When I was about 15 I tried windsurfing for the first time. Since I was confident that I understood the basics of the apparatus from watching other people hold the sail in front of them and go forwards I hopped onto a windsurfer in a lake with some wind and went to sailing. As soon as I managed to get the sail catching some wind I started to realize that whatever I tried to do resulted in the windsurfer drifting downwind in the same direction. So those clever sailors must have known a trick for not only moving but also selecting and controlling the direction to move in. I had asked a friend before who mentioned that you can sail in a variety of directions into the wind since you can use some of the force goes into the direction while the rest does not. So I tried to will the windsurfer to do this by shifting my legs and twisting the board into the water at different angles but I still just drifted downwind. The unfortunate problem with this drifting downwind is that I would start in a location like the beach and dock and end-up in a location like the middle of the lake. The only way back was to paddle while sitting on the board which was both embarrassing and hard work compared to letting the wind take me home.

At the time when I was learning how to use this windsurfer the general design of a windsurfer was to have the surf board separate from a piece called the dagger board. This piece was inserted through a slot in the surfboard when the board was far enough into the water to not drag the dagger board through rocks, sand, and other hazards in shallow waters. The problem that I was having that led to the drifting randomly about was that I had left the dagger board on the beach. The result of doing this I learned after consulting an expert on why I was unable to get going in a direction of my choice.

I was thinking about this as I was losing sleep thinking about the direction of my latest software venture and obsessing about whether with the few resources we have whether we are really moving in the right direction and how to do so. The idea that I wanted to glean out of that old experience was that working on a new product in a new market with a new team is like trying to sail using the wind of opportunity (people willing to pay money for a product) in a lake (market) without knowing how to sail (sustain and grow the company in a coherent direction).

But of all the things to master the first one is how to take the opportunities available and direct the energy from them into a coherent purposeful direction. The requirement to do this is the business equivalent of a dagger board. The dagger board in a business sense is an evaluation and shaping process for how to approach opportunities where you already know where you want to go in general and then be able to take a portion of an available opportunity to move you there and leave the rest behind.

In our case we want to build out a great desktop organizer. Users have requested that in order to have a great organizer we need to integrate within their workflows. We have an OEM opportunity to help a certain type of users, public relations users, to use our product to integrate with a PR utility. The actual need from the OEM partner is only to use 10% of our product to accomplish their needs leaving the other 90% unused and also includes building out a bunch of areas in the product. So it is the equivalent of a nice breeze at about 45 degrees from our selected direction and course overall. But this is exactly what we want and it is hard to show using normal logic why that is an important way to press forwards.

The reality of sailing is that the wind rarely blows in the direction you are interested in going. If you want such luxury you should consider buying a motorboat where the force pushing the boat can be fully controlled by the driver. So finding angles that go partially in the right direction and partially nowhere are the rules of getting from point A to point B. Actually because a sail can either act like a balloon or a wing, the sailboat can go faster at 45 degrees to the wind than it can with the wind directly behind it. The reason is that with a 5 mile per hour wind behind the sail the boat can at most go 5 miles per hour. But with the wind running across the sail to create a wing there is a constant force and acceleration on the boat from the pressure differential in the wing without the issues of the wind itself creating resistance at the maximum speed.

So this is also an important area of interest with regarding setting a course with a company. The idea that you just pick a direction and select the opportunities that align with that direction is misguided. It doesn’t account for the areas where you could acquire constant acceleration, not bounded by the specific opportunity. Now there is no perfect angle with a business opportunity like 45 degrees to a sailboat but in that kernel there is the possibility to innovate by not looking only at the easiest direction. The equivalent of a wing for a product is an innovation like Dell selling direct while everyone else is selling through channels or Microsoft finding an OEM deal with IBM and then licensing the same OS to other PC manufacturers. There is a way to find within the off center opportunity a potential big gain and the available opportunities increase immensely when the acceptable angle to gather them goes beyond completely on course. So I think we need also to look at this opportunity and see whether we have a wing somewhere in it.

So I’m trying to sail off into the sunset with this latest venture and although I feel like I am drifting about in the middle of a lake I am confident that I know what a dagger board is and how it might get me where I need to go.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was walking back from eating a Bruegger’s lunch with Jeremy having chatted with him about the terrible time he has finding a girl that is tall enough for him and is a good fit for him conversationally. I had just walked Jeremy back to his sister’s condo and hopped back on my bike to ride the ten seconds back home.

As I was unlocking my bicycle a pair of little girls aged six or seven and their mothers were setting up a lemonade stand complete with a small child size umbrella, a table, jug of lemonade, small cups, and a sign in white chalk that said lemonade and ice pops 25 cents. I had just had a large cup of iced hazelnut coffee and then crunched all of the ice at the bottom of the cup as Jeremy and I continued to ogle and comment about the passing women through the window while chatting about the best way to secure data so that people can’t match people’s records with unique personal identification like names, ages, etc. (a problem often occurring in the medical world). So I had plenty to drink from the iced hazelnut and could probably wait the ten seconds back home to pour a glass of juice.

But the kids were just finishing getting ready with their mothers beside them and they were operating on Alton Place, which as lemonade stands in Brookline go, is a valley of death for foot traffic. It likely wouldn’t help their morale given that it is 95 degrees outside where they were waiting to sell their lemonade. Upon thinking the situation through I found myself hungry for the potential glory for being the first customer of this makeshift little lemonade stand and potentially the first ever customer for these girls in their lives. So I rolled the bike across the street and the girls quickly got excited when I asked if they were open for business. They hadn’t worked out the important operations of a lemonade stand including how to pour the drink from the cooler to the cups so they knocked the cups off and they scattered to the ground.

A quarter isn’t a large amount of money in the grand scheme of the universe but since I am in bootstrap start-up mode I think more about every penny. Four quarters is a dollar and with eight months of sales we’ve only accomplished 1000 of those dollars in our own sales. But I had to consider the importance as a human being that I would gain from making this specific purchase. I handed one of the girls a quarter and she quickly tossed it into a bucket under the plastic table behind her. One of the mother’s suggested that it might be best for me to hold the cup as the girl tried valiantly to pour into a cup that kept moving as she was attempting to pour. The general solution finally reached was that one girl would hold the cup while the other one would pour. As girl #1 handed me the little cup of lemonade one of the mothers asked us to pause for a moment and return to the pose for a photograph to capture me as I received the first ever sale by girl #1 and girl #2. The mother then told them that they should post this first quarter on a wall to remember their first sale and for good luck. Apparently this is the tradition for any food service vendor. The girls had likely already budgeted the quarter for a portion of a candy bar or a new Barbie doll and were already getting ready for the next sale to come along given such early success.

That camera shot holding a cup of lemonade along a girl also holding it with her arm outstretched was the highlight of the past week. It is too bad I won't get a copy of it and will be included as the first customer in some other family's photo album.

Lessons learned relating to running any start-up business as a whole:

* When you are new at something customers appreciate enthusiasm and can be entertained by your efforts even if you feel confused or unprepared.

* It helps to get advice from experienced people like your mother.

* When your product isn’t perfect there are always underdog rooting people in the world who want to be included as a part of your success and will buy because they want to see you overcome your challenges.

* It helps to be cute or humble when you aren't skilled enough yet.

* You need to get out onto the street to make the first sale.

* Being in business can be a fun activity and a good way to meet your neighbors.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sarah and I tried to see Charlie and the Chocolate factory at the IMAX theatre on the way back from Gloucester last weekend. We had gone to Gloucester to see Matt and Kate in their natural summer habitat after having missed their annual party the week before. I am batting .000 with regards to the Gate House party due to a trip last year to Japan and a wedding in Long Island this year.

The Swift house in Gloucester is on the waterfront and is a shell of the former glory of the house that once was on the property. The first main house was demolished in 1972 after about fifty years of fighting with New England storms. There was another small house that once was on the property that was destroyed during The Perfect Storm. So Matt and Kate are staying in the remaining house, the Gate House that used to be the little one at the entrance to the property. When we arrived we couldn’t find people at first but it turned out that folks were at a table by the ocean at the end of a winding grass walkway defined among the grass and sea rubble by a series of stones.

One of Matt’s friends, who is a poet was there with his girlfriend. We got into a nice long debate by the water about whether bicycles are a better mode of city transportation than automobiles for city transportation. The poet was good at presidential impersonations and had a long list of opinions about politics including that George Bush was smart enough to pronounce the word nuclear properly but that he pronounced it newcular to appeal to voters in blue collar jobs despite his very rich boy background. The poet also thought that Hillary Rodham Clinton was the only possible candidate that the DNC would bring as a presidential candidate in 2008.

Kate was worried about her art homework project due Monday where she needed to interpret a story written by a fellow classmate. The story was about a child’s blanket/blanky and the poet gave a full red pen mark-up. He wasn’t fond of it and thought that deceptively anthropomorphizing objects and then later trying to appear clever by revealing that the person is really a beloved object was something that should be beaten out in seventh grade. He gave it a name like fools deception.

The only drawback of the ocean property in the northeast is that it lies near marsh. The mosquitoes are especially fierce and represent a good portion of the variation in the mosquito kingdom. I got a good look at one little mosquito biting my arm and she had yellow racing stripes. Sarah and I slept in a twin bed. In the past this has worked well for us but with the extra half person growing inside of Sarah we kept trying to find a comfortable equilibrium in the bed but were tossing most of the time. At one point of getting bitten we turned on the light and it was like a scene out of a B rated horror movie where worms suddenly come to life after an electric line is left in the swamp or just an epic battle against bugs like Starship Troopers. The bugs were everywhere and the room was filled with a swarm of enemy bugs trying to slowly attack us in our sleep. The mosquitos must have seen us as a welcome treat nicely delivered. I fought them valiantly by swinging a towel at them crushing as many as I could and then went to sleep with Sarah in the bed for 30 minutes before she moved to the other twin bed because I was snoring too loud.

In the morning when we awoke a little after noon we had a Wimbledon breakfast of berries with cream and bacon. It was quite tasty and enjoyable. We thought about flying the kite but there wasn’t any wind. So after a bit Sarah and I took a look at the tide pool that most years had been used as a swimming area but was out of commission because of a combination of low tide and a mysterious fast draining problem. Matt explained that the tide pool is mostly a natural phenomenon where the cold arctic water collects in the rocks to be warmed by the sun. To keep the water in people have plugged the draining points with concrete and rocks. Since every year storms, ice, and the tides batter the pool it develops leaks both in the natural rocks and where the concrete plugs the open holes. This year the leaks are particularly bad and they haven’t had the will to continue plugging them so the pool was empty.

This was fine as Sarah and I were just trying to walk around. We walked down some roads to a lighthouse and a break water and then lay on the break water for a while napping on a flat and wide bed that was comfortable for the two of us. When we returned Kate had been working on her art homework having decided to make a final panel in her interpretation of the blanket story that looked like a child’s drawing.

Sarah and I then tried to attend Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at the Reading IMAX on the way home. Unfortunately it was sold out but we did manage to get to see it on Monday night instead with Lisa and Dave. It struck me that the movie and most other children’s movies in America was very culturally American. Like Robots it professed the importance and high status results of being an entrepreneur. The best example of this was when Charlie had his Golden ticket in his hand and he decided he didn’t need to visit the factory since someone would pay him money for it. His grandfather’s response to it was that you should never trade a once in a lifetime opportunity for something as ordinary as money. Translation – In America you will be rewarded for being a risk taker and an entrepreneur but people who just work for money live plain and boring lives.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Waichi came over last night to say hello and because she has mice and a leak staining her ceiling. As a downstairs neighbor these are reasonable reasons to visit and say hello. The benefits of a second floor apartment include that mice don’t tend to go beyond the first floor and the climb up the stairs isn’t as bad as the third floor. It also doesn’t get damp and flooded like a basement. But the second floor apartment dweller does need to worry about how to escape in a fire since it is a long jump down, potential babies falling out of windows, and solving mysterious problems of leaks and mice. The solution we came-up with for the mouse problem was for Waichi to borrow Jeremy’s cat. There is no solution to the ceiling leak problem but I’ll continue to investigate it.

Waichi is winning an award for being a good doctor and volunteering with doctors without borders. They are flying her down to Washington to be pinned with a medal by George W. Bush in the rose garden of the White House. I was wondering whether the president actually pins things onto people or if he just hands them the medals and walks away. I would imagine that people wouldn’t be allowed to get too close to the president with sharp objects and a doctor might be able to sever a key artery with a pin so I don’t think they will be giving her pins.

Waichi also told us a funny little true story. It was about an emergency room doctor and his wife. The doctor receives a call on the phone from the emergency room and calmly talks to the person on the other end of the phone. His wife then asks him whether he will need to go into the emergency room. He tells her that he does need to go and that she ought to come with him as well in a calm and collected voice. His wife starts to get worried and frantic and asks him what the problem was. He calmly lets her know that their son had been drinking and got into a motorcycle accident while driving home. She then started acting hysterical and wanted to know why he too wasn’t hysterical as well. He then let her know why he could remain so calm in such a terrible situation with this statement - “I have been waiting for that call my whole life.”

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My Canon PowerShot S410 broke while I was at the wedding this weekend. Just as we walked into the church at exactly the time the wedding was supposed to start and we sat down the zoom lens made an awful crunching sound and then proceeded to get stuck halfway between out and in. The camera suffering from an unfortunate priapism then squawked in pain with a beeping sound that was fine before the processional music began but was then deemed unacceptable once the violinists started to play. I tried forcing the lens back into it’s home with some pressure and it went inside again but upon attempting to get it back out it had erectile dysfunction and only peeped out a few inches. It was impossible to get it into the discernibly turgid state necessary to take a photo and instead offered me the consolation of the error code E18 on the screen on the back of the camera. I then pulled at it to get it out of the position but the tiny peeping eye didn’t give much room for yanking on. So I declared it dead for good, pushed the lens back into it’s socket and declared to Sarah that we would have no pictures of this wedding from my camera. Luckily they had a full paparazzi gallery of wedding photographers complete with a man wearing a women’s suit and bleached blond hair working to focus the flash bulb above the bride and groom.

But for me it is a painful and effeminizing feeling to have a camera that can’t shoot so I was not feeling myself for the whole weekend. So this morning I decided to call the Canon corporation to ask them whether they had a little blue pill that could make my camera work better. Apparently Raphael Palmeiro’s blue pills have been working well this weekend as he hit three homers in three games for a 3 of 4 win rally by the Orioles over the Red Sox. So I called and quickly got through to a service representative. The first question I had expected was to identify the camera by the serial number. I don’t have any idea where the serial number would be. This wasn’t their question. The man asked what the problem was and I then told him that the lens wasn’t protracting and retracting normally. He told me to pull the battery out, wait a few seconds, and then try again. I didn’t do this but instead just pressed the power button to turn it on. Of course, without all the pressure to film a wedding, my camera had overcome the stage fright and the lens extended normally. I then went through the paces to try the zoom and this worked well. Next I tried turning it on and off ten times and the lens worked like a champ opening and closing.

Now I am certain that it is broken and this is a short lived phenomena since this lens problem has been happening off and on for a long time with the camera. But if I mail it into the shop without the problem being apparent they will likely mail it back telling me I suffer from a common mental disorder potentially leading me into ruin rocking in the corner in a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. So, despite the fact that the camera will celebrate it’s one year anniversary in mid-August and thereby be ineligible for repairs of blue pills, I am not yet able to send it back to the Canon Corporation. It is probably for the best. I couldn’t find the receipt in the half hour routing around the apartment that I did. It is also good to know that cameras operate by the same principles of most sickness and injuries that I suffer from. When I invest in fixing it by going to show it to the doctor, dentist, electrician, mechanic, or editor - it mysteriously goes away.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We have been attending a lot of weddings since Sarah and I were married. At some level it begins to feel like an anthropological survey of the rituals across cultures of modern American culture. It would be nice to sneak in a few ceremonies in India involving grooms riding in on elephants and I would have enjoyed that ritual in the Carvey backyard had it been feasible. The last two weddings we went to were church weddings. I was surprised by the amount of focus that the priests give towards the relationship between the married couple and Jesus. The Jewish weddings that I have been to don’t focus that much on having a trinity of the bride, groom, and God working together as much. But in a Christian wedding I hear statements like “Todd and Jessica and Jesus together are an unbeatable team” or “The key to a successful marriage is to let Jesus be the glue that binds you together”. It is a little hard for me not to have visions of a TV Funhouse team of the groom, bride, and Jesus fighting off the many evils of the devil, Saddam Hussein, the Joker, and prostitutes using a combination of clever Yankee/McGyver inventions combined with divine bolts of lightning and Jesus turning water into wine. But when I think deeper about this philosophy it makes sense as a working model for consensus in a family. The challenge in any organization being successful, at least according to the Jim Collins disciples who wrote Good to Great and Built to Last, is cultural unity and consistency. As an atheist I am not likely to be able to glue much together with Jesus. But I can effectively glue together my marriage and my family by first finding someone, Sarah, who shares in my cultural belief system. This wasn’t going to work with prior girlfriends either because they were too religious or didn’t believe in the same goals for our lives. So I do take something meaningful out of these different ceremonies we are attending despite not taking the literal meaning from the advice given. The important thing to do if you don’t have a Jesus is to create one, something even if it is embodied in a lawn gnome or just bedtime chatter that is a solid and clearly identifiable set of our shared system of beliefs, expectations, objectives, and to keep those things as the glue that bind us and our growing family (including the little one likely to be named Madeline Eve Housman) together.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

July 4th weekend was a lot of fun. We didn’t have a lot of time to spend in Chicago downtown but there are some highlights of downtown Chicago worth noting from the small amount of time we did spend there. The Museum of Science and Industry has an exhibit called Body Worlds at the moment where they plasticized 200 cadavers in various ways including posing them on horses, cutting out different layers (cardio-vascular system, bones, muscles and bones, nervous system, etc. They even had a cadaver which was a woman with an unborn child. That one was a little tough to avoid thinking about the horror of the circumstance prior to plastinization. But for the most part the cadavers were artistic and I felt like I learned a lot about the world of the body that would otherwise have been too intangible to learn. The museum also has a great train set model of Chicago and Seattle with a train going through the mountains to reach in between. The robot exhibit was terrible. It didn’t have any robots, just a lot of toys from the 1950s and a video promotion from the iRobot corporation.

On the drive to the museum Sarah’s uncle Paul and I were talking about potential treatments for Alzhiemers and Parkinsons. They are starting to test nanotechnology spheres that can cross the blood brain barrier. The localization of them is done through tricks with the immune system and antibodies to locate certain blocks of cells and they can then release the key missing enzymes (nerve growth factor) back to only the areas affected by the neurodegeneration. It sounds like a workable idea although I can already imagine that the next few science fiction novels will start to go for robotically controlled brains through nano-technology that locates a region in the brain and can then be controlled by radio signals. Such an application would allow someone to make a person feel orgasmic when doing a mundane and unattractive task like sweeping a floor. That could lead to an ultimate state like the one in Brave New World where people were bred for different castes.

After the museum we pressed onwards to a bar where we learned that Chicago hasn’t outlawed smoking in bars yet. Sarah asked for non-alcoholic versions of Mohitos or Pina Coladas but they couldn’t figure out how to do it. After the food we walked to the Hancock building to go to Top of the Cock, a very nice art deco bar that overlooks Chicago and lake Michigan. When we were there it also overlooked the sunset. It looked like a scene out of the Aviator with the big styled art deco ceilings, elevators, and bar areas. We only had drinks there but the dining area is visible below and you can see how prepared and dressed people get to go there. I could imagine the women going out with their boyfriends dressed fancily and wondering whether their boyfriends would pop the question. I think you would need reservations in advance to go but it beats the skyline restaurant in Boston Top of the Hub that is very cheap in comparison.

On Tuesday morning we went back into the City for a half-day to see some sights. We went to Navy Pier. The pier itself is a bit of a tourist dive with overpriced un-refilled drinks and a big mall. But boats leave from the pier for various cruises in the harbor and through the city canals. We took an architectural cruise for an hour and it was awesome. The boat went through the east river and the tour guide pointed to all of the skyscrapers to describe the style they were in, when they were made, why they were made, and who made them. The architecture reminded me of Ayn Rand’s the Fountainhead and it was very grandiose. The Mesian boxes were pretty but not very interesting while the post-modernists had warped the same boring rectangles into prisms and curves that hugged the river. Many of the skyscrapers are built above the original train system because there was no other way to negotiate the rights to the land. It led me to believe that Chicago is a ripe city for a scary terrorist attack by exploding a train underneath the skyscrapers. This was on Tuesday, two days before the attack on London’s transit system.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Scorzelli family goes back to the future
I learned in an email from DK that the Scorzelli family has been hiding a Delorean in their garage for the past few years. They were interviewed about it in Town Online This Car's a Throwback to the Future. The article contained some great quotes from Chris' dad and mom including:

"I don't know what I'm going to do. The car's become an albatross around my neck, to be honest with you," Scorzelli said.

"This car has taken on a life of its own. It's ludicrous," said Reinke-Scorzelli. "The idea of having it was more fun than actually getting it. It became such an obstacle."

In other news, Ron and Jen are finally getting married which brings the summer of weddings total, including the wedding we missed in California due to morning sickness and our own wedding, to seven. I think we will need to watch the movie Wedding Crashers to figure out how to better optimize these events.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)