Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: deficit, gr8 depression, great depression
O.k. Maybe it’s simply one of those days, but I felt like I got hit with a wave of reality today. Hoping I’m wrong, but I just get this sense that we might be heading for another depression. Yes, news came out today that the U.S. is looking at a $1.2 trillion deficit. Yes, there was another round of layoffs announced today across the country. Yes, the market was down by 3% today (the largest single loss day since Dec. 1, 2008). Yes, the last depression was in the 1930’s and we’re overdue.
But, that’s not why I think we’re heading for a depression. The reason I’m thinking we are is because most of the people that know me closely also know that I’ve studied the Great Depression of the 1930’s and that I’ve also spent countless hours researching survival and traditional living skills. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve received almost a dozen emails from people asking for advice on everything from cutting costs in their household to how to collect money from customers and even rudimentary home gardening skills. Maybe I’m looking way too far into this, but I’m convinced I’m seeing enough early indicators that people are thin slicing (blinking) trying times around the corner.
Please understand that I try to maintain a fair balance between optimism and realism. There is no desire on my part to see our country fall into depression. However, all the small signs I’ve seen recently coupled with talk of an Public Works Program leads me to believe that leaner times may be a-coming.
Tonight I was talking with my wife about some of my concerns. She too is “nervous”. Even though she is still employed, the confidence in a job being there in the months to come is at an all-time low. Like many industries, the one she works in is feeling the pain of slowdown and customers buying less and cutting orders. Things are just slow every day, and moving slower.
Not intentionally being insensitive, I asked her what we’d call the next depression in the U.S., should it arrive? As I stared at the term “great depression” something hit me. Texting is huge. I mean really, who doesn’t text these days??? So let me try this out on you….
The GR8 Depression
I thought in this always connected, pounding out truncated words with our thumbs on tiny keys on a tiny mobile phone world, why not just call this next depression the same thing it was called last time, but with a nod to the current. I mean gosh. There’s nothing great about a depression, so we might as well shorten it!
So it will come as no surprise to hear me say that at any given time I’m reading at least three books. Last night I was foraging deeper into the book “Blink”. In it the author tells a story about how almost all doctors that are sued for malpractice are not nice doctors. The author quoted a study showing the majority of patients who were the victim of a medical mistake, but like their doctor and felt their doctor treated them kindly, did NOT sue the doctor because of the mistake. Instead, patients injured through malpractice sued based on a negative interpersonal experience with a doctor.
My mind floated on this for a while. I wasn’t concerned with avoiding future malpractice lawsuits, since I’m not a doctor and only occasionally practice medicine. However, what occurred to me is this….
In your professional life, your career, it might not be such a bad idea to emulate a GOOD DOCTOR. They are kind. They ask questions. They want to get to the heart of the problem. They are sympathetic.
Imagine engaging in a customer service experience where your customer is the patient. You need to be on time. You want to under promise and over deliver. You do not want to be condescending. You want to offer the customer options. You want to express sympathy. You want to treat your customer as the most important part of your job. You want to smile and be kind.
Yahoo has had noticable outages today. I was a little shocked when I saw this affected multiple verticle content sections within Yahoo! Being the sleuth that I am, naturally i went to GOOGLE to type in “is yahoo down?”. The second query result made me laugh so hard, with all its irony wrapped in more irony. See the pic of the query result below and see if you get it.
Search query result from Google about Yahoo being down
Filed under: Uncategorized
SAASY?
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is basically a model for generating revenue from your web-based software. The CEO of Lawson software recently stated that SaaS will be dead in two years. You can read a podcast on this from my friends over at Minnov8 by clicking here. I’m not picking sides here, because I believe there’s a larger discussion that needs to occur first…. does an application qualify as SaaS vs. a true platform? For example, YouTube is an application (one of many) for uploading video to the web. Albeit small, there is a revenue model growing within YouTube. Salesforce, on the other hand, is a platform for managing core components of business, and most definately has a strong revenue model. I’d propose more discussion should happen on the difference of apps and platforms before calling SaaS dead.
What does Barack Mean?
Just about everyone knows that Barack Obama is a Christian (not that is really matters). He has been attack on the obvious name meaning having origins in Islam. About.com has a possible name origin here. This last weekend I reread the book “Skeletons on the Zahara” and the arabic reference to Ba-rack suggested a shaman or person who had a (sometimes) evil spirit. The reason I call this out is that his full name Barack Obama, is most similar to this reference in the book than any other name origin I’ve seen.
Urban Love Affair
My wife and I are not hippies. Yes, I have a rather large urban garden and can many vegetables each year. This is mostly the product of my upbringing in Wisconsin and the importance the annual harvest played in our traditions. Although my office is only a couple of miles from work, I drive every day. I could be more “green” and bike to work, but I enjoy the drive. My wife, on the other hand, finds she can get to work in a downtown Minneapolis skyscraper just as easily/quickly by taking the bus.
Yesterday she recounted for me her arrival into downtown on the bus. She normally gets off by a downtown landmark: a statue of Mary Tyler Moore, the iconic symbol from a show of the same name, which was supposedly set in downtown Minneapolis.
When she got off the bus and looked for the statue (as she does every morning), she was surprised to find a homeless person hugging the statue. So engulfed by the scene she neglected to take a picture. However, she found some poetry in the scene. “After the homeless dude stopped hugging the statue, he stepped back, planted a kiss on his fingers, and gently touched his hand to the lips of the statue.”
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INNOVATIVE WAY TO PICK A FUND
With the relative low cost of creating new applications, products and services these days, I run through a lot of really, really bad ideas. I’m mean really, does the world need a Web 2.0 application that crowdsources people to come paint your house!?! However, I was pleasantly surprised and excited about THIS APPLICATION. It’s a fund that is based on crowdsourcing top performing stock pickers. What makes this so innovative is that a chimpanzee once outperformed eight brokers in analysts in a head-to-(‘er)monkey-head competition. Frankly I’d much more trust some dude laying around his house all day in pajamas doing the day trading thing than some fat guy who wears a tie and takes a fee whether stuff is going up or down.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Entrepreneurs CAN NOT Do It All
Sure, you’re both the CEO and the janitor for your company. Wearing many hats comes with the entrepreneurial territory. However, you CAN NOT go it alone. Having key advisors, competent employees, and great vendors can made the difference between slogging through the mud and taking off like a fighter jet. I just returned from a meeting with my friend Thom Sandberg, founder of Kenyon. Thom has worked on brands like AirForce Nutrisoda, Summit Beer, and many others. In twenty minutes Thom was able to do for us what we couldn’t do in two months. The point is, don’t go it alone. Entrepreneurship is just as much about asking for help as it is about independence.
Being a Contrarian Isn’t always the Wrong Right Way to Go
Microsoft announced that in their new browser, users will be able to select an option that would create a barrier to cookies that would make your web surfing all but untraceable. To the privacy advocates out there, this might seem like a really cool feature, but I have to wonder how well this was thought out by Microsoft. Sure, they may be taking the contrarian route, but let me point out something I’m not hearing anyone else talk about. Online advertising was almost nothing just twelve years ago. Today it’s $28 billion and growing. Using session data to deliver advertising based on contextual and geo is big business. Advertisers will not be happy about this decision. Mozilla’s Firefox is stealing market share from IE every day. This move could easily put the advertisers right into Mozilla’s hands.
Some Entrepreneur’s Will Say it’s Luck, the Other 99% Say Hard Work
My friend Toby Dayton, founder of the web career channel and newsprint empire JobDig, has written a short but truthful blog post on the secrets to business success.
Happy Labor Day
Labor Day exists for all of us who work hard all year long, and it’s the calendar’s way of saying, “Hey! You keep America going strong, so thanks!” If you’re a slacker, maybe this is a hated day for you because it reinforces your general apprehension to do anything that requires effort. If you’re interested in a refresher course on Labor Day, consider reading this article from Wikipedia.
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A Taste of His Own Medicine
The dude pimping herbal substances for male sexual enhancement is probably feeling rather flaccid right about now. He’s going to the slammer for cheating and defrauding customers. The upside is that a product that simply does not work is being taken off the market, the downside is that you’re still sitting without a cure for being married to the same woman for 23 years.
So Who Owns What, Really!?!
If you’re going to sit down with an accredited investor, having a cap table on hand is a must. It provides some expectations on ownership and (mathematically speaking) can help you achieve some expectations on unit/share value. You can download a template for your cap table here. The one thing it won’t do is tell you how much your company is actually worth. As I learned, it’s worth exactly what someone is willing to pay you for it (whether selling the whole business or just selling off a % of ownership to raise $$$).
Enabling The Disconnected with Computers
If you have an extra laptop or computer laying around, please give me a ring. I’m working on a program to provide computers to economically disadvantaged households in the City of Minneapolis. The computer hard drive will get wiped clean, refurbished, and distributed to a (previously) disconnected family. Although owning a computer my not be a right, it’s a privilege out of the reach of many people. I was given my first computer at age 7 and the rest is, as they say, history.
Even Grandma Could Create the Next “Killer App”
Drupal has gathered quite a following for people who just don’t have the time to learn how to program using a complex framework. Their publishing system is like training wheels for development novices. Now they actually have a commercial support structure behind their content management system called Acquia. It’s just rolling into beta right now (I got an invite and will report back later). If you’re looking to create your own website, stop back here in a couple of weeks.
Guilty Until Proven Innocent
Have you ever subscribed to a magazine by mailing back in a subscription insert, then forgot about it and never paid for the subscription? I did that once a couple of years ago with a subscription to MIT Technology Review. Of course I paid the bill after I got a nasty letter from them, but this stuff happens. Now imagine for a second if they went into my bank account and just took the money. You’d be pissed, right? Well apparently in Minnesota credit/debt collectors can do this entirely legally. Not cool.
Filed under: Uncategorized
O.k. I know when I get three emails in one day asking when I’m going to start blogging again, it’s time to get back in the game. First off, I can ill-afford the time necessary to spill my guts on a daily basis, so I’m going to come in here and write as often as I can, and only about things the truly interest me…and therefore hopefully things you’ll find interesting. And I’m not going to elaborate on any one subject matter, because in our heavy info consumption culture you don’t have time to listen to me go into detail. So here it goes…
Killer App
www.woot.com If you haven’t been there, go now. If you have, you knows whatz I’m talkin bout.
Google Krack
Today I heard that Google Ad Manager is finally out of Beta. If you have a website the brings in advertising revenues, it’s worth a look. Keep in mind though, although Google claims to want to inventory the world’s data (or not be evil or whatever), every time you use one of their services you’re essentially ringing the cash register for them. Third-party dependency sucks, man. If you’ve ever tried to log-in to your Gmail account under such a circumstance as a Gmail outage, that should be proof enough that they’ll own you if they can. Be careful of the Google Krack.
Entrepreneurship in Minnesota
If you’re an entrepreneur in Minnesota and trying to raise $$$ for your deal, think about showing off at the Minnesota Venture Conference in October. I’ve done it before and not raised any money, but you can pay $800 bucks to meet people that might help you somewhere down the road when your “game changing idea” actually has proven that it can last more than a year.
Palsy Light
I mean retarded in the most sincere way. Last weekend I went to see the Paulding Light in the U.P. Michigan. People say it’s an alien, or a dead person’s soul, or whatever. It’s totally stupid. I stood there like an idiot with a bunch of other idiots. I did in fact see the red glowing light, but the most entertaining part of the whole experience is when I hypothesised that we were seeing Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer in the woods. The crowd had a chuckle, then we got in our car and bailed.
Obamamama
So I watched Obama’s wife last night on the boob tube. They must have given the woman a gallon of Taurine right before she stepped to the podium because she was racing through her speech so fast it was mind boggling. And what was up with all the hand and arm gestures? At times she looked like C-3PO doing the Humpty Dance.
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Welcome to the Blog of Lief Larson. I’m a technologist, futurist, and serial entrepreneur based in Minneapolis, MN. The purpose of my blog is greater than sending noise into cyberspace. Rather, my intention is to help business people such as yourself to find the path to opportunity and success by having me entertain you with my daily “Sound Bytes”. I invite your questions and suggestions.
Being an entrepreneur is not about having an MBA. Rather, it is about street smarts. It’s about pounding the pavement and maintaining the personal resolve that you have a great idea and other people will buy into it. It’s about learning anything you can about everything. It’s about being o.k. about not always being right (risk is good!). It’s about recognizing problems and creating solutions. I have been very fortunate to have a series of mentors who have helped guide me over the years. This blog is my attempt to pay it forward. Enjoy! My business card is located at http://lieflarson.businesscard2.com
