Cerdafied...startups, people & the variety Hour

Where to work: startup or big company

UPDATE: Well, the candidate decided for the big company. Oh well. Best to know now.

I was interviewing a candidate this past week, which had lots of big company background in her resume. Yet at the same time, her skillset is exactly what we need. That leaves for a lot of probing on the DNA front, but that's standard anyway. This person had a job offer and a start date at a more established, publicly traded company already. So we came in at the 11th hour. This person has to weigh the following:

Big company: security, established practices, principles, run rate revenue, predictible, well formatted, nice salary, little equity, 1 of perhaps hundreds or thousands of people

Startup: privately held, experimental, roller coaster, growing revenues but early stages, frequent changes, nimble, maverick, nice salary, nice equity, 1 of 20 people

The security of a big company comes at a price. That price can be borderline irrelevance. Sometimes it's easy to become a social security number. I was at Livingston as a big fish and when Lucent bought Livingston, I disappeared in the noise. There were 5 other people that had overlapping immediate responsibility as I. My time was spent on navigating the political landscape, as opposed to pure contribution and results. On the other hand, if you play that game you can climb the ladder.

Startups can be scary. They're held together by a few key leaders and believers. They can break at any time. They can also rise above faster and with more individual contribution than anyplace else. At Jangl, I realize that every single person is in the critical path. That makes for pure relevance for those individuals. No one can hide. My ultimate question for anyone considering this sort of thing...."Would you rather try for a home run or guarantee a base hit?"

We'll see what this candidate decides...

another kind of startup

When I was 18, I worked at a startup called Binobuddy. It was literally in a garage. Well, it was a rent-a-garage/rent-a-storage place at Ollie Viberg's units on South River Rd in Paso Robles, CA. The entrepreneur behind it was Bob Boyer, the father of a friend of mine Erik. Bob was the consummate big idea guy. He was a dreamer.

His idea was born out of a problem he had while hunting. He'd have binoculars hanging around his neck, that would always dangle (for some reason I almost spelled that dangl) and swing when he leaned forward to strike his target. His solution was to build a contraption out of rivets and rubber tubbing, which would affix to the binoculars. With the "bino buddy", the binoculars would sit snug against the chest, but be easily accessible. Here's a picture of the bino buddy:

It was a small operation. Bob's sons and myself assembled bino buddy units. It was slow, boring, mindless work, but was a hell of a lot cooler hanging out listening to Z93 classic rock, then taking 3-piece dinner orders at KFC. What was even cooler, was that Bob let our band at the time, rehearse upstairs in the place.

Anyway, this is all a musing that startups like Bino Buddy are all over the place. There are dreamers everywhere. They come in all shapes and sizes. But unless they are in technology, are in a silicon valley-like location and have venture capital, no one ever hears of them. There is no hype, rooftop shindigs, or even beer bust Friday. And there seems to be far less upside potential in ventures like Bob's.

Fortunately for Bob, he sold off Bino Buddy. He's now doing some real estate near Austin. I'll bet he's still dreaming though. Shouldn't we all be?

Technorati Tags: Startups

Iowa Drama...is it worth it?

The color commentary continues and continues on the topic of companies using the legal loop hole that is the Iowa business model for getting free phone numbers and origination (and sometimes even getting paid for doing so). Some people agree with AT&T and Qwest that it's illegal. Some people feel that the phone companies have been raping us all anyway, so why not work it.

There are people I care about, who do use this loop hole to do business. There are also people I don't care about, that try and compete with my company using the loop hole. Hey...right, wrong or indifferent, it's dicey, risky, and defocusing for companies that employ the model. Who wants to have that 'on the run' feeling? It may even become expensive, to the extent companies have to defend themselves. I'll bet the size of the legal teams at the phone companies are bigger than the total employee base of all the defendants named.

Technorati Tags: Iowa, VoIP

ETEL: Telephone 2.0 for real?

I am going to be speaking on an ETEL panel next week, which will discuss Telephone 2.0. I'm glad they're calling it Telephone 2.0, because it occurred to me that lots of people are talking about Voice 2.0. To me, it's about much more than voice. It's about text (SMS), identity management, personalization, etc. I'm looking real forward to sharing a panel with some guys I know like Jeff Bonforte and Alec Saunders, but also with guys I haven't met like Jeff Black, Craig Walker, Simone Gwatkin, and of course the moderator Owen. I've been looking forward to sharing a panel with some of these guys for a long time. I'm sure it will be entertaining to us geeks.

Here are some of the items we'll be discussing:
-What will be the first truly new application of voice 2.0 - not a derivative but something culture-changing - at least on the level of voice mail?
-Where will the real success come from? Telcos, new VoIP companies, Internet application builders, the open source movement, or somewhere else?
-What comes next -- looking five years out where will we be?
Here's my off the top of my head definition of Telephone 2: Everything web develops quickly. Everything phone doesn’t. Our consumer facing experiences reflect this. Phone 2 is the next stage of bringing web like capability and adaptability to phones. And...it’s not about cheap talking to me. It’s about lifestyle impact.

Technorati Tags: ETEL, Voice 2.0, jangl, VoIP

Help Wanted!

Jangl is looking for someone with start up DNA to come run engineering program management.

Here's the description:

Director Engineering Program Management

This is a hands-on position requiring significant experience in engineering program management. In this role you will drive day to day program activities including: planning, managing and communicating development schedules and managing critical path / risk items; prioritizing issues and project details while maintaining strategic and critical thinking; and providing clear and consistent cross-functional communications; and leading key development release cycles.

Responsibilities:

This position is responsible for the overall ownership of service delivery and requires very strong leadership plus the ability to collaborate across Development, Production and Product Marketing disciplines to meet aggressive quality, schedule and product objectives. The EPM responsibilities include:
· Detailed service development planning
· Service definition and specification creation
· Resolution of interdependencies and cross-functional issues
· Creating and implementing the overall program release strategies
· Providing domain knowledge and understanding of use cases covering multiple services
· Establishing a collaborative working environment across the program release team

Personal Characteristics:

A successful candidate will offer the following attributes:
· Strong desire to own/drive rapid development program(s) and navigate through constant change and challenge
· Extremely organized, fearless problem solver and capable multi-tasker
· Highly skilled at critical path management, conflict resolution and mitigation planning
· Strong interpersonal skills, wide-ranging soft skills and ability to remain calm under fire
· A high level of personal integrity, honesty and openness

Required Experience:
· Minimum of 8-10 years experience in software management
· Excellent presentation, oral and written communication skills
· Excellent knowledge of software development processes
· Proven ability to drive change and promote best SDLC practices

Desired Experience:
· Experience with .NET, web-based services and Internationalization
· Experience directing offshore (outsourced) resources

PhoneBoy, Thai, Futures

PhoneBoy was on town on business, so Timmy and I were able to catch up with him and take our initial blog/comment thread into live detail. It was clear he was up on the space, more so than some in the space itself! I asked him where he picked up this domain, given it has nothing to do with his gig at Nokia. He said he just took an interest and has been playing around with it ever since. I learned that he had been involved in my old friend Marcello's place Voxilla in the past. (Marcello - why the hell haven't you written anything about Jangl yet?)

Anyway, PhoneBoy (Dameon) totally got what we were talking about, with regard to futures. I explained that Jangl is now in a frame of mine that poses "Why would I want all my contacts to call me thru Jangl?"

I think we've figured out our privacy play, yet we're iterating it as we speak. Of most interest, is how Jangl will extend into personalization and control (and even entertainment). I did admit that those of us in the space will start to look more competitive once we all step up our respective traction levels. (And I CAN'T WAIT to announce some happenings to this end). Those of us that are succeeding will be expanding and begin to resemble each other, and I plan to be on the front end of that fun!

As Dameon mentioned in his blog, Krungthai was great.

Technorati Tags: jangl, phoneboy, Tim Johnson, Listen Outloud, VoIP, Voxilla

New Jangl Widgets Coming Soon

I'm stoked about our upcoming widgets, which are a big improvement on the Jangl user experience. My son likes the grey one on the lower left and my daughter likes he pink one. There will be more skins to choose from. I'll be interested to see what the people have to say.

These will be great for a profile, blog, website or sig file. Just post it, visitors can visit and get a number and call. Then both people can continue to use that same number to reach each other. And text is still on the way for these Jangl #s!

Technorati Tags: jangl

The Police Announce Oakland Show

June 13 @ the Arena in Oakland

I'm so enthused by this, I'm getting some buddies together for a one-time Police tribute act. If you're going to do covers, they should be good ones right?

More here

allfreecalls on ice: THIS WEEKEND ONLY

I knew the news about allfreecalls.net would travel fast. Techcrunch, Shel, Gigaom, Phoneboy and I'm sure others have blogged it. I wasn't going to blog it since I knew so many others would. What else could I add to this conversation? Then I thought about it some more, and decided I would blog it afterall. Besides, the people that read the sites I pointed to don't come here just yet.

A friend of mine, Pat Phelan is an admirable man. You have to read his story to know what I mean. But let me give you a glimpse...

Pat was a chef in a restaurant in Ireland. He grew tired of watching his co-workers spend half their paychecks making phone calls to loved ones in other countries. So he dug his heels in and started a company called Roam4free. He solved a real problem for real people. He then got so busy with Roam4free, that he hung up his apron. Then he expanded with a company called allfreecalls.net. This service gives people based in the U.S. the ability to make calls to loved ones in other countries for free.

Here's how it works: you dial a particular phone number in the state of Iowa, and then dial an international destination number as a second stage, and then talk as long as desired. Again, this is free to callers. It's not free to the caller's carrier, since the carrier pays the phone company in Iowa an access charge for every call that is placed into their switch. This is all due to a tariff that was put in place in order to support these rural phone companies. These companies have figured out how to monetize this opportunity, perhaps in ways that it wasn't intended to be. That's the gripe of a new lawsuit by AT&T anyway.

Due to carrier (AT&T?) pressures, Pat's supplier that hooked him up with the Iowa deal closed doors, leaving allfreecalls.net on ice. Pat is committing to have the service back up and running by Monday, using an alternate supplier.

Regardless of all the behind the scenes details, Pat's doing a great service for many people. It's clear when you learn about how much traffic he's passing. Even if AT&T are successful in halting these kinds of business models, there's no doubt Pat will have done a great deed.

The thing to note here, is the human aspect of all this...of Pat and his continued passion for helping people talk. I think Shel characterized it best when he referred to this as a Robin Hood sort of thing.

Technorati Tags: Roam4free, allcallsfree.net, shel israel, Pat Phelan, gigaom, phoneboy

Iterate or Go Home

Contrary to popular belief, companies aren't always built on paper. Sometimes they can be, but those ones thrive best in mature markets, with mature products and services. I believe the more interesting companies are built on instincts and iteration. Yes, the must be very smart calculations made along the way - I won't discount that. But you must iterate. If you don't have the patience to nurture that reality, go home.

Jangl, while doing lots of the things we said we were going to do, are a million miles evolved since the day we set out. That's because we've learned along the way, and applied those findings in the further development in the product and the company overall.

As an example, our first offering to the online personals market place has been great. It's enabled the company to have traction doing something where dozens of other companies have failed. The good news was, we learned from their findings too:) On the other hand, our first offering direct to end users was far off the mark. It was flat out funky. So then we iterated and got to a better place, where the funk was gone, but there wasn't anything really differentiating. Then we iterated again, applying more of the offering we built for online personals to the direct to end user product. That's been differentiating, kind of cool, but still has some funk. Don't get me wrong, it works great for online relationships that want to graduate to phone relationships. It doesn't work great though, if you've met someone in the offline environment. It's also turned out to be really hard to message on the marketing front. Time to iterate.

So as we've iterated further, we've found that there was some friction to remove. Great. Next up comes a better widget. Coming soon. Next up we'll make a user's Jangl ID = an actual phone number (this is really in the weeds if you don't know the details of Jangl's service). At this point, messaging and general use all becomes much more easy to message and much more easy to adopt.

We've also come to the conclusion that resting our loins on privacy alone won't give people everything we want to give them. So we've begun the transition from "Use Jangl with new people you meet" to "Use Jangl with everyone you meet AND everyone you know". Instinctively, we knew we'd go here at some point, but we never knew when.

The bottom line here, is don't be afraid to veer from what's on paper. Use your gutt. Leverage what you learned today in your company tomorrow. Iterate. See what happens. Beg for forgiveness later if need be;)

Technorati Tags: starups, jangl