This is tricky, as I’m quoting Bryce Roberts who is quoting the CEO of Heath Ceramics in the video Bryce posted here:

People ask, “So, what’s your goal with Heath? Are you going to build it up and sell it?” But I really like my job. If I sold the company I wouldn’t have the job I like. How many people do you actually know who have a job they like?

For the record, I really like my job. And that is at the heart of the issues I have with external (non-customer) funding.

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I’m conflicted. I can’t come to a conclusion about how I feel about funding.

This is an old conflict for me, by the way, one that goes back a decade to our first round of funding. At the time, I didn’t think much about it. Everyone said get funding or fall behind so I went after funding. I don’t think I even had the experience to question it. But now… it’s different.

Let me explain with simple pros and cons:

Pros:

• Speed. Raising money allows a company to move faster than it could have before.
• Time. It (hypothetically) gives a company more time to build it’s business.
• Focus. It allows a company to focus on the long-term plans, rather than short-term necessities to make the next dollar.
• Ego. Feels good. Other people believe in your business enough to give you money. And it carries cache.
• Experience: The right investors can really bring significant experience to the company.

Cons:

• De-Focus. While funding can let a company focus on long-term plans, too much money can also allow a company to focus on everything rather than the finite things that will make it successful.
• Funding Perceptions. Entrepreneurs, by nature, prescribe to the school of “Just Do It.” Funding makes this possible — just go do it and we’ll figure it out as we go. But market success requires understanding before doing. I have to know who I’m selling to, why they’re buying, and what product they will purchase before I can deliver them a product. It’s easy to forget this when there is plenty of money to play with.
• Accuracy and Precision. To be successful, a start-up must be accurate and precise. I must know where to aim and I need to roughly hit the same spot every time. Funding can distort the perception.
• Forced Decisions: Investors have one goal; the employees and founders of the company may have an alternative one.

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I want to keep doing what I’m doing. I have a problem to solve — the world has changed but we still work with numbers they way we did in 1979 — I want to solve it, and I don’t want to move on until I do. I’ve tried many times now: FCPlus, powerOne, FastFigures, an education product that didn’t make it to market, a prototype of another that didn’t get productized, and now something new to be announced soon. The closest we have gotten is with powerOne.

I’m worried that taking money from outside investors will force me to make do things I don’t want to do. But the opportunity is big and I don’t want to miss the chance of taking it on and I could really use the help and guidance. And thus my conundrum.

Awesome post by David Brooks from April on The Creative Monopoly:

One of his core points is that we tend to confuse capitalism with competition. We tend to think that whoever competes best comes out ahead. In the race to be more competitive, we sometimes confuse what is hard with what is valuable. The intensity of competition becomes a proxy for value.

…

Think about the traits that creative people possess. Creative people don’t follow the crowds; they seek out the blank spots on the map. Creative people wander through faraway and forgotten traditions and then integrate marginal perspectives back to the mainstream. Instead of being fastest around the tracks everybody knows, creative people move adaptively through wildernesses nobody knows.

He goes on to point out that this is exactly how we treat our education system now, as if it is for building competition, not creativity:

First, students have to jump through ever-more demanding, preassigned academic hoops. Instead of developing a passion for one subject, they’re rewarded for becoming professional students, getting great grades across all subjects, regardless of their intrinsic interests. Instead of wandering across strange domains, they have to prudentially apportion their time, making productive use of each hour.

Then they move into a ranking system in which the most competitive college, program and employment opportunity is deemed to be the best. There is a status funnel pointing to the most competitive colleges and banks and companies, regardless of their appropriateness.

This is why No Child Left Behind is a joke. This is why the goal of beating out Pacific Rim countries like China, Japan, Korea and Singapore on the PISA and TIMSS exams makes no sense at all.

In the business world, in the Lean Startup movement, there is a term called vanity metrics. Vanity metrics are numbers that make us feel like we are doing well but in the grand scheme of things doesn’t mean much. They don’t mean much because they are not actionable numbers and to be actionable they must have a clear cause and effect. In the iOS software world, downloads are one of those measurements. I have no idea why downloads happen because I am completely removed from the App Store process.

I would argue that PISA and TIMMS scores are also vanity metrics. Who cares if we are 19th in the world in this or 5th in the world in that. For the most part we aren’t even comparing apples to apples, as this incredibly good article by Zalman Usiskan, professor emeritus at the Univerity of Chicago, points out. What really matters is that our students can graduate and be productive members of society.

What we need in this country is more creativity, not more competition. And our success and failure in birthing creative students will not be reflected in any test score.

George Will is a funny duck. I usually agree with half of each one of his articles and disagree with the rest. This article, about subsidized student loans, is no exception. But I’m a sucker for contrarian thought and his opening two paragraphs make me think:

Bipartisanship, the supposed scarcity of which so distresses the high-minded, actually is disastrously prevalent.

Since 2001, it has produced No Child Left Behind, a counterproductive federal intrusion in primary and secondary education; the McCain-Feingold speech rationing law (the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act); an unfunded prescription drug entitlement; troublemaking by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; government-directed capitalism from theExport-Import Bank; crony capitalism from energy subsidies; unseemly agriculture and transportation bills; continuous bailouts of an unreformed Postal Service; housing subsidies; subsidies for state and local governments; and many other bipartisan deeds, including most appropriations bills.

Speaking of bipartisan snow jobs, I watched Inside Job last night. It’s a documentary about the financial crisis, wonderfully explained and presented. Well worth your time. Go watch it (Netflix, Amazon) right now.

The amazing part of reading Fred Wilson’s blog every day isn’t just Fred Wilson’s thoughts, it is the conversation that surrounds it. The video Fred posted is of Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter, and one of the lines is “Twitter brings you closer.” Closer to what, of course, is the question. Serial responder kidmercury comments [no changes by me]:

what dick says about why they don’t finish the sentence — i.e. it’s up to the user to decide what twitter brings you closer to — is at the core of why i’m a twitter skeptic. i think niche social networks that answer that question for you — will bring you closer to statups, your family, baseball, etc — are much better positioned, and that we are going to a world with many such startups rather than the one world social networks of google/facebook/twitter etc.

i look forward to seeing their financials whenever the IPO stuff goes down. i believe the bigger a network gets the tougher it becomes to monetize……i.e. the wikipedia problem grows. if it really wants to bring you closer to everything, than no one can own it. and that’s why i think a federation of niche networks is what will ultimately emerge.

I don’t know whether I agree with kidmercury’s comments. I find it hard to believe that the universal companies — Twitter, Facebook, Google — are going to be replaced by niche networks. But as Instagram showed, there is clearly a “niche” network for photography and as Pinterest shows there is a “niche” network for sharing web stuff. Kid’s comment, however, is well worth thinking about.

In the 1880s and earlier, before the industrial revolution, there really was no middle class. In fact, I would argue that the middle class really didn’t emerge until after World War II. Before that there was just one class, albeit split between those with money and those without, those who could feed themselves and those who relied on others. These two groups aren’t connected by the way. Those with money often relied on others to feed them while those without, often farmers, managed to feed their families just fine. But what was clear during these earlier time periods is that those who “made it” took care of their own [1].

The industrial revolution changed that. Many people went to work for someone else and a middle class emerged, particularly in the mid to late 20th century. Thanks to organized labor unskilled workers could make a living in factories all over the country.

But we all know where we are now. Many factory jobs have left these shores for foreign countries and middle class wages have officially been stagnant for almost 30 years. The golf between the better-off and the struggling has expanded and it isn’t clear that this will close any time soon.

Many people have theories of how to close this gap. Short of wealth-redistribution, I’m not certain it is possible. But I didn’t write to talk politics. What I am wondering is if this middle class era was really an anomaly in world history? I am wondering if this era of relying on others for your work and wage was a short-lived by-product of the industrial era? And now that the industrial era is fading, I’m wondering if we are returning to a provide-for-yourself economy?

Bryce Roberts alluded to these questions a week or so ago in his post Rise of the Independents. In it he facets that we are entering a “golden era” of indie companies, an era when it is financially feasible to chart your own course and work on big or small projects of your making. Later, in a subsequent post, he clarifies his thinking: “The point I wanted to make was that we’re at a critical inflection point for entrepreneurship. The company man and his accompanying gold watch and pension are a relic that I, nor my kids, will see again in our lifetimes.”

Times change and we all need to adopt. Maybe, just maybe, the sooner we each realize we have to make our own way in this world the sooner we can get the country back on track.

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[1] Obviously there was some period serious problems during this era of American history. Blacks had no place in the country and while they had earned their rights after the Civil War they were still in essence slaves and indentured servants. Women, too, had no place outside the home.