The first toad is free...

 Seems like it might be time for an cross-species intevention. From NPR:

"We noticed Lady spending an awful lot of time down by the pond in our backyard," Laura Mirsch recalls.

Lady would wander the area, disoriented and withdrawn, soporific and glassy-eyed.

"Then, late one night after I'd put the dogs out, Lady wouldn't come in," Laura Mirsch says. "She finally staggered over to me from the cattails. She looked up at me, leaned her head over and opened her mouth like she was going to throw up, and out plopped this disgusting toad."

It turned out the toads were toxic -- and, if licked, the fluids on their skin provided a hallucinogenic effect.

What followed was the Mirsch family's quest to stop their cocker spaniel from indulging herself. But it wasn't easy. Lady was persistent, and resourceful.

The situation seemed to resolve itself when the toads went into hibernation for the winter.

But when they returned, so did Lady -- and with a vengeance.

"We couldn't keep our dog's addiction a secret any longer," Laura Mirsch says. "The neighbors all knew that Lady was a drug addict, and soon the other dogs weren't allowed to play with her."

In the end, Lady seems to have found a way to manage her problem.

"She seems to have outgrown the wild toad-obsessed years of her youth," Mirsch says, "and now only sucks on weekends."

Tankball: just the thing to bring to Fight Club.

Tank paintball. Now this looks fun. (Hey, is that Michael Moore in the turret?)

Stuart had the guns removed and contacted Jez Smith, 26-year-old local engineer and serial inventor, to make the biggest paintball gun ever seen. Their chosen ammunition, fired by compressed air, would be paint-filled ping-pong balls.

The first attempt blasted a ball into orbit. Jez lost sight of it after a mile-and-a-half when it passed the church spire. It also sent a small potato through the sound barrier. Over time, he calmed it to a legal and relatively modest 200mph. Jez then designed a 40mm, 8ft steel barrel to slot into the turret and the company now has five. "Obviously, these aren't proper guns with rifled barrels or they'd be illegal," says Stuart, 38. "But a ping-pong ball full of liquid doing 300ft per second is lethal. That's why we operate with sealed hatches."

Multipreneure or Parallelpreneure?

 From the Mercury News,

``Basically, everyone I know is involved in five or six projects right now,'' said Scott Rafer, 38, former CEO of the search engine Feedster and now CEO of blog tracker MyBloglog.com, co-founder of Mashery.com, a stealth-mode company aiming to help Web developers, and chairman of WiFinder.com, a WiFi hotspot directory. ``VCs spread their risk across numerous companies,'' said Rafer. ``Why shouldn't we?''

George Zachary, a venture capitalist at Charles River Ventures on Sand Hill Road, compared the climate to Hollywood. ``It's like how multiple people get involved in multiple movie projects as insurance. Entrepreneurs are responding to the hits-driven nature of the industry, where only a few big acquisitions are happening every year.''

... Indeed, most observers agree that a committed business partner is critical to make running more than one company work. ``The entrepreneurs I've studied have found partners who complement the entrepreneur very nicely and who devote fuller attention to an individual venture,'' said Noam Wasserman, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School.

Connect Magazine: I guess it's my point of view except for the fat guy in front.

I was flattered when Connect Magzine called me and asked if they could send up a writer and run an article on my. (Connect article) I prattled on for an hour at least before Lisa felt she had had enough.

But that's not what this post is about.

Geoff Osmond called me later and asked if they could come up to Park City and take a picture for the article. Fine with me. Everyone at Connect is great to work with. So Kevin Kiernan proceeded to snap a few pictures. I was happy enough until he showed me a few of the shots on the back of his camera. Who the hell is that fat guy standing in front of me? That was my first thought.

Here's the picture that Kevin took. What the hell's happened to me?

 Now I'm not totally wrapped up in vanity but hey, that's not nice.

Especially since this is how I think of myself. (This is a promo shot for my publisher and it's about 10 years old.)

Startups take their toll. I used to be something of a gym rat. I ran the NYC Marathon. I was in really good shape.

Seven years of startup hours have left their mark. Now I've got Married Mans Disease.

I'm going to the gym. 

Silicon Valley: It's location that makes you visible & viable.

Why will Silicon Valley rule the start-up universe? Because they're already there.

From the New York Times comes an article on location awareness in VC backed startups. 

Los Angeles area also has a pool of talented engineers (working at aerospace companies like Lockheed, Northrop and Hughes) and great universities (notably Caltech and U.C.L.A.) and plenty of money to invest. “But in Los Angeles,” he said, “people are scattered across a wide area; everything is more spread out.”

It’s harder for entrepreneurs to meet with one another and with investors, he added. And that means connections take longer, deals move slowly, fewer companies are formed. “Like a gas, entrepreneurship is hotter when compressed.” he said.

Sequoia makes its preference for the 20-minute rule almost explicit, telling applicants whose companies are at the “seed stage” (receiving less than $1 million) or “early stage” ($1 million to $10 million) that “it is helpful if the company is close to our offices” because they “require very frequent contact.”

And more on startups as a priority:

“In New York, it would be extremely difficult to find a law firm willing to defer the first $20,000 of your legal fees,” Mr. Sternberg said. “Here, we got that. It’s a pretty standard thing in Silicon Valley.”

... He did end up needing Silicon Valley for something else: technical talent that would be willing to accept equity in place of any salary. Six weeks ago, he moved to Silicon Valley to recruit more people like his chief technical officer, who has been working full time since Jan. 1 for equity only.

“Elsewhere, if people in a large organization think you have potential, they offer you a job, trying to save you from the uncertainties of a start-up,” said Mr. Sengupta, who himself has worked at Oracle, Microsoft and General Motors. “In Silicon Valley, they say, ‘Can I join you?’ ”

Mr. Sengupta now has six “employees” working for BeyondCore without salaries. Only in Silicon Valley, he said, do “people have confidence that if you act on great ideas, the money will come.”

Design Engine: Robin Peng builds really cool things.

I met Robin Peng at a networking event this week and we immediately hit it off. Robin runs Design Engine, an industrial design shop where they're working on some stuff that just blew my socks off. (He let me play around with a 3D modeling tool that gives feedback. You can lift, move, bounce anything in the environment and actually 'feel' the differing weight. It was mindblowing.) I really liked the parachute Hummer that they designed for the Army. Rob made me sign a couple of non-disclosures so I can't tell you what they're up to except that you'll be seeing some of it soon. I didn't get home until 2 a.m..

Robin went to Art Center at the same time I was at USU. At the time (84-88) USU had one of the best illustration programs in the country and we'd bus down to LA in the summer to meet people. Art Center was always on the list. It was eye-opening to pull the bus into the parking lot and see that the students were driving BMW's and Lamborgini's. They'd rent Tigers from the Zoo for drawing classes. It was another world. We did kick their ass thought, at least in the illustration department.

Rob came out of the auto design program and was hired by Ford's Advanced Concept division. He's a 'Golden Child' in the best sense of the word. He's also just a great, genuine guy who I immediately trusted. I've set up a meeting with his team Monday to show the some medical laser & IPL technology that I'm in the process of turning into a business.

I'm adding Robin to the Fight Club list so you might meet him there. 

Big Chair: Just what every stylist wants.

My good buddy Shane Jones is getting close to opening his business Big Chair Salon & Spa Suites.

Big Chair (He stole that name from me.) is an almost tech solution to a small business problem.

Opportunity: Every hair stylist, massage therapists on earth wants to own their own salon.

Problem: Salons and spas don't make money (6% margins nationwide) and have high startup costs.

Solution: Big Chair builds out individual 'suites' that they lease by the week, providing exactly what the market wants. Every stylist can now own their own salon and run it however they wish.

Shane's a smart guy and knows this market. The beauty of this business is that he'll have 'no employees', it's just a simple lease agreement that gives the tenants what they want and prevents all the headaches.

Fight Club: To flame or not to flame, that is the question.

Matt Asay wrote a column in Connect Magazine about entrepreneurship and startups in Utah. Matt states that Utah has significant hurdles for startups and concludes that entrepreneurs should consider leaving the state in order to gain experience. (I'm speed paraphrasing.)

Chris Knudsen takes exception to this on his blog here. In addition to trashing Matt's article, Chris uses the following language to attack Matt:

"Bay Area transplants riding into Utah on their high horses and knocking the state.."
"condescending garbage"
"asinine"
"How may I help you leave Utah…forever?"
"leave the Bay Area attitude in the bay. We do things a little different here and for that we offer no apology."
"don’t lecture me about whining. You’ve made an art out of it and Connect has been your outlet."

First: I do not know Matt Asay. I do not really know Chris Knudsen (although I met him once at Fight Club.)

Second, and this is the point, while Matt may be right or wrong, it's obvious to anyone reading Matt's blog (AC/OS) that he's worth listening to. Chris damages his credibility by resorting to personal attacks. No matter what your disagreement with an opinion, personal attacks are unwarranted. I've been on the receiving end of these type of flame attacks and it's not pleasant. So while Chris won't apologize, I will. Sorry Matt.

Utah has potential, but to think that Utah isn't a pale shadow of the coasts is silly. The reason companies or entrepreneurs relocate is because it's in their best interest. Matt's opinion is one I find reasonable (as were his comments on Utah's funding problems.). The first step in change is to understand where there are problems. Personal flame attacks have no place in the discussion.

I'll extend an invitation to both Matt and Chris to duke it out at Fight Club. I'll supply the oversized sumo suits.

This just in! Candid shots from Phil Burns Tag Jungle web 2.0 development basement.

Looks like the Tag Jungle crew have built the next generation of search alright. Just put on this helmet and plug in. You'll find yourself able to search blog posts by sentiment. Of course the sentiment will probably be claustrophobia.

Actually, this is a dorkified helmet from Toshiba via Gizmodo. 

Founder Discount: More on why founders make less than hired guns.

From Canadianbusiness.com: Read the entire article here.

To solve the mystery of the underpaid entrepreneur, Wasserman collected data from 1,200 executives at more than 500 U.S. high-tech companies. After controlling for numerous variables such as experience and company size, his findings were stark: founders earn about $30,000 (U.S.) a year less than hired-gun managers doing pretty much the same job. In fact, 51% of founders earn less or the same as their employees.

The good news: the founder discount isn't forever. It shrinks over time and with the growth of the company. The bad news? Founders' compensation is inversely related to their control over the organization and their own job satisfaction. As I read it, as a company grows and gets more complicated — with more layers of management, boards of directors, outside investors and stricter management-performance metrics — founders get paid more because their jobs get harder.

But why does the gap exist in the first place? In simple terms, it's because founders tend to care too much about their own creations. Outside executives have to be paid market rates or more to join a company, and if their compensation doesn't keep pace with the outside world, they have little incentive to stay. Founders take a longer view. Like Cullen, they often put the company's financial needs ahead of their own. And their boards of directors don't worry that founders will bail out, because they know that founders are emotionally committed to the organization.

And there's this:

Paul Britton, a compensation consultant to businesses big and small, sees this problem again and again. The founding partner of Crossford Consulting in Toronto says there are two stupid reasons why entrepreneurs underpay themselves.

First, he says, some entrepreneurs think they can use their own lousy compensation as a lever when negotiating subordinates' pay. By pointing to their own pay packages, they think they can convince their employees to accept less, too. The problem, of course, is that your best people have lots of job options and know you have an ownership stake; it's generally only less valuable employees who will agree to work for below-market pay.

The other reason entrepreneurs underpay themselves is bad budgeting, says Britton. Instead of factoring in an appropriate salary for themselves ahead of time, founders will wait and see how much money the business makes over the year, and draw from that. When he asks groups of entrepreneurs if they have built a rate of return for themselves into their forecasts, Britton says only about one person in 20 will raise their hand.

Linked In is a digital chain letter.

Who likes Linked In? Not Scoble, and definately not Jeff Atwood who thinks Linked In is a digital chainletter.

Of course there's this on Linked In from Mashable. 

Threadless: Sticking it to the man.

You have to love a bunch of guys who are sticking it to the man just because they're too lazy to sign the contract.

Via Jason at 37 Signals:

It’s about time the Chicago press noticed a few dropouts in their 20s selling nearly $20,000,000 worth of T-shirts on Ravenswood Avenue.

“It certainly doesn’t hurt our PR when we go to speak and stuff like that to say, ‘Yeah, we turned down Target. We turned down Urban,’ ” Kalmikoff says. “But honestly, a little bit of it was laziness. We were like, ‘Well, who’s gonna fill out all this paperwork? I’m not doing it. Are you gonna do it?’ It just sat for like two weeks. Then we’re like, ‘Just tell ‘em no.’ We couldn’t take the time away from our client work for our side project to be filling out the paperwork to get into Target.”

Utah Technology Council: Cookies at Wilson Sonsini

This week I attended my first Utah Technology Council event. I wasn't sure what to expect, but hey, I'd paid to join so I might as well find out. I also wanted to hear Niclole Toomey Davis (her blog). It wasn't at all what I expected.

It was held at Wilson Sonsini's offices and Mark Bonham was supplying the cookies. (I'd met Mark before at a Funding Universe speed pitching event where we sat at the same table so I don't really know him but I've heard great things.) Mark alluded to the pizza and beer of Silicon Valley which frankly would have been my preference.

Mark Newman, COO of HireVue was also there and from what I could tell, he was co-hosting since he introduced Nicole. Mark and I both graduated from Brighton High School in SL. I found this out while telling Mark about the student team at Brighton (of which I was a member) that flew the first science experiment from a high school on the Space Shuttle. (It was on seed germination in zero gravity.) I made the comment that that would probably be before his time. He informs me that he was born in 1984. Some of these young, wet-behind-the-ears-types don't know when to shut up. Evidently, Hirevue is run by toddlers.

Nicole obviously knows whereof she speaks. She's with Utah's Centers of Excellence COEP now and it seems that part of her responsibilities extend to trying to get science out of Utah's universities and into the market. Her presentation was short and most of the time was spent in something akin to a round table discussion. All of the talk about SBIC's and such was outside of my experience but I found it all very interesting.

There are a number of networking events around that are fairly focused and cater to specific groups. I'll get together a list and post it. If you know or are part of a group, add it to that post and I'll make sure it's included.

Tag Jungle: It finds blogy things.

Phil Burns and the Tag Jungle crew gave me pizza today for lunch. That always makes me feel kindly.

Phil was trotting out Tag Jungle again before he tries to find money for more than pizza. That's always a good idea and especially for Phil. I'm generally geek-i-fied enough to follow discussions about blogging in general by I actually had to listen to follow some of the whatchamacallit goes in the gobblygook and comes out here stuff.

Jungle looks to be a real world solution for relevant search in the blogosphere and I'm anxious to see it in real world action.  I farted around with the alpha site for a little while and it looks promising. I was going to write a list of what TJ can do but I'll leave that to Phil. I will say that 'jungle juice' was first spoken by me. (I'll want some nachos at Fight Club.)

Phil et al are going on a roadshow to get more pizza money. Guy Kawasaki recommends watching this pitch by Majora. (Watch it online here.) Who am I to argue. 

I spoke briefly with Phil about building a pre-pitch dinner where Phil can pitch and receive feedback from investor types. I have a few people in mind. If I call you you'll get to see Phil gesture wildly and probably come away with a free T-shirt.

Founder Frustrations Blog: From Harvard Business Schools Noam Wasserman

From Noam Wassermans "Founders Frustrations" Blog. Noam Wasserman is a professor in the Entrepreneurial Management unit at Harvard Business School.

Noam's blog is a great read for entrepreneurs looking to understand how to structure ownership in a startup or why investors think they're adding more value than the entrepreneurs running the business. Here's nifty chart.

Table 6: Entrepreneur Expectations
(traces the trend between the entrepreneur’s perception and expectation of
the value-add potential of the investor throughout the various funding stages)

Entrepreneur's perception of investor

 

Build your starup team by consensus, or not.

Paul Allen is putting his pizza where his mouth is. After writing an article in Connect on building a team by putting all interested parties in a room and letting the cream rise to the top, he's setting aside an afternoon to to just that. (Here's the post on Paul's blog.) A one day free for all. Paul must ended up with a good impression of the business problem solving breakout at the last Corporate Alliance Summit. (Personally, I thought the keynote by Chad Hymas was the best takeaway of the weekend. After being teary-eyed through most it I ran out and called my daughter.)

I think that a startup brouhaha sounds like a great idea. I fired off an email introduction to Paul asking if I could attend. We'll see if I'm persona non gratis. I do tend to eat a lot of pizza and that could make for some hard feelings with those left hungry. They might vote me off the island.

Tag Jungle rolling out a beta test.

I really met Phil Burns ten days ago at a Corporate Alliance networking event. (We'd shaken hands and been introduced numerous times at geek dinners and blogger conferences but I'd never really sat down and been able to talk to him.)

Phil, for those of you who don't know, has been busy in his basement with his band of merry men for the last three months after they all took the axe at Provo Labs.

(Paul Allen was at the same event but unfortunately I didn't cross paths with him. Paul's someone I've never met either although I've been in the same room often enough. {Actually, I did cross paths with Paul on the last night but he was headed back to his hotel room with his wife. It was midnight and I thought better of jumping in his path to introduce myself.})

I digress. Phil and I discussed Tag Jungle at some length. Phil gave me a demo and booted up the beta site. I'm impressed. Farting around with TechCrunch as much as I do and seeing all of the web 2.0 apps, I think Tag Jungle has a workable solution that should get use. Technorati beware?

And 42co.? Evidently it's the answer to the entire universe according to Phil and Hitchhikers Guide. Who am I to question it. At least they changed the name.  Provo Labs Solutions = 8 white bread Mormon geeks in a basement.

From Guy Kawasaki's Signal Without Noise Blog: 10 questions with Polly LaBarre

Guy Kawasaki's blog has some excellent '10 Question' interviews with authors. So what if he makes a little money with the Amazon link.

Ten Questions with Polly LaBarre

Barre spent almost two years writing this book. Taylor is a co-founder and founding editor of Fast Company. LaBarre was a senior editor at Fast Company for eight years (and was one of the best reporters on the topic of entrepreneurship and marketing, in my humble opinion). She has made media on Good Morning America, CNN, CNBC, and PBS’s Nightly Business Report. She is also a co-author of The Big Moo: Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable. She is a graduate of Yale University.

Turn that model on its head and you get Pixar’s version of the right way to make movies: a tight-knit company of long-term collaborators who stick together, learn from one another, and strive to improve with every production. A key component of that model is Pixar’s no-contract policy. Famous, talented directors like Brad Bird, Peter Docter, Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich all of whom could secure lucrative contracts with any studio—are salaried employees of Pixar who contribute to all of the studio’s projects rather than just their own pet projects.