Chefs & Ginger: Lessons for the Startup CEO

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One of the best kept secrets least discussed matters in the startup world is what power a CEO really wields. When you are one of the worker bees or even a vice president it seems that the CEO is this powerful fellow, who at times appears all-knowing. And even when he isn’t, he still seems to wield an unfair amount of power. It’s only when you get to be the CEO of your own startup — by accident, choice or default — you realize that the power of the CEO is all too illusory.

Sure you can TELL folks what they should do and you can mean NOW! but that doesn’t work too well nor get you too far. You’ll soon find out, what anyone who’s raised teens knows, that what you want and what you get can be two different things.

Recently as a friend and fellow entrepreneur and I discussed issues each of us were facing in our businesses, about getting things accomplished, it hit me suddenly. Ginger! There’s much leaders, especially new CEOs, can learn from good Asian chefs – especially in how they use Zingiber officinale – or ginger.

Ginger when used in small amounts, whether to flavor a favorite curry dish or to create a zing in your tea, elevates the dish and the entire culinary experience. There are few delights greater than having sushi with some finely sliced and pickled ginger – a near out-of-body experience when accompanied by wasabi. At the other end, a well made ginger ale or even a ginger chutney, despite being all ginger can be immensely enjoyable.

The trouble however arises when too much ginger is used in the tea or too little in the ginger ale, making both undrinkable and worse yet leaving a nasty aftertaste. Despite the taste risks too much or too little ginger poses, you rarely find Asian cooks using physical measures of the quantum of ginger they use. It’s all a subjective call and a visual appraisal honed through apprenticeship and experience.

It is the same expertise that leaders, especially of startups need to cultivate of when and how to use what amount of cajoling, pressure, suasion or even the occasional threat to get their work accomplished.

Of course both the chefs and chiefs can benefit from sharp knives, but that’s a story for another day!

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Discretion – a skill founders and CEOs need in spades

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As parent of two teens, I’d like to claim that my wife and I never argue in front of them. I’d of course be lying. That being said everyone with children knows, that even if their kid can’t rattle off the 5 times table, they can recall every last word you said in your last spousal encounter, down to the tone of voice. And if you are [un]lucky, it will be saved for posterity in their biography.

Now as an entrepreneur, founder or CEO why should this story be relevant to you? Basically, this is a lesson on discretion – or the lack thereof – and how it can come and bite you in the rear!

As an entrepreneur, founder and especially as a CEO, you are going to having some rough times out there – being plagued by self-doubts, or worse yet certainty that you are screwing up. You will also wonder why you are doing what you are doing (or not) and is this whole thing a mistake? You wouldn’t be the first one to have had these thoughts nor are they likely to occur only once.  The question is what should you do when you are thus assailed?

What you should NOT do is share it with your partners – immediately or without reflection. Usually it’s best shared with someone outside your founding team – a friend, an advisor and if you are lucky, with a spouse. This last can be tricky and deserves a whole another blog post.

I have worked in and with multiple startups and started two of my own, where the founders were friends, sometimes having known each other for many years and other times, been colleagues who’d worked with each other. Almost in all cases the co-founders had been friends before becoming business partners.

And in almost everyone of these instances, when one or more founders have been plagued by self doubts, voicing it without forethought to other founders or senior staff has caused immense grief. Not unlike arguing in front of the kids (or other 3rd parties) who have no context on my wife and our deep abiding love or other ongoing issues :)

In every case, talking about it with a non-stakeholder first would have done away with much thrashing and grief that otherwise ensued. Talking it out with a third party always worked better – in terms of achieving distance which helped in gaining clarity and perspective before looking for answers.

Many a times, our self doubts maybe no more than a fleeting moment of vulnerability – or the result of a bad day or week, a setback. We may bounce right back. At other times, they may be grounded in facts – in that we are operating at the limits of our ability or capabilities, personal life (or the lack of one) may be intruding into our professional lives or we may be avoiding a critical set of actions/decisions at work to avoid unpleasantness.

And if there are real issues at play that need to be brought up to your partners, it should not be done in a flippant comment or regrettable aside that can be misconstrued or worse. It can be presented with some distance and perspective that you’d have gained in discussing it with a non-stakeholder first. This alone is a good reason to seek out a mentor or advisor, but almost any friend, who’s not involved in your business and has no axe to grind will do.

So the next time you think of making a casual remark to the other founders, especially those who are your friends, bite your tongue. You are a parent – or at least need to behave as a responsible one – if you want to keep the job!

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Be Generous – Lessons from my dad

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As in my worst fears, the call came early in the morning, just before 3AM California time. When the phone rang the first time, I rejected the call, reckoning it was a colleague in India, who’d lost track of time. When the phone rang again within minutes, this time with caller ID showing another colleague’s name, I knew something was amiss.

“Sri, I am sorry to inform you your father has passed away!” At first, I was not sure I had heard right. My first thought strangely was for my colleague who had the unpleasant task of having to call me with bad news. I almost felt apologetic that I had put him in such a position. Maybe it was shock and I was not ready to hear that my father was no more.

Rushed calls to my travel agent, wondering what to tell the kids sleeping in the next room – the next thirty-six hours were a blur – neither Icelandic volcanoes spewing ash, nor delayed flights and uncooperative flight supervisors would get in the way of our making it back to India. The nearly two hour trip from the tarmac to my father’s home felt longer than the whole journey.

“Your father paid for me to go to college and then got me started on my Chartered Accountancy apprenticeship,” said the stranger, who’d come to the funeral. He looked to be about 40 years old. “Your dad was also the one who helped my brother go the United States,” he continued. There were nearly 150 people at home when I got in from the airport, most of them extended family and a good many folks that I didn’t know. Much of the afternoon, was spent recounting tales of how my father had helped someone buy a house, another furnish one and still another get a compound wall put in.

Second cousins who’d grown up in my house abounded and had their own tales of getting jobs with my dad’s help. I recall when I was a young teen, some relative admiring my father’s watch. I was aghast when my father removed it and insisted that the relative have the watch.

That evening I recall my sister and I arguing with my dad, that if he just gives away stuff, we’d probably not have anything – not that we knew what we had. My dad just laughed at first. Then when he saw how serious we were, he said “There’s great pleasure in giving – I’d say more so than even receiving.” My sister, ever the smart alec quickly retorted, “Then you’ll be happy to give and I will be happy to receive.”

It was only many years later that I learnt about my father’s journey to the city as an impoverished young man with three rupees in his pocket. While he became a successful man over the years, he never stopped giving regardless of his own financial status. His life itself was one critical lesson – “Be Generous”

My father Dr. K. Kuppuswamy passed away on the 24th of May 2011.

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10 books every entrepreneur should read

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A question “What books should Indian entrepreneurs read” on Quora set me thinking. The good news is that Indian entrepreneurs should read, for most part books that entrepreneurs anywhere would do well to read. The trick is picking the 10 or fewer, that would make reading (or starting) seem not so daunting and that you’d have a snowball’s chance of completing. My own recommendations (& favorites) include the following. Much like a travel guide that tells you what to see if you have only one day in Paris, a week, a month or more, I have attempted to bin them in an attempt to bring coherence and priority.

Plan to ready only ONE book

  • The Effective Executive by Peter F. Drucker: Forty years after its first publication, this book, like good wine, has aged well. If you are going to read only one book, this should be it. Even if you are only contemplating to be an entrepreneur, you should read this. You’ll do better in any role with this one.

If you can squeeze in two more
Particularly for tech founders and any first time entrepreneurs, knowing about sales and design, particularly as it related to customers, these two books work.

  • Selling the Wheel by Jeff Cox and Howard Stevens: Most entrepreneurs are surprised when they build something and the world does not beat a path to their door on its own. This novel is the gentlest way to get acquainted with selling.
  • Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman: How many times have you had to re-print your document to get the two-sided printing working? Or needed to paste instructions on your copier or building door. Before we build it – anything – it would be nice to understand what folks are trying to get done.

Now you are on a roll, here are three more
Now its time to hear others’ stories and to see what part of it is relevant to you.

  • Growing a Business by Paul Hawken: The first person conversational tone of the book speaks from the heart and is as applicable today as when it was written more than a decade ago.
  • Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston: this is probably the newest book in this list – and one that I am still working my way through. The breadth of entrepreneurs covered alone would make it worthwhile.
  • Made in Japan – Sony’s story by Akio Morita, Edwin M. Reingold and Mitsuko Shimomura is a timeless story of innovation, perseverance – that’s particularly relevant from Indian entrepreneurs trying to enter global markets

If you are still with the program, these can help you round it off

Bonus number ten
If you got this far, you need to read a darn good yarn of how a set of engineers got a new machine built.

  • Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder – this book helped the author land a Pulitzer prize – a non-technical journalist covering the story of how Data General went about trying to beat Digital at the microcomputer game. Human drama and much that goes on in the name of startup success.

It is hard to pick a finite list and any such list if likely to be highly subjective. You will notice I have not picked any Indian entrepreneurial stories – its just that they don’t figure in the top 10 – in which itself only one book younger than 5 year old figures. This is in a sense a foundational reading course rather than here’s how some specific company has done it, in India or overseas. It is important in the first instance to read – which I am still surprised how many tech folks in India don’t seem to read and freely admit to not doing so :) .

Happy reading!

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Who’s pain are you trying to address?

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In the last two months of 2010, I participated in a number of meetings with founders of startups – as an adviser, reviewer or investor. Interestingly in nearly every one of these meetings the same questions kept coming up.

In particular four different companies  -  two nascent startups and a couple in their early tweens – were facing eerily similar issues. Despite the startups being in very different spaces,  the varying ages of their endeavors and having  smart and motivated founders – they were all trying to come to grips with the lack of market traction. This despite a great deal of time spent talking to prospective customers, partners, building and launching working prototypes.

I must admit after the first couple of meetings it appeared they were having different problems. In one, a marketplace that was not getting suppliers nor buyers off the starting block, in another focusing on the technology to the exclusion of all else, and yet another having a solution looking for a problem. However by the time the fourth meeting rolled around it was plenty clear, that all of them required a sharp focus on answering the question

“Who is your target customer?”

and more importantly,

“What pain are you trying to solve for them?”

Two years into our own start up, we find ourselves returning to this question with reasonable – some would say troubling – frequency. When we got started on dog-earz, the newsletter tool for the rest of us, we defined our target customers as “marketing & sales folks in SMBs” and the pain we were trying to solve for them was How to keep in meaningful touch with everyone in your Rolodex, even if there wasn’t a deal on the horizon.

Of course it helps, if your target customers actually exist (ours did) and are accessible (a little more difficult) and truly felt this as a problem (not clear). Our solution seemed more a nice-to-have vitamin rather than make-my-pain-go-away Aspirin. We hung in there, as we felt we were target users ourselves. With time it was clear that we’d better solve their pain rather than imagine that they will behave the way we’d. Seems obvious in hindsight, doesn’t it?

Things are not always as evident as we’d like them.  I once had an opportunity to talk to Phanindra Sama, founder of redBus.in about his understanding of what pain they are solving for their customers.  Phanindra shared his view that the pain his customers felt was not in purchasing bus tickets – as I’d have thought. In fact it might still be more convenient for a traveler to call someone to hold a ticket and pay for it at time of boarding – only one phone call needed, but it is the absence of reliable information – as in how many buses, when and at what price or location will leave from Bangalore to Chennai (or better yet from Jalandhar to New Delhi?) that was the customers’ pain point.

Ask yourself these two questions, repeatedly and validate them by getting out of the office and asking your target customers about their pain points. Once you nail this down it makes, at the very least, decision making a whole lot easier. Knowing this is of course only a good start, but not knowing can kill your business.

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Giving this Diwali

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The diwali diyas at Diwali Celebrations at Ban...

Admiration, respect, possibly adulation or envy are the emotions that pop to mind when people talk of Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, who are not just among the world’s richest men but among the most philanthropic.

Yet fear or trepidation seems to have been the emotion stirred, if we are to believe the media, by these two men when they took their message of giving to China and are rumored to be bringing it to India.

Even before the Joy of Giving week rolled out at the end of September, newspapers in India and elsewhere were talking about “…concern among some of China’s wealthy that they would be pressured into contributions” and of Gates and Buffett’s dinner plans in India.

Other Op-ed pieces discussed everything from the high-rise “apartment” that Reliance’s Mukesh Ambani is building to what philanthropy India’s wealthiest are doing, if at all, and how much.

It is nice that, despite the never-ending stream of scams (Mumbai high-rise, Commonwealth Games, iron-ore mining) the mainstream media is also discussing philanthropy, particularly in the private sector. However, their starry-eyed view of it as something solely the domain of uber-rich would be depressing but for the fact that a million “little men and women” are toiling away in India each day, giving well beyond their means.

As anyone who’s tried to support a charity knows, it is easy to give a little money of your own, harder to give your time and hardest to get others to give their money or time — and it is this giving that I’d like to celebrate this Diwali.

Certainly, the wealthy in India have contributed enormously to philanthropy, be it the Tatas with their charities and institution building or Azim Premji’s eponymous foundation. Their giving, even when they’ve sought to keep it quiet, has gotten the rightful recognition and coverage.

However, most Indians who are giving each day — disproportionate amounts of their time and money — rarely have their story told. Their story needs to be told, if only to inspire others to celebrate them by following in their footsteps. I share the story of two such unheralded givers, so that giving becomes as much a second nature to all of us, as taking seems to be to a large swath of our politicians and bureaucrats.

“Why me?” is a question I hear often as the father of two teens. It is hard to explain even seemingly simple life lessons to kids. So when the “Why me?” question is posed by a teen, both orphaned and HIV positive, it is particularly hard.

Krishnagiri is a town on the Tamil Nadu-Karnataka border just an hour outside Bangalore. Its location on the cross roads of four national highways and as a main trucking route connecting Chennai, Hosur and Bangalore make it a hotspot for HIV/AIDS infections.

This has led to a number of children within the Krishnagiri district being orphaned and many are HIV-infected at birth. Many children were taken in by grandparents, relatives and in some cases by neighbors. Most of these foster parents are themselves poor and face economic challenges even before having to care for these orphaned or infected children.

The Association for Rural Community Development is an NGO that has taken up the cause of these children. Founded in 1998, ARCOD is focused on the empowerment of rural poor, particularly women and children. From the initial days of helping rural poor women form self-help groups in one district, they have grown to four districts of Tamil Nadu and their initiatives span micro-finance, rural housing, and health with emphasis on sexual and reproductive health rights.

Their most recent initiative has been to ensure that these orphaned or HIV-infected children get the nutrition that can ensure them a reasonable quality of life — and so, too, the foster families.

As in any human situation, the numbers rarely paint as clear a picture as individual stories. One 13-year-old girl’s father died of AIDS and even while her mother tries to earn a living as a day laborer, the teenager has to take care of her three younger siblings. Another girl is 11 and HIV positive; she has lost both her parents and is being raised by her grandmother who works as a coolie.

A contribution of 500 rupees a month per child enables the provision of such nutrition. With their volunteer teams on the ground, their counseling and training services for families, ARCOD is directly impacting the lives of hundreds of children. All this with little or no fanfare and even lower overhead.

Pasha is a gifted painter and, like many kids his age, likes playing computer games. However, growing up with muscular dystrophy in a family that lived in the slums of South Bangalore, he’d have never been able to pursue his dreams but for the Foundation for Action, Motivation and Empowerment India.

Founded in 2001, FAME is a Bangalore-based NGO that supports rehabilitation and empowerment of children and young adults with neuro-muscular and intellectual development disabilities, such as cerebral palsy, Down’s syndrome, mental retardation and muscular dystrophy.

“Most poor parents who work had to leave their mentally or physically challenged children locked at home,” says Janaki Vishwanath, managing trustee of FAME India. “They could not put their kids in regular schools nor necessarily afford the special education or schooling.”

It is this gap that FAME India has stepped in to bridge. While admitting students of every economic group, the fees it charges for the school is based solely on parents’ ability to pay. The school bus service at FAME is as important as the special education teachers, the dedicated volunteers, the wheelchair friendly building and in-school lunches as it allows both the children and their parents to pursue an empowering course.

Now, as some of their students approach or cross into adulthood, FAME has stepped up to face the challenge of helping them seek gainful employment that offers a modicum of income and immeasurable confidence to face the world. Opportunities they have created include those in their in-house production facility for cloth and paper gift bags, paper cups, painted clay lamps or diyas for festivals or through mail room or copying and courier jobs with local companies.

Although in a relatively nascent stage from a job creation standpoint and constantly challenged by the financial needs of a growing student body, FAME India is yet another instance of unsung heroes who are changing lives each day one child at a time.

There are yet more organizations such as Gift-a-Future, who are attempting to remove economic impediments that come in the way of education, particularly for high school students. Even if we featured one a week, or better yet one a day, our lives would be that much the richer. Join me in getting their stories told.

This story first appeared online at the Wall Street Journal’s India Journal.

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Be Grateful – Lessons from my dad

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“I was in 9th grade – nearly 15 years old, when my father passed away.” I could see that my father was already in the past living through those first few traumatic months after his father’s death. “We continued in the same village where my father hand been the karnam - the village accountant.” My older brother was still in high school, two younger brothers and a sister in middle and primary schools. My mother did not know how she was going to put us through school – which she was clear we should complete at all costs.”

“At one end of our village lived the Mirasdar - there were two brothers, the peria (elder) and chinna (younger) mirasdar. I remember their house being a big pukka house. A family friend approached the younger mirasdar for help, when he learned that my mother could pay for only my elder brother to go to school. The mirasdar offered to pay my school fees. The amount of money involved, though small by today’s standards, was a huge boon and put me through high school. I don’t think I thought about it much at that time, besides being grateful for their support. After all in our eyes the mirasdars were the richest family in our village.”

My father after graduating from high school left his village for the “city” – Chennai and then onwards to Delhi seeking his fortune. After three years of being away, my father returned to his village for a visit. He was now employed as an accounting apprentice in Delhi earning a princely 300 rupees. In the meantime he had his share of adventures with his uncle declining to support his college education, running away to Delhi and landing a job, travelling to Shimla and other towns on his job. Wanting to share his good fortune and to thank his first benefactors he visited the mirasdar family.

“I was shocked to discover that the mirasdar family was not at all well-to-do.  They lived in a dilapidated house and in talking to others in the village I realized that they had probably been living in genteel poverty for the last decade or more. My youth and naivete, when I still lived in the village, was probably what lead me to believe that they were wealthy. I was all the more grateful and overwhelmed by their act of kindness and charity in paying for my education, when they could probably ill afford it themselves.” My father’s eyes were no longer dry as he recounted this tale of magnanimity.

His story did have a good ending, in that the children of the mirasdar family themselves went out to seek their fortunes and did well – which my father attributes, at least in part, to the good deeds of their parents.

“Things are not always what they seem,” was my father’s advice to me. “Keep an open mind and recognize that we often see what we want - which may be far from reality.”

“Be grateful for what you have and strive to help other people whenever you can.”

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Be Self-aware – Lessons from my dad

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“Just tell me what I should do!” My 15-year old was filling out an application for an international student exchange program. One of the questions was “What are your goals in life?” She’d of course asked this same question a week before, when she felt all her friends already knew what they wanted to do in life. As I couldn’t think of any excuse, I had to embark on a discussion with her.

“Think about what you like doing. What you truly enjoy. And what you think you are good at.” In her case, we figured she enjoyed drawing & painting, playing sports and working with young kids – and she was really good at all three. Ah yes, she enjoyed traveling too.”

The discussion set me thinking about a conversation my dad and I had many years ago. I can’t recall what triggered the conversation, but distinctly recall my father telling me “You are a Hanuman!”

For those not up on Hindu mythology, Hanuman is the monkey demi-god who is cited as the ideal devotee for his major-domo role to the eponymous hero of the Hindu epic, Ramayana.

I didn’t reckon that my dad was alluding to my physical appearance when he said I was like the monkey [even if a] God. Nothing I had done thus far, could allow me to be termed a devotee of anything other than good food. My perplexed expression must have given me away, when he continued “Like Hanuman, you don’t know your own strength!”

While knowing one’s strengths is good in general – it is a particularly critical skill for entrepreneurs. Most successful entrepreneurs, when observed from arms length, may come across as manic- depressive.  Maniacal in pursuing what they believe is the right path and optimistic to a fault and then when that critical deal doesn’t happen or funding falls through or a key employee leaves, lost in the dumps – even if only for a short time.

Knowing your strengths may not do away with the ups and downs but certainly will help dampen the amplitude and help you make decisions with greater confidence. Knowing your strengths is just as much about recognizing stuff that you are not good at and surrounding yourself with folks who’s strengths complement your own.

Unlike my daughter who’s just fifteen as of this writing, I was on the wrong side of thirty when my father made his comparison to Hanuman. So don’t wait – get to know your strengths today. Ask your colleagues, your ex-boss, your staff and if your bold enough, your spouse or significant other. And once a year take stock to understand what new strengths you have acquired and what has atropied and been lost.

Be a self-aware Hanuman!

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Who else is inside your entrepreneurial head?

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Seth Godin recently wrote a post titled “Is this noise inside my head bothering you? ” about the many voices that operate inside our head. Seth characterized the voices in roles varying from an artist to a zombie. Terri Lonier, author of the Working Solo newsletter, added a time component of the past, present and the future in her response “Who’s inside your head?”

This naturally lead me to think, “Who else is inside our heads?” Here are a few characters you are likely to encounter daily, mostly from your past.

Your parents A great deal of how we think about things, has been formulated at the parental knee, the family dinner table through all those years you spent at home. So when you find yourself agonizing over “I’ll never be able to get it done” or “I’m just going to have to hold firm, if I am to get what I want” this may be the voice of your parents (or teachers). As with all humans, they were likely right, about as often as they were wrong. So recognizing when you are playing a parental script versus when you are consciously thinking things through is important.

Your managers Most of us have had the good fortune of having worked for one or more great managers. And all of us at one time had that manager from hell – maybe not pointy-haired – but close enough. So when we deal with people particularly and problems that arise with the powers-that-be, its likely our managers turn up in our heads.

Your hereos We’ve all been faced with tough choices. Be it walking away from an ethically challenging situation or having to make a hard choice between work and personal life or letting go of a co-founder. The more honest among us ask out loud “What would ____ do?” fill in with your favorite hero – Jack, Steve, Gandhi or Jesus.

As entrepreneurs we’d like to believe we are smart, motivated  go-getters and we likely are. But knowing that many a times we come up with an answer, it’s worth reflecting who’s voice it is we are hearing.

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Can startups afford work-life balance?

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Balance

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Is work-life balance an oxymoron for startups?

Many people would suggest – Jack Welch comes to mind – that you are either successful or have work-life balance – and he wasn’t even talking about a startup!. So does this mean as a cash-strapped, competitor-chasing, crew-challenged startup you have no option but to give up your life till you reach some major milestone? To make matters worse, said milestone may each quarter either appear to change or move further away.

Yet others – such as the crew at 37signals and FogCreek software – strongly advocate fewer working hours and working smart. For many of us struggling in the trenches this may sound like Warren Buffett telling us “Money doesn’t buy you happiness.” Yeah right! We’ll believe it once we’ve have made some money!

An equally important question to ask is can you afford to not have work-life balance?

So can startups and entrepreneurs achieve work-life balance? And if so how do they do it?

My own experience is that it depends. It depends on what we mean by work-life balance and the choices we make. The extremes are easy to identify and agree upon.

  • You haven’t let your office for four nights, can’t remember when you last had a non-pizza meal and can’t recall the name of your first born, or if single, when you last called your girlfriend | mom ][pick your loved one]. And this is when there isn’t a crisis at work. You probably have only work (and likely no girlfriend).
  • If you clock in by 10AM (you have “flex” hours) – are out each evening by 455PM, take your lunch diligently between 12PM-1PM, and turn off your phones on Friday at 6PM, you are in the wrong place, working in a startup or even in a job!

But reality each day rarely appears in one of these two extremes, but in a whole slew of gray areas.

In a startup context, to me, work-life balance can be achieved by moving the goal posts to a realistic settings with two simple steps. I can hear some of you saying that’s cheating, but aren’t all successful startups about changing rules and sometimes definitions themselves?

  • 15-day to 30-day cycles Measuring and working towards a semblance of balance over a longer period such as a month or week (depends on whether you have kids, girlfriends or other commitments). Simply put, be they chores such as doing your laundry or paying your bills, even filing your expense reports (all stuff I continue to have problems with) or having a life such as calling Mom or going on a date (one that’s prepared to be flexible) set a frequency – I will do this once a month or twice a month. So rather than beat yourself up, that you haven’t called your mom (which you can never do enough of, according to her) or paid your bills, because you are so busy you know that at any time you are unlikely to be more than a month/week/fortnight behind.
  • Emergencies - make the right call in emergencies – that means family/friend/life comes first in an emergency. As a startup you intuitively rush to a client, when they have a line down (or these days cloud down) situation, spend the four days/nights to get the application/system/production line back up or ship two guys to a small village in Japan. Similarly when the “done” deal seems to be slipping away at the last minute you spare no effort to get it back – regardless of the debasement required. Use the same judgement or gut call, when your spouse calls to say the kids running 102, or your best friend’s in a bad car accident or your dad’s having chest pains. Don’t Blackberry, multitask or manage – drop the other stuff and get  over there. Your startup will manage, your employees/partners would better appreciate you and your actions will speak louder than any number of TXT messages or emails to your family/friend/life!

Now quit reading this blog and get back to busting your rear – you are in a startup Joe!

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