Entrepreneurs vs. Arm Chair Quarterbacks

I have in my life taken a much different route compared to most of my peers. Startups and entrepreneurship have always been part of me since the very early stages of my life. I vividly remember the experience of leaving my cushy IS Manager job at a medium size corp when I was 16 years old to start an import car accessories and stereo consulting/installation company for the first time. Sure, it wasn't a glamorously successful venture but I made my lunch money and had lots of fun while doing it. From that point on, I knew that entrepreneurship was what fits me best. However, startups are not for everyone. I think many would agree with me. With that said, the thing that I can't stand is exactly what Kelly Smith from Curious Office beautifully describes in his blog entry, Entrepreneurs vs. arm chair quarterbacks. Arm chair quarterbacks criticizing startups can be pretty annoying. It's like if EnGadget were to do product reviews without ever even touching the physical thing... Doesn't make a lot of sense does it?

China Content Filtering

One of the things I found annoying when I was in Beijing at the end of last year was that I was unable to blog because Blogger, Livejournal, wordpress, and most any large blogging sites were blocked by the government's filters. This is not new to me since it's pretty much a widely known fact but it's one of those "I knew that" type things that didn't really sink in on me until I actually experienced the block first hand.



This experience made me think of a crazy idea. I started by thinking that if I ever moved to China, I would make sure I had a VPN server hosted in the US so that I can route all my traffic through the US to by-pass the filters (I am sure other techies have thought of this before and probably already do it). Then I thought hey, there are probably quite a bit of US/UK/CA entrepreneurs and English teachers that would enjoy the same technology. What if I made a business out of this by providing a service available to foreigners visiting or living in China? That way, the online freedom we have always enjoyed can travel with us regardless of what country we visit. Of course, that's given that the Chinese government only cares about filtering the content that the Chinese nationals see and hear but not foreigners as well. However, even with that aside, it may still be an unrealistic idea after all. This is because I am concerned about two factors:

1. Political implications
2. Demand for this type of service to make it a viable business

As you can probably tell, this is probably something I won't pursue myself but if anyone is gutsy enough, has a good business model, and has enough connections with the Chinese government to get their support for it based on economic growth implications, I would love to see it happen!

Stress Relief / Team Building Facilitator

One of the coolest things about working at Imagekind is that everyday between 3pm - 7pm, you will from time to time hear this "tick, tack, tick" sound coming from near by our front door at the office. This is not a clock ticking like you might have guessed but rather the sound of pairs of our employees taking short 10 min breaks to get their ping pong game on. =)



Some times startups get so entrenched into their work because of limited resources, they forget that proper team building and stress relief also needs to take place to keep a healthy company culture. It also puts an interesting mix into a work day which allows employees to look forward to not only taking down their work related challenges each day but also an intense 21 point ping pong madness.

You might wonder, "What about productivity?" Let's just say, with or without ping pong, people should always step away from their monitor for 10-15min which will one, give their eyes a break that they need, and 2, give a short down time for the employees to rejuvenate their mind so they can attack their challenges again when they come back to their desks. With that said, what a better use of time than to play some ping pong and loosen up your entire body and hence, getting some real rejuvenating rest?

For you readers out there, what do you do for stress relief at work? What's your facilitator? I would love to hear more ideas.

Ideas, People, and Execution

I am sure by now, most everyone has read one article or another that says, "it's not the idea, it's the people." I like to take one step further and point out that, aside from the ideas and the people, what's even more important is "execution." I am not the first one to say this as this idea has been published by well established entrepreneurs like Ryan P. Allis before. Here's an example.

With that said, this is not to say that I am undermining the importance of good ideas and great people but on a scale of comparison, execution is what I see as the primary factor for why many startups fail which ties in very closely with my last post because execution summarizes exactly what many former fortune 500 executives running their first startup fail in.

Ideas need to be refined to create a sound business model but as Allis pointed out in the above linked article, unless you are a PHD doing research at a top university, chances are, someone else has probably thought of your idea. On the other hand, giving "people" credit for a successful business seems flawed in that although the people is the source of effective execution, at the end of the day, "execution" is the underlying factor on why a business is successful.

I want to illustrate what I mean by "execution": For example, even if you have the greatest product in the world but your deployment staff is poorly trained or communicated to, no customer is ever going to be happy with you. Another example would be, if your employee's morale is low, the outcome of their work will never be optimize even if it's acceptable. Perhaps an even better example would be, if you don't properly foster a healthy environment for employees to step up and take charge of their area of expertise, you are wasting money and producing poor results.

The point to all of this boils down to one thing. When starting a business or reevaluating why your business may not be optimized, pay very close attention to the execution portion of your business and the answers to your questions will become much more clear.