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The Single, Most Important Secret to Success

Posted by Mike Taber on March 16th, 2010

iStock_000010304538XSmall About 6 weeks ago, I had dinner at a pizza place near Boston with some fellow developers. We were generally discussing various aspects of business, things to do, things not to do, etc. One of the guys asked me a question that I feel like I get quite frequently:

“What’s the most important thing you need to do to be successful as a single founder?”

I immediately came up with three different things, but settled on explaining the importance of setting goals and having a plan for meeting those goals. We talked about how to go about setting goals for a few minutes and then went on to discuss other things.

This isn’t a new question to me, but I was uncomfortable with the answer. I seem to answer it differently every time I’m asked and not usually the same way twice. This past Friday, as I sat white-knuckled in a small turbo-prop plane that was being buffeted violently by winds over the mountains of West Virginia, it dawned on me why I had been uncomfortable with my answer.

I was wrong.

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The Builder and the Salesman

Posted by Mike Taber on March 9th, 2010

Job Well Done I published a popular article named “The Single Founder Myth” a few years back. In this article, I contended that contrary to popular opinion, it was not impossible to go it alone with a software startup and be successful. To clarify up front, what I mean by “going it alone” is that you build up the company without handing over equity to someone else, be it either investors or other co-founders.

In this article, I gave several reasons why companies have multiple founders and countered the necessity of each for a single founder company. I came to a sudden realization the other day why most technology companies have two founders.

It’s because one of them is a builder, and the other is a salesman.

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Be Smart, Make a Ton of Money Doing Stupid Stuff

Posted by Mike Taber on January 8th, 2010

Several weeks ago, someone pointed me to an article on a blog I’d never read before. It was very profound it its simplicity. It was called Smart People should do Stupid Stuff. The basic concept of this blog post was that there are millions of dollars to be made doing things on the internet that anyone is capable of doing. I mean quite literally, anyone can do these things, regardless of how smart or how dumb you are. Here’s a very short excerpt, because I know you’re not going to go actually read the entire article. (more…)

The Day the MicroISV Movement Died

Posted by Mike Taber on November 17th, 2009

Rest In Peace #1

I remember the day very clearly, although it was not apparent to me at the time. It was the day that the Micro-ISV movement died.

A Brief History

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the history of the Micro-ISV, I’ll provide it for you here. Eric Sink is widely credited with the creation of the term “MicroISV”. As far back as May 8, 2003, Eric was talking about what he referred to as “Small ISV’s“. The concept is rather simple in nature. An “ISV” is an independent software vendor, a phrase which is derived primarily from the Microsoft ecosystem and refers to software companies that are not Microsoft. As for the “Small” part, they’re small companies with anywhere from 3-100 employees. It’s a pretty simple definition, but definitive as well.

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Re-branding Products, Services and Companies

Posted by Mike Taber on November 9th, 2009

The past several weeks I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the work associated with and the consequences of re-branding something. In part, I’m talking about my Blog but also some of the products that I have developed and some of my services offerings through my consulting company. The process made me sit down, think about re-branding in general, and do some research. Here’s what I learned.

iStock_000009820211XSmall

Why Should You Re-brand?

There are a few different reasons to re-brand a product, offering, or company. The first is to shed a negative image. On May 11th, 1996 a DC-9 flown crashed in the Everglades killing 110 people. The airline that owned the plane was ValuJet. They were grounded by the government for three months following the incident. When they were given permission to begin flying again, they found it very difficult to attract customers because the public perception was that their low fares lead to shoddy maintenance and ultimately the crash. In 1997, ValuJet purchased a competitor that was one-third their size and re-branded the entire company to use the name of their newly acquired competitor. That company was AirTran.

The second reason for re-branding is to attract new customers. Sometimes even the name for a product doesn’t quite make sense. It’s unwieldy and doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. In early 2007, a company called SimulScribe was selling voicemail-to-text software and felt the company name was holding them back. They received a lot of their business from word of mouth referrals, but the name was difficult to spell and didn’t roll off the tongue.

They hired a re-branding consultant which ultimately didn’t work out. Eventually, the founder came up with the new name while on his own during a flight from LA to New York City. That name was PhoneTag. They had some challenges, but the new name seemed to work out really well. Their daily sign up rate is up 40% and the number of customer referrals has tripled. The only downside to the re-branding effort was not doing it sooner.

The third reason to re-brand is to focus your efforts, either because you didn’t have focus in the past, or because you’re trying to appeal to a sub-market. Many manufacturers re-brand their products to enter a lower end segment because they don’t want to dilute the value of their core brand or don’t want the new brand to be dragged down by the old one. For example Lexus is well known as a luxury car, but it is owned by Toyota. Dexxa is the name on low priced computer mice, but is manufactured by Logitech. There are a lot of other examples, but the key component here is making sure that the new brand doesn’t have a negative effect on the old brand or be influenced by the old brand.

Problems With Re-branding

Re-branding is a difficult thing to do correctly. It’s easy to change the name of something. It’s much harder to make it work to your advantage and in exactly the way that you intend. One of the difficulties with re-branding is striking a balance between attracting new customers, and alienating old ones. This applies whether you’re re-branding a product, a service or a blog. In a way, readers of your blog are customers. They have been attracted to your site for one or more articles that were written and subscribed for the same reasons. Re-branding can alienate some of them because you might not be focused on what originally attracted them, so some attrition is going to occur.

The same is true for products or services. A balance must be struck between going too far in the re-branding effort, and not far enough. How far you should go is dictated by your reasons for re-branding. If it is to shed a negative image, you will need to do a complete overhaul. If your intent is to attract new customers, then a mid-level change is required to strike a balance. And if you simply want to reinforce your brand with the existing customer base, then perhaps a fresh coat of paint will suffice.

No matter what, you need to have a plan moving forward. Without a plan, the re-branding process will not be as effective as it needs to be to make it work.

Re-branding The Single Founder Blog

So all of that re-branding mumbo-jumbo was a lead in to this. What follows are the efforts I’ve taken thus far, and will take in the future to re-brand my blog. I’ll post about some of my other re-branding efforts in the future, but one thing at a time.

Subscription Methods

In the past, I only offered RSS as a subscription method, but within the last month or so, I added the ability to subscribe via via email using Google Feedburner as the back end. It’s worked out well enough so far, and I’ve only had one person unsubscribe since I implemented it at the end of September. He or she might have switched to RSS, but I don’t know for sure. Other email subscribers have trickled in, but I suspect that people prefer to use RSS to manage their subscriptions instead of email. I’ve gathered a lot more RSS subscribers in the past 4 weeks than email subscribers. I’ve also started using and in only a week with absolutely zero marketing, I have a modest following of about 20 people already, none of whom I’ve ever met face to face.

The reality is that I have no good way of tracking whether I’m really getting the message out about being a single founder and running your own company from the comfort of your own home. I know others are making taking a similar journey and making it work, but I feel that the journey itself is just as important as the destination. I’d like to share that journey with as many people as possible and measuring subscribers is a much better indicator than unique website visitors.

Face Lift

Next, is obviously the face lift itself. I implemented a new theme, but the categories need to be changed up a bit because the new theme has them listed across the top of the menu bar and doesn’t display all of them. There’s a few cleanup items to do concerning the excerpts on the main page and adding a few descriptive pages to the site, but it looks a lot better than the previous SimpleX Wordpress theme I was using. I have a list of things that I’m working through right now.

New Domain Name

Perhaps the most significant change I’m making is to focus the content of the site more on how to build a business consisting of a recurring revenue stream as a single founder company, which some refer to as a solopreneur. About 2 years ago, I blogged about trying to land the singlefounder.com domain, only to find that someone else registered it a few days before I had. It had been on my radar to snag the domain name for months, but I waited because I was an idiot. Actually, I felt that I didn’t have the time to go about doing something significant with it so wasn’t willing to shell out a mere $10 for a domain when I wasn’t ready to use it. That’s prudent for some things, but not domain names.

Anyway, I contacted Scott Preston, who had purchased the site immediately after he registered it. He is a fellow blogger based in Ohio, has written a book on programming robots using Java, and seems like my kind of techie. Unfortunately, he wasn’t terribly interested in selling the domain as he had some of the same ideas I did about building it out into a place where people could leverage it as a resource for building single founder companies. Fast forward two years and he still hadn’t done anything with it. In fact, it didn’t point to a server at all. I considered making him another offer, but decided against it. I don’t know what he would have sold it me for or whether he would have sold it at all. In the end, Scott didn’t bother to renew the domain and I ended up buying the domain name as it expired without forking over loads of cash.

I’ll give the story behind how to buy expiring domain names in the next couple of weeks, but I think you’ll find the process interesting. I also managed to snag miketaber.com using the same method. If you don’t want to miss that story, subscribe now using either RSS or email. *hint* *hint*

More Frequent Blog Posts

For those of you who have been following me for the past few years, you’ll have noticed that since 2007, I’ve been rather absent. I’ve had a lot going on. I’ve added two children to my family, expanded my company, contracted my company, ridden an economic boom, suffered through the economic slowdown, opened an office, closed an office, and finished a Masters degree, among other things. It’s a lot to deal with, but I think I’ve learned how to manage it all moving forward. This past month, I’ve started writing a lot more and you can expect more of the same as time goes on. If you’ve lost faith since 2007 that I would shed some light on running a business as a single founder company, my apologies. I aim to right that wrong ASAP.

On that note, leaving comments or questions helps keep me going. If you want to help keep this blog going and appreciate the advice, distraction from reality, and general edutainment that it gives you, just post to the comments. It’s virtually no effort on your part, but does a great deal for my motivation to continue.

This Time It Will Be Different

In any case, I intend to move forward with the singlefounder.com domain name to provide a real identity for my blog and to reflect my goals for the future. I’m still a tech geek at heart. I love writing software, I really like interfacing software and hardware; doing cool geeky things is fun, but doing fun stuff doesn’t provide the lifestyle that I want. At least not yet it hasn’t.

I’ve been self employed for more than 4 years now and I’m not quite where I want to be. I’ve come to realize that I know exactly why I’m not. It’s because I lost focus of my goals. I used to post my goals at the beginning of each year. I did it in 2006 and again in 2007. Somehow I got off track posting those goals in 2008 and 2009, but realistically I got off track long before then. You see, once the consulting business started to take off, I never reviewed the goals I had written to begin with. I just ran off into the weeds without looking at the map I laid out. Bad Single Founder, no donut! It’s time to change all that.

In a way, I feel like PC guy in the Mac commercials. “This time it will be different. Trust me.”

But this time it will be different and for one very important reason. My life has changed, and my new goals reflect that. Back in 2005 when I started my journey toward self employment, I had one goal in mind, which was to run my own company and not have to work for someone else. It’s been 4 years now and I’ve been largely successful with that. It hasn’t been quite as smooth as I would have liked, but it has worked out well enough so far. Now I have a new goal which simply builds on the previous one.

My Next Goal

To transition my situation from offering consulting services to offering software products.

Over the past several years, I’ve traveled a lot for work, averaging about 3 months of every year on the road. It was fun at first. I flew all over the US from Minneapolis to southern Texas. From Boston to Vegas. I even did work overseas, flying to Paris, Athens, San Juan and working with a client out of Australia. I’m married, but the money was great and the wife understood what I was doing. Then I had two kids.

It’s a lot harder to leave two kids at home when they’re so young, because they grow up so fast and I feel like I missed quite a few things; like rolling over for the first time, the first few steps, the first hand wave, the first high five, etc. I probably would have missed them anyway, regardless of how I was making ends meet. But at such a young age, they learn to do so much in a week that I felt like I missed a lot more than I should have due to my travels. Besides I really liked traveling at first. I loved it even. It’s very exciting to fly into a new city or country, explore it as much as you are able in the time that you have, and then go off to something new. It just doesn’t work for me anymore.

So my new focus is to run my business completely from home to spend more time with my family, while making what I hope will be a substantial living doing it. It’s going to take time to put all of the different pieces together, but this blog will serve as the place where I document the journey, my successes, my failures, and the tools I use to get there.

The nice part is that I have a much more substantial network of people to help me than I did several years ago. I have software and hardware infrastructures in place from my consulting company, and at this point, I understand what it takes to maintain a company and grow it.

I will post my concrete goals in a blog entry next week, so stay tuned for more detailed information. Just one other quick hint before I go. Subscribe to this blog. I promise that I’ll make it well worth your while as I describe in detail my successes and failures on this expanded journey.

How to Sell Enterprise Software

Posted by Mike Taber on October 29th, 2009

One of the biggest differences between selling software to small businesses versus selling into the Enterprise space is the price. Most people think that it has to do with how well the software scales and it’s ability to do its job on an “Enterprise” level, whatever that it supposed to mean. Others will say it has to do with the feature sets and whether you bought the Micro-ISV edition or the Enterprise Edition. Simply not true.

The one and only difference is the total price on the bottom of the bill. And it is this total price that dictates whether or not you need sales reps to sell your software.

First, let me quantify roughly what I consider to be the different market segments. This is mostly based on my experience as a Symantec partner, so your definitions may vary but I want to give you an idea of what I’m talking about. In my world, up to 1,000 client computers is considered small to medium business(SMB), up to 5,000 is the Enterprise, and above that is Large Enterprise.

The Problem

At any given company, managers and directors have a certain level of purchasing authority. Below a certain dollar amount, they have free reign and can buy whatever they feel is appropriate and within their yearly budget without getting a signature from their manager for approval. So $50 isn’t a problem. Spending $50,000 isn’t quite as easy.

The problem of selling “Enterprise” software comes about because of the size of the company making the purchase. If I’m selling widgets for $50 each, I can sell just one to an Enterprise level company and they won’t even think twice. But what if they want one for every employee?

Suddenly the price tag for your widgets went from $50 to $50,000 for a 1,000 employee company, and to $250,000 for a 5,000 employee company. These companies make millions, or even billions but they’re not stupid. They put spending controls in place to ensure that people aren’t wasting money on frivolous things. It’s just common sense.

Unfortunately for the vendor, this prolongs the sales process from what might have been a few minutes on the vendors’ website, to one that takes several weeks or even months to complete. This is why sales reps are hired to sell into Enterprise accounts. The sales process needs to be managed from beginning to end.

What does the sales rep do?

Well, they buy dinner, they buy drinks. They make sure you get drunk and have a good time at whatever event they happened to convince you to come to. Eventually, you like them enough, or are drunk enough to blow thousands of dollars of money that isn’t yours and everyone is happy.

I’ve seen that happen, but most companies don’t really work that way. Mainly, it is the job of the sales rep to manage the sale and try to close the deal. That means determining if there’s an opportunity for a sale, and then driving that sale to its Natural End. Note that I don’t say to completion. The Natural End of a sale can be one of four things.

You won the deal
A competitor won the deal
The sale got pushed into the future
The sale died somewhere along the way

Winning the deal or losing it to the competition are self-explanatory. Sales get pushed to the future for a variety of reasons. Some are budget related, some are concerns over the product or vendor, etc. We’re going to focus on the last outcome, which is that the sale died.

When a sale dies, it typically happens because you weren’t paying attention to something important. This tends to be the most painful outcome. If you are head to head with a competitor, at least you had a shot at it. When deals get pushed, you still have a shot, but you won’t receive a PO anytime soon.

The biggest problem with deals that die is that you wasted your time, money and effort chasing something that you never had a chance at winning. Everything you did was for something that wasn’t ever going to happen. Unfortunately, we’re all too human and think that because the customer is talking to us, we have a chance at winning.

Let me break you of that habit right now. Just because a customer is talking to you and likes you doesn’t mean they’re going to buy anything from you. In fact, it might be your best friend in the whole world on the other end of the phone who completely trusts you and it still might not happen.

Sales reps are typically compensated by the volume of sales they make, not the relationships they have with the customers they talk to. To be successful making sales at the Enterprise level, you need to spend your time working on deals that have a good chance of landing, and avoid talking to customers who are either unwilling, or unable to make a purchase. So how do you tell the difference? Enter the sales methodology BANT.

BANT

BANT is an acronym which stands for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. Without all four of these things, any deal you’re working on is going to die before you get a PO. This methodology technically is applicable to any sale, regardless of the price. But it becomes a lot more important at the Enterprise level where you are spending human resources chasing a small handful of customers. A sales rep can only talk to so many customers in a day, but a single website can “talk” to millions of customers all at the same time. So what do these terms mean and why are they important?

Budget – Make sure that whomever you’re talking to has a budget for whatever you’re selling or that they can get one. And remember that just because someone says they can get the money, doesn’t mean that they can. You can have all the ROI justifications you want in your back pocket, and if they don’t have the cash to spend, it’s just not going to happen. Spending $1 million now to save $10 million sounds great, but if they don’t have $1 million, it doesn’t matter.

Authority - Is the person you’re talking to the guy or gal who makes the final decision? Does he put his name on the PO? If not, you need to find out who does make the decision and talk to them instead. It’s ok to ask to talk to this other person. If you’re afraid of offending the person, then you’re in the wrong business. Always try to talk to the person in charge. You can convince every single one of his minions that what you’re selling will really help them out, but at the end of the day, they’re not the ones who have the authority to make the decision. Without speaking to him or her, you won’t know if there are other projects that take precedence.

Need - Is there a genuine need for what you’re selling? At the personal level, luxury items like chocolate and nice cars are not absolutely necessary. A Honda gets you to the same place as a Ferrari. It might be slower, but it gets the job done. Find out if what you’re selling is a necessity, or if they can get by with the way things are today.

Timeline - How long can things go on the way they are without addressing the issues that your product or service would address? If you sell RFID tags which help companies do inventory, ask how long they can do their inventory manually. If they can go forever, move on to the next lead. Remember that you can’t push a rope.

Summary

It’s important to make sure that the people you’re talking to have the ability to move forward and make a purchase. If they don’t have the ability to move forward, it doesn’t matter how badly they want what you have to offer. It’s a little unnatural to avoid calling people whom you’ve started to develop a relationship with, but it’s necessary if you want to make the best use of your time.

The fact of the matter is that this methodology applies whether you’re selling Enterprise software or dish detergent. Understanding the methodology behind the sales process is the key to being successful, no matter what it is that you’re actually selling or who you’re selling it to.

Do you have a favorite sales methodology that works for you? Leave a comment and let us know.

Sales reps are typically compensated by the volume of sales they make, not the “quality” of the customers they sell to.

A lesson in economics for the CFO of Microsoft

Posted by Mike Taber on October 27th, 2009

I happened across this little tidbit a few days ago and was a little surprised that someone as high up as the CFO of Microsoft might actually think this way.

Microsoft CFO Chris Liddle had this to say on a conference call after their Q3 earnings report.

Businesses’ reluctance to upgrade PCs, he said, has to fade eventually. “This can’t continue forever,” Liddell said. “Eventually those PCs wear out and have to be replaced. We hope and expect (the refresh cycle) to be next year.”

I realize that picking on Microsoft is like trying to hit the broad side of a barn with a rock, but this is just so easy I can’t help myself. Really Chris? Are you kidding me? I’m sure that as the CFO of Microsoft, you probably think that computers break every three years like magic. The warranty on the hardware expires and *POOF*, the computer dies and is thrown in the recycling bin, along with all the Microsoft software that was installed. Naturally, this happens in every company around the world, and naturally they all rush out and buy a brand new computer and brand new software for every employee as soon as the first one breaks.

The reality is that it just doesn’t work that way.

Skeptics who read my blog are going to point out that he said “eventually”. I’ll concede the point that “eventually” everything is going to wear out, but he “expects” that to be next year. Computers tend to be different than most other physical goods and if this recession has shown people anything, it’s that doing a full hardware refresh for the entire company every three years is no longer necessary. In fact, I would argue that it hasn’t really been necessary for the last three years. So what makes the next three any different?

The answer is absolutely nothing.

Companies across the world said loud and clear “We’re not going to upgrade our operating systems to that piece of garbage you call Vista.” And you know the kicker?

NOTHING BAD HAPPENED!

Amazing. Just absolutely amazing. People still bought new hardware though. So, lets talk about why.

Corporate Hardware Refreshes

Companies have a tendency to replace PC’s every 3 years because they want to, not necessarily because they need to. From around 1995 – 2007, companies were conditioned to buy new computers for every employee every 3 – 5 years because the hardware was so dramatically improved in the course of 3 years that they could see instant productivity gains. At the time, buying newer hardware was a relatively inexpensive way to get great productivity increases out of workers for relatively low cost. Moore’s law essentially held true and every 18 months, processing power would double. This loosely translated to doubling the speed of computers every 18 months.

Then the speed of silicon hit a brick wall and it wasn’t cost effective to get faster processors. But Moore’s Law persevered for a bit longer and on May 25, 2005 Intel released the Pentium D. With that release, multi-core processors started to take over the market. Instead of faster processors, you have more of them in a single chip. And the business world was content with the Pentium D, Core Duo, Core 2 Duo, Athlon MP, Athlon XP, and all the other multi-core processors that came out.

Suddenly, it’s 2007 and Microsoft releases Vista and it bombs hard core. People still refresh their PC’s because they think they need to, but they choose not to upgrade to Vista, instead choosing a 5 year old operating system for their brand spanking new hardware. Now here’s the problem.

All these companies bought dual processor computers with beefed up hardware specs because that’s what it would have taken to run Vista. Compliments of Wikipedia, below are the minimum hardware requirements to run Vista.

Windows Vista system requirements^[51]
	Vista Capable	Vista Premium Ready
Processor	800 MHz^[60]	1 GHz
Memory	512 MB	1 GB
Graphics card	DirectX 9.0 capable	DirectX 9.0 capable and WDDM 1.0 driver support
Graphics memory	32 MB	128 MB
HDD capacity	20 GB	40 GB
HDD free space	15 GB
Other drives	DVD-ROM

And here are the specs for Windows 7:

Minimum hardware requirements for Windows 7^[94]
Architecture	32-bit	64-bit
Processor	1 GHz 32-bit processor	1 GHz 64-bit processor
Memory (RAM)	1 GB of RAM	2 GB of RAM
Graphics Card	DirectX 9 graphics processor with WDDM driver model 1.0 (For Aero)
HDD free space	16 GB of available disk space	20 GB of available disk space
Optical drive	DVD drive (only to install from DVD/CD Media)

You’ll notice that the hardware requirements to run Windows 7 are basically the same as they were for Vista.

No business in their right mind bought a computer in 2007 that had a 1GHz processor. Not even notebooks were that lame and netbooks didn’t exist yet. At a minimum, they were at least 2GHz and had dual-core processors because that’s what it took to sell computers in 2007. Computers today are not significantly better than what was available in 2007, as much as Intel, AMD, Dell, HP and all the other computer manufacturers would like to have you believe. All of this means that the hardware refresh rate can be extended for those PC’s bought in 2007 with virtually no ill effects.

Some pretty smart companies over the past few years figured out that if you can extend a hardware refresh from every 3 years to every 4 years, the company will achieve a substantial 25% yearly savings. If you extend it from 3 years to 5 years, it becomes a 40% yearly savings. That means that a company with 1,000 employees using computers with an average cost of $1,500 are going to spend $500,000 on hardware alone every year if they do a complete hardware refresh every 3 years. If they are able to extend it to four years, they’ll save $125,000 each year and extending the hardware refresh to 5 years, saves $200k every year.

When the guy in charge of the IT budget is being forced to do more with less each year, he’s going to quickly realize that buying new hardware for every drone in the company isn’t going to help him do his job. He’s going to find places to cut the budget which doesn’t involve the lost of his employees. The hardware refresh cycle is the perfect place because there’s very little downside and a huge upside.

Why Companies Refresh Hardware

There’s a short list of reasons why companies use a 3 year hardware refresh rate.

They have money to burn
They’ve always done it that way
The hardware today is so much better than it was 3 years ago
The warranty on the hardware has expired

That’s about it. Until a few years go, the first three were true. They’re not anymore. As for the fourth, it’s called a warranty. Most major computer vendors offer 3 year warranties on computers for their corporate customers. Depending on your vendor, you may be able to swing a 4 or even a 5 year warranty for just a fraction of the cost. Replacing parts is a heck of a lot cheaper than replacing entire computers, so they’ll save buckets of cash by extending the hardware refresh, whether they get extended warranties or not.

Back to Microsoft

The latest hardware refresh has obviously been delayed for quite some time and it is impacting both Microsoft and the major computer vendors. As the economy improves, we’re going to see a lot of companies that initially pushed out their hardware refresh commit to it and spend the money. Microsoft will probably still sell millions of copies of Windows 7 and Bill Lumbergh’s stock will go up 1/4 of a point.

Unfortunately, many of these companies are going to realize that the latest hardware refresh didn’t do them a bit of good beyond renewing their hardware warranties. The next hardware refresh will get pushed out even longer as companies realize that it just isn’t necessary. When that happens, Microsoft is going to be in real trouble, as are the PC manufacturers whose major revenue source is selling hardware.

Earlier this year, Dell bought Perot Systems in an effort to boost their lucrative services arm and compete better with HP and IBM. Smart move. I think they see this coming and realize that the virtualization trend isn’t the only thing working against them. Moore’s law has been undergone a transition such that it now applies to overall computing power, not just raw speed. Past a certain point, 99% of corporate employees just don’t need more computing power. It’s going to waste. So why should you upgrade those PC’s?

The smart answer is: You don’t.

Microsoft needs to start looking ahead beyond Windows because it’s not going to be a cash cow for much longer. The fact that people are still using an operating system that is bearing down on 7 years old is telling, especially when it’s in preference to a more recent release. It means that customers don’t see a compelling reason to upgrade. This is part of the reason that Apple is doing so well with the Mac.

Without a compelling reason to upgrade, customers aren’t buying new licenses or upgrading old ones and Microsoft isn’t making nearly as much money. Microsoft uses the money they make from Windows to fund other business lines, so if the margin on Windows starts to falter 5 years out, they’re going to have to make some hard choices. It makes me wonder if I’ll even care in five years. Will you? Let me know your thoughts by commenting below.

The Widescreen Laptop Conspiracy

Posted by Mike Taber on April 4th, 2007

For the past six to eight weeks, I’ve been on the lookout for a new laptop. Now, I know that I have high standards, but I can’t believe that some of the things that I really want in a laptop are no longer available. About a year ago, my old Dell Inspiron 8100 was about to bite the dust. It was 6 years old, overheated frequently, one of the two batteries I had was essentially a short circuit, and did I mention it was six years old?

One of the main reasons I bought that laptop was that it went well with my 20″ LCD monitor. They both had the same resolution, and 1600×1200 resolution on a 15″ screen really isn’t that bad once you’re used to it. In fact, when you get used to it it’s very hard to go to anything else. The middle of last year, I broke down and bought a new laptop. I was a little bit concerned that the screen resolution wasn’t quite what I was used to, but it was a widescreen monitor. Apple didn’t make anything else for their 15″ MacBook Pro series, so that’s what I went with.

I’ve been using this thing for just shy of a year now, and I have to be honest: I have some pretty major gripes about this laptop, which I’ll cover in a different article. Don’t get me wrong, the raw power and the light weight of the MacBook Pro are great. But using BootCamp isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. More on that later.

So here were the criteria that I put forth for my new laptop:

Dual core is a must. Don’t care whether it’s Core 2 Duo or Athlon X2. Either would work fine.
I want 2GB of RAM. This shouldn’t be hard to do, although I would prefer a single 1GB RAM chip installed so I could buy the additional RAM at a reasonable price.
15″ screen. It can be 15.0″, 15.1″, or 15.4″. I don’t really care. I don’t want 14″ because the screen is too small, and I don’t want 17″ because they’re too heavy. Neither of those would fit well into my laptop bag and I don’t care to blow another $60 on another laptop bag.
1600×1200 resolution. Having been running my Macbook Pro at 1440×900 for the nine months, I can’t tell you how much I miss that extra 300 pixels at the bottom of the screen. I’m not a fan of widescreen, so I’d prefer not to have WUXGA.
7200 RPM main hard drive. Doesn’t need to be large. 60GB would probably work fine. I use an external 80GB USB drive to house VMWare images and the system performs better with VMWare running on a separate drive.
Must be reasonably light weight. I’m somewhat willing to compromise on this. I know I won’t find anything as light as the Macbook, but the 1600×1200 resolution is more important.

I didn’t think that these requirements were too much to ask. My current search for a new laptop has run the gauntlet of every reputable notebook maker I could find. I’ve looked at Dell, HP, Alienware, Prostar, Sony, Toshiba, Gateway, etc… It turns out that finding a laptop with a screen resolution of 1600×1200 these days is close to impossible. Since I bought my last laptop back in the year 2000, the 1600×1200 screen resolution has become less common rather than more common. The ONLY laptop I’ve found that meets that criteria is a Panasonic Toughbook 51 from NexTag.com and it’s really not what I’m looking for. Everything else has been widescreen, which as I said before, isn’t something I particularly care for.

Part of the reason laptop manufacturers no longer make UXGA screens is that widescreen laptops are cheaper to manufacture because the screens have less screen real estate overall. It’s hard to quantify this without having two LCD’s that are nearly identical to compare, so as an example we’ll use Dell’s 20″ 2007FP monitor and compare it to the Dell 20″ 2007FPW because excepting the screen resolution, they are virtually identical. The first thing you notice is that the 2007FP retails for $449 while the 2007FPW retails for $399. Comparing the screen resolutions, we have 1600×1200 and 1680×1050. So what? That’s basically the same, right?

Actually, they’re not. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist here. Just do the math. 1600×1200=1,920,000 pixels while 1680×1050=1,764,000 pixels. That’s nearly a 9% difference in screen real estate for the “same 20 inch screen” yet the retail cost increase is roughly 12.5%. But nobody pays retail for these things, right? After all, Dell runs deals every week in an effort to top your local supermarket in the number of deals they give you. Current sale prices are $384 and $359, respectively. Voila! You’re getting a better deal by buying the 4:3 format screen as opposed to the widescreen based on raw percentages. With computer margins as thin as they are, laptop manufacturers are being squeezed to save money anywhere they can. Going back to our widescreen laptop problem, using widescreen monitors on their laptops is how they shave dollars off the cost.

If you look at LCD monitors larger than 20″ from Dell, you’ll find that all of them are widescreen and it’s not possible to get one larger than 20″ with the 4:3 format. One rumor I read from a laptop forum last fall was that there were production problems making UXGA screens, but I suspect that’s not the case. They were making 15″ monitors with 1600×1200 resolution 7 years ago so unless someone deleted a hard drive that had some important information on how to do it, they still have the technology to do it. If there were supply problems, laptop makers would get it resolved. If you go to Pricewatch.com and look for UXGA notebooks, there’s only one on the entire site.

You also might think that these are laptops, so their video cards aren’t up to par but that’s not true either. Again, laptop makers were selling UXGA screens on laptops 7 years ago so technology has only gotten better. Besides, my Macbook Pro supports an external connection to a 2560×1600 monitor!!! I never did real well at Calculus, but something tells me that’s a much larger number than 1600×1200.

So we know that it’s still technically possible to make UXGA notebooks; what bothers me is that they’ve stopped making them. What’s even more mystifying is why more developers and CAD engineers aren’t complaining. There are a few people commenting on the lack of high screen resolutions for higher end laptops on the Dell IdeaStorm website, but not enough to make a difference. In a world where mobility has become more and more important, laptop vendors are responding with 17″ laptops with WUXGA screens. Let me make one thing clear to laptop makers.

For software development purposes, or dare I say most business purposes, widescreen sucks.

Are we clear on that? Now, I realize that widescreen has a place in the world. People in the accounting department use spreadsheets for which widescreen could be useful to see more columns of their financial statements. Home users would certainly want to be able to watch movies on their laptops. But isn’t it entirely possible that having more vertical screen real estate would be just as important as horizontal real estate? Indeed it would. I like ketchup on my burgers. On my cheesecake, not so much. I love widescreen for movies. For writing code… not so much. Everything has a place, and widescreen does not have a place on my laptop.

The astute reader will point out that there are many 15″ notebooks out there that feature 1920×1200 LCD’s. To this, I will refer you to my previous point: that widescreen sucks for software development and most business purposes. Somehow, writing a design document in letterbox format doesn’t appeal to me and I don’t remember the last time I had a single line of code that was so long that I needed a widescreen monitor to see it all. The problem with widescreen is that you are sacrificing height for width, when for software development purposes, the opposite is what you need. I need to see more lines of code, not less. The only conceivable benefit of a widescreen would be to have multiple windows open, and 1920 pixels just isn’t enough to have multiple software development applications open side by side. Anyone who’s ever used Visual Studio would know this. Heck, when I’m using Viso Enterprise Architect on my desktop, I use two 20″ monitors to get me 3200×1200 and shift all of the tabbed windows onto my other monitor. Guess what? I still wish I had more vertical real estate. I’m tempted to move to 4 monitors in order to get it.

It’s an unfortunate reality that over the past few years, the push for widescreen televisions has carried over so much into laptops. It’s as if laptops are suddenly no longer used for anything else except watching movies. Let’s think about this for a minute. What percentage of time that you use your laptop are you watching movies vs. doing something where widescreen really doesn’t help? I think I’ve watched a grand total of 3 movies on my widescreen laptop in the last 9 months. To me, that in no way justifies a complete transition to widescreen laptops.

As applications move from the desktop to the web, browser based applications will become more and more prevalent. If you’re a web application developer, widescreen is a terrible waste of otherwise good screen real estate. There’s a limit to the width of the web pages that you design because you have to be sure that the majority of people will be able to see everything horizontally without scrolling right and left. The standard 4:3 format seems like a better fit for not only the developers, but for the web application users as well. What’s worse is the fact that our option to choose widescreen or standard format is being eliminated entirely. We no longer have a choice, as illustrated by the fact that there is only one high resolution laptop left on the market.

I blame Apple for part of this transition. For years, widescreen has been the only format available for their computers. They’ve morphed their company into something of a media mogul with the iPod and iTunes. With the recent release of AppleTV, they’re poised to enter the video market after dominating the audio market. Somehow, that translates into hundreds of lemming companies yanking standard format laptops from the shelves and replacing them with widescreen. Is there a good reason? I don’t think so, but lets take a closer look.

What are the real arguments for widescreen? As I mentioned before, you can fit more columns on a screen in Excel. Ooh. A whole 3 extra columns and 30 less rows. Yea, I’m not excited about that, either.

How about the fact that using a laptop on a plane is a little bit easier because the laptop isn’t as deep and fits better onto the tray table. That’s a good reason. Of course, since it’s wider, you no longer have room for soda and peanuts. What, no peanuts? Just soda I guess. I’ll hold it and type one handed because my laptop is too wide to actually set my soda down.

Yep. That sucks too, and it’s a legitimate problem for those of you who haven’t had the ‘pleasure’ of this problem.

What about watching movies? Ah yes. The proverbial golden hammer. In my eyes, that’s something of a lame excuse given that business class laptops are meant for well… business purposes and I don’t know anyone running a business that makes money from watching movies. For all you widescreen fanatics out there complaining about “artists rights“, feel free to chime in on this at any time. Artists rights have nothing to do with the screen. It has to do with the format of the medium (that being VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, HDDVD, etc). If you want to watch a movie, get a TV, a PSP, or a portable DVD player. Let the rest of us get our laptops with screen sizes and resolutions that actually help us do our jobs.

I can’t think of any particularly good reasons to have widescreen LCD’s on laptops or to make them generally unavailable on larger LCD’s that are intended as desktop monitors, so I pose this simple innocuous question. What good is widescreen on a laptop? Anyone?

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How to get any job you want

Posted by Mike Taber on January 11th, 2007

“Peter, most people don’t like their jobs. But you go out there and try to find something that makes you happy.”
- Joanne, from the movie Office Space

Look where you will, and there are statistics showing that anywhere from 50% – 87% of people are unhappy with their jobs. No matter how you decide to read the statistics or how much faith you put in statistics, even 50% is a high number. Just a quick tally of your coworkers, divide by two, and if those people had a better offer, they’d be gone. Chances are good that they’re not the people you’d want to be gone because statistically speaking, just as many good people would leave as people you didn’t care to work with.

So if even by conservative numbers half of all people don’t like their jobs, why is the turnover rate at most companies so “low”? I say low as a relative term, as it varies widely by industry but most industries have turnover rates that are under 50%. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics , the average turnover rate is 3.2%. The way they calculate it seems a bit funky, but bear with me because the actual turnover is an order of magnitude lower than the people who are unhappy with their jobs.

Essentially what we have are two numbers showing that the turnover rate is under 5%, yet the number of people unhappy with their jobs is at least 50%. Only one out of every ten people who want to change jobs are doing so.

Why the Discrepancy?

Any number of factors could be contributing to this discrepancy. For example, just because people are unhappy with their jobs doesn’t mean they’re looking for new ones. Starting a new job is stressful, and the anticipation of that experience is similar. Most people don’t go looking for unpleasant experiences, even if there’s a payoff at the end.

For some people, situations in life may be pulling them back. People who plan to buy houses are told not to change jobs because it can affect mortgage rates. Others who have children on the way sometimes feel a responsibility to stick with their current jobs, as if somehow their current job is any more secure than another. There are also existing obligations of both time and space, which seem to prevent busy people from looking for jobs too far away from their current location.

That’s the short list of why there’s a discrepancy between the turnover rate and the number of unhappy working people. But these reasons only address the people who are not looking for jobs and why they’re not looking. There’s another distinct group of people who are looking, but are not being hired. Statistics on how many of these people exist are scarce, but it’s pretty safe to say that very few companies hire the first person they interview.

When companies start looking at candidates for a position, they look to qualify them as best as possible. Guy Kawaski interviewed Libby Sartain about Yahoo’s hiring practices and it came up that the ratio of applicants to job openings is about 50-1. Of those fifty applicants, only about ten are qualified for the position they’re applying for. When I applied at Lycos back in 2003 I was told in the second round of interviews that there had been more than 200 applicants for the position. Of those 200 applicants, they interviewed only eight people. The second round of interviews consisted of only myself and one other candidate.

What is unclear is whether there were more than eight people whom Lycos felt were qualified for the position but whose resumes didn’t draw enough attention to themselves to warrant an interview. And this, of course, is the point. Why didn’t they get an interview?

Landing an Interview

Landing a new job is a process. It is not a set of steps that you go through where you land a job at the end. One misstep along the way and you’re back at the beginning, very similar to the game of Trouble. So you have to put your best foot forward every step of the way. The first place to do that is your resume…sort of.

In a previous life, I spent a lot of time interviewing new candidates for engineering positions because I was very adept at assessing the technical capabilities of people. I paid a lot of attention to their resumes, but what was really enlightening was their cover letters. I know people spend countless hours on their resumes every year. I’m not about to tell you that this time is misspent, but you need a cover letter. And don’t think you can just slap together a three liner in an email because a bad cover letter is much worse than no cover letter at all. Here’s an example that is similar to some of the ‘cover letters’ I have seen for a recent job opening I posted here at Moon River Software:

“Hello,
I saw your job opening for Solutions Architect on Monster.com and I am very interesting in your position. Attached is my resume. Please contact me if you are thinking of scheduling an interview. Thank you.”

Compare the content with a fictitious, if somewhat humorous cover letter that I might send:

“Hello,

My name is Mike Taber and I would like to be considered for the Solutions Architect opening that was recently listed by your company on Monster.com. I have more than ten years of software and hardware development experience and training, ranging from web application development to sub-micron VLSI hardware design. My most recent employment was at Moon River Software, a software and consulting services company that I founded. As the sole owner, I handled all aspects of the business including sales, marketing, software development, and consulting services. In just fifteen months, gross revenue has exceeded $250 million.

I am a hard working and driven individual who has good business sense and is well versed in a wide variety of technologies. I can design either digital or analog hardware, and know some of the challenges associated with digital interfacing, especially on a high speed bus. I also have a great deal of software experience that includes Assembly on 16 bit processors, C, C++, Java, C#.NET, database design, and web application development. While I realize that your Solutions Architect is expected to know VB.NET, I am well versed in the .NET framework and have a solid C# background. The similarities within these technologies are extensive and I feel that I would have no trouble using VB.NET rather than C#.NET.

I am seeking full time employment with an established company that will allow me to work less than the 80-90 hours every week that I have been for the past six months. While I am grateful for the $250 million I have made in the past year, I believe that it has been a good learning experience and no longer wish to be successful. I prefer to return to the drudgery of a 9-5 job where I will be underpaid, under appreciated, and forced to reside in a cubicle farm in an uncomfortable chair for a third of my waking hours.

I want to thank you for taking the time to read my cover letter. If there are any questions about my resume or if you wish to reach me to schedule a phone screen or an interview, you may send me an email at mypersonalemail@mydomain.com, but I would prefer to be called at 555-867-5309 between the hours of 8am-4pm, as I am often bathing in the ‘Tub-o-Cash’ and have the phone by my side. Thank you for your time.

Kind regards,
Mike Taber”

Based on the cover letter alone, whose resume would you be more inclined to look at?

As an applicant, you want to stand out from the crowd and tell your story so that you are asked to come in for an interview. Your cover letter is the perfect place to do that. Most of the applicants for any given position are going to know roughly the same technologies, so a resume simply doesn’t convey why you’re worth their time for an interview. Some would argue that what you put in your resume about your responsibilities at previous jobs has a lot of bearing on whether you are selected for an interview. Without a cover letter, this would be entirely true.

There’s another reason for writing a good cover letter. If you do a good job on your cover letter, you can stand above and beyond the other candidates to the point that they will have to work harder during the actual interview to overcome your advantage. People have an unconscious tendency to make up their minds about a person within the first few seconds of meeting them and there’s a lot of research to support this. If the interviewer thinks highly of you before you walk in the door, you can screw up a lot and they will still think highly of you. This carries over past the interview process and into the part of the process where final decisions are made.

So nail that cover letter at all costs. Have friends read it over. Rework it several times if need be. You only get one shot and it has to be good. Remember. No interview, no job.

How to Write a Good Cover Letter

To make a cover letter work for you, there are a few important things you must pay attention to. First, show that you’re interested in the job. The first paragraph should do this. At the very least, you need to go to the company website (assuming it’s not a recruiter posting the listing) and learn what you can about them. Tailor your first paragraph to them and any experiences you might have had. If you haven’t had any experience, you can address that later. Just a quick intro will be fine.

Next, talk about yourself a little bit. What are your qualifications? What have you done in the past that relates? Again, if you haven’t done anything related, you can address that in the next paragraph.

In the third paragraph, you need to make sure that questions about your resume are addressed appropriately. This is the place to spell out why they shouldn’t disqualify you because of X, Y, or Z. When I sent a resume and cover letter to iRobot, it was for an entry level hardware position. I had recently finished all of the coursework for my Master of Science in Computer Engineering. On the hardware side, I met the requirements for the position, as the focus of my Computer Engineering degree is split between hardware and software. Unfortunately, on the software side I was grossly overqualified for an entry level position. That meant that to a resume reviewer, I should have been immediately disqualified. My cover letter not only prevented me from being tossed out as overqualified, I was called and informed that they wanted me in for an interview based on the strength of my cover letter.

In my resume I explained that while I realized my software experience would typically put me in a higher salary bracket, that I would accept lower compensation than my experience would otherwise require. I pointed out that I was looking at a potential career change focused more on hardware, and realized that it would require I take steps backwards in order to move forward in that direction.

Both of those points that I made to iRobot gave concrete reasons not to throw my resume out the door. For those of you who think you can’t be overqualified for a position, you are gravely mistaken. It is very likely that iRobot would have seen “Master of Science in Computer Engineering”, several years of experience and said “He’s going to cost too much. Move on because we’re not hiring for that right now.” By pointing out that I was willing to work with them on the salary issue and why I was willing to work with them on it, I stayed in the game and got a phone call. Had I simply said I was willing to work for an entry level salary without explaining why, they probably would have thought “Ok, what is wrong with this guy?” and moved on.

Without a doubt, this is absolutely the most important section of your cover letter. You must completely neutralize any negatives on your resume as they relate to the job opening.

Be up front with what your shortcomings are and why they should not be viewed negatively. If you don’t have a software degree and you’re applying for a software development position, you need to talk about it. Why do you feel your Associates degree is sufficient when it calls for at least a Bachelors degree? What experience do you think you have that makes up for that? Is there a good reason you don’t that you might be willing to share? If you’re just out of college and don’t have any experience, what have you done to help prepare for the industry? What differentiates you from the other entry level applicants? etc…

Some people like to include a blurb about a specific project they worked on. This is a good idea, but try not to get carried away and make your cover letter too long. If they ask for specific examples of projects you have worked on, you’ve basically been given a free license to make it several pages long. The fact is, it takes time to explain a complex project, and reviewers will understand that. But if they ask for something in the job posting and you don’t include it, you’re going to look bad compared to the people who followed their instructions.

If you’re not very comfortable with writing a solid cover letter, you can take solace in one very important fact: most people don’t bother. If they don’t bother, the fact that you wrote an average one gives you an edge. Just make sure it isn’t riddled with poor grammar and misspelled words. Nail the cover letter, get an interview. That is the sole purpose of a cover letter.

The Interview

Once you’ve got an interview, you need to do more homework. Assuming you really want the job, you need to research the company, its products, its competitors, and find out everything you can that will help you during the interview. Now if you don’t want the job, you should turn down the interview. It’s not fair to them to accept an interview for a job you have no intention of taking. The general feeling is that the larger the company, the more acceptable it is to use the company as a practice interview. But if you do your homework, wrote a decent cover letter and a decent resume, then you don’t need to go through practice interviews.

For your homework, you also need to concentrate on your resume. I’ve interviewed a lot of people and I completely drill them on what they’ve done in the past to find out what parts of projects they were really involved in. As an example, I interviewed someone who claimed to have a lot of SQL Server 2000 experience. After grilling him for about 20 minutes on his database project, I realized he wasn’t nearly as competent as his resume or he had indicated. He had no idea what a cascade delete was. To maintain referential integrity when deleting data, he used multiple triggers on every table to determine whether data should be deleted or updated. Needless to say, it didn’t work right, and he had spent months trying to get it working, eventually just giving up and accepting that garbage data would exist in the database. This was for a product being developed at a financial software company he had started with some friends. Needless to say, he wasn’t hired.

Not knowing what you are doing is unfortunately something that would be beyond your control. However you should be aware of absolutely everything that is on your resume, every project that it mentions, and details of the projects. If you don’t remember them off the top of your head, then you should take a few minutes to print your resume and write a couple of paragraphs describing and detailing each of those projects. It will help you to remember them, and you will look more prepared during the interview when you can rattle off exactly what projects you worked on, how you were involved, and the results of each of them.

A great thing to note is that props help. By props, I mean any source code that you can bring, photos, printouts, etc. Be very careful that you’re not violating any agreements that you might have signed in the past. Fortunately for me, I’ve done a lot of things outside of work that look stellar during an interview. As an example, for some of my early interviews I brought photos of the obstacle avoidance robot that my team built for our senior project in college. We designed all of the electronics hardware except the Motorola micro-controller itself, hand picked all of the sensors, and wrote all of the assembly language that literally drove the robot.

Due to the complexity of the project, there were a lot of complications. The only problem we were unable to solve had to do with motor limitations due to the weight of the vehicle and the fact that the motor could spin left and spin right, but not spin “straight”. By that, I mean that after turning right, the vehicle cut power to the steering mechanism, but due to the weight of the vehicle and the friction between the wheels and the floor, it didn’t straighten out the wheels afterwards like it did when it was much lighter. What that meant was that if the vehicle turned right and moved forward to get away, and then tried to go straight, it had a tendency to continue to the right because the wheels didn’t straighten out.

I loved bringing photos of it because it was such a complicated project, that I had a big role in. I was often asked “What grade did you get?” I got an A on it. One of the few A’s in my undergrad career, but I got it and I’m pretty damned proud of it to this very day.

I also have source code for a number of other applications I’ve written, so people can see how I structure my code, my coding style, naming conventions I use, whether they’re consistent, etc… Many of the code bases I have are large and it’s nice for interviewers to see a lot of code so they can dig into the guts to see if I’m really consistent. It’s one thing to be consistent in a single function or maybe a page of code. Showing them 20,000 lines of consistent code that you wrote “for fun” is an entirely different story.

Have you done anything really cool or out of the ordinary that your friends might talk about? Show it off during the interview. Personally, I like to look for things that people have done outside of work because it shows they’re interested in technology for its own sake, rather than looking at the technology industry as just a weekly paycheck. I knew people in grad school who, just for fun, rigged up a system that indexed all of their mp3’s and allowed them to be streamed through Windows Media Player via the URL. There’s software these days that allows you to do that pretty easily, but back then it was unheard of.

Years and years ago, someone in the Computer Science House at RIT rigged up a system where you could buy credits from the “House”, which would let you order soda (usually Jolt) from the vending machine. Simply place your order online, stating what time you wanted the soda to drop, what flavor you wanted and presto. Instant caffeine. You could have a can of Jolt drop at 7:45am as you were on your way out the door to your first class of the day. Neat huh? Not entirely practical, but neat.

It shows ingenuity. It shows creativity. And it shows a desire to use technology to solve problems and do cool stuff. The fact that it isn’t practical doesn’t mean much, at least not to me. True techies will realize that you did it for the experience. Not for the non-existent business problem it didn’t solve.

Conclusion

Applying for a new job is not particularly difficult, just ask the hordes of people who use Monster.com and click “Apply” without a second thought. But not many people do it well.

If you follow these tips, you should be able to land yourself an interview for any job that you are reasonably qualified for. If you go the extra mile to represent yourself as an impressive candidate, you can considerably increase your chance of being offered the position, to the point that the company thinks that it is a no-brainer.

My final piece of advice is this: before you start looking for a new job, decide what you want to do and what you are willing to do to get it. Until you decide what you are looking for, it’s difficult to filter what jobs you should and should not be applying for. And there are jobs you should not be applying for. If you focus your efforts on getting a job you really want rather than just any job, you will be much more successful in landing one that makes you happy.

And finding a job that makes you happy is the real goal, isn’t it?

The Single Founder Myth

Posted by Mike Taber on October 23rd, 2006

My previous article, Startup Myths Debunked, seemed to attract quite a bit of attention in the developer community. In particular, people who left comments seemed to agree with “Myth#3: I need a partner”. Paul Graham who is one of the more influential voices in the startup community recently wrote an article titled “The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups” and apparently thinks otherwise. Weighing in at mistake #1 on his list is “Single Founder”.

*sigh*

I hope that Paul reads what I have to say and rethinks his stance, or at the very least clarifies that what he means does not apply to all startups. Let’s take a look at this.

Have you ever noticed how few successful startups were founded by just one person? Even companies you think of as having one founder, like Oracle, usually turn out to have more. It seems unlikely this is a coincidence.

To recap where the Oracle reference comes from, in my article I had pointed to Oracle as having one founder, and one of the first comments on my blog was a correction. Paul Graham alluded to the same correction, having probably read the article himself. I did some further research, and it turns out that I was incorrect. Larry Ellison did indeed have a partner named Bob Minor. In fact, my research showed that Oracle had four co-founders: Larry Ellison, Bob Minor, Ed Oates, and Bruce Scott. My apologies.

After finding that I had been incorrect, I delved deeper to make sure that my other examples of Michael Dell and Thomas Siebel still held true. Thus far, they have held up to additional scrutiny. If anyone else has corrections to these examples, please let me know via comments or the contact page.

In any case, I agree with Paul that given the statistics, it seems unlikely that this is a coincidence. So why are so few successful startups founded by just one person? My examples seem to indicate that it is possible to succeed, but why is the figure so lopsided with multi-founder companies holding the lion’s share of the success stories?

One Word: Funding
I believe the answer lies with where these companies get their funding. Paul Graham’s Angel Investor group called Y Combinator refuses to work with individuals. I suspect that most VCs probably feel the same way and refuse to fund a company with only one founder. Neglecting their reasons for operating this way, the most popular way to fund a startup, historically, is through Angel Investors and VCs. If Angels and VCs requirements for funding a company also require co-founders, then it stands to reason that the majority of startups will have more than one founder. This only perpetuates the myth that it cannot be done, or is excessively rare.

It’s not an absolute fact that angels and VC’s refuse to fund single founder companies, but is generally accepted as such. I’m sure there are exceptions to the rule in other angel groups, but Y Combinator flat out refuses to work with individuals and they are arguably more well known to developers than any other angel investor group. Paul has such a wide reach with his writing, that it’s difficult to believe that he has less market share than anyone else. So on one hand, Paul asks the question as to why so few successful startups are founded by one person and on the other, he and his Angel group refuse to fund single founder companies. I would think that the reason there aren’t more single founder companies would be self evident.

A contributing factor to this phenomenon is the fact that single founder companies are forced to find alternative forms of funding.Thomas Siebel was lucky enough to be on the sales team at Oracle from 1984 to 1990. After that, he was the CEO of Gain Technology and after only 3 years, the company was sold for $30 million. I’m told by a serial startup executive that CEOs of startups take in around 5% of the sale price when a company is sold. That means Siebel made somewhere around $1.5 million when Gain was purchased. Even after taxes, that’s plenty of cash to fund your own company and fast track it in the early stages with employees rather than co-founders.

Most single founder companies are not quite so fortunate. They have to fund their company using much more creative means. Without hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank, they must watch their spending far more than well-funded startups do and can’t hire on a whim. Having started three different companies myself and worked for three more “conventional” startups (startups with Angel or VC funding), let me clue you in on the difference. Conventional startups have money to burn and are willing to burn it, trading dollars for fast growth. As Paul Graham points out in Mistake #13, VCs want their money to go to work, and that means spending it. On the other hand, self funded companies have all of their eggs in one basket and cannot afford to burn money indiscriminately because they need to be sure the steps they are taking are going to pay off, both short and long term. This means that unless the founder had money to begin with, the self funded company is forced to grow in a much slower, much more controlled fashion unless they’re willing to take substantial risks.

Contrast a startup company that hires dozens of people within the first few months with a self funded company that adds employees only when the current business can support that growth. The result is another condition that contributes to the seemingly skewed statistics whch appears to indicate that single founder startups can’t make it or are far less often successful than multi-founder companies. Angel and VC funded startups are given X dollars to get the company going, ramp it up as quickly as possible and sell it (or have an IPO). Self funded companies don’t have wads of cash in the bank to trade for the ability to build the business faster without accepting the significant risks that operating at a loss every quarter entails.

Guess who else noticed this fundamental difference between highly funded companies and self funded startups? Joel Spolsky. He wrote a fairly detailed analysis of this phenomenon back in 2000 with his articled titled “Ben and Jerry’s vs Amazon“. (If you haven’t read it, I encourage you to do so. It’s a very good read.)

Reasons You Might Wind Up Doing It Yourself

Let’s dig further into what Paul says about single founder companies.

What’s wrong with having one founder? To start with, it’s a vote of no confidence. It probably means the founder couldn’t talk any of his friends into starting the company with him. That’s pretty alarming, because his friends are the ones who know him best.”

Hmmm… Perhaps sometimes this is the case, but certainly not always. I can think of half a dozen other reasons why a company might have only one founder. All of them are plausible and I don’t see any reason why they would be uncommon for single founder startups.

1) The founder already had enough money in the early stages, thus enabling him to hire employees instead of trading equity for co-founders.
2) The founder might have had a bad experience in the past with a partner, or seen someone who did.
3) The business is making enough money to support the founder (and thus his family) but not enough to support another founder.
4) The founder has no interest in taking on partners because his aspirations are not to build a huge company.
5) None of the founders’ friends or former co-workers are qualified to be a part of the company.
6) The founder is contractually bound to not solicit former co-workers.

In fact, with the exception of the first reason, every one of these reasons applies to myself and Moon River Software. It has absolutely nothing to do with having friends I couldn’t talk into joining my company. I’ve considered hiring two different developers who I knew on a personal basis and declined to hire both of them, for different reasons. I have a friend who has an MBA, was best man at my wedding and I was best man at his, yet I would not hire him at this time because he doesn’t have experience in the software field.

Number 1 is beyond the control of most people unless they inherited wealth to begin with or managed to sell off a previous company, as in the case of Thomas Siebel. I would imagine that numbers 2 and 3 are probably very big issues for many single founders and are probably more common than some of the others. Number 4 is not as atypical as it might sound. Look no further than Thomas Warfield for someone who is extremely successful, has only one employee who basically helps with support and order processing, and who has publicly stated he has no intentions of growing bigger. I read somewhere that during the Super Bowl one year, he didn’t get an order for 15 minutes, which was the worst he did all year. Let’s see, $25 X 4 copies/hour X 24 hours/day X 365 days/year = $876,000/year. Not bad for a single founder if you ask me.

Number 5 is a sticky point, and can be a bit subjective. Are these friends not qualified because the founder is too arrogant to think they can do a good job, or are they really not qualified? For me, an additional wrench is thrown into the equation. Because of my somewhat older age, even if I knew someone who I thought was qualified it would be difficult for me to convince my friends, who are of a similar age, to move their families to Massachusetts. In addition, having only moved to Massachusetts in 2003, I have virtually no friends in the state outside of the acquaintances of my wife, former co-workers, and fraternity alumni (most of whom already own their own businesses, I might add).

Number 6 is an issue for any founders who worked in startups recently, including myself. Sure I’ve lived in Massachusetts for the past several years, but during that time I only worked at Pedestal Software, since acquired by Altiris and with whom I’m contract bound to not solicit for employees.

Going it Alone

But even if the founder’s friends were all wrong and the company is a good bet, he’s still at a disadvantage. Starting a startup is too hard for one person. Even if you could do all the work yourself, you need colleagues to brainstorm with, to talk you out of stupid decisions, and to cheer you up when things go wrong.

I’m not going to be too hard on Paul for this one. I believe he has good intentions and is doing his best to talk some good developers out of trying to make a go of it alone because it really is hard to do everything yourself. That’s important to remember – it’s really hard to do it yourself. But for Paul to say “Starting a startup is too hard for one person.” is incorrect and misleading. I’m doing it now. Is it hard? You betcha. In fact, you could say that I’ve failed twice in the past both with and without a partner. But I learned a lot during those failures and learned a lot as part of the success of Pedestal Software. Having been in the situation before, I’d prefer to have no partner and have to do all of the work than have a partner who isn’t pulling his weight.

Paul acknowledges that even if you could do all the work yourself, there are other reasons for needing co-founders. Some of the things he mentions may be true, but do you need a co-founder to provide them for you? You can brainstorm with friends without forking over equity in your company. You can hire salaried or contract employees to work for your company, thus providing you with brainstorming partners. If you talk to friends and take time to gather information before making decisions, you can help prevent stupid decisions. Just remeber that having more people involved in no way prevents people from making stupid decisions. I’ll refrain from pointing to any number of failed companies *cough* Webvan *cough* as examples where an entire executive team blew spectacular amounts of money.

Staying cheerful when things go wrong is incredibly important in any startup company and is arguably where Paul has his most valid point. But again, thinking that the only place you can find this positive reinforcement is in co-founders is also inaccurate. As developers it is in our nature to solve problems, and treating your morale as a problem to be solved is no different, whether you’re a single co-founder or whether you’re a multi-founder company. In either case, you will find it helpful to know in advance what sorts of things affect your morale and how.

Personally, I do a couple different things to keep my morale up. Due to the fact that my business is doing well enough financially, I keep track of my financials every single week in Quicken. It shows that the things I’ve done that week have made an impact on my corporate bottom line, and I can quickly see how much of an impact. Every time I’m able to show my cash on hand increasing, it’s a morale booster. And when things get tough or don’t seem to be going my way, I’ll treat myself to a few video games which are challenging, but winnable. One of my favorites is to play Command & Conquer: Generals on an 8 player map playing 3 vs 5 with myself on the lean end. It turns out to be challenging enough that a victory shows that I’m not a strategic moron and should get back to work. After reviewing my failures to help me avoid them in the future, I focus on my victories, no matter how small and the things that I’ve learned from the experiences.

Not letting people down is definitely a significant motivating factor, but it is easy to replace a co-founder with someone else to obtain that motivation. As a married man, not letting my wife down would be more important to me than not letting down the co-founders that I don’t have. By staying in business I stay happy, and my wife is happy that I have a career I enjoy.

The one person that drives me to succeed more than anyone else is me. I’m more afraid of disappointing myself and not reaching my goals than anyone else. And guess what? My goals keep changing and increasing. Eventually I’m going to have to lower my sights because I keep raising the goal, which drives me even harder. My wife describes me as the most driven lazy person she knows.

With my business I’m driven to the ends of the earth to succeed. If Moon River Software fails, it will be because I’m dead. On the other hand, I’m too lazy to mow the lawn, clean the house, do laundry, fix things around the house, etc. I pay people to do that stuff so that I can work on my business instead. And you know what? It’s well worth the money. The value of my lawn will not increase nearly as much as the value of my business over any period of time. This principle is described in the book “The Millionaire Mind”. It’s a matter of priority and being able to get ahead. It’s not a matter of laziness.

On another weblog, I debated the topic of single founder companies with someone who claimed that you couldn’t run a company alone. After arguing a little bit, we realized that what the author had really meant was that you can’t truly run a company alone without delegating any of the tasks or hiring employees. While I don’t discount the difficulty of running a business without delegating anything, I don’t believe it would be impossible. It would just be far, far more difficult and time-intensive to do so. This is entirely different than being a single founder.

I hope that you’re now convinced that it is not only possible, but reasonable to become a single founder of a startup and be successful at it. If not, I invite you to leave feedback and comments.

Special thanks to Rob Walling for reading drafts of this article.

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Update: One of my readers contacted me and pointed out that Siebel Systems had another cofounder named Pat House and cited not one, but two references to back that up. Direct from the first link to InformationWeek.com:

“The company, funded entirely by its employees, launched its first application suite in 1993. By 1997, revenue was $206 million, and many of its original competitors–companies such as Brock Control Systems and Sales Technologies–had disappeared.”

It would seem that they were entirely self funded, which fits with the first of my six reasons for starting a company without a partner. Still, labelling Pat House as the cofounder of Siebel Systems bothers me. If she was really a cofounder, why is the company named after only Siebel? It would seem that it wasn’t an equal division of ownership, which doesn’t particularly surprise me. My best guess would be that Siebel had the money and asked Pat House to leave Oracle and take a chance with him so that Siebel could keep up on what had been going on at Oracle the previous three years.

In my eyes, this begs the question of what exactly constitutes a cofounder? If a cofounder defaults to your first employee, then by definition, no company of more than one employee can have a single cofounder. What if the “cofounder” owns less than X% of the company, where X is a number between 0.000001% and 49.999999%? Where is the line of being a cofounder drawn? Using that as a basis for the argument, one could say that I was a cofounder of Pedestal Software, since I was granted stock options and thus held some ownership of the company. To me that doesn’t make sense.

Similarly, if we base it on time with the company, if you hired an administrative assistant on day one, that hardly qualifies as a cofounder of the company.

Unfortunately, this starts to take us down the path of defining what a cofounder is and is not, which is not the path I wish to explore. I still maintain that it is possible with a lot of hard work to be a single founder and be successful. Perhaps not with Angel/VC funding due to their requirements for cofounders, but it is still possible.

The Single Founder

Musings on software and startups from a single founder