Holi-daze

Yes, it happens to startups too, whether they have three or thirty employees. Unless your business has a special focus on the month of December a la Amazon for example, you too will be infected.

Top signs you're under the influence of the season:

- 'Out of office' is your #1 sender
- All the investors you're trying to meet are in the mountains or the islands
- Gingerbread lattes are the beverage of choice in your coffee house meetings
- You're seeing red or green, or, yikes, both, everywhere
- Your conference calls meander into a discussion on which alcoholic beverage is the gift of choice
- Your parents are visiting
- You are visiting your parents
- You're up late working because you've been partying earlier
- You're up even later because your work stinks as you've been partying earlier
- You just give up and sleep in as you know no one else will wake up early to care anyway

Startups are not immune to the effects of the season, so if you can slack off a teeny bit, give in to the spirit. It's good for the morale and all that of course, but most importantly, it is fun.

Cheers!

The downside

There's been a lot of blogtalk about a couple of startups that have recently pulled the plug on their failing ventures, some after many millions of dollars of spending and years of effort. There are two that I found interesting because they contemplated the possibility of failure and how it could become reality - the downside of startups.

The first was about the recent closure of Edgeio and what appears to the similar fate facing Podtech. Both companies had high profile guys - the kind that were sought after to opine about tech trends at big-ticket conferences - at the helm, both raised decent VC funds, but that didn't guarantee success. According to the blogger (here's the post) it all boils down to too much hype and too little focus on the business.

The second one is by a founder of the company that shutdown, Zingdom. His post details how the company went through 5 years and three rounds of funding, built a product with a supportive customer base and still couldn't stay in business. It is extremely interesting to see how things can appear to be moving forward on the surface while unraveling below. A most cautionary tale. The lessons learned span everything from development methodology to keeping up with the Valley happenings, but one of particular note is that 'having too much money' can be dangerous.

Focus on the customer/user. It's a very simple and powerful mantra whether you're opening a Cali-French bistro or creating a website for folks hot-footing it to global-warming travel sites. But however well-intentioned you are, and even if you think that's exactly what you're doing, it is easy to get your sights blurry. For instance, our team made a technology decision in the interests of getting the product out to the user quickly. User-focused right? Maybe, but not comprehensively so, as they missed the requirement that users would want adds and changes and the tools used should easily support that - which unfortunately the bleeding-edge choice wouldn't be able to without much bandaiding. Lucky for us we saw this before we got too far, and it has made us hyper-aware about double-checking our decision-making at all levels. And it makes us more sympathetic and less know-it-all-y. The companies mentioned above didn't seek to fail and they had sharp people leading them. And yet they strayed off the path, stumbled and couldn't get up. And as conjectured in the blogs, it could be that all the money they got muffled the 'stay on target' message in their ear. Money - too much can deliver too little.

All about the 'tude

Attitude. That's what gets things done. Yes, it is a staple of every inspirational speaker or motivational totchke shelves, but there's a reason for it - some people need reminding.

In a previous post, I've opined on the startup balance between resources, timeline and deliverables and the constant challenge it raises, especially in the early stages when your dreams and deliverables overpower your resources. And I held forth on how to make those compromises. But, as I'm now involved in an almost daily balance reset, I've realized that there's one important component that determines how successful you're going to be, and that is Attitude (a big 'A' in a good way).

For many of us, especially those who tend to let the left brain be big boss (the right does little more than visualize pin stripes, cigar and some power girth), we tend to get all analytical about it. That goes double for the techies. Don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating an emo-meltdown, channeling fear, despair or anger. But you need to shake up the can-do attitude and pass it round for a good whiff before you get into the fray.

For instance. We have another user trial coming up. We have a list of must-have features. What we don't have is enough engineer-time to get those taken care of - in the 'normal' manner. And our framework makes it counter-productive to try to get contract help, at least in this time frame. Yes, there are constraints. But, as I heard Marissa Mayer of Google so succinctly put it in one of her talks: creativity likes constraints. It is so much more effective to address your problems with the attitude of 'Whoo! An opportunity to show how I can make things happen!' instead of '*&!# this is going to blow up'. It's not being new-agey to say the way you feel impacts the way you think which affects the outcome.

Build the attitude, build the startup (and be a hero?). This is one of those things that should go into your culture. Leadership by example is required of course, but it may need a little more nurturing. A workshop if you can spring for it. Or maybe those totchkes?