Dan Sweet

I find Vinod Khosla fascinating.  He founded Sun Microsystems, was a general partner at Kleiner Perkins, and then formed his own fund where he now focuses on cleantech investing.  He’s from San Francisco but he talks trash about hybrids, solar, and wind power.

This post over at VentureHacks brought this recent interview with Vinod Khosla to my attention.  Vinod is on from 10:40 to 20:40.  If you want to hear the LinkedIn founder not answer some questions in a typical CEO-like manner feel free to watch the preceding portion of the video.  I wouldn’t bother.

A couple quotes that struck a chord with me from this video:

“If you succeed, it better be material.  I say, I don’t mind failing, but if I succeed it better be worth succeeding instead of some incremental thing.”

Also…

“This is really really important and misunderstood about startups.  Startups aren’t big or small, they are MADE big or small.  So an entrepreneur picking the right partner will more likely end up as a big company than if they pick the wrong partner who wants a 3x return on their money.  Any investor who looks at exit strategies, or multiples of investment, or even does an IRR calculation, a rate of return calculation, probably is the wrong partner for you.”

I work for P&G.  Everything we do is huge.  At the same time most of what we do is very very small.  We are absolutely thrilled if we grow a business 10%.  We consider 5% growth a very solid performance.  We regularly put significant effort into growing a tiny piece of something in one small channel a couple percentage points, do this all a few times over, and then are proud to put together a plan that moves the needle by incremental points (by points I mean one or two).

When we do something new, we do WAY more than “an IRR calculation”.  We’ve got teams of people from multiple functions, worksheets with tons of tabs, financial review meetings, and  years-long timetables.  According to Vinod, this would be guaranteed to smother the idea, result in failure, or at the very best something only “incremental.”  And often that is what happens.  However, occasionally the team turns out a Swiffer and builds a billion dollar category out of thin air.  P&G is full of paradoxes.  Big and small.

I wrote this recently in reply to a question posted on Quora.com.  If you haven’t checked out Quora yet, go check it out.  Quora is a great example of a business model based on Clay Shirky’s concept of cognitive surplus.  I like the execution because they make it easy to share your knowledge and also make it social enough that it motivates people to contribute more.

Q: If a merchant offers you a discount when you apply for their credit card, how much should it be worth to go for it?

A:
Short answer: minimum $100 offer value
Long answer:
3 filters to use
1 – What is your current credit score?
2 – Are you getting a major loan (house, car, boat, etc) anytime soon?
3 – Are you making a larger purchase from this vendor in the future?

If the answer to 1 is “I don’t know” then just say no to all of these offers in general.  Go to a site like creditkarma.com and check your credit for free without a “hard” inquiry.  “Hard” and “soft” exist.  Google it if you don’t know the difference.  If your score is 700+ then proceed to question 2.

If the answer to 2 is “yes”, then you should also just walk away.  $100 or whatever isn’t worth a few extra hundred in interest on that new loan because you dropped your score just under 720 with some dumb “offer” you “took advantage of”.  If the answer to 2 is “no” then proceed to question 2.

Many of these offers are one-time offers only good at that store on the initial purchase when the card is opened.  This is where question 3 comes in.  For example, 5 years back I bought a furniture set at Macy’s signed up for a card and got 20% off.  $2-300 in my pocket.  Yesterday I asked about a coupon that was valid only for Macy’s cardholders.  My account had gone inactive but, no problem sir we’ll open it right back up for you and you’ll save $14.  No thanks, I am thinking about some new furniture down the road.  Probability I buy furniture from Macy’s again * expected value of future deal > $14 so this is a pass for me.  You do the calculations for your scenario.

If its not a one-time deal with a vendor, you have decent credit, and no plans for major new loans in the works, then go to town.  It will impact your credit if you do a number of these.  For that reason, I don’t do these for less than $100 as plenty of them come along.

This phrase often runs through my head and almost just as often includes an expletive that I try hard to suppress.  Of course, IT systems don’t make it possible to NOT open a ticket so I just suck it up and open them like a good little employee.  Enterprise IT blows, opening tickets rarely gets you what you need, and the whole process is generally infuriating.

2 recent experiences from work:
1 – A standard accounting report that I regularly supply to a retail partner had an error in it.  (Still unresolved 12 days later)
2 – LCD panel on my laptop went out combined with multiple blue screens of death.  (Partially resolved 7 days later)

These experiences involved opening multiple tickets, filling out more than one form, sending multiple emails, and working with multiple support people.  I am still not satisfied with the resolution of either of these problems.

The ticket opened to investigate the accounting error in the report was “resolved” within 4 days with an email informing me that the clearly incorrect report is actually correct along with a classic “buck pass” name drop of someone else who might know more.   Now, one other coworker and I have received multiple emails from the individual who “resolved” our problem asking us to please “close the ticket” since the issue has been resolved.  Where is the “are you freaking kidding me!?!” response voting button in Outlook?  There is no straightforward feedback mechanism.  Someone with no understanding of my business thinks they have solved my problem and I am still stuck with no answers for my retail partner.  They can’t close their books and I am left looking like an idiot.  With the help of my coworker, we are now multiple buck passes down the line with multiple cryptic responses prominently featuring random internal numbers generated by various internal systems I’ve never heard of.  Sweet!

I do have a new LCD screen in my laptop (different resolution from original panel).  No resolution on my blue screen of death errors however.  I was offered the classic “I guess we could re-image it again” line.  The annoying part of the harware experience was that I got significantly faster and better service from Dell as a student when I bought a laptop from the Dell Small Business division.  Taking a machine to the on-site kiosk in my work building is an exercise in silliness.  First you need to go online and open a ticket before they will talk to you.  Then once you have opened a ticket online they have a terminal where they want you to enter your info, your ticket number and a description of your problem.  Once those two steps are complete and they are willing to actually converse with you, then they want you to fill out a paper form with all of the same info again.  Awesome!  The loaner for my Core2Duo with 2GBs of RAM was a Celeron with 1GB of RAM that takes 20+ minutes to boot and open Outlook.  On a return trip to the kiosk I talked them into installing an extra gig of RAM to make the loaner usable.  They explained that this wasn’t normally ok/against policy/whatever but did “hook me up” in the end.  Dell wouldn’t have been able to give me a loaner same day, but would have had a tech onsite with the right parts the next business day.  Based on three experiences with Dell service, my problem could be captured in one phone call or IM session and the tech would treat me like a human.  I much prefer being treated like a human over the enterprise IT “rat in a maze” nonsense.

This is a huge business opportunity.  Salesforce.com sucks in many ways (that is another post) and still has built a business with a $15B market cap.  Their equity seems to be “we aren’t in-house IT” and people eat it up just because we have all had such lousy enterprise IT experiences.

We need Stack Overflow or a competitor in the same space to create an enterprise IT support platform and attack this in-house support problem.  Tickets that are opened need to be worked on by people that understand the business need.  If I am working with retailer accounting data I want to talk to someone who understands customers and retail.  I’m sure the R&D engineer wants to talk to someone who gets labs and experiment design.  Let the support people choose what problems they work on.  Use a keyword-based algorithm to tag incoming tickets and route them to the relevant boards/holding areas for pickup.  Make solving more difficult issues worth more.  Get transparent end user measures of satisfaction and compensate support people on the end-user satisfaction levels they deliver.  Gamify the system by increasing the value of a ticket the longer it goes unassigned.  Enterprise IT has the potential to be a real help, but instead we settle for cost savings, roadblocks, and more “tickets.”  Someone will fix this and build a billion dollar business.  Who is it going to be?

I’ve struggled to find the balance between contributing and consuming.  Folks like Fred Wilson write a blog post every day.  That is some serious contributing.  Over the last two years I have read blogs consistently but have never found the time to post consistently.  Serious consuming. Recently, I’ve been striving for a better balance between contributing and consuming.

Over the past couple months I’ve begun commenting on blogs more frequently.  I’ve struggled as I’ve attempted to share my point of view.  It is difficult to balance being concise, sharing your experience, saying something meaningful, using humor, and being persuasive.  I’ve found the experience of commenting regularly (primarily on Fred’s blog A VC) has forced me to think more carefully about how I communicate in writing.  The experience has made me more determined to actually write posts myself and stretch myself further in this area.

Thoughts on writing:

1 – Writing well is a differentiator. (Check the 100+ comment threads daily on A VC.  The same people consistently write the most interesting comments, receive the most “likes”, generate the most discussion, etc.)

2 – Commenting, or posting yourself, builds the skill.  (classic skill-building grunt work here)

3 – The right tools help a lot. (I really like the Disqus/IntenseDebate comment systems.  Avatars, likes, threaded replies, etc.  It all comes together to make the commenting experience much more fulfilling.)

Net, I’m pledging to comment and post more.  I encourage you to do the same and put conscious effort into building this critical business skill.  In that vein, leave a comment below if this post has resonated with you.

PERSONAL:
Drop 60 pounds by June 30, 2010
Establish “date night” (min 1/month)
Host people at home (min 1/two months)
Blog more (min 1/week)
Pray / meditate (nightly)

WORK:
Get “1” Rated at work
Continue to use GTD at work – weekly reviews every week
Monthly join-ups to grow network
Meet quarterly with mentors