Geezepreneurs and the depression - we're not dead yet

America is a dog that's been beat too much.

Our publicly traded corporations can't get much pull from America's dwindling middle class. Their growth and future is abroad. The vast compensation of their executives will build higher walls around the estates of the new aristocracy.

Left Behind, we are the Detroit Windows 7 of nations.

So now what?

Now we need to climb out of of the ruins. Because we're not dead yet.

We could use some help. Roosevelt style investments in infrastructure and schools would be a good thing, but they are not enough and the Tea Party is too powerful to allow them.

So instead we need lots of small to medium privately held businesses [1]. It would be great if we could get something like a national small business generation service, but good-enough health insurance, an accelerated and expanded loan program for small businesses, reduction of the tax and accounting scams that favor large corporations [2], rationalizing regulatory frameworks and providing startup education programs would all help.

Who will start these businesses? The usual suspects - the young, the immigrants [3], the restless. They're not enough though. This time America needs geezer entrepreneurs - geezepreneurs. In a global economy where talent is plentiful and cheap, we have a surplus of the undead gray without hope of retirement. Might as well use 'em.

The forty plus set aren't going to do all nighters any more, but we have learned a lot about leading and managing people, and about how the world works. I admit, even as a geezer myself, I'm surprised by how productive 60+ software engineers are. Maybe it's selection bias -- perhaps by that age only the very best are still coding. Whatever, these guys are really good, even if they need flexible schedules to help their kids, grandkids, and parents.

Small business growth driven by geezer entrepreneurs and the underemployed young. It's different. Try it.

--

[1] In theory these measures are GOP friendly. Alas, that's confusing rhetoric with reality; to the extent that the modern GOP has any guiding philosophy it would be directing short term benefits to its voters, donors, and office holders. They are at least compatible with past GOP rhetoric, so that might help a bit.
[2] Removing those advantages from large corporations helps level a currently very uneven playing field. On the other hand, they will never surrender the fruits of their political investments. So, perhaps disguised as deficit reduction, we try for reduction rather than removal.
[3] Canada mitigated its social security problem largely by importing wealthy and/or highly educated citizens. I'm amazed this isn't talked about in the US.

Update 8/17/11: See also - Tillman and Phelps, National Bank of Innovation

Rework reviewed

I wanted to like Rework by Fried and Hannson, but I feel like I overpaid.

To say it's a short book is an understatement. This is pretty much it:

• Simplicity is the only winning formula.
• Don't hire until quality falls.
• A successful private company can get by with very few employees by outsourcing utility functions (details on this may be in their other book)
• Meetings are bad, but distributed teams need to get together every three months or so. Evidently whatever those teams do together is not "meeting". Whatever "meeting" is.
• True productivity works with a balanced 45-50 hour week -- but when you're doing a startup you should sacrifice sleep and keep your day job.
• You can make money by reselling the detritus of corporate activity, like this book.
• Cash flow is king, be positive early.
• Build enough to sell, then build what you need to keep selling.
• Customers can't tell you what they need.
• Don't fear customers graduating from your services (but I wager they don't make it easy for customers to migrate their data).
• Don't surrender ownership early -- wait until you're a proven company.
• Only hire talented writers - regardless of the position

The book isn't worthless. About two thirds of it feels right, which is better than the average business book. On the other hand, I don't buy average business books.

I'd recommend a pass on this one. Do pick it up at the library or a used book store. $8 would be a fair price.

Business startups - being cheap

I keep my eye on startup advice -- even though I'm about 25 years past prime startup age. It's long been Plan B. (Plan C is being a Doc again. There are also Plans D through K ...)

I liked this article ...

46 Ways To Start A Business With No Money

... An LLC is probably the best business structure, but don’t worry about incorporating until you’re earning money, just do a sole proprietorship, you can always incorporate later (you can get it setup with the IRS in just a few minutes by calling them at 800-829-4933) ...

Personally I'd prefer to incorporate earlier, if only for the liability protection (nothing to sniff at if you have family assets).

Based on my own past experience, incidentally, I'd pay for a bookkeeper even if I had no money. I know I won't do bookkeeping, but if you don't know your cash flow situation then you're doomed.

iPad take 2: the end of OS X

When a colleague asked why the iPad runs iPhone OS rather than OS X a wee bulb went off. Kind of like those little bittie bulbs that came with a camera flash in 1967.

The iPad with iPhone OS is the second coming of the original Macintosh. It runs an OS that anyone can use, including the 50% of the US that doesn’t really engage with the net or with personal computers. This is the OS for all those people who keep every photograph they’ve taken on a 4GB flash card in their camera.

Yes, I know the first Mac soon became far more complex. Twenty-five years ago the personal computer was growing into a geek market. Satisfying that market meant the platform became more and more powerful. That increasing power pleased geeks like me --- for a while. Even we, however, noticed that it was a lot of work to keep these machines happy.

Around the same time, a poor grad student in 1986 accidentally unleashed an internet worm. We know what came after. Security issues combined with platform complexity to give us a world in which non-geeks shouldn’t touch a connected computer.

The iPad and the App Store though, that can work for most anyone. The dependency on iTunes will fade away over time – look soon for online backup. I assume there will be viruses, but the iPhone world will be a very tough, locked down, target.

Chrome OS will be playing in the same big field – non-geek computing.

The geek environments won’t go away immediately, but the end is in sight. Ten years from now we may say that the iPad killed OS X.

My first iPad impressions were cautiously positive. I think I missed the real target. The iPad isn’t aimed at Microsoft or Google or even the Macbook. It’s aimed at everything.

Antidote to The Great Recession: A national small business generation service

Robert Reich's asks "Shall We Call it a Depression Now?" Brad DeLong says ... not yet.

It is looking rather bad though (Glurk! by DeLong):.

Rex Nutting of Marketwatch:

Payrolls plunge by stunning 533,000 in November: U.S. nonfarm payrolls plunged by an astonishing 533,000 in November, the worst job loss in 34 years, the Labor Department reported Friday. It's only the fourth time in the past 58 years that payrolls have fallen by more than 500,000 in a month. Since the recession began 11 months ago, a total of 1.9 million jobs have been lost. The unemployment rate rose from 6.5% in October to 6.7% in November, the highest jobless rate since October 1993...

Everytime I remark to Barry Eichengreen about the disjunction between the intensity of the financial crisis and its limited transmission to the real economy, he says "just wait." I guess we can stop waiting.

So call it the Great Recession for the moment.

In the Great Depression the solution to economic stall was World War II. That's like treating pneumonia with malignant melanoma. Let's not try World War III.

So we can do all the things that have been tried here or elsewhere, depending on how cooperative the rump of the GOP is.

That's good, but maybe we should try a few new things too.

Imagine a national small business generator. A web site built around a knowledge-base of tens of thousands of business plans. Plans for franchise businesses, plans for manufacturing, plans for service businesses. Plans for businesses that need a lot of startup money. Plans for businesses that need a credit card and a mega-Kiva (it's the US, not Uganda) microloan. Plans for all the things people need in bad times, and plans for the good times to come. Plans for business that write the business plans that go into the knowledge-base.

The plans are organized by pre-requisites. Some are tagged for special skills, others for grinding hard work. They come with packaged loans, like the ones the Small Business Administration already offers - and maybe with grants as well. They come with packaged legal infrastructure, and an expedited incorporation package that greatly simplifies current law - a kind of augmented LLC with simplified tax filing. IP protection, the whole nine yards.

Add an option to invest. So would-be investors can browse these small business startups, and choose which to invest in. Optional online skills based training, or sign up with the people who've just launched, you know, teaching businesses.

Most importantly, the plans are tied to a federal health insurance program, modeled after the Minnesota small-business plans available to any two people starting a business.

It's a web site of course.

So one day you're out of work.

Take a day off. Then go to the knowledge-base.

Login. Browse. Search. Compare some plans. Get some advice. Pick on, click, click, sign.

You're in business now. A grant to start. Health insurance. A loan.

It's not new. Similar programs have been very successful in developing nations. It's just a bit bigger.

It could be done.

Eckels on managing software projects

Bruce Eckels (new feed of mine, so I'm working through the archives [1]) distilled a lot of professional experience into a commencement address [2]. I've emphasized one statement that a less kind person than I would suggest be applied to certain persons with a branding iron ...

The Mythical 5%

... some companies have adopted a policy where at the end of some predetermined period each team evaluates everyone and drops the bottom 10% or 20%. In response to this policy, a smart manager who has a good team hires extra people who can be thrown overboard without damaging the team. I think I know someone to whom this happened at Novell. It's not a good policy; in fact it's abusive and eats away at company morale from within. But it's one of the things you probably didn't learn here, and yet the kind of thing you need to know, even if it seems to have nothing directly to do with programming.

Here's another example: People are going to ask you the shortest possible time it takes to accomplish a particular task. You'll do your best to guess what that is, and they'll assume you can actually do it. What you need to tell them for an estimate like this, and for all your estimates, is that there's a 0% probability that you will actually get it done in that period of time, that such a guess is only the beginning of the probability curve. Each guess needs to be accompanied by such a probability curve, so that all the probabilities combined produce a real curve indicating when the project might likely be done. You can learn more about this by reading a small book called Waltzing with Bears...

I admit, I'd not thought about the inevitable unintended consequence of the "bottom 10%" cuts. Once one person figures out the "hire human sacrifices" strategy everyone will soon learn it, just as ingenious hacks percolate in prisons. Now it's hit on the web, so it's known to the metamind. Humans adapt, and a ruthless corporate culture will breed ruthless employees -- which might not work out as intended.

The rest of the essay is all good advice, most of which I've learned the hard way.

[1] Tip: When you find a good blog, explore the archives deliberately. In bloglines I mark a post as 'keep current' as a reminder that I'm still mining the knowledge. If it's a decent blog there will be far more gold in the best of the archives than in the day-to-day (average) posts of even the very best blogs. (Basic stats - sampling curves.)

[2] I remember when things like this were said once, barely heard, then vanished. Now they live on. I don't think we understand how much difference this makes.

Spolsky tips on travel, gear, phones and so on

Spolsky would be darned annoying if he weren't so generous. Entrepreneur, geek, knows everything ...

Fortunately, he's generous. Here he writes about lessons learned from a promotional tour for his software company - FogBugz. Many of them apply to routine travel (except the first class part). Emphases mine, alas I live in Saint Paul so I cannot escape Northwest.

Joel Spolsky's Travel Survival Guide - Business Travel - Software Demo'ing

1. We waited until September to start the tour. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, September sees 15% fewer air passengers than August. That may seem like a small difference, but thanks to queuing theory, it's actually significant enough to eliminate most of the lines at airports.
   
   
2. We fly first class...
   
   
3. We scheduled most of the travel in the early afternoon, when airports are relatively quiet...
   
   
4. We never booked a flight until we were sure there was at least one later nonstop flight that would get us where we were going..
   
   
5. Oh, and we refused to fly Northwest Airlines (NYSE:NWA), which routinely schedules more flights than they have the ability to operate.

... we didn't have a single delay of more than an hour, and the longest line I waited in was about 10 minutes for security at Seattle airport.

...Here are a few of my tips for good demos:

• Ban PowerPoint...
• ...I try to watch video of myself to learn how to be a better presenter...
• It's OK to tell jokes...
  

...In my carryon luggage:

• My laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad X61s…
  
  
• To get on the Internet wherever I go, I have a Samsung Blackjack phone on AT&T ... supports GSM, so it works abroad, and HSDPA, for high-speed internet access... I wirelessly connect the laptop to the phone using Bluetooth and get high speed Internet access using my phone's unlimited data plan (this is called "tethering").
  
  
• The projector I use is the NEC NP60 (about $1250)...
  
  
• Because the laptop is usually too far away from the projector for a standard VGA cable, I carry these little gizmos called baluns which let me use a standard CAT-5 LAN cable instead of a VGA cable. I've found that a 25 foot LAN cable is plenty, but the baluns let you go much further if you need to.
  
  
• I also carry my own lavaliere microphones with transmitters and receivers (Sennheiser Evolution G2s) ...
  

As checked luggage:

• We had Lands' End Business Outfitters make us up a bunch of piquém polo shirts...
  
  
• We had our printer make up two big professional vertical banners with the FogBugz logo...

Shipped straight to each hotel via UPS ...

• 12-page 4-color brochures for each attendee
• Logo pads and pens for each attendee
• A couple of 25' extension cords, for the projector and the laptop
• A roll of duct tape to tape wires down on the carpet
• A couple of hundred "Hello, my name is…" stickers and sharpies so attendees can socialize before and after the event.

I didn't know you could do that with a Blackjack. Imagine if the iPhone were to support Bluetooth tethering...

There's a lot of advice in one place. I liked the "ship extension cords" -- obvious only in retrospect.

Thanks again Joel!

File for the mythical startup - operations

I have a small collection of these "pearls" of startup wisdom. Come the day I'll be able to find them all, using my newest tag - "startup" (it'll take a while for me to tag the back posts): 

Operations is a competitive advantage... (Secret Sauce for Startups!)

...In my experience it takes about 80 hours to bootstrap a startup. This generally means installing and configuring an automated infrastructure management system (puppet), version control system (subversion), continuous build and test (frequently cruisecontrol.rb), software deployment (capistrano), monitoring (currently evaluating Hyperic, Zenoss, and Groundwork). Once this is done the "install time" is reduced to nearly zero and requires no specialized knowledge. This is the first ingredient in "Operations Secret Sauce".

This kind of scaleability becomes really interesting when you find yourself suddenly popular, as iLike did when it launched its Facebook app and had to scale up fast (Radar)...