Author Archives: Elia Freedman

The Entrepreneurial Life

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Mark Suster wrote a post a few weeks ago on what it means to be a start-up entrepreneur. Mark has done both. He started companies and now is a VC so has a unique perspective from both sides of the table.

With this article he did a tremendous job of outlining both “On Being an Entrepreneur” and the roller coaster ride that being an entrepreneur is. Highly worth a read!

It has been 14 years for me now, since I was a senior in college, running Infinity Softworks with probably three to four “start-ups” all in the same company. There have been lots of highs and lots of lows. Mark says it better than most.

His list of what being an entrepeneur is to him is particularly enlightening. I did a lot of head nodding and yeps while reading it:

  • Not very status oriented
  • Doesn’t follow rules very well and questions authority
  • Can handle high degrees of ambiguity or uncertainty
  • Can handle rejection, being told “no” often and yet still have the confidence in your idea
  • Very decisive.  A bias toward making decisions – even when only right 70% of the time – moving forward & correcting what doesn’t work
  • A high level of confidence in your own ideas and ability to execute
  • Not highly susceptible to stress
  • Have a high risk tolerance
  • Not scared or ashamed of failure
  • Can handle long hours, travel, lack of sleep and the trade-offs of having less time for hobbies & other stuff

The only major changes in the last few years has been the introduction of children in my life. I don’t do as much travel as I used to and try to take off blocks of time to spend with my girls. For instance, I try to not schedule dinner meetings so I can eat with my wife and kids each night.

I still have no hobbies (besides working). I have gotten better about getting exercise the last year and that has helped a lot. I lost almost 20 pounds last summer and have managed to keep it off this winter (so far!).

All the rest are pretty true, though, including being tone-deaf to “no”, a little anti-authoritarian and high degrees of confidence and decisiveness. As for stress… I do have a lot less hair than I used to but otherwise no big deal.

My dad and uncle run their own businesses; both of my grandfathers ran their own; two of my cousins the same. When one of my cousins was going to start his own business his wife expressed some concern to me. I laughed and said that us Freedman’s just don’t know any different!

It really is a life style.

The Power of Your Own App

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John Economaki runs Bridge City Tools, a 25-year old company that makes finely-crafted woodworking tools. John was working on a new tool, the extremely cool Angle Master Pro (see the video here), and wanted to develop an app instead of producing a booklet. The booklet had massive tables covering thousands of angle calculations for calibrating the tool.

Enter powerOne.

I worked with John, who had written his calculations in a spreadsheet, to develop a template that did the same and, coupled with a number of improvements by John himself, is now available for download in the Library. powerOne is a great companion for Angle Master Pro!

And powerOne can be a great companion for you, too. Have a business that needs custom calculations or could use your own calculator app in the App Store? Drop us a line! We’d love to help.

Thank You, IBM

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I watched Jeopardy! the last couple of nights to see how Watson did against the humans. To make a computer think in abstract terms is an amazing accomplishment. My hats off to the folks at IBM.

But it isn’t just basic research in artificial intelligence that sets IBM apart. They have their fingers in lots of huge problems that could have a major impact on society. For example, Robert Scoble has an interview up at the Building 43 site by Rackspace that talks about IBM’s work on building a lithium battery that can hold enough energy to power a car 500 miles.

At a time when our federal government is cutting basic research done by the Department of Energy, DARPA, NASA and the National Science Foundation, among others, it is great to see an iconic American company picking up the slack.

The best you can do is iOS is Cool and Android is Open???

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I have recently been accused of being an Apple fanboy. I personally found it funny as, if you follow my writing you will know that while I like Apple’s products and approach I personally think Android will be the big player on the smartphone block.

Of course, my reasons for recognizing the dominance of Apple and Google platforms are usually different than most analysis. This weekend I was listening to an interview by Robert Scoble of two developers in the Bay area whose opinion boiled down to this: Android’s open and iOS is cool and thus they win. Robert’s argument, by the way, is that iOS and Android dominate apps and thus will dominate device sales.

As for me… my argument boils down to my college level strategy class taught by one Mr. Nelson Olf.

There are really only two sides to any market: the premium providers and the low cost providers. Apple, clearly, is the premium provider in every market they walk into. They maximize profit by protecting profit margin at the expense of market share. But in tech, just like in cars, there is always a premium provider. Think Apple as Lexus [1]. On the low end it is all about volume and cost control. Google, by open sourcing, is playing this game perfectly. Think Google as Toyota. The last thing to consider is that there really is no middle ground, or at least if you are in the middle ground you are likely to get squeezed. And that, I’m afraid, is Microsoft, Nokia, RIM and HP. None are considered premium platforms any more and, while Nokia and RIM have traditionally been low cost providers, they are getting squeezed by the army of hardware companies Android has unleashed.

Unfortunately for those three (now that Nokia will be a Windows Phone 7 licensee) there are only two ways to compete: either reclaim the premium brand or undercut Google as the low cost provider. Both are unlikely with the current crop of OSes.

As for developers, let’s face it, we are followers. (And I am one of them.) What we primarily care about is revenue in our pockets and thus the platforms that have the best chance of delivering that. (We also care about what is in our pockets.) A year ago that was only iOS. Now it is iOS and Android. For Windows Phone 7, webOS, and BlackBerry OS/QNX to become relevant, they have to either 1) get developers interested in buying and using their devices as their own or 2) show platform numbers that will attract developers because they think they can make lots of money there.

For now, only Apple and Google are demonstrating either of these.

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[1] The car analogy isn’t perfect. In cars there are multiple luxury (premium) brands: Lexus, Mercedes, Porsche, BMW, etc. I think the auto industry, though, is more forgiving of multiple players than tech because of developers. In tech developers act as a catalyst to drive consumers to one platform or another. We can only truly support a couple of platforms, making it unlikely that there will be more than two high profile players.

Nokia, HP and RIM, oh my!

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Wow. What a week. Let’s summarize (oh, these are snarky):

  • HP announces webOS Everywhere strategy. Make way for new smartphones, updated smartphones, tablets, and… webOS coming to a PC near you. The last one is the shocker and barely discussed, but most pundits are taking it as HP divorcing Microsoft. As for me… I will be the only honest one. Who knows?
  • Meanwhile, it turns out, Microsoft doesn’t care so much about HP asking for a divorce because they were already in bed with Nokia. It appears that Nokia is dropping their go-their-own-way Meego and eventually Symbian in favor of being another Windows Phone 7 box. That’s a way to act like a market leader, Nokia. Grovel to the guy with 1.5% market share.
  • RIM apparently is working on making Android apps work on their tablets, which makes it possible to write WebWork apps, Adobe Air apps, Adobe Flash apps and Android apps all for the platform, not to mention BlackBerry OS. RIM’s starting to feel like the back-alley watch salesman. Don’t like that option? Here’s twenty more to choose from.
  • Apple keeps doing what they do: sell freakin’ devices. Rumors: over a million in the first day on Verizon. 1 million units! And guess what? Everyone is disappointed! (I wish I could be disappointed like that.)
  • And Google… oh wait. Google was quiet this week. I guess that was expected after elevating their CEO out of the building two weeks ago and announcing Android version 3 (Honeycomb).

 

What One Developer Heard

Now that I summarized the news, let me tell you what I heard this week as a developer:

Blah blah … Apple sold another million units to a bunch of people that didn’t have iPhones before on a new network that will net millions of new iPhone customers, some of which will buy my products… blah blah … HP webOS everywhere … blah blah … Android on RIM? Great. Don’t have to develop specifically for RIM anymore … blah blah … Windows Phone 7 on Nokia? Excellent. I now have four platforms to worry about instead of seven.

 

…And Then There Were Four

(Sorry, Genesis, I know I butchered the album title.) So that leaves us with four major platforms: iOS, Android, webOS and Windows Phone 7. That’s what I call a good week for developers. (Oh, wait. Unless of course you make your living developing for Symbian or BlackBerry or QNX or Windows Mobile or Palm OS or …)