Access BoS 2012 videos
December 21, 2012 by bosblnposts
Access all the videos of Business of Software 2012 talks now AND get a free copy of Dan Pink’s To Sell is Human – $150.
Access all the videos of Business of Software 2012 talks now AND get a free copy of Dan Pink’s To Sell is Human – $150.
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Over the years we have accumulated a great deal of really useful content from BoS conferences: guest blogs as well as talks. But we know a lot of you come here for the presentations, so we have decided to index everything from 2011 and earlier here to make the search easier (of course, all talks are also tagged in the appropriate year category in the blog, so they can be found that way).
Full details on when we are publishing the BoS 2012 talks can be found in this blog post here. If you would like to view all the BoS 2012 videos immediately, with the added bonus of a copy of Dan Pink’s excellent new book, To Sell is Human, they can be purchased as a bundle, by clicking on the link below:
And a gentle reminder: anyone registering for this year’s event will also receive a code to access the talks prior to their general release.
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At the end of a packed 2.5 days in October we asked the attendees if they could sum up their BoS experience. Here are their responses – uncensored. Thanks for the feedback: where we can, we will tighten things up. And some of you definitely need more sleep.
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Index to the summaries of the Business of Software 2012 presentations.
Kathy Sierra – Building the Minimum Badass User
Jason Cohen – How data, statistics and numbers will make you do the wrong thing
Joel Spolsky – The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange
Dharmesh Shah – Valuation, Competition, Porter’s Five Forces and Culture
Peter Bauer – Founding Principles vs. Scaling Principles
Peldi Guilizzoni – Coding is the Easy Part
Michael Trafton – How to build company culture in three easy steps
Adii Pienaar – A message of Hope
Gail Goodman – The Long, Slow SaaS Ramp of Death
Paul Kenny – Resistance is Futile
Noam Wasserman – Understanding Founder’s Dilemmas
Bob Dorf – How Silicon Valley Innovates
Dan Pink – The Surprising Truth About Moving Others
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Noah gives a talk on rogue marketing strategies and the six steps to the Lovegasm.
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This is a summary of Peter Bauer’s Business of Software 2012 presentation.
According to Peter, the four principles to a successful company are:
Mimecast started in 2003 before cloud computing was cloud computing. It’s been almost 10 years. Mimecast started over a bottle of Absinth, as a group of friends drinking together said they should start a company and work with each other.
It was not a picnic, however. They were deadly serious about success and about each other. They were fully engaged in building together, and it was obvious who the contributors were.
Working with friends is one of the key reasons Mimecast was created. When hiring they ask, “Can this person act and work with us like a friend?” But this extends beyond the company to customers, suppliers, etc.
Favor endurance over brilliance.
One of the biggest challenges of an entrepreneur is the guilt of prioritizing work and the fear of missing out on your family. An entrepreneur is compelled to choose between family failure or business failure. You start to think great success isn’t the thing for you and you start buckling. Peter would think “Do I want to go up there?”, when thinking about success. However, his co-founder would say success brings many options.
The first five years of a startup are risky from a business perspective. Because they were backed into a corner they found more efficient ways of being successful. The early stage is not the time of sustainable effort, it’s the time of gravity defying heroics. A real CEO thinks, “The harder you make it sound, the more I want to do it.”
A strong sentiment after the dotcom bust was that founders could not scale, and VCs kept thinking they needed to pick the management team.
Don’t let the team expire.
Writing that check doesn’t make you right.
Angels provided a better way for Mimecast. Then by the time they brought in VCs, they had proven themselves and could assert the company’s interest over the investors’ interest.
When considering intent on scoring think about boys playing soccer. The young kids have no intent – they run around because it’s fun. The older kids, on the other hand, are intent on scoring. Just participating is not intent.
You should be far more frightened by the guy that has intent…intent on taking you out. Intent creates a power multiplier. A lot of startups are bumbling along, waiting to be taken out by someone with intent.
Targets help define and declare intent. Mimecast’s sales department had a focus on intent, and the whole business followed sales. The non-revenue generating departments would apologize to the sales department for anything they did that took away from the sales resources. This started to impede Mimecast’s growth, so they began putting product marketing and system goals as a priority. Then they had to ensure those projects had intent of their own, so they forced the non-numeric intent departments to write down their goals.
The AIM (Actionable Intent Matrix) factors determine the supply chain of success.
[Justin Goeres has a more detailed summary of Peter’s presentation on his blog.]
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This is a summary of Jason Cohen‘s Business of Software 2012 presentation.
The way you’re approaching metrics in your business is wrong. How you’re using data is wrong, because the tools you’re using are wrong.
When asked to guess how many jelly beans are in a jar, individual answers are off by 67%. However, if you average all the answers together, the average is only off by 3%. People suck at guessing, but averaging guesses across people is a nearly perfect predictor of truth…sometimes.
The wisdom of the crowd only works for certain things. When asked to vote for the funniest joke, the wisdom of the crowd didn’t produce it. Crowds are wise when there’s a correct answer. Crowds are useful in objectivity, and destructive in creativity. Yes, crowds are not just neutral in creativity, in fact they are actually worse (i.e. destructive).
Take A/B tests as an example. A/B tests are usually not done right. Picking B over A because it is beating A by a little bit can be very destructive. Sparefoot, an Austin startup, ran an A/A test using Google Website Optimizer, and found that Google Website Optimizer had one A beating itself!
When what you are testing for is rare, the results are overwhelmingly wrong.
Jason has a great (and super cute!) article on his blog on easy significance testing (and hamsters).
The way you determine whether an A/B test shows a statistically significant difference is:
- Define N as “the number of trials.” N = A + B = total number of conversions
- Define D as “half the difference between the ‘winner’ and the ‘loser’.” D = (A – B) / 2
- The test result is statistically significant if D^2 is bigger than N.
Seek large outcomes from more traffic (as in 100,000’s of data points, not 10,000’s), especially if you are a small company. Go for the big stuff and shy away from the small stuff. A great example of this is Google’s famous 41 shades of blue test. Google ran this experiment to determine which shade of blue received the most clicks. Running this test with 2 shades of blue, and picking one winner with a 95% confidence level, leads to a 5% chance of a false-positive. Running this test with 41 shades of blue, leads to an 88% chance of a false-positive.
Test theories, not headlines. Don’t spitball headlines. First form a theory about why a change would be better, then test it. If the theory turns out to be invalid, think about what other assumptions could be wrong. Invalidating a theory gives you an opportunity to think deeper, and come up with another theory. Examples of theories:
Which metrics actually matter?
Which variables should I care about? The ones that have the biggest impact on growth, revenue and cash.
Let’s take a hypothetical affiliate program for a SaaS product as an example, and figure out what’s important. Affiliate program parameters:
Using a simple model in a spreadsheet, it looks like we will break even in about four to five months. Now let’s add a 15%/month growth. That 15% growth causes 50% more costs. But that doesn’t count cancellation rates, or affiliate customers being lower quality (i.e. cancel more). The end result: your dead (with a 10%/month cancellation rate). If we then increase the price by $10/month (50% more MRR), we’re back to breaking even at 4 – 5 months.
Affiliate program optimization priorities:
Strategy:
Tactics:
[I’d like to thank Bill Horvath, founder of DoX Systems, for sharing his notes with me.]
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This is a guest post by Brian Turchin. Brian is CEO/Founder of Cape Horn Strategies, a consultancy devoted to helping software CEOs create vibrant and flourishing businesses. Brian has helped dozens of CEOs successfully proceed from one business life cycle stage to another: he helps start-up CEOs become a growing profitable business; he helps CEOs with a more mature business grow and scale into a much larger business dealing with topics like business strategy, sales, leadership, organization, funding and acquisitions; and he helps CEOs sell their businesses. Complementing this work, Brian Turchin is an Executive Coach helping CEOs and other “C” level executives do what they do better.
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As a bootstrapped founder, your business has been growing at more than 20% per year and doing it profitably. You now have 50 employees. Your recurring revenue is high and you have built an excellent leadership team.
But you have competitors who are bigger than you. And you feel the need to push your business to another level in order to be able to compete.
Should you seek outside investment?
One of the CEOs I met at our last Business of Software conference in October had a problem like this.
He came to the conference like others to learn from the speakers and to network but he took it a step further.
He treated the conference as an extended Board of Advisors.
He made it a point to identify and talk to as many attendees as he could about his challenge. (I was one of the CEOs he met. And we first met like many others just by sitting near each other during the presentations and introducing ourselves to each other. )
How did it work for him? Here is what he said in an e-mail to me after the conference was over.
Thanks for spending time with me in Boston. Our talk was quite helpful to weed out my brain :>)
After also talking to 8 CEOs, 5 VCs and several other people at the conference I am quite confident that bringing a VC into the company is not the right thing for us to do. We simply can’t offer them an appropriate exit (at least not one that is in sync with OUR plans). So it might help us in the beginning but would create turmoil later. So: Don’t do it.
It was interesting that some of the VCs I talked to said exactly that after we talked about our plans and my motivations. While other VCs just wanted to “get in” without actually talking about the exit. 🙂
What’s this mean for you? You too can get more value out of the conference by thinking about it as your extended Board of Advisors.
How might you do this?
So at next year’s conference get the kind of value that is “priceless,” as the Mastercard commercial says, treat the conference as your extended Board of Advisors.
We produce exceptional conferences & content that will help you build better products & companies.
Join our friendly list for event updates, ideas & inspiration.
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This is a summary of Kathy Sierra’s Business of Software 2012 presentation.
It starts with “I’m going to start a startup.” Then your friend tells you you need to get funding first. “Funding?,” you ask, “Users will just pay for it.” For some reason people forget that getting paying customers is the ideal way to fund your business.
A business is not going to be successful competing on the various “economies”:
How did we ever get here? Competing on these issues is fragile and not sustainable, so let it go!
So, what’s going to make your business successful? Build a product that is:
“Desirability engines” is a new concept people have come up with to indicate that people like to engage with brands. But we don’t have an engagement problem. More brand engagement is not the answer. Trying to get people more involved with the brand can cause more harm to the brand.
Gamification is a form of operant conditioning. Operant conditioning is also responsible for slot machines and cocaine. Gamification is rarely helpful (based on behavioral psychology) in building a sustainable business. Don’t confuse buying behavior from gamification with loyalty. Gamification is a form of bribery, not loyalty. Loyalty is what you get from a dog, bribery is what you get from Best Buy (“loyalty program”). Your customers won’t take a bullet for you.
Your product needs to be sustainably desirable without bribery or coercion. So the question is, what makes something truly desirable? What are those attributes?
GP;DS = Great Product; Didn’t Sell. This means that quality doesn’t drive desirability. In fact, users will tolerate more crap from desirable products. People will reinterpret the crap as not crap.
Trust in ads is inversely related to trust in recommendations. Word of mouth drives desirability, and it is more powerful today than it ever has been. What drives word of mouth? User awesomeness, not app awesomeness. Therefore, you want to compete on user awesome, not app awesome. The key attributes of a successful app don’t live in the app, they live in the user. Think about what makes your users successful/awesome. If you can make your users awesome, by extension your app will be viewed as awesome.
Desirability depends on the user getting results. If you make your user awesome, your product will be desirable, which will result in success. It’s not luck, and it’s not quality or marketing. It’s all about making your users awesome. And by “awesome”, we mean “badass.” There’s a science about being a badass.
It doesn’t matter what the user thinks of you, it’s what the user can do with the app. People don’t use the app because they like the app or because they like you. They use it because they like themselves. And they tell their friends about the app, because they like their friends.
You want robust, fault tolerant users. “Point of view is worth 80 IQ points.” ~ Alan Kay. This means that the way you come at a problem is very important. But how do you get robust, fault tolerant users?
Don’t think pseudo-badass. Don’t help users pretend to be badass, help them be badass. Most gamification is not badass except in certain circumstances. Customer service is a trap, and most customer service isn’t badass either. Customer service should support the user in being badass.
Badass at what? Think about what your tool is for, and what that solution gives your users. What does the user do with or because of you? What bigger things do you enable? Users don’t want to be badass at the app, they want to be badass at what they do. No one wants to be killer at Final Cut Pro; they want to be killer at making videos.
Consider how you treat customers before and after they buy. Think about the difference between a marketing brochure and the user’s manual you get once you purchase. The marketing brochure is glossy, slick and in color. The user’s manual is plain, boring and in black and white. The marketing brochure focuses on making the user badass, and the manual focuses on the product.
What bigger, cooler thing are you enabling (even if it’s loosely related)? Think about how you can help people be badass at that. Exercise: Write your ideal Amazon product review. Then deduct points for mentioning the founder or the product, and add points for the first person.
Think about what people would tell their friends. Does your app enable that, or would you design things differently? Think about what happens when the user is done clicking. What kind of conversations are people having after using your product? In the end, all that matters is what happens when the clicking is done.
Another exercise: Write your ideal surveillance report of your users. What did they do AFTER they were done using your product?
Being badass is about getting the users a little further up the curve/out the door. High resolution = Deeper, richer experiences around something.
Subtlety is a superpower, but it can also be Kryptonite. Given a representative task, experts perform in a superior way more reliably than non-experts with the same amount of experience. Researchers have found this to be true regardless of the domain. Therefore, your app needs to enable superior, more reliable work on representative tasks.
The three myths of expertise:
Expertise does not come from knowledge, experience, or talent. Experts are defined by what they do. After 18-24 months, amount of experience is not a good indicator of future performance. The 10,000 hours rule isn’t just about 10,000 hours. It’s about 10,000 hours of doing a very specific thing.
Don’t confuse badass with jackass. You want to be a badass, not a jackass.
Becoming badass takes three things: forward flow, models and edge practices.
Kathy recommends reading Daniel Pink‘s book Drive and watching his TED talk. She also recommends The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle.
Step zero: Define badass for your thing. Given ___ (representative task), an expert would ___ (description of better, more reliable results).
Find experts and find out how they do it. Experts have deep intuition – they just know. This can be a problem, because it makes it hard for experts to describe how they do things. The curse of badass expertise:
Assume the person needs to know a billion things to understand.
If you could do only one thing for your users, provide repeated exposure to the performance, process, and results of badass users. Most people could learn better by literally staring at experts and the results of expert work. Practice doesn’t make perfect, but it makes permanent.
A top mistake we make when trying to build expertise is trying to push knowledge in. Brains can acquire deep perceptual knowledge and skills more effectively when we STFU. Google “doing with symbols by Alan Kay“, which is about learning how to do something without knowing how. People can become experts at something without ever doing it (for example, chicken sexing).
If you could do only two things, add a progressive series of exercises (deliberate practice), each designed to build a fine-grained skill within 1 to 3 sessions. Deliberate practice is not the same as tutorials. How do I get my user to 85-90% reliable at this thing in three sessions? Define a clear criterion for a result – “Play this musical passage with no mistakes in this key.”
If you could do only three things, add a clear, believable path (i.e. model) to keep users making forward progress (e.g. martial arts). In other words, provide a motivational GPS to keep them moving forward.
There’s one thread driving all of this: cognitive effort is inversely related to willpower and concentration. Researchers ran an experiment where they asked people to either memorize two numbers or memorize seven numbers. At the end of the session the volunteers walked by a table and were given the option to choose either cake or fruit. A majority of those that were asked to memorize seven numbers picked the cake, while those that only had to memorize two numbers picked the fruit.
Cognitive resources are scarce, limited and quickly and easily depleted. Willpower and cognitive focus live in the same resource pool, and they are easily depleted. Therefore, draining cognitive resources drains willpower. The same resource pool is managing all of these links, and cognitive resources are depleted by making choices. This leads us to realize that self-control is expensive (in terms of cognitive resources).
In another experiment, dogs were given a simple puzzle to solve that released a treat. Before being asked to solve the puzzle, half of the dogs were crated, while the other half was asked to sit for 5 minutes. The dogs that were asked to sit for 5 minutes gave up much quicker than those that were just crated. It takes much more energy to consciously sit for 5 minutes than it does to just hang out in a crate.
So, what does all of this mean? Your app makes me fat!
Becoming badass is hard (cake choice). Make your UI, documentation, support, etc. require a two number (vs. seven number) effort. Always be asking “Is this a fruit thing or a cake thing?” Ask “How can we reduce the resources needed to get the desired result?”
Practice cognitive-resource-driven design. Being overwhelmed with choices is a huge cognitive resource leak. (Having more filters makes you lose weight.) Cut through possibilities to what really matters. A cognitive resource hack is to offload something off of the user’s head. Put it in their world instead of their head.
The enclothed cognition test: Someone wearing a white, doctor-type of coat was presented to a group of people, and they were asked to identify what that person was wearing. Those that scored high on scientific tasks and bad on artistic/creative tasks identified it as a lab coat. Those that scored high on the creative tasks and bad on the scientific tasks identified it as an artist’s smock.
How to be instantly badass: Stand like a superhero. Literally.
Because people are loyal to themselves and those they care about, align the company goals with the user’s goals. Increase the resolution of the user in the real world. Your customers still won’t take a bullet in the head for you, but maybe in the leg or arm.
[I’d like to thank Bill Horvath, founder of DoX Systems, for sharing his notes with me.]
Justin Goeres also has a very nice summary of Kathy’s talk on his blog.
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Hi folks,
A quick update for you on two things that people seem to want to know about.
Where are those videos of the talks from 2012?
They are being processed – again – as there was a problem with the sound output. 🙁 The good news is that we have been able to get a better sound recording and this is being re-edited and they will start to be uploaded in the next week. We will let you all know when they are all done which should be by the second week of December. I am sorry it has taken so long but they will be worth the wait…
Business of Software Conference 2013
Also mark your diaries for next year’s Business of Software Conference, to be held 28th-30th October 2013, in Boston. More details as we pull the program together but we hope you will want to participate.
We produce exceptional conferences & content that will help you build better products & companies.
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This is a summary of Adii Pienaar‘s Business of Software 2012 presentation.
When Adii started WooThemes he didn’t have a whole lot of experience starting a business. And to complicate things even more, he did so from Cape Town, South Africa – not exactly a startup hub. So how did Adii get to where he is today? Adii shares his lessons learned with us.
2007: First product initial revenue.
2008: Adii quit his job. Met his co-founders online. Formalized the company in July.
2009: Met his co-founders in person for the first time. Hired first employees.
2012: WooThemes is four years old today, with 25 employees. $0 funding, 100% bootstrapped.
Cape Town is not exactly a tech hub. They don’t really have:
In Cape Town there is no startup culture, and there is a shortage of skills. When you attend an event, it’s hard to feel like you are the smallest person in the room. So, against all odds, Adii started WooThemes.
Social network, web 2.0, etc. you’ve heard it before. There are so many great people working on crappy ideas. Why do people feel the need to follow the crowd?
What, you need a competitive advantage? Ignorance is bliss.
Also, tech bubbles haven’t reached Africa yet. One of the advantages of being based in South Africa is that trends and hype don’t play a major role in your business decision making.
Avoid groupthink, because it’s dangerous to copy trends. For example, bootstrapping vs. getting funding. When Adii started he didn’t think VC money was an option. He just had to get revenue as quickly as possible. That meant getting paying customers!
It’s actually refreshing if you come from outside those startup hubs. It makes it easier to find new solutions to old problems (remember avoid groupthink).
You’ll be compelled to build something of international quality. And the Internet allows you to compete on a global scale. Invest in branding, because it’s free.
Customer service is cheap marketing. It’s about the way you react to a screw up that matters, not the screw up itself. The screw up is an opportunity for you. Every time you get an angry email it is a license for you to market to them. But you can’t provide customer support to users that haven’t paid. Free users don’t get customer support, because it’s not financially feasible. However, give them options to upgrade to a paid plan that offers support.
And in the end, nobody cares where you are from.
Put the right structure, processes and culture in place for your team to flourish, and trust that they will get the job done. Trust in the people you work with is of utmost importance.
The WooThemes team is spread out through out the world. Some team members have never even met each other in person. You should hire the best regardless of location.
Diving into the deep end is the best way to learn. Doing something and feeling a little pain is good, because you will be compelled to put on a Band-Aid.
Work harder than anybody else. Imagine that someone else is executing a similar idea and is working harder than you. Thereafter, work smarter than anybody else.
Adii prefers B2B over B2C, because businesses are always looking to make more money. It’s always safer to stick to a model that enables businesses to make money.
It’s important to get out of your normal environment and meet new people. You can make new friends and meet mentors. One of the main enablers to running a business from South Africa is traveling. Having friends and mentors really helps, and if you are from a location where you don’t have access to these people travel is the way to do it. Having conversations with likeminded people is a great motivator.
Instead of being put into a box, create your own box. Entrepreneurs have the ability to make their own reality.
When designers see a problem, they have the ability to see how A to B should look like and then executing on that. Constraints breed creativity. Take the creative approach. Go out and make your own box.
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This is a summary of Dharmesh Shah‘s Business of Software 2012 presentation.
Your company should be coming from a place of love. Zynga’s motto is “do evil.” It is one of the most evil places from a culture perspective, and in its business approach. Before you gamify your product, you should decrapify it.
Go big great or go home. Attention is finite, problems are infinite. Build companies that solve problems. Work on a problem you care enough about that you’d be happy even if someone else solved it.
Valuation vs. Value
The valuation equation -> Valuation = Revenue x Multiplier
Valuation is based on revenue?! Not profits?! Yup. This isn’t Dharmesh’s rule. He’s just telling you how things are done.
The multiplier for SaaS companies is around 5.0. Historically the multiplier is around 3 for software companies.
So how do I get my multiplier to that? Growth is hugely important. The faster your revenues are growing, the higher the multiple goes. Profitability is negatively correlated with the multiplier for companies about to go public. The market rewards growth. They are investing in growth, they don’t want dividends.
Factors affecting the revenue multiplier:
How to increase revenue:
At this point Dharmesh used a car metaphor to highlight a few important points.
How important is culture?
How do I scale my team without losing my culture?
Strive not just to build a great startup. Strive to build great entrepreneurs.
Warren Buffet quote: “Build a moat around your castle.” The idea is that you want to make it hard to attack your castle (i.e. create a barrier to entry).
Determining your revenue multiplier is determining your risk. Mitigate your risk, because your success will attract competitors.
You don’t just want customers. You want crazy, loyal fans, because this discourages competition. The most attractive thing to your competitors is when you suck as far as your customers are concerned.
Technical switching costs should be low, and emotional switching costs should be high. This makes an awesome barrier to entry.
Porter’s five forces is a framework for industry analysis and business strategy development. The five forces determine the competitive intensity and attractiveness of a market. Attractiveness refers to the overall industry profitability. An “unattractive” industry is one in which the combination of these five forces acts to drive down overall profitability.
Pick markets where the barrier to exit is low. If your competitors can get out easily, they won’t fight to stay in.
Really, I can build my business on your platform? Platform partnerships are awesome…until they’re not. It’s easy to fall into this trap. When you get awesome (i.e. big enough), they will either buy you or kill you. Unless you’re so big the costs will outweigh the benefits.
[I’d like to thank Bill Horvath, founder of DoX Systems, for sharing his notes with me.]
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Jonathan Cogley, CEO at Thycotic Software writes…
“Thanks for a great conference. We thoroughly enjoyed it! Learned lots of new things that we will be applying at our company over the next 6 months.
“I came to BoS in 2011 and again in 2012. One thing I have noticed is that the conversation works best in person so it would be great to find other people in my area that are also interested in BoS so we can keep the conversation going between each conference. Unfortunately many of the great people that I met were from all over the place (Australia, West Coast, etc.).
“I threw together a meetup.com group for BoS people in the Washington DC Metro Area – http://www.meetup.com/DC-Business-of-Software-Group/“
So, ‘Yes’, I could blog about it but sometimes I feel lazy…
If anyone else has set up a local Business of Software meetup, let us know in the comments and we will try to pull a list of the others together.
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This is a summary of Joel Spolsky‘s Business of Software 2012 presentation.
Joel is the CEO of Stack Exchange. Stack Exchange gets about 266 million monthly page views and 22 million unique views. Stack Exchange is about the size of Texas in terms of the number of monthly visitors.
Cultural Anthropology was the most boring class Joel took in college, but it has been the most useful in the long run and now it is the only thing he uses. Building a website with 22 million users is an exercise in cultural anthropology.
The whole Usenet culture was a result of accidental and intentional choices in the software. The world’s first Internet troll used a straw man as the target of his flames.
We evolved from Usenet to online discussion forums. However, the behavior of discussion forum users is still similar to what emerged from Usenet, even if it wasn’t intentional. When you copy the same format of Usenet, you get Usenet.
We wanted Stack Exchange to be different. The whole idea of Stack Exchange was to disrupt all the accidental design choices resulting from the Usenet era, and make a culturally distinct site. If we know we’re going to build a culture, and what we want that culture to be, we can design for it. We designed Stack Exchange for the culture we wanted from our users.
Every time you see a group of people, you decide whether you’d like to join them. That’s the purpose of the homepage. Everything about the first impression on Stack Exchange is designed to drive the wrong people away, and incentivize the culture they want.
The goal of Stack Exchange is not to have super popular pages (it would be Reddit then). The goal of Stack Exchange is to have super useful pages. The most useful posts on Stack Exchange are not necessarily popular…they’re intensely useful to those who need them.
Religious debate type of questions get an enormous amount of page views, but they don’t teach you anything. Hence we close them down for further discussion and eventual deletion. Examples of such questions are
Off-topic questions are an attractive nuisance, and will also be closed and eventually deleted. Some ask, why not move off-topic questions to another site that is strictly for off-topic questions? There are two reasons:
The purpose of Stack Exchange is different from that of discussion forums. The goal is to create a permanent, useful artifact for the Internet. If your goal is to produce something of permanent value to the Internet, you start to think differently about what you want on the site. Stack Exchange caters to the millions of people that never create an account on the site, but have questions they need answered.
Having a community is a huge advantage for Stack Exchange that can’t be overcome.
[I’d like to thank Bill Horvath, founder of DoX Systems, for sharing his notes with me. Justin Goeres also has a nice summary of Joel’s talk on his blog.]
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This is a summary of Dan Lyons‘ Business of Software 2012 presentation.
Dan Lyons is the writer behind the Fake Steve Jobs blog, which at one point was supposed to be turned into a TV show. In the process Dan learned that the TV business is completely broken. Lesson learned – writing a blog is way more fun than writing a TV show.
Steve Jobs called mobile the post-PC era, because he got his ass kicked in the PC era.
The global population is 7 billion, and there are 6 billion cell phones.
Mobile is the fourth wave of IT. Bill Gate’s vision was that someday there would be a PC on every desk. Mobiles today are more powerful than PCs at that time. Mobile is the $100 laptop.
Mobile is a new mass medium that’s bigger (and better) than TV. Mobile is:
A tale of two Internets: PC vs. mobile. Windows PCs accounted for less than 50% of Internet connected devices in 2011. Four years ago Windows PCs accounted for 95% of Internet connected devices. As with TV, hardware leads, content follows.
Apple is today’s RCA. A $112 billion business that didn’t exist eight years ago. There is a growing (and risky) dependence on mobile. Apple knows it’s about controlling the content, not the hardware. iOS revenue accounts for 2/3’s of Apple’s overall revenue.
The mobile wave is just starting, but bear in mind the story of RCA. By the 1980’s RCA was shutdown.
As mobile grows, what’s happening to TV? TV is already killing itself. There is a generational shift – young people are tuning out TV and using YouTube more. YouTube has lots of stupid videos, but the money is real. Memes are extremely short-lived TV shows. Check out Cats with Bread.
75% of YouTube users are mobile. Google has invested $300 million on content; doing an end run around the TV business.
Are companies becoming more like TV shows?
Today’s hit shows:
These are still the early, experimental days. There will be numerous flameouts:
New world: light, fast, fragmented, ephemeral. Audience is in constant motion.
Who gets hurt?
Why don’t online ads work?
Shift to mobile is hurting Facebook, Google and Pandora (i.e. web-based companies).
But, what if we reinvented advertising? Make it all about context – not just who, but when and where and what they’re doing. However, mobile devices are incredibly personal, so we must be careful not to violate the circle of trust (i.e. don’t be creepy). This has high potential if implemented properly – the ability to reach 7 billion people on the Internet. Two things we need:
When you bring in a reporter for a story, have a story to tell. What makes a good story?
Follow Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey when crafting a story. The idea is that every story is about a hero that overcomes obstacles. So, who will be your protagonist? People don’t like to talk about their failures, so if you are willing to expose yourself you have an opportunity.
Pro tips:
Example of a bad pitch: “I saw the article you wrote on company A and I represent company B.” Once a reporter writes about a topic he is good for a year.
What do print journalists need? Like everyone else, they need to impress their boss.
What about bloggers?
Every once in a while you get to see how corrupt and craven we are. Yes, you can buy off a blog. It usually involves Apple since any Apple story drives a lot of traffic. Apple turns reporters into courtiers. Pogue, Mossberg et al. must get Apple devices first – if not, they’re dead. Since Apple does not tolerate dissent, those that get their hands on Apple devices first will always write positive reviews; fearing that saying something even slightly negative will get them banned from being the first to receive the next batch of new Apple products. Think of the recent huge failure of Apple Maps, and the strange lack of its mention from those that reviewed the iPhone 5 before its official release. Strange isn’t it?
Trading favors:
It’s all about building relationships and being useful.
However, be careful what you wish for.
[I’d like to thank Bill Horvath, founder of DoX Systems, for sharing his notes with me.]
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This is a summary of Mikey Trafton’s Business of Software 2012 presentation.
Company culture can have a real impact on your bottom line. Mikey shared two stories that demonstrate this.
Story 1: Mikey stayed at a Four Seasons hotel, and ordered room service with ice cream for dessert. When the food was brought up to his room, the hotel employee asked him about how long it would take him to eat his dinner. Mikey told him it would take him about 15 minutes, and asked why. The hotel employee explained that he wanted to wait to bring his ice cream up so that it wouldn’t melt while he was eating. During a later stay at another Four Seasons, Mikey ordered ice cream again from room service to confirm that it wasn’t simply a hotel policy, but an employee going out of his way to provide good service. And sure enough, the second time the ice cream was brought up with the meal.
Story 2: An IBM executive visited a bank to make a transaction. The bank teller told the exec that he had to come back another day to make the transaction, because the one person that could help him with it was not working that day. The exec said fine, and asked the teller to validate his parking ticket. The teller refused to validate the ticket, because she said that she could only validate tickets for those that have done business with the bank. The exec said, “I tried to, but you told me to come back.” The teller wouldn’t budge on validating the ticket, so the exec said, “Fine, I’ll make a transaction.”, and withdrew all $1.5 million he had in the bank! The bank teller was never fired for this incident, so it was pretty clear that this was the company culture and not a bad employee.
Allow employees to take the initiative to go above and beyond for your customers.
Culture is the personality of your company. Most companies have a split personality – one person is helpful, the next is mean. This results from the company not caring about the culture.
If you have a great culture, by definition you have a great place to work…but only for people who fit with your culture. A company culture attracts the right people and repels the wrong ones. An excellent example of this is the US Army. The US Army does a great job at attracting those that will fit in nicely into its culture, and does an equally good job at repelling those that won’t.
Culture attracts better employees who stay with you longer, stick with you through hard times, and work for less money. Culture trumps money.
Make sure your staff fits your culture. Mikey shared a story of his early days as an entrepreneur. He started a company and hired seven people over lunch who said they all worked well together. After some time, people started missing deadlines and pointing fingers. It turned out that these seven people came from a telecommunications background, where they always missed deadlines and liked to telecommute. Mikey liked people to work at the office so that they could collaborate more easily. And because of his consulting background, Mikey didn’t miss deadlines. This was obviously not a good culture fit. In the end all seven of them quit on the same day – one right after the other.
There are three steps to a great company culture:
This is the one time in your business that you get to act like a king. When it comes to culture, you’re the decision maker. In every other instance you have to win people over – customers might vote for someone else, vendors might vote for someone else, etc.
Think about the place you want to work at and think about the place people you want to work with want to work at.
Think about what it is that you stand for. At Blue Fish, they strive for customer elation, not customer satisfaction. When you go to a restaurant you want to be elated after eating your meal, not just simply satisfied. So why do we set such a low bar for our companies?
Define your core values.
For inspiration, here are Blue Fish’s core values:
Mikey said he is strong on all but one of those core values. He said that accountability is not a strength of his. If he tells you he is going to do something he will definitely start it, but odds are he won’t complete it all the way through. He means well; he just has a hard time following through. However, accountability is important to him, so he included it in Blue Fish’s core values to drive the team to make up for his weakness.
Make it real. Think about what your culture would be if it were true that the only thing that can get someone fired is if they violate your culture.
Make a list of those values that could serve as a checklist for hiring.
For Blue Fish you are a culture fit if:
(Blue Fish has a total of 13 of these.)
Fire everyone who’s not a culture fit, and hire those who are.
Use culture fit questions in your interview.
This is where you make sure that you and the team deliver on what you want.
You will get the behaviors that you tolerate from others. You don’t need to fire someone, just say it. For example, at Blue Fish being late to a meeting is a no-no, so they implemented the “feed the fish” program. If you are late to a meeting, you have to take the smallest bill out of your wallet and drop it in the fish bowl sitting on the conference table – feeding the fish. At the end of the year, Blue Fish matches the contributions and donates the entire sum to charity. This is an example of how you can inform everyone about what you will tolerate without being a jerk about it.
Reinforce the things you care about, and recognize results you like. Some ways to accomplish this:
At Blue Fish they ring the good news bell when:
At Blue Fish they don’t use hero stories, but they do something similar that they call “round of praise.” Round of praise is like a hero story but using a lower threshold. For example, John spent all day Friday helping me solve a problem, so he was unable to finish his tasks and had to come in on the weekend to finish his work.
The best way to find out if this actually works is to turn your company over to the team to see what happens. Mikey ran an experiment by firing himself from Blue Fish and turning over the company to the team. The result: the team doubled revenue over the past year!
[I’d like to thank Bill Horvath, founder of DoX Systems, for sharing his notes with me.]
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Thanks to Stephen Kellett, English Bagpiper extraordinaire, for bootlegging the entirety of the BoS BOS Big Band live sets.
Here are the two sets, in their entirety.
I am a bit of a numb-nut when it comes to music so if anyone can let me know which song is which and when they start (I believe it is called a playlist in the trade), I will post too.
For some pictures and video – see the original BoS BOS Big Band live post.
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This is a guest post by Brock Armstrong. Brock is a musician, web developer and digital media instructor turned personal trainer, marathon and triathlon coach. To fund his Triathlon & Marathon racing habit, he takes well planned designs and turns them into clean and consistent HTML and CSS code. Find out more by going to www.frozenpuck.com and/or www.skywalkerfitness.ca.
Brock gave a Lightning Talk at Business of Software 2012. This is a summary of his talk.
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After making the (partial) switch from Developer to Coach, I have become very aware of my fellow desk-jockey’s lack of… physical prowess and I want to do something about it. I don’t think everyone needs to run marathons, I just want you to feel better, look better and live a good long life.
We average North Americans work more than 47 hours a week and we’re sitting down for most of that time. In fact, we’re sitting more than ever before in human history: 9.3 hours per day. That’s more time than we spend sleeping!
Did you know that sitting for 6 hours (or more) per day makes you up to 40% more likely to die within 15 years than someone who sits less for than 3 hours per day? And here’s the kicker – this is true even if you get regular exercise.
Between 1980 and the year 2000, exercise rates in the UK stayed the same but sitting increased by 8% and obesity doubled (obese people, on average, sit for 2 and a half more hours per day than thin people).
Desk jobs, commuting, watching TV, and playing video games all encourage us to be sedentary and even people who exercise regularly spend much of the workday planted in a chair in front of the computer.
Reduce our sedentary behaviours to a total of 3 hours per day (or less) and we could increase our average life expectancy by 2 years (among many other more “fashionable” advantages).
I have a confession to make… I’m one of those people who has a standing workstation – because standing workers (like a clerk at a Best Buy) burn about 1,500 calories while at work; a person behind a desk might burn 900. This explains why people gain 16 pounds within 8 months of starting a sedentary office job.
What it comes down to is that you don’t absolutely have to stand all day long but you should absolutely interrupt your sitting and move around as often as you can. I set an alarm on my iPhone to go off every hour, on the hour, and I do pushups, or calf raises, or squats, or jumping jacks, or burpees, or… you get the idea.
Getting up and raising your heart rate for 4 minutes, once an hour, gets you the 30-ish minutes per day that your doctor has been nagging you about. Plus it makes you more productive, clears your head, gets you refocused and energized.
Try these when you are not at work: Never sit on a bus/subway. Always take the stairs. If you are on an escalator, pretend it’s stairs. Never sit through a commercial break on TV. Ignore what your mom told you and bounce a leg or fidget whenever you can. This extra movement is called “Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis” or “NEAT” and it all adds up.
But… getting up and exercising alone is only part of the equation – you have to look at your diet too.
Here are 3 great phrases to remember:
Lastly, remember the 80/20 rule: you don’t have to be perfect all of the time (that will set you up for failure), just be perfect 80% percent of the time… that other 20% probably won’t kill you.
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Some short excerpts of the band at Business of Software this year. I know a guy standing at the front with an iPhone 5 got one of the songs complete on video. If you are that person, please get in touch. Would love to see it. If you see a man walking around Boston trying to navigate his way back to the InterContinental Hotel with an iPhone 5, please get in touch too.
Thanks to Stephen Kellett, English Bagpiper extraordinaire, for bootlegging the entire thing too.
Here are the two sets, in their entirety.
I am a bit of a numb-nut when it comes to music so if anyone can let me know which song is which and when they start (I believe it is called a playlist in the trade), I will post too.
Fair to say not many software based rock concerts feature English Bagpipes…
Bassist showing off shocker…
Something a bit more familiar.
If you were the guy with the iPhone and still have that video, please be in touch…!
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