Jason Goldberg has a great post on some of the things he learned while CEO of Jobster.com.

1. The CEO's job is to create value.
2. Try to ride some powerful existing waves vs. just creating new waves.
3. Technology companies are all about the product.
4. Related to #3, the rapid iteration model (ship early, learn from usage, adjust) works well for consumer services but works not as well for B2B services.
5. Hire people who are passionate about the specific problems you are trying to solve.
6. You must get close to your users and customers and live their personas.
7. The value of your company is directly related to your capital efficiency.
8. In the early days, I highly recommend that you force your startup to be resource constrained.
9. Don't listen to outsiders who tell you to go faster and ramp sales and marketing.
10. Avoid field sales in favor of telesales.
11. Once you are in the market and have established some measurable and repeatable levels of success, #11 negates #8 on this list.
12. Have fun.

Planning on starting your own company? Here are some good points to consider from High Tech Strategies - Ten Reasons High-Tech Companies Fail

• Lack of Market Focus
• Excessive Pace of Product Improvement
• Incomplete Products
• Undifferentiated Products
• Channel Mismanagement
• Failure to Establish the Right Competitive Barriers
• Using Price Alone To Drive Market Transformation
• Improper Use of Advertising
• Misinterpretation of the Technology Adoption Lifecycle Model
• Irrelevant Market Research

I've decided to try out this twitter thing. Follow me.

One of my staff (Aaron) found this great post from David Bock called the 7 Question Project Health Check.

The only thing I'd add is start working on this today!

If you want to know why, start adding up the cost of not doing it. How long will it take you to recreate your build server if it dies? I've seen everything from 1 hour to 3 days or more. Assuming $100/hr burden rate and a team size of 5 that can result in a $100 cost (1 person, 1 hour, nobody is blocked) to $12,000 (all 5 people are blocked for 3 days).

You can imagine how the costs can escalate if your source code is sitting on a file server somewhere or even worse on the programmers box.

Now go calculate your opportunity cost. At one company I worked at the finance department calculated the opportunity cost for the development department was $550 per hour per person! Show that number to the CEO and the head of IT and find out how quickly support requests get resolved.

One final note: if you are relying on your people working overtime to overcome these types of issues consider how you might act differently if you had to pay for that overtime out of your own pocket.
 

I can't really add anything to Geoff's post. Go read it and apply it.

A good reminder

It was one of those wonderful home IT support issues that show up from time to time.

My Mac suddenly stopped sending mail. It could receive mail, but not send. The message was: "This message could not be delivered and will remain in your Outbox until it can be delivered. Sending the message content to the server failed."

Odd things have happened with my hosting provider in the past so I just decided to wait for a day to see if things would clear up.

The next day nothing had been resolved and my wife had resorted to using webmail to make sure the mail was getting out. Webmail was working so it seemed unlikely that the mail server was down, just my communication over port 25.

I look around in my mail settings and tweak a few things with no change in behavior.

I little googling later and it turns out that some ISPs have been blocking port 25 to try and help with the spam problem. At this point we are way beyond what mere mortals should be worried about. I can't imagine working through this with my mom over the phone.

I started poking around on Qwest for information regarding blocked ports, but didn't get far.

Back to Google and I come up with this post on Mac-Forums: OS X Mail will not send replies

The thread meanders a bit, but the meat is in post #7 by DarthMoops:

Hey, I was poking around on the Internet some more. It looks like many have had Mac Mail troubles with Verizon. The following seems to have fixed the issue (so far).

http://expertmacintoshconsulting.com...;id=34;lang=en

Go to: Apple Menu > System Preferences > Network > Built-In Ethernet > Ethernet TAB > Configure/Manually > Max Packet Size(MTU)/Custon > set to '1492' > Apply

The referenced site seems to have disappeared but to my amazement changing the MTU from 1500 to 1492 solved the problem!

This is so obscure I can barely believe it. There were other site that referenced this change, but most had to do with wireless connections, whereas I am hardwired.

If being a geek wasn't your thing and you don't have a handy geek laying around (like my wife does) - what do you do? Drag your computer back to the store? Call the Geek Squad? Pave your system? Get a new computer?

What is a normal person to do?

Max Wideman got permission to reprint Jim Highsmith's article The Chaos Report - Reality Challenged.

Jim takes on the Chaos report for their definitions of success and failure. This is something that has bothered me for years. I've been on several "failed" projects over the years that were wildly successful in the eyes of the business and are still running to this day.

I for one am going to take it upon myself to challenge anyone who uses the Chaos report as a basis for any kind of action.

The Aligning talk wasn't as engaging as I'd hoped. Not because Geoff didn't know what he was talking about or wasn't personally engaging, rather by necessity it was somewhat introductory and is is something I've been thinking about a lot in my new role of VP.

Geoff's "secret sauce" is:

• Tie development investments specifically to business goals and priorities.
• The development process should match the business processes
• Enable the development staff to deal with business drives that drive projects
• Measure development performance against business goals

Geoff pointed out that the business needs to know what it's goals are before there can be any alignment.

When talking about business value Geoff identified 3 different types:

• New opportunity
• Staying open
• Cost reduction

Increasing revenue and decreasing costs are types I've dealt with commonly. The cost of staying open was a new way of thinking about certain problems for me. The example he used was the need to upgrade a database server from an older version to a newer version. Typically I've had a hard time arguing the value of such a project. Now I have a way to think and explain why we might want to do such a thing. One of the audience members rightly pointed out that this is really a risk decision. Do we want to stay on the old version even though it is no longer officially supported (risk) or do we want to upgrade (different kind of risk).

The other point that resonates with me is the identification of the value of not doing something. I don't think enough businesses think about opportunity cost. For example the other day I was involved in a discussion about an upcoming meeting with 4 people to discuss whether an extra $400 software license should be purchased. Just looking at the $100/hr burden rate for those employees was enough for me to justify just purchasing the license. Even more significantly the opportunity cost for those employees is in the $300/hr range. I'd much rather have those people producing value.

Geoff had a couple of book recommendations:

I also think Software by Numbers is another great resource.