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.

Common Problem of Many Startups

Over the last 10 years, I have heard over 50 entrepreneurs pitch to me about how a niche of their startup is that their management staff consists of former big shots of so and so fortune 500 company. Little do they know that it's a red flag for me when I hear a pitch like that.

This is why:

1. They over reference how things were done at the fortune 500 they were working for (ie. At Microsoft, this was how it was done..." 10 times a day! Get over it... you are not at that company anymore and this startup is nothing like it!

2. They have no idea how a small business should be managed. Their team building skills in startup environments is particularly weak. They also want everyone to do things the "big company" way even when it doesn't make sense to do so.

3. They carry over bad and illogical habits from their fortune 500 experience. ie. being overly political about everything that just doesn't need to be.

4. Their bandwidth for managing multi-facets of the business is usually very low because they are used to the blinders that they have to put on when working at a fortune 500 or otherwise spoiled by having other departments to take care of some of the responsibilities of a manager in a startup. ie. What? I have to worry about chasing after my employee's benefits paperwork? Or what? We need another IT guy for 20 extra hires?

5. Communication is not fostered by them. ie. Let's keep the information to ONLY the people that ABSOLUTELY have to know. Well, news flash buddy, a lot of other people need that information too if you just put yourself in others' shoes to analyze overall information needs and distribution. For example, I once worked with a startup that fired people and didn't announce it hoping that it would just blow over... Imagine that. They apparently didn't understand that this method of terminating employees only leaves others feeling like they don't know when they will be let go of too for whatever unreasonable conspiracy. Former fortune 500 managers also often forget that because the company is so small, even employees from other dept also feel near and dear about why another employee at another dept is fired unlike a large corporation where segregation makes it none of their business. The result is that, when you asked the employees what they thought of the manager who did the firing, 80% of them used the word "shady" to describe the manager. The issue then was that there was no more trust within the organization and morale for the company as a whole became extremely low.

These are just some of the reasons why I am not a big fan of most former fortune 500 executives running their first startup. I say the word "most" obviously because not all of them are the way I describe them to be. However, I bring this up because this has been responsible for too many growth stunnings of startups from what I have seen. Of course, even with all that said, there are also many other counter factors that can make a startup successful even with such management personnel but I will leave that for another post.

Thoughts on Venture Capital & the Current Market

I have been meaning to write something about this topic for a while and finally decided it's time. I think the kicker was definitely from reading this blog entry.

If you scroll down towards the readers' comments after reading the blog entry, you will see an individual commenting on the fact that NWVA is failing because of its investment strategy. I am not dismissing that there's the possibility of that being a partial cause of failure but I am more supportive of Simpson's explanation. Here's why:

The market is saturated and full of failing ideas because:
1. There are too many individuals with great ideas "playing business" when they are blatantly not ready and haven't the slightest idea about what they are getting into.
2. Most of these same individuals described above are extremely outspoken and can easily manipulate investors even though they have no viable execution plan.
3. Simpson is right in that, there are too many "me too" companies. Everyone seems to think "I can do better." Face it, it's not that easy.

This is largely fostered by an influx of venture capitalists as described by Simpson who are just throwing money left and right. When the supply of funding became greater, the natural market reaction was that the minimum quality of what investors demand decreased by a mile. I think most of you would agree with me that some of the business ideas that were funded in the recent years are just absolutely ridiculous.

In my opinion, everything is interrelated. There's always a cause for every effect. In this case, I would say the current business trend caused by many of the factors mentioned above has created a broken down economy. The only reviving chance is if more realistic and experienced entrepreneurs step up to supply us with some breakthrough businesses to stimulate our downward curving economy.

By break through, I mean business ideas that are less trend aligned. I have never really been a big believer of business ideas that are heavily aligned with the latest hype such as a good number of the web 2.0 businesses out there. Sure, they make money and I am definitely not denying the success of trend catchers. However, I truly believe that a great business idea is something that's timeless. Of course, maybe this is most likely derived from the fact that I am more or less a traditional and conservative businessman.

Back from Asia...

What can be more of a perfect way to fight jet lag than to keep my blog up-to-date? ;) So I just came back from a combination of Taipei, Beijing, and Hong Kong. This trip was half business and half pleasure. The business purpose is to explore my future opportunities in Asia while catching up on some oversees work for Metacentrix. As for pleasure, well, I just haven't had a vacation in ages. So I did the usual Taipei night market, Great Wall visit, LKF parties and such.

Although I didn't have my camera with me for the most part of this trip, I managed to still take a few pictures here and there:



Out of all three places, the most outstanding experience must have been Beijing. While I was there, I ran into my friend, Francis randomly and finally got to catch up with him a little bit. It turns out that he's now working as a program manager at IceBreaker, Inc. What a perfect job I must say. He works half the time in Seattle and the other half in Beijing. It's almost my perfect scenario. The only difference would be that in an ideal world, I would replace Beijing with Hong Kong. Of course, that's only a fantasy especially when Beijing is developing at such rapid speeds. Any entrepreneur with the right mind would hit Beijing over Hong Kong any day.

To give you an idea how fast Beijing is developing, on my first night there, right downstairs from my friend's apartment, there was a barebone empty leased space with construction tools all over which was apparent that they hadn't even started renovating the place yet. However, the next night as I walked by the same place, this same exact space became a restaurant already and was in business with lots of customers inside. That's something that you won't see in the US or even Hong Kong for that matter of fact. Now I only wonder if this speed of development will sustain after the 2008 Olympics. After all, the Olympics is what really prompted the recent rapid development efforts. After seeing Beijing, I am even more excited to see what Shanghai is like. I can't wait. I am just not sure when the next time I have enough vacation will be given my upcoming family reunions.

Lastly, the other worth while event I attended was the Info Expo in Taipei. You have to see it to know what I am talking about. They effectively bring street market tactics into a high tech environment. ;) See pictures in link provided above.

Happy New Year everyone!

Apple scores again on my scale... or maybe not?

I was browsing around the Apple store in Bellevue square yesterday with a friend that wanted to buy a Mac Mini and ran into this:



It was love at first sight. It's too bad that I already very recently bought a Plantronics discovery 655 or I would have picked one up on the spot.

Though I am thinking it's probably a good thing I didn't pick one up considering the reviews I have been reading about them. It appears that the functionality of this slick bluetooth headset is not as impressive as its design.

The almost perfect car dealership...

As some of you know already, my car was slightly scratched up by one of the valet guys in a garage located in downtown Seattle recently. Fortunately, they were perfectly honest with me and told me right away. The manager also offered to take my car to Lexus of Bellevue where he worked in the evenings to get my car buffed out and fully detailed at no charge. So after a few back and forths, I decided that I was going to take him up on his offer but I would take the car in myself.



When I got there, I was thoroughly impressed. They had moved to a brand new location down the street since July. Basically, think of a multi-level elegant building with views of downtown Bellevue all around. They also have all the amenities you can ever think of. There's a showroom, surround sound theater, gift shop, cafe, TV area with fire place, a beautiful fish tank, LCD screens in multiple locations, children's play room w/ video games, work area, and most notably, a mini golf course!



Problem? yes... while I almost had a perfect experience waiting for my car to be finished, I hopped on their guest wireless to get some work done. My first impression was, "hum, decent speeds..." then I found a significant problem. I was unable to connect to any of my e-mail accounts via IMAPs or remote into the office with VPN or SSH. After some investigating, it seems that their IT dept. decided to block all outgoing ports except for 80 and 443 which make their guests only able to browse the web. You would think that a dealership for cars of such prestige would be more sensitive towards business usage when it comes to their IT amenities. Unfortunately, that's not the case. It's one thing to be security conscious but it's another thing to be unaware of customer needs.

Well, maybe I am just too critical.