Andy Boyer

I have to write things down here or I'll forget them.

Author: Andy (Page 19 of 26)

Ben Huh Discusses Laying Off 1/3 of His Team

July 9, 2013 /

An interesting article ran in Inc Magazine this week about Ben Huh and the layoffs at Cheezburger a while back, “How I Live With Myself After Firing a Third of My Employees.”

At first it looks like it’s been written by Huh. But I read it and it sounded nothing like how the charismatic CEO speaks. Then I noticed that it was “written by Liz Welch, as told to her by Ben Huh.”

This fact made have contributed to the piece sounding self-serving to some. In fact, there was a mini-debate in a Private Facebook group I belong to about this very subject. Some people found the article in very poor taste, suggesting Ben’s attitude seemed to be, “Well too bad for everyone I fired, I don’t feel bad at all.” Having met Ben several times in the Seattle start-up scene, it struck me that this didn’t seem like it would be Ben’s general attitude at all. Even the people who were neutral on Ben’s comments seemed to think the piece came across staged, edited or worse.

I want to give Ben the benefit of the doubt here, since he didn’t write the piece. So we don’t know what was lost in translation or incorrectly quoted by Welch. But I took away a few points:

  1. “We were profitable until we took VC investment” = Don’t just spend money because you have money in the bank. You still have to make smart decisions.
  2. “The Board did not ask for this, it was my decision” = As CEO, you have to think about the 42 people you are keeping just as much as the 24 you let go. I made the mistake of growing too fast, I’ll take the blame.
  3. “To mitigate the risk of a leak, I called John Cook” = The info will get out anyway, so unless you want one of the folks who got laid off to pen an anonymous op-ed piece for Geekwire, call Geekwire first and give John the straight scoop.

What do you think about this article? Any comments? Was Ben wrong, or did the magazine just butcher the story?

May (and Almost June) in Review

June 22, 2013 /

I’m getting really bad at keeping this up to date. Here’s what you missed if you haven’t been following along with the 15 second blurbs on Facebook and Twitter. And yes I’m breaking bog rules by not including links or photos.  I’m just happy to have 10 free minutes on a sunny coffee shop deck to bang this out.

  • If you didn’t catch the US Soccer game vs Panama at Century Link on June 11, you really missed out on a great experience.  At least 40,000 fans made their way into the stadium.  You really have to wonder why the Mariners and Major League Baseball didn’t try to move the Astros/Mariners game up to 12:40 for a business person special. I mean, with all those out of towners visiting Seattle for the day, some percentage would have started their festivities at the baseball field.  You certainly would have drawn more than the estimated 3,500 fans you got trying to compete with a once every 40 year occurrence. I still haven’t sorted any of the 450 pics I took, but you can see them all here.
  • Congrats to all of my former students who took home prizes in the UW Business Plan Competition in May (links to come.) ZGirls featured former MKTG 555 student Libby Ludlow, and iHome3D featured former student Nelson Huang.  Alvaro Jimenez and Dave Knight put in strong perfromance as well with Elemental Hotels and a host of the folks from the TMMBA class went on to the final 32 and 16. Big winner was Alan Luo from MKTG 555’s Team Happy Back, whose BPC team Pure Blue Technologies won the whole shibang.  Nice work guys.
  • If you haven’t made it to a Seattle Tech Meetup yet, I would mix it into your networking event rotation. It has start-up flavor, but isn’t 100% focused on start-ups.  So there’s a nice mix of people. Red and Brett do a great job mixing in networking time, short presentations, good speakers, great sponsors and free food and drink.  Check the next one out.
  • On a side note, the seat belt law is stupid.  I’ve never been in an accident, am stopped at a light, take off my seat belt to reach back to the back seat and grab something out of my bag, when all of a sudden State Patrol Officer Snoopy Brains drives by.  Forget the fact that he nearly causes his own traffic incident for parking his patrol car in the middle of the road waiting for the light to change, and forget the fact that by the time he pulls me over my seat belt is back on.  The guy still writes up a ticket.  Seriously WSP – 20 years and no accidents and like one speeding ticket 15 years ago. I have health insurance.  Is the state budget in such bad shape that you need to be searching for seat belt offenders, and not even let me explain the situation? He tried to give me a ticket for lack of insurance because I was pulling up the cards on my phone and he didn’t want to wait for me to find them.  Annoying.

More stuff is coming in the next few weeks. So come back soon.

Random Thoughts and Things Left Unsaid – April 2013 Edition

May 2, 2013 /

Life was a little too busy in April, and I have a bunch of half-finished blog posts to show for it. Rather than try to finish them, here were my thoughts for the month, in no particular order.

  • Thanks to Art Thiel of SportsPress Northwest for letting me write about my trip to the Colorado Rapids v Sounders game on 4/20. I didn’t think it was a very good article on my part so I didn’t promote it. But for any writer, being published is being published. So thanks, Art.
  • Seriously – the construction on Aurora makes it impossible to get to work from Wallingford to Queen Anne. Just hopeless.
  • I have a new irrational addiction to broccoli. Here are two awesome recipes that are super easy to make. Parmesan Roasted Broccoli and Brilliant Sauteed Broccoli.
  • Poor Mariners. Man. What a shame. Is there any answer here?
  • The fact that the Sounders have struggled mightily in the first two months of the season, and I still have no doubt that they’ll make the playoffs, shows there’s something wrong with the length of the MLS schedule.

    • IMG_4866

    Coors Field, Denver

  • Denver is a great city. For that matter so is Boulder.
  • I want to thank Brett Greene from Fresh Consulting for hooking me up with some great meetings I was in Boulder. Check out these companies did you get a chance: Metzger and Associates, Room 214, Sendgrid. Also check out check out Galvanize
  • Did I mentioned the traffic yet? The one good thing is that a combination Siri and Aurora Bridge traffic gives me a lot of chance to write down – I mean talk down – blog posts.
  • It was mentioned to me that our softball team is now in its 20th year of competition, in which I played 18 of those years. That has to be some sort of record for Seattle amateur sports.
  • Right now I’m way past a month of no caffeine. All seems be going well, except for my new addiction to hot chocolate, which I fear is way more fattening than coffee.
  • And the Beat the Bridge Run is a few weeks. I might give it another shot this year despite being desperately out of shape.  This could be the year my winning streak of getting across in time ends.
  • If there is a logic to how the parking works in lower Queen Anne, I haven’t been able to figure it out. Block by Block it changes – Four hour meters, two hour meters, two hours free, one hours free, unlimited free, carpool, and anything else. It makes no sense.
  • I’m an uncle again.  How about that.  Welcome to the world, Lyla Margaret Kline who was born May 1.
  • And the cycle of life continues, as today marks the day that my mom passed away 13 years ago.  Hard to imagine it was that long ago.
SportsPressNW-AndyBoyer

Check the Top Right Corner…

 

Lessons From Launching New Products

April 2, 2013 /

We started toying around with the idea of Relaborate a little more than a year ago, in late 2011. In the beginning, we weren’t really sure what was going to happen with it, but everybody we talked to seemed to think it was a really cool idea.

These last months have been a great education in learning the differences between a “really cool idea” and “something that I immediately want to invest money in.”

There are a lot of hurdles to jump through to raise money. It’s not about the idea. It’s about being able to quantify an addressable market, convincing people your team is solid from top to bottom, and showing enough of the product that they can see the potential without criticizing the present MVP version.

It’s been a long and funny road, and I’m sure like any entrepreneurial organization, we’ve made some missteps along the way. But here we are in April 2013, with a brand new release of the product that we really think is starting to live up to the expectations we had when we first conceived it. And other people are saying nice things too.

So I guess my moral for this personal blog post is that it’s never just about the idea. Ideas are easy. People invest in execution. So if you have something that you’re sure will be a success, keep plugging away at it. Don’t expect to be rewarded for simply having an idea. The real effort is in taking that idea and making it something somebody else will understand and use.

They say there’s a very thin line between being an entrepreneur and simply being insane, and we probably straddled that line a few times in the recent months. After all, to start a new company you have to build something that no one else thinks is worth building, or they’d be doing it themselves. There’s something a little inherently nuts in that.

So if your reader of this blog, I expect you to run over to Relaborate.com and sign up for the trial of our new product. Read this blog and if you know me, I’m sure you’ll end up getting a discount (if you ask). Let your marketing people test it out, and if you end up bringing it in your organization, you know I’ll be the first one by you a round of drinks.

Relaborate Photo Search

Speaking Today at Market Mix 2013

March 20, 2013 /

I hope to see some of you today at MarketMix 2013. I’ll be speaking in one of the Breakout Sessions, talking about how to add Storytelling to your Content Marketing Plan. If that’s not enough incentive, I also brought along Rebecca Lovell of Vittana and Billy Pettit of Pillar Properties.

If you want to cheat, here’s the presentation I’ll be giving.

Tossing 15 Things a Day

March 16, 2013 /

My friend Liz told me that she has a pact with herself. She throws away 15 things a day. It could be 15 pieces of paper, 15 paper clips or 5 shirts and 10 paper towels. It doesn’t matter. 15 things go into the trash (or charity bin).

She said it’s not that hard to do, and less painful than a whole day of spring cleaning.

By the end of the week, she’s tossed 105 things.
By the end of the month, 450.
By the end of the year, 5400.

Maybe I can’t do 15, maybe I can only start with 10. But I am going to start to do that today.

Learning About Phoenix Jones, Super Hero

February 21, 2013 /

Phoenix JonesI’ll admit, I didn’t expect to like Phoenix Jones. I was excited to attend Sasha Pasulka’s Tech Show on Feb 20, but Jones was not the person I came to see.  I figured at best he’d be kind of uninteresting.  At worst, a complete joker. I was pleasantly surprised.

For example, I did not know that Jones actually wore the same body armor that our troops wear – and that he has been shot twice in that armor.  I also did not know that he works closely with Police, making sure he gathers evidence properly when he is at a crime scene.  Also, whenever a police officer orders him to stand down, he does exactly that.

Jones has an interesting stat in his corner.  Since he and his crew started patrolling, Police response times have improved – possibly to avoid the embarrassment of being beaten to the crime by a guy in a super hero costume.  Response times in Belltown on weekend nights were 29 minutes before Jones started his work.  How they are around 6.

You may not believe in vigilante justice.  But after hearing Phoenix Jones talk for 5 minutes, I believe the streets of Seattle are actually safer with him guarding them.

 

The Power of Correcting Mistakes

February 6, 2013 /

I’m not saying companies should make a practice of this, but here’s something interesting I noticed today in my email.

I sign up for 100’s of free products, so you can imagine how many newsletters, product announcements and other emails I get every day.  Most go ignored, unless they have a catchy title or I’m in a certain type of good mood.

So like normal, I ignored an email from a company called 6wunderkinder.com and added it to the mass delete list of the day.  Then something funny happened.  I got another email later from them.

6Wunderkinder_email

 

Truth be told, I didn’t even remember getting their first email.  And I don’t exactly know why I opened it this time.  But I did. And I got this.

6Wunderkinder_email_2

It was funny.  It was genuine.  It felt real.  Was I mad about getting a 2nd email from them? Nope. Do I think any less of them?  Absolutely not.

The lesson I walked away with – Don’t stress on the small stuff.  Anyone who refuses to use your product because you made a spelling error or shipped the wrong link doesn’t deserve to be your customer anyway.  After all, who wants customers who fancy themselves as perfect?

My Dumb Idea to Help with Homelessness

February 2, 2013 /

If you were to line up all the causes I wish I could support more, Homelessness comes to the front.  It’s not that I think it is more or less worthy than others, but it feels like something we should be able to make more progress against.

Every time I go into my neighborhood QFC, I pass between 1 and 3 homeless people asking for money.  One man stands at the front of the store with a “Homeless Vet” sign, one woman sits across the street by the parking lot and occasionally there is a representative from “Real Change.” Clearly, we can do better than this as a society.

Now, there are a couple of problems that we all face.  If we write big checks to a charity that helps with homelessness, we don’t know where the money goes and if it is being used to help people get out of their situation or just make their situation more tolerable.  If you give money directly to a person, you don’t know if they’ll spend it down the street at 7-11 on a bottle of Boone’s.

So here’s my dumb idea that will likely offend a bunch of people.

I would like to try to focus some efforts on the homeless who are closest to climb their way out.  The  people who have cleaned themselves up, paid their debts to society or taken other steps to get back to a position where they can succeed.  There are plenty of people who just need that little burst of cash to get the first and last months rent, a nice set of clothes, a moped or bus pas, or whatever is keeping them just 1-2 degrees from that point.

So how do we do this? I’d like to propose a kind of combination of Anonymous LinkedIn and Kickstarter managed by some reputable organization.  In this system, i could look at the anonymous profiles of  everyone who is applying for personal donations and what they will be need the money for.  They set personal goals and achievements that they need to hit.  With each success, they get closer to collecting their donation from me and the others who are rooting / supporting them.  The reputable organization then makes the purchase of the apartment, clothes, car, whatever on behalf of the client.

So in a nutshell – the homeless person “earns” the money they need by achieving some set of goals and objectives, people like us get to choose the unnamed profiles we want to support based on our preference, and there is a group in between making sure everyone stays anonymous in the process.

I can already hear the 100 reasons this is unfair to a whole set of people and not a solution to a massive problem.  But I’m not trying to boil the entire ocean here.  I’m just trying to help a few people out.  Anyway, that’s my latest dumb idea.

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