Author Archives: Elia Freedman

The Little Things

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I got my first job when I was 14. My job was to wash out golf carts a few days a week at the local college-sponsored course. In exchange, I received free green fees and a locker to store my clubs. I didn’t get paid in cash for that job — I was actually too young for that by state law, I believe — but to a 14 year old who probably would have spent most of the money playing golf anyway, it was a heck of a deal.

At the end of the summer my mom and stepdad moved us to Florida and the next summer I came back to Ohio to stay with my dad. That summer my dad talked to a friend of his who painted houses and got me on his crew. I worked hard that summer. It was grueling, physical labor with very long hours. I’m sure my dad got me the job partly to show me what life would be like if I didn’t go to college.

But that wasn’t the only thing I learned. I also learned a little about working with people, in particular managing them. My boss, a friend to this day, worked us from early until late every day but at the end of every day, he never failed to say thank you as we each left for home and dinner. It wasn’t a complex gesture, just a simple one, but it always made me feel wanted and respected.

I try to do the same thing to this day.

Springsteen and an Atlanta Shave

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Joe Posnanski is one of the great sports writers of this generation. His post, from December 31 though, has nothing to do with sports. It starts with a hair cut, an odd thought for a man like Posnanski who possesses very little hair. It weaves into a story about searching for an American Doll in a mall in Atlanta, getting a great shave, and a Bruce Springsteen concert in Oakland, California, from a few weeks before.

But in the end, though, this article has nothing to do with American Dolls, Springsteen, haircuts or shaves. It’s about a lesson he wants to teach his daughters. As Posnanski said, it’s about never mailing it in, “that life is about delivering your best effort, giving the best you have, all the time, even when you’re tired, even when you’re discouraged, even when you are alone, even when other people will not see it or acknowledge it or even accept it.”

It’s a fabulous article from a fabulous writer. I highly recommend reading the entire post.

Good Luck, Michael Dell

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If you are unaware, Dell, Inc. went private with a $24.4 billion buyout funded by Silver Lake Partners, Michael Dell, Microsoft, and some banks. The question Om Malik asked yesterday about Michael Dell is an interesting question. In short, why? Why is Michael Dell putting his reputation and personal fortune on the line to save the company that bears his name? Om’s answer is simple, and one any of us running a company we founded will understand:

Every so often people say that its not personal, its business. Nonsense! It is always personal and it will always be personal. If you spend your lifetime nurturing and growing a startup, it is nothing but personal. Outsiders will never understand — for a founder, failure, defeat and ignominy are always personal, just as success and fame. For founders, our identities are intertwined with the companies.

I can relate. By no means do I keep Infinity Softworks going for irrational reasons but here I am, 16 years later, running a business that doesn’t pay for itself. I’ve spent plenty of time asking myself why I keep going. I could have walked away at any point having felt good about what we attempted, even if we didn’t accomplish our goal of changing math education. We’ve distributed 20 million software calculators, helping students and professionals all over the world. I’ve kept a business running for a decade and a half. That’s nothing to sneeze at.

For me, I keep going because I still have hope to accomplish what I set out to do. We’ve been using the same tools to work with numbers since the 1970s but we now carry always connected computers around in our pockets. In 40 years the tech has changed; the products we use haven’t. I have one more shot, I believe, to re-invent the way we work with numbers and I’m going to take it.

Obviously Dell Inc. is a different deal. Here’s a company, and Dell a man, who accomplished his goals. But those goals morph as maybe they did for Michael Dell. His name is literally on the line. Here’s hoping, from all of us running the companies we started, that Dell makes it happen.

The Only Startup Decision-Making Question You’ll Need

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Phin Barnes at SneakerheadVC asks whether you can boil decision-making down to a single question. It’s an interesting theory as the question he comes up with is, “Does this help us own more complexity for our customer?”

Every process or task (in enterprise or consumer) has a certain level of complexity — and the most valuable companies are able to attack very complex problems, hide the complexity from the customer and let them accomplish the task in a simple, straight forward way.

This single question lens is the same way I look at which products I use, for example. I want to know that all my photos are in iPhoto, all my events and tasks in Calendar, all my music in iTunes. I don’t want to think long and hard about where to put things. I was saving these Phin Barnes-types of articles, once upon a time, to Evernote but realized that some were in Evernote and some were in Instapaper and some were referenced here on the blog. Instead I started writing every day, referencing all of these articles here at eliainsider.com.

Back to Phin, this is a very interesting lens in which to look at decision-making. We are confronted with so much information that having a single question to analyze something is so much easier to remember and apply. I love it when complex issues can be boiled down like this.

The Case For Direct Cable Channel Subscriptions

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Bloomberg is reporting that HBO Go may be coming to Apple TV this year. Sounds interesting, right? Well, guess again. Unless something changes with the release, you can only watch HBO Go if you have a cable subscription. I have to admit even though I’ve read a ton about the cable business and how the market dynamics work there, I still don’t get the benefit to HBO to not charge a subscription. Maybe it’s a contract obligation?

Since I personally don’t have a huge interest in HBO, let’s use ESPN as an example instead. According to this article, ESPN makes $4.69 per household per month from cable companies and the total average bill for sports is $8. This includes not just the other ESPN channels (ESPN2, ESPN News) but also the regional sports channels.

As I’ve mentioned here before, we cancelled all cable a while ago. In exchange we have Netflix and Amazon Prime subscriptions, streamed through an Apple TV and Roku box to deliver these channels to our television sets. In addition, I subscribe to MLB.tv each year. Netflix runs $20/month, Amazon Prime $7/month and MLB.tv $10/month [1]. That’s trading a $70 per month cable bill for $37/month. The point of this is to note that ESPN gets nothing from me.

So, ESPN, here’s what I propose: offer me streaming versions of ESPN, ESPN 2 and ESPN News for $10/month. We both win. You get about twice the rate you get from cable companies and I get sports. $47/month is still a bargain for me versus the $70 cable bill (and rising every year). I get what I want — more sports — and you get exactly what you want — money from me.

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[1] Amazon Prime and MLB.tv are billed annually but that’s what it works out to monthly.