Feeling Sheepish?

I've been helping a few other startups think through some stuff this week, so it's really taken a lot of my time and headspace. I'll keep blogging, but perhaps less frequently. Things are about to really tighten up for me.

Today I met with someone who wants to start something around a pretty solid idea, and he brings a bunch of experience to the table. He's passionate, and driven by a personal mission to right what he sees as a major wrong in the world.

I like that.

But he felt sheepish about asking investors for a salary. He doesn't think highly of himself as a business leader, because he's not one yet. When I asked how much he needed, he again was sheepish about paying himself, and was considering having someone else run it.

Wrong.

You are the keeper of the flame. Most of us have little or no experience when we first start.  We make it up as we go. We learn. We screw up. We fix it and move on. We grow into the role. We're imperfect. But we make it happen.

Some of you will roll your eyes when I say this (again), but I'll say it again: there's a lot of darkness in building a startup; your job is to bring light to the darkness. You'll figure it out.

What the company needs at the startup stage more than an experienced leader is passion for a mission and the commitment and tenacity to get there.

That's what investors care about. They know they'll never get a return on their investment if you aren't driven by a mission and passionate about getting there. They know you'll figure it out.

I almost signed up for it--that's how much passion for the cause he has.

So no, don't feel sheepish. You're giving investors a chance to benefit from your passion, your sense of justice, your hard work during the day and endless thinking about it nights and weekends. That's a privilege, and nothing to be sheepish about.

Now get out of here and go be your badass self like you know you are.

Today's Punt: Steve Blank on Sopa

Some really great points about Hollywood's misstepts. 

"(Imagine if the $110 million/year spent on lobbying went to disruptive innovation.)"

http://steveblank.com/

Try. Break. Refine. Try Again.

First, you're going to get back to your list/calls/code in about two minutes. 

Today I'm once again learning something new. Learn, implement, refine, move forward. I'm breaking my coding into 30 minute blocks--more or less the Pomodoro approach. A call comes in, I take it, pace while I'm talking to get a bit of exercise. The knee's a lot better--radically--so it's time to get back to exercise. 

Hit a stopping point--weird behaviors in my routing. By habit I hit the web to look for the answer. 

Wrong. It's almost never the right approach--it should be a last resort. 

Test. Doesn't work. Try something else. Doesn't work. Try again. Keep track of what you're trying, keep refining it, track everything. That's better...ok...picked up the trail, and ...ok, nailed it.

Break's over. What's next?

Star Wars, Crowd-Sourced over the SOPA-Free Interwebs

I came across this on the Facebook or the interwebs somewhere. It's Star Wars--the entire movie (first one)--remade by, well, the crowd.

At first it seemed gimmicky. But I couldn't turn it off. At 12 minutes in, I realized I had to take it seriously and watch it on my 42" TV.

And pull my studio speakers and mixer into the living room to get the full effect.

It's truly an amazing work. Each participant contributed 15 seconds. The producer edited each 15-second segment together, perfectly.

Some of the scenes are hilarious; if a scene is 2 minutes long, that's 4 different approaches tied together. I'm still shaking my head at some of them, including one scene with the Dude and Donny at the bowling alley talking about the death star.

Some are artistic, some are silly, some are cartoons. One is done in the style of Casablanca, another, the Simpsons. There's a lot of stop-gap animation.

And of course, the most fun are the ones with kids, or kids and their parents, typically with a kid as Darth Vader, with the original James Earl Jones voiceover.

My favorite kid scene is where a captured Leia first meets Vader, with Vader played by the dad, and leia played by a 3 or 4-year-old, held by dad as they deliver the lines perfectly.

After yesterday's brawl over SOPA over at AVC, this was a refreshing piece that never would could have been made had SOPA passed.

Even as it is, it's possible it could get pulled given George Lucas's notoriously tight hold over the Star Wars franchise, but I'm guessing he'll be won over right about the time he sees Indiana Jones flying the Millenium Falcon.

Watch it--HDMI out of your computer to your TV. Pump up the volume.

SOPA & The Third Stage of Grief

Fred posted on the SOPA defeat; this post is an edited version of my comment there.


I've been thinking about the transformation of the creative industry since I walked from my record deal in 1994 to start a computer company.


Things have changed dramatically since then. I remember bitterly saying to them "you're not getting another record out of me", then sat out the rest of my contract, which had 3 years remaining on it.


So here's where I am with the SOPA b.s. and the plaintive music and film industries: The content industry needs to ditch its scarcity mentality and move to an abundance mentality; if it doesn't it will continue to die it's slow, grueling death. 


And I bet because they've pissed us off so much, someone will figure out a way to accelerate that.


Part of the problem is that the music and film giants are, well,  a big part of the problem: the old school, top-down control model with many middlemen, concentration of capital and resources at the top, trying to hold onto every.last.dime. 

For years they squeezed the life out of most of their creators, taking the bulk of the profits, and now they're unhappy they've been disrupted? 

This isn't about piracy--that's a red herring.  It's about the direct model. They've been cut out of the relationship between the artist and the fan, and you know what? Good riddance.


10 points on an album I took 6 months to write and 4 weeks to record? For what? If I'm lucky they might throw a release party, but the reality is unless I win special favor with the execs, or my rep does, nothing's happening because the company did something. 


It's up to me anyway. So why work for them anymore? We don't need them anymore. 


Most people don't steal; most people who used to grab stuff off LimeWire moved to iTunes because 1) it just worked and 2) the price was right. 

Creators can create without them now. They can sell direct. 10,000 great fans can easily float a songwriter at $5/album. Make the album at home. The tools are amazing now. 

A friend in NY is working on his first film. Skipping most distribution, going direct and through iTunes, Video on Demand, Netflix. Screw retail distribution. We don't need atoms to move these bits. 

They're in the 3 stage of grief: bargaining. Good luck with that.

Unwanted Downtime

Yesterday I was really cranking.

The day started slowly; I was distracted by the SOPA stuff and couldn't seem to get into a groove.

And then things started popping for a few hours--finished authentication and sessions and started testing to see where things stood.

There was a bug. One of the modules has a number of dependencies, and something had destabilized it. So I started chasing it down.

(For you hackers out there, the evil module is JSDOM, which has dependencies on HTMLParser and Contextify)
.
I made a mistake, as I occasionally do: I see something over at Stack about upgrading, so I upgraded to the latest stable version of Node and NPM.

And that's when it started.

4 hours later, I got everything working again--except for JSDOM. I'm no closer than I was do fixing the issue, and wasted 4 hours I'll never get back.

I try to avoid unnecessary downtime. Configuration issues take a lot of time and energy and can suck the life out of you.

What causes your downtime? How do you avoid it? I keep touching that hot stove...

SOPA Overreaches

There are two bills in Congress purporting to be about internet privacy: PIPA and SOPA--one for the House, one for the Senate. I'm not sure which because my traditional starting points are protesting and not available.

The legislation gives the government the ability, rather arbitrarily, shut down or block sites that