So You Want To Be a CEO?

0 comments on this article Posted by Jesse in Opinion on October 29th, 2011 , tagged with .

A CEO does only three things. Sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders. Recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company. Makes sure there is always enough cash in the bank.

- Anonymous Venture Capitalist

It sounds simple enough, but being the CEO of a company, any company, is an extremely demanding position. There is a lot of responsibility that goes along with being a CEO. It’s not a title that should be taken lightly. As I’ve gained experience working for different CEOs, reading about CEOs, and observing/experiencing them first hand, I’ve formed some strong opinions on the most coveted executive role. As an aspiring CEO, I’ve put a lot of thought into this post, even though I haven’t had true CEO experience thus far. That will change, maybe my opinions will too, but as of today, these are my thoughts on the position of Chief Executive Officer.

”Respect commands itself and can neither be given nor withheld when it is due.”         - Eldridge Cleaver 

The title of CEO is all about respect. It denotes intelligence, hard work, leadership, and vision.  One of my biggest pet peeves is the lack of respect for the title by young entrepreneurs.  By lack of respect, I mean when a one person company or a person who works on a “company” part time call themselves a CEO. Call yourself a founder, not a CEO. Don’t diminish the hard work other executives do by calling yourself a CEO of your one person, part-time company. It makes you look silly. There will be a time when calling yourself a CEO is appropriate and it will be apparent to everyone.

“No one is born a CEO, but no one tells you that.” – Drew Houston, Dropbox CEO

Being a CEO is not easy. Just because you start a company and anoint yourself as the CEO, it doesn’t mean you’re a true CEO. But that doesn’t mean you’re not capable of becoming a great CEO. Like any other skill, becoming a great CEO takes time, patience, failure, and hard work. The number one reason young or inexperienced CEOs have difficulties (in my opinion) is that they don’t communicate properly. Let’s revisit the opening quote, “…Sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders.” I stress this point because that’s been my biggest point of contention with CEOs that I’ve worked with. They haven’t communicated their vision clearly and they don’t communicate enough throughout the working relationship. It’s frustrating and can kill morale, which is vital in a young startup’s life.

If you’re going to be a CEO, be cognizant of that fact and make sure you don’t keep your team in the dark. One person can’t know everything and if you recruit an A+ team, you won’t have to. But at the end of the day, that team looks to you for guidance. If you can’t articulate the vision, you’ll run into problems. You’ll lose your greatest asset (your team) and could hinder future financing if you can’t communicate to the investors.  I can’t stress the importance of communication for a CEO. Don’t get too down if you’re currently not the strongest communicator, but have CEO aspirations. There are resources out there to help you become a better CEO.

“Everyone needs a coach.” – John Doerr, Venture Capitalist at KPCB

Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, spoke with Fortune a few years ago and said this quote,

“Every famous athlete, every famous performer has somebody who’s a coach.  Somebody who can watch what they’re doing and say, “Is that what you really meant?  Did you really do that?”  They can give them perspective. The one thing people are never good at is seeing themselves as others see them.  A coach really, really helps.”

Here is one of the most successful CEOs of the modern tech era, telling everyone that he has a CEO coach and you should too. There is no shame in having a CEO coach. A CEO coach is someone who can help a young executive build their skill set and become the CEO they envision and are capable of. The best CEOs surround themselves with the best talent, that should also include a CEO coach.

You can take this advice with a grain of salt since I’m not a true CEO yet. But I would encourage you not to completely disregard my opinions. There is truth to my words, even if it’s in my limited experience. I’ll be sure to reference this post in the years to come as my career progresses.

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Starting a Company: Business Partners

0 comments on this article Posted by Jesse in Career Advice, Opinion, Relationships, startups on October 24th, 2011 , tagged with .

Starting a business isn’t easy. There are a lot of unknown obstacles and the reality of starting your own business is that most new businesses fail.  One essential step when starting your business should be to decide whether or not  you should have a business partner. I chose a business partner and I’ll share why I chose a business partner and the pros and cons of starting a business alone.

I originally started my company alone. That lasted about two months. Then I brought on my co-founder. It’s probably one of the smartest moves I’ve made professionally. The reason is because we complement each other very well, which is the first of my three arguments why you should bring on a business partner.

Complementary Skill Sets

Everyone has strengths and weaknesses and businesses will most certainly exceed only your strengths. Are you the visionary or the operator? Do you have an eye for design but not a knack for numbers? Can you program but not sell? It’s imperative for a young company to be able to function at all levels, long before you have the bankroll to hire specialists for each position. Therefore having a business partner helps round out your skill set and makes sure that your business is running on all cylinders and ready for growth.

Decrease Workload and Increase Productivity

This doesn’t mean you don’t have to work as hard. Hard work is a necessary component of any young company. However, it does mean that you don’t have to increase your workload by concentrating on tasks that you’re not proficient at.  For example, graphic design. I have some remedial skills at graphic design and have an idea of good design, but it’s not my strong suite. If I were alone I’d have to spend many hours trying to create a specific design that absolutely would be less than acceptable. With a complementary partner, that task can be assigned to him/her and I can concentrate more hours doing more work on a tast that I’m much more proficient at. Greater output with decreased input.

Two Minds Are Greater Than One

It’s always good to get the opinion of someone you trust when making an important decision. Get as much information as you can. If your partner complements you well, you’re going to look at different problems and situations from a different angle. Not to say person is right or wrong, but getting someone else’s perspective will help you make the right call. It’s always better to get perspective from someone who has a “horse in the race.” Anyone can give you third party opinion because there will be no consequence to them. But if they’re going to be impacted by said decision, they’re not going to give you honest, meaningful opinions.

Being an entrepreneur is a rocky and often lonely endeavor. Finding a complementary person and becoming business partners can make it a less lonely and more fruitful endeavor.  I recommend you read these two books on the matter to get more information.

The Partnership Charter - David Gage

Working Together - Michael Eisner

But at the end of the day, follow Andy Grove’s business advice when choosing your business partner, “Dive deeply into the data, then trust your gut.”

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Google’s New Data Visualization Tool for Analytics

0 comments on this article Posted by Jesse in Online Marketing, Tech News on October 21st, 2011 , tagged with , .

*I originally wrote and posted on Demeter Interactive’s blog.

Yesterday at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, Susan Wojcicki, SVP of Advertising at Google, announced the latest Google Analytics tool: Flow Visualization.

Flow Visualization is going to be a great tool for a variety of different site owners. Flow Visualization can track the path users take when navigating a website. It’s visual representation of data that’s easy to digest for any user of Google Analytics.

Google Analytics has always had sales funnels, to track sales conversations, but Flow Visualization takes it to another level. For instance, you can sort your visitors by browser, determine which pages they visit, and at what point they might abandon your site. You can ascertain which links users are clicking on to navigate your site and if there is an optimal path that you can take advantage of. All of this represented in a graphical, interactive map, for free.

Ms. Wojcicki started her presentation saying that Flow Visualization was inspired by an obscure spaghetti map of Napoleon’s march to and from Russia in 1812. The map visually represents the number of soldiers who died on the journey. As soon as I saw this I immediately knew the relevance of Google’s new analytics tool and was quite enthused at the possibilities.

This very spaghetti map has been framed and hanging in my family’s living room for years. It first became relevant to me when I was a senior in college and finishing my degree with a required cartography class. Little did I know that years later, in an entirely different context, it would again rise to significance in my life.

At Demeter Interactive, we love data and this paradigm shift in data technology is very exciting for us. Which is why when I first saw Susan Wojcicki share the Napoleon spaghetti map I knew how Flow Visualization would impact our company first. When we create promotions on social networking sites, like Facebook, we can directly track how many visitors are sent to our site and which social network is sending us the highest quality traffic. Flow Visualization is going to eliminate a lot of the guessing game for marketers.

Flow Visualization is going to be rolled out to users over the course of the next several weeks. I’ll be sure to let Theridion readers know our thoughts when we first get the chance to experience it first hand. Is Flow Visualization as interesting to you as it is to us or are we just die-hard data junkies?

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Wise Words from the Dalai Lama

0 comments on this article Posted by Jesse in Relationships on October 12th, 2011 , tagged with .

I’m fortunate enough to have family that cares about me. They’ve supported me everyday as I work toward my professional dreams. They worry like family should and they remind me that life is more than just work. My Dad did it when he sent me this story that I posted a few weeks back. And today my sister sent me a poster with the words of the Dalai Lama.  It was sent with the subject: Just a Thought. 

This quote describes a cycle that I could see my life follow, which is funny because my blog quote for years has been,

“How vain is it to sit down and write when you have not stood up to live…”

Therefore I promise I will always remember to stand up and live and enjoy the present.

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What Guy Kawasaki Learned From Steve Jobs

0 comments on this article Posted by Jesse in Career Advice, Entrepreneurship on October 8th, 2011 , tagged with , .

Guy Kawasaki recently shared on Google+ some things he learned from Steve Jobs. It’s a great list and I suggest everyone read the post. I wanted to highlight a few of the lessons here on my blog because I strongly agree with the sentiments. My comments are italicized after Kawasaki’s point.

Experts are clueless.

Experts—journalists, analysts, consultants, bankers, and gurus can’t “do” so they “advise.” They can tell you what is wrong with your product, but they cannot make a great one. They can tell you how to sell something, but they cannot sell it themselves. They can tell you how to create great teams, but they only manage a secretary. For example, the experts told us that the two biggest shortcomings of Macintosh in the mid 1980s was the lack of a daisy-wheel printer driver and Lotus 1-2-3; another advice gem from the experts was to buy Compaq. Hear what experts say, but don’t always listen to them.

One of my biggest professional fears is becoming one of these people who tells someone they’re doing something completely wrong, probably call them an idiot behind their back, and then produce nothing myself. My rule is I don’t like to give advice unless I have personally had experience and/or success in whatever I’m giving advice on. 

Customers cannot tell you what they need.

“Apple market research” is an oxymoron. The Apple focus group was the right hemisphere of Steve’s brain talking to the left one. If you ask customers what they want, they will tell you, “Better, faster, and cheaper”—that is, better sameness, not revolutionary change. They can only describe their desires in terms of what they are already using—around the time of the introduction of Macintosh, all people said they wanted was better, faster, and cheaper MS-DOS machines. The richest vein for tech startups is creating the product that you want to use—that’s what Steve and Woz did.

I’m a strong believer that people don’t know what they want, they rely on people telling them what they want. If you were to hear the pitch for some of the top Internet companies/apps today in their idea form, you’d probably say that’s stupid, don’t build it. 

Design counts.

Steve drove people nuts with his design demands—some shades of black weren’t black enough. Mere mortals think that black is black, and that a trash can is a trash can. Steve was such a perfectionist—a perfectionist Beyond: Thunderdome—and lo and behold he was right: some people care about design and many people at least sense it. Maybe not everyone, but the important ones.

I am not a designer nor have I always appreciated (understood) design. I want the utility of the product to be second to none. That’s my first focus, but I think that products need to look good. Admittedly, I bought an iPod Mini in college because it looked so much better than any other MP3 player on the market. Since then, I’ve been Apple all the way. Design is important, but it only complements a superior product. 

“A” players hire “A+” players.

Actually, Steve believed that A players hire A players—that is people who are as good as they are. I refined this slightly—my theory is that A players hire people even better than themselves. It’s clear, though, that B players hire C players so they can feel superior to them, and C players hire D players. If you start hiring B players, expect what Steve called “the bozo explosion” to happen in your organization.

I’ve always said that I want to be the CEO of my company and also be the dumbest guy on the team. That’s not to say that I’m stupid, but I want to surround myself with the most talented people I can. Fear of people being smarter than you on your team is a sure fire recipe for failure. 

I highly recommend you read Guy’s post in it’s entirety. However, it’s these four points that really resonated with me. As my career progresses, you better be sure that I’ll take these four points into consideration with any project I’m involved in. What points do you most admire?

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RIP Steve Jobs

0 comments on this article Posted by Jesse in Entrepreneurship, Life on October 5th, 2011 .

There isn’t much I can say that hasn’t been said about Steve Jobs already. He was an amazing, free thinking spirit. Many of us dream to transform ONE industry, Jobs transformed five. I feel very fortunate to have been alive for a great majority of his greatest innovations.

For all the amazing products Steve created, the companies he built, and the industries he transformed, his greatest legacy might be his impact on entrepreneurship. He inspired an entire generation to go out and change the world. He showed what entrepreneurial resilience really is. He built an empire, saw it taken away from him, and rebuilt it again. He never gave up because he had a vision. It’s something that every entrepreneur should aspire to emulate.

Today’s a very sad day and I know I echo many people’s sentiments when I say, Steve Jobs will be missed. Stay hungry. Stay foolish. Most importantly, find what you love.

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Working For Sweat Equity

0 comments on this article Posted by Jesse in Entrepreneurship, startups on September 30th, 2011 , tagged with .

Every start up begins with sweat equity. You have to put in time with no pay to make your vision come to fruition. Having started a services company, I am no different, I have been working for more than a year without taking salary. But because I started a services company, I am also presented with offers of sweat equity for my services.

Sweat equity is an interesting and tantalizing concept. People are willing to give you a percentage of their company (sometimes a large percentage) to work for “free” in hopes you’ll make them rich and prosperous. For many boot strapped startups, their valueless equity is all that they have to offer. It’s tantalizing because no one gets rich from cash. Individuals get rich from equity. This is the illusion of grandeur that masks the reality of sweat equity from another company.

The reality is, there are many different factors that you have to weigh in the decision of working for sweat equity in another company. Essentially, you really have to treat it like a venture capitalist would. Who is the founding team? What is their track record? What is their strategy for success? All of this has to play a role into your decision to join give up man hours that you could be billing for, for the opportunity of a payday years from now.

As the founder of a marketing agency, I am not opposed to sweat equity deals. In fact, I would prefer to have a sliver of sweat equity deals mixed in with my cash clients. However, I will be very deliberate and careful with any company I decide to do business with like this. I must also be very conscience of my company’s cash flow.

At my company’s very young stage, we have been presented with three sweat equity offers. We have chosen not to participate in two of these deals, largely due to the fact, our monthly cash flow is not where I believe it needs to be before we take on more than one equity deal. You can’t get over excited about the possibility of a multi-million dollar exit 5 years from now, when you don’t have the cash to make it 5 months from now.

Be weary of any sweat equity offers you may receive. It will be exciting and flattering, but stay rational. Sweat equity can often be fools gold so conduct your due diligence and do what’s best for YOUR company.

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Dear Fellow Twentysomethings: You Are Not Alone

0 comments on this article Posted by Jesse in Life on September 24th, 2011 .

I thought I’d share some nuggets of knowledge from my 28 years of living.

Nobody Knows What They’re Doing

Don’t get stressed if you don’t know what you’re doing, because we ALL feel that way. Any twentysomething that tells you with 100% certainty that they know what they are doing is a jackass…and a liar.  Even the most confident, focused twentysomething isn’t entirely sure what the fuck they’re doing.

Stop Comparing Yourself to Others

It’s easier said than done, but stop comparing yourself to your peers. We have a tendency to compare snapshots of our friends’ lives to our life as a whole. Don’t worry if you don’t have a SoHo loft or a wife and two kids.  I can assure you that your friends are looking at some part of your life with envy.

It’s Not Too Late

You’re not old.  Stop freaking out about being 24 or 28. Really, you’re just scraping the surface of the rest of your life. Don’t think that you’re trapped or it’s too late to change your life. A wise friend told me that while we’re in our twenties/early thirties we’re all just a few years apart until everything levels out. By the time we all hit forty, we’ll be where we want to be.

You Are Not Alone

Most importantly, remember this…you are not alone. Any uncertainty you might be feeling, there is someone else who is feeling it too.

If you need to vent, have questions, or want to tell me I’m an idiot, shoot me an email.

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Don’t Put Your Life on Pause

0 comments on this article Posted by Jesse in Entrepreneurship, Friendship, Life, Relationships on September 11th, 2011 , tagged with , , .

About two months ago I wrote a post about how entrepreneurship is a lifestyle, not a job.  To sum it up, there’s a lot of sacrifice you make when you decide to become an entrepreneur.  However, don’t misconstrue that as “Being an entrepreneur is first and everything else doesn’t exist.”  It’s a mistake I’ve been making since I started my company.

Balance is essential for a healthy life.  Diet, friends, work, family…all of it needs to be balanced.  When one aspect of your life overpowers the rest, it’s unhealthy and unsustainable.  I (like so many twenty somethings) think that I’m invincible and can do anything.  That’s why I’ve been so content with the entrepreneurial lifestyle I’ve lead over the past year.  I figured I could bust my ass at this one thing, ignore everything else, and when I succeed at business, everything else will be there waiting for me.  That is no way to live life. Do not put your life on pause because you are an entrepreneur.

I am just now starting to realize how unhealthy my lifestyle has been the past year. I’ve neglected my health, abandoned my friends, and lost focus on the truly important things in life.  That’s why I posted the story from my father the other day.  It’s a really important story that I think everyone needs to read.  I want to get married, have children, and have lifelong friends. I’m not going to have these things if I neglect the people around me. I’m not going to magically wake up one day 5-7 years from now and know that it’s the right time to start the “life” that I imagine for myself.

To any young entrepreneurs who might be reading this; DO NOT pause your life for your career.  Go home and visit your parents. Ask out that ridiculously hot girl at the coffee shop. Stop working early for a beer with a friend.  Pick up the phone and call an old friend for no reason. Gather a group of friends for dinner. And for pete’s sake, get away from your computer, unplug, and enjoy the outdoors.  If you’re anything like me, that might seem daunting, but it’s essential to your mental health and business success to do so.  Life is too short. Go live it.

 

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Decision Fatigue and Your Career

0 comments on this article Posted by Jesse in Life on September 7th, 2011 .

My mother sent me the New York Times Magazine article, “Do You Suffer from Decision Fatigue?”and it really resonated with me.  Shortly after I read the article I discovered “The Real Reason Dieting Is So Hard, and Why It Matters for CEOs” which is an extension of the NY Times article.  Both are great reads and I highly recommend reading them both.

I would take these articles into consideration during your daily life.  We have a lot of decisions to make on a daily basis.  Navigating your career is difficult and you need to preserve your mental acuity for important decisions.  Reduce unneeded decisions like the articles suggest and improve the quality of the decisions you do make.

Here’s an excerpt from New York Times Magazine article:

“Even the wisest people won’t make good choices when they’re not rested and their glucose is low,” Baumeister points out. That’s why the truly wise don’t restructure the company at 4 p.m. They don’t make major commitments during the cocktail hour. And if a decision must be made late in the day, they know not to do it on an empty stomach. “The best decision makers,” Baumeister says, “are the ones who know when not to trust themselves.”

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