November 2008 Archives

I always enjoy visiting Chicago. It has its own local culture, great restaurants and other things to do at night, and is pretty easy to get around (but then again, I grew up in Manhattan, so I suppose it's all relative). It also has a history as a city people came to with very little, and with hard work, started businesses and made lives for themselves.

The rich history of Chicago makes it a great location for the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards (GSEA). I had the good fortune of visiting Chicago again November 6-9 to participate in the final judging for the GSEA competition. I was also in the city to attend the Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization (CEO) conference, where I received their Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. I was honored to receive the award from CEO, as well as have the chance to speak to college students about entrepreneurship.

Talking to people just a few years younger than myself about entrepreneurship can be weird, but I feel like I've learned a lot in a short amount of time. When I was getting ready to deliver my acceptance speech at the CEO conference, I knew I wanted to say something that would be relevant and meaningful to the 1000+ college students sitting in the audience. I think a lot of people in college are under so much pressure to "stay on the right track" that entrepreneurship and risk is sometimes frowned upon. But my message is that "staying on the right track" is different depending on who you are, and learning how to take a calibrated risk--like launching a business--can be a crucial learning experience for a young person and budding entrepreneur.

Mahatma Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see in the world." Quotations like this find their way into many different cultures, languages, and institutions and that's because there is a kernel of truth to the statement--it's the truth of human experience, trial and error--whatever you want to call it. Because this is just a blog and not a novel, I'll just share one of the most important lessons I've learned as a young person and as an entrepreneur, which is based on the quotation above: use any freedom you have--whether you're young or old--to be an agent of change. It's the only way to make your mark in the business world, and beyond. Is there a population that would benefit from a service (big or small) you've been thinking about offering? Do it. Does your business model make impossible for you to grow as a company? Change it. I wanted to get across to the young entrepreneurs in the audience in Chicago that life is now. When you graduate from college, there's no one at graduation who shakes your hand and says, "OK, you can start your life now." While it's important to stay on track in school and cultivate those connections that only college can offer, you have to also find the track that's right for you. College isn't one size fits all and it shouldn't be, because everyone's different.

Being an entrepreneur means seizing the enormous opportunities before you, and taking calibrated risks that will help you make your dreams a reality. No one is ever going to give you the "right" circumstances or the "right" amount of money to build your ideal business--work with what you've got, and it will take you somewhere. Even if it's not exactly where you want to end up, you've made progress towards your goal. For me, being a young entrepreneur was about finding the right track for me. I was never going to find it by asking a professor in college or taking classes in business without ever having any experience launching a start-up of my own. It's true, not everyone should (or could) start a business while in school--people have different responsibilities and priorities--but it's all about finding the path that's right for you, not taking the one that everyone else travels down.

This post is about something I have really strong opinions about: work. Some people hate going to work, and for a variety of reasons. When people hate going to work, they aren't productive and when they aren't productive... Well, you get the point.

One of the reasons I think people hate going to work is that the companies people work for have no identifiable core values. At the end of the day, if your employees don't know the company purpose and the values (which are non-negotiable tenets of the way you do business) then you've failed them--you've given them no reason to get excited about coming into work each day, and no reason to relate to the goals of your company.

This is a topic I'll continue to write about, but today I wanted to share this video with you. It's from Atlassian, and John Rotenstein and he has made an awesome video which highlights--in Atlassian employees' own words--what their core values are. The Atlassian core value that's one of my favorites is "DFTC": "don't fuck the customer." Yup, that's right. It's such a basic concept--don't make it harder for the customer to do anything--but it's pure genius. It's also a "big picture" concept that anyone can understand why pursuing that goal is important. Roteinstein's video is a great example of how vital core values are to a company because it shows how employees take them to heart, and incorporate them into their lives--and all in their own words. It also shows that it's not just about getting a project done, but also creating a work environment that makes people comfortable and understanding that changes that you make to anything have to work for the customer.

Anyway, I'm done writing. Watch the video and you'll see why it's no surprise the staff at Atlassian enjoys coming to work each day. We (my company, GotVMail, that is) happen to be a happy customer of Atlassian as well, using JIRA, Confluence and a few other applications.

As a syringe filled with this year's flu vaccine pierced my flesh this morning, I thought about how much things have changed since the flu vaccine shortage back in the fall of 2004. At that time, only people who were considered "high risk"--if they were elderly or had a chronic illness, for example--were encouraged to get the vaccine.

Four years later, there is no flu vaccine shortage in the United States. I've heard ads urging people to get the vaccine on the radio, and seen some on TV. Apparently, they're working: I decided to get the shot for the first time in years (and I'm not in any of the "high risk" groups), and the nurse that administered my flu vaccine told me tons of people have been coming in for the flu shot. I travel a lot and thought the vaccine would be a good idea "just in case"--but the ads I heard on the radio kept the idea of getting a flu shot at the forefront of my mind. So, it seems the ads have served their purpose: everyone wants to get vaccinated now, including me.

And, according to Google, people want to know about the flu, too. On November 11, Google launched Flu Trends, which allows users to see if their state has a low, moderate, or high threat of the flu virus based on how and when people search for information about the flu. Google's theory is that people who look for information about the flu online are likely suffering from the virus as well. Google points out, "Of course, not every person who searches for "flu" is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together". According to CNN, the Google project was completed in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Depending on how you look at it, this factoid could be either alarming or reassuring: according to the CNN article mentioned above, "In the 2007-08 flu season, Google accurately estimated current flu levels one to two weeks faster than published CDC reports in each of the nine U.S. surveillance regions...". It's no surprise that a government agency can't compare to Google in terms of efficiency, but it's still a little surprising (and scary?) that this also applies to agencies that are entrusted with matters of public health.