So, apparently I have to write a blog post today which doesn’t mention royalty or babies, despite every other media outlet in the United Kingdom being awash with nannies, nappies and nurseries.

So let’s talk about Lightning Talks, shall we? The gestation of a Lightning Talk is relatively short, at only 12 weeks, and although the delivery is far from painless, at 7 minutes and 3o seconds at least it is over and done with quickly. No sooner have you finished than the worst of it is all forgotten as your bundle of personal pride is passed to you, warm and squawking.

If you have decided to take a shot at Lightning Talk greatness, the submission process is at the end of this blog post here. If you’re still dithering, here is some advice from the horse’s mouth: the Lightning Talk alumni. But be quick to act on it: the deadline for submissions is 7th August.

Lightning Talk alumni have been generous with their advice and support for anyone considering entering the process this year. Here’s some of the points that were frequently raised:

• Treat your submission video seriously. ‘I filmed about a dozen takes of me trying to say it.  The submission itself is work and you should set aside a few hours to do it.’ Tim Cull.
• Practice, practice, practice – should go without saying, really. ‘Practice helps, but that’s table stakes. Everyone expects you to have practiced.’ Des Traynor.
• Don’t get clever with powerpoint – ‘Your slides are context not content’. Joe Corkery.
• Get feedback – ‘you also need to have the support of a friend who will give you candid feedback and support (I would be happy to be that person for any BoSer, BTW, just give me a shout).’ Jody Burgess.
• Prepare for disaster and be OK with it. ‘If you watch the video of my talk, there’s a point in the first third where I’m just standing there like a dummy saying nothing in front of a room full of 300 people.  It lasts for about fifteen agonizing seconds’. Tim Cull

Was it worth it? (The Lightning Talk, not the baby)

• ‘It was a great experience and  a serious confidence booster.’ Jody Burgess
• ‘I got a lot out of the process, way more than just my linkedin profile picture!  I got to meet a great group of Lightning Talkers, many of whom I’ve stayed in contact and discussed projects with.  It was a great icebreaker to chat with other attendees and presenters’ Gregory Menvielle
• ‘First and foremost, giving a lightning talk is awesome and totally worth the effort’ Tim Cull
• ‘I gave a Lightning Talk at the 2010 conference and for me it was one of the absolute highlights of the conference.’ Joe Corkery
• ‘If you’re considering attending BoS, I strongly recommend you apply to give a lightning talk. I wasn’t sure I could do it well, and I’m still not sure I did, but it was a great experience. Give it a try.’ Des Traynor

If you want more top tips on preparing your Lightning Talk, then I particularly recommend these blogs as a bottomless pit of information and inspiration (plus they made me laugh):

Des Traynor: Talk: They’re all just perspectives

Tim Cull: How to be a Lightning Talk speaker

Jo Corkery: Preparing for a Lightning Talk

Go on, give it a go! What’s the worst that can happen in 7 minutes and 30 seconds. You can find the submission process at the end of this blog post here, and the deadline for submissions is 7th August

I read, ‘Anything you Want‘ by Derek Sivers after he shared this wonderful talk at Business of Software Conference 2010. Most business books are long and become boring as there is a central point that is repeated ad nausem as publishers are still stuck in the, ‘More is more’ publishing paradigm. ‘Anything you Want‘ is published by the Domino Project, Seth Godin’s (another speaker that year) and neither Derek nor Seth really give a flying banana about existing orthodoxy.

‘Anything you Want’ is a very short book and you can read it in an hour. It had such a positive impact on the way I think about life that I ended up buying a copy for everyone who came to the conference the following year. I also have a small stock of copies that I like to give to people, especially people I meet who talk about how they really want to be an entrepreneur. It often puts them off and this is a good thing, not everyone should be an entrepreneur, it won’t lead to happiness for everyone. Sometimes it makes people leave their jobs and start something and that is awesome too. They are going into something with their eyes more open than they would have otherwise.

So pleased for Derek that he just found out that the book is Number One in all three categories on Amazon. Congratulations Derek, well deserved. It’s a great read.

Three more great speakers confirmed for Business of Software Conference (28-30th October 2013). We hope you will be as excited as us about the new additions…

First and second, Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek from Re-Wired Group will be doing a talk, ‘Uncovering the Jobs-to-be-done‘. You might remember Clayton Christensen’s talk a couple of years ago when he introduced this concept at Business of Software 2011 – it’s the idea that customers often ‘hire’ your product or service to do something different to the thing that you think. Bob and Chris will explain the idea in more detail and help us understand how this knowledge can help you build better products that more people use. Seems we aren’t the only ones that pleased they are coming – Jason Fried at 37 Signals tweeted, “So glad to see Bob Moesta speaking! Bob’s amazing. He’s going to blow minds.”

Thirdly, we will also be joined by the incomparably fabulous Kathy Sierra. Kathy has been thinking hard about whether she should speak this year. Last year, her talk, ‘Building the minimum badass user‘ received the highest ever feedback for a talk (and we like to think we set a high bar). She has been working hard on her book (it won’t be out before BoS this year sadly), but she didn’t want to speak unless she felt she had enough material to move the conversation on significantly. I never had any doubt she would but it was a source of celebration when she said she felt she had enough to come back. Welcome home Kathy.

Here’s Kathy’s talk from last year – Building the minimum viable user.

So that speaker line up is starting to look good huh?

• Professor Rita McGrath, Professor, Columbia Business School: Dynamic strategy. The end of competitive advantage.
• Scott Berkun, Author, The future of work
• Jeff Gothelf, Managing Director, NEO, How does ‘lean’ work when you aren’t a startup? A practical step-by-step guide to making innovation better.
• Dan Siroker, CEO, Optimizely, If data can help win elections, what can it do for your business?
• Iris Lapinski, CEO, AppsForGood. What can we learn from a new generation of tech entrepreneurs?
• Mikey Trafton, Founder & CEO, FireAnt Software. Recruiting & hiring a world-class team.
• Dharmesh Shah, Founder & CTO, Hubspot. The Culture Code.
• Mike Muhney, Founder & CEO, VipOrbit. Building sales into code.
• Sarah Hatter, Founder of co-Support: Support is never, ever, as important as product development. Discuss.
• Patrick McKenzie, Kalzumeus Software: Building things to help you sell the things you build.
• Scott Farquhar, CEO, Atlassian: Leadership in crisis. When stuff gets real.

• More information on the talks on the speaker pages.

Perhaps you would like to speak and share something you care about with an audience of passionate software people? Don’t forget that we are open for submissions for Lightning Talks – details and entry here – don’t forget the deadline is 7th August.

Is there anyone you would like to see there this year? Is there a topic you think we should be covering in more detail? Is there a problem that we can help you solve – either in a talk or by connecting you to someone else in the BoS community? Let us know, we will try to help. One thing we have been asked a few times recently is software pricing. Do you know any tools or frameworks out there that can help people approach the problem of software pricing? Who are the best people writing and talking about it? Please let us know and we will share via the blog.

There is lots on the Business of Software blog that is new including Joel Spolsky’s talk from last year, ‘The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange‘ and Bob Dorf’s ‘Customer Development, The Science of Acceleration for Growth Businesses‘.

Just for a change though, we thought you might like to look at a couple of things we found recently that we thought you would enjoy. Some of you will read these and change your lives.

• Make your life better by sending 5 simple emails. Some great life hacks elsewhere on this blog from Eric Barker.
• ​Quitting consulting via productization. Fearsomely useful advice from Patrick McKenzie.
• ​A wonderful interview with Clayton Christensen in the Economist on health, big data and disruption in education among other things.

We hope to see you at BoS 2013. If you haven’t already, don’t forget to book your place today.

Mark Littlewood

Remember that amazing Professor Clayton Christensen talk at Business of Software 2011 about life, marketing and the jobs that people hire products to do? You could almost hear the pennies dropping as he talked about the importance of understanding the job that your product does.

Before we tell you a little bit more about Chris Spiek and Bob Moesta’s talk at this year’s Business of Software Conference, let’s remind ourselves about what, ‘The Job your product does‘, means…

Clayton explained the concept by talking about a project for McDonald’s who were a bit bemused that sales of their super thick milk shakes, which they had assumed would be a big seller at the weekend (think children being given a treat by their parents) but were surprised to find that they were also selling a lot on weekday mornings…

This is the transcript of the relevant part of Clayton’s talk at Business of Software 2011.

“I will describe it with a silly story about Milkshakes. So this is one of the big national fast food restaurants and they were trying to goose up the sales of their milkshakes. I walked into one of their restaurants and there were the sandwiches and over here were the desserts and the milkshakes were the line item in the desert menu. And these guys were very sophisticated and they had a profile of the quintessential customer that likes each of those individual products. So they had a profile of the quintessential milkshake consumer and I read the milkshake characteristics and I thought “Holy cow this is Clayton Christensen right there” and so they invite people like me into conference room and so they say could you please tell us how we could improve the milkshake so you buy more of them?

“They get very clear feedback they would then improve the products in the ways that their customer said and had no impact on sales or profit whatsoever. So as we were thinking about this we realized that the unit of analysis is the job not the customer and so we stood in a restaurant one day for 18 hours and very careful data whenever somebody bought a milkshake; what were they buying, what time did they buy, what were they wearing, were they alone, did they buy other food with it, did they eat it at the restaurant or go off with it?

“And it turned out as we added it up at the end of the day that nearly half of the milkshakes were sold before 8 AM . People were always alone, it’s the only thing they bought and always got in the car and drove off with it. So to figure out what job they were doing, we came back the next day stood outside the restaurant so that we can confront these people as they are coming off with their milkshake and we say “look I see what you are just doing here but I gotta understand what job you were trying to do that caused you to come here and hire that milkshake?” and they struggle, and so to try to help to them we say, “think about the last time you were in the same situation needing to get the same job done but you didn’t come here to hire the milkshake what did you hire?”

“It turned out they all had the same job to do in the morning and that is they had a long and boring drive to work and they just needed to do something while they drove to keep themselves occupied. One hand had to be on the wheel but jeez somebody gave them another hand there wasn’t anything in it and I just needed to do something to do while I was driving. ‘I wasn’t hungry yet but I knew I was gonna be hungry by 10’o clock so I just needed something that would sink down and stay there for the morning’ [Laughter]. Boy I never thought about it this way before but you know last Friday I hired a banana, take my word for it never hire bananas they are gone in 3 minutes, you are hungry by 7:30, if you promise you won’t tell my wife I hire donuts twice a week. They are better but they are not very good they crumble all over my clothes, they are gone too fast and gets to my fingers gooey. Yeah I hire bagels on occasion but jeez so dry and tasteless, I have to steer with my knees while I put the cream cheese on it and if the phone rings we have got into trouble. If you look under the seat you will see a snickers bar wrapper that’s because I had snickers bar once but I felt so guilty I just have never done that again.

“But let me tell you when I come here and hire this milkshake, it is so viscous, I can’t even pour it out and it takes me 25 minutes to suck it up that thin little straw. Who cares what the ingredients are? I don’t, I just know that I am full for the morning and it fits right in my cup holder and it turns out that the milkshake does the job better than any other competitors and the competitors are not Burger King Milkshakes. But its bananas, donuts, bagels, snickers bar, coffee and so on and then it turned out in the later afternoon and evening it was hired for a fundamentally different job primarily by fathers who have been saying “no” to their kids all week long and there have just been something they can say yes to so that their kids will think of them as kind parents. And so I’m standing at the counter and I order my meal and then my son, Spence orders his meal and then he looks up at me and he says, “Dad could you buy me a milkshake?” and I put my hand on his arm and I say, “Spence I would love to give you a Milkshake” and I say that it has nothing to do with Spence but I just want to feel good about myself you know and so watch what happens there its consumed in the restaurant with other food and with other people and I finish my meal and Spence finishes his meal and then the kid picks up that crummy milkshake and lemme tell you it is so viscous, it takes the kid forever to suck it up that thin little straw. You know, and I wait patiently for a while and then I wait impatiently for a while [Laughter] and they I say, “look Spence we can’t stay here all night” so we throw it away half consumed.

“Then they invite me as a customer who buys milkshakes and say, “so Clay how can we improve our milkshakes so that you buy more of them?” What am I gonna say because I hire for 2 fundamentally different products and then when they combine my response with all of the other 45-65 year old male slobs with children and they give one size fixed in product that doesn’t do any of the job so that it’s been hired to do.

“I hope you can see how if you understand the job then you understand how to improve it so that it does the job even better and it turns out that they were improving the milkshake on a trajectory performance that was irrelevant to the jobs for which it was hired. So for the morning, how would you improve it? Well you wanna make it even more viscous right to take longer to suck it up, you stir in tiny chunks of fruit but not to make it healthy because they don’t hire it to become healthy but to just bring variety and unpredictability to a boring commute. On occasion it would go [pop] and it would wake me up and then you would move the dispenser machine from behind the counter to the front of the counter and give people a swipe card so they could just rush in gas up and go and never get caught in the line and the other afternoon job would be a totally different concept you know. But I hope that you can see that how understanding the job to be done is really critical.”

The same principles apply to building great software products. The guys behind the concept, Chris Spiek and Bob Moesta deliver some brilliant workshops that help you to understand what job your product does with organisations like 37 Signals – here is Jason Fried talking about the concept of ‘Jobs to be done‘.

“Customers don’t just buy a product — they switch from something else. And customers don’t just leave a product — they switch to something else. “It’s in these switching moments that the deepest customer insights can be found. “Most businesses don’t know the real reasons why people switch to — or from — their products. We’ll teach you how to find out.” Jason Fried

We’re delighted that Chris Spiek and Bob Moesta will be talking at Business of Software Conference (28-30th October 2013) about the concept of Jobs to be done, why customers ‘switch’ from one product to another and how to apply the ideas in your own organisation.

TALK: UNCOVERING THE JOBS-TO-BE-DONE

Have you ever wondered about the REAL reason your customers are buying what you sell? The Jobs-to-be-Done framework has been used for over 20 years to understand what motivates consumers to buy, or to switch from one product to another, and often times it has very little to do with what product developers believe to be the most important features or attributes of the product.

During this session Chris Spiek and Bob Moesta will lay out why it’s essential to understand the Jobs that your products and services are being hired to do, and how understand the Job-to-be-Done can lead you to leaner, faster, more simple product development and highly effective advertising and messaging.

But we are going to have to wait till Monday to share some news with you.

Reminded me that people are awesome…

I am feeling as sharp as the guy at 1.12 on that video right now though it is really nothing to do with me.

Two new speakers for Business of Software Conference (28-30th October 2013) and a reminder that the EARLY BIRD rate of $1,695 closes in 24 hours time.

Scott Berkun will share his experiences working at WordPress.com, one of the top 20 websites in the world (by traffic), one of the world’s most distributed companies – there is no office. He’ll share his thoughts on what every organisation can learn from a company that holds no meetings and doesn’t ‘do’ email.

Jeff Gothelf is Managing Director of Neo, a global product innovation company that includes Eric Ries and Joi Ito on the team, with a focus on delivering mobile and web software and helping educate companies to build better software teams.

We hope you will be able to come. Please don’t forget, tickets are available until midnight PST on 8th July (TODAY!) at $1,695 saving $800 on full ticket price. Please, book yourself a place now.

Please join a truly international group of people that care about building long term, sustainable, profitable software businesses and speakers including:

• Professor Rita McGrath, Professor, Columbia Business School: Dynamic strategy. The end of competitive advantage.
• Dan Siroker, CEO, Optimizely, If data can help win elections, what can it do for your business?
• Iris Lapinski, CEO, AppsForGood. What can we learn from a new generation of tech entrepreneurs?
• Mikey Trafton, Founder & CEO, FireAnt Software. Recruiting & hiring a world-class team.
• Dharmesh Shah, Founder & CTO, Hubspot. The Culture Code.
• Mike Muhney, Founder & CEO, VipOrbit. Building sales into code.
• Sarah Hatter, Founder of co-Support: Support is never, ever, as important as product development. Discuss.
• Patrick McKenzie, Kalzumeus Software: Building things to help you sell the things you build.
• Scott Farquhar, CEO, Atlassian: Leadership in crisis. When stuff gets real.
• More information on the talks on the speaker pages.

• Peter Bauer, (CEO & Founder, Mimecast), on the challenges that success brings to staying true to your principles. Very thought provoking.

If you go down to the BoS blog today…

• Details about this year’s Lightning Talk Competition. Entry deadline is 7th August.
• Jason Cohen, (CEO WP Engine) ‘Why data will make you do the wrong thing?‘ A brilliant talk on the dangers of relying on too much AB Testing and not enough gut feel.
• The mother of all demos. Marking the passing of Doug Engelbert, inventor of the computer mouse but creator of so much more. This live demo of a computer in 1968 is mind blowing.

We hope to see you at BoS 2013. If you haven’t already, don’t forget to book your place today.

We’re delighted to announce Scott Berkun as a speaker at this year’s Business of Software conference, 28-30th October 2013, Boston, MA.

Scott is a thoughtful and insightful character, and you may have already read one of his books, Making Things Happen, The Myths of Innovation, Confessions of a Public Speaker, and Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds.

If you want a little insight into the way he thinks and writes, watch the video of him explaining, ‘How to write well, instantly, every time’.

His talk at Business of Software Conference will consider what he learned as a Team Leader working at WordPress.com, a highly distributed company with no offices. How does a company where, ‘working from home’, isn’t just the norm, it’s the only option, organise itself, share ideas, innovate, celebrate, build a common culture? What holds a company like that back and what gives it an advantage over others? We are looking forward to some entertaining and thought-provoking insight from Scott.

Find out more about Scott at www.scottberkun.com and he tweets at @berkun

Talk

The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

What can you learn from a company without an office? Would you like to work somewhere with no meetings, no email and that let all employees work from any city in the world they wished?

Scott worked as a manager at WordPress.com, the 15th most popular website, and one of the largest 100% distributed companies in the world where these perks are true, and more. He led a team of programers and designers and wrote a new book about the challenging experience called The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work. From herding cats you can’t see, to launching features every day, he’ll share what every organization can learn from the provocative examples WordPress.com provides leaders and managers.

Scott’s talk will also consider:

• Whether creativity can thrive online.
• When will remote working fail?
• The benefits and pitfalls of remote working, for employees and employer.
• Why culture is critical to successful remote working.
• Why good tools make all the difference to successful remote working.
• Why Marissa Mayer’s approach to remote working at Yahoo was mistaken.

—- ——— —

DOUG ENGELBERT RIP

Doug Engelbart, inventor, visionary and apparently all round good guy, died yesterday aged 88. He will probably be most remembered for inventing the computer mouse though his legacy is much more significant than that – this is a nice appreciation from Bret Victor – that explains the problem of describing someone’s contribution to humanity in terms of a single object they created…

“Technology writers, in particular, tend to miss the point miserably, because they see everything as a technology problem. Engelbart devoted his life to a human problem, with technology falling out as part of a solution. When I read tech writers’ interviews with Engelbart, I imagine these writers interviewing George Orwell, asking in-depth probing questions about his typewriter.“

If you want a sense of the man, his achievements and legacy, take a look at this live demonstration of a computer that Doug Engelbert delivered in front of an audience of 2,000 people with his team at Stanford Research Institute.

It was made on December 9th, 1968.

On the shoulders of giants…

The Lightning Talk Competition is always one of the highlights of the Business of Software Conference programme and last year’s speakers did us proud – the highest quality set of talks overall we have ever had. We had over 50 video submissions to speak so picking the presenters wasn’t easy even if it was entertaining. This year, we want to make them even better so if you want an opportunity to speak at Business of Software Conference, please consider sharing something you are passionate about with a great group of software people.

They follow a simple format – every speaker gets 15 slides and 30 seconds per slide to talk about a subject of their choice. The slides advance automatically. Warning, they are a challenge!

Patrick McKenzie, winner of the Lightning Talk Competition in 2010 (‘Hello Ladies’) and a speaker the following year (Engineering your marketing outcomes) was very clear when we spoke that he found the Lightning Talk to be the most challenging, (I think he said in fact, “terrifying”), by far.  It is a challenge worth rising to though and Lightning Talk speakers over the years have told us that doing a Lightning Talk has been of real value to them – not least because those talks have often been a platform to a lot of other speaking opportunities.

The Lighting Talk Competition entrants receive a free pass to the Business of Software Conference where they will speak, the chance to share an idea they care about with a live audience of 400 (as well as the 3,000 or so viewers of the Business of Software livestream), and the respect of their peers. Don’t underestimate the last one.

If you would like to submit a Lightning Talk, here is what to do before Midnight PST, Wednesday August 7th:

Send an email to Hermione and enclose:

• Your name
• The title and description of the talk you propose
• A link to a video of you speaking – ideally about what you want to do a Lightning Talk about.

We will review all of the submissions, and pick what we feel will be the most appropriate ones, to talk live at BoS 2012.

Remember to submit by August 7th.

(Please note submissions from third parties including marketing departments, speaking agents etc will be ignored – we don’t have the time – please see below). We only want submissions from people that care enough to do their own stuff. This is a chance to stand up in front of a bunch of people and share an idea you love.

To get your creative juices flowing, here are the previous winners:

• All of the Business of Software Lightning Talks from 2012.
• Business of Software 2011. Justin Goeres, ‘Getting to Nowhere‘ (You can also see all last year’s talks here too).
• Business of Software 2010. Patrick McKenzie, ‘Hello Ladies’
• Business of Software 2009. Mark Stephens, ‘Are you a large lizard or small and furry?’
• Business of Software 2008. Alex Ohanian, ‘Keeping it Real’

Even if you don’t submit an idea, why not think about what you would talk about in 7.5 minutes? Strange as this might sound, lots of our attendees do, even if they have no interest in standing on stage. Thinking about the essence of what you are passionate about can be a very good way of helping you work out what is important to you.

Remember to submit your application to Hermione by 7th August:

• Your name
• The title and description of the talk you propose
• A link to a video of you speaking – ideally about what you want to do a Lightning Talk about.

Good luck!

Dan Siroker heard Senator Obama speak when he visited Google Campus at the behest of Eric Schmidt back in the days when he wasn’t the POTUS. He was so impressed with what he heard that he volunteered to be part of the Campaign team, eventually resigning his position at Google to work on this full time. As Director of Analytics for the campaign, he , in his own words,

“Led a team of software engineers and analysts to maximize voter registration, email sign-ups, and donations. Helped the campaign raise more than half a billion dollars from small donations from millions of voters.”

You can get a flavour of some of the things that Dan and his team did from this talk from 2010:

We are delighted Dan will be talking at Business of Software Conference about the lessons that he has learned during this time, as a product manager at Google, an entrepreneur and most recently, as CEO Founder of Optimizely (tagline, A/B testing you’ll actually use), where his company has helped over 4,000 companies, from Walt Disney, Starbucks and Salesforce through to startups including LogMeIn, Yammer, Asana and 37 Signals. He will share some of the secrets data and social media secrets of the Obama campaign (many of the techniques were widely adopted by both main parties for the 2012 campaigns proving that technical advantage is temporary at best), as well as offer some practical help and advice about making A/B testing a habit in any emerging software business.

About Dan Siroker

Dan is the CEO and Founder of Optimizely, the company he founded after his time as Director of Analytics for the Obama Presidential Campaign and Deputy New Media Director for the Presidential Transition. While there, his team relied on the use of A/B and multivariate testing to maximize e-mail sign-ups, awareness, volunteers, and donations to raise additional revenue for the campaign. Before Optimizely, Dan co-founded an online math game for kids called CarrotSticks. Formerly, he was also a Product Manager for Google Chrome and AdWords. Dan graduated with Honors from Stanford University with a B.S. in Computer Science.

Talk

If data can help win Elections, what can it help you do for your business?

Dan will talk about his experiences as Director of Analytics for the Obama Election campaign. In Obama’s campaign against Senator McCain, The Republican Party raised $201 million from online and offline donations (not including Federal contributions). The Democrats meanwhile raised $156 million offline. This was however dwarfed by the little over $500 million raised in online fund raising. Whatever your political views, there is no doubt a key part of Obama’s successful campaign was the social media activity that surrounded it. Dan will consider what he has learned running this campaign.

Don’t just think of this talk as a blue print to win an election – in the 2012 campaigns both main parties used similar ideas extensively to optimize the output of their campaigns but  Dan will offer some insight into how social media and data can make your business better and how you can apply some of the principles to your business today.

We want our attendees to be inspired to: start A/B testing – today. Companies like Disney, Amazon and Salesforce already use optimization as a core part of their business activity and they have masses of data that they can use to achieve this but how can smaller organizations with relatively small data sets use it to generate long term value? How can you get buy-in for A/B Testing in a business? Understand the future of optimization in the software industry as it enables the transition from a one to many relationship to a more personalized relationship with individual customers.

Adii Piennar, founder and CEO of Woothemes was one of last year’s Business of Software Conference speakers. Watch his talk (with transcript) about running a global business from the edge of the world here. Adii’s company, Woothemes celebrated it’s 1,000,000th download this week but Adii has moved on…

Adii Pienaar…

When I was a kid, my dad always told me “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. I never really understood that until the day that I quit my day job in the pursuit of a new startup.

But before I made that decision (and before I tell the story), I attended BoS – as a speaker – in 2012. I had intended to already attend BoS in 2011, but as the gods would have it, the dates coincided with the birth of my firstborn son. (Whilst the BoS crew made a compelling argument for me to attend, I would not have missed my son’s birth for anything. :))

At this stage, I can tell you about my wonderful and memorable experience at BoS 2012. I can tell you that I found all of the talks super interesting and that Mikey Trafton’s talk about hiring for cultural-fit was mind-blowing (and my favourite one at that). I can also say that the catering was superb and that my tummy never felt more loved.

And so much more. Of course.

The one thing that however turned BoS (from being a great) into a spectacular conference was the friendships. The fact that BoS (purposefully) doesn’t attract thousands of attendees means it’s small, intimate and super-connected. For me, it wasn’t just about networking (something which I’m not great at to be honest), but about the relationships that I made and still have today.

I met some incredible people; both fellow speakers and attendees. Many of these have become friends, with whom I interact daily. In fact, some of these friends have become mentors and advisors along my entrepreneurial journey.

I found that everyone I met were so gracious with their time, passion and ideas. Which in turn meant that I had so many fascinating and stimulating conversations that my brain was literally fried at the end of each conference day.

But what’s the value of those friendships?

If you’re like me, you’re trying to quantify the value you’ll get from attending a BoS conference in future and you’re benchmarking that against what a conference ticket costs. And BoS isn’t the cheapest conference around either.

To answer that question, I’d like to tell you a story.

I recently made the decision to take a less hands-on role at WooThemes (the company I co-founded in 2007) to pursue a brand new startup adventure with PublicBeta.

PublicBeta aims to help other entrepreneurs by sharing the knowledge and experience of other, successful entrepreneurs. So the BoS audience is pretty much exactly the same audience that I’m targeting.

Whilst I’ve not yet launched PublicBeta and most of the work is still behind-the-scenes, I’ve already learnt a few things since I started work on the new venture:

• There was no way that I’d be able to launch PublicBeta without having the audience or network I have today. This is best evidenced in the fact that I’ve got commitments from 40+ entrepreneurs already (some of whom I met at BoS last year) to teach courses on PublicBeta in the next 6 months.
• In taking early signups for PublicBeta, I’ve seen so many friends and people that I met at BoS sign up. I can only assume that this is partly due to us meeting (entrepreneurs support each other).
• When I set out to work on PublicBeta, I was reminded about all the stories I heard at BoS where the entrepreneur had a vision and were working incredibly hard in their pursuit of that vision. That’s some inspiring stuff and working with people like that is a big part of my vision for PublicBeta.

I’m not suggesting that that BoS is the only reason that I’m in the position to work on PublicBeta. Yes, BoS was awesome and yes, there’s other entrepreneur-orientated conferences out there too.

What I do however know is that BoS taught me that my dad was right all those years back: “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”

I’ll be back at BoS this year, because I obviously can’t get enough of a good thing. 🙂

–

Thanks Adii and see you there.

A wonderful, short, readable, helpful eBook from Mike McDerment, CEO of Freshbooks and Donald Cowper. (You might remember Mike’s talk on the litany of product development mistakes he made at Freshbooks a couple of years ago at the Business of Software Conference).

Take a look – remember, it is an ebook and it’s free so take a chance on your time, take a look and if the value hasn’t grabbed you in the first minute, delete it. You won’t.

Click the book or this link.

It is amazing that so few people understand how to price their services effectively and if you are either a freelance coder, developer, designer, ‘lean social media ninja guru’ or work in an organisations that is providing services to others, YOU NEED TO READ THIS BOOK. Even if you download it and scan through, you will learn something good.

We all use contractors for things and while on one level I run the risk of ending up paying a higher price more for the services that these people provide, the flipside of that is that if I was having the type of conversations that Mike and Donald propose in this book, I am almost certainly going to get a better value service or product as a result.

Rita McGrath, Professor at Columbia Business School and Scott Farquhar, CEO and co-Founder of Atlassian, will be talking at this year’s Business of Software Conference.

This is what they want to share with you…

Professor Rita McGrath will be explaining why the concept of sustainable competitive advantage, long touted as a key principle of corporate strategy the world over no longer applies in today’s fast-moving and rapidly evolving world. She will share the concept of temporary advantage and what that means for you. One thing it does mean is that you have to be brave and be prepared to exit from business activities that won’t be sustainable in the long term – how can you do that elegantly?

Scott Farquhar will talk of a few non-public incidents that almost broke the company and how Atlassian’s management team came through them as well as the challenges and benefits of Atlassian’s fabled, ‘No salespeople’ approach to sales. What were the most important things that Scott learned as a founder entrepreneur in taking a startup to the point that it is one of the most credible technology IPO candidates in the software business?

Scott is also keen to make the talk as relevant as possible for the Business of Software Conference audience so drop us a line with your question about growing a software business and Scott will try to answer some of them in his talk.

We will announce some exciting new speakers next week as well as some details about additional workshops we have organised to run for the whole afternoon on the last day of the conference – the conference closes at lunchtime on Wednesday but we will have a small number of workshops around product management, customer care, strategy for software entrepreneurs. These will be more structured than the informal gatherings we’ve had in past years and will involve an additional nominal charge – though considerably less than the price you would pay to attend workshops in the open market. Intrigued? You should be. 🙂

June 11^th 2043

“We need more white men in technology and have to make more efforts to make sure that London and the South East are supported more. It is simply not fair that the technology industry is so dominated by women and the Wick technology cluster is still sucking talent from across the United Kingdom.” said a 73 year old Mark Littlewood.

“As a young man, I never thought about what was then an almost entirely male dominated industry, why should I? Everything was easy for us and it didn’t seem that strange to me at the time that so many industry events were filled with rather boring people wearing rather boring dark suits, white/blue shirts and the only possible way of being able to know where in the pecking order people were was to ask them what kind of company car they drove. Sure it was very boring but there were good times too. We used to get drunk and celebrate hitting our quarterly sales target for selling the latest piece of useless enterprise software. Unless we missed them. Unless we missed them. Then we were fired but we all knew we could walk into another sales job with another big software company because they only hired those white men with proven enterprise sales experience so it was a bit of a closed shop.

“I rebelled against the status quo, by wearing shirts that weren’t white and often went without a tie. (Remember, it wasn’t until 2019 that scientists in California were able to prove that wearing ties restricted blood flow to the brain and made men make bad decisions). Later, particularly after the birth of my daughter, I started to feel very uneasy about the whole assumption that it was only men that could write code and run technology companies. She was a super smart kid who was really into technology but didn’t understand why so many technology companies and events only had men at them. I tried to help but it was hard work.

“Today, the pendulum has swung the other way. White men are a minority, albeit not a persecuted minority as the industry seems much more accepting of anyone, regardless of background but it does worry me that the traditional doers in the technology industry are so badly represented. We need to do something.

“Looking back, the tipping point for me was an event I went to in 2013. It was held in South Cambridge, (known by many at the time as ‘TechCity’), and I went to an old car park, or church, I can’t remember exactly. There were a bunch of school kids there who were going to, ‘pitch their apps’ (remember apps!?). People I trust said they would be good but I knew they were only kids so I reminded myself they were children, not grown-ups with proper ideas and I shouldn’t be too mean to them when they rambled on about their ‘entrepreneurial journey’ and described their useless ideas about how to trick people into clicking on adverts for stupid products that no one would want. (This was a very popular idea at the time – remember, it was 30 year ago!).

“I walked into the room it was buzzing. I hadn’t even had a chance to open the event programme before I was approached by a girl offering me fashion advice. (That wasn’t unusual for me in those days, still isn’t actually though most people I know in real life gave up a long time ago). She and a bunch of her best friends had come up with an idea for an app with some great ideas for helping girls choose outfits. Charming, enthusiastic, articulate, intelligent, open, the team Dynamic App Company from Hillcrest School made a huge impression on me with their friendliness and offer of helping me to style my wardrobe. they were a bit like an intelligent, functioning, version of the Spice Girls who were doing something useful with their lives.

“Then it struck me. Women were not represented in the tech industry in any meaningful way at the time – less than 5% of VC backed companies had a female CEO for example at the time and a lot of VCs would pat themselves heartily on the back for ‘beating the average’ if they had one investment in ten with a female founder in those days. This was a room full of more girls than boys. And the girls were good. Very good. Brilliant in fact. The girls were leading the teams.”

“Normally, the protocol at that sort of event in those days is you turn up, grab a drink then hang out with a couple of other men you knew to talk about ‘deals’, the latest venture capital fund raise, your new car that sort of stuff but this was different. I don’t think I spent more than a minute speaking to anyone I already knew, I was sucked into an endless whirl of meeting amazing people who had brilliant ideas and had sat down, come up with a problem they wanted to solve and worked out how they would solve it. This was weird (the culture at the time often measured the success of an idea by how much money it made the venture capitalist that had funded it). These people were really young kids with problems. Not the sort of problems that couldn’t be solved, the sort of problems that they just matter-of-factly knew were there, worked out a way of tackling the problem and got on with it.

“It was stunning. Try as I might, I simply couldn’t talk to all of the teams. There was a queue of people who wanted to talk to them all and I missed some out. Every team I talked to left me feeling excited, happy and enthusiastic. Hopeful that some of these ideas – almost all of the ideas – would actually make the world a better place for someone.

“Did you know that some dyslexics find reading words easier if the words are in a particular colour? Neither did I till some 13 year old kids from Stratford Upon Avon explained one of the ideas behind Xcite – an app they had come up with as one of their team was dyslexic. Another team from the same school had an ace instrument tuning app. A team from Bentley Wood High School had a brilliant idea for an app that helped young carers. Nelson Thomlinson School had great ideas to help people with learning disabilities. The enthusiasm of the Westfield Junior School team who wanted to bring Manga to Britain was breathtaking.

“I remember wishing there were a couple more hours so I could talk to all the teams. Then we had to sit down and listen to the talks from the organisers, the sponsors and hear ‘pitches’ from all of the teams. They had one minute each. In the days before teleportation, this was called an elevator pitch. Lord knows I have sat through a bunch of those in my time. They are tough things to do and usually people get them totally wrong and leave you with no idea about what the ideas is. Trust me. I worked out I had seen over 5,000 pitches from companies in the previous 10 years and 90% of them left me none the wiser about what the ideas was or why it mattered. They were usually designed to be boring.

“I can honestly say that I left that evening thinking that they had given the best set of ideas presentations I had ever heard. (Not in a patronising, give them a break they are kids kind of way. In a, these guys have some serious Silicon Valley (remember that!?) hustle but are actually trying to solve problems tha people care about kind of way. Most importantly, every company described the problem they were trying to solve and the job that they wanted their app to do.

“And then there were the kids from Wick. Four teams competing across 6 categories of app. Two of their teams won their categories – it could have been more if they weren’t competing against another team from, err, Wick.

“It was only a matter of time before the industry changed. After all, even Larry Ellison, one of many technology sexists of the time with all his billions couldn’t pay to keep all those kids, (and therefore out of the technology industry Man Club), at school forever.

“I loved the idea of getting more women, more diversity into the technology industry but now things have swung too far the other way. Granted, the industry is more open, more innovative, more thoughtful, more useful to humanity but those investment obsessed white men of the 80s, 90s, and early decades of the 21^st century have a place in it too. It was inevitable that the new wave of innovators and game changers would not be white men when everyone had a chance to shine. We should support their reintegration into the technology ecosystem. They weren’t all bad.”

When I asked Iris Lapinski, The CEO of Apps for Good, to speak at the Business of Software Conference in January I was delighted that she accepted. A brilliant communicator who has done something amazing in very short order to address the huge challenges facing us as an industry around, not only lack of diversity but the worrying lack of people who are choosing computer science at school. What I saw last night was orders of magnitude more impressive than I had expected. Collectively, those kids talked about their ideas, the problems they want to solve and the jobs their apps were going to do in a way that I don’t often see when talking to ‘grown up’ entrepreneurs. You will not want to miss this.

Some pictures from the Apps For Good Award presentation evening.

I wish I had a picture of everyone there as some of those people are stepping out to make the world a seriously better place. An inspiring and humbling evening for me and for many others. A night that would change the world of technology for good. Forever.

The Apps for Good Awards, June 2013.