Agile Learning Labs

What I learned at Startup Weekend SF: Agility is the state of nature

What's a good mother/son spring break activity? Why, going to Startup Weekend and spending 50 hours building a company with ten total strangers. Perfect because my 17 year-old vastly prefers the company of adults to that of other teenagers, and because he's been on the high school treadmill for so long that I thought it would be nice for him to see what the light at the end of the tunnel might look like--that the world of work can be a rather thrilling place.

Several years ago, I visited the very first Y Combinator class of college-age founders when they were only six weeks into their startups and was astounded at the number of fully functioning products. Turns out six weeks is an eternity, way more time than you need to build and launch a startup!

This weekend, 150 of us crammed into a giant room in Microsoft's Market St. facilities. We were given lots of food (thanks to Sana of Women 2.0) and very little direction. After a free-form round of idea-pitching, with coaching from the lovably dyspeptic Dave McClure (our team-member Han Pham describes his style here), we were cut loose to self-organize into teams.

Tyrone and I were interested in Connor Lee's idea for a venue-rating site for event planners (easy to build in a weekend), and Julian Bryant's pitch for a site that would allow people to intereact around pending legislation. As it turned out, Connor, who had legislative experience Tyrone and I all joined Julian, along with developers Marcus Phillips and Philipp Pfeiffenberger, SEO/Social Media/Web Marketer Aris Vlasakakis, marketing gurus Sherbeam Wright and Mariam Ishpahani, journalist Han and a couple of others who came and went over the weekend. Julian emerged as the natural leader, as well he should being a former Senate intern and Georgetown Law grad with a startup around language learning.

I have worked as an employee or long term contractor on three tech startups, one VC funded, one angel funded, and one bootstrapped. This team outshone them all in terms of raw talent, intellectual horsepower, organization, distribution of skillsets, commitment and efficiency. And we were not alone. In all, 23 teams had working demos or prototypes to share on Sunday evening, and a couple had actually launched fully functioning products (I was using Snoozemail in my gmail inbox before the evening was out). There could be no better demonstration of the power of self-organizing teams than this display of exponential creativity and productivity.

Marcus and Philipp--both Y Combinator alumni if I'm not mistaken--were curious about Agile, and we talked about it a little bit, but there really wasn't time to talk about anything but pushing our product out the door. What I found enlightening was that their native values, instincts and practices were inherently Agile. Being Web 2.0 guys who work in Ruby and Python, they have never been exposed to Waterfall. (The only team that did anything resembling a Waterfall process was the one team that had absolutely nothing to show on Sunday, having spent all their time creating specs.)

This makes me think that perhaps the best way to promote Agile is to take a cue from crime prevention and literacy drives: don't focus on reforming those who have already been "lost" to Waterfall methods; focus instead on preventing the destruction of our talent pool in the first place!

Our team, christened "Democlarity," divided rather quickly into two right-sized sub-teams (also quite Agile). Tyrone went with the bus dev side, working on business planning, market research and content creation, while I went with the development side--the first time I've ever worked on a project and not been the writer/editor. I did some HTML wireframing, then turned my attention to CSS styling while the devs blasted in the functionality.

We had technical difficulties here and there--the wifi broke, version control broke, my host account where I was hosting images while designing went down at a critical point. Marcus and I paired on merging the disparate html files, then Philipp and I paired on some last minute CSS (he is 10x faster than I am, so my main contribution was saying things like, "Can you make that greener?").

Everything  got done, and Aris and Marcus had time to practice their demo pitch. We weren't live online, but we were certainly way too cool for powerpoint, and were able to show a site with functionality and an amazing amount of depth.

Aris and Marcus rocked the demo, with Phllip driving the mouse so they wouldn't have to break their patter, and we disbanded feeling like we'd accomplished something fairly spectacular and been a part of something pretty important. The Democlarity team is looking forward to a reunion in a month, and plan to continue developing what we started in an open source-ish sort of way. In the meantime, a demo of our site should be up on www.democlarity.com fairly soon.

Tyrone went back to swim team practice today, and I'm back at work too. But I learned more about teams and teamwork this weekend than I did in the previous year--and that's a year in which I wrote an Agile training manual and helped organize the Orlando Scrum Gathering's Open Space Conference. I'd highly recommend the startup weekend experience for anyone who is seriously committed to working on or with software teams--the pressure of an insane deadline like that compels you to strip everything down to the purest, simplest form: communication, decision making, work flow, product features, everything, and conversely, it also leads one to discover the enormity of one's own personal resources. We were like those people who, in a crisis, lift a car off of a person. Heady, empowering stuff.

This weekend was Startup Weekend World, with 50 cities participating. There will be another soon enough. Hope to see you there!

Microsoft's Anand Iyer has written a superb overview of the event on his blog, along with descriptions of all 23 companies.

Long Live Lucky Oliver

On Wednesday, I'm doing a presentation on doing presentations. One of the little gems that I was looking forward to passing on was Lucky Oliver. It has been my favorite source for images for presentations and the web. The quality and variety of the images has been consistently great, and the prices were more than affordable. Today I discovered that Lucky Oliver will be closing down on May 15th. I'm sad to be losing this source for great photos, and sad to see the business fail. Best of luck to Bryan, and everyone else at Lucky Oliver.

Now where am I going to get my images? Any suggestions?

Cheers,

Chris

SDForum SEM Sig

I spent the evening at the SDForum Software Engineering Management Special Interest Group (SEM Sig) meeting. The room was filled with engineering managers of almost every type and experience level. The presenter tonight was Narinder Sandhu, who worked at HP and Intuit before founding T-Rex Global. He managed to get everyone in the room to do a basic skills-assessment and career action plan, as part of his presentation comparing large companies to small startups.

After the formal presentation, the informal discussions were amazing. I talked with people about things as diverse as: finance, feedback, agile development, a mathematical model for organizational structures, and C vs. Lisp vs. Verilog! Oh yes, I’ll be back.

New Business Cards

I wasn’t liking my business cards.

So Hillary and I spent a couple of hours on OvernightPrints.com today and came up with something that I like better.

What do you think?

Speaking of techdirt...

I was recently invited by techdirt’s Mike Masnick to be a part of the Techdirt Insight Community. The idea is really interesting:

The Techdirt Insight Community is a service that lets a company engage a dynamic and diverse group of experts who provide analysis and insight tailored to meet your specific needs quickly and cost effectively. Our qualified community of expert bloggers tackles your issues through an interactive online conversation and quickly provides you with the answers you need to drive your business forward.

I’m looking forward to it!

Plug and Play

I just met with Shobeir Shobeiri and Kayvan Baroumand at Plug and Plug and Play Tech Center. It has been almost a year since I was there for techdirt greenhouse (one and two). The place has really come along. I think that they were hosting about 20 companies back then. Shobeir told me that they now house over ninety!

Mini MBA For Free - Thanks TVC!

I spent yesterday morning with about 30 other entrepreneurs, learning about some real-world legal, HR, and funding issues that startups typically face. The program was one of six that Technology Ventures Corporation (TVC) puts on in rotation. The program is free, and they even include a decent continental breakfast! Interestingly, TVC is funded by Lockheed Martin and the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. The event was hosted by SRI at their headquarters in Menlo Park, CA.

Ralph Kokka, a lawyer with Randick, O’Dea & Tooliatos, started us off with a presentation on the pros and cons of the various forms a business might take, such as LLC, S Corp, and C Corp. He hit the high and low points of each, with a focus on the concerns of startups looking for funding. There were many questions and he did an excellent job of answering them while keeping his presentation moving.

Sherry McVicar then walked us through the most important HR considerations for a startup. She pointed out common pitfalls such as mis-categorizing workers contractor vs. employee or exempt vs. non-exempt. She also explained what benefits are mandatory, and when these requirements kick in. For example:

• All companies must provide leave for jury duty.
• Companies with 5 or more employees must provide pregnancy leave.
• Companies with 50 or more employees must provide family and medical leave.

TVC's very own Ralph Patterson rounded out the day with a presentation entitled “13 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make.” The mistakes that he pointed out were all issues that would keep professional investors from funding a company. The mistakes included:

• Assuming too much debt
• Acquiring too many shareholders too early
• Pitching the product instead of the business
• Too many Powerpoint slides
• Not having a business plan

The event was interesting and informative, and I’ll be back to checkout the other 5 installments:

• Entering the Entrepreneurial World
• Market Research and the Marketing Plan
• Financial Management
• Preparing and Presenting the Business Plan
• Attracting Equity Investors and Lessons Learned

Big thanks to Juan Montermoso, who told me about this event.

Entrepreneurs, Managers, and You

One of the podcasts that I enjoy is The Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture series from Stanford. The speakers tend to be smart, insightful, and inspiring. This morning I listened to the show from February 7th, which featured Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn.

Reid really grasps the differences between being an entrepreneur and being a manager. Listening to him compare and contrast the two will help you, no matter which you are. He also explains how even those who choose to have jobs are more and more entrepreneurial these days. You need to treat yourself as a product, and your career as your business. You even need a ‘business plan’ for your career.

If you want to network with me on LinkedIn, you can find my profile here.

The Soul of an Entrepreneur

Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur yourself or just an entrevoyeur, there's much to be gleaned from the musings of a distinguished group of business adventurers over at My Way, The Entrepreneur Collective, which aggregates feeds from a dozen individual entrepreneurs' blogs.  Blogging here are some really superb and entertaining folk, including Tom Evslin, whose post Why A Great Programmer is Worth 50 Good Ones is a classic all managers should read, the always brilliant Chris Yeh, and Ben Casnocha, whose Business Rules of Thumb wiki is full of gems like this:

First-rate men hire first-rate men...second-rate men hire third-rate men...these third-rate men will then employ the bulk of your company's employees and they tend to select fourth-rate people. - Richard M. White. 

Here be much wisdom.

SCORE!

I spent yesterday working on the business plan for The Technical Management Institute. It’s mostly there (like 20 pages worth), except for the financials. Even though we are not looking for financing, I think it makes sense to put a couple of days into building projected: balance sheets, income statements, cash flow statements, and a break-even analysis. A call to a good friend of mine at FactSet got me some good pointers and information about what to include. Then this page at SCORE set me up with templates for doing all of these documents. Life is good.