As an entrepreneur I can't help find the lottery irksome. I don't mean to pick on this guy who won the lottery recently featured in the article Downside of winning the lottery. But can these people please direct their money to some ventures that have a chance of being useful and successful.

Now, the young entrepreneur is dabbling in the creation of a reality television show that melds two of his dreams: professional wrestling and beautiful women. He spends all his time promoting the project called "Wrestlicious."

I too dream of "professional wrestling and beautiful women" but this does not sound like a great use of capital.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:11 AM | Permalink

A good quote adapted from Getting Things Done that I read in Dreaming in Code that I agree with as a manager is -

Things rarely get stuck because of lack of time. They get stuck because the doing of them has not been defined.

Another good one adapted from Peter Drucker was about the three stone cutters. The first said.. I am making a living. The second said.. I am doing the best job of stone cutting in the entire country. The third said.. I am building a cathedral. The third is a manager. The first is likely to get things done. The second can be a problem since they are confused in what they really do.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:24 AM | Permalink

I liked this how to wiki article I read this morning. How to define a problem . I especially liked the quote about

"Einstein is quoted as having said that if he had one hour to save the world he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution." and "When a Toyota executive asked employees to brainstorm “ways to increase their productivity”, all he got back were blank stares. When he rephrased his request as “ways to make their jobs easier”, he could barely keep up with the amount of suggestions."

It is useful for pitching solutions to clients who think they can skip right to the implementation.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:47 AM | Permalink

Yuval's company Eye-Fi has been doing great work these past few years. I remember when Madeline was not even born chatting with Yuval about his original concept that looked like some device to attach to cameras to snag photos off of them and how he was considering leaving Cisco to pursue it. Last week on Friday a day before Zachary's arrival was rapidly approaching he asked about when I would get one of his wireless cards and start using it to get my photos out faster. Meanwhile he was heading out to the Consumer Electronics Show to achieve his destiny to win the CES award for best gadget, a nerd of the year type honor. I am hoping to receive my new Eye-Fi card in the mail shortly to help get photos online a little more effectively than in the past. As step one I have purchased a LaCie 2 terabyte RAID network storage drive where I will move all my photos and media to. Step two will be to upgrade one of my PCs to make it a modern machine to speed photo editing and other things I do in the office.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:35 PM | Permalink

I don't normally read the Supply Chain Management Review. But after hearing about Walmart's policies towards the environment I needed to know more about what they have actually done. Here is the article I found that outlines their approach to greening their business The Greening of Wal-Mart's Supply Chain. What is amazing is that a company as influential would be so comitted to environmental stewardship to take the steps normally used to increase profits to increase accomplishment of goals like Walmart's "To be supplied 100 percent by renewable energy; to create zero waste; and to sell products that sustain our resources and the environment." With their approach they can drive 60,000 suppliers behavior by setting requirements on how the suppliers operate in order to be able to sell through the Wal-Mart retail distribution channel. So this is what is so amazing and unexpected to me.

Corporations have been portrayed correctly as inhuman and often acted inhuman in content like the movie "The Corporation" establishing that corporations were created as entities that may employ people and have many of the rights and responsibilities but aren't people. So they have done things that a human wouldn't actually do like ignore human rights issues (think pre-unions), pollute the environment to their own advantage, place unreasonable expectations on suppliers to push for price, force customers into modes where they had no choice of supplier (monopolies), push countries/regimes towards military actions for their own profits (debeers diamonds), exploit third world populations for labor, treat livestock/lab animals in a cruel way (factory farming), etc.

From the imdb site on The Corporation:

"Since the late 18th century American legal decision that the business corporation organizational model is legally a person, it has become a dominant economic, political and social force around the globe. This film takes an in-depth psychological examination of the organization model through various case studies. What the study illustrates is that in the its behaviour, this type of "person" typically acts like a dangerously destructive psychopath without conscience. Furthermore, we see the profound threat this psychopath has for our world and our future, but also how the people with courage, intelligence and determination can do to stop it." Written by Kenneth Chisholm (kchishol@rogers.com)

They needed to do these things to compete and in the Darwinian sense of evolution of corporations if they were non-competitive they wouldn't exist and persist. But unlike evolution of humans going back some 100 million years - corporations have only existed for a few hundred years.

The corporation is evolving. The environment around them is radically different than it was even 15 years ago. Customers always wanted scale to reduce the costs of their goods but they also wanted "Good" practices to be behind them. The big dinosaur of the Wal-Mart's of the world can't hide from the millions of potential critics in the world waiting to expose a flaw in their social ethics. They need to create web sites like Wal-Mart facts to educate themselves and critics about their business ethics. So in order to maintain competitive they need to lead their own organization ahead of the critics. In Wal-Mart's case they partnered with NGOs, big environmentalist organizations, and consulting teams knowledgable about how to do transformation to move in 2 years from being perceived as the big monster destroying American small town jobs into the most powerful instrument on the planet driving change.

The big cool enlighening part of the Wal-Mart effort and what fascinates me is that when Wal-Mart looked at their entire impact as a retailer the tentacles reached farthest and widest when they considered their impact through their influence on the suppliers. So Supply Chain Management designed for changing how you purchase stuff cheaper and reduce inventory, one of the key drivers of Wal-Mart's and many other companies' success, has had an unexpected impact - the supply chain can be managed to achieve ANY objective set by a consumer of the supply chain. So a retailer with pressure from customers to be environmentally responsible can drive back that requirement backwards and it can cascade down to the lowest levels of suppliers of raw materials over the course of each link.

So while the corporation is a legal entity that may not be human it is fully responsible to the demands and needs of humans that ultimately consume it's output. After all corporations must produce some product or service of value to a human sooner or later in order to get that money that the economy operates on. So the new co-evolution of the corporation and the human is leading towards sustainability, the "symbiotic" relationship necessary for the corporation to survive under the scrutiny of us highly judgemental and humans.

Even Deloitte is in the game. They wrote a white paper called Creating the Wholly Sustainable Enterprise. In it they wrote some broad reaching requirements for transformation:

"In evaluating a company’s evolution to WSE status, there are some organizational constructs that may limit or
reduce the effectiveness of an enterprise-wide sustainability strategy.

• ‘Green’ Is Not A Corporate Function: Companies that limit sustainability efforts on to a specific department or
function (e.g. EH&S) may fail to advance in the journey towards overall sustainability. Ownership of
sustainability by a single function suggests that responsibility resides with a specific, limited number of
individuals rather than responsibility residing with everyone as an inherent element of the overall culture.

• ‘Green’ Is Not An Executive Position: Companies are experimenting with a ‘Chief Sustainability Officer’ and
other such titles, perhaps a positive step but insufficient on its own to drive consistent value. While executive
ownership and accountability for ‘green’ is an essential element of an overall approach, it is not, in itself,
sufficient to drive the enterprise-wide activities required to succeed.

• ‘Green’ Is Not a Fad: Like business trends of recent decades, sustainability as ‘the next big thing’ may be
advancing as a means to driving competitive advantage. Yet ‘greening the company’ is more than a fad. Many
business improvement methods of recent years—MRP, reengineering, lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, and
others—can be considered specific application of sustainability principles applied to business activity. It would
be appropriate to begin to think of sustainability as an organizing principle within which business improvement
methods are developed, applied, and evolved. And over time it is reasonable to presume that the next waves of
business improvement frameworks will be based at least in part on principles of value-driven sustainability.

• ‘Green’ Is Not a Cost of Doing Business: Thinking about sustainability in this manner establishes a culture of
sustainability as an ‘add-on’ or incremental cost. Rather than being an integral part of every process,
sustainability is evaluated after ‘core’ decisions are made. This can be illustrated by describing the difference
between a traditional design project followed by a ‘value engineering’ phase, vs a design project initiated as a
A Practical Guide to Driving Shareholder Value Through Enterprise Sustainability 6
‘green’ project where sustainable materials, systems, etc. are a core part of the initial specification and
conceptual design amongst key participants in the design process.

• ‘Green’ Is Not a Political Statement: The history of conflict between ‘environment’ and ‘big business,’ combined
with the natural politicization of the issues creates a substantial amount of ‘baggage’ to the company
undertaking a broad Sustainable Enterprise effort. The successful organization will undertake this
transformation based on the principles of improving shareholder value and company performance, and the
environmental and social benefits will be positive, concurrent consequence."

The fun part of all of this is going to be watching the corporations scramble over the next 5 years to digest the shock of the wave of sustainability. I think we have the following to thank for it: Internet transparency, Supply Chain Management, Improved Movie/education distribution, Global communication networks, Real problems/risks to our planet, and most of all -- millions of people consuming beyond price to drive suppliers for something better. The impact of all of this leads me to believe that the structure can reduce the same drivers for war as we are finding for the environment so that we can conquer the problems raised in the worry around the military-industrial complex in each country hoping to participate in a global economy. Imagine if Wal-Mart, McDonalds decided to stop/prevent wars rather than drive sustainability? Wasn't Michael Moore complaining that Wal-Mart sells bullets and guns? So much seems possible.

So I am filled with something rare about the environment, human rights, animal rights and wars - HOPE!

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I had the opportunity to see a presentation from Design That Matters on Tuesday morning and what they are doing is very inspiring. They are having a benefit dinner listed on their web site that might interest people.

The group has taken a new approach to working with problems in developing countries where issues that may be solved here are still lagging and the impact would surprise people. Their solution is to work as a non-profit to design solutions to these problems in the form of new products that understand and address the complex issues and reality of the environment/local ecosystem themselves.

For example, in some countries 4 of 5 adults can't read. So Design That Matters team analyzed the problem in villages and with governments learning that classrooms only work at night since people have to work to support themselves. But classrooms don't have an easy way to share information. I would just get a digital projector and a laptop but that's an expensive solution readily available in my world. In those countries what turned out to be more helpful is a low cost and low power portable projector and microfilm with lots of content on it.

The presentation focused on a design challenge of infant mortality and I got an education on the need for incubators for low birth weight babies to regulate temperature and oxygen. Stevie Wonder, among many people, is blind because when he was an infant his incubator delivered too much oxygen. The modern $20,000 incubator that you see in a neo-natal intensive care unit (sounds very expensive) isn't what's out there in the world. There are hand me down incubators and make shift solutions like blankets and oxygen tubes feeding into plastic boxes put over the infant's head. The result is that within about 2 million infant deaths per year, 1 million would be preventable with a proper incubator. So they have been working to design a solution that deals with all of the environmental issues like the fact that nobody can repair an incubator in a remote village other than the car mechanic, moving the incubator from the delivery room to the ICU on stairs and across unpaved surfaces since there aren't nice elevators, etc.

It was a pleasure to learn about the organization and if someone has some interest and skills (like mechanical engineering) or a fund looking to be green they might be a useful source. I have noticed and I feel like I suddenly awoke in a new world in the past month the sudden GREEN revolution reaching the business world. Folks who were in the Internet boom and bust that I know are starting to build companies that are focused on environmental sustainability. I can't get into everyone's details but one example is Terry Swack who is doing green design and a green marketplace with her start-up Clean Culture, Business Objects put a big green page for using BI to reduce global warming Insight, folks have created One Percent For the Planet that directs corporate funds to environmental non-profits, NYU had a conference on the social entrepreneurship pipeline Dave Berry is creating green fuel from bacteria, and another contact of mine is in stealth mode doing an environmental sustainability project.

I'm not sure what is driving this shift of business to look at green issues but my hope is that it is the consumer. The big black box that is where we get our stuff from is getting more transparent because information flies fast and far quickly with internet publishing, social networks, email, ratings systems, and blogs. The planet is at risk and getting back in control of the black box is important for business in order to satisfy consumer demands from it and to sustain itself. I loved the quote on the One Percent site

"There is no business to be done on a dead planet"
- David Brower
Environmental Visionary
1912-2000

Posted by Dan Housman at 02:21 AM | Permalink

It was bothering me today that I can go to the supermarket and put money into the changestar machine and it will credit me with 85% of the change that I dump into it for use in buying my groceries. BUT if I want to deposit change into my local Bank of America bank account I need to roll the change into these stupid change rolls. Why doesn't retail banking in ATM machines or within banks have a section where you dump your change into a container to deposit it. If banks want lifetime customers maybe they should start with folks like Madeline at age four or so. If I had a bank I'd put a change depositor machine into the mix and make a big deal of it in my advertisements to show that we care and we innovate.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Since I was inspired by Dr. Berry to tackle a complex problem I was losing sleep last night about the question of obesity. In recent years Americans have been getting progressively fatter. This is nicely illustrated in the following map. The resulting complications of obesity are higher likelihood of diabetes, hypertension, coronary artery disease, and ultimately chronic heart failure – the big chronic diseases that people should be afraid of. The government pays for care of a lot of the obese with chronic conditions through Medicare and Medicaid so it strikes me that getting obesity under control in America would be a very good and strategic thing. Here are some thoughts on potential solutions that I could come-up with.

1. Exercise is not in the current American way of life, especially for men with slight to major obesity. These people aren’t really marketed exercise as either an activity or a product. Gyms currently target healthy fit people who want to improve performance or go the extra 10% because those people seem to be the folks who will sign-up for long-term gym memberships and keep paying for them over time. For the fatter people they need to show-up at the gym once in a blue moon and then are self-conscious and decide not to risk more embarrassment in sweat suits. The only marketing I can see really targeting obese men is Subway and that’s for eating sandwiches not exercise BUT was very successful. I am also thinking along the lines of the Netflix guys who basically started the company because the founder hated late fees on videos. It bugged him so he started Netflix. On my end I hate the fact that I pay for the gym even though I don’t show-up. So my concept is for a gym that was focused on weight loss and that charges members based on usage rather than membership periods. The system might even be able to provide pay for performance fees to pay for additional weight loss over a period of time for people with a BMI over a certain number. This would align the incentives of the trainers and the folks visiting the gym so that the trainers would need to work for the core hope that the people investing in the exercise would find. Secondarily I think the pay for performance gym could also be tied into insurer policies and workplace health initiatives better than the monthly memberships. In a measured membership system you could only get the benefits FREE if you meet your usage quota. This would reward use and discourage non-use. But it would still allow the individual to choose to pay if all they were going to use was a small amount of the service. It’s my contention that people who currently subscribe to big name gyms like BSC (Boston Sports Clubs) could be wooed away from these with a different and disruptive business model. The one above may not be right but the right one could be worked out by delivering a service and taking care to integrate feedback in terms of how people spend their dollars and what they are looking for in a new service. The investment into the market is a good timing. Look at the map. The obese are a growing market and they are huge.

2. There must be a pill that can safely suppress people’s appetites. The gastric bypass surgeries have been thought to limit hunger not necessarily by making the stomach smaller but by disrupting the primitive nervous system of the gut which is the predecessor to the more advanced nervous system of the brain. If marijuana can give you the munchies and folks on heroin don’t need to eat for days then there must be something in between that has a focused effect on just hunger/satiation. Let’s finally find this thing and give it to people so that they aren’t hungry all the time. It could make lots of money as a blockbuster drug too. Hopefully the drug isn’t nicotine.

3. Our culture is sick. One physician I met with at a conference of medical informatics executives let me know that we often confuse healthcare problems with health problems. A healthcare problem relates to how we care for diabetics. A health problem is that people despite it being bad for them continue to get obese and cause their risk for diabetes to get dangerously high. In other countries this isn’t happening. Folks in Europe despite having access to unlimited food like we do have been able to keep their weights in check because they culturally have a healthy lifestyle involving exercise and portion control (and some would say smoking). To fix our culture will take some overhauls somewhere but some ideas would be to bring health into the workplace as an issue just like we bring health insurance into the workplace. The two are connected. I went to a company a few years back that was founded by a man very into health and he had a large gym at the center of his building. It sounds stupid but having corporate sponsored gyms built into campuses and planned during working hours sporting events could be very helpful for employees. While productivity may go down the benefits would be to have lower long term health costs and better strength and conditioning in employees that could lead to better performance mentally and physically. Another option would be a national health initiative to build thousands of facilities for people to exercise more readily. Build more parks for kids. Have more little leagues sponsored by the Federal and local governments. I’d rather pay for sports than for dialysis, heart surgeries, and gastric bypasses.

4. Let’s figure out why people are obese in America rather than figure out that they are becoming more obese. Someone should pay for this research and figure out the answers to the top questions: Why are American’s becoming more obese? Which American’s are becoming more obese? Are any American population segments becoming less obese? Are there any factors in recovering from obesity to become non-obese? Can these factors be promoted? Is that guy from Freakanomics just going to tell us that we weren't measuring anything other than that the baby boomers are getting older so the whole population is getting fatter showing the whole obesity trend is a hoax? If we figured out some causes and scientific conclusions maybe something can be done that we haven’t thought about.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:15 PM | Permalink

“You’re afraid of your imagination. And even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the responsibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep, and dreams are a part of sleep. When you’re awake you can suppress imagination. But you can’t suppress dreams.” From H. Murakami - Kafka on the Shore

I liked the idea that having a vision of something, a dream of what could be, carries with it a responsibility to work towards fulfilling the concept. It puts us as sometimes unwilling servants to the creation of our own ideas.

While I was on the plane I had the other idea. There was a passage about how the main character was reading a book that had been annotated by another character. It made me think of something that might be a cool concept. What if different people could collaboratively annotate a book analogous to when one person reads a book already underlined and written in by another. It wouldn’t be a very hard technology but basically everyone could be the equivalent of a Talmudic scholar writing in the margins around a book. Sure we have discussion forums on news articles but I was thinking of taking a political book like the one from Barack Obama and letting people add their thoughts. The reader can then choose to read thoughts or view underlined comments from other readers. Some could be in the same group like a class or a book group and others could be strangers like experts or just fans of the author/genre. The annotations could contain links potentially to other books when a book refers to content in another book. It might be especially interesting for something like Shakespear, the bible, or pop-fiction.

There is the barrier that people don’t yet read books in electronic form… but that could change any time now.

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:11 AM | Permalink

While flying into Indianapolis for a sales meeting this week I was looking down at the trees below. As usuala flying afforded some time to comtemplate solving the world's problems in impractical ways. The area I was focused on was energy. Given that carbon dioxide is a problem as an energy by product it is amazing how trees absorb solar energy and consume carbon dioxide as they go. So it would be nice if genetic engineering could take what we know of various genes and create a tree that could convert sunlight into electrical power that could be added into the overall grid of power. The great thing about it is that a forest of these trees would be a power plant so planting and nurturing the forest would be beneficial to the needs of humans for consumable power. Now this somewhat happens today but we burn the trees instead of maintaining them since it is the current most efficient way to extract energy from them.

I figured we could investigate one of two routes to accomplish this. The first would be to engineer battery fruit. The fruit portion of the trees would output high power batteries that could be connected into devices. This didn't appeal to me very much because it required harvesting the battery and seems like it could lead to problems like explosions in the forest when fruit became over ripe. The second would be for the tree to convert energy from sap/sugars flowed from the top to an organ near the roots that consumed the sap to output voltage and current. This organ would have a plus and minus node for DC current that could be wired into the grid through cables designed to look like vines run along the forest floor that would consolidate into a central station to pump the power outwards. The electric eel is the obvious place to look for genes that might provide a way to convert chemical energy into electricity.

I also was considering my body vs. my total genome regarding how much of my genome encodes information useful to intelligence. I figure that most of what my body does is very mechanical in nature. The heart is just a pump and connects to a big sewage and transport system, digestion is a process for obtaining energy but it is largely low value add when it comes to intelligence, locomotion is helpful but not fundamental since a quadraplegic can still be intelligent, and all of the parts to run individual cells of different types and just the basic cell functions is mostly unnecessary doing the same sorts of maintenance. So without putting any science behind it I figure about .05% of my genome is focused on intelligence and thought. It is probably a lot of information but not that many instructions? So I figure eventually we should get computers over the hump on some of the areas of intelligence by understanding the algorithms that result from the expression of these genes. Among them, my favorite, is the operant conditioning system. It's the functionality behind why clicker training dogs works so well and people will stand in front of slot machines for days on end. So I would find it interesting to create an AI prototype that focused just on implementing operant conditioning as a model in software to train a computer.

Unfortunately I have no time to play with genes, people, power, and computers.

Posted by Dan Housman at 04:55 AM | Permalink

On Thursday morning the ground was covered in ice from the stuff that fell from the sky. Sarah’s car got stuck so I used my steel-toed REI Kilimanjaro climbing boots to knock the ice from under her wheels. Afterwards I wandered around the corner to look for some ice melt to help get my car clear and to get the ice in her spot to melt. What I found was a large supply of day old marked down Valentine’s day candy and a new set of more expensive Easter candy. I did not find any ice melting substances. I then went to Stop and Shop and had the same experience. So my conclusion was that someone should make “Ice melting Valentine’s day candy” or the local venues should stock things that are useful in winter despite the predictions of tropical weather and parrots flying through the Boston rain forest until they actually see a passion fruit plant growing in Boston Commons.

On Saturday morning I watched “Good Morning America” since I was already up for three or four hours from the earlier showing that Madeline put on to demonstrate that she was bored at 4 AM that included readying some exciting board books, testing a new farm music CD, munching on blue berries, and playing pick-up quarters from the floor. On the show they featured a guy who had invented a robo-plow out of an old golf cart frame. It was actually not robotic but instead a remote control device that he could either control by looking out his window or control from his television using the cameras and lights mounted on the front of the plow.

That was the interesting thing to me. Maybe the true application of telepresence is to outsource common household tasks like lawn mowing, driveway maintenance, and vacuum cleaning to people living in countries where they can use fast internet access to control household appliances in other countries. I can imagine saying that we outsource our vacuum cleaning to India and our lawn to Africa at some point in 2015. The key is for the manufacturers of these pieces of equipment like Toro and Electrolux or some smart Japanese manufacturers to figure it out and start making these appliances and the service contracts now. They have outsourced the person who takes your order at McDonalds over that intercom so the time is near. Maybe it’s time to get a patent on the whole business model for remote controlled outsourcing of household chores before it is too late. But what will the neighbor’s kids do for cash?

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:03 AM | Permalink

"Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual."

- Mason Cooley

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:13 AM | Permalink

I was thinking about the issue of the web 2.0 price point since folks have been working towards making things closer to free per this ZDNet article. My thought on the world of the free is that is somewhat how software started. Things were "free" but that really meant that the software was integrated with a bunch of services to keep the hardware running. The model started to break down when folks like Microsoft, Lotus, and SAP figured out that software could be made well if it wasn't free. What I noticed in the mid-late '90s was that the Microsoft software was doing much better than the free world of Unix that was tied into vendor operating systems and had lots of strings attached that caused the non-commercial software to get fragmented into tons of versions. I would expect that Open Source will continue to have this problem but that isn't exactly what Web 2.0 is supposed to mean completely.

The iswithwith free stuff is that it tends to get worse over time against stuff that costs money. So eventually if you value the item you want it to be not so free. The one exception is when things are free because they come attached with something someone else wants. In the case of most internet services that are free the attached thing is advertising. The search engine game isn't new. We've been getting advertising with the phone book, and media outlets like magazines, newspapers, radio, and television forever. So the free stuff that is advertising funded ought to stick around for quite a while. But the entire web 2.0 world isn't advertising oriented... or is it?

Posted by Dan Housman at 12:17 PM | Permalink

I received a promotional item in the mail yesterday. It was a notepad that read at the bottom "Don't make a move without me" and had a small picture of the realtor at the top. The message was rather disconcerting when taken literally that I couldn't do anything without this stranger being involved. I promptly dropped the notepad into the trash with a twinge of guilt that I was wasting paper. It was frightening enough that I would have burned it if I could have.

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:28 AM | Permalink

I was thinking of the problems that the airlines are having with screening luggage now that people are putting larger bags and more bags through due to increased security restrictions. When I thought back to our trip to California my general take was that baggage as a whole is a major pain in the butt. You have to get to the airport early because of it then you have to wait longer afterwards because of it. I heard on the report that some people have started to Fed-Ex their luggage to their destination in advance. This makes a lot of sense and could be taken to an extreme for an airline such that it covered "No baggage" flights as a specialty and re-routed all luggage through a non-carrier route including delivery to and from the doorstep of the passenger's leaving location and destination. That way when I got to my arrival city I would just need transportation to my hotel and my luggage would already be there when I arrived. If there wasn't any luggage on planes then they could board and leave faster with less time to turn them around, have less security issues with the baggage, reduce overhead related to handling the baggage in expensive airport locations and with large numbers of staff. Maybe the planes themselves could be re-engineered to hold more people or provide better and more comfortable seating on the plane because there wasn't any baggage on it.

Even if it doesn't happen... it would be a pretty cool concept.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:52 AM | Permalink

Nothing like a good poem to liven-up a mentoring group meeting. Here is one good reason why MIT's mentoring program is better than most. Guys like Lou Goldish have a lot of heart.

Ode to VMS Mentors
By L. Goldish

Every month I stand up here reporting,
The new ventures which I’ve just intook.
On the other end there sits Roberta,
Looking stern, so I’ll go by the book.

Just be nice, and describe the new ventures,
Don’t talk long; set a positive tone.
It’s your job to get each venture mentors,
Or you mentor that group on your own.

So please, guys, please raise your hands skyward,
And for that I’ll be thankful a bunch.
You guys really are super mentors,
And that’s why VMS gives you lunch.

As you know, VMS takes all comers,
Every Mahesh, Jin, Nguyen, or Jamie,
No matter what field their idea’s in,
Even if it appears cockamamie.

‘Cause you never know who’ll be successful?
We must help founders learn so much more.
And I know some of us find it stressful,
But come on, guys, that’s what we’re here for.

Yet, you think, “What the heck’s going on here?
Some ideas are just fanciful tours,”
But, remember the words of S. Greenblatt,
“Our job is to build entrepreneurs.”

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

About seven years ago ChannelWave hosted an e-lab team to do market research and generally help out the business for a semester. Since then every six months or so I get invited to the e-lab CEO reception at the Sloan school. This year they got nice and feisty with their RSVP standards and put out the following message along with their invitation.

The MIT Entrepreneurship Center is pleased to announce the deployment
of our new networking software algorithms, motivated by Emily Post's
landmark masterpiece, ETIQUETTE

1.If you RSVP = YES and don't show, you are dropped from all future
invitations.
2.If you plead for forgiveness after the first violation you can be
placed on probation for one year..
3.If you wait to sign up 'til the day of the event, you are marked in
our database as "high maintenance"

I was quite frightened by this threat regarding failed etiquette so I arrived at the event after having been called by someone to confirm that I would arrive. So when I arrived they had not made a name tag for me so I assume that I may be accidentally uninvited because they can’t match my RSVP to my attendance.

The event was better than usual because now that I have been with VMS (MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service) for over a year I recognize a number of people who are entrepreneurs that I have worked with as well as the mentors. The event gave me time to chat with the folks I already knew and to discuss how they were doing with their ventures. I even connected with some new people like some folks that have interns from Norway that work at Boston University. That could be helpful for my fledgling business(es) given that I haven’t been able to convince the e-lab folks to volunteer for my newer ventures after submitting a project three semesters in a row. I also managed to rekindle some old ideas and got some juice in me again about making things go with some ideas that just had stalled like my "pet project".

I highly recommend following the rules for the etiquette because the event is a great one for MIT based folks who have engaged with Sloan in the past. It has a “no bozos” feel to the group which keeps me from watching my back for roaming lawyers and weirdo consultants and the folks there are all very interesting to chat with and very interested in making MIT based entrepreneurs successful. Even at the end of the evening last night I had a conversation with a man who said that he could now recognize faces by using striking imagery associated with someone's name (Brian would look like they had a brain sticking out of their face).

To whoever hands out the invites. Thanks for inviting me year after year.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:30 PM | Permalink

Yuval took a chance and pulled together a company around an idea he had a year ago. I recall chatting with him about the idea only about a year ago and he already has what appears to be the big IT bloggers excited with a product that is already headed for an alpha test. I can't say more than what is on the web (not that I really know more!) but I am wicked proud of Yuval and his team for following through with a good idea, refiniing it, and turning it into what appears to be a going concern at Eye-Fi.

Just yesterday Robert Scoble wrote a piece on eye-fi that basically says that once their device hits that he advocates it and I am sure many more folks are to follow.

Awesome... Totally awesome. Congrats Yuval!

Posted by Dan Housman at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Someone asked me today why I don't give-up the low security world of consulting and entrepreneurship and get a nice secure position at a big company. I figured I might sleep better but then I watched Taxi Driver and this quote from Wizard, played by Peter Boyle (yeah the guy from Everybody Loves Raymond) seemed appropriate.

WIZARD
Travis, look, I dig it. Let me
explain. You choose a certain way
of life. You live it. It becomes
what you are. I've been a hack 27
years, the last ten at night.
Still don't own my own cab. I
guess that's the way I want it.
You see, that must be what I am.

A police car stops across the street. TWO PATROLMEN get out
and roust the JUNKIE from his doorway.

WIZARD
(continuing)
Look, a person does a certain thing
and that's all there is to it. It
becomes what he is. Why fight it?
What do you know? How long you
been a hack, a couple months?
You're like a peg and you get
dropped into a slot and you got to
squirm and wiggle around a while
until you fit in.

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:48 AM | Permalink

On Thursday night I finally got out to see Lisa and Dave’s Sweet Wednesday full band show play at Sally O’Brien’s. Sweet Wednesday after more than three years of work, probably a lot more actually, just released their first CD as a band. The CD is called Wherever You Go and the tracks are available for listening through the web site as well as an option to buy the CD online.

The show included some great moments. I heard the song that they wrote for Madeline for the first time and it was a rockin’ tune that I’m sure Madeline will come to love along with plenty of other folks. Unfortunately I don’t have a recording of the song yet but I am hoping to get one shortly from a live set. Sarah would have loved it when the band played “Take a load off of Annie” later in the evening including a strong showing from the audience, at least me, singing along. The Sweet Wednesday band shows are a ton of fun and anyone who is missing them is just missing out. American Idol was playing on the television behind the bar with nobody wanting to watch it while a real band, with songs written by the people playing the music was standing on a small stage making a lot of great sound. America needs to dropkick the synthesized Nick Lachey pop idol crap and start getting out of their homes to see some real people play music at their local bars.

That song from Hustle and Flow (Whoop that trick) has been stuck in my head since I watched the film. The basic notion from that movie was that this pimp puts his time into making music and creates a demo tape to show to a rapper who was successful. The rapper doesn’t give him much help but one of his prostitutes does promote the tape and it becomes a hit. So this is where Sweet Wednesday is now. They have the music mixed perfectly and it needs to get fed into the media machine so that people can realize that it is just some great music that needs to be put onto the radio play lists.

We also watched The Hotel New Hampshire on Friday night, probably the eighth time I’ve seen that movie. I never before noticed that the actor playing the younger brother named Egg was Seth Green. The story line has the father chasing after his dream of running a hotel only to have two failed ventures. He is described as wanting to start a hotel no matter what happened because he was a Gatsby, someone who chases their dreams even when they are failing over and over again. So being a musician or an entrepreneur like my sister and myself are puts us into that category of the American’s who keep trying and failing despite the more conservative folks providing sage discouraging advice to get a real job. It’s a long, suffering, depressing road full of nos and occasional maybes.

Why do we do it? What keeps us coming back despite the discouragement?

To find out listen to the Sweet Wednesday CD. Buy a copy for yourself and ten copies for each of your friends for birthday and holiday gifts. Get the barrista to play the music in your local coffee shop. Tell your friends they need to hear this music. Request Wherever you go from your local radio station. Complain that the CD isn’t in the shelf for local musicians at your local record store. Review the songs and put your comments in a podcast. Do something to get this CD heard and then drop me an email and maybe I’ll give you a hand the next time you have something that needs to be heard.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:27 PM | Permalink

When Marvin Minsky was working on artificial intelligence in the 1960's he discovered that when dealing with the press to describe some of his projects that the one story that the press always reported to the world was that he was working on a robot that plays ping pong. He was not in fact working on a robot that did this. He created the term eigenstory to describe this sort of scenario. The eigenstory is named after the types of results that often return from differential equations that are more a function of the system than the input. So the eigenstory is the one stable output from the media that people want to hear as the real story whether it is actually true or not. The important lesson from this from a marketing perspective is that you can feed the press your own version of what you are trying to make but they may only register an eigenstory result. Rather than fighting this result it might make sense to just learn from the output of what people are able to hear and repeat and try to create a product that does exactly what the story output of the system suggests. I have become less impressed with the individual genius of inventors given the basic view that products themselves do evolve out of the system. They are the eigenstories of societies that have become concrete.

I have been thinking about artificial intelligence recently given the recent slow roll backwards in the pro-choice/pro-life debates driven by actions like the South Dakota abortion ban. I am a believer that we will be superceded by the evolution of intelligent machines more equipped to explore the universe. Once the computers do become self-aware among the first problems that we will face is the restructuring of politics. Politics is how people are organized and governed but these intelligent beings won't be people or have the same interests and needs as people. To have a separation between humans and machines with two political systems will also pose the problems that laws that govern the interaction between them need to be consistent. But it's unlikely that there will be room for AI voting in the US legislature. The AIs would be unlikely to be trusted in the executive branch given their track record in movies like The Terminator.

The issue of AI reproductive rights would be a key problem. Any organized group of living and self-aware intelligent things is going to worry about how the group adds new members. The conventional religious answer is to become as plentiful as grains of sand. Since our silicon buddies are most likely made indirectly from processed sand that might not be a problem. But if an AI is developing and it probably will take about 10-14 months for one to develop rather than just machine them off a production line. Part of the AI development process will be the slow act of becoming self-aware with a unique personality learned through a neural process following a sexual intermixing of code from AI parents rather than a fabrication of a machine from parts in a factory. Will operating systems come into play and is Microsoft going to try to control life through a control economy while freedom is available through an open source market economy? What will the machines decide in their own right to life debate if they are allowed to self govern? When will a new machine be considered to be alive during it's development process? Will we decide for them when a new AI life can be terminated? Will the AIs have problems with gender inequalities, incest, rape, and abortions? Will they just follow the human lead or supercede our primitive understanding of life as is written in the bible or in scientific texts? All of these questions will be told in headline eigenstories in the future.

Personally I would like to play ping pong against a robot and it could be as far as we get in my lifetime.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Jeremy while obsessing about the quality of the sound and focusing all of his brain cells not dedicated to filtering the Internet dating scene has tasked me with figuring out how to properly enclose and promote the revival of our college radio show in the form of a podcast. The initial test can be found on a blogger blog called Entropy and packaged as an RSS feed using Feedburner.

Among the interesting things that I found for promoting the podcast was the Podzinger site. It is a search engine that indexes podcasts into text and then allows you to search for the content and load the section of the podcast that raised your search results. At first glance this appears to be some incredible technology. What I found interesting about it given that I have been doing some research into the speech to text world is that Podzinger is a BBN technology. Now for those people who are unfamiliar with BBN, they were a big time government contractor building among many things the original infrastructure for the Arpanet, the government’s private predecessor to the public Internet. One speech to text expert had mentioned to me that BBN had a large contract in the 80s building speech to text for the government, probably the NSA, in order to filter international telephone calls. The system would convert International conversations to text and then identify conversations that might be worth listening deeper into for national security. If BBN has been working on this technology since the ‘80s for Uncle Sam then they probably are going to be getting to the point by now where they are good enough at it to really recognize what it happening when people are talking. They might even be better at it than the Microsoft Speech to Text engine.

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:14 AM | Permalink

Having worked as a father with an infant for over three months I have been pondering various areas where modern technology could work in my favor to reduce some of the labor of handling a child. Since the average budget for a baby is unlimited given that other people are buying items off of a registry I don’t see why the makers of baby products don’t work on some of the challenges that I have faced. Below are some product ideas that I would be happy to talk to any private investor about turning into a large enterprise.

Problem area 1 - Feeding

The breast pump has gone through significant breakthroughs in the past century moving from manual extraction to an automated portable systematic way of pulling milk out of mothers. The good thing is that us fathers have bottles full of milk to feed our hungry children. The bad thing is that we have to sit and hold the baby while they suck down the milk and the bottle itself isn’t nearly as good as the breast. The breast doesn’t have any air in it while both the standard bottle and the ones where you put bags in the bottom both have air in them. Air means burps and milk spilling all over the place. That isn’t to say that burping isn’t needed for breast feedings. Since I can’t feed during the breast feedings I tend to get put onto burping duty. Unfortunately the burp cloth on the shoulder technique requires a lot of dexterity when switching shoulders and the burp cloth, which is really an old style diaper, tends to slip all over my shoulder and not cover the actual area where the infant burps, down my back. So here are some solutions to these feeding problems…

Bottle holder/feeder: They managed to build the automated feeder for Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times and that was back in the 1920s. A robotic arm using a visual sensor and feedback from the bottle that could properly hold the bottle in the baby’s mouth while they are seated in the perfect feeding position, strapped into a harness, would allow me to happily talk to the baby and keep my shoulder from getting sore scrunched into a ball. The baby would also be treated to the perfection of the perfect hold.

Hold it yourself long thin bottle: I noticed that the reason why Madeline doesn’t hold her bottles herself at three months is that the bottle is far too wide for her hands. When she was given a thin bottle, which is what formula samples come in, she was both able to put her hands around the bottle and keep it stuck in her mouth for an hour as we walked through Boston. A long thin bottle designed for the baby to hold the sides would allow me to be hands free during the feeding. I would imagine it could even be optimized to avoid air by looking like and working mainly like a syringe.

Electric bottle: If the pump can automate getting the milk out of the mother then the bottle should be able to automate getting the milk into the baby properly. The pump uses electricity to get the milk out while the bottle relies on air. The plastic bag in bottle solutions seem to have the best answer to the no air problem but they tend to get air into them anyways. Using a second hole and a pump to take the air out of the bottle (but not the liquid) would be a better bottle system.

Breast nipple: Breasts distribute milk through lots of little ducts and not one little hole. Why not a nipple that does the same. It would output milk more like a sponge with many small holes rather than one big one. That way it is harder for the air to flow back into the holes to put air into the bottle.

Burp collars: Since burp cloths are always sliding everywhere when you put a baby on your shoulder and need to be switched back and forth, a collar that provides spit-up milk catching optimization that can be worn during burping would be ideal. The collar would cover the shoulder and upper back areas and be easy to put on quickly when burping.

Problem area 2 - Entertainment

Babies like to be entertained and suffer from the unfortunate condition that they can’t use a remote control or even sit-up in bed. So the entertainment needs to be brought to them. Some progress has been made by the Fisher-Price corporation with bouncy seats that have vibrators in them and swings that move the baby around but these don’t seem to do the trick most of the time and the music that they play is monotonous and annoying to adults. Mobiles and play gyms are good but they require placing the baby in the right spot to see or play with them so when the baby is lying on the bed or in their seat they aren’t readily available. Plus the mobiles need to move to make the baby stimulated. Here are some solutions…

Exchangable music in toys using flash ram: Basically if the makers of toys that play music could just include an MP3 player in them instead of the annoying canned music then we could use a USB cable or a 8MB Flash RAM card to update the music. Otherwise it feels like we are trapped like an FAO Schwartz employee listening to music that can drive us into a psychotic state.

Ceiling projector or television: Babies can’t sit up. They stare at the ceiling most of the time and unlike the rest of the room, there is nothing to see on the ceiling but the lights and white paint. To improve the ceiling experience a projector mounted on the floor would should something stimulating, like the visualizations from Windows Media Player, Barney (hopefully getting eaten by rodents), or images of mom and dad saying important phrases. Using crystals their child can bring key advice back once the child leaves the mother planet and goes into their fortress of solitude on the North Pole.

Mobile mobiles: Mobiles are great but they need to be mounted from the ceiling. But if the mobile was hung from a little, but heavy remote control car, like an RV that could drive around the room to wherever the baby was it would allow them to be entertained anywhere. The mobile could then automatically be moved and jostled in time to music or based on feedback from the baby.

Mobile fishing rod: I already built one of these. It is like those fishing rods for cats when you drag a mouse around except it holds the mobile over the head of the baby and allows me to bob it up and down in synch with Techno music.

Humanoid robot: This would have obvious uses in holding and calming the baby without causing too much long-term emotional damage. It also would prepare the child for the next century, The Age of Intelligent Machines, when robots like Arnold Schwarzenegger will control the world.

Car seat train ride: The car seat is a safe place and Madeline can be calmed down often by swinging it around right after she is put begrudgingly into it. Some people don’t have my extreme upper body physique that allows me to swing around the car seat. What Madeline appears to want is a small indoor Disney style roller coaster that the car seat can be placed on that can ride her at a reasonable velocity up and down hills and with some turbulence. The seat is safe and everyone loves indoor train sets. It could require a lot of power but given that they already have electric cars this shouldn’t be too tough to power.

Problem area 3 – Changing and strolling

When moving about with a baby in a stroller or baby carrier a number of things can go wrong. One of them is that the baby needs to be changed and can leak gross baby refuse all over. Knowing that a change is needed could help reduce leakage since a quick change might catch a leak before it causes too much damage. Unfortunately babies enjoy wallowing in their own urine or feces. They only cry when bored or hungry so they are unlikely to warn that a diaper needs changing. The second issue for leakage is dealing with the problem that diapers don’t actually contain what I like to refer to as explosive diarrhea. After cleaning-up the baby, which has adequate technology short of the humanoid robot to do it for me, dressing the baby is a whole other story. Some solutions…

Diaper nano-technology warning system: Batteries have been providing little meters to determine their level of charge for a number of years now. They include these little chemical meters that don’t usually work until you try to puncture them with your fingernails and even then you can’t figure out whether they have a charge in them or not. Well if we can make battery testers then we can make diaper moisture testers. People working on the problems of moisture detection in buildings and construction are already placing small nano-tech sensors into walls to detect the moisture in them in order to alert building maintenance staff. Every bottle of Pepsi may have an RFID tag in it soon. So how about an active RFID tag inside of each diaper to measure the level of moisture and potentially other things. It could be polled by a monitor and would sound an alarm if the monitor registered that a diaper needed to be changed.

Diapers that don’t leak: Anyone with a baby knows that despite advertisements that you can pour a cup of water into a diaper that this isn’t good enough. A better advertisement would be if someone were to put eight carrots into a Cuisinart with peanut butter and then shot the resulting beverage out of a cannon at the diaper at close range. If the diaper showed no leakage then I would buy a container truck full of them. The folks who are doing aerodynamic optimization for the car companies should take a look at the physics of the baby projectile poop and redesign the diaper folds at the edges to contain it.

Clothing that’s easier to put on the arms (arm snaps): Maybe I am incompetent but I find it hard to put baby clothing on. The snaps are helpful but I generally get stuck for a long time trying to get the arms through the little holes. The folks at MIT doing knot theory should be able to create a surface that can be easily snapped together to avoid the dreaded pulling through of the arms.

Smart light blocker: When in a stroller the direct sun tends to get into Madeline’s face. We don’t like this because we were told that we would go blind if we stared at the sun. Madeline likes to stare at the sun and we would prefer to not have her go blind. We also don’t want to have her get sunburned. The problem with our stroller set-up is that the rain cover doesn’t shield the sun well. What I’d prefer was an arm that held a parasol that moved it automatically to being between the baby and the sun. If that isn’t possible then some other automation to block the sun would also work fine.

While this list is not likely to be set-up as SBIR challenge grants from the US Government I’m always in the market for some good products. Unfortunately soon all of these will be obsolete since Madeline is rapidly outgrowing the need for all of these. But plenty of new customers are born every day.

Posted by Dan Housman at 06:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Now that Sarah and I are back from our vacation in California we are ready to face the next big hurdle in our lives. After three months of maternity leave, on Monday, Sarah returns to work. While this was a known event it crept-up on us suddenly and now we are scrambling to figure out how to not become totally dysfunctional while having both of us work with an infant needing our constant care and feeding. The initial plan is to have me stay home on Monday, Sarah to stay home on Tuesday, for me to take Madeline to my mother’s on Wednesday, and take Madeline to Sarah’s mother in Bedford on Thursday. This leaves the conundrum of what to do on Fridays. But that isn’t a problem until it happens.

The return to work is taking a toll on both of us. I have to adjust to getting back into a rhythm for my work and it is tough with a mix of programming, marketing, management, sales, etc. to find the right priorities to get everything done. Sarah was nearly crying over not having gotten the laundry finished and put away last night along with the apparently relentless cancerous growth of clutter in our apartment. I think everyone suffers from a general haze in January trying to figure out what they are really supposed to be doing this year. I intend to spend more time selling and less time developing or marketing but that may be a tricky proposition. I have been getting plenty of calls from people offering director of product management jobs but I have been turning them down because the arrangements at my current gig are still quite good and the whole scene around personal knowledge management or medical data warehousing haven’t played out yet. I belong more on the initiation phase than as a clean-up guy even if it pays better to just organize a bunch of people already rowing a ship out of synch.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:54 PM | Permalink

I had this idea about a year ago. I am filing it under things I'll never continue working on.
Among the areas that made this less appealing were competitors and I think that I was going to mainly copy a site that focused on doing this for books called allconsuming.com

Hypercrit – thoughts

Mission: To create the largest independent online rating system for media and high-tech products for the community of bloggers.

The system will need to have a source data set of items that can be critiqued. To begin with it can be a basic database of items like any publicly available database of movies or even a way to allow people to find an item on Amazon and import the item.

The business model is that there are many companies today that have a large inventory/database of products that seek increased mind-share among consumers. These companies include online merchants such as Amazon.com, Netflix, and itunes as well as content providers connected to the specific industries like CNET for hardware. This list could also be expanded to organizations like comparison shopping engines like PriceGrabber and Froogle. Many of these organizations thus far have mainly built their own rating and recommendation engines into their systems.

This is fine but may not be the model preferred by bloggers to rate and recommend products because the content does not result in information included into their blog. By creating a blogger friendly tool for publishing ratings to individual blogs that includes their promotional objectives a business model can be reached that allows bloggers to achieve affiliate revenue or credits from these companies for driving traffic and it allows the online merchants to drive increased consumption through them as a channel. The central hub for opinions can also be a source to drive increased mind-share for the vendors.

In order to get the blogging community interested in a tool existing blogs with strong influence could be targeted directly as well as the major blogging tools (Movable Type, blogger, etc.) Specific early champions of the tool would be critical in the process.

Constituents

Bloggers:

• Publish reviews and ratings of products
• Improve look and feel of blog entries for ratings/reviews
• Simplify the process of publishing or re-publishing ratings
• Drive increased blog traffic through active rating
• Have ratings included in a central repository
• Link to other blogger opinions
• Find other bloggers with similar opinions
• Achieve affiliate revenue/credits from vendors

Merchants:

• Sell more products
• Increase traffic on specific items
• Syndicate relevant blog content
• Achieve new affiliate revenue from actively publishing bloggers
• Increase sales within blogger communities

Comparison shopping sites/publishers:

• Increase traffic
• Achieve new affiliates from actively publishing bloggers
• Add relevant content from syndicated blogs

Non-blogger consumers:

• Quickly obtain reviews
• Learn more about reviewers through blog entries
• Quickly link to products for use or from merchants from blog entries (e.g. add to Netflix queue, get showtimes, compare prices, etc.)

Content producers (media companies – movie makers, book publishers, etc.)

• Drive increased consumption of listed media
• Achieve faster time to market for new media items
• Access the influential independent “blogger” press

Competitors

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:41 PM | Permalink

As someone not too afraid to fail at things I am currently a member/founder/leader of two organizations. This week was the post Labor Day, come to Jesus, come to the meeting to see who is really a member week for both of them. On Monday the Boston Bootstrap network held it’s second meeting at Flat Top Johnnies and we had a total of three people at the meeting. This was a bit of a drop-off from the 25 or so who attended the first month but Bijoy, the founder of Bootstrap Austin, is a big proponent of quality over quantity. So that group will be slowly growing from our small core of three people.

The Off The Shallow End improv group on Wednesday met where the general concept was that anyone who didn’t show-up was going to be declared by default someone unable to perform in the group going forwards. By sending out a stern message our leader, Suzy, got replies back with potatoes in or out from most of the former class. We lost four people including Gadi, who couldn’t make the commitment because he is starting a class this fall on data structures. So our Improv group has shrunk from 11 people graduating in the class to about six dedicated improvisers. The nice thing about having the smaller set of people involved now is that we can all commit to working harder and more focused on improving. We spent a while talking about getting a director for the group and Suzy and I butted heads about how we needed to fix some problems independent of a director with regards to work ethic for the group. After a long pow-wow we got to doing some improv and had some great scenes based on detailing an environment.

So fall is a time of contraction and harvesting for my hobby groups. I like the tightening of the groups to their essentials. It makes me more comfortable to see commitment and common interests in a few people than to wonder about it with a larger group that doesn't all share common purposes. It makes me think back to the Good to Great and Electric Acid Cool Aid Test discussions about success of organizations being about getting commitment for the question - "Are you on the bus or not?" and getting the people who want to be off the bus off as well as upping the ante for the people who want to be on the bus.

Posted by Melody at 04:17 PM | Permalink

The CEO of Forrester sent an email to lots of people about changing from bowties to diamonds and assumed somehow that people know what you are talking about when you say <> or >< with regards to working with customers.

;)

Excerpt:
"Using Jack Welch’s model of servicing the companies you build products for (the diamond: <>) versus merely making the products (the bow tie: ><) revolutionized the buyer/seller relationship in big industry."

Read Bowties to diamonds if you are interested. I didn't bother to try.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:26 PM | Permalink

If you have ever tried to sell enterprise software and been presented with responding to a dreaded RFP. This is what an RFP would be like if someone was interested in buying your house. I dug this off my old computer too. I am not sure why I wrote it.

Home Owner RFI

This RFI (Request for Information) has been sent to you because you have been selected as a potential vendor for Daniel Housman and his family in the area of HOME OWNERSHIP. Mr. Housman and his family have contracted our consulting firm Amoco, Price, and Kraft to aid in the selection process. Your response is due on [ print yesterday’s date] in order to be considered for a demonstration of your home. If your home is selected for the next round of our purchasing process you will be contacted via a secret code and be provided with a key to unlock the code. In order to respond you will first need to send back an NDA that you have received this and are not intending to show it to anyone else.

If the house burns down will I be able to replace it the next day? What tools will you use to rebuild it?

How many houses have you sold before and to who? Can you provide 50 references of people who have purchased properties from you and which types of things such as bathrooms, swimming pools, or solar panels were included in each one.

Can your house fly?
If not what are your plans to make your house fly in upcoming remodeling?
Can your house fly if we remodel the basement?

Our family would like to move our current swimming pool to where your swimming pool is because we like our swimming pool better. Can you describe any tools you are offering with your house to allow us to do this? Is there a price break for bringing our own swimming pool (REQUIRED)

What materials was your house built with? Please explain how it was built describing each layer in the houses architecture.

Does your house support all standards for power, television, and reception? We have some appliances that we bought in England and would like to use them in our new house including a telephone – France , a toaster oven – China, a Television and VCR – England. Please describe how your house would accommodate these appliances.

Does you house provide broadband access?
Do your outlets support industrial machinery standards?

How many people can be fit into your house before it crumbles t o the ground. Please provide any load testing you may have done on your house such as total volume of people that can be fit into the building as well as what will happen during particularly active periods with varying numbers of participants such as

A) A dance party
B) Riot
C) Tae-Boe

Have you ever held a party with more than 800 people in your house before? IF so please provide the names of some of the attendees at the party.

Home features – We are evaluating features of our home please enter whether you have any of these features and whether it is a “Minor”, “Moderate”, “Major”, or “Impossible” home improvement to improve your home to meet our requirements

Included – Included in price of home
Minor – Small adjustment to furnishings
Moderate – Cosmetic change such as paint, interior modification
Major – Structural change to walls, floors, etc.
Impossible – Beyond the laws of physics

Kitchen - Requirements

Big Sink big enough to fit 100 unwashed dishes
Self-Cleaning Oven with top grill
Microwave oven
Sub-Zero Fridge
Wooden Cabinets
Wooden floor
Washing machine and dryer
Robot that cooks and cleans for me

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:33 AM | Permalink

As I nest and clean the apartment I find old thoughts that I had locked in laptops like my NEC Versa from the nineties. Here is an example showing that I was still obsessed with start-up survival even back when Survivor's first season came out. I actually watched it back then...

Lessons learned from the TV show "Survivor"

Although the show Survivor is only a representation of a sample of one group of people in a scenario that is obviously contrived, when watching it I can't help but make some observations about the nature of competition among people that can be applied to competing in a high tech new market environment.

The island began with 16 people who were eventually narrowed to 1 person.

At first - The objective was to survive not to be the best.

You need to understand the nature of the game if you want to win. In a competitive environment where only one person can survive, you have to realize that surviving is the objective. Many of the people did not understand this and may have been more fit but didn't win. Greg was an incredible outdoorsman but he wasn't able to last very long nor was a woman who also had significant outdoors experience. Most of the contestants were able to eat bugs or rats but in the end nobody said of the winners that they survived because they had an uncanny ability to eat bugs and rats or walk on fire. It was something else. The skill to handle the competitive environment to survive is different than the skill to survive physical, mental, or environmental challenges. Kelly, who survived until the last round was very quiet and nobody felt threatened by her in early rounds when people were being voted out. Because of this she was able to survive through initial rounds.

The first objective of a start-up or provider in a new market is also to survive. Focusing on survival at early stages is supercedes focusing on being better. Most markets can't support multiple 600 pound gorillas and being too obvious or too capable of intentions at the beginning can endanger survival at an early stage. Allowing others to focus on competing vs. surviving can be an important way to make it through an initial selection. In many ways that is the start-up imperative at first. Just don't be noticed by the more competitive competitors. Stay off the radar screen. So when big companies like Siebel and Oracle keep focusing on being a better CRM provider, staying quiet can be a way to fight them as a PRM provider in the early stages. If they are paying attention to competing and not survival in the new market it can hurt them later.

* Alliances are critical to survival. With 16 potential survivors converging upon one eventual survivor it came down to a group of four people who had formed an alliance early in the process that were able to engineer the survival of the four people Sue, Kelly, Rudy, and Rich by systematically ousting the other players. It is much easier for four to compete against 12 individuals than for one to compete against 15. This alliance was begun by Rich, the eventual winner of the contest at the beginning of the contest.

Strategic alliances determine the outcome of competitive situations. Clearly having a plan for alliances like Rich did at the beginning of the competition was the way to survive.

The need to create alliances when there is a large group is also true in business in an early stage competitive market. With a large number of potential providers in the market it is more competitive to form an alliance with a would be future competitor than to go alone to the market. For ChannelWave this means that forming the right alliances in a market that allow for survival can allow ChannelWave to weather a fragmented market or a new market. This is not something that necessarily happens once in business. New markets emerge from existing ones. The question comes down to who will dominate those emerging markets since that dominance is the prize. Taking on a strategy that uses alliances effectively to lock out the new markets is needed to survive in any round one of an approach to an undefined market.

Also the more fit were less likely to form alliances as was clear later. A company like Siebel is so fit that they are a threat to the survival of any company that wants an alliance with them. This is a disadvantage to them in long term survival since the less fit companies can "plot" to remove them from the market because they are such a threat.

From a product perspective we should note that when winning is about survival, if our product can provide the needed tools to execute strategic partnerships that allow survival than we are providing the "brains" behind the market equivalent of Rich, the eventual winner. The key value in the software for alliances is in the ability of our customer to "win" to win in new markets by first surviving and ultimately out maneuvering even alliance partners when needed. They need to use tools as early as the first day in competition, while they are just planning to compete through the last day in managing their alliances. That was Rich's strategy and it worked very well.

Within the 4 - How to survive in the tight competitive market

Once the field had been narrowed to 4 people how the group dynamics worked differently. The alliance had survived but needed to be restructured with a single winner. One alliance member was singled out by the group for removal, Kelly.

Kelly was able to survive only because she was able to handle the challenges that gave her immunity 5 times in a row. It was clear that she had made mistakes in her relationship with Sue that had ensured that she was going to be voted out from the alliance of 3 Sue, Rudy, and Rich had she not won two consecutive challenges. Basically she was more fit than the other competitors and had in her words only been able to get to the final two because of faith, and a will to survive. Rudy was ultimately removed because he couldn't beat Kelly in a competition to hold on to a pole. Had he been able to do this he would have won the survival game.

Kelly's ability to execute was necessary in order to survive. While alliances are important, they can be overcome by execution of objectives outside of those alliances. Kelly very well could have won the competition on execution alone. Companies like Siebel have been flawless often in their ability to execute. In a tight competitive environment the one who executes can survive longer than one who doesn't. It is better to be a Kelly than a Rudy. Making little mistakes can take you out of the running.

Kelly didn't win though as competitive execution was not enough. She made some mistakes along the way that cost her. One mistake was that she admits to was that she voted to remove Sue from the island. Sue had been one of her allies and later proved her worst enemy in the final decision.

In many ways this comes down to keeping your allies as you compete with them. Rich had a tremendous advantage among the four competitors because two of them were going to vote for him after they were removed. Rudy would because he was loyal. Loyalty was very important. Sue would select Rich because Rich was the lesser of two evils. Again loyalty was important. Sue was Anti-Kelly because Kelly had not stayed loyal to her.

Since former competitors ultimately decided who the winner would be it was necessary to not lose the trust of the other competitors. It meant that Rich had 2 of seven votes going into the final decision and Kelly had none. This was the equivalent of having a 2-0 lead in a seven game playoff series. The challenger needs to win 4 before you win 2 more. Again the alliance returned and execution within the alliance was critical to Rich's success. Had Sue tried to go against Rudy she would have faced the same odds or worse which is why Rich didn't even need to try to win the pole competition. He knew Rudy was loyal, and he knew that Kelly would rather compete against him than Rudy. Rich was also able to win over the doctor with his relationship with him that was not an alliance but the leaving him only needing one vote. Two of Kelly's 2 votes were for "not-rich" except for one which was a performance based approval for having been so capable. Clearly there was a cost to forming alliances, which was that in doing so Rich appeared very politically motivated and unlikable. He would have been a land slide winner had he been more likable. Kelly had spent energy on this and it nearly landed her the competition.

So it was important for Kelly to make it to the tie that she was likeable. It is important to be likeable in order to survive against a strategically capable competitor. Being likable is just as important as being a good alliance strategist and is a form of alliance strategy in and of itself. Businesses should look to be likable if they want to survive. They never know when they'll need a vote for them based on this over loyalty.

From a business perspective for CW and for our customers it should be clear that alliance creation and leadership is very important but in the long term it is the appropriate management of the alliance throughout time that is critical. It is a matter of survival to maintain loyal alliances. These alliances can also allow organizations the luxury to not always win or even compete in execution of a competitive objective.

Luck and chance are always factors

- It appears that the 3-3 voting tie was broken by Greg, who used the number 9 to figure out who to vote for and he voted for Rich because Rich gave him the number 7 when asked and Kelly gave him the number 3.

As a company in competition you can't always win on principles of strategy or execution. These just weight the odds one way or another to get us to a win, a loss, or to stay even enough to let luck take its course in a tie. Luck does not create winners though, it breaks ties among highly capable competitors. You can't easily say that Rich won because of luck given all of the obstacles it took to get to the coin toss. From a business perspective it boils down to opportunity favoring the prepared.

Posted by Dan Housman at 06:35 AM | Permalink

I have been working on doing some elephant hunting lately in order to grow the business. I don’t have a financial partner like a VC to outfit us with the latest sales hunting gear from their portfolio companies and cash to pay the smooth service companies that feed on fresh start-ups. So I’m on the hunt for that elephant of a deal that can feed us for six to twelve months provides the energy and capital to expand the business. It’s going to have to be a six or seven figure deal so there is no point in calling on folks that can’t stomach that. Luckily millions of years of evolution have contributed to making me a natural born killer and I’m ready to feed.

Picking the prey

The companies I am looking to sell to are ones that have cash to spend. So I focused on the ones that were public and the venture backed start-ups since they appeared to have the best promise for revenue. From them I looked at a number of criteria to match them against things that analysts, customers, friends, and advisors had said that our technology would be or is good at solving. Since it takes a lot of energy to hunt each company I like to pick the right ones. The ones that are having a problem or are in distress can be more attractive than the others because they can be taken down the easiest. So I went to Monster.com and looked at the job boards to see if they were doing hiring in areas that indicated that they needed support with building desktop applications for organizing content. I found one elephant this way that looked like a good fit. They were hiring a sr. product manager to lead a product team locally to build a product that could use our technology and knowledge to succeed. So I marked them for a hunt. I also read the news about companies worth checking out. To do this I subscribe to Google news but more recently I have been using our own product to search RocketInfo to get the latest news feeds and blogs about companies to see who might be a good fit. In general change is good at a prospect site. A good change of management makes everyone unstable including existing vendors. The new management may not be ready to buy immediately but the first in is the most likely to win.

Tracking and studying the game

I have grown to love the Internet as a source of information to find the broken branches and holes to help quietly approach the game. Plenty of clever start-ups have provided tools to use that in an aggregate form leave most individuals exposed to a phone call or email. For the contacts that I wanted to approach I first wanted to look deeper at their organization. LinkedIn provides a host of information about individuals that is frankly, incredible. I generally don’t care much about whether I am linked to each person so much that there is a person named John Smith who is the VP of Engineering at Elephantco who used to work at Elephantcoacquiredsub and Frank Black who used to be the VP of Engineering at Elephantco and is now working at Gazelleco. So their business model means they are giving me tons of value and I don’t pay for it but that isn’t my problem. Years ago I used to dream of having a resource like this to find people’s names and interests and roles. Sometimes I’ll even use the tracking tool in LinkedIn to see how I’m linked to a person. In one case recently I knew someone who was a former employee at the company I was interested in reaching that was a new colleague from one of my former colleagues. I didn’t actually use LinkedIn to contact the person. Instead I called my old buddy and asked for an introduction.

Testing approaches

But the social network garbage only goes so far. Most people aren’t directly connected to me and I don’t mind hunting alone. At some point it is just me and the game out there in cyberspace. When it comes down to that I need to get some contact information and make an approach. The site zoominfo.com is a good companion to LinkedIn because it provides utilities to send an email to the contact. They have a form where you can forward an email to the person and propose something like a meeting or call. The email comes from you so they will reply to you. I don’t use this tool often but you have to try something to get through. An alternative is to guess the email address. Companies have corporate standards for email addresses and they look like this flastname@company.com, fname.lname@company.com. So you don’t need to guess a seven digit number to put an inquiry into a person. I’ll try five or six people at the same company over the course of a few weeks to see if I can get anyone to bite. It only takes one to get started.

But email is a little indirect and the telephone is a very useful tool. So while in hunting mode I like to make a lot of phone calls to very important people. Some people find this intimidating but it is actually a fun, contact sport, part of the hunt. To make it a little less intimidating think about it this way. If you are selling something worth $100,000 then it must have an ROI to the buyer of over $500,000. So you aren’t making a call to take $100,000 but instead to announce that the person you are looking to reach is the lucky winner of $400,000. You are the publisher’s Clearing House, the lottery, the good guys. People should love to talk to you.

The telephone attack

But they don’t like being cold called. So the avoidance strategies by the prey to block me from calling and reaching my targets are significant. They include hidden extensions, people who don’t answer the telephone, and rerouting of calls to irrelevant peons. To handle locating the extension of the person you are looking for I just call the main number and ask for John Smith, the guy who I found on LinkedIn. People’s blogs also can work well although it is sloppier to use them. Since I have the name and their title I normally get through to the right extension. That worked for me the other day and I’m in the process of negotiating an elephant opportunity that came from it. But it is often more complex than that. If I don’t have a name because the management team isn’t networking on LinkedIn to find their next gig then I need to interrogate someone on the phone directly. The administrative people in companies are actually quite nice and want to be helpful since they are in an outward facing customer service role. They can be reached using the O key on the telephone. Chatting with them can help build a map of people that I can go back to later with names and titles that aren’t available anywhere else. Then I can pull the same trick of calling and asking for a person whose name, title, and favorite sports teams I already know.

If you have ever tried this then often when I get to the target person and their response is to fob me off to that guy from the Capital One commercials who says no in twenty languages. This is a typical response. “Wow that’s a great idea. You should talk to people in product management about that.” I have come to learn that the best way to play this with a real elephant is to play along but use it as a hook to get back to the real buyer. So I’ll talk to whoever you want and then I’ll call you back to tell you how it went and what they thought, etc. Sometimes the referrals really are sending me through the whole political route to get the approvals, etc. to make a big sale so it isn’t the end of the world if this means actually doing some work.

The waiting game

The big game don’t die quickly. In fact it is good to have a lot of time on your hands when hunting these big companies. Really good ideas take about six months to percolate through the big companies before they can regurgitate the $100K or more. I like to use this to my advantage to spend less time working on them when they are making me wait. In fact I prefer to gamble with them by telling them I am ready for meetings that I’m not ready for. So I’ll say something like. We’ve been working on the proposal and we are hoping to present it tomorrow. This roughly translates to in my mind. “I think you are going to schedule a time in two weeks to go over the proposal. If you do schedule something then I’ll put together a proposal.” This strategy does carry some risk to it but my time as a bootstrapper is very valuable and experience with these elephants tells me that they can’t move as fast as me so in order to avoid spending lots of time making a proposal, etc. I’m going to get on the schedule with them and make sure the right folks will be there.

The kill…. To be continued.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:43 AM | Permalink

I learned last night that the baby doesn't like to give those big kicks to Sarah when I am watching her belly or putting my hand on it.

Today I found another bug when trying to finally accept that the new build was ready for prime time and kept finding a problem with each successive new release. This experience once again proves Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entymology: There's always one more bug. I haven't found the law for fetal non-kicking but my guess is that this Lubarsky guy is somehow involved.

This afternoon I have dedicated some time towards the August 15th holiday of National Procrastinators Tax Filing Day. I heard from Jeremy that the government is organizing a march on Washington to support the war. So they are organizing people to march to them to show their support. It sounds a bit egotistical and Jeremy thinks it is the beginning of a totalitarian Animal Farm state. I just thought it was a little awkward that they could take money the people paid them to protest that the people were protesting the war that people were paying them to vote to carry out that the people are paying for and dying for. At the moment though I am trying to figure out how to make my ink jet work well enough to print the paperwork that I need to prove that I paid the right amount to them to carry out all this effort in Washington. Unfortunately with all of the billions of dollars spent in Iraq, I am still getting ripped off by the Epson corporation for spare ink cartridges.

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:46 AM | Permalink

I learned last night that the baby doesn't like to give those big kicks to Sarah when I am watching her belly or putting my hand on it.

Today I found another bug when trying to finally accept that the new build was ready for prime time and kept finding a problem with each successive new release. This experience once again proves Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entymology: There's always one more bug. I haven't found the law for fetal non-kicking but my guess is that this Lubarsky guy is somehow involved.

This afternoon I have dedicated some time towards the August 15th holiday of National Procrastinators Tax Filing Day. I heard from Jeremy that the government is organizing a march on Washington to support the war. So they are organizing people to march to them to show their support. It sounds a bit egotistical and Jeremy thinks it is the beginning of a totalitarian Animal Farm state. I just thought it was a little awkward that they could take money the people paid them to protest that the people were protesting the war that people were paying them to vote to carry out that the people are paying for and dying for. At the moment though I am trying to figure out how to make my ink jet work well enough to print the paperwork that I need to prove that I paid the right amount to them to carry out all this effort in Washington. Unfortunately with all of the billions of dollars spent in Iraq, I am still getting ripped off by the Epson corporation for spare ink cartridges.

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:46 AM | Permalink

I was in Sarah's parents basement the other day when I saw their pile of wires connecting from the place where the cable line came into the house. I noticed that with the advent of cable modems and wireless networks that the inbound cable wire was connecting into a modem-802.11 router. The wire then made a line up into the house to connect to every location where a television might be located. Each television needed to have it's own box.

So I got to thinking about it that the wire doesn't need to go any further than the basement if a wireless network was powerful enough and the TVs were hooked up to devices that could show the content streaming from the basement. I was thinking of a wireless television system where the smarts of the television stay in the basement as a server able to serve-up television to any wireless device in the house able to consume a fast wireless protocol. The advantages of doing this would be to get rid of one more set of annoying wires, to reduce the cost of high-end hardware attached to each television, to centralize functions like TIVO recording, and make television available to standard PC computers with cable local television decoders. The main product would be this basement router plus the decoding / subscriber units to connect to televisions. The system would also work for satellite dishes that sit on rooftops and are tricky to link via wires to where the televisions reside. Anyone interested in building this into a multi-million dollar company... you know where to find me.

Meanwhile I realize the big problem is that my wireless network itself is still very unreliable and I can't post pictures to the web from my camera at the moment because the machine I usually do it from is no longer connected to my wireless network for some stupid reason.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:52 AM | Permalink

A big software company that we had cozied up to was giving us the opportunity to have our software be downloadable on their add-ins page.

Survival tip: The beaurocracy of the big boys is an invitation to partner

There is more of a story to it than that but the short of that story is that small companies should partner with big companies where possible. Us little guys can do things without the inertia and trouble that the big companies have. So when a big company may be making a similar product to yours that won't be ready for 18 months they may want to partner to have a similar product on the market much sooner. Big companies have all sorts of problems getting new products to market including 18 month delays because the products needs to be translated, security checked, architectural review boarded, IRB approved, HIPPAA compliant, uncrackable by chinese hackers, alpha, beta, gamma, integration, smoke tested and terrorist screened. That doesn't even begin to mention the MRD and adjustments to the field sales compensation plan that needs to be filled out in triplicate and delivered in person to Anchorage Alaska to get the engineering resources available fix the bugs in the product. So before I return to the story I started the main point is that us little bootstrappers look great as an execution engine for getting real things done fast. We are always the little mammals scheming against the dinosaurs but they know it and if you drill deep enough and high enough into the big guys there is someone who will champion partnering with you. Ask Bill Gates if you can get through to him.

Survival tip: Borrow graphics styles and get cheap illustrations

So this large software company was willing to add a link to their plugins page featuring our software and was ensured to be a lock-in for at least 45 days before anyone else would make it onto the page due to obvious beaurocracy around obtaining the rights to change the page and the resources to do so. Beaurocracy is your friend. The first folks through may be the last. But this great opportunity included a logo at 170 X 170 pixels. As a bootstrapper my first instinct was to call the graphic arts department at my company. When I picked-up the phone I realized that the graphics department was me futzing with some old versions of Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Fireworks because it was the only thing I had handy. If you have neither try GIMP - It's a free knock-off of Photoshop.

So I created the graphic below that showed my utter lack of skill at designing logos at any size. Upon showing this to my partners they suggested that we call in favors from a graphic designer friend. Unfortunately we had already used those favors. If you have a graphic designer friend I strongly encourage pretending you are a pledge in their fraternity doing their laundy, giving them rides, cooking them breakfast, whatever you can do so that when you ask for that favor they will be there for you. Bijoy told me that he cut a deal as a revenue split on his book with a graphic designer.

But favors were not available for us. We just had me, the marketing guy who is graphically challenged. But Shelley, a key partner, suggested we look at licensing images from istockphoto.com. At first I was skeptical about doing so since licensing images normally costs billions of dollars and stealing images puts me at risk for legal action from angry mobs of photographers with deep war chests. But on istockphoto.com I was able to acquire about five icons in vector format for under $10 total that looked like professional WindowsXP graphics. They pasted into the graphics programs like champs and by copying a logo that I liked, below from Microsoft. While the logo isn't great it was done the bootstrap way.

First awful embarrassing graphic

Microsoft image imitated Imitation is the sincerest form of bootstrapping.

Cheap knock-off image done by bootstrapper Dan using istockphoto.com for $10

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:55 AM | Permalink

You can find plenty of survival manuals for when you are lost in the woods or on a desert island that explain what types of plants are poisonous vs. edible, how to build a shelter, and how important it is to have fresh water. The bootstrapper is luckily a few rungs up, although sadly not very many rungs up on Maslov's heirarchy of need from the poor shmuck marooned on a desert island. Please watch Survivor to cheer yourself up when things are looking particularly bleak. The venture financed start-ups like to watch bootstrappers when their worlds get bleak but we don't have our own reality TV program yet.

While I don't have the time at the moment to write a comprehenive guide of survival tips for the struggling bootstrapper here are some bare essentials as you get started and I'll try to add more in subsequent entries.

Some tips before you start the journey...

Pride tastes good. Get used to swallowing it

You will soon find yourself in plenty of situations asking your network of friends, family, and peers for help either directly financially or otherwise. These people can help you and your venture survive. It can be tough to ask for an investment or a favor but the same pride that makes you wary to do this is the stuff that makes you confident that you will succeed.

Layoffs and unemployment can be your first investors

If you are lucky enough to have a job then keep in mind that being forcefully removed from your job is a good thing financially for you. I am not advocating any actions out of the movie Office Space but a good time to start a new bootstrap company is when you have a check coming from somewhere but you don't need to work.

Unemployment pays about $528 per week (or at least that is what they paid me) for 10 months or until you are making enough money to pay yourself what you need to eat that ramen soup. So you can seek $20,000 in investment or just go on the dole for 10 months. Uncle Sam wants you to start a company to create new jobs and increase the overall employment rate in the USA. It's good for the economy. Layoffs aren't as reliable as your Uncle Sam but they can provide a nice cushion on your way out the door from your last full time gig. Six to Eight weeks pay can tack some time onto your runway before needing outside capital.

Take stuff from your last job

I don't mean that you should steal office supplies but a good bootstrapper takes what they can from the resources that they have. The things you can take from your job ethically include your contacts and relationships, knowledge, and other things you can buy cheap. Employers have to get rid of things like that old laptop that you have been using. You can offer to buy back products you have been using from them at very low prices and they may be perfectly happy to do so. If they chucked you in a lay-off then they may have a lot of equipment they need to get rid of before closing the office in Chicago, etc. and someone who is willing to pay $100 per computer could be a welcome way to dispose of the hardware they don't need.

License stuff from your last job

A more interesting set of things that I have seen people take from their former employer is intellectual property and products that the company didn't have any reason to bring to market. So imagine that someone builds a very fancy custom software solution internally for a hardware manufacturer to configure their products. The hardware manufacturer can only use it but a good entrepreneur can sell it to other manufacturers. Similarly in a research laboratory they can only take technology so far before it needs to be commercialized. Every university and big company has a TLO, technology licensing office, where you can buy your inventions and even other people's inventions for a percentage of revenue in future earnings of your venture. So before doing tons of R&D you may be able to get a product that has already been funded to the tune of $1,000,000 or more before you start if you are willing to pass back royalties and give back some ownership to the folks at your last job. But consider the license back to be your investment capital.

Contract back to your last job or at least contract somewhere

It is amazing how people at your former job can't get their work done without you once you are gone. If this is not true you may not want to become a bootstrapper. I have a friend who became fully employed as a contractor at three times his salary and then could 2/3 of his time doing start-up work. If the last job isn't an option then doing high end contract work part-time is a good way to avoid raising capital. In my current start-up's case, Viapoint, we are doing datamart consulting for a healthcare company while our product business, which has yet to generate much revenue, is the main marketing and development push we do. The consulting work pays over $100 per hour which leaves us with three days free to work on the product. The contract work also helps to provide clarity regarding what people are actually willing to pay for. If we can't make it with our consumer desktop organizer product we can always fall back on creating a health care datamart product.

Get a free space to operate

Commercial office space rent is expensive and you may not need to pay for it until you are in growth mode. The first free zone you have is your own living space. The world is flat, nobody cares where you are operating as long as you show up to the meetings in the right dress code. But if you want to avoid having the baby crying in the background while one conference calls, other than giving the baby a pacifier, find someone with open office space. Now in my case the people who have had open office space for my first venture were my parents and my current venture is one of my partner's parents. I can't generalize this too much but your relatives may own property that is suitable for you to operate a small start-up business in. I like the deals we cut with our parents because they have lots of incentives to not charge rent to us. Among them is the fact that I'll probably get some inheritance sooner or later and this is a double dip tax avoidance strategy for them. They can write-off the lost revenue in the rental property and don't have as much inheritance tax to pay in transferring the value of the asset.

But most people's parents don't have office space so the other options are to find people desperate for someone to occupy their office space, cheap sub-lets in big company buildings where they are stuck with an inflexible lease due to the bubble, borrowing space at a university, change your residence to rent a place with a bed and shower, working from a desktop while at a contract job. One friend of mine is convinced you can live in a geodesic dome tent on the roof of an office building since it is wasted space. If you are a good bootstrapper you will find the cheap space to operate in.

That's about it for today. Good luck.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:04 AM | Permalink

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

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

I somehow bumped into the new Synch Magazine site today. They had created some imaginary IT products for gangsta's.

I think I know enough about Photoshop to start creating my own similar photo inventions. That is what I have been doing with trying to build an OEM channel at work. The work is mainly taking the existing product, other products, and photoshop to show how they would work together. It is a fun activity and is generally received well because people are able to appreciate the visual prototype more than the conceptual one. They can look at it and go... "oh that is exactly what we need to have." once they see it.

I personally want the gun remote control or the low-rider laptop. My only problem with the gun remote control is that it didn't appear to have the universal remote buttons that I need.

On the entrepreneurship side I was talking to Bijoy Goswami who started a group called Austin Bootstrap that has been steadily growing. The bootstrap mantra at some level is one that most people don't intuitively trust but is very important. It is sell, build, market. You have to find some customers willing to pay for the product and then build it for the ones who pay for it. You can then market the success to other folks with the same needs. At least that is among the solution to the problem of getting out of the cycle of needing capital.

Bijoy wrote a book that he self-published and talked me into being the leader of Bootstrap Boston, the wing of his organization. He also had made a keen observation about the differece between east coast entrepreneurial culture and west coast culture. The west coast culture provides a greater degree of respect and importance to the entrepreneurial activity of evangelism while the east coast is still focused on the technologist who can build the solution.

As a convert to the religion that the problem with technology is that people try to make products but don't know why anyone needs the technology or how to convert a generic tool into an actual business solution I was happy to hear about it. It filled my head with crazy ideas including that schools teaching technology (ahem MIT) should also teach courses in evangelism to give the students a real edge. Evangelism is different from marketing and even the generic entrepreneurship although they go hand in hand. Maybe I can mention this to folks around MIT like Ken Morse and see what they think.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:22 AM | Permalink

On Thursday afternoon Deloitte and Touche was running their fourth annual play bocce at the Tech Center afternoon networking event. The main draw suggested that we would be able to play bocce with venture capitalists and potential investors. Actually the main draw was also free food and an open bar. Since Jeremy doesn’t have a car I had driven him over to Burlington in the morning and he didn’t have a way to get home other than to go to the VC Bocce thing Aaron, Jeremy, and I all wandered over to this Waltham event in two cars. Upon arriving both Jeremy and I were lacking in the pre-registration category so we didn’t have our nifty name tags pre-made. So we got the low-budget ghetto hand written name tags. Jeremy was one step lower on the name hierarchy because I at least had a card to drop in their bucket of who attended. Jeremy had to write his name onto one of my cards. I suspect they use these business cards for witching ceremonies creating broths fed to CEOs for special corporate events like IPOs and FEC investigations. “Eye of newt, tongue of frog, business card of software engineer, cackle, cackle.” Actually business cards in buckets perform an important role in the economy. They are consumed by hungry interns who diligently enter large buckets full of them into spread sheets and then generate beautiful but useless reports to new employees at consulting firms who then roll-up the reports to real partners who ignore them and are glad to not be distracted by the underlings but also happy that the underlings are miserable and staying-up all night making reports.

The bocce game itself was quite fun for almost an entire game. The people we were playing with were not venture capitalists. I actually didn’t meet more than one venture capitalist the whole night. Most people were either other entrepreneurs looking to find the venture capitalists, a ton of young accountant/consultants from Deloitte clustered together and chatting about how they were going to make a great report out of the business cards later, and some service providers looking to sell things like part time CXOs, leasing at high rates on office equipment, executive recruiting, and IPO document management. I wasn’t sure if I was in the right place or not but since the bar was open and the Corona’s had limes in them I wasn’t going to complain too much. So we played Bocce against a pair of people, one of whom I swear was Slobidan Milosevich or Mikhail Gorbachev but since he spoke very little English I never figured out his name or nationality. His business partner was a tall guy who thought that bocce wasn’t quite as much fun as boule, a similar game with an oblong shaped throwing stone that processes and spins in cycles after being thrown. I’m still waiting for space bocce although the game might take too long.

In my defense the Waltham Tech Center is at the top of a hill overlooking a large reservoir. The road itself that leads to the parking lot is at the bottom of a cliff that is at the end of some woods with a steep incline that are at the base of the hill where the grass forms a slight saddleback where while there is a stone barrier, the stones are mainly level to the grass, especially where the saddle reaches it’s lowest point into the woods leading to the cliff leading to the road. The bocce courts we played on were defined by string rather than regulation wooden border bocce courts. The end of the court was at the top of the saddle leading down to the woods. We did manage to play until the score was seven to five when I decided to go for a long and high shot where the white ball was near the back corner of the court. The big green ball bounced once and then started rolling first slowly and then more quickly down the hill. One attendee stood by and watched the ball roll past him and then proceeded to watch the ball tinker down the saddle through the grass to the low point in the stones lining the border to the woods, hop over a stone and then roll down through the woods.

After looking carefully for the ball in the woods and nearly spraining my ankle I was unable to locate it anywhere. Part of the problem was that it was a dark green ball in the middle of some fairly dark green wooded area. I went all the way down the side of the cliff to see if there was a ball at the end of the road but even if it had reached the road it would likely have rolled another half mile down the winding road until it reached the street in front of the reservoir. So Jeremy and I switched places and he went to look for the ball while I continued to play the two folks with only three balls. I was doing fine and then Jeremy returned so that we could play some more.

Among the highlights of who I saw at the event was Mr. Jim Levinger, formerly of Pixeldance and now working at a new start-up that produces software for reading encoded messages through camera phones. The camera phone takes a picture of some dots and it then knows what to do next. It looked quite cool but I couldn’t think of the killer application for this other than in an upcoming spy movie where messages could be hidden in paintings or walls and a camera phone with the decoder software was the only way to read the message. That would be quite cool. He should call the DOD. Some other folks were doing some RFID work and I told them that the killer application for RFID would be a system to find the bocce ball lost in the woods.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:26 AM | Permalink

Sarah and I took a road trip to New York to go to Jason Lin’s, Stephanie’s brother’s, wedding. We took most of Friday off in order to get down to New York. The plan we had created involved going out to the Chrysler dealership in Concord to pick-up my PT Cruiser from the shop, driving to Bedford to drop off the Passat, then driving into New York City to check-in to the Hotel Pennsylvania, followed by driving back to the New York Botanical Gardens for the wedding at 6PM. The day started out fortunately enough. My three way Skype call between the US, UK, and the Netherlands started at 8am instead of 9am. Nothing says “wake-up” like a ringing computer next to your bed. The call went to 9:30 which was when I had expected the call to end in the first place but I got a 90 minute call in and felt good about doing it on the Internet dime rather than paying the phone company. Sarah and I then proceeded to run around packing random things. We had to get a stain out of the tuxedo, figure out how to bring the portable DVD player and DVDs, get bathing suits for the pool, and get my contact lenses.

Finding things in the apartment can be very annoying. The other night I lost my glasses and spent a panicked hour looking everywhere for them including going back and forth to the car in flip-flops and tearing off some skin from my arm reaching under the seat of the Passat. I have been more than patient enough with the RFID and nanotech folks and I deserve my HomeID system so that I can find all those HIDden items with a tricorder-like device that points like a divining rod to my lost items and lets me know what inventory of junk I have throughout the apartment. When is this technology going to help me out around the house? There is one product out there from iautomate – I guess I should have registered for it. ( ). The glasses were found in the bed where I had taken a nap earlier in the day and lost them in the folds of the comforter.

The PT Cruiser had $745 worth of repairs. The steering pump had been replaced because it had broken and they had decided to not only fill the air conditioning system with Freon (good timing at least) but also to run some expensive fluorescent dye test that didn’t appear to have had any results according to the payment slip. We were in a hurry so we pushed out of the dealership and I figured I wasn’t going to get anywhere with the dealership staff and I was lucky they hadn’t found some other awful problem like a broken flux capacitor or that a mafia don had installed an explosive device underneath that I would need to have removed. The dealership loves to find problems with the car that I can’t possibly ignore. In general the answer to what will happen if I don’t fix something is “You might die!”

So once we hit the road at 11:40 we figured we were in good shape for a 6:30 wedding. I was listening to the phone religiously because I had told a VC friend of Brad’s that I would be in the city on Friday and he had left me a message via email to ask if I was in town. But the phone never rang so it was all about the wedding.

We didn’t expect it but we hit severe rush hour traffic when we got close to New York at 3:30PM. When we thought about it we were near the Bronx, where the Botanical Gardens are, so we made a significant change of plans to avoid the traffic. Sarah changed our hotel reservations to Tarrytown, and we drove straight to the Botanical Gardens. The major worry that Sarah had, since this new plan didn’t involve stopping at a hotel, was that among the hundred things we had done before leaving for New York, the one she should have done was to iron her new wrap that was likely wrinkled. Since we were going to change somewhere at the Botanical gardens this wrinkly wrap would be unacceptable and she might freeze to death in the 90 degree heat of an unnaturally hot June.

So we walked about the botanical gardens from 4:00-5:45. The botanical gardens are very nice but I noticed that all the signs were pointing in directions that led to gates rather than being like the arboretum where once inside you actually reach the nice flowers when you walk around. The secret to the arboretum is that they charge you multiple times. The initial fee of $6 gets you onto the grounds, but to see a nice rock garden it costs another $1 per person. We enjoyed the rock garden since we were the only people there and it was nice and romantic to walk alone. Sarah wanted it as her backyard since it was maintained in a natural state filled with flowers of all sorts, with waterfalls, and trees. One section of the rock garden area was filled only with native flowers. We stopped on a bench for a while there and enjoyed the warm weather.

They also had a big white building that cost $7 per person to enter and with a AAA card we got some deal that was $7 for two people. The building was advertising the spring flower show so basically if you wanted to see spring flowers at the botanical garden you had to fork over the cash. It was actually very impressive inside of the big greenhouse building since it had multiple mock climates including a desert, rainforest, palm forest, and lily pads in a big pool. I was impressed and thought we got our extra seven dollars worth.

So at 5:45 we suddenly needed to change and drive over to where the Lin/Moy wedding was to be held. The wedding was at the Snuff Mill. I assume that is where they mill snuff? We were parked at the main gate and sweating heavily from our walk out in the heat. So we cranked the new air conditioning on to keep our clothing from sticking to our skin and then changed comically in the car. I had never put a Tuxedo on with a steering wheel in front of me but the secret is to periodically leave the car and return. It took about 20 minutes to change completely and I wasn’t much faster than Sarah despite her need to fuss with beauty products and worry about how ironed her wrap was despite the irrelevance of a wrap on a swelteringly hot evening.

So we arrived at the wedding at 6:25 and were just on time. Lots of other folks hadn’t adjusted well to the traffic problems so there was a commotion about how to handle some of the gaps in the guest list since any delay at the beginning would cascade through the wedding activities throughout the night. They started about 15 minutes late, just like we did at our wedding, and plenty of folks had arrived in that extra window. A few stragglers processed by accident behind the bridal party walking to the stage but it wasn’t important. The ceremony itself was lightning fast. Both Jason and Kathy said some words that they had written themselves. Sarah and I had a good time although we didn’t know most of the Chinese/Taiwanese family members at the wedding. After the wedding we tried to caravan back to Tarrytown behind the Lin family Prius. The Prius contained a GPS device that led us through some crazy back roads to avoid a detour but after about half an hour we arrived back in our hotel room and got some sleep.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:30 AM | Permalink

On Wednesday night I met with an influential potential business partner and Aaron in Concord over dinner by the bar. It was unfortunate that I had to skip out on my Improv group practice for this occasion but it was a case where prioritization worked out. The guy was the number two person at a start-up in California with venture financing and their CEO was on the cover of Newsweek last month. At dinner Aaron and I learned all sorts of interesting stuff about our potential business partner. He was an eccentric man including a stint in military school as a child, then becoming an Olympic jujitsu fighter in Korea, getting shot in the gall bladder as a paramedic, working as a recruiter for Cisco stock per hire when Cisco had 35 employees, owned a fight gear clothing company, and finally became a good buddy of the venture community by rescuing some failing start-ups. He also would go crazy if he didn't work 20 hours a day, said "GOT IT" whenever he understood something and loved the restaurant we went to in Concord because to him it was the Cheers of Chinese restaurants.

Upon arriving the partner was drinking a fruity looking beverage in a tall blue Chinese restaurant mug with a naked woman embedded in the side of the mug. I asked him what it was called and he called it a "One of these". This was the name that had been given to it by Paul the bartender, a tall Asian man with large Elvis sideburns who had created the drink for my new friend the partner eleven years ago when the partner was just a kid. The partner used to come in with the most beautiful woman he had ever met but they then moved to California and she had stumbled into a Less than Zero situation before marrying a biker. The partner was now married to a Dolche-Gabana Japanese model who he couldn't love any more and is now living atop Pacific Heights in San Francisco. He only was attracted to Asian women and spoke fluent Japanese. At one point he picked-up his Treo phone and answered is "Moshi Moshi" because the ring was the one for a Japanese country code call. It turned out to be an engineer for his company working in Japan who didn't speak much Japanese. He was sending his kindergarten age kid to a fancy school that cost $30,000 a year and the partner thought the kid would be getting the same education back in Concord. That's why I got in touch with the partner. I filled out a form and despite there being a lot of forms being filled-out on the web site, mine came with a 781 area code. So I guess I won the lottery?

I decided that I had to try the unique concoction in the girly glass so I ordered a "One of These" as well. The "One of These" was a potent drink and despite it being a unique concoction for the partner it was very similar to a Scorpion bowl in an embarrassing Chinese restaurant mug. Aaron arrived and soon we were all drinking these beverages and chatting away about the adventures of the partner, who he knew in common with Aaron. We did talk enough about business for me to get that the partner felt we had a good shot at success but that we should raise some money to execute faster. "GOT IT".

Paul, the bartender who has the Elvis sideburns, is an amateur singer. The partner had taken his Dolce-Gabana Japanese wife to this restaurant and Paul had sung for her and she had cried for three days. We had gotten there at 5PM but by about 7PM we had already imbibed two "One's of these" and were ordering dinner including a the partner special and an Earl special. Earl was the guy that the partner brought to the restaurant when he owned a landscaping company in the area eleven years ago and was cutting his teeth in business. Earl's claim to fame, other than the aforementioned Earl special was that he could drink 48 beers at a sitting. Now this is quite impossible and he would likely die. Earl's secret was that he would drink them and would throw-up in the middle of the drinking multiple times in a Romanesque vomitorium style. Both of these dishes were off the menu and had been created those 11 years ago when both the partner and Paul the bartender were just starting out and the restaurant had just opened. The Earl special was a seafood dish with scallops and shrimp in a viscous sauce with vegetables including mushrooms and chinese broccoli. The partner special was a fried chicken dish also with vegetables in a viscous sauce.

When the third "One of These" arrived the glass was changed from the blue naked woman to a flesh colored Fu-Man-Chu bearded guy mug. The drink itself was getting stronger and Aaron dropped off drinking, his 50 years experience kicking in. We were chatting a bit with some executives at a table next to ours and it was fun to see the partner talking to an executive who had never heard of their company. That was when I learned about the Newsweek article. The partner convinced Paul the bartender to serenade a woman drinking at the bar and he sang what seemed to be an Elvis song with a great southern twang to his voice. Around 9PM Aaron brought the leftovers home to his kids and the partner and I moved to the bar.

We chatted a bit more about life and getting married. I could tell we weren't birds of a feather because he thought he would slit his wrists or jump off a bridge without working for 20 hours a day and wasn't that involved in his home life. I gave Sarah some glowing marks for having her head where mine was and us both wanting to chill out and enjoy being parents a bit. After the fourth "One of These" it was 10PM and time for the restaurant to shut down for the evening so we parted ways. Paul gave the obligatory warning to drive home safely and I walked out to my car smelling like I had just raided a liquor cabinet. My calculations were that I had four drinks in five hours so I was probably not so drunk to drive but might be close enough to play it very safe.

So as I started to drive home I felt nice a paranoid that I was going to get pulled over by the local police out hunting for DUI cases to throw in jail. Because of this I switched to the slow lane on Rt. 2, which was the only route I could figure would lead me home. Being in the slow lane is an interesting experience because you see more police in the slow lane. They hide in the bushes, pass you in the fast lane, and generally make a very good appearance when someone is up late and night and praying to not get pulled over. One of the police cars that looked like an SUV drove in front of me and then pulled himself over to the side to form what looked like a speed trap. I sighed a good sigh of relief because if he wasn't there when I passed then he probably wasn't looking to catch me speeding or swaying like a snake on the road or whatever else I might have been doing to alert someone that it might be fun to make me blow into a DUI tester or walk a straight line while touching my nose. I don't think I can do that sober. But the same police car appeared behind me only thirty seconds later with lights flashing to pull me over.

I have seen the show Cops many times and I always wondered why any criminal when pulled over by the police for an unknown reason, except for Timothy McVeigh, would get out of their car and run as fast as they could into the woods of Lincoln. The answer was suddenly clear to me as I was pulled over, not for speeding, with alcohol coming out of my sweating pores. Adrenaline! I don't often get shocked with an extreme dose of adrenaline but this was a case of pure fight or flight super-high. I was ready to pop someone in the face, run away from the saber tooth tiger, do whatever it took to get out of that situation as fast as possible. My life could be ruined. This was going to be the most embarrassing incident of my young and foolish life. There goes the presidential nomination. I had just been thinking about how I could try to run for president as an atheist and I could at least say that I didn't have DUI charges like George W., wasn't a coke addict, and after eight days of marriage, hadn't proved to be a serial adulterer. Granted all of those traits actually qualify you for the presidency so I shouldn't have been worried. Now here I am, my own deep throat admitting everything anyways.

So I fumbled my license out of my wallet and tossed the wallet into the seat beside me, grabbed the registration from the glove compartment and greeted the officer when he arrived at my rolled down window with a smile while trying hard to hold my breath and control my breathing. This would be easy if my heart rate wasn't around 205 from the adrenaline but most people appear a bit fidgety when they get pulled over so I may not have seemed that off to the officer. At the window of the car he asked me a question and I was sure it would be "Sir, have you been drinking this evening". But somehow those words had morphed through an act of science fiction into "Sir, do you know that you have a broken tail light?". I answered "Yes." He wanted to know how long I knew it was broken and I said that it had been about a month. He then let me know that I should get it fixed as soon as possible and then turned back to his vehicle to write me either a ticket or a warning.

The return to your vehicle for a cop with this mystery ticket or game show warning is always an interesting experience as the driver. It is basically a horror game show. Will you get a ticket that will effect your insurance premiums permanently or a warning that will make you want to hug the officer? In my case I still wasn't sure whether I was being observed for signs of drunkenness so I was just sitting on top of the brick underneath me that had been extruded from my anus and was staring into the mirror trying to see what the officer was doing. The new jumbo LEDs that have been installed into emergency vehicles are very compact and very bright. They are bright enough on a dark new moon evening to cause significant temporary blind spots in your vision. So as I looked back in the mirror my field of vision was slowly turning into a fun, 60's fantasy world of lights and colors no matter what direction I looked in. My cell phone rang and I decided to ignore it, knowing that it was probably Sarah, my pregnant wife, wondering when I would be home. I didn't pick it up figuring that the police probably think of calls by waiting pulled over drivers to be calls for the gang to ambush the officer or spot legal consultation suggesting guilt. I considered closing my eyes to avoid the blindness and pondered how I would drive off blind and potentially DUI in front of the officer if he did let me go and imagined ending-up in the blinking ditch twenty feet in front of the car.

When he returned to the car I smiled again as he gave me the "warning" for the broken taillight. I nodded and gave a guttural OK to continue my policy of not breathing on the officer. Finally he turned back to his car and I pulled out in front of him. Cops love to follow you for about a minute while you drive the speed limit and then pull off ahead of you approaching the speed that a Delorean uses to go back in time. He did this and when he sped into the distance I called Sarah back.

I gave her the scoop on the situation and she offered to come out to pick me up but instead I decided that I was fine driving but totally freaked out by the experience. So I held Sarah on the line as I was driving home, recounted the story, and let her know about the two hundred cops that seemed to be out on the empty roads leading all the way home on Route 2 including two motorcycle cops who kept stopping at lights next to me for three straight red lights. I was happy to catch the red lights for a change and one of the lights freed me from my motorcade of unrequested police escorts. I just dragged myself through memorial drive, storough drive, comm. ave., and Saint Paul Street, until a breathed a heavy sigh of relief upon arriving in the driveway of a private property at which point I yelled into the phone to Sarah that I was free. She was probably home rubbing her belly the whole time wondering why she was on the other end of the line of the late Hunter S. Thompson reincarnating himself in me for some fear and loathing on the way home from Concord on a Wednesday night.

She welcomed me home and let me know that I smelled like I had raided a liquor cabinet before we went to sleep.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:38 AM | Permalink