Startups

10 reasons to work in someone else’s startup

If you’ve never worked in a startup business you don’t know what you’re missing. It really is the most fun you could ever have at work – even when they don’t become the next Groupon (let’s face it – any of us that have been around for a while have all got drawers full of old share option certificates from the companies we believed to be “dead certs”). However, if you’re not yet quite ready or equipped to start your own business, working in someone else’s startup can be a marvellous stopgap solution and one that brings all sorts of opportunity. These are my top 10 reasons why:

1. Whatever you do, your startup job will have more scope simply because there are fewer people in the company and everyone is required to work beyond their comfort zones – that adds more strings to your bow & improves your confidence;

2. Your working day will be far more varied than if you worked in a bigger or more established company and there’s bags more opportunity to move sideways into something else if you find you fancy it;

3. If you’re talented and hard working, you can move up fast & make yourself indispensable far easier than in a different sort of organisation; no-one cares about your age or gender or even experience – it’s what you can do today that matters;

4. Startup teams are really special – the bond between team members is unusually strong (probably because we all have so much at stake & let’s face it – there’s usually nothing else – no customers, no product, no money – so the team is EVERYTHING) and it’s a unique experience; when I think back to the startups I’ve worked in the teams have all been pure gold (Learning Pool’s Team Lovely pictured, snapped at our May 2010 conference by the rather wonderful Paul Clarke);

5. Visibility – you can have access to the CEO’s big picture vision if you want it (if you’re not interested in what that is, you probably shouldn’t be there);

6. You can learn so much so fast at someone else’s expense & with no financial risk to yourself – I remember the dizzy learning curve of my first startup dalliance – but even more I remember the exhilaration;

7. Potential long term risk-free financial upside in your share options – if you work in someone else’s startup & don’t have options ask them why;

8. The environment is extremely challenging & it helps you find out stuff about yourself as you become more resilient;

9. There’s a chance that this might just be THE ONE – the next Google or Amazon;

10. It’s serious fun – those roller coaster highs sure are high & we celebrate every success (sometimes even a little too much); you never know what’s around the corner.

Sounds good so far – sounds like you might enjoy this. If you’re going for it, it’s only fair for me to give you the other side of the coin – which I’m going to call:

5 team member behaviours that really p*** the startup CEO off – and in my book they are:

1. Whining – either to me or your colleagues about (delete as necessary) long working hours/not enough time to get stuff done properly/the spec is too loose/the working environment is too transparent/my salary is too low/the goalposts keep moving/etc);

2. Not being customer focused enough – unforgivable in a startup;

3. Wasting money – booking travel late, forgetting to cancel subscriptions, not parking in the cheapest car park at the airport, not asking for a discount on absolutely everything we buy as a matter of course, nor getting the most out of every minute of the day;

4. Not thinking about stuff – inexcusable & I don’t want to hear your excuses;

5. Not being a team player – peddling your own agenda, bitching about a colleague, not carrying your fair share – unacceptable – we’re all in this together & see above – the team is everything. If you don’t believe this you need to get out & let the rest of us get on.

As always – I hope you enjoyed this blog & I look forward to your comments or questions – some of you will no doubt have different views & stories from your own start-ups which the rest of us hope you will share.

So you wanna be a startup CEO…5 qualities you absolutely need

Being a startup CEO seems to be an attractive occupation right now and one that the press & certainly Hollywood makes look pretty easy as well as fairly glamorous. I thought I’d write a blog about my own views on the necessary qualities people need to make it through to the other side. Please note that being the CEO of a startup requires a different set of qualities to being CEO of a mature & established business and indeed, that sort of experience may well be a hindrance in a startup environment. Also it’s no accident that the photo of Paul & me above shows us in a casino setting – there’s a lot of luck at play as well – so don’t feel too bad if your startup is one of the 50% or so that fail in the first year.

I’ve seen other bloggers make great long lists of these but I’ve distilled mine down to 5 main qualities:

1. RESILIENCE – this is the big one. It’s also a quality you should look for in a business partner or in your team members as you recruit them. The official definition of resilience is an ability to bounce back into shape. In reality in a work setting it means being able to continue functioning & making sensible decisions in the face of adversity – which could be a one off event (like a disaster) or longer term (like always being tired from working 16 hour days consistently). As part of this quality I would include not bleating about how miserable you are & making your colleagues feel bad as well – there’s nothing worse than that. Resilience is what you need when the 10^th bank you’ve spoken to that week won’t lend you money & you don’t have enough to cover payroll right now, it’s the quality that makes you get up at 3am to go & catch a plane to London even though you only finished work at 10pm last night, it’s what makes you sit down & start working on another response to tender when you’ve just had a rejection letter in from something you thought was a dead cert. In summary, this is the quality that keeps you going & you either have it or you don’t – so be honest with yourself. At the end of the day, having the stamina & energy required to make a new company a success should not be overlooked. The amount of sheer hard graft is savage & impossible to communicate to anyone that hasn’t been there.

2. READING PEOPLE AND SITUATIONS – you need to be naturally good at this and it’s the quality that stops others from pulling the wool over your eyes. First up you need to have a gut feel about how things are going for the company – you should be able to just tell, a bit like second sight. You also need a natural ability to read your markets and know what products are right, when to launch them, etc. Other times you use this is in appraising ideas (which you do on an hourly basis in a startup) and rapidly sorting them into good & bad, negotiating, making decisions (most of the time with a serious lack of information), recruiting people, choosing partners and so on.

3. OPTIMISM & POSITIVITY – if you don’t have this alongside being the keeper of your original vision, don’t expect anyone else to believe in your company and that goes for both team members & people outside. I don’t mean blind belief but I do mean being confident and using a bit of spin when you need to. By that, I don’t mean lying to your team about stuff – it’s more about protecting them from many of the stresses that they don’t need to know about as they have no ability to influence the outcome & it will only distract everyone. You need to be able to absorb all of this burden and put a smile on your face and your best foot forward at all times.

4. RISK – I’m unsure if this is a quality or not but being a startup CEO and being risk-averse do not walk along hand in hand. You will borrow large sums of money, you will guarantee those loans against whatever tangible assets you own, you will take major decisions without any of the information you need never mind would like, you will fail at stuff over & over again. If you are unable to compartmentalise & shut these things away in a place where you don’t think about them – you aren’t cut out for this life. It will make you ill & paralyse you with fear.

5. LEADERSHIP & VISION – your team needs to look up to you & your customers & other stakeholders will hopefully admire you & what you’ve achieved. You need to keep the team on track, communicating the shared vision to them over & over again so that no-one ever loses sight of where you’re going, you need to be able to pull off what I call “Take my hand & walk with me into the abyss” when you only have half the story yourself and you need to be able to keep it real – no-one wants to work for a CEO that never does any work themselves.

I hope this helps any of you that are thinking about going down this route yourselves. It’s hard work & unrelenting being in or heading up a startup but it’s also deeply satisfying and a lot of fun. Always interested in hearing your views so post your comments up below.

10 fabulous things that have happened in the last 4 years

#teamlovely has been celebrating Learning Pool’s 4^th birthday for the past week or so – just look at that cake in the photo. There’ve been many times in the last 4 years that the achievement of this milestone seemed like a tall order – but resilience has always been the order of the day round here so we’ve just kept our heads down and carried on plugging away. A rather frightening statistic is that 75% of new start ups have crashed & burned by the end of Year 3 – so it’s good to be in a successful minority, especially during the current global economic recession. As we reach the end of our celebrations, this has got me thinking about the highlights of the last 4 years for Paul & me (this blog is a bit selfish for which I apologise now). Here they are in no particular order:

1. Getting to see Bill Clinton in Derry this week – that was cool & so was he (disappointed you didn’t mention “digital” Bill – ah well)

2. In the early days, making a snap decision to go ahead & build Modern Councillor whilst crossing the West End of London in a taxi – it’s been a roaring success ever since

3. Also in the early days, receiving a Letter of Offer from one of the Belfast VCs and turning it down – twice!

4. Blagging our way in to spending 45 minutes with a Director of Education in Capitol Hill & listening to his sage advice

5. Reaching the final of the 2008 All Ireland Seedcorn competition and having a great night out with our team

6. Following on from No 5, our team meeting Jerry Kennelly (founder of Stockbyte that was sold to Getty Images in 2006 for $135m) at the Seedcorn awards party and having him tell us we have a great company, to keep doing what we’re doing & not to take any investment (thanks Jerry!)

7. Holding a launch party in Johannesburg in Nov 2009 at the UK Trade Commissioner’s residence and having lovely Baroness Glenys Kinnock, Minister for Africa, as our keynote speaker

8. Being overjoyed when Donald Clark approached us and subsequently offered to join our board as a non exec director (great to have you on board Donald – #teamlovely loves you to bits)

9. Welcoming 200 people to our annual conference at London’s Royal Mint on 12 May 2010 and receiving their fabulous feedback

10. Being one of Deloitte’s Rising Stars at the end of 2009

11. Knowing that we’re well on our way to building the biggest & best public sector online learning community in the world

OK – so there were 11…here’s to the next batch!

Similarities between the Learning Pool community and the “Deadheads”…

There was a great article a couple of months back in the Sunday Times magazine. It made comparisons between the Grateful Dead (Californian band headed up by the late Jerry Garcia, prolific creators, performers, LSD fuelled, very personal relationship with their fans – known as the Deadheads) and the Apple Corporation (personified best in their use of the “Think Different” slogan). The basic premise of the article was that the Grateful Dead were ahead of their time in the way that they interacted with & involved their fans in the running of the band. It was an innovative business model that was the exact opposite of what every other band did.

This got me thinking about the way Learning Pool interacts with its own community – and yes – there’s a lot of similarities, with the exception of consumption of large amounts of LSD of course. Here are 5 of them:

1. The Grateful Dead allowed & even encouraged the Deadheads to tape their concerts and share the tapes with each other – as long as no money changed hands; Learning Pool encourages its community to use our authoring tool to create content and share it via the community – as long as no money changes hands. This is fundamentally different from how other e-learning companies operate. Even those that facilitate “sharing” make some money out of that process somewhere along the way.

2. The Grateful Dead’s operating model flew in the face of how bands did things back in the 1970s and 80s; Learning Pool bucked the trend in e-learning by launching a learning management system in 2008 that was built on open source technology and priced to disrupt the market. It has since been adopted right across local government making it the LMS of choice and the clear market leader by a long chalk.

3. Barry Barnes, professor of leadership in the School of Business & Entrepreneurship in Florida describes the Grateful Dead’s energy as “dynamic synchronicity”; I like to think that this description could be equally well applied to the way that Learning Pool builds products hand in hand with its community and steering group, encouraging community members to steer our direction and shape the way we do things is second nature and allows for dynamic interaction.

4. Continual innovation & creativity meant the Grateful Dead had a repertoire of over 150 active songs covering many musical genres and this in turn meant that none of their 2,300 or so live concerts were ever the same; the way Learning Pool builds content and accesses subject matter expertise with its members means that we have a huge catalogue of well over 200 up-to-date & constantly refreshed e-learning courses for our community to use.

5. The Grateful Dead understood that in an information economy, the key relationship is between familiarity & value (not scarcity & value as in the old supply & demand model) and for the band this manifested itself in the incredibly close almost mystical relationship that existed between the band and the Deadheads – in business parlance they brought passion to the customer relationship; Learning Pool has built an incredibly personal relationship with its growing community (tens of thousands of local government officers, elected members and school governors use our learning products) and our customers frequently tell us we are more like partners than suppliers or that we’re part of the fabric of local government – and that makes us both proud and happy.

In true Irish fashion I’m going to leave you with a local story about the Grateful Dead, as told to me by Raphoe man & famous fiddler, Martin McGinley. Jerry Garcia was in Co Donegal whilst recovering from his triple heart bypass operation & happened upon the Bridge Bar in Ramelton, a well known & popular music venue. He noticed that the McPeake band from Belfast were playing that night & returned later for the gig. He was spotted drinking tumblers of Jack Daniels at the bar by local men James McDaid & John McIvor. The boys sidled over for a chat & established that it was indeed really Jerry Garcia and with mounting excitement they asked him if he would get up and play a few numbers. Jerry said that he would – but the McPeake band refused to allow it – saying they didn’t permit anyone to perform with them on stage. Hard to know what to say sometimes, isn’t it?

Image of Jerry Garcia used above attributed to Jay Blakesberg with grateful thanks

The truth about marketing…

With less than a week to go until Learning Pool’s annual conference & with no flights leaving Northern Ireland again this morning – oh and with the prospect of launching a new website next week – marketing is something that’s been in my mind – a lot – recently.

For small companies, there’s always a lot of anxiety around spending your limited amounts of cash on marketing. Everyone knows the old premise that 50% of marketing spend is effective, it’s just a shame that no-one knows which 50%…

At our HQ in Derry, we’re up to our eyes in balloons & conference giveaway bags & party planning so I think it’s wise to take 5 minutes out & reflect on the following excerpt from 37 Signals’ recent book “Rework”:

Marketing is not a department. Every time you answer the phone, send an email or someone uses your product – that’s marketing. Every word you write on your website is marketing. Every error message in your software is marketing. The checkout counter and every invoice you send is marketing.

Aah – I feel so much better now – it seems those conference giveaway bags aren’t so important after all…

Mary McKenna's Blog

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