Andy Boyer

Month: October 2011

  • Rich Barton Urges Seattle to Think Huge

    (Note: Most of this is also reposted at the Social3i.com blog)

    Working in an emerging industry like social media, and with clients from Microsoft down to small startups, we’re in a unique position to see a ton of entrepreneurial start-ups. We play with tools from Simply Measured and Visible Technologies, work with WordPress Plug-ins and developers, and see everything from new Facebook radio applications to sports energy drinks.

    So, when a publisher like Geekwire sets up a Fireside chat with Rich Barton, it’s kind of a can’t miss event. I’ve seen Rich speak a number of times, and his mantra about online marketing carries with me whenever I see a new business plan. His line is simple to remember and generally dead on: “Whatever can be free will be free, whatever can be found will be found, and whatever can be rated will be rated.”

    But last week at Spitfire, Rich added one more message to the Seattle VC and entrepreneurial community. He said (and I paraphrase here), “The problem with the Seattle Entrepreneurial community is that no enough people swing for the home run. It takes just as much energy to walk out of the dugout and bunt as it takes to walk out of the dugout and swing for the fences.”

    It’s a fair and accurate comment, and something even more extraordinary when you consider that besides Barton, there are at least 4 or 5 other Seattle based entrepreneurs who went long a decade or more ago:
    – Bill Gates, who put a PC on every desktop.
    – Howard Schultz, who put a $4.00 cup of coffee in everyone on the planet’s hand.
    – Jeff Bezos, who made it possible to buy anything from anyplace, anytime for a market price, and get it delivered almost overnight.
    – Paul Allen, whose goals are so big and audacious he probably overshoots them by a few years (ie space travel.)

    Barton’s message which every marketer should hear as well – “Pick a Big Hairy Audacious Goal and don’t surround yourself with any team members who don’t think that big. People have an amazing capacity to do huge things if a huge goal is set before them.”

    It seems like a good lesson for all of us in either digital marketing or entrepreneurship.

  • Recapping NWEN’s First Look Forum 2011

    I always enjoy attending business plan events such as NWEN’s First Look Forum, the UW Biz Plan Competition, Startup Riot, etc… I tend not to call them competitions, and lean towards words like “showcases.” Sure the teams may be competing for a prize, but what they are really doing is showing the public the amount of work they’ve done on taking an idea from imagination to execution.

    The real inspiring part of days like this is to see people striving to reach or exceed what is generally concluded as their “potential.” For every 100 people sitting in Westlake Park complaining that the world is unfair and out to get them, there was 1 person in the NWEN First Look Forum pitching an idea that they believed would create jobs and money. If I had my way, that would be the 1% / 99% ratio we should be trying to change.

    This was the first year I was involved with a team (Relaborate) that made it through the process, even succeeding down to the final 5 companies. And now I’l use the term “competitor” because from the team’s viewpoint, making it from 37 to 20 to 12 to 5 really is a gauntlet, and you do feel a measure of success each time your name is called to advance.

    But when you look at the other 11 companies, you can’t call it a competition, because I don’t know how any consumer would ever be making a choice between any of our products.

    • BAM Testing, What’s your athletic potential.
    • FanZappy, “Social-to-Store” service attracts social fans to local businesses and further converts fans to repeat in-store customer via our mobile app.
    • Glacier Peak, Nature does nothing uselessly.
    • Green Simian, Renewable Mobile Power.
    • Grid Mobility, Connecting Power to People.
    • Lacuna Systems, Expert Web Performance Management.
    • MotoVolta, Inc., High Performance Electric Motorcycles.
    • Mountain Logic, Halves heating and cooling costs for 100 million homeowners with central forced air by only conditioning occupied rooms.
    • Phytelligence, Smarter plants.
    • ProtoSec, Creating the next wave of Internet and Web vulnerability detection giving enterprise customers novel and low-cost vulnerability information about their applications, helping them meet compliance and security requirements.
    • Radiate, The Future of Internet Radio.
    • Relaborate, Blogging Made Easy.
    But no matter what, here are 12 people – from an original list of 37 – who are attempting to build and create jobs, not protest that no one is creating jobs for them.  Maybe not all of these will turn a “profit” some day, but if you are looking for ways to stimulate an economy, I think these are the kinds of events and people you should be investing in.  They may not all show a return, but at least there’s a chance.

  • Kasey Keller’s 4 Save Extravaganza (In Case You Missed It)

    Sorry for the poor quality from the clip I’m borrowing. But if you haven’t ever seen a goalkeeper make 4 saves in 20 seconds, in front of 64,000 people, with his team already down 1-0, check out this sequence.

  • A Small Business Owner’s Thoughts on the Economy

    There’s no question that we are in some ridiculously bad economic times. And when you look at the system as a whole, the problem certainly seems unfixable. Now there is a lot of rhetoric on each side of the political aisle but here are the few humble thoughts from a small business owner.

    1) There are actually jobs out there – This may seem like an inflammatory comment to my unemployed readers. But when we spun off our new company, Relaborate, a little while ago, one of the first things we needed was a developer to help us flesh out the prototype. And let me tell you – that developer was really hard to find. You may not want to code. But if you want a job, learn to code. You won’t be the best coder in the world but the economy needs more coders.

    2) The Unemployment system is horrendous – I’d like to hire more people to full-time, full benefit roles. However, our clients aren’t always signing 12 month deals. So often that means contract/project work. And too many times, I hear the following positively ridiculous statement: “How long is the gig? I’m not sure I can do any work or get paid for doing project work, because it will mess up my unemployment benefits.” That’s insane. The entitlement system provides incentive to not do part time projects, which could lead to a full time role. The system actually discourages productivity. Sure, someone could argue that I should just give the person a full-time job. But that’s not always an option. If I have a specific time-bounded project that I need someone with a specialized skill set to help me with, I’d like to pay a fair market wage to someone to help me with it. The system shouldn’t be stopping that person from being able to say yes. Someone should be able to fix this.

    3) The labor “Supply and Demand” Curve is out of whack – This goes back to the point about developers. The Universities need to do a better job of controlling how many degrees are given out in each field of study. If the country only has jobs for 10,000 Art History majors, the Universities shouldn’t pump out 20,000 new Art History majors a year, paying $40k a year in college tuition. I know it would take a little foresight and research to make these projections, but I kind of assume the Universities should have the collective intellect to pull this off.

    4) It takes a little effort – A friend of mine recently offered to help someone with some connections. The job seeker sent a Facebook Wall post asking for those connections. No resume, no personal email, no phone call…just a Facebook Wall post. The entitlement generation needs to figure out a few things about professional behavior.

    Now the point of this post is not to be a rant. It’s actually optimistic. Every day I work with people who are hungry to work more. I see entrepreneurs trying to build companies that will enable them to hire people. I see people who are under-employed wanting to work. But I call upon the high schools and universities to push students towards careers where there is demand, I urge the politicians to fix the arcane unemployment rules that make it hard for people to take short-term project work, and I strongly encourage the under-employed to think about what kind of roles people are desperate to hire. I want to be Commissioner of Baseball. But there’s already a line of people more qualified than me for that role, so I’ll have to keep doing these Marketing jobs. It’s just the way it is.

    In a lot of ways, we are all our own small businesses, and we are all selling a set of services to someone. We all need to have something that people are willing to pay for.

  • Monday Night Video Ad Fun – Nokia “Dot”

    If you haven’t seen this ad from Nokia yet, give it a shot. Super creative use of stop motion animation, utilizing the Nokia N8’s Cellscope Technology.