I’ve been traveling for business more than usual lately.  Five times in the last five weeks.  Not long trips mind you, but enough to make my wife take notice.

Since it has been a while since I’ve spent any significant time traveling, it took me a while to get in the groove and optimize my travel time.  If you travel, you know a lot of optimization can be done in the area of airport time and flight time.  Since this is fresh in my mind from a few quick trips, here are my top ideas on how to get the most bang for your buck on air travel time.

1)      Booking the flight. First, if you get good at using Expedia or Orbitz, you will save a ton of time in booking your flight.  Always book the hotel, air, and car on the same reservation.  Use a low-cost car company like Advantage, Thrifty, or Dollar (don’t use Fox – bad experience).   There are lots of tips on simply using Expedia that I could write about but I’ll constrain myself and focus on the bigger picture for this post.

2)      Choose a direct flight or long+short hop. Direct flights are the best if you can get one economically, but a long+short hop works equally well.  The main thing is to try and get a lot of advantage from uninterrupted time on a long hop flight.  For instance, from Austin, I would want to go through Dallas to get to San Jose, rather than go through Phoenix.  That gives me one long leg from Dallas to San Jose and allows me to get a lot more work done on the computer.  Spreadsheets, emails needing more time and thought, and doc reviews are perfect for this quality time.

3)      Using your iPhone/Droid on the plane. Here’s a big one.  For some reason, when you first get on the plane, the flight attendants won’t let you use your phone after the plane doors close.  Yet on landing you can use your phones the nanosecond the plane lands and is taxiing on the runway.  I don’t see the difference.

Nevertheless, you can use this common knowledge that you have to turn off your phone immediately when getting on the plane to your advantage.  Use this time to quickly send a couple emails that are shorter and more cryptic than normal.  People on the receiving end will understand.  For example, let’s say someone emails you a long explanation of something that normally you would feel compelled to write a lengthy response or set up a meeting to discuss.  You can instead type “plane door closing.  I agree. Can we get Fred’s take?”   The beauty of this is you acknowledge the sender, move the ball down the court to a next step, avoid a meeting (at least temporarily), and hopefully make you and the other person more productive.

4)      Use the priority line at the security check-in.  Ok, this one is probably not right to suggest, but if necessary in an emergency, it works very well.  Normally this line is reserved for first class and airline personnel.  If for example you travel on Monday or Tuesday morning, you might be surprised like I have been when you get to the airport and the security check-in line is practically wrapped around the terminal.   Get your boarding pass as usual and try to change the seat to the bulkhead row, which is usually row six.  The good thing about this is row six looks like it may be a row in a business class seat.  Maybe this is just me being paranoid and this isn’t even necessary.  But if you can jump in the priority line, I’ve personally seen it can save you as much as 50 minutes in some cases.

Those are a few tips.  Since I’ve been traveling more, I’m looking for other smart time-saving ideas.  Please let me know if you have any other good tips. J

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The Buffetts in 1937 (left to right): sister Bertie, Warren, mother Leila, and sister Doris.

I recently finished reading “The Snowball, Warren Buffett and the Business of Life” by Alice Schroeder.   By all accounts this may be the one book that comes closest to a Buffett autobiography, as he gave the author full access and encourages her to write about “the less flattering version”.

The book is a long, deep read about his business and personal life, leaning more towards the personal side and its effects on his business deals.  After I finished the book, I read many of the reviews on Amazon and was struck by the lack of commentary about how his early childhood affected his life.  I’ll talk about that in a second.

To begin with, I think you can read the book looking through two sets of lenses.  One pair of lenses is rose colored, and the other pair is like the bifocals that I have found I need to start wearing because they bring things more into focus.  (I am still in denial about this by the way).

The first, rose colored, way to read this book is to look for clues of what makes Buffett a legendary investor and how you might apply those lessons to your career or personal investments.  That is how I assume most people read this book, and is what I call the light version.  There is a lot of great information you can learn from Buffett’s life story about the need to focus, how to find “cigar butt” investments, what constitutes a good company manager, and much more. Warren Buffett often gets noted for his incredible focus, and that is attributed to the drive he had from a young age.

Then there is the second way, with bifocals, and that version is dark.   The author Alice Schroeder covers Buffett’s personal life in great detail, including his early childhood.  Buffett was born in 1930 during the Great Depression, and that extremely difficult environment played a role in how he viewed life as it did my grandparents and most others that survived that era.   But Warren Buffett had a second, even greater difficulty with his home life.

Warren was a middle child with an older sister Doris and younger sister Roberta (Bertie).  They grew up in what was described as a very cold household with no outward displays of affection for the kids from either his father Howard or mother Leila.  His mother Leila took it a step further and verbally abused Doris and Warren regularly from the time they were very young.  She had a bad temper and would “verbally lash the children over and over again… they were worthless, ungrateful, and selfish, and should feel ashamed.”  The author goes on to say:

“While it was apparent that her attacks were deliberate, and she had some degree of control over them, it isn’t at all clear how she perceived her behavior as a parent.  But no matter what she thought she was doing, by the time Warren was three years old and their sister Roberta, known as Bertie, was born, “it couldn’t be put back together” he says, for him or for Doris.  The damage to their souls was done.”

As a parent of three young kids myself, that’s hard to read.  If you then make some assumptions on how that affected his life, you come to some stark conclusions.  A psychologist friend of mine surprised me when he said that likely Warren Buffett has obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).   Given his childhood, he is most likely obsessed with the need to feel secure.  He feeds that obsession with compulsively pursuing money.  He built what eventually became an empire of businesses around him and insulated himself from his family.   Throughout his life, his relationship with his own kids and grandkids has unfortunately been horrible.

That part of the story gets glossed over somewhat and you realize it could be because the author is a close friend of Warren’s and doesn’t want to hurt his feelings.   But if it were talked about more, I think Warren Buffett’s life story would look a lot more ordinary and would teach an even more valuable lesson – the lesson of family.

Rather than what happened to him, and what he did to his kids and wife (which I didn’t even get in to, but suffice it to say he stayed married but really wasn’t “married” for over 30 years), there are these four (negative) Lessons from Warren:

1)      Love your kids and demonstrate it to them every day.

2)      Love your wife and demonstrate it to her every day.

3)      Always prioritize family.

4)      Then, and only then, work hard, get smarter, be driven, focused, and determined.

Otherwise, what’s the point?

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I seem to be drawn to small, hi-tech companies that show a lot of promise.  I’ve been lucky at picking several to work for that have done well.   Of the last four companies I joined, two were acquired and two went IPO.  If you have an entrepreneurial spirit and want to feel what it’s like to be a part of a huge success, you undoubtedly will want to increase your chance of success by choosing a company wisely.   Otherwise you are wasting valuable time and opportunity cost.  But how do you choose the right company to work for?

After scratching an entrepreneurial itch and finally starting my own company last year, I recently decided to accept a go-to-market role at what I anticipate will be number 5 of 5 successful hi-tech companies.  The company I joined is RGB Networks, and I run product marketing and management for the software business unit created from a smaller company RGB acquired called Ripcode.  Since I just started at RGB and the hiring process is fresh in my mind, I thought it would be a good example of criteria that can be used to evaluate a company’s chances for success.

First and foremost, you don’t really get to choose any company to work for.  They have to want to hire you.  Either they need to come find you, or you need to find them and convince them to hire you.  In my case, I knew someone at the company and they reached out about a position the company was looking to fill, and that’s how it all started.  But possible opportunities come along all the time, and you can’t take every one.  If you are looking, you may be evaluating two or three at the same time.  You need to evaluate each opportunity carefully while concurrently demonstrating how you would be a valuable hire for the company.  Ideally both you and the company should be convincing each other why it’s good for you to join.  If it’s just one way, likely it won’t work out in the long run.

1)      Value proposition.  The biggest criterion that has served me well is evaluating a company’s product value proposition.  I recently wrote about this from an investor perspective when looking at a company to invest in; and it is equally important when evaluating a company to work for.  In my opinion, value proposition is paramount.  In RGB’s case, after taking a close look at the market opportunity and what RGB Networks provides, this part was a no brainer.

RGB builds big iron for video streaming in cable networks, IPTV networks, mobile networks, and anywhere else someone wants to view video.  Delivering video is incredibly complex, partly because the industry and technical requirements are constantly evolving.  Video and audio codecs, transport protocols, set top boxes, servers, video players – everything is changing which makes it hard for operators to keep up.  Couple that with the fact that operators and content providers are teaming up at an incredible rate to offer new ways to deliver content.  Every day for the last week I have heard AT&T U-verse radio advertisements offering to stream television programs to my mobile phone.  Just today the Financial Times announced Google will be offering Pay-Per-View Hollywood movies on YouTube.  And three weeks ago Mashable reported that NetFlix is going to offer content to Android and iPhones.

The biggest problem with delivering video content to all of these devices is that there is not one standard.  In the days when only your cable TV provider was handling your Standard Definition and High Definition video content, it was a lot easier because they controlled the end point – the set top box (STB).  Now with devices like iPhones, iPads, and Droid phones, IPTV portals like Hulu, and competing streaming protocols from Microsoft, Apple and Adobe – it’s a crazy mixed up world.

Now enter RGB Networks.  RGB makes life easier for all of the operator networks, by building hardware infrastructure that can scale video streaming at an order of magnitude over the competition, offered in a flexible architecture (chassis, blades with ASICs and FPGAs, hardware and software solutions).  RGB is the one-stop shop for any cable, telco, mobile, or Over the Top (OTT) provider.

2)      The strength of the management team.  Right after the value prop, the biggest thing to consider when looking at a company is the management team.  This is why I was so happy to see who is leading RGB.  The CEO Jef Graham is the former CEO of Peribit and sold Peribit to Juniper for $337 million where he became an EVP.  The CTO Yuval Fisher is an industry icon in IP video, and has an uncanny market sense in addition to being extremely technical.  The VP Engineering, Charles Corbalis, has an incredible track record including a VP/GM at Cisco after Cisco’s acquisition of Stratacom where he was the founding VP Engineering.  (For those of us that were CCIEs at the time, the Stratacom ATM/Frame Relay devices were the cool toy to play with.)

And the list goes on.  Suffice it to say that if you have a strong management team, and everyone has respect for each other and plays nice, then you have a huge competitive advantage.

3)      Company culture. If you are on the go-to-market (GTM) side of a company, especially in product marketing and product management, culture is critical.  Not only the traditional sense of company culture, but also how a company conceives of and develops products.  Does the product team work in an Agile/Scrum methodology?  Is customer development (Four Steps to the Epiphany) encouraged?  Will people embrace a Minimum Viable Product (Lean Startup) strategy?  The greatest competitive advantage of a smaller company is being agile and responsive to market changes.  If you get a sense that a small company isn’t acting like one, that’s a problem.

4)      The investors. Having tier-one investors is obviously a good thing.   RGB’s investors include Accel, IVP and Kleiner.  You should look for companies that don’t have too much investment, or too little, for what they are building.  Hardware products take more capital.  Software and services not so much. Strategic investments from industry related companies can be very helpful.

5)      Revenue trend. Investors like to say “the trend is your friend” when looking at a public company’s investment potential.  The same can be said for looking at a company to join.  When I joined Inktomi for example, the company was in the middle of what became 14 quarters in a row of 30% quarter-over-quarter growth.

6)      Company size. In my opinion, smaller is better.  Most companies I join usually have between 50-200 people when I come aboard, which seems to be a good range.  Fewer than 50 and the company is likely not that far along yet and the future is more in doubt.  Greater than 200 and it’s hard for one individual to make a big impact day one.

7)      Opportunity to leverage and extend your strengths. I come from a technical background (network engineering), have run a regional sales organization, led teams in product management and marketing, and recently ran my own web-based business where I learned a great deal about search engine optimization (SEO) and online lead generation.  I love to learn new things, as probably do a lot of entrepreneurial-minded folks.   If a potential company gives you the opportunity to grow, that’s a great thing.

If the majority of these seven criteria apply to a company you are considering, you have found a winner.  If you are fortunate enough to be in a key go-to-market role, then you get to help build the company’s success.  Having that possibility in your own hands is a gift and makes every day exciting.

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There are so many adages about persistence; it can make your head spin.  “90% of success is just showing up”.  “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”  And perhaps my favorite “Being defeated is only a temporary condition; giving up is what makes it permanent.”

Persistence is unquestionably needed as an entrepreneur, and is often highlighted as the number one quality of a successful entrepreneur.  Mark Suster recently covered this topic well on his blog.

What really needs to be said about persistence though is that it has to be married with the ability to change course quickly if that is what the market is telling you.  Steve Blank of Four Steps to the Epiphany fame has a great story about adapting quickly when initial market assumptions don’t work out.  An entrepreneur went to his VC board to tell them what wasn’t working and what the plan was to change it.  The inexperienced VCs screamed, but the older, wiser VC in the room calmly told the entrepreneur to follow his gut and make the strategy change.  That’s brave for an entrepreneur to admit what wasn’t working, and commendable for the investor to believe in the entrepreneur.

Having a quick iteration loop and adapting quickly has been defined by Eric Ries as the pivot.   This turns out to be incredibly hard to do for tech entrepreneurs when you have a large “sunk cost” of a particular iteration or set of code.  You really want to believe that your initial assumptions will work out, and it can be difficult to determine when enough is enough and to try something else.

I don’t think there is anything more important to remember as an entrepreneur, or general business person, as 1) be persistent and 2) be willing to pivot.    Those two qualities are at the foundation of any successful venture.  If you can do both of those things well, your chance of success goes up by an order of magnitude.

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A careful balancing act is needed when running your business.   You must carve out a lot of time initially to strategize on how to build your business.  You must also strategize on a regular, almost daily basis, as you research, fine tune and tweak the business model and long term goals.  Your strategy is a set of plans to reach a set of goals.  But most of your time is spent on tactics.  You need to do all the things necessary to execute your plan.  Your tactics are usually a laundry list of dozens of items you should prioritize and act on every week.

The key is to make sure that your tactics always correspond to a strategic goal.  This can be a challenge.  A good trick to ensuring tactics-to-strategy alignment is for every task ask yourself “why am I doing this?”  What strategy does this support?  If you can’t put a tactic in the bucket of something that supports your strategy, you should seriously question whether it is necessary.

Correspondingly, all tactics should be prioritized by where they fall on the list of strategic goals.  This is a great way to prioritize your day.   For example, your strategic goals may include getting five new customer wins by the end of the month, or doubling traffic to the website in six months, or increase revenue by 30% in three months.  Every action item on your plate during the day should be weighed against that list of goals.  Does the action support the goal?  Yes?  Proceed.  No?  Why are you doing it?  If you don’t have a good answer to that, you need to re-prioritize.

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One of the biggest questions entrepreneurs have is how to get funding for their venture.  Fortunately there are many sources for venture dollars.  Where to look for funding depends on what stage your company is at.

Early on you should either bootstrap or go to friends and family. Many companies start this way, and the goal with limited early funding is to stay lean and get something built as cheaply as possible.  There is disagreement on whether bootstrapping is ultimately successful, and whether you should take angel money early on.  Personally I believe it is crazy not to bootstrap, at least initially.  Bootstrapping forces you to think very carefully about your business; and it is your chance to prove to yourself and potential investors that there is something worthwhile to invest further in and keep the ball rolling with the company.

The next stage of funding is usually angel money. The amount of angel money can vary widely, but is often within the $25K to $100K level.   However, anything south of $1M is usually considered to be an angel level.   To get an angel level of investment, you need to get plugged into your local angel network.  In most high tech communities like Austin, there are dozens of organizations and hundreds of angel investors.  In Austin, a good list to reference is on Austin Entrepreneur Network.

After an early seed round, if your company continues to do well, you may want to go for venture capital funding.  As with angel, you should first reach out to local VCs.  It’s best to do research on the venture firm and see if they typically make investments in your space, and target those first.  Unlike angel, going for VC money opens up a wider aperture and you can look at VCs in other cities, as it’s harder to get angel money from someone living elsewhere.

Regardless of where and from whom you attempt to get funding, the most important thing in most investor’s eyes is where the introduction comes from.  Cold calls to investors or throwing business plans over the wall will never get a warm reception.  It takes a reference from a trusted source to get a meeting, and ultimately get an investment.  In the case of VCs, they see hundreds of business plans per month, and there is no way they have time to look at all of them.  Priority goes to known entrepreneurs and references.

Alternative funding sources are starting to emerge.  Companies like stealth-mode Profounder promise to bring crowdsourcing to venture financing.  Profounder is being started by the founder of the microfinance site Kiva.org, and counts Reid Hoffman, chairman of Linked-in, among its advisors.  A crowdsourced model of investment is a brilliant idea that it’s surprising hasn’t been already done yet.

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To successfully start a venture, there is no way you can do it alone.  Not even with just a partner or two.  To build a strong company, you will need to build a correspondingly strong network of people around you.

You should begin this process early.  If you haven’t started in earnest yet, do it today.  The people you want to network with will largely be driven by the type of business you are starting.  Of course you will want to network with other entrepreneurs, but you will also want to network with folks that can lend some direct insight into your business and potential customers.

In truth, you want to network with as many people as possible because you never know where one good contact will lead down the road.  But you should prioritize who you network with, because time is precious and you will have a lot on your plate.

There are four optimal types of people that you must network with at some level.  Make sure all of these bases are covered.

1)      People that have direct insight into your business. This could be someone that started, or has worked at, a company in a similar market.    For example, if I wanted to start selling cars online, it would be great to talk to a car dealership owner or someone that started another ecommerce site.    These people are very valuable because for sure they know something you don’t about your business.

2)      Potential customers. Perhaps the best people to network with are prospective customers.   You will want to understand their needs and have them define your products for you.

3)      Potential funding sources. You should network within circles of high net worth individuals, VCs, angels, and business partners.  Even if you are bootstrapping you will want to be in a position to take the company to the next level, and having strong relationships with people that could invest money in your venture is very important.

4)      People that augment your skill set. As the saying goes, you should focus on your strengths and hire to your weaknesses.    In the case of a startup entrepreneur, you should absolutely network with people that augment your strengths.  Let’s say you are bad at bookkeeping, creative design, SEO, or any other major task of running your business.  You better network with someone that is awesome at it, otherwise you are in trouble.

The best thing about networking with a lot of smart people over time is that if you do it right, eventually you will build up quite a fan base.  Most people love to be cheerleaders when it comes to helping an entrepreneurial venture.  Personally, I love to help others reach their goals, and am glad to help out when asked.  By building a large consortium of people that want you to succeed, there are infinite ways that group of people can directly and indirectly help you through advice, guidance, customer referrals, bartering services, discounted services, investment, and dozens of other ways.

Nothing is more important when starting a business than building a strong network.

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If you are serious about your business, you have to trademark your company name.  You absolutely won’t get really big otherwise.    You may find out in the process that you can’t really trademark the name you were planning to use because someone else has trademarked it, and it’s certainly best to find that out earlier than later.   However, if you chose your company name correctly based on good branding guidelines, you shouldn’t have a problem.

Using a trademark attorney is the best course when establishing a mark for your company name.  You can do a lot of the initial legwork yourself though to save some of the cost, and if you are feeling adventurous you can even do the whole thing yourself.  It’s actually not that difficult.

After choosing a good potential brand name, start by visiting the United States Patent and Trademark Office website.  You can search on name you are considering and see if anyone else already owns that mark.  The search may turn up results for that name, and potentially that is still ok.  It depends what the business owner of the mark does and whether their business is related to your business.  But most times, you want to avoid a mark that anyone else is laying claim to.  This is where consulting with an experienced attorney pays off.

Additionally, you will want to do a Google search for the potential company name.  If the search returns a lot of results, that’s probably not a good thing.  Someone else may be using it for their business, and that can cause you problems down the line.  Again, consulting with an attorney will be helpful.  For sure if your Google search returns results for another company or product that is similar to the type of company that you are planning on, that’s a bad thing.  You should move on and try another name.

The same goes for names of your products. If a Google search or USPTO search turns up an existing mark, you should probably steer clear.

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I’ll reveal a pet peeve of mine about entrepreneurs.  In this post, I really mean “entrepreneurs” rather than entrepreneurs.

It seems there are literally countless people that can talk about an idea they have, what they want to do, and why it is so smart. They can talk the talk.

But very few, and in my opinion the low single digits, can actually walk the walk.  Meaning, can you execute?  Will you do what you say you can do?  Can you take something from the idea stage, flesh it out, figure out if there is a market for it, and then go build it?

For most folks, the answer is no.  And the excuse list is a mile long.

I don’t have… money.  Time.  Anyone to help me.  I’m not a programmer.  I don’t know anything about fund raising.  My wife won’t let me.  I’ve got mouths to feed.  The timing isn’t right.   I’m working 60 hours/week already.  My butt needs wiping.

It’s pathetic.

Look, either you want to do it or you don’t.  Stop whining.  This is where Nike got the branding right.  “Just do it”.

For all the excuses on the list, there are even more ways you can overcome the obstacles.  There is always a way.  Everything in life is a trade off.  You just need to figure out what to trade off.  Time, money, sleep, exercise, and lots of other things can be horse traded when you are following your passion.  A great blog post from Jason Cohen of Smart Bear drives this point home by saying to truly succeed, you need to sacrifice your health.   Hopefully you can succeed without doing this, but I have to agree with Jason.  If you need to, you should.

However it seems so many are not willing to put in the sweat equity.  My advice to all “entrepreneurs” is this:

If you catch yourself starting a sentence with ‘I don’t have’ or ‘but I’m not’, then stop.  Back up.  Think about what you just said.  Then tell yourself “ok, there must be a way.”  Strategize about how to solve your problem.   Get advice from others in your network.  Move forward.  Be persistent.  Do something.  It may not be the right thing, but eventually you will get where you need to go.

And if you need inspiration, watch the first two minutes of this Youtube clip.  Its the most iconic “walk the walk” scene ever.

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Almost any company you start will require some level of creative design.  It could be your website logo, web layout, business card design, stationery, or a brochure.

In the past, you would need to find a contract creative designer that hopefully would work cheaply.  But today you have some other really good options.

Websites have sprung up that offer outsourced creative work to be done on “spec”.  Sites like crowdSPRING and 99designs are duking it out for customer mindshare.

Let’s say you need a logo, or a website design, powerpoint template, etc.  As a buyer you simply post a project, timeframe, and name a price you are willing to pay.   Then the clock starts ticking, eBay style.  By default you would allow a week for submissions.  Along the way you would rate and comment on those submissions, until you find the perfect one.  At the end of the week, you award the project to the best submission.  Sound simple?

Spec work isn’t without it’s critics.  Some would say that doing work this way commoditizes the efforts of designers.  This may be true, as you can get really good logo designs for less than $400.   But the benefits for the buyer are many, including lots of choice and different perspectives.  Typically a contract creative designer might give you four or five choices if you are lucky, and that’s just from one creative person.  With 99designs or crowdSPRING you could easily have more than 100 choices from two dozen creatives.

The market will decide if there is a place for these types of companies, but so far the answer seems to be a resounding yes.  For small businesses, this is an excellent new way to tackle what was once a difficult obstacle – creative help in branding your business.

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