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.

Serendipity

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Yesterday, if you were living in a cave, was the Superbowl. What interests me so much is how the National Football League became the NFL. The reality is that television and the rise of the NFL came at the same time, and football, as Seth Godin talked about in his post yesterday, was made for tv. In fact it is pretty clear that if it wasn’t for television the NFL specifically and football in general probably would not be as great as it is today.

Serendipity, luck, perfect timing. These are such important factors to get any business off the ground. Twitter was launched, in essence, at South by Southwest conference six years ago. It just so happened that SXSW was the perfect storm for Twitter: lots of people together who didn’t really know each other all looking for the hottest place to be. Twitter, with its indirect connection model, was perfect for that time and place.

Sometimes this timing doesn’t work out. It was the year before Twitter launched when we were on the verge of changing math education forever, except a fateful decision by Palm to stop making handhelds and abandon the education market killed the entire deal.

Yes, a company needs a good product. Yes, it needs to have all the pieces in place to take advantage of this timing. But the perfect storm of success needs to happen too. Rovio took years to have success and finally found it with Angry Birds on iPhone. Before the iPhone there was barely a casual gaming market. It’s rise made Rovio, as we know it today, possible.

Dropbox, too, owes its meteoric success to the small screen, or more exactly to multiple screens. Ten years ago most of us didn’t need Dropbox. We had a single computer and all of our files were there. In a world where we carry three or even four machines, though, keeping files on all of them, up-to-date, is critical. Dropbox launched at the perfect time.

This is why fortitude is so important. The ability to endure hardship, the pain that is believing in something even when the world is laughing, is critical. Serendipity happens. Being there at the right time with the right product is a huge part of success.