Christian Renaud's Blog

Stealing a page or two

I have a confession, I used to be a habitual 'tuner'.  

A tuner is a person who incessantly tinkers with their schedule, productivity tools and reads volumes of blogs and books on how to be more productive.  About six months ago, I finally stopped all the tuning and set a 'no fly zone' on my schedule tinkering and productivity tools to see what would happen.  Lo and behold, the time I recovered from not constantly learning new tools and adapting to new schedule formulas was a time windfall. I was able to get more done and spend more time with my family.

I recently read a publisher draft of Brad Feld's excellent book Startup Communities (the actual book is out in October, so you should go to Amazon right now and pre-order it)(also, Tej did a great review of it that I heartily agree with and won't rewrite my own gushing review of.)  Of the tens of things that I took away from the book about building long-term startup communities like Boulder or Des Moines, there were two in particular that caused me to rethink violating my own no-fly zone.

The first was something that Brad implemented to cope with the growing bulk of meetings on his calendar, which was setting office hours like our college professors did.  This allowed him time each week to meet with all of the people he was struggling to squeeze in to an ever-busy schedule while still leaving time to tackle the projects he needed to tackle.  I looked over the last three months on my schedule and I am averaging about six hours per week of 'informational meetings', plus at least an additional 2-3 hours of random drop-in meetings.  All of these meetings are good and useful, don't get me wrong, but an unlimited schedule of those is unsustainable.

The second item was actually something observed from swapping rapid-fire Q&A emails with Brad in the subsequent days that I recalled from Merlin Mann's Inbox Zero, which is that 'less is more':

"I used to think one-line email responses were the height of rudeness. If someone took the time to type me a 20-paragraph email, I always felt I had to respond in kind. It's like that horrible feeling at the holiday gift exchange when you realize that the present you brought cost a tenth of what your colleague spent. Well, get over it, because it ain't the same thing." - Merlin Mann

Takeway: If you can say it in 1-5 words, then do that.  Making three paragraphs out of it won't create any more meat, just textual fat.

There were a couple more items that were more important and not workflow related from the book that I will cover in follow up posts.

As far as the first two are concerned, here we go.  Starting next week, I'm blocking out Thursday mornings for 'Office Hours'.  Requests to meet that aren't explicitly part of one of my existing companies or StartupCity residents will be scheduled for Thursday mornings.  This should help everyone involved as it keeps a consistent window for follow ups and also won't suffer from the other meeting-runs-late vagaries of my schedule.  It also aligns well with the open-office hours at StartupCity every Thursday, so people can mix and mingle to everyone's benefit.

Second, expect a lot more one-line emails.  Social graces are important, but not so much that they should add minutes or hours to inbound and outbound emails.  Right now, I regularly skip my morning workout (not good) to triage my inbox, and that's just not sustainable in the long term.  I'm going to trade efficiency for prose for a while and probably piss everyone off, but the meaning will be conveyed as efficiently as possible.

That's it.  Speaking of efficiency, no pretty summary and wrap. 

A coaching moment

Back in my corporate days, we used to call situations like this 'coaching moments', or 'teachable moments'.  

I need your help.

As I have mentioned previously, at the beginning of June, we announced Plains Angels, an angel group of Midwest investors who were interested in seeing and potentially investing in more Midwest startups in information technology, biotechnology, and manufacturing (as well as rare 'other' opportunities as decided by a subset of the group affectionally named 'the screening committee' which determines if applications are in/out of scope of the group's interest).  The group has grown from 50 to over 90 accredited investors since June, and now meets monthly to review startup applications that have been passed by the screening committee.  Of the four applicants who have presented, one received investment within nine days, and the other three are in some form of (potentially pre-investment) diligence.  

It is customary for me to send out a note to companies that have begun the application process but not yet completed it to remind them that they need to get their application in by a certain date, to give the screening committee time to do a high level review, and then us to work with them to make sure they have the proper information prepared for the group in the right formats (what we call 'pre-diligence').  After last night's second successful startup-presentation meeting, I sent a message out to the 'in progress' applicants at 9:31am this morning to let them know about the deadline the group has to give them appropriate time to review the inbound applications.

What follows is a redacted and anonymized exchange from 9:31 this morning to around 6:30p this evening.  If you all have some feedback on how I could have handled it better, please please please comment on the blogpost as I would love to hear of ways I can refine my feedback.

Dawn of the Bricoleurs

"Man, as creator of Culture, is like a bricoleur, ...who makes constructions for the fun of the thing out of anything that is lying around." - American Anthopologist

The world is changing.  In his classic work 'The Hedgehog and the Fox',  Isaiah Berlin contrasted individuals who viewed the world through a single lens and specialty (hedgehogs) with those who drew on multiple disciplines and experiences (foxes). I see this in the startup ideas I review daily in that they are often interdisciplinary in scope, incorporating not only information technology, but also frequently biotechnology or advanced manufacturing.  

Increasingly, we are seeing technology bricolage, as Kevin Kelly once called it, with entrepreneurs repurposing existing technology from across the spectrum for new and novel uses.   It's this recombination and remixing that I think of as the constant innovation heartbeat of civilization.  We are all so intertwined with one another that we cannot avoid drawing on multiple adjacent fields in anything we do.

This is one fundamental problem I have with traditional University education.  In order to draw boundaries for curriculum and scope, they had to put up walls between disciplines (who else could separate math and physics into separate buildings?).  These boundaries of convenience got systemized when people started optimizing within them to the detriment of the greater innovations that are gained by intermingling them. Universities stopped being a mirror of human knowledge institutionalized, but rather speciated hedgerows.

If you go to one of these Universities today, they seldom point at the robotics building, or the graphics art building, but rather the great accomplishments coming out of the few spaces dedicated to multiple groups (i.e. The MIT Media Lab and Stanford MediaX). There are the complexity theory oases like the Santa Fe Institute, where Nobel laureates and authors and historians intermingle across the entire knowledge spectrum for the express purpose of discovering previously unknown intersections.

The Eureka, or 'Aha', effect of interdisciplinary insights lights up the brain's right hemisphere (specifically, the anterior superior temporal gyrus).  The right hemisphere is where we get music, visual imagery and spatial intelligence.  It makes sense that these intuitive, artistic abilities form the foundation of our interdisciplinary insights, because they eschew process, logic and math.  These are not logic-driven associations, they are remixed and remastered eureka moments.

In this world today, we need more Eurekas.  We need more Ahas.  We have done an excellent job endlessly researching the hedgerows of the hedgehogs.  You can earn your Doctor of Philosophy in any single discipline without ever leaving your university building and coming in to contact with the broader world.  What we need now more than ever is to burrow some foxholes between these hedgerows, and open up opportunities for the bricoleurs who are poised to build new products and industries at the intersections between them. 

Free Range Entrepreneurs

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the Des Moines session of IdeaMensch, a traveling series that is currently touring the lower 48 states featuring local entrepreneurial speakers.  Among the indigenous entrepreneurs were Tej Dhawan, Andy Stoll, Carl Blake, Ben Milne and Jason Lampe. 

One of many points consistent among the speakers was that entrepreneurs are irrational, non-linear people who thrive in ambiguous and potentially dangerous situations.  Andy Stoll said “uncomfortable is the new normal”, and while this is true, I would append to Andy’s quote that ‘uncomfortable was the normal’ before we began confining and domesticating people in the industrial age.

Think about life a few thousand years ago. We were constantly looking for game to kill, and gathering berries and root vegetables. We didn’t know where our next meal was going to come from and if the baby would have enough food to thrive.  Stress.

Think about life two thousand or even two hundred years ago.  In addition to the constant fear of being killed by wandering bands of ruffians, dying of smallpox, or not having enough feed for your oxen, you pretty much lived in a state of low-grade stress that stemmed from your sustenance-farming lifestyle.  

A hundred or so years ago (in the United States) we settled in to a more industrial-age model of compartmentalized, predictable work that originated the ‘9 to 5’ mindset, lifelong employment, career ladders, cubicle farms, pensions, and so forth. Look ma, no stress.  At least compared to the fear of dying of smallpox or starving to death.

This was a mistake. 

Champions

Yesterday afternoon I was suprised by a congratulatory tweet from Lynn Hicks at the Des Moines Register letting me know that I had been nominatated for a Silicon Prairie Community Champion award at the inaugural Silicon Prairie Awards late this month.  I am humbled to be nominated for the award and included in such a group with Joni, Thad and Dusty.

As usual, I have mixed feelings.  I think the rapid progress across the Prairie is the result of not one, or four, or forty individuals, but the entire community rowing in the same direction.  Publications such as Silicon Prairie News, the Des Moines Business Record, and the Des Moines Register continually highlight the multiple accomplishments across the region by entrepreneurs of every species.  It is the aggregate of all of these  accomplishments that deserve 99.999% of the credit for the renaissance in entrepreneurialism we are experiencing.

That said, I cannot emphasize enough the outstanding accomplishments of my co-nominees.  I met Dusty two years ago at my first BigOmaha and he has been relentless in his regional collaboration and open-door attitude so seldom found in traditional economic development organizations.  He is cut from a different cloth, and I use him often as an example to his Iowa peers as the personification of a 'abundance, not scarcity' mindset that is going to get us from where we are to where we need to go.

Joni and I met at this last BigOmaha via an introduction by the indefatigable Bart Dillashaw.  She immediately impressed me by having a fiercely entrepreneur-centric compass by which she steers Pipeline, an excellent program for mid-stage startup CEOs to work with one another to share learnings and collaborate.  She showed more of this same zeal at a recent three-state collaboration event hosted by Gallup in Omaha that we attended where she brought in CEOs from Kansas City and Omaha and discussed cross-border ecosystem building.

Thad was also at the Gallup event and immediately distinguished himself to the group by having the pragmatic, no-nonsense attitude of a serial entrepreneur.  I had not met Thad prior to the event, but was quick to grab his business card as it is obvious that he is going to go through the (somewhat labrinthine by Iowa standards) Kansas City entreprenurial ecosystem like a tornado through a trailer park.

Finally, Iowa.  The considerable progress we've had in Iowa has been the direct result of the entire tribe leaning in and taking an ownership role in the future of the community.  StartupCity would not exist without Tej Dhawan shouldering an ever-increasing amount of weight.  The guy puts circus strongmen to shame.  Ditto for Mike Colwell at the BIZ who has 4-5 meetings per day with wantrepreneurs across the entire spectrum of ideas, and who created (the desperately-needed) Plains Angels out of thin air in June.  The entrepreneurs and mentors of StartupCity, like Brian Hemesath (who is both a mentor and entrepreneur), who selflessly give their time and energy to help one another along the bumpy entrepreneural journey.  StartupIowa missionaries like Amanda Styron of SeedHere,  Joel Bennett of Veel Hoeden, Josh Cramer of CramerDev, Ben Milne of Dwolla, John Schnipkoweit, Levi Rosol, Andrew Kirpilani, Tom Chapman (who is selflessly advancing the Iowa cause from Nebraska regularly), Dan Shipton,  Andy Stoll, Alexander Grgurich, and about a million more that I will kick myself repeatedly in the ass today for not including in this short pre-caffeine list. All of these people deserve an award for their constant exertions to make Iowa a better place for startups and entrepreneurship in general.

Collectively, everyone above, and everyone they work with and everyone THEY work with (and so on, ad infinitum) deserve the real credit for being the champions of the Prairie.  Don't vote for me.