The Police in Concert!
February 26, 2007
I was reading Charlie’s blog and learned that The Police were getting back together for a reunion tour this summer. I was in junior high during their last tour and didn’t get a chance to see my favorite band. The tickets were more money than my mortgage, but I bought them anyway. See you on the floor! Get your own tickets at StubHub.
Employers, offer fringe benefits . . .
February 26, 2007
When we started Architel, the fringe benefits were scarce. To start, we didn’t have our own offices, offered no health benefits and didn’t pay very well. Over the years we have been able to offer more and more benefits and as a result the quality of applicants and subsequently employees are better. Some of the many benefits include:
- United Healthcare PPO - 100% paid for by Architel
- Direct Deposit with various investment options from Chase
- Full cafeteria with healthy or non-healthy food
- Fully stocked free drink refrigerator
- Foosball table (one of my favorites)
- Free colocation space and servers for engineers side projects
- NEW!! Full gym with lockerroom and showers
Put up or shut up!
February 26, 2007
That’s what various Linux supporters are saying to Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer in their "Show Us The Code" effort. Ballmer has repeated his claim that some Linux components infringe on Microsoft’s patents.
Most Linux supporters think that Microsoft is simply trying to scare business customers away from the popular operating system as SCO did a couple of years ago. I suspect they are right.
It is doubtful Microsoft will release the code they feel has been infringed, but I do suspect that as soon as someone loses a court case, the Linux community will rewrite the offending code (if in fact there is any). So my advice, "move along, nothing to see here."
Remember, your current deal is rarely your last deal. . .
February 22, 2007
Do ethics matter in business? Does it matter if it is ethical if it is legal? Sometimes it is hard to do the right thing, especially when everyone is telling you to do the opposite just because it is legal. We were working on a very small acquisition at Architel for the last couple of weeks. The company’s investors fired the CEO and as a result almost 70% of the staff quit (quite a testament to the loyalty of these employees). We began discussions with the investor to take over the business. Our offer would make the investor whole, but it didn’t provide a return on his investment. The company is in distress and has about as much revenue as it has in debt. Our discussions have been going on for a couple of weeks and yesterday we supplied the company with a letter of intent and term sheet. We knew we were a few hundred thousand apart, but we decided to present our offer formally. We didn’t get a response until just after lunch today.
One of our employees came into my office and reluctantly explained that the CEO of the company we were looking to acquire contacted her last night and indicated that they had decided not to accept our offer. I was a little shocked that the CEO would contact my employee instead of calling me directly. She then explained that he had made her a job offer she couldn’t refuse and handed me her resignation letter. I was floored. On the flip side, our salespeople had been contacted by various customers of the company who were concerned about the viability of the company throughout our negotiations. Instead of piling on doubt, we notified the company and explained which customers contacted us and offered advice to fix the various situations. Legally, we could have attempted to turn these customers into Architel clients, but ethically we felt it would be a mistake. I think we made the ‘right’ decision.
I guess over the years I have learned that your current deal is rarely your last deal. In the overall scheme of things this employee leaving our company won’t ruin our business, but on the flip side it won’t save the investors business either. What it will do is taint my opinion of the investor and his CEO forever. Additionally, everyone else involved in the deal including our lawyers, accountants, consultant and employees will remember how the investor and his CEO behaved. It will cloud any deal or transaction the investor is involved with from now on. I have made mistakes in the past, many that I regret and some that impact my ability to conduct business. We all have. My advice to anyone in business is to consider your actions outside of the scope of your current deal. Think about how they might affect your next deal and the deal after that. It is a very small world, trust me VERY SMALL INDEED.
Machine Lamps by Frank Buchwald
February 22, 2007
Looking for a functional piece of art for your desk? Frank Buchwald will make one for you for the low, low price of $15,500.
Ironic: No Materinity Leave at CPS?
February 22, 2007
One of our employees just found out that his wife is having a baby. He shared with us that his wife’s employer did not provide any paid maternity leave. She could use her accrued vacation time, but other than that she was on her own. I was shocked when I learned that she worked for Child Protective Services. Isn’t that ironic? The State agency charged with the protection of children does not provide maternity leave for its own OVERWORKED employees? I dug a little deeper and called The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, Child Protective Services division, and talked to Michael Hess who confirmed this fact. Does this seem right? I don’t think so…
If you want to voice your concern about this issue contact:
Carey Cockerell, Commissioner 512-438-4800
Joyce James, Assistant Commission for Child Protective Services 512-438-4800
Rick Perry, Governor 512-463-1932
Odeo, only 40% bigger than PodServe?
February 20, 2007
We created PodServe as a tool to make it easy for our clients to host their podcasts. We released a public version of PodServe and with very little support it has grown substantially. Lots of people have used it to get their podcast started (most stop podcasting within 3 months) and the successful one (i.e. the guys who need stats) migrated to a paid service within 12 months. The remainder of the users on PodServe are what we call casual podcasters (or videocasters). We have been busy working on custom versions of PodServe for various clients including FX Network (to date we have built custom installs with the PodCall feature for Nip/Tuck, Dirt and The Riches and we recently executed a 6 show deal with FX).
Today I noticed that Ev was selling Odeo. He released the following stats:
- Unique visitors: 684,951
- Pageviews: 3,012,921 (does not include RSS, MP3s, or Flash widgets)
- Flash plays: 1,523,963
- Logins: 76,106
I had assumed Odeo was much bigger, entrenched than PodServe. My assumption was wrong. In rough terms Odeo is only about 40% bigger than PodServe. Maybe we should talk to Ev about merging the PodServe and Odeo brands/sites together creating a bigger and better Odeo 2.0 (just kidding about the 2.0 part). How about a deal where we give 25% of the combined company to Obvious in exchange for the assets and perhaps an ongoing advertising relationship with Twitter? I will have to think about it…
Update: I have been informed, by an Odeo fan, that at least 25% of our traffic is from suspect sources (i.e. people that might be breaking the law). Ouch. Our thought is that combined, we could justify allocating time, resources and money to the combined effort. PodServe alone is an interesting basis for custom built tools, but as a standalone business it is hard to compete with sites like Odeo. Combined, well, we would have a good reason to invest more in it.
India’s outsourcing business = nirvana for Indian workers?
February 18, 2007
Last year I went to India and have blogged extensively about my thoughts since. If you were to believe the news over the last couple of years, everyone in India was (or wanted to be) a programmer working for Tata or Infosys. Om Malik has noted in his own blog that India’s best and brightest see the outsourcing giants as "code factories." Turns out, most graduates of IIT Powai won’t even interview with the outsourcers, in 2006 only 10 of the 574 IIT Powai graduates went to work for tech outsourcers. Instead, most are joining companies like Google and Yahoo. Even Tata executives realize that the future is gloomy for their business.
Nothing is as simple as the people who write books and business articles would lead you to believe. I am very bullish on India, Philippines and China ~ but perhaps not for the same reasons. I suggest that entrepreneurs or recent MBA grads head to India and take a look for themselves. Why? As I suggested last year:
My advice? Go to India and witness how entrepreneurs with 10% of the resources available to Americans can create viable businesses. These guys have to deal with daily electrical outages, old computers, faulty wiring, substandard building codes, no air conditioning; these guys don’t have 90% of what we have, but somehow they are able to start businesses. Climb back into your business class seat, drive to your comfortable home in the suburbs and tell me you need more money for a laptop or a phone system. I bet you will realize that you don’t need as much as you thought. The ironic truth is that with less, your result will undoubtedly be better. Or maybe I am wrong…
Want better schools? Dump the unions.
February 18, 2007
Steve Jobs and Michael Dell, in a joint appearance, met in Austin to discuss how to improve public education in the United States. Jobs spent most of his time suggesting unions were the problem, while Dell explained that unions were helping teachers (he never addressed whether or not they were any good for kids).
Jobs asked, "What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn’t get rid of people that they thought weren’t any good? Not really great ones because if you’re really smart you go, ‘I can’t win. I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way. This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."
If you can’t fire bad teachers you will end up with more and more bad teachers. Ever heard of the ‘one bad apple’ idea? Of course, it isn’t just the teachers. Last month two Dallas area principals were asked to resign over purchases they made using their district provided credit cards. Principal Govan of Maceo Smith spent $236,000 on his card to purchase everything from furniture to flat-screen TVs. Ardis McCann, principal of Sprice High spent $266,000 on his card to pruchase everything from pizza to wedding flowers and shoes. They both refused and still serve in their positions. It may take up-to a year to remove them, if they are removed at all.
Note to Patrick Scoble: Do some research first!
February 17, 2007
Robert Scoble is blogging about how he is trying to teach his 13 year old to follow his dreams. He recommends taking your ideas to Sand Hill Road instead of taking it to a big company. I was just taking to a very young programmer who spent the last year at our company yesterday and gave him some advice regarding his career.
This particular individual is very young (under 25) and is VERY bright. He didn’t go to college and has worked for a number of small companies learning a great deal about networking and programming in his short career. This kid is a great problem solver, but over the past couple of months it was clear he had gone as far as he could in our company. He found a new job at a company even smaller than ours that paid a little more and exposed him to new challenges. I am not sure how our conversation started, but I thought it might be a good conversation to blog.
I suggested that he consider finding a position with a large company (Fortune 1000). To start, larger companies usually provide great training for their employees (they might even send him to school). Second, later in his career recruiters who are seeking candidates with resumes from ‘Fortune Company No. 743′ will seek him out. It is unlikely that they will be looking for guys who previously worked for Big in Japan. Finally, if he is interested in eventually starting his own company working at a big company is a great way to figure out what to do. How?
Let me explain my own path to entrepreneurship. I worked as a salesperson at three telecom/internet companies when I was in my twenties. First, I started at ICG Communications, a compentive access provider (later a CLEC). The company sold local connections within municipalities. Their fiber optic cables connected buildings together. ICG’s customers were typically ISPs and IXC (LD providers). Their biggest problem? ICG rarely had connectivity to the ISPs or IXCs who wanted to buy their fiber. Deal after deal was lost by the sales team. Next I worked for IXC Communications, a long distance provider (selling long haul capacity between cities). IXC’s customers were typically ISPs, other IXCs and CAPs. Their biggest problem? IXC rarely had connectivity to their customers. Finally, I worked for Genuity (BBN Planet), the first Internet Service Provider (AS1). Their problem? Connecting their service to local businesses who wanted to buy.
By working for these huge companies I was in the perfect place to find a niche to build a business around. Had I spent time working for small niche players I may have never seen my own opportunity. My idea? What if you could create a ‘pooling point’ where IXCs, CLECs, CAPs, ISPs, ASPs and other internet/communication providers could connect? These sort of places exisited, but typically they were not neutral. My idea was to create a neutral location and allow each provider to ‘enter’ for free. The industry typically required providers to pay ‘entrance’ fees (i.e. buy it before you sell something). My concept was very simple - charge a premium fee AFTER a carrier sold a connection. Carriers could connect hundreds of fibers, DS3s and DS1s to our distribution frame for free. They only paid once they sold a deal. Within a couple of years we had almost every carrier as a customer (except Sprint).
Khali Henderson wrote about it in Xchange Magazine:
Beyond Real Estate
The virtual pooling point arrangement seems to be developing organically in the market at carrier hotels and neutral hubs. As critical mass is achieved at some of these locations, carriers are looking for ways to facilitate doing business with collocated carriers and other service providers. Neutral facilities operators are beginning to step up to the plate.
LayerOne Inc., which calls itself the first optical transport exchange, offers quick and simple provisioning of local and long-haul circuits among multiple carriers via neutral optical distribution nodes at carrier hotels. LayerOne had more than a dozen exchange sites in place at year’s end, and plans for more than 120 nodes within three years.
CEO Alexander Muse says LayerOne is similar to the metropolitan access exchanges (MAEs) at which ISPs have traditionally swapped traffic, but that those are at Layer 3, while it offers service at Layer 1–the physical and electrical level of the open systems interconnection (OSI) model.
By transporting traffic at Layer 1, carriers can achieve greater speed and gross throughput. At Layer 3, traffic is sent through routers and switches where each packet is read one by one and forwarded to the destination based on its unique address. At Layer 1, traffic is transmitted as pure light and, at the interconnection point, converted to electricity and back to light to resume its journey. A Layer 1 connection can be more efficient transport for traffic that has already been sorted into big streams heading toward the same destination.
LayerOne targets heavily populated carrier hotels that house multiple service providers, but lack an entity to connect carrier tenants within the building or to carriers’ customers outside the building that want access to these tenants’ PoPs, network access points or dark fiber.
The exchange sites, called NEXUS optical distribution exchanges, or NODEs, provide connections to everyone in the building using cross-connects from vendors such as ADC Telecommunications Inc. (www.adc.com). Muse says the seller of the transport connects on the "A" side of the cross-connect, and buyers hook up to the "B" side to access their services and bandwidth. The buyer pays LayerOne a monthly fee for the connectivity.
"We created the standard for the A and B side methodologies in our exchange," Muse says. "Today it’s on a one-to-one basis, but we want to create a one-to-many relationship."
In its first one-to-many agreement, LayerOne announced in October that Level 3 Communications Inc. (www.level3.com) will act as an "A" side provider of a variety of services in all of LayerOne’s markets. Level 3 will initially deploy in LayerOne’s Chicago, Dallas, Miami and St. Louis facilities and expand into additional NEXUS Exchange facilities as they become operational.
Since then, LayerOne has struck similar deals with Cidera Inc. (www.cidera.com), Enron Broadband Services, Metromedia Fiber Network Inc. (www.mmfn.com), Telseon and Qwest Communications International Inc. (www.qwest.com). Prior to that deal, LayerOne had only announced single-market deals with such service providers as Enron Broadband Services, NEXTLINK (now XO Commu-nications Inc., www.xo.com) and Qwest. The Level 3 deal "is tremendously valuable to us" because it creates lots of "inventory" for LayerOne, Muse says.
LayerOne keeps a database of what connectivity and services it offers and where from "A" side providers, so carriers looking for such services can quickly find and provision such services without lengthy carrier-to-carrier interconnection negotiations, Muse says. But, he adds, carriers have to interact directly to agree on pricing.
LayerOne eventually expects to provide the database information via a web interface, but currently the company’s engineers provide the information on request.
Screwed by Save My Ass?
February 15, 2007
Last year I wrote about a service called Save My Ass in a post titled, "Great Service, Unfortunate Name!" The service which made me look like a loving husband for the past 12 months failed me yesterday. That’s right, on the ever important Valentines Day. I tried to log into my account and got a message indicating my account had been cancelled. Thanks guys…
Do you work for a jerk?
February 15, 2007
Guy is riffing on Bob Sutton’s book, The No Asshole Rule, and has a list to help you determine if you work for one:
- Thinks that the rules are different for him
- Doesn’t understand the difference between a position making a person and a person making a position.
- Requires “handlers.
- Requires the fulfillment of special requests in order to be happy/productive/efficient
- Relates to people primarily in terms of what they can do for him.
- Judges people by her personal values, not the employees’ or society’s values.
- Judges employees’ results and his intentions.
- Asks you to do something that he wouldn’t do.
- Calls employees at home or on the weekends.
- Believes that the world is out to get her when faced with criticism or even omission.
- Slows down or halts your career progress.
Boss Joke
February 15, 2007
How many bosses does it take to screw in a light bulb? Answer: One. He holds up the light bulb and expects the universe to revolve around him. [via]
You’re big when:
February 13, 2007
Someone takes the time to build a website to bash you. Take for example, arringtonsucks.com, some guy has taken the time to build an entire blog dedicated to how much Michael Arrington Sucks. I only hope I get big enough to get my own musesucks.com site.
Startup Banking Part Deux
February 13, 2007
Last month I wrote about our plan to find a new bank in a post titled, "Banking for Startups" where I asked for ideas for a new bank. Bank One, our old bank, was bought by Chase and we felt since we were changing anyway, we might as well find a bank that offered exactly what we needed. Lots of people contacted me with potential banks to visit. We got down the road with Silicon Valley Bank and thought they might have the perfect product for us. Their systems were compatible with Macintosh computers and they offered our controller the ability to deposit checks from her desk through a little check reader. They asked us to send them our bank statements and various account information to make sure they could bank us for the same or less money than Chase cost. We were hopeful that we might build a relationship with the local officer.
Once we sent them the information, our controller called asking them to confirm receipt as the information was somewhat sensitive. It took a week of calls from me and the controller to get confirmation that they got our information (our controller was actually fairly worried that SVB might not be a real bank, just some sort of scam operation). I had indicated that we wanted to get everything in place to move the accounts before February 1st, but time was running out. Finally, they got back to us and told us that we would have to pay $1400 for the check scanner. Our controller was annoyed that she had to pay since SVB does not have a branch to accept deposits. They suggested that if we maintained our average $400,000 checking balance for three months they would waive the fee (thanks a bunch I thought).
My controller and I sat down during the last week of January and talked about SVB and decided that we might be even LESS impressed with SVB than we were with Chase. The SVB banker didn’t bother to visit our offices or invite us to his office. He failed to call us back and finally turned us over to someone else at the last moment outside of the Dallas office. I guess our hopes for a relationship were dashed. We were looking for a relationship and it seemed that the lack of relationship with Chase was better than the negative relationship we had during the sales process at SVB. We decided to stick with Chase for the time being. As it turned out Chase’s banking website, despite what they told us, actually works with the Firefox browser! So technically, we have everything we need at Chase except for a relationship. We still would love a relationship with a real person at a bank here in Dallas.
Search
-
Startup Jobs
-
Recent Network Posts
-
Ignite Clean Energy business plan competition
From North Carolina Startup Blog -
I am Robert Scoble / What is SpringStage
From Fort Worth Startup Blog -
How to Make Money in 2009 With Your Web Startup
From Fort Worth Startup Blog -
Event: "Reboot your Work", by TriUPA
From North Carolina Startup Blog -
Herrd.com in the dotcom deadpool? Caribdaily.com the new frontrunner
From Caribbean Startup Blog -
First SpringStage Startup Happy Hour of 2009
From Fort Worth Startup Blog -
Kentucky Startups Events
From Kentucky Startup Blog -
Entrepreneur Expo Coming to Fort Worth on April 22
From Fort Worth Startup Blog -
Let's Do Lunch
From Fort Worth Startup Blog -
Squeejee Adds New Features to Tweet Congress
From Fort Worth Startup Blog
-
Ignite Clean Energy business plan competition