Agile Racecar: Software, Magic, and Life

Guy Kawasaki wrote an article a few days ago titled: In Search of Inexperience He talks about why serial entrepreneurs are not necessarily what they're cracked out to be - implicitly arguing in favor of first-time entrepreneurs. I wrote a comment there which I'm reproducing below. ____________________________________________ I agree with the premise, but disagree with the analysis. In other words, the theorem is correct but the proof is wrong. In the 8 years since I first dived head-first into entrepreneurship, I've found that people with common sense - in this Silicon Valley chockfull of analysts, MBAs, VCs, and "angels" - are an endangered species. It is plain common sense that anyone who is hungry, passionate, persistent and all that good stuff is more likely to succeed than someone who is not as motivated. But the malaise afflicting the armchair quarterbacks in the Silicon Valley (i.e. anyone who is not an entrepreneur) is the obsession with b...

A blog post by Guy Kawasaki inspired me to go digging for this classic poem. Dedicated to all my fellow bootstrapping 'Agile Entrepreneurs'. The Man Who Thinks He Can If you think you are beaten, you are; If you think you dare not, you don't. If you'd like to win, but think you can't It's almost a cinch you won't If you think you'll lose, you're lost, For out in the world we find Success begins with a fellow's will; It's all in the state of mind. If you think you're outclassed, you are. You've got to think high to rise. You've got to be sure of yourself before You can ever win a prize. Life's battles don't always go To the stronger or faster man But sooner or later the man who wins Is the one who thinks he can. Walter D. Wintle, "The Man Who Thinks He Can." - Poems That Live Forever, comp. Hazel Feldman 1965

Would you hire an entrepreneur? A lot of entrepreneurs, especially the successful ones, proudly proclaim how "unemployable" they are. But given that a lot of entrepreneurs are bootstrapping these days and funding sources have gone upstream, more and more entrepreneurs are looking to moonlight or get back into the job market to make ends meet. Assuming that a typical entrepreneur is a highly motivated and driven individual and likely to contribute more than any typical employee, the only risk for a hiring manager is the knowledge that the entrepreneur-hire is going to leave the job sooner or later. Would you consider hiring an entrepreneur for a short-term (3-6 months) contract, assuming that you'll get double the work and a lot of passion, energy and a can-do attitude in the bargain?

For whatever it is worth, I would like to announce to my millions of would-be readers that I have been invited to join the Entrepreneur Committee on the Board of Advisors to the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs . And I have accepted. If you're a hi-tech entrepreneur, I would love to hear your suggestions on what I can do in my "official" capacity to make SVASE a better organization for startups.

Most of you probably know about this site already, but I just learned about it and I had to share it with you! Report Card for VCs The Funded Quoting from the Red Herring story: Report Card for VCs TheFunded.com turns tables, letting startups rate funders. April 29, 2007 By Ken Schachter Venture capitalists, long accustomed to taking the role of Simon of "American Idol" in judging startups, are seeing the tables turned. That's because TheFunded.com recently launched, inviting entrepreneurs to post to its web site ratings of venture capital firms. On Thursday, after collecting more than 500 reviews, TheFunded.com released a list of the top five venture firms worldwide. Venture capitalists said it was inevitable that VCs became subject to the same scrutiny as college professor (RateMyProfessors.com), doctors (RateMDs.com) and contractors (AngiesList.com). "It was only a matter of time before this came up," said Sarah Tavel, an analyst at Larchmont, New York-based...

I have often said that people should be selected and rewarded based on productivity, not mere experience.  In fact, this belief forms the basis of the 'pay by productivity' contract system we use in the services division of Crystal Ball. But today I'm not going to talk about how we do things at Crystal Ball. Instead, let me just point you to this very cool article on incentivizing, measuring and rewarding productivity. Quoting: Software defect measurements are frequently attributed to individual developers, but the development environment often conspires against individual developers and makes it impossible to write defect-free code. Instead of charting errors by developer, a systematic effort to provide developers with immediate testing feedback, along with a root cause analysis of remaining defects, is much more effective at reducing the overall software defect rate. By aggregating defect counts into an informational measurement, and hi...

I'm posting my response to a question asked on LinkedIn Answers by Sramana Mitra : " Bootstrapping a Product Company from India? " Here's what I had to say: One aspect of bootstrapping is money. The other is people- good people. We're solving both problems with our strategy of treating our offshore team in India as a services company that specializes in high-quality, low-cost product development for early-stage startups in the Silicon Valley. But we are really a web-based product startup based in the Silicon Valley with our offshore team based at Hyderabad, India, since June 2005. When I came back from India in September 2005 after putting it all together, I had a team that boasted a University gold-medalist who turned down an offer from Google and deferred PhD at MIT to join us, a national programming competition winner, and a seasoned manager from Wipro. Then one fine day, in March 2006, my whole team just disappeared, and I only had 85 pages of use...

Often, you hear about how two or three or four friends/colleagues got together and launched a hi-tech startup ... and lived happily ever after. You might also have heard about how VCs "help" a single founder put together the right team- sometimes without the need for the quotes around "help". I have come across several founders of hi-tech startups lately. Maybe it's because they're all bootstrapping, and maybe it's because the cost of doing a software startup has gone down so dramatically. But the fact is that more and more startups are being launched and bootstrapped all the way to Angel/VC funding, until they become cash flow positive or until they die. Many of these solo-founders don't want to go it alone. But once you're bootstrapping, you are on a roll, and it's not easy to find someone at a later stage who comes along, say a year later, and shares your passion and vision. On the flip-side, I see wanna-be co-founders on the sidel...

As the bootstrapping founder of a web 2.0 startup, the single most important - and difficult to find - skill for me is the web User Information Architect . Not quite UI design, and definitely not graphic design, a UI architect is a human-computer-browser interaction expert and highly experienced and skilled at both layout and transitions. Many of my fellow entrepreneurs seem to share my predicament. They tell me how they hire 3 different people: - the first one to do the UI storyboards (in Visio or some graphic tool, or even paper); - a second person who converts it to HTML, changing where needed to see what's really possible in HTML, finding appropriate tools/controls for combos, etc., but adding hard-coded links to show page transitions; and - the third, to convert remove the hard-coded links from HTML before implementing JSP. In the last 8 years, I have personally found only one person really skilled and able to do it all in HTML/JSP, with phenomenal productivity (about 3 tim...

I am a prolific writer when I set my mind to it. From 1977 to 1984, I had exchanged an unbroken chain of written letters (about half a dozen per year) with a childhood friend. I had similar, smaller chains with some of my other school friends. I read a lot too. And don't me talking - I usually have a lot to say. But trust me, I listen well too (when I shut up). So, it's like all my life I was waiting for the blog' to get invented, but when that did happen, I seem to have run out of steam to take advantage of it. I've thought about why that is and the answer is simple. I'm a whole lot busier- especially since I'm bootstrapping my startup. But there are those who should be busier than me, successfully blogging all the time. How do they do it? I don't know for sure, but I'm going to start doing the following: 1. Write short blogs, with anything that I can think of. Even a single line quote. 2. Start writing the moment I think of something t...

While searching for a metaphor for "Entrepreneur", I came across this very interesting blog by Tom Evslin: Entrepreneurs Are Predators Predators are smarter than prey. Hare-brained is an insult; sharp as a fox is a compliment. I have an evolutionary theory to explain this (full disclosure: except for reading voraciously on the subject, I am totally unqualified to have evolutionary theories).  A leopard chasing an impala can make a mistake, lose the quarry, learn from the mistake, and hunt more wisely on another day. If the impala makes a mistake, it becomes the leopard’s lunch.  Predators fail often;  Prey fail only once. So it would be a waste of energy for prey to have a large analytical brain or to divert any resources into learning while running away. Better just to have long legs, good ears, and a healthy paranoia.  Thinking could be fatal.  It also doesn’t take a lot of smarts to eat grass. On the other hand: Predators learn terrain;...

Formally known as the Pareto principle, the 80-20 rule states that "80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes." Startups - who by definition are starved for resources - would do well to apply the Pareto principle to everything they do. From Wikipedia: It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., "80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients." It also applies to a variety of more mundane matters: we wear our 20% most favoured clothes about 80% of the time, we spend 80% of the time with 20% of our acquaintances etc. In business, dramatic improvements can often be achieved by identifying the 20% of customers, activities, products or processes that account for the 80% of contribution to profit and maximising the attention applied to them. The idea has rule-of-thumb application in many places, but it is commonly misused. For example, it is a misuse to state that a solution to a problem "fits the 80-20 rule" just because it fits...

I have not met a single person who doesn't acknowledge the inherent values in XP when we talk about the values and not "this thing called XP". It is obvious to *anyone* who has enough years of experience behind them. * The challenge then they often face in accepting XP/Agile is their own conflict-of-interest. * You see, XP and Agile are brutal if you are lazy or if you are (or have become) mediocre. There's no place to hide in XP- everything is exposed. You can't create the anecdotal "job security hacks" so that you can't be replaced- because there are others in your team who know your code and can replace you if you're not pulling your weight. Or if you're a contractor, you now risk being caught for overbilling if you don't have "velocity" commensurate with the hours you're billing. I speak, of course, from my experience as a programmer. But more currently, I speak from my experience as the founder of a startup- as the em...

The problem I see with most objections to Extreme Programing (XP) and Agile development is that they are often speculations on theory, rather than wisdom based on actual practice. It's amazing to see the amount of time and energy people spend in *discussing* process than actually building something and learning from the experience. The following is my real-world take on this subject, directed at no one in particular, but at everyone in general who is critical or afraid of XP (often the same people who don't have meaningful experience of using it): XP is a process that has *evolved* through the collective experience of programmers through the mess that the software industry had become- always late, always over-budget, always buggy. And we were told to accept it as a fact of life. In the midst of all the chaos, there were programmers working after hours doing what they weren't allowed to do during the day - writing tests for code (TDD), automating builds ...

While browsing the web randomly, I found this very cool article on the value of testing. Says the author, Gerald M. Weinberg: "Throughout my career, I've watched in dismay as one software manager after another falls into the trap of achieving delivery schedules by trimming tests. Some managers shortcut test work by skipping reviewing and unit testing in the middle of their project. Others pressure the testers to "test faster" at the end. And, most frequently, they just drop planned tests altogether, hoping they "get lucky." I've written several essays about the dangers of test trimming, but nobody seems to understand, so I asked myself, "What am I doing wrong?" Perhaps I wasn't practicing what I was preaching. Perhaps I was trimming tests myself. Perhaps my writing needed more testing! So, I wrote a story about taking shortcuts and read it to my granddaughter, Camille."

Is your startup in the list?

These are indeed exciting times for the bootstrapping entrepreneur! If you haven't already, please join our self-help networking group, Agile Entrepreneurs where entrepreneurs help each other with a variety of issues in a format borrowed from the Toastmasters club. And if you're in a tight spot for money, you should join our group on Prosper.com , an excellent people-to-people lending web-site that I wish had found six months ago. In fact, I wish I had founded this group a year ago! I had certainly been talking about the concept- my friend Pravin can attest to that fact. Regardless, I've dived in and created a closed group in Prosper , called Agile Entrepreneurs . I intend to invite other entrepreneurs to join the group and use it to raise small loans until they are able to generate cash flow or get funding. And if you're looking to make money while helping out your fellow entrepreneurs, you should support Agile Entrepreneurs on Prosper. You make money on the intere...

Here's a very cool song for entrepreneurs . The story of my life! Enjoy!

Agile Entrepreneurs is an organization created with the entrepreneur in mind, first and foremost. Perhaps your dream is to own a lifestyle business where you’re the boss of your business and you make more than you would in a job- that’s it. Or perhaps you have a plan to develop a product that you can sell to Yahoo or Google for $10 million in 2 years. Or maybe you dare to dream big- a $100 million company that can compete with the big boys, and may need Venture Capital someday. You must have heard about entrepreneurs who wrote a business plan on a proverbial napkin, got VC funding, built a product, and made a lot of money selling it (the company, and optionally the product too). Well, the reality is that far too many first time entrepreneurs end up in the heart-breaking position of seeing their companies get “successfully” bought out, but only the investors make some money and the entrepreneurs lose out completely. For a startup to have a fair chance of success (hint: why...

  The problem with the designated driver program, it's not a desirable job, but if you ever get sucked into doing it, have fun with it. At the end of the night, drop them off at the wrong house. - Jeff Foxworthy Made me think about how in the 21st century, we're still trying to figure out how to get from Point 'A' to Point 'B'. Seriously, how many of you have a reasonable legal solution to this problem of getting home from the bar or a late night party- when you're buzz drunk ? How about getting to the airport? Do you really pay $90 for a cab ride after 9 pm to the SF airport from Sunnyvale? Perhaps you get a friend or spouse to drive 30 miles to the airport and back. Maybe you belong to the small minority of people who have figured out the $31 door-to-door shuttle- and can put up with it. Well, think about how you usually drop off and pick up your car for oil-change or repairs? The list goes on and on - think about all those times your old faith...

Good listening skills, in particular Active Listening is essential to learning- and success. Listening- you think you know it- most of us think we're good listeners. It's very hard to know and acknowledge that you are not good at listening. You may never become a good listener because so many personal emotions and prejudices get in the way of listening. A good listener tries to understand thoroughly what the other person is saying. In the end he may disagree sharply, but before he disagrees, he wants to know exactly what it is... - Kenneth A. Wells, American Active listening is about focusing on the person who is speaking. An active listener needs to focus full attention on the person who is speaking. Here are a few good links to learn more about listening: What is listening? Poor Listening Habits, Poor Listeners, and Good Listeners. Active Listening You'll find here the four characteristics of empathetic listeners. Attributes of Good Listening Have ...

Here's a really nice quote from one of my dear friends in response to one of my dreams . Between the bigger things you cannot do, and the smaller things you don't want to do, you may end up doing nothing The problem with quotes and analogies is that they are almost always approximately appropriate, but rarely if ever exactly applicable . A quote is by definition a generalization. Also, we are by nature biased with our prejudices, biased by our own very personal and unique experiences, and biased, by nature, against those who are near and dear to us. While we want them to succeed and would eventually be happy if they succeed big, our natural instinct is to "help" them "stay grounded". I disagree with this helping nature, of course. I can - and will- expound on the virtue of dreaming big and having a big mouth. But that will be another day. Today I'm going to present a few quotes on the flip-side of my friend's quote. Feel free to add you...

Sabeer Bhatia is at it again. Generating hype, that is. This time he's building a city, Silicon Valley to be precise, in India. It's called Nano City and the idea is to create an environment that will foster innovation and create a Silicon Valley in India. Well-informed readers would shrug and yawn - this has been tried umpteen times before without credible success. Paul Graham discusses the futility of it all in his essays "How to Be Silicon Valley" and Why Startups Condense in America . But for India it's a win-win, regardless of whether Bhatia succeeds in his vision. At a minimum, India will end up with a modern development housing some universities, some companies, and rich residents with a lot of disposable income- creating a mini-economy of their own. But Nano City? Am I the only one who is sick and tired of the Cyber-Xs and Nano-Ys? Why not give it a nice Indian name? To get started, check out some of the more popular suffixes for city names in India . An...

... contd. from Part -1: Your Conscience is Your Compiler Friend: Ok, got it. I used to think these are instincts. Me: Well, you can hack it, i.e. ignore your conscience, but then you're corrupting your "code" and it affects your "program" behavior. And soon, you can't fix it anymore. It's gone, unless you do major "refactoring". Or a complete rewrite- which for humans is death and rebirth... and what does anyone know about death and beyond anyway? In this life, you can only do refactoring, there's no rewrite. Friend: Nice analogy. TDD! Me: Well, TDD- Test-driven development is to ensure you are always following your conscience...But at the same time, allowing yourself the oppportunity to learn and the privilege to change your mind some day as you mature. TDD lets you easily incorporate lessons you learn as you grow and mature. It helps you change more easily than would be otherwise possible for you. It helps you easily figure...

Your Conscience is Your Compiler! The following is the exact transcript of an IM chat about "Conscience" I had with a friend: Friend: I follow my instincts. Me: Animals follow instincts - humans follow their conscience. It's the only God I know. Your conscience always tells you what's right or wrong. Friend: No murali, I disagree. How do you define what's right? Me: Your conscience tells you- always. If you do something you believe is wrong, you'll feel guilty. If you don't believe it's wrong, you won't feel guilty Friend: Yeah, but why do you do things? Me: Because we are human. Friend: No, it's because we want to survive. Me: It takes a lot of character to always obey your conscience, a lot of strength.We survive either way. But if you and your conscience are on good terms, you have unshakeable self-belief. Friend: Yeah Me: And you'll care about little things like pride, self-respect, principles, character, reputati...

... continued from "Milk Money for Meebo.com" I’d put the percentage equity that the VCs took for their $3.5 million at Meebo at a lot closer to 20% pre-money given how hot Meebo was (again, based on all the buzz about them on Sand Hill Road). Still, let’s assume 25% pre-money . That makes the pre-money valuation of the company 3.5 * 4 = $14M. In other words, Sequoia put in $3.5 million and got 25% of Meebo, putting the company’s value at $14M pre-money. After the investment, Meebo’s post-money valuation is $17.5M (i.e. 14 + 3.5, the value of the company + the cash). That means, Sequoia now owns 20% of Meebo, post-money. Like I said, that’s about the minimum any self-respecting VC firm in the Valley would like to hold in a startup after Series-A financing. And Sequoia is right up there with Kleiner-Perkins at the top of the VC hierarchy in the Valley. --- Note that at the other extreme of 40% post-money, Meebo’s post-money valuation $8.75M. That puts the pre-money ...

The Agile entrepreneur has a choice all too common these days. Implement it yourself. Or hire smart people for equity only- easier to do in the Silicon Valley than anywhere else (it's amazing what a single ad in Craigslist can do). Or pay young, super-smart programmers in India for a fraction of your monthly salary- you may not be able to afford it for a whole year, but we're talking about 3 weeks (i.e. iterations) here at a time. Regardless of the approach, practically every software entrepreneur in the US now has the ability to incrementally implement the features defined by the customer(s) , one iteration at a time. And get valuable feedback. And sooner or later, you'll have a paying customer as long as you stay true to the principles of Agile- "The Customer Is Always Right At The Beginning Of Each Iteration" (apologies to Sam Walton and Kent Beck:). Alternately, the customer(s) might realize soon enough and declare that the product doesn't have as mu...

Ok, so you've all heard zillions of quotes on success- and how to achieve it. Here's my take on it- that takes all extraneous factors and mind-games out of it, and puts the responsibility for success squarely on *your* shoulders: You can Choose to have an Excellent Reason for Failure; or You can Choose to Succeed It all depends on how much you want to succeed!

Here’s something that I highly recommend y’all read: “ milk money …” - parts I, II, & III It’s an amazingly detailed and honest account of the fund-raising process from someone who raised the money just over a month ago - in December 2005! One thing that’s not mentioned in the story is the amount raised from Sequoia. I know it’s $3.5 million- straight from the horse’s mouth. So let’s do the numbers . $3.5M in Series ‘A’ means anywhere between 20% to 40 % stake was given away, based on how much leverage each party had. Note that regardless of leverage, any experienced VC will typically want to own *not more than* 40% and *not less than* 20%, “post-money”. [VCs taking more than 40% drastically reduces the founders’ feeling of ownership and thus, their incentive to succeed. Taking less than 20% would mean the VCs will spend very little time or effort on this company- instead choosing to focus on the other companies in their portfolio where they have a greater “interest”.] ... continue...

Too often wannabe entrepreneurs fade out because they do not have the resources to put their ideas to the test. They may be able to talk to a customer or two, but there they often reach a dead end when the customer asks for a prototype or demo. It costs money - and takes time - to build one. And most aspiring entrepreneurs don't have a lot of money- or not enough - at least that's what they think. If you're an aspiring software entrepreneur, without an infinite capacity for risk, your prayers have just been answered. Imagine this scenario. The entrepreneur uses an online (web-based) agile project management tool to define the requirements. He then meets with potential customers, gets their feedback and refines the requirements, and prioritizes the features. Next the entrepreneur defines a short Release that contains the bare minimum functionality needed to "validate the business model". In plain English, this means that there's a customer out there who...

Mark my words, it is going to start happening within a year. I can see it in my Crystal Ball :) And remember, you read about it here first- Friday, Jan 27, 2006! Agile methodology, XP, and Hosted Agile Project Management tools (like Rally) are poised to take software entpreneurship and offshore outsourcing to the next level. India is finally going to shake off it's mentality of servitude and take major steps towards fostering Silicon Valley style innovation. How? Agile/XP approach of rapid, iterative development with customer feedback at its core is screaming from rooftops with a megaphone for very very v... early stage startups and budding software entrepreneurs to notice it. It's a marriage made in heaven! I can't think of a more natural fit of a solution to a problem. Agile development is for software entrepreneurs what lithium is for bipolar disorder (ok, so I guess the analogy proves that I can actually think of a more natural fit). ... contd. in "Ag...

UPDATE: Feb 2010: I wrote the following in Jan 2006 before I had enough exposure to User Stories and before I got stuck in the quagmire that Rally - at least in that version - turned out to be. I stopped using it a month later. The problem was ironically the same problem Agile development evolved to solve- Rally itself was over-engineered, tried to do much and did the simple & important things not well enough-- if at all. To make matters worse, it was very slow and highly cumbersome to input info into- these were the early days of Web 2.0 and Rally seemed to be going overboard with use of AJAX. I've heard good things about Rally again lately but haven't validated it for myself. I'll do a separate blog post on this topic when I do. I'm smitten by the Agile software development methodology. It's not as if I've heard about it only today, but now I have a tool that can (I believe) help me manage the CommuterStation product development in India more effectivel...