An Entrepreneurial Journey



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  • Our Marketing Revolution Continues

    I previously wrote about our efforts to improve our marketing material, to stop talking so much about ourselves and start talking about how to solve our clients’ pains.  A company called Square2Marketing (writers of Reality Marketing Revolution)has been helping us make these changes, and that over time I would update on the progress.  The time has come for an update…

    Our website is the first major change we’ve made.  It is still a work in progress, but we’ve taken some huge strides towards where we want to be.  We’ve defined the most common pains of our clients and have really focused on addressing those pains on the website, starting right on the home page.

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  • 6 Factors to Spotting Potential

    A few weeks back when we were visiting our office in India, we took a few days and flew on over to Bangalore to attend the EO India regional event called RIE.  The India EO events are always a great time, as they’re known for bringing in fascinating speakers and holding dinner events in extraordinary places such as castles, old forts or roof top venues.  This year, staying true to their reputation, they brought in Praful Patel, the Minister of State for Civil Aviation, Vijay Mallya, the Chairman of Kingfisher Airlines and Rasmus Ankersen, a self proclaimed high performance anthropologist.

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  • Will Your Foundation Support Your Growth?

    Some really great things have been happening on our visit to our India office.  In addition to hiring 2 new developers, 1 tester and a designer, we shared a lot on improving our projects and engaged our R&D team in some awesome discussion on new products. Outside of the office, we broke off into 2 teams and Chris and I enjoyed our first game of Cricket.

    A few days ago we had the pleasure of visiting a very unique community called Auroville.  Auroville came to be in February of 1968 when some 5,000 people representing 124 nations came to India and participated in a ceremony.   They each contributed soil from their homeland as a symbol of unity, that Auroville would be a place where people “of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities.”  The place where they joined to perform this ceremony is in the picture below…and it is one of the most amazing things I’ve seen yet.

    india matrimandir tree big resized 600

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  • Are you doing what Works or what Doesn’t Work?

    People look at things in very different ways.  We all have our own rose colored glasses that affect how we view the world and 2 people seeing the exact same thing can easily come to 2 completely different conclusions.  This is a matter of interpretation.

    Sometimes it’s difficult for people to see through their rose colored glasses to see what actually works, and what doesn’t work.  For example, thinking that you can jump off the empire state building and go up instead of down…that won’t work, and will soon make those rose colored glasses very, very red.  A little less extreme…say you leave LA planning to drive to NYC, and your rose colored glasses say it will be fun to just “wing it” and you drive west. Does this work or does the Pacific get in your way?  Looking at the journey through rose colored glasses doesn’t render reality.

    Many people require something along the lines of a scoreboard to have a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t.  Say you and I are on opposing teams in the sport of your imagination, and we are about to compete.  We both brag about our teams being better than the other, but how is that possible when you beat me 10 fold every time?  Do I have credibility to make this argument?

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  • Dreams..it’s in the process.

    As we bring in the New Year, so many of us want take this new beginning and work toward starting something better for ourselves. Something that will help us advance or grow in some way, because it’s in our nature to desire to be better. Many of those New Years resolutions end up being no more than a desire. Why is that? Why is it so hard to turn our desires into reality? 

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  • Thanks…Giving

    As we celebrate this weekend with our family and friends, I find it a reminder to realize the significance of the 2 words that you get when you separate Thanksgiving to get Thanks and Giving.

    Go back with me for a moment and remember how there were just 50 pilgrims, only half of the original settlers, that managed to endure the touch environment and lack of food their first winter. It was a Patuxet Indian named Squanto that helped the pilgrims communicate with the other Indians and learn their ways of harvesting. On that first day of Thanksgiving, they celebrated the Giving of the Indians and Thanks to God for their lives. Looking back, what we call Thanksgiving today is really a celebration of the Giving done by the Indians and Thanks for the gift that allowed the settlers to survive, thus founding the great nation we live in today.

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  • What’s the Risk? The Black Swan vs. The Bell Curve

    If you recall, I wrote a blog not too long ago on the Black Swan, with emphasis on its take of an Extremistan world, where living in a scalable world makes you subject to extreme events. With the recent movie Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, I’ve been thinking a lot about this theory, and about what caused the stock market crash. Was it really because of the greedy types on Wall Street?

    A big portion of the Black Swan is on how the Gaussian bell curve can measure risk in a world not subject to extreme fluctuations, but it doesn’t come close to measuring the risk that is associated with things that can range more than 3 standard deviations from the mean.

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  • Lunch is free, afterall…

    Have you thought about the idea of “free” as a business model before? You know…give it away for free and then get paid in some other format. It’s nothing new. The concept has been around for years, but was not accepted until the Google world of today.
    Everyone knows what Jell-O is, and most likely have tried it, but what most people don’t know is that when Jell-O was created back in late 1800’s, it sat in a warehouse for a few years because no one knew exactly what to do with it. I read about this in Chris Anderson’s book Free, The Future of a Radical Price.

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  • Ship Strategy…in business?

    In the early 1800’s, a new kind of ship was manufactured. It was a leaner, more slender ship, built for speed rather than capacity. Its sharp long prow was made out of expensive oak, and its sails spread 160 feet across. These ships were called clipper ships. They ran wide open, day and night, virtually ignorant of weather conditions, arriving beaten and battered at their destination, but on time no less.

    In the 1840’s, still recovering from a 5 year economic depression, the US built 160 of these low capacity, more expensive ships.

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  • Are you an expert…yet?

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    Have you ever thought about how long it takes to be really good at something? Or have you thought that if you weren’t born with a natural talent in something then you couldn’t be an expert at it?

    According to Malcom Gladwell, in his book Outliers, it takes about 10,000 hours of practice in your life to be an expert in your respective field. This crosses over in all fields from sports, music, chess player, business and even master criminals.

    Daniel Levitin, a Neuroscientist, was quoted in the book saying “It seems that it takes this brain this long (10,000 hours) to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.” Even Mozart didn’t write his outstanding concertos until he had his 10,000 hours of practice, which translates into about 10 years of serious practice and dedication.

    Gladwell gives examples of this from Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Bill Joy (Sun Microsystems) to the Beatles. Their success and rise to fame was a combination of a few things, but all had the 10,000 hour expert rule associated with them.

    Given the awareness from this great research, are you putting in dedicated, nose to the grindstone work to be an expert in something? You might like that song “I want to be a Billionaire so freaking bad”, but are you working towards your 10,000 hours of focused, dedicated practice to get there?