His Saving Grace

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Great story in The Chicago Tribune about Chef Curtis Duffy. It’s the story of a small town kid whose upbringing was less than ideal. When he was a teenager, his father killed his mother and then himself. But Curtis found a love and found a person, his home economics teacher, who would nurture it.

Slowly Curtis re-entered the world, and he seized upon the one stable thing in his life: the kitchen. When he’d first started cooking five years earlier, the kitchen was a place to run away to from the fighting at home, a place that kept him from bullying neighborhood kids.

Now his parents were dead. Every hour focused on cooking was another hour not dealing with his confusion and anger.

Curtis worked his way up from dishwasher to line chef to chef de cuisine until he decided to open his own restaurant. It’s a great story and touches on so many of the things that we treasure about our country. Hope you’ll read it this weekend.

Optimistically Depressed – Start-up Life and Roller Coaster Rides

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In mid 2007 Infinity Softworks was falling apart. The project we spent two years working on was ending with a big thud, I had already laid off most of the team and was about to let go of the remaining two. I was tired and worn out. A friend looked at me and said it was the first time in the eight years he had known me that I ran into a brick wall and stopped.

At that point in 2007 I was clearly depressed: depressed with my situation, depressed with the state of the company, depressed with my failure, nervous about fatherhood and the new pressures that brought on me. Brad Feld had a great post on depression last October.  As Brad said:

For some reason we’ve embraced failure as an entrepreneurial trait that is ok, but we still struggle with acknowledging and talking about depression. Entrepreneurs function with a wide range of stresses and emotions that often have overwhelming intensity. In many cases, we are afraid of admitting depression, and are often highly functional when we are depressed. But that doesn’t deny the fact that entrepreneurs get depressed. To deny this, is to deny reality, and that’s against my value system.

But by late 2007 a plan was in place and we kept it together by doing contract work. We survived to fight another day. I wasn’t blinded by the realities but I still believed in what we could do. We’ve battled for over five years now, learning a ton along the way.

Which leads me to the recent post in The Atlantic about optimism:

This questions turns out to matter a great deal if you are trying to figure out who grows after trauma and who gets swallowed up by it, a question that each movie [Life of Pi and Silver Lining’s Playbook] addresses and that psychologists have been grappling with for years. Think back to the last time you experienced a loss, setback, or hardship. Did you respond by venting, ruminating, and dwelling on the disappointment, or did you look for a faint flash of meaning through all of the darkness — a silver lining of some sort? How quickly did you bounce back — how resilient are you?

The roller coaster of start-up life never really fades away. Optimism, depression, it all turns on a dime. Keeping a positive outlook, though, that’s the key.

OS Control and the Next Billion Smartphones

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Mobile World Congress was last week and what we have gotten in exchange for mobile computing news is a stream of new operating systems. What we’ve added is Tizen, an operating system primarily being developed by Intel and Samsung, and Firefox OS, an operating system developed by the makers of Firefox browser, Mozilla Foundation. So let’s sum up what OSes we have now:

  1. Android
  2. iOS
  3. Windows Phone
  4. BlackBerry 10
  5. Tizen
  6. Firefox OS

When I made my list six years ago there were 10 operating systems. Six is definitely better than 10, so we have some improvement. Interestingly only two of these six where on the list six years ago (Android, iOS) and only one was shipping at the time.

There are two dynamics at work here causing a contraction and proliferation of operating system versions. The first is that so few companies are actually making a profit on their devices. The list, at most, is Apple and Samsung, and only Apple controls their OS. Everyone else in the industry is on the outside looking in, including last generation’s big winners Microsoft and Intel.

The second dynamic at work here has to do with a concept called “the second billion.” The second billion refers to the next billion users of smartphones. The first billion, you and me among them, are relatively affluent and can afford things like $500 devices and $100 per month data plans. The next billion, however, are living on something like $500 a year (at best). The kinds of plans you and I subscribe to are out of their scope. Given that they are all cell phone users, the race is on to convert them to smartphones. And to convert them, the race is on to drive smartphone prices down to US$50 or less.

This is why Mozilla thinks they have an opening with Firefox OS. “We’re not trying to replace Android or iOS,” said Mozilla’s Christian Heilmann at Mobile World Congress. Of course not. He’s trying to sell to the next billion customers, not to the ones that already bought. Selling to the next billion will mean cheap devices and Internet connections. Tizen, BlackBerry 10 and Firefox OS are all built on top of web standards (HTML5), too, to make it easy to create apps. After all, slap together some cheap hardware parts, put a browser on top of it, and call it an OS is the cheapest way to go.

The question is do any of these “second tier” players have a chance against iOS and Android? Apple is a tough nut to crack. The bet being made by pundits — and the reason I believe the stock price is dropping — is because it is believed that Apple won’t be able to make a high margin, low cost phone. But Apple is a mysterious company and I wouldn’t necessarily bet against them at this stage of the game.

Android could be installed on cheap hardware and there is already a huge build-up of apps and games. On the other hand, Android is showing some signs of weakness. Samsung, as I mentioned earlier, is one of the major developers of Tizen. Samsung, in essence, controls all the profits in the Android ecosystem but has continually worked on its own operating systems over the years. The question is why? And the answer is protection. Understand that Samsung and Google don’t trust each other. Understand that as long as Samsung’s main smartphone revenue stream is from Google’s Android, Samsung is under Google’s thumb. Understand that Google buying Motorola was an affront to Samsung. And know that Samsung doesn’t want to be controlled by Microsoft.

Huh? What? Microsoft?

Yes, Microsoft. Microsoft, you see, has patents that has allowed it to extract royalty payments from Android licensees. It is believed those royalties are as high as $15 per device sold. In order to sell to the next billion customers, none of the Android-licensees can drive a profit when 1/3 of the retail price goes to Microsoft.

Everyone in the Android ecosystem — everyone — seems to be looking for a way out. Samsung is working on Tizen. LG and ZTE are licensing Firefox OS. This doesn’t mean these OSes and these companies will be successful and that they are all jumping ship from Android. It only means that they are all trying to move onto an OS that each one can more completely control, an OS that doesn’t cost them $15 in licensing fees per each $50 retail device.

The world is shifting. As I look back on this post in another six years I’m certain I will see a limited number of surviving device manufacturers each using a very limited number of operating systems. Apple will continue forward with iOS. Nokia will be tied to Windows Phone and Blackberry tied to its OS. Samsung will control Tizen and Motorola/Google will ship devices on Android. Amazon will survive, of course, with its not-quite-Android version of android. Maybe LG or ZTE or someone else will survive with Firefox OS.

In six years will all these companies and all these operating systems still be around? I wouldn’t count on it. But what I would count on is a more siloed mobile world than the one we have seen so far, one where individual operating systems and individual hardware manufacturers are even more closely aligned than they are today.

The 5 Ps: Achieving Focus in Any Endeavor

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Charlie Kindel references this post awhile ago but wanted to make sure I recorded it for posterity. When most of us talk about business planning we think of it as a 20 to 40-page document that never again gets updated even though the business changes considerably. When Charlie talks about the plan, he is focused on a short, 1-2 page document that outlines the rules of engagement. He calls it the 5Ps and outlines them here:

  • Purpose: Why do we exist? Why are we in business? Where do we want to be in the future? What will we deliver?
  • Principles: What are the non-negotiable rules and key strategies? How will we act?
  • Priorities: What’s the framework for tradeoffs?
  • Plan: How are we going to stage and tackle solving the problems? What are the known dates & forcing functions on the calendar?
  • People: Who’s accountable for every key part of the plan?

We’ve been doing a variation on this as we work on a new product. It’s a tiny team so people is not as important for us, but I’ve spent time outlining the purpose, principles and priorities all in notes shared across the team.

I highly recommend reading the entire thing. Great way to do planning.

Google’s Design Aesthetic

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There’s been a statement going around for a while that says Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at services. To which I reply, duh! Google bought a hardware company! I’d hope they are getting better at design.

The shape of the mobile market has changed since that day when Google acquired Motorola. Yes, Motorola is still a separate company but all the same I’m certain the experiences and expertises have leached into Google. Since then, the Nexus devices and Chromebook devices have only gotten nicer. I have a Nexus 7 tablet here and can honestly say that it is by far the nicest of the Android tablets that I’ve played with.

Meanwhile, Apple continues to struggle with services. MobileMe became iCloud and still there are endless problems in making them work correctly. Ping came and went. Now Apple’s maps has received plenty of criticism. Four years ago I watched a small Oregon company, Urban Airship, come about. Urban’s business was to make notifications really simple.

My colleagues and I never thought the service would take off not because we thought Urban Airship wasn’t doing something useful but because we thought Apple would provide the service. After all it is one thing to provide the operating system hooks and another completely to make it easy to use. Apple never did it and Urban Airship is now approaching 100 employees on two continents.

Will Apple get better at services? I’m certain Apple can be good at whatever it turns its attention to. But I know Google has gotten better at design, and a big part of the reason is because Google recognized it needed the expertise, went out and acquired it.