So I wrote yesterday about the influence that Steve Blank’s book had on me and that I was in Bend, Oregon, at the venture conference. The night before the conference itself is a networking event. I went, talked to some people I knew, met a few others. Across the room was Steve Blank so I went over to introduce myself and, if he was interested, tell him the story I told you yesterday. (People love to hear how influential they are so I thought it’d be a good icebreaker.)

Steve was deep in conversation with someone else — although he did take enough time to say hi and introduce himself. I waited patiently for 20 minutes and the minute he was done, he turned and walked away so quickly I didn’t even get the chance to say anything [1].

I kind of stood there dumb-founded, not just because of how abruptly he left but also a little mad at myself for having stood there for 20 minutes like some idiotic fanboy.

So I started talking to the guy Steve was talking to and it turned out that he was a fascinating guy. Tim Gieseler started a small company to sell telescopes to hobbyists. He grew the business first by selling other people’s telescopes and eventually building their own. He ran Orion for over 30 years before selling it, by which point it had become the largest creator and seller of telescopes and accessories to amateur astronomers.

We had an amazing and long conversation about his business, about Equals, about the ups and downs of running businesses over the long-term, something that is neither talked about nor celebrated much in today’s get-rich-quick start-up culture.

The serendipity was overwhelming to me. Now I was thankful that I stood there like an idiotic fanboy for 20 minutes. It just turns out I was waiting there to talk with the wrong person. Luckily fate stepped in.

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[1] I did meet him again the next day and got the chance to tell him my story.

I went to Bend for a few days last week primarily for one purpose: to hear Steve Blank speak. If you are not familiar, Steve wrote a book called Four Steps to the Epiphany, which had a huge influence over me.

In 2002 the handheld market was shrinking and we were looking for a vertical market. We had a number of calculator products, including a graphing calculator that had gained some traction in math education. In order to gain broad adoption, though, the product needed to be accepted on the AP Calculus exam. No software product had ever been available for it before and the rules for acceptance were specifically designed to eliminate handhelds and other computers.

Over the next few years we did the impossible: got powerOne Graph into trials for the AP exam. Then disaster happened. Right as we gained acceptance Palm fired their education team, focusing on smartphones instead, and we lost the deal.

By this time it is 2005 and we are trying to figure out where to go. The College Board said they were looking at laptops instead so we hunkered down with our now really small team (three of us from 11 or 12 before) and worked on a toolset that would run across the web. There were some interesting ideas in there but we didn’t stop to think about the product or business or how the alternative environment would impact the service. I spoke to a handful of educators, all of whom were encouraging, but that was as far as I took it. We charged ahead with a complete product.

Two years later we were ready for beta, released it to the world, and no one cared. Even the teachers who had been encouraging didn’t use it. I was devastated. All that work ended in failure, all that wasted time and money. We were done.

At this point I started consulting at an incubator, helping other start-ups, hoping to get a spark for what I wanted to do next. Shortly after this failure happened I was consulting with one of the companies in the incubator when I told him the story I just told you. He reached into his pile of books and threw Four Steps at me. He said read this and maybe it will help.

I couldn’t put it down. I remember reading and re-reading it, especially the sections on customer discovery and customer validation. Suddenly I understood where I failed.

That set me on a path to figure out what makes start-ups start-ups. I wanted to understand why they were a big mystery, why some succeeded and some failed. I found the Lean Startup movement, read a lot of the stuff happening there, and came to understand it well enough to know what I wanted to keep and what I didn’t.

Steve’s work has been extremely important in the start-up world. If you ever get a chance to hear him speak I hope you will take advantage.

I was in Ogden, Utah, last weekend to present at the second CocoaSlopes conference. (Access my slides here.) I had a lot of fun doing it. I haven’t given a speech in a long time and thought I’d share a few random thoughts:

1. Wow, did putting the presentation together take a ton of work! I had some starter notes and then wrote a full outline then started putting the slides together. It took me four days, which pretty much killed last week. While my ticket and travel was taken care of, the cost of putting the deck together is expensive. I didn’t anticipate that.
2. I was nervous before I started to speak. I hadn’t given a presentation in a long while. This took me by surprise. I never am nervous before a presentation. I think because I presented in the middle of the day plus not sleeping much the night before all kind of did me in. Plus I didn’t feel like I got enough practice in  because I spent all week just creating the presentation.
3. Given that, the minute I started to speak the nervousness disappeared and I felt like I was back in familiar territory. I do love public speaking!
4. With the amount of work it takes to put this together it really makes sense if you can use the presentation more than once. Justin Williams, also speaking there, told me he puts together one presentation a year and then gives it five or six times. That makes a ton of sense.
5. The people at CocoaSlopes were just awesome. Dave Klein, who runs CocoaConf, Joel Grasmeyer and the others were fantastic and made me feel right at home. Thanks, Joel, for the invite! Dave, if this is what CocoaConf is like except on steroids, I’m going to have to attend.
6. The participants were really into it. They cared deeply about what was being presented and participated as much as possible.
7. The CocoaSlopes folks did a great job creating opportunities to talk and get to know people there.
8. I was so burned out that by 3pm I needed a break. A few of us went out to grab a beer and eat some snacks and decompress.

Probably the best part for me personally, though, was getting to meet some of my fellow speakers. The guys accepted me right away and made me feel at home. It was nice to hang out with and get to know Justin Williams, Collin Donnell, Charles Perry and Jonathan Penn, in particular. I hope we get the chance again soon.

Hayao Miyazaki, the famed Japanese animator, announced that he is retiring a few weeks ago. Miyazaki animated and directed one of my all-time favorite movies, one called My Neighbor Totoro.

It is the story of two young girls who live with their father in 1958 Japan. Their mother is sick in the hospital so the family moves into a new home to be closer. As the family gets used to their surroundings, the two girls discover they have a very special neighbor.

It is such an amazingly gentle movie, one very much at odds with the typical hero-worship faire of Western culture. I’ve found with my own daughters, about the same age as Sasuki and Mei, that they have this amazing ability to seamlessly intermix the “real” world with their “pretend” world. Few movies I’ve ever seen embody this ability like My Neighbor Totoro.

The version I’ve seen is the English version released by Disney and voiced by Tim Daly and two of the Dakota sisters. It is definitely available through Netflix or to purchase from Amazon.

John Battelle on the open web, incubators and starting businesses (emphasis mine):

In the past few years, entrepreneurship seems to have become a profession, like acting or sales or architecture. On the one hand, that’s a good thing, it means more companies, more jobs, and more great ideas. On the other, something about it strikes me as a bit …forced. I can’t put my finger on it, quite yet, but it centers around the idea that we’re credentializing innovation. … I never saw starting companies as a career path.

I, too, have noticed a significant increase in people who are doing start-ups because they want to do a start-up, not because they have some burning desire to solve some problem that they won’t be able to solve working for someone else. Maybe that’s a good thing, maybe it isn’t. Maybe we have reached the tipping point of technology start-ups where people like me, us early doing-a-start-up adopters, are on the outside looking at an idea that has reached the mainstream. We are just curmudgeons who sit around saying, “Back when I did my start-up… .”

Then again, I can’t help but wonder how long these people will last. Doing a start-up sounds fun until the sine curve takes effect, until the money gets tight and the times get hard. Is “doing a start-up” a fad, or a long-term, populist movement? I have a hard time seeing these people who are doing this for the start-up lifestyle surviving for long.

(via Michael Mace)