I've been looking for a good copy of this Toni Frissell photograph for a while. If you look at the way the model's hands are reaching down, but clearly not feeling bottom, and just visualize that feeling in your mind - on your back, treading water, nose and mouth just above water and reaching down through the water... finding nothing, no support.

I know that dangerous, exciting thrill of a feeling.

 

That feeling? That's start-up. That's what I mean by "No Visible Means of Support".

Enjoy!
@cxtinac

In 2006 I was persuaded that "Ramen Profitable" (although we did not have a name for it back then that I can remember) was the right way to go by a co-founder and CFO, against my own inclination at the time.

Was it the right thing to do?  Read on and find out!

First the background:

In the 2-3 years before 2006 we had invested a lot of technical and thinking effort (and bootstrap money) in building and refining a product suite built on top of a services based stack. It always received great reviews in all the presentations and demos we did, and we were confident it could become a successful long term B2B offering. But from that good start we made the mistake of putting too much of our time and attention into trying to raise outside money, so that we could accelerate, but with only a little success.

We had a product, we had good feedback on the concept, and atthe time I believed that all we needed was outside money to fund our growth. As a result we spent far too much time chasing fund raising and far too little time selling real things to firms that wanted to buy them. And time kept slipping into the future. Things were looking bleak and we were running out of money.

So in 2006 we shifted gears.

We walked away from fund-raising efforts, and started focusing on selling. We quietly concentrated on a few things:

• Getting and retaining real paying customers;
• Polishing rough edges (of which there were many) based on what those customers told us they wanted;
• Truly understanding at a granular level what business we were in;
• Building a CMRR that paid the same or a bit more than our basic expenses every month.

The outcome is that we've been "Ramen Profitable" for about two years now.

Thinking back I can see now that it's an indescribably huge relief to get to that point, although for me it was barely noticeable at the time. But the important point is that everyone (trust me I mean everyone!) notices the different demeanour. Most folks only notice it at a subliminal level, but it still has a powerful impact on buying decisions, and everywhere else.

To illustrate: in a sales presentation the psychology, body language, and other non-verbal, etc. go from something like:

Before: "Dear Prospect: I gotta get this sale or we may not be around in 3 months time!"

to:

After: "Dear Prospect: Customers A, B, C like what we're doing for them, you may like it too... Or you may not, and that's fine too, but by the way we'd love to understand better what we didn't do for you.."

Which one would you buy from?

* * *

So here's the zinger.

Life is not too bad. We've been in that safe mode for over a year now. The team is getting their expenses more or less covered, we're doing what we want to do, with a solution we believe in, and we have happy clients where we're adding measurable value. We're not terrified about being a complete and abject failure any more. So what's wrong with this picture?

 

The fact is, life is getting too safe. The way I see it, the challenge now is to "throttle up" again. Personally I like shuttle and flying analogies, and the analogy here would be that moment (we all know it) when the shuttle has cleared the launch tower, has stabilized on a trajectory at maybe 80% engine load, and then the launch controller says something like "Go for throttle up!" and it goes to 110% load and heads on up into orbit. And there's that moment of dangerous excitement.

The challenge is that we've gotten too used to the comfort of an undemanding Ramen diet now. Going forward we need to shake it up, to go-for-throttle-up, without breaking things.

This begs the question: "What are the triggers, what do we measure to drive that acceleration?".

If you're going to get off the ground at all, the sheer adrenaline of doing a startup can drive you a lot of the way up the first hump I believe. But it takes something else, something essentially different to then go to the next level. What is it? I'm honestly not clear, but I'm talking to folks and trying to figure it out.

Here's my thoughts so far.

I believe these are some of the leading factors (i.e. prerequisites), not prioritized:

• Figuring out how to scale each and every the part of the business model
• Being easy to do adopt (freemium, zero deployment etc.)
• Expanding the real addressable market and how we connect with it
• Avoiding mistakes and recycle in the post-sale and assuring a polished, high quality, credible execution
• Learning to be a small capable fish in a bigger pond

And these are the lagging factors (i.e. they may be required to sustain that second uptick, but only once it is underway):

• Significant extra investment
• That "breakthrough sale"

I 'm planning to drill down on these in future posts.

What do you think? Is this list appropriate, complete? I'm very interested in your thoughts.

@cxtinac

 

Last couple of days so many people have been getting in a tizzy and all kinds of posts all over about Google's Chrome OS and what kind of competition it will be for 'MS Windows' etc... And every post has comments along the lines "well will Chrome have a file manager, and a console, and what about device drivers... and... and... if it doesn't have all these things it won't compete with Windows."

Seems to me, the point is that the target market (<- important words) really doesn't care about file managers and consoles for the most part. The goal is the same as the Palm Pre - a true web OS, where most of the functionality resides outside the device (whatever the device is).

That concept has been fermenting for over a year now - look at the CrunchPad development and comments I've seen all over about "wouldn't it be great if I could turn on my <insert device here> and have a browser in front of me in less than two minutes and not worry about patch Tuesdays" etc. This is the successor to the "OS bloat" debates of a couple years ago.

There will always be a need for serious desktop systems - there are some things (debugging & compiling code, OS builds etc.) that require a real substantive local platform. But the reality that has been emerging for a while now is that most people don't do those tasks. And the cloud is there. The power of desktop & notebook systems has been outstripping the processing needs of most end users. If you ask most users "what's the next thing you do after you turn on your computer" I'm sure most will say open an email / IM client or open a web browser. Certainly true for me 5 days out of 6. With browser-based email clients widespread this collapses down to "open a web browser".

So the fact that we all missed (I'm as guilty as any), is that if you're only running a web browser etc. you don't need the kind of bloated stack and massive hardware capability we have grown accustomed to having to manage and pay for.. I agree that this is a huge oversimplification - what about device drivers, and running Flash and Air and Java and so on you say. But the point is that the vast majority of users don't care about these things. They are looking for an instant-on device to surf the web, watch videos, listen to music etc. and no more. For the rest of us, there will always be the Windows, Linux, Mac debate. But we're the 10% market - the other 90% (out a few years) is the market Google is pitching with Chrome.

My own preference is still Ubuntu. But that's me. Go on admit it - we all missed a gaping hole in the OS spectrum.

I've watched this video a lot - I think it truly -is- amazing. If you haven't
seen it, here it is [spoiler alert: watch it first and then read on].

 

 What -really- impresses me is that the pilot basically learns to fly all over
again - using one wing, in the 10 seconds before he would (otherwise) hit the
ground.

 Just after the wing comes off, the plane is clearly finished, and fishtailing
into a horrible crash, and then within a few seconds pilot figures it out,
lands and survives without a scratch!

 There was quite a bit of back chatter that it was faked, but if you look
carefully just before touch-down, you can see the control surface on the
(remaining) left wing gets used to flip the plane back horizontal to touch
down on all 3 wheels.

 Also, if you watch the landing "approach" closely, the flier uses the rudder
as elevators (up|down), and the elevators as a rudder(left|right), and the
remaining left wing gets used as some weird kinda tail.

 Crazy!

Found a wolf spider in the woodpile yesterday! It's hard to judge the scale
from the pictures - it was about 1.5" long. Identified it as a wolf spider
from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_spider

 I'm glad they don't grow to be much larger!

• Great account of P-E. Obama's trip to Washington by train in today's UK Observer, following in Lincoln's footsteps. Compelling stuff.

• Cheerio to dubbya. I've been racking my brains to think of a counterpoint quip about heading back to TX on a beast of burden, but it just hasn't crystallized yet. The following from Lincoln's farewell address is perhaps the most fitting point to pick up the torch:

• Farewell to Andrew Wyeth. I specially like Christina's World for obvious reasons.

• Farewell to Tony Hart. I grew up watching Vision On.. I still remember the intro music.

That's all...

Seems to me there's an interesting convergence of ideas that promises to take doom and gloom to a new meta level. Let me know what you think.

In a previous post originally written in 2006 I talked about (my limited understanding of) the growth of CO2 in the atmosphere and the saw-tooth growth curve.

Fast forward to late 2008.

If you look at the saw-tooth more closely, and specifically the seaon-adjusted line in solid black, you can see inflection points for years in which the economy went south, e.g. 1973-4, 1982-3, 1992-3, 2000 etc... I won't go on, you get the drift.

So to flip this around it would be a reasonable expectation that we're in an especially deep inflection point in 2008-2009 for obvious reasons, and the emerging data does seem to support that, although it's early days yet. "So what", you may say - "so the current recession is dropping greenhouse gas levels a bit, like all the previous ones".

Well here's the zinger:

I happened to come across some news of studies reported from the recent American Geophysical Union meeting (December 2008) that suggests that human influences on climate change date back much further than 200 years, and that we have actually been delaying the onset of a new "natural cycle" Ice Age for several thousand years. Given that global temperatures have been warm and fairly stable for much longer in the current interglacial than in all known previous examples, and it is apparently accepted that according to previous cycle timing we should be in another Ice Age already it seems possible that we are in an (unknown and increasingly tense) tug of war between human-induced warming on the one hand, and a new Milankovitch-driven Ice Age on the other. It could make for an interesting time coming up now that we have collectively rolled back the global CO2 blankets in the current recession.

Call me crazy, but looking out the window there sure is an awful lot of snow out there...

This is part of an old item originally posted on my old blog Saturday 18 November 2006 I will be picking up the theme shortly in a new post...

[...old political commentary edited out, you can read it if you really want here... and so to continue:]

The bottom line is still the bottom line. Gigatonnes of CO2 (et. al.) dumped into our atmosphere.

There's one thing in all of this I find very interesting. Kinda technical, so bear with me while I try to explain. Everyone knows by now the shape of the curve showing the rise in CO2 in the atmosphere, here's a good example. But look at that curve again. Notice the saw-tooth shape. That means it's a dynamic equilibrium: the teeth on the saw represent winter in the northern hemisphere - when Green Things stop growing. (With apologies to New Zealand, Australia, etc. most of the southern hemisphere is water).

In the northern hemisphere in Spring and Summer, Green Things start growing again, and basically what happens is:

CO2 + Water + Sunlight(energy) => Cellulose [wood] + Oxygen

- so Green Things eat CO2, and we go onto the downward slope of the saw tooth. Now if you look at the steepness of the slopes. [Stay with me here, this get's interesting again in a minute]. The drop due to what Green Things 'eat' in one year is about equal to 5 (five!) years of what we dump into the atmosphere. That means that atmospheric CO2 level would respond quite quickly to changes in what we dump. Put another way (look at the picture) we could quickly (1-2 decades) reduce atmospheric CO2 to [previous] levels [...] if we stopped dumping more.

So finally here's the punch-line: if we think of the atmosphere+Green Things system as a balloon with a [pin-]hole in it; we have to keep blowing the CO2 into it to keep the levels up - if we stop, it goes down pretty fast. And what that means is that we have a problem of political will on our hands, we are not victims of our dirty CO2 emissive historical past. That's good news! If we can only yank the leash of our elected Important People, just maybe...

Mean while [back in 2006] Canada's New Government is [was] presenting a Clean Air Act, duplicating much existing legislation I understand, and with a proposal for consultations
with industry about intensity-based reduction targets for 2050. Good grief! That's like the farmer saying to the fox: "I'd like to set a date next year to discuss with you a target to steal fewer chickens in 10 years time."

Fiddling while Rome Burns.

Anecdote: When I was at Oxford there was a research building in the science campus off Parks Road in the Physics Dept. The sign by the main entrance read:
"Atmospheric Physics: Top Floor"
-which always struck me as amusing, as if you couldn't do atmospheric physics in the basement...Ha.

Re-reading the post below I would probably make a few changes, but for "historical accuracy" here it is unedited - still seems like a sensible starting point...

Originally Posted on my old blog Saturday 21 October 2006

I was prompted to do this, by reading this: A world on the edge - and the realization that if our long term survival as a species on this planet is uncertain (which it certainly is) and we are unable to get beyond it in any meaningful physical way (which we aren't - notwithstanding 'tourists in space' etc... - a topic for a future post), then the one thing that should be relatively cheap and easy to send as ambassador should be ideas.

'Cos ideas one might argue is what really makes us... us. Where they go... we go.

So what we need to do is reverse the SETI antennas (antenae?), put a big transmitter at the centre, and pump out a few TB a day to... whoever or whatever. Because what theyreceive will elucidate the essence of who we are. It's interesting to speculate on whether ideas are truly universal. i.e. given any sentient being, is there a single set of 'ideas' that defines the total available idea-set for all sentient beings? I suppose sort of like a unified field theory of thought. Put another way, as a sentient being in some far off place light years in the future, would I ever say 'yeah I know that feeling'.

I dunno.

Though having said that, I dunno know why the SETI _successful hit_ is taking so long, and maybe it's important to do the inbound too. Drake's fractions are looking pretty tiny to me these days (but what do I know), and all of a sudden the universe is feeling like it's a cold (or hot) inorganic world. Like successful fusion power, it would be just such a stunning confirmation to receive just a few coherent bytes from the ether...

On the other hand some might argue that SITI (INTRA terrestrial) is more important on this uhhh... planet.