Unprofessionalism in a professional world

In the course of a professional career, there are a certain set of expectations from individuals or parties that you interact with. Whether at the office, with customers, or meeting vendors, we expect they work with you in a way you would want to work with them.

However ideal this is, it is not reality. The reality is there are situations with individuals or parties that are unprofessional. They tend to be poor in following up, not clear in communications, or, in some cases, just screaming like a child. Whatever the core motivation around this behavior, fear, lack of ability to understand, or poor attention to details, it is a behavior that was learned and, probably engrained, since childhood to “get their way”. The ethical dilemma is how do you deal with those who do not speak the same professional language that you do, but instead are bullies?

When having to deal with these situations, it’s good to step back, evaluate and determine if you want to be a part of it or not. There are certain situations that you do not have this option and there are certain situations that you do.

The times you do not have to deal with are situations are if you are dependent on an employee, customer/vendor for your business or require some level of funding to continue. If this is the case, it’s a risk assessment to continue or not until the status quo has changed. For the status quo to change, that change has to come from you – switch vendors, change customer or customer’s agent, or find alternative forms of funding, replace employees. However, it has to be in a way that risk is managed.

In other situations, you do not have to deal with this. You can try to fix it or work with the party, but if it is not getting better, you have a few options:

• Ignore the person. No contact is sometimes the best way to get them to stop communicating.

•  Continue to calmly and clearly set your boundaries. It is not unfair to say statements such as “Your email is unprofessional and unless it becomes more professional, I have a right to not respond.” Or “Your communications is unprofessional and not acceptable.”

• Quit/walk away/remove yourself. Although there may be a tendency to feel a certain sense of failure if you quit, there may be situations where this is the only option you have to get away from certain negative behaviors or time-wasting situations. Walking away should not be considered a sign of failure on yourself, but the party you are dealing with. Finally, it sends an unsaid signal of  strength to others.

The world of business is not just marketing, finance, tech, product, or sales. These are categories created by humans, but business existed before these categories existed. The world of business is dealing with different types of people that have different priorities, values, approaches, and options. Your best option is to use your knowledge and instinct to act upon those you interact with. Finally, learn as much as you can about the situations you are dealing with. Knowledge is power.

Since April, we have been polishing off the buildout of the new File Apartment.

The new File Apartment will have more functionality, but with the same great ease-of-use you are used to.

For a sneak peak, here are some screenshots:


    Your apartment:

   










Invite others to collaborate:

 
   











File details window:

 











 Create a new room:
   

As you can see, it's a clean, but easy to use intuitive interface. With File Apartment, you can now create multiple rooms and invite multiple users to the rooms you create where your files are stored. 

Big minds talk about ideas, average minds talk about events, small minds talk about people

One of my favorite sayings of late is:

"Big minds talk about ideas, average minds talk about events, small minds talk about people"
- Eleanor Roosevelt

This one line statement can be interpreted many ways, from the loosest to the strictest sense.

The way I look at it is not each of the three pieces are exclusive, but generally, people lean towards one of the three pieces. You cannot exclusively talk about one without the other two in most cases.

There's also a bit of your background on where you fall into these categories, i.e. your upbringing and environment that you were brought up in.

But ultimately, human society runs on ideas and the execution of ideas. Talking about ideas fosters more ideas and more creativity that can be executed on. It also helps the mind feel alive and interested.

Discussing events, and more so, people, are a result of talking about happenings around us vs ideas to make the happenings around us better.

Only with ideas, can the world improve and move forward.

So, as you go to school, work, hang with friends, or relatives, keep in mind that the guiding the discussions towards ideas is more enjoyable then what's happening when or who's doing what, and do not expect anything less.

What do you think about this saying?

Runway needed for new products to come to fruition in the marketplace

These days, there are more software start-ups being funded faster then ever before.

From incubators such as YCombinator to full-service firms such as Kleiner Perkins providing funding. Also, the tools to get products out quick through cloud computing, such as AWS and Rackspace, and programming languages, such as PHP, Python, and Ruby on Rails, we are seeing a factory of minimal viable products come to market at an accelerated pace.

However, once a minimal viable product is released, there is an injection of marketing, quick iterations through customer feedback and adding new features, potential legal complexities, and selling to the marketplace to gain marketshare and customers as quickly as possible. This is where the company truly needs to prove itself.

The challenge is not getting version 1 out, the challenge is getting to version 2 - where there's a need for a hockey stick growth of customers and proving the viability of the company and the idea.

The sad truth is 99% of the companies do not make it to version 2, which is where series A funding generally kicks in.

So, if you are going to do a start-up, from my experiences, it is important to consider the ratio of product development to marketplace acceptance is about 3-1. What does this mean?

Simply, if a product takes 3 months to make, expect an additional 9 months to determine market viability and maturity, or 1 year in total. If it takes 1 year to make a product, expect an additional 3 years, or 4 years in total.

The reason this calculation works is a direct correlation of the features, complexity, and competitiveness of the product itself against how much time will be needed to allow the product to infiltrate in the marketplace.

As a result, it is my recommendation, if you are going to do a start-up and want to succeed with subsequent fundings, growth, it's important to calculate the 3-1 ratio before embarking on a boiler room adventure.

Finally, it is hard to predict if the product will take off in the marketplace, before getting it out. However, it's good to think through the different permutations of the product early, so that there are potential areas to quickly pivot if needed based on the marketplace responsiveness.

That said, go forward and have fun.

Happy 2014-updates and goals

Happy New Year 2014!

Every year, I put updates on goals for the year.

Our last year was fantastic in terms of marketing, traffic traction, and updating our back-end systems.

We also picked up a few partners along the way for licensing some of our back-end systems that drive our own web sites.

Also, for the first time since we started the company, we are profitable. Not immensely, but enough for to get a 1 TB SSD Macbook Pro 15" retina and cover our administration costs.

As we roll into 2014, we have a renewed focus on moving forward on our products. Some things to look forward to:

- Redesign of File Apartment (http://www.fileapartment.com) that will encompass a stronger foothold in the filesharing space providing features and functionality that will increase the tracking, storage, and sharing of files with accounts and plans. (Don't worry, we will still provide our a-la-carte option for those who want to just simply upload and share.)

- Feature enhancements for GetMeThe.com to support attributes and sub categories.

- A new classifieds site based on the GetMeThe.com classifieds engine/system.

- Refresh of the All Vineyards app.

- A potential new utility app for Android.

- More exciting/interesting stuff.

Software low barrier to entry not necessarily good

Generally, in the technology industry, the mantra is that barrier to entry for software is low. There are multiple reasons for this, but the primary reason is that software requires very little physical pieces to get started with and there is a lot of documentation out there. This is unlike other industries such as :

Hardware - which requires hardware components, physical goods, durable materials. Examples: Computers, phones, appliances

Retail - which requires having expensive physical stores built-out to attract customers

Hospitality - which requires having attractive, physical spaces to allow individuals to be entertained/housed at, such as hotels, resorts, and/or cruises.

Because of this belief, generally, it is believed software is a great industry to get into. However, after being in industry for close to three decades (I started when I was 10), I argue that having a low barrier-to-entry is more of a hindrance than advantageous for the software industry. 

In the early days of software, before distribution was easy to do over the internet, there was a premium to buying a physical good, i.e., a software package, for hundreds, sometimes, thousands of dollars, to build out applications on desktop computers. Alongside knowledge and documentation was sparse and hard to find except only in the hands of industry professionals through bookstores and the companies that built the packages. Examples of this include Borland's development tools, Microsoft development tools, middle-wares such as CORBA or EBS, or PowerBuilder. There was no such thing as try before you buy in those days. 

These days, software packages and documentation are easier to acquire across the spectrum, from low quality to higher quality, for free to mere hundreds of dollars to get started. If there's enough interest, intellect, and momentum, almost anyone can pick up a software package and develop software for desktop, web, mobile, or embedded systems.

However, due to the high investment of higher barrier-to-entry industries, there is an incentive to create something that is different, competitive, appealing, and interesting for the consumer.

With lower-barrier-to-entry, as we are now seeing, the level of quality of resources and deliverables in the industry have gotten lower and lower over time. An example is software development tools are not as good as they used to be and, as a result, the software itself has suffered. Games industry is another industry that have become highly fragmented. Very few companies have done a good job in keeping up with the concept of premium and quality, which are those that have a high investment. The companies that do not are the ones that anyone is picking up and using pure short-cuts and non-thoroughness to build what I call crudware. From what I've experienced and seen in the past and today, there is a lot of crudware out there today.

One may argue that low-barrier is better because this empowers those who may not have been able to participate if it was high-barrier. I would say these individuals also do not think through as clearly what they are building which results in lower quality products that beg the question why it was even built in the first place. A lot has to go into quality software, such as UI experience, requirements, understanding what the customer wants, graphical and font elements, and finally consideration of multiple screens (web/mobile,etc).

Finally, we have gotten into a position of "ready, fire, aim", which costs a lot more in terms of time and people resources to get a quality piece of software out that is usable and makes sense on why one would use it in the long term. Most companies get to "Ready, fire" (which are seed/a-round investments", but aim fizzles way. Which in turn, results in consistent low quality and, frankly, as we are seeing, low ROI and waste for 99% of the software technology companies out there. This in turn does not help the investors.

A good metric for that is to look at companies that were mentioned in publications such as TechCrunch, Business Insider, or Gizmodo a year ago, and look now. You will notice most of these companies are not in existence anymore. Lower barrier entry results in lower quality industry.

My suggestion is if you were going to go into software development, instead of seeing what is the minimal you would need for seed, first start with what you would do if you had $2 million investment. And then break it down into iterations of the company. This will put more thought into how you would recoup the $2 million investment over a 3-5 year timeframe. And as VCs, this is what I would recommend looking at. This is what has to be done in high barrier-to-entry industries. If we treat software as a high barrier-to-entry industry, we will get high barrier-to-entry industry quality.

You can not do it all in one iteration, plan what you release and when you release.

7 layer burrito architectures and it's drawbacks

As I talk to different companies, there are places that exhibit what I have dubbed the "7-layer burrito" architecture. Of course, this name comes from the 7-layer burrito that Taco Bell sells.

As a food item, it's delicious. As an infrastructure or software architecture, it's not advantageous for an organization.

A 7-layer burrito architecture is an infrastructure architecture that has added layer upon layer of systems because:

1) There was not time to refactor or refactoring was not done completely.
2) There's a new technology that is "cool", so they must have it.
3) A belief that more layers are better - "bigger is better".

7-layer burrito architectures, of course, does not mean exactly 7-layers. But, if any organization goes to 7-layers, it should rethink what they're doing and focus on minimizing.

Personally, I like simple. The lesser the number of layers:

1) The less time spent maintaining and up keeping of each layer as new versions come out. Including testing, debugging, and fixing integrations.
2) More time is available from the team to work on value-added items.
3) The speed to debug and fix production issues is faster because there are less layers to roll through to find the root cause.
4) The speed to process and deliver information is faster.

If any organization does have a 7-layer burrito architecture, they do need to rethink why it is there and find ways to minimize it. Else, the organization can become bloated and slow down throughput tremendously.

At AcceleWeb, our architectures are simple. We have no more then 3 layers of infrastructure to support our sites, and believe that these days, very few organizations need more then 5. As the number of layers increase beyond 5, the architecture gets derailed by complexities in handling each addiitonal layer.

I would love to hear from others their thoughts.