Full Circle Associates

Dave Sifry – Leadership Hacks
Background: founder, CEO Technorati, serial entrepreneur, started at age 16. Lot of scars on my back. Made as many stupid mistakes as I can find, have a few left in me. There’s a couple of things that seem, as I talk to others, to mentors, that building a business and being an entrepreneur is not about making money. It really isn’t. It is the single biggest fallacy when we talk about capitalism and capitalism theory. The more I talk to E’s, the less I hear about making money. It’s about building something, finding your passion and expressing it to the world. It’s the kind of thing that builds in all of the things that gonna hit you when you start your business, leading any kind of organization. Where you are asked to be a leader. Distinguish between leadership and management. People go to B School and learn management. Leadership and management have little to do with each other. Management is a function of leadership. I don’t know anyone who grew up saying they want to be a manager. I’m a terrible manager. You don’t need to be a great manager to be a great leader. One of the things I always find that great leaders have passion. They intrinsically know from deep down in their heart there is something they want to express, bring to the world. We all sitting here have that feeling.

Does gut instinct fit in
It certainly helps a lot. If you are doing it just to make money, the first time you have a major setback you are done. Insanity is up there on the list (referring to his slide). We’re all a little bit insane. When you think about it, going out there trying to start a business is an egotistical act. It is saying I know better than all of you what is right for the world. That takes balls. Instinct backed up with facts. Passion is one of those important thing. If you are thinking about building a biz, don’t think about money, glory and fame. That is all external crap. I get up each day because I absolutely friggig love what I do. If you are not feeling that you should check twice. Shit will happen, things will go wrong and you will be the guy who screwed it up. I have screwed up so many things so badly, going to sleep slapping self. You can’t get up and do it unless you love it.

Second thing is team. Cannot emphasize it more. One of the commitments I made at Technorati, I said to my VCs, investors, team members. Listen, I don’t care if we actually don’t get big enough, miss markets, our competitors beat us to something. The one rule is “only a great team.” I will never fill a position because I need to fill a position. A players A players and B players hire C players.

Third, lead, don’t manage. We could do an entire hour, day on leadership vs management. Talk more about that later.

These are meant to be discussion points.

Develop Leaders – 80% on your top 20%. After watching other successful companies learned a lot. You can’t do it by yourself. You can only take a team up to 8-10 people with you as leader and you micromanage everything. The best thing you can do is focusing on developing other leaders. Giving them the power. For those of you who don’t have kids, this is like having kids. You allow people to screw up badly and it is your fault. It is good. I want to encourage my guys to take risks, to screw up, fall on our faces, to mess up. That’s how we learn.

Prepare for the scalability traps…

Back of the napkin it – lately I’ve had a bunch of people, the valley has woken up again, Vancouver woken up. People back to building business. There is a game I play call product/feature/company. Someone comes with an idea. The great question is to ask is it a feature of a product, a producxt itself or actually a company. One of the best ways to figure it ou – can you write your biz model on the back of a napkin. For grad school points on the back of a cocktail napkin. Real time search paid by adverts. Wow, this is something with a biz model, write it on napkin. See if you can’t do that for yourself. Distill it down. Back of an envelope, but goal of cocktail napkin.

Remember, it is a business. I was co founder of a company called Linux care. 1998, huge open source community, worldwide. We hired a whole bunch of them and created a services company. Big personal mistake was treating it as a clubhouse with friends. One of those things that as an entrepreneur I have to keep thinking about. In the end you are building a business. Not just hiring your friends. The hardest part is sitting down and having the conversation, lets be clear about the expectations. This is a business, not a club house. I’ll tell you to do things and you will do it. Difficult to do. Interesting is when companies grow – 2-20 to 70 to 500. Clear distinct organizational changes.

On Outside Investment – all I have to say is “don’t do it.” Remember that Rodney Dangerfield line, Stay in School. Nothing like getting a check from a customer . When a business model calls you on the phone, take the call. Customers are the smartest people and tell us what we should and should not be doing. As smart as we think they are, the customers are smarter and they have the checks. If that doesn’t work, there’s a couple of rules on taking outside investors. Remember you are giving away your firstborn child. The amount of time and energy you spend on that business. Be careful, do your homework, know what you want to do.

Some further reading: Seth Godin on marketing… (missed rest)

Now, let’s get the discussion started.
Building teams is the single most important thing. Technology is bullshit, it means nothing. It’s all about the team. They will figure out the technology.

How many here are entrepreneurs? Most of people raised their hands. How many want to be entrepreneurs? Some duplicate hands…

Go round and under 30 seconds, what are you building today.

Dave Olson, used ot havea web design company in 1.0. Rolled in with ISP, sold to an evil phone company, learned all the lessons at a young age. No one hire me, moved back into old office after phone company went bankrupt

Jon Hus and, Qumana, former consultant, social critic on hyper linked world. Became an entrepreneur because could not face the corporate world. Underline the frugal and time.

Argin Singh, interested in this million pixel guy. How to find ideas that have that kind of resonance.

Boris Mann, CEO of Brygth, building open source one click web ap for every vertical. Working in a highly distributed manner we learn things every time. This isn’t working and switch. Use whatever method possible, duct tape, work on your ESP.

Tell us a leadership hack so we all can learn and share.

Nancy _ give it away, it will come back ten times.

Omar Bikel – co found a non profit in Montreal providing IT services around OS. Goal to help bring independent IT workers out of isolation to work together, sustainable cooperative. Creating employment rather than dividends. Allow people to work how much they want and give them to some time to work on what they want. Makes them happy.

Reg Shirami, web 2.0 central – passion sells – investors, employees. You can’t bootstrap without passion. Can’t buy it.

Jay Fienberg, small info architecture consultancy – tell the truth and be willing to cut losses when something going bad.

Fred Fabro, Quamana – build a better blog authoring environment, make it easier, more profitable. I know those scars. Never underestimate how difficult it is to get things off the ground. Pay attention to people inside and outside. Communicate and listen

Mark Mayo – Now working in a research facility Working to eliminate private sector market to make sure the data stays in the public domain. Never underestimate the motivation of a noble cause. (Genetics research )

Matt of WordPress and Automatic – it’s I thought leading an OS project would be more coding. Morea bout managing egos. People working for no money, thousands of hours. Find out what drives them. One guy is 10% of our posts. Say thank you. My mom taught me that.

Kaliya – a hack is waiting for the market to be ready for your idea. Being patient. All these spiritual groups need to get with social networking three years ago. Maybe ready this year. Patience.

Audrey – build AJAX components. Reinventing ourselves over the years. Figure out how to get customers from day one. (Someone shouted Open Source It). Stayed together for 7 years through determination, tenacity, having customers. Finding something of value you can provide. Then listen to them.

Evan – just starting emptymind technology, bringing context to personal info … Still fresh to recognize screw ups. Document all of your assumptions so others working with you know what’s going on.

Dixon – Make it as rich and easy for podcasters as bloggers. Hire someone as passionate about the company as you.

Matt, same company. You have to make it real. Taking it out of the basement, getting an office. Until there is something on the line it is not the same.

Always build the bare minimum product necessary to ship. You always have other features. The second thing, when you have an office you have to pay for, you have to get customers.

Jean – Bryght. Never worked for a company with more than 25 people. I like new, pushing myself. Always try to keep perspective. At the end of the day, it’s just a job.

Jean – GM small credit union – competitive environment. Indecision is decision. The team thing – as a leader you have to create the culture that makes meaning for employers and customers. When you can create an environment where they are making meaning, you are there.

Dave - Sending chills down my back. You could not say it better. Scott McNealy used to say I’d rather make a wrong decision than no decisions. You can always fix it. One of the things I learned, whether you know, like or conscious of it or not, your corporate culture gets built by the people. Founder is like smearing DNA. The first 20 people define the DNA of your company, the values it is going to have, trying to do. At Tecnorati I want to be conscious about building a culture. We put the fun back into dysfunctional at Linuxcare. Here’s the values: Open, honest, integrity, frugal. Nothing to do with how we make money. What’s our mantra going to be, the guiding principle. The core inside and outside, the way we act and who we are. It’s be of service. We all want to be of service to something greater than ourselves. How can you be of service to everyone who reports to me. Get shit out of their way. If you are conscious and inform people, it gives a shot up in terms of hiring people that believe in that culture.

That credit union is a sponsor and did a marketing hack.

Want to business rock star (missed name) – Music, 2.0 creative commons. If you re gonna hire a good team, then trust them.

Dethe – creating animation tools for kids of all ages, super simple. Use my kids and friends kid for QA

Sweet, child labor

Dustin – sillysoft games, downloadable games. Do the bare minimum, but try new things, iterate, listen to customers, scrap it, find what works.

Wendy – Open space facilitation – around serendipity. Be open to it. Invite it. When you’ve got your finger on that thread follow it. Even if you don’t understand it.

Avi – dabble DB – don’t be afraid to do things differently.

Andrew – look for reasons why you are wrong. Don’t be satisfied with lower goal.

Mike – aim high, the worse you could do is aim low and miss.


Categories: Sifry, Technorati, leadership, moosecamp, northernvoice