting to write the story was unwise.

Given that I posted the piece and got back many helpful comments and thoughts, I hope that sharing them will prove instructive.

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Tools: join.me

August 30, 2012 by Leave a comment

A wee while back I posted a link to ScreenLeap, a free screen sharing tool useful for web presentations.  Recently I’ve been introduced to join.me, which goes one further and allows remote control of machines.  This is an absolutely brilliant facility for anyone trying to offer customer support.

To share a screen get the person whose screen is to be shared (or machine controlled) to go to join.me and select the “basic” option in the left panel, then click the orange play button.  After the usual faffing to download a java app into the browser (which may include security confirmations) they will get a little widget at the top of their screen showing a link to share, along with a 9 digit code.

There is a mouse icon on the widget which allows them to share control as well.

To join a shared screen, ask the sharer for their 9-digit code and enter it in the box on the right panel at join.me.

There is also a pro version (with a free trial) which includes additional features like integrated audio, customised urls for sessions etc.  I haven’t tried this but at $19/month this might be worth checking out if you plan to do a lot of web meetings.

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Friday Link: Forget what you think you know about pricing!

August 24, 2012 by Leave a comment

This article is a collection of examples of pricing experiments that yield counter intuitive results.  Many of these have effectively NO COST to implement, but some yield up to 40x increase in turnover.  Forget everything you thought you knew about pricing.

Pricing  Experiments You Might Not Know, But Can Learn From

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Turing Festival: Aligning Interests Notes

August 23, 2012 by Leave a comment

This morning I attended a session at the Turing Festival entitled “Aligning Interests: Entrepreneurs and Investors”.

The background of the session appears to be that in Scotland, there are relatively few investors that “get” web technology companies – a category that includes giants like eBay, Amazon, Facebook and Google.  Interestingly, Brian Caufield pointed out  that well-known angel Ron Conway, an early investor in twitter, had said “I don’t get Twitter, but I do get growth” – perhaps web-tech companies in Scotland generating strong growth should take heart from that!

The speakers all recognised that acitivity within Scotland was going to tend towards the web-tech opportunities that require relatively little funding and can get to revenue relatively quickly, but even here, entrepreneurs are having to work very hard to find seed funding and are having to look overseas for VC.

Brendon Richardson finished the session with an inspiring call-to-action for entrepreneurs to lead the way and bring investors into the sector with them.  To achieve this, Nigel Eccles believes that entrepreneurs need to start lean, focus on revenue growth, and seek funding for accelerated growth once there is a proven customer acquisition model.

Nigel also made a couple of observations about VCs I rather liked.  The first is that “VCs are not like taxi drivers“.  Initially baffling, he went on to explain that the difference between a good taxi driver and a bad one is relatively small – you tend to end up at the destination in either case.  The difference with VCs is much greater – a  bad VC can be catastrophic for a business, with feedback and advice sending it off toward failure.  He also noted that “there is an inverse correlation between confidence and comptence“, that the VCs with the worst advice were most confident in it, and the most competent VCs offered the benefit of their experience in a much more subtle and collaborative way.

I’ll probably write some more posts based on this event once I’ve had time to digest it a little…

 

Filed under Events

A Hard Lesson: Getting the best out of Professional Advisors

August 15, 2012 by 3 Comments

Working with Professional Advisors shouldn’t lead to this…

A young company I know the founder of has recently had a terrible experience with professional advisors, and I want to share it in the hope that it will help others avoid the same problems.

I must first qualify the story by pointing out that what follows is second hand (I was not involved with putting together the deal) and is entirely from the perspective of the founder.  I recount it in this way because I think the founder behaved reasonably and followed a path which other founders would likely follow – and would likely end up with some of the same troubles.  This account is simplified in some ways, and written to protect the identity of the parties.  I believe it is a fair representation of the story however.

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Filed under Startup Management

Friday Link: When Employees Misinterpret Managers

August 10, 2012 by Leave a comment

I love this blog from Ben Horowitz on how employees don’t necessarily react to management the way you would expect…

When Employees Misinterpret Managers

Filed under Friday Link

Friday Link: The Turing Festival

August 3, 2012 by Leave a comment

If you’re around Edinburgh in August, check out the Turing Festival events from the 23rd to 25th:  http://www.turingfestival.com/tickets/

I’ve already booked for Aligning Interests: Entrepreneurs & Investors, but I’ll try to go to a lot more events if my diary permits nearer the time!

Filed under Friday Link

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