GigaOM

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is doing public service commercials, and some of them are being aired on DISH Networks. He is letting folks know about the digital television transition. I can’t remember any FCC chairman making a play for the airwaves like Martin is — something tells me this man has bigger political ambitions.

Editor’s Note: We’ve been introduced to a great new founder’s blog, and we’re delighted Chris Lyman has agreed to share it with us. A 3-time entrepreneur, Chris is currently CEO of Fonality, a Los Angeles-based VoIP provider he founded in 2003 — and where Chris prefers to be called ‘Janitor’, which tells you a lot about him. Chris has written about many useful things lately, including why CC’ing colleagues on email should be banned from the manual of best business practices. The first post we share in full is about the law of diminishing returns at young companies — and how more resources can actually mean less for your startup.

I have noticed some funny math in my startups over the years.

This funny math doesn’t start until after VC funding — so to better explain it, I must first rewind the clock to our pre-institutional investor stage.

See, I do funding a bit different than other entrepreneurs. I launch the company myself. I form (some of) the team. We build the product. We get to revenues … and we even go profitable. In short: we get our ship lean, mean, and pumping efficacy from every valve.

Then we go get VC funding (less dilution, more control, etc.)

It’s so predictable what happens next. Ya gotz some green in the bank and a newly formed HR department, replete with a salivating recruiter, brimming with job reqs to be filled. Go! Go Go!

Staffing at warp speed always scares the crap out of me.

I approve each new req. — queasy — because this new person will now solely be focused on what used to be 1/20th of my job. As I sign the req, I hope they will be better at “it” than me, care more about “it”, and get more of “it” done.

But, in my heart, I feel the funny math coming on. Continue »

Asterisk, the poster child of open-source telephony, was downloaded a million times in 2007, according to Digium, the company started by Asterisk creator, Mark Spencer. Wow, it is an impressive number.

“To succeed in business it is necessary to make others see things as you see them.”— John H. Patterson, 19th century industrialist and founder of National Cash Register Company (NCR). Patterson established one of the nation’s first sales training academies.

I’ve been reading the flak over Sunday’s New York Times piece on the brooding Google-Microsoft “rumble.” Like many others, I didn’t find the piece to be especially insightful — a declaration that the two largest companies in software will soon compete, in just one area of their respective billion-dollar businesses, isn’t a newsflash. And while a “Clash of the Titans” is always a great story, in this instance the soldiers haven’t exactly lobbed the heavy artillery yet. Prognostications aren’t as fun, or as useful to founders, as gritty accounts of battle. But I’ll look forward to reading those, in time.

I will say that what struck me about the piece was how ardent both Microsoft’s Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft’s business division, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt were in articulating their views of the world:

“In our view, yes,” Mr. Schmidt says. “It’s a 90-10 thing.” Inside the cloud resides “almost everything you do in a company…” Later he adds: “You’d be crazy to buy packaged software.”

to which Raikes shot back:

“It’s, of course, totally inaccurate compared with where the market is today and where the market is headed.” Microsoft’s competitive tracking of the corporate market, Raikes told The Times, finds little momentum for what [Google] portrays. “It is not in any way, shape or form close to what he is suggesting.”

Ok, so Google Docs has 1.6 million users. Microsoft Office has 500 million. The truth is, there will always be some customers who want to use Office and others (notably younger) who will be thrilled to compute in the “cloud” using Google. (I think The Times story focused too little on these distinctions in the marketplace.)

But then a friend reminded me. Schmidt and Raikes aren’t being stubborn, exactly. Their job is to advance their company’s vision of how the business landscape will evolve. This is an equal piece of making it all happen — one just about as important as the development of the products itself. Guy Kawasaki calls this evangelism. In other spheres, it’s called lobbying. It’s really all a form of marketing. As one late, great management guru used to say:

“Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation.” — Peter F. Drucker

Remember to do them both, with equal vigor.