MADE IN DETROIT

Did you watch ESPN’s Top Ten Plays on SportsCenter last night? If you did, you would have seen LeBron James, Dwayne Wade…and this Matt Johnson shot. With one amazing last-second move last night, Matt gave the Maroons a win over Emory and broke UChicago and UAA records with 49 points for the game.

Seriously, go Maroons!

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A serious productivity question

A serious poll: Are you more productive (and able to finish everything you need to finish) when you have your day scheduled completely or when you leave your schedule open for free time throughout the day?

For instance, I have the following I need/want to complete on any given day:

Respond to emails.
Contact current users for feedback.
Contact potential users.
Write code.
Read and digest analytics.
Project management.
Product brainstorming.
Pay bills.
Fundraise and/or pre-fundraise.
People management.
Blog/social media/content marketing.
Recruit employees and/or advisors.

Obviously, that’s a lot of stuff. I currently keep my schedule open as much as possible, unless it’s committed to someone else. But I always feel as though I’m missing some of these things — should I be explicitly scheduling time for each?

Sunday, January 22, 2012 — 1 note ()

What is Detroit‘s Brand?

If you’re not from there, you might only think of Detroit as the city with the massive population contraction. Or the one abandoned by the auto industry. Or the place with all the racial tension.

Or maybe when you watched the Super Bowl last year, you were introduced to a Detroit you hadn’t considered. You saw Eminem driving a Chrysler 200 through a hard-nosed, never-say-die, lunch-pail city with the Joe Lewis fist suspended proudly by the riverfront (ironically located just outside of General Motors’ headquarters).

Whatever your impression of Detroit, I can tell you that if you’ve never spent any time there, it’s wrong. You may think you know about the city’s grit, but unless you meet gritty Detroiters, you don’t. You may think you understand the concept of reinventing blight into opportunity, but until you walk through the Russell Industrial Center or the Heidleberg Project, you don’t. You may think that as an enlightened white person, you understand the psychology of blacks who are just a few generations removed from slavery. But until you walk through the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, you don’t. (And even after that, you don’t.)

Detroit’s Brand Is More Than The Sum Of Its Advertising

Yes. YES. YES!

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How you know you have great investors

I’m extremely lucky. I have great investors. Every day, I learn a ton about every topic imaginable from an active, experienced, smart, humble, and just plain awesome Chris DeVore. He’s not in some posh corner office or playing golf; he sits out in the same open space approximately 4 feet from where I sit.

Chris just closed an $8M fund for Founder’s Co-op. When the news was released, I realized the difference between good investors and great investors.

Good investors make money for their LPs. Great investors make money for their LPs and have entrepreneurs who love them.

The number of entrepreneurs backed by FC who are excited to see FC succeed with another fund is the surest sign that Chris and Andy are great investors. Just take a look at the tweets for that GeekWire article. Or take a look at the comments. They’re all positive and encouraging, and a large percentage are from entrepreneurs who have already been backed by FC and love them.

I’m extremely lucky. I have great investors. And I hope this latest fund is a big success for them.

Saturday, January 7, 2012 — 1 note ()

Stale code

Developers talk often of code smells: cues that might mean your code isn’t written as well as it should be. There’s also a general notion that the best code never needs to be touched after being written. It’s so perfect that there are no bugs and it works for years without intervention.

I assert that, in a living and growing application, code which never needs to be touched has its own smell: the smell of stale code. Like all code smells, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it very well could be. With a startup, if you aren’t growing, you’re dying. With stale code, if you aren’t refactoring, you’re smelling.

Code that never gets changed tends to become legacy code more quickly than oft-refactored code. It becomes dead weight, people forget how it works, and thus it becomes a black box. It locks you into old, non-backwards compatible versions of frameworks and libraries.

Perhaps we should rethink how amazing our code is just because it never needs to be refactored?

Wednesday, January 4, 2012 ()

3 simple rules for 2012

I decided to come up with 3 simple rules to live by in 2012.

Be a good person (have a strong moral compass).
Work hard.
Don’t take life too seriously. (You’ll never get out alive… thanks, Van Wilder.)

Wednesday, January 4, 2012 ()

The 2000 purchase of KB Toys, then one of the country’s largest toy retailers, became one of the most contentious.

As in most Bain deals, the partnership put up a small fraction of the money — in this case $18 million — and borrowed the rest of the $302 million purchase price. Just 16 months later, the toy company borrowed more to pay Bain and its investors an $85 million dividend.

That gave Mr. Romney and the other partners a quick 370 percent return on their money. But it also left the toy company with a heavy debt burden. Before long, the company began closing stores around the country and laid off 3,400 workers. It filed for bankruptcy protection in 2004.

Buyout Profits Keep Flowing to Romney.

I know lots of interesting things go on in LBOs/private equity deals, but this seems to me to be the pinnacle of Bain playing “who’s the bigger idiot” with banks… and winning.

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