Monthly Archives: April 2010

Larry Chiang is a coat-tailing instructional humorist that rode the anti-MBA sentiment into psuedo celebrity fame. His 15 minutes is going into over-time with major media placements on CNN, ABC News and Wall Street Journal. He confessed to an IQ of 88 on TechCrunch and somehow manages to get Ivy League schools to pay him to speak. Chiang takes coat-tailing to legendary, record-breaking, heights. His most recent feat in the publishing world was promoting his mentor, Mark McCormack, back onto the NY Times best-seller list.

By Larry Chiang

There’s this theory I have that is making me popular enough where people are paying me for my thoughts (vs just reading them for free here at Business Week). My theory is simple-stupid-genius: It is easier for a CS major to learn to be CEO than for a CEO to learn what a CS major knows.

Hmmm!

Given that simple-stupid-genius foundation, I lecture, mentor and advise CS majors aspring to be tech CEOs. Look inside our conversations by searching my hashtag #CSMajorCEO. Here is some awesome stuff spoon fed: “Top 8 Business Mistakes of CS Majors Turned CEOs”

-1- Getting Mentored from a Non-Selling VC

Ok, there are VCs out there that have never sold or gotten sales. If you’re getting schooled, learn from someone who has done what you need to do or sold in a way, shape or manner that you need to sell.

Don’t get mentored in sales from an advisor who mentors you on programming.

Me, I talk to my nail technician about cuticle management and cuticle management ONLY. Because of her 3x divorce history, I try to elicit relationship chatter to people with a slightly better track record.

-2- Don’t Let Urban Myths Guide You

There’s this silicon valley urban myth that company Z sold for $170mm. Replicating from an urban myth playbook is tough. Mimicking sales practices in a granular “blocking and tackling” is your best plan.

-3- Events + Social Media + Direct Marketing

You have to spend 10/hrs per month doing these three things. Ideally, it’s before an industry conference. If you’re selling janitorial services tracking software, locate the case study on OrangeQC. Yeah, its CS majors selling at an industry conference for very little money.

-4- Dumb Down, Sandbag For Sales Success.

Remember, we don’t want to impress the CS Majors we met at college, Stanford eBootCamp, Bar Camp or Foo Camp. We want to dumb down so a silly person who graduated in the 70s or 80s called a C-T-O is impressed.

Note: the disparity in knowledge between a junior in CS and a 30 year-old CS professional has never been smaller.

-5- Biz Model.

Focus all your energy buying $20 bills for 3-7 bucks.

It’s my opinion that your first goal should be a lifestyle business. Having a goal to reach $10mm in sales where you keep about $500k in profit is a pretty lofty goal. A lifestyle business is frowned upon by VCs but last time I checked… every billion dollar business at one point was worth $30mm. True story.

What are you charging $20 for?
How much does it cost you to make that $20. If your answer is ‘less than $20′ then you have a business.

-6- Hiring a Business Guy

A good 1st biz dev person is tough. Steven Blank writes about the hazzards. Paul Graham and Dave McClure advocate extreme caution so much so that you can count the number of their portfolio companies to have reached $2mm in revenue (ever) on one hand.

-7- We’ll Just Do A Partnership

Zaw Thet did a deal with Gannett for 4INFO
Peter Pham did a deal with T-Mobile for BillShring.

Both of these deals were legendary. Doing a partnership like this takes doing about 400-480 maneuvers of a possible 650 micro executable things – It is not easy to properly execute a partnership with a big partnership. If you’d like to talk to Zaw or Peter, paypal me $5 and I’ll sell you access to their cell. Translation; I’ll fwd your texted question to them Text me at 650-283-8008

-8- 80% of CEOs Sell

This stat is misleading because it is true.

Apply this to a miniscule amount of action by slightly selling and promoting. Self-promotion or selling your own company is tough because failure is so uber personal.

Here is how you the CS major needs to sell
A) sell yourself as an expert first
B) promote some other company or concept first
C) mentor while your market your product/service
D) host something
E) educate media/bloggers about what you’re an expert on to get testimonials
F) Set aside your own fear of failure because

Larry has a new company where he helps entrepreneurs get a dashboard look into their accounting reports. It’s called inDinero. ‘In’ like inside/outside. ‘Dinero’ like Mexican for money. He was working on Muck9 which does something similar. Muck9 is Money’s Underground Cashflow Knowledge. He is co-founder of Duck9 where he has testified before Congress on credit and been an expert witness at World Bank.

So, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I hope today’s sunshine is here to stay for the season. The back and forth rain showers have inspired me to do no more but keep my socks up high and my scarves tied tight. Tomorrow will be May 1^st. Doesn’t May mean summer, sunshine and sundresses? I sure hope so!

This happy Friday post is one that is wishing, hoping and praying for a May that will let me wear one of the hottest colors of the season – nude. I’ve always been a fan of nude fabrics and accessories, but this season, they’re pretty much a must!  There’s nothing like nude pumps, jeans and a nude tank to take a stroll in the sunshine, and I’m so ready to be there!

Wondering what’s around to add to your wardrobe? Here are a few ideas:

Shoes:

Steve Madden’s Caryssa

Aldo’s Tambe

Dresses:

American Apparel’s Terry Tube Dress

Lulu.com’s Shark Attack Dress

Accessories:

Givenchy Tinhan Old Pepe Hobo

Thomas Maier One Piece

Book worms really are getting social. A new update to the second-generation Kindle and Kindle DX support Facebook and Twitter, enabling you to share book passages directly from the ebook. This is a first for Kindle’s ebook reader, and it takes yet another jab at the quickly growing ebook market. As Amazon fights to maintain a prominent position in the ebook industry, determining how it will go social and what it will do once it gets there could be a promising move for the online retailer.

The update for Amazon’s Kindle comes days after Barnes & Noble announced updates to its own ebook reader. While the B&N Nook had updates that brought it up to par with the Kindle, it’s encroaching all the same. Throw the Apple iPad into the mix and you’ve got quite a flurry of burgeoning ebook readers for consumers to select from. Choices are good things, particularly when it comes to consumer electronics. But going social with reading behavior is a new realm for each of these companies to explore.

A platform on top of a platform? Seems to have worked out well for Labpixies, the app development firm that was recently acquired by Google. The deal suggests Google’s desired expansion for apps to run on its Android platform, which has staked its claim in the mobile realm and is moving beyond to include other consumer electronic devices. As Google continues to push Android, the need for apps running on the platform continues to grow as well.

Giving the app market a bit of a kick start, Labpixies was acquired in order to incorporate more casual games into options for users. This is a welcome change, as gaming on the Android platform has been relatively dismal, especially when compared to Apple’s mobile platform for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, or even when compared to Facebook.

With Facebook making the “Like” button essentially accessible from anywhere on the web, it seems as though there is plenty of opportunity for developers and website publishers to generate more social interaction. It also seems as though the need for social networking services has decreased just a little, as Facbook controls so much of the market. Yet Lunch.com has found a way in which to incorporate both sides of the coin, all in an effort to improve its service and offer better recommendations to users.

What Lunch.com has done is ramped up its own recommendations system by extending an option for importing your Likes from Facebook, thanks to the newly rolled out Open Graph. What this does is leverage your preferences as demonstrated through your Facebook activity and re-purposed it for recommendations based on your Lunch.com network.

This type of recommendation system is what Lunch.com has been striving towards since launching its service about a year ago. Taking a game-like approach to gleaning likes and dislikes from users, Lunch.com had a bit of an uphill battle. If users can simply import their preferences from Facebook, Lunch.com has little to do beyond generating useful recommendations accordingly.

It’s what many startups had in mind with the past few years of social networking development, each facing their own unique problem at replicating data that many users had already inserted on other sites across the web. Centralizing that activity and those preferences is something Facebook has successfully worked towards, making it the go-to platform yet again.

The good thing about this particular rendition of Facebook’s Open Graph is that it keeps users in the driver’s seat, enabling them to take their information from Facebook and use it in a direct sense towards receiving recommendations on anything, from books to sightseeing. It’s this maintenance of control that will be necessary in the ongoing success of Open Graph implementation, particularly as more third party sites and developers seek ways in which to utilize the new socially-driven options.