The management and marketing communities often mention the importance and the advantages of being an early-adopter (as a consumer, and as a business). But, it is rare to see the opposite: the late-adopter advantage.
Maybe Google finally got it right in its social network approach: stop, step back, analyze and then react. Grant McCracken explains this concept in his blog.
Food for thought.
With a project I was involved in last year, I had a unique chance to work with many Web startups and their APIs ecosystem. An API (or Application Programming Interface) is a set of rules that software engineers create to facilitate the interaction between systems. Most of the time, Web startups use it to provide other businesses and developers some access to their features and data (see Twitter’s API or Facebook’s OpenGraph protocol).
For many Web startups, building and maintaining an open API is a great way to develop relationships with customers, developers, partners and investors. Here is why.
Aside from business and strategic goals, “thinking API” improves the application’s design. In fact, a good API is :
On the other hand, poorly designed APIs can be very dangerous. The fact is that once it’s out, it’s very hard to change it. The ecosystem will rely on it’s design and maintaining useless or resource-intensive features can be costly. You don’t want to end up sacrificing scarce developer energies on stuff that is not creating value in the end. You have only one chance to do it right.
There is no need to say, if some feature can be re-used with an existing API, it should not be recreated. Maintaining many parallel features or a too-fat API can take your focus away from core-business features and prevent you from creating added-value.
An API is a powerful technological asset but it can also be a great marketing tool. A well built API will definitely bring visibility to your business.
For more:
Every entrepreneur starting a new business here in Quebec needs to know the various French language laws specific to the province. It is sad to see many entrepreneurs failing to comply with those, putting their fresh startup at risk. An excellent post (Understanding French Language Laws for Startups) on those laws was posted a few weeks ago on the very well known blog Next Montreal.
A few key points mentionned in the post:
[...] Oaks grow strong in contrary winds and diamonds are made under pressure. - Peter Marshall
In the life of a startup, there is always a lot of pressure resting on the shoulders of it’s founders. After all, they are taking most of (if not all) the risks and they want return on investment. At this point, it looks very tempting to drop off a little bit of this pressure on the employees in order to speed up things. Diamonds are made under pressure, right?
According to the influencial psychologist Donald Olding Hebb, there is a strong relation between pressure and performance. Little pressure is very similar to too much pressure : productivity drops. There is an optimal level of pressure that needs to be reached. Below this level, the work looks boring or uninteresting. Above it, there are chances the employees will feel like they’ll never make it or that the energy they need to deploy largely outweighs the results. If the perceived outcome is smaller than the perceived efforts needed to get there, motivation and the team’s health might get hurt.
For tech startups, rushes are common. Software changes fast, and overnight deliveries are hard to avoid but, efforts should be deployed to keep those at a minimum. Developing a product is a marathon. No one needs an exhausted team after the first sprint.
More reading on this topic :
Lately, I’ve seen a few great bloggers writing about e-mail and how it can be fixed.
To me, e-mail in a business is a communication process (or channel), and there is no precise technique that can be implemented to make it 100% efficient. In fact, processes should be unique because teams and organisations are unique. If a process worked well in another team, there is no way to tell if the process will also work fine without any tuning in another context. These processes and channels are so glued to the business that they are an inherent part of the culture and the business itself. And yes, bad e-mails can be bad for business.
Can people learn how to write good e-mails? Yes! I believe people can learn to write good e-mails (and communicate globally in a better way) as anyone can learn to play tennis and become a better player. Being a good communicator is a skill that can be learned and practiced, right?
To get you started, beth Kollo of the University of Washington put up a proposal for fixing and recreating e-mail that Scott Berkun comments in How To Fix Email: A Radical Proposal.
Want to get better (or help someone get better)? Here are 6 tips that can help you in How to write good e-mails. Seth Godin posted on his blog a nice checklist that is a good place to begin.
Good writing!
A few months ago, I wrote on Can people learn to write good e-mails?.
I believe communicating via e-mail (I mean good and efficient communication) is something people can learn. It is like learning to practice a sport or like learning to write software. In all cases, it takes practice, and some people are better than others at first.
In distributed teams and in (especially) startups, e-mail is a very common communication channel. Your business can benefit a lot by taking the time to teach how to write good e-mails and showing the right example. Here are a few (obvious) tips to help you getting started.
These are pretty obvious but always useful tips to keep in mind when writing an e-mail. Feel free to add yours to the comments.
Giving critical feedback is always an hard task. As managers, we always seek to maintain an healthy work environment. It is essential if you want your team to progress. No matter how hard your team members work to achieve productive work, if there are relationship issues there will be an impact on long-term performance.
It is common to see people misinterpret the messages we try to communicate. One of the dangers in providing feedback is that the concerned team member might take more responsibility for himself for the results than we would credit them. This egocentric bias can cause the individual to feel directly attacked : he might believe his identity or personality are the root causes. But, because a task was not completed as it should have been does not mean the team member is incompetent. In fact, the fear that the message can be misinterpreted can easily slow down a manager from providing essential feedback.
Instead of focusing on the risks, managers should focus on the bright side of critical feedback. Giving good feedback is giving your team member an opportunity to grow and to become a better person. It takes courage, but it is very valuable for an individual and, ultimately, for the team itself.
What do you think is making providing critical feedback a hard task for you?
Git is a distributed revision control system (RCS). Git is open-source and focuses on speed. It was originally developed by Linus Torvalds for the Linux Kernel Project.
Revision control systems allow developers to keep track of the changes they make to their code. Before such systems existed, developers would keep backups of their files in case their changes would break something. In case it happened, they could easily revert to the previously working version.
Such systems are an essential part of any technology business. Without them, it would be very hard to release early and often, quickly revert buggy releases of software, etc.
Decentralized revision control systems (like Git) allow developers to :
Other systems like CVS or Subversion (SVN) are centralized. This means that they require a main repository to exist. Each developer then checkouts a working version from this main repository, and commits back changes when they are complete. In a decentralized system, there is no main repository. Each developer has it’s own complete repository and changes are exchanged across developers.
Conceptually, there are many ways to work with Git. This is what is beautiful with decentralized systems, they allow the team to choose what best suits their needs. Let’s explore two common methodologies :
It is up to the team to decide where is the right place for hosting the remote repositories. Git can be remotely accessed from anywhere (HTTP, NFS, etc.). You can even share your repositories on Dropbox (something that was not possible with Subversion). There is also the famous GitHub.
What revision control tool do you use? Where and how do you share changes to your code? Feel free to add your methodology in the comments.
Last Wednesday (02/02/2011), Pléiade Capital and HEC Montréal were the hosts of a conference on Venture Capital in Québec (in French). This event was the first conference on venture capital organized by students. The speakers were François Gilbert (Anges Québec) and Chris Arsenault (iNovia Capital). This post is a short and simple summary of the topics that have been discussed that evening.
Businesses will always need capital. The question is, what kind of capital does my business need? There are many sources of capital (customers, love money, angels, venture capital, etc.) and some of them are not available to everyone (~8 businesses are chosen out of 500 every year for VC). To play big, you need big returns. Investors in the venture capital world are looking for returns on investment around 20 to 30%. In fact, investors need large returns to compensate on losses. According to M. Gilbert, 15% of the investments will generate all revenues while another 25% of the investments won’t come back. This is why investors are so good at evaluating risks : their job is to measure the risks and the possible gains of each project.
Funds are generally specialized to an industry. This allows the investors to make smarter moves, by helping businesses operating in fields where the fund has expertise. One important fact to note, is that investors do not help only by providing capital. They also act as mentors, where their knowledge of the industry can help the entrepreneur. It is common to see investors work with businesses where synergies can be created. This minimizes the risks and creates a environment where entrepreneurs working in similar fields can help each other succeed.
Usually, investments are made when :
Most of the time, the first business plan never makes it. Ideas and strategies evolve (to fit the ever changing market) and this is why startups need “exceptional” managers : managers that can adapt quickly and reinvent their businesses as soon as the market changes. Entrepreneurs must not be too tenacious. If their ideas do not work out, they must be intelligent enough to understand it, and react consequently (easier said than done).
According to the speakers, Quebec has a pretty healthy Venture Capital ecosystem. However, there are still a few challenges to overcome, including :
What do you think the Venture Capital / entrepreneurial ecosystem needs the most in the next years? What do you think will be the greatest challenges for young and innovative entrepreneurs?
Ever wanted to leverage Zend Framework for your CLI applications?
Well, I did, and I’ve found an excellent and up-to-date guide for doing so, thanks to Joseph Chereshnovsky!
Edit (02/06/2011) : There is also a nice set of slides on the same topic built by Cal Evans that can be found here.