Moving Beyond Break-Even: Predictions for Energy Innovation in 2010

[I'm going to try to avoid the political debate and stay on the topic of tech adoption and innovation. There is incredible work being done in this space, regardless of the politics behind it.]

This past year we heard a lot of big headlines and saw sneak peeks of new technologies laying "just over" renewable energy horizon. Fuels from algae, fuels from trash, new thresholds of efficiency in solar cells being achieved almost daily, and some awesome home wind turbines. Problem is, most of these technologies are still either too expensive for widespread adoption or are still making their way from the lab bench.

So What's in Store for 2010?
Sadly, it'll probably be more of the same.  We'll see fantastical headlines.  Our blood pressures will rise, if only momentarily. Days and weeks will pass and the story will be forgotten. Then we'll see another jaw-dropping story and the cycle will repeat itself. We aren't seeing plug-in hybrids or hydrogen anything hit the market in 2010.  We'll see industrial advances, but little in the consumer space worth getting excited about.

Labs and "Big Energy" Will Advance Quickly
Technologies will advance, there is no doubting that.  We'll continue to get wowed by lab-scale achievements, and new breakthroughs 5 years to a decade from commercialization. We'll also continue to hear about rapid commercialization by large utilities and small entrepreneurial companies for industry-level innovations.  We'll hear about wind farms, solar fields, the "clean coal" advancements, carbon sequestration, and even some really wild geoengineering proposals.  Some will be hot air, sensationalist, and get a ton of press. Others will be quiet, but important, advances that will do more for this industry than we will probably ever know--or hear about.

What About Us?
But what we're all waiting for, and continue to wait for, is economies of scale. When will we see panels cheap enough to install on everyone's roofs? When, particularly for the windy state of Oklahoma where I reside, will tax credits (or better yet, just the retail price in the first place) be worth it to make the investment?

Moving Past Break Even
From my limited research it seems that we are getting nearer to that tipping point.  Many home turbines, like the one linked to above, are right at that critical point where the investment, minus tax credits and energy savings throughout the life of the product, reach the break-even point.  As such, the only people willing to spend the time and money to just break even are the ones on the fringe who are avid and extremely early renewable energy adopters with cash to spare.  What we need is products that will save people considerable money over the long run.  That is the only way we'll see rapid and widespread adoption.  When it's cheap and easy to use renewables, they'll be adopted.  This will be true in wind, solar, and geothermal.  Unless we see an uptick in the size of tax credits available to us, or dramatic price reductions as these companies move more inventory, we won't start seeing widespread adoption until 2011-2015 (depending on the tech).

Efficiency, Efficiency, Efficiency
The space in which we'll see the most rapid change will be not on energy generation, but in energy savings in the efficiency of everyday products we already use.  Companies like Serious Materials will continue to ship vast quantities of ultra-efficient sheetrock and windows for homes.  LED and compact fluorescents will continue to gain market share, and costs will come down. Electronics are getting more and more efficient.   And yet, the overall impact will be marginalized by the current economic wobbles.  The folks with the cash to make dramatic improvements in their homes are keeping it in their pillowcases.  We'll see improvements in 2010, but nothing too dramatic here.

What Can We Do?
Keep your eyes open.  A few companies and renewable energy innovations for the home may start to peek through the clouds and sell for attractive prices or long-term energy savings offsets.  Take a look at the federal tax credits available, and what your specific state's tax credits look like (states differ widely).  There are some great opportunities there.  Don't be afraid to call up some of these companies and talk to them about it.  They basically have to have someone on staff managing the different tax credits and reimbursements--they wouldn't sell much without them, sadly.


My Energy Resolution for 2010, and a Challenge to You
Find a renewable energy technology you connect with.  Find a product you think is cool, made by a company trying to change the world.  Call them.  Work with the company to find a way to get one in your home.  Move beyond the break-even.
I've got my eye on a few vertical axis wind turbines (VAWTs). I'm hoping to bring one home this year.  It's poised to be a windy 2010 in Oklahoma, as usual.  And I'm going to make the most of it.

MicroFAIL: An Entrepreneur's Best Weapon

Isn't a MicroFAIL much more appealing than this?

You have to think on your feet, make quick adjustments, and be decisive.  Duh? But I see a lot of startups do the exact opposite.  Often, the more technical the issue, the slower the response.  This is understandable, but unacceptable.

Adjust, Tweak, Repeat.

The shorted distance between two points is a straight line.  We learned that very early in school. So making a lots of quick, minor changes will result in you and your company's strategic vision to stay closer to that straight line.  The longer you wait, the farther from the line you drift.  Your adjustments will have to be sweeping, and your FAILs will be greater. 

"Fail early, fail often..." or, make a lot of small fails quickly... MicroFAIL.

The more detail oriented you can be in the beginning the better off you'll be.  Think through functionality and usability as much as possible, so later on you don't have to make sweeping changes.  This is also true on the design side. Don't just glance at the overall mockups.  A trick I like to do is stick them in Acrobat or Powerpoint and put link boxes over the buttons and link to the other pages (your AJAX won't work here, though - but wouldn't that rock if it could?).  This way, instead of just a wireframe you've got an essentially fully functioning mockup for the site.  I'm not a designer, but I like to put these together for the teams I work with. And it doesn't have to be web-related. I cut my teeth preparing these type of docs on multi-hundred-page FDA electronic submissions. It was tedious in those cases, but it works great for preparing financials, business plans, meeting agendas and materials, etc.

One way to identify MicroFAILs, is just use your product.  I've seen lots of times where people create prototypes and not really stress test them. QA starts from the prototype, not just the final product.  Doesn't matter if you're making software, a drug, or a widget.  

The best way to test your business model is to step through the value-chain. How is your product made (starting with the raw materials), packaged, shipped, displayed, opened, used, disposed of?  How will you go from contacting your first distributor to waving at a customer as they walk out the door? Now where are the weaknesses in those steps?  

When you build a bridge (think rope bridge, not interstate), you don't just jump on it and hope it holds your weight.  You stress every cable, very plank, every tie off.  The life of your business is at stake.

@msuster has a great post on what a VC looks for before writing a check.  Very spot on.  The MicroFAIL is a theme you can see woven through his points. Tenacity, the ability to pivot, resiliency.   

What are your thoughts on the MicroFAIL? Let me know in the comments.

MAPS3: A Tale of Two OKCs

[This post is just one man's opinion about making this city better.]


I'm going to give you a glimpse of two very different cities; where we stand as a city today and where we will be some years from now.


Take a walk around downtown Oklahoma City, watch the tour boats navigate the canal, eat at the fantastic restaurants in Bricktown, go to a Thunder game, feel the energy that is there is in Bricktown.  To the South, watch a regatta paddle along the Oklahoma River.  In between, there is a pretty desolate landscape of dilapidated warehouses and vacant car lots.  Look up you see a crumbling, monolithic highway. Teetering and shuddering, it divides the vibrancy to the North and dinginess to the South.

Now as if you were a giant lumbering over the city, grab that stretch of highway like a giant cable strewn across the floor, and pitch it Southward.  Bring downtown together again.  Using Zeus' shovel (we're using our imagination, remember?), turn the soil under what used to be I-40. Replace it with a burgeoning boulevard. Next, swing from the peak of the new Devon skyscraper and draw a steel circle around downtown.  Watch as a rail car rolls through the city; past new businesses and restaurants, better shopping, neighborhood lofts and an expansive green park, the Ford center and ballpark throbbing with concerts and maybe even an NBA playoff game (or two, please!), a convention center that sits as an architectural triumph we actually want to go to, through centers of scientific advancements and technology pioneers, a new world-class law school, and a river that is a magnificent sporting and leisure destination. A city admired.  (This incredible fly-through video for the Core to Shore project got me really excited for what downtown could be.)

We are faced with a choice on December 8th.  Which fate will we set for ourselves: Will we stagnate, waste incredible momentum and strangle this city, or will we continue our rise and strengthen the foundation we've already started?  If we choose the latter OKC could become, quite possibly, that city on a hill--OK, a plain--that shakes off this recession and helps lead this country back.  We can make OKC great again.  We have to show that this recent growth wasn't a blip but is sustainable.

Whether you voted for it in the past or not, MAPS has done an awful lot to help this city. We came together, invested in our city, and it has paid off. So many more jobs, millions to schools and for safety, more opportunities, and finally a pro team for a city so wild for sports. These initiatives weren't perfect, sure.  But all of our lives have been touched by MAPS. Doesn't matter if you live in OKC or Del City, Edmond, Norman, Yukon, or wherever.

Everyone worried about MAPS. Each time it came to a vote we worried that the plans they set forth wouldn't happen or would help our city. For the most part they did.  We held our city leaders accountable and they rose to the occasion.  They should know that in such a time as now, we'll be watching them that much more closely.  The tasks ahead of us on this third installment of MAPS won't be easy. The proposed plan doesn't have what each and all of us want, but it has some pretty amazing projects in it.  This city will be much better for it. Increasing investment and activity in the city is what we need to get out of this recession, not to shudder our doors as if a tornado were overhead. It's time to come up out of the cellar.

What if MAPS3, worth an estimated $777 Million, were spent elsewhere?
Let's imagine we put every penny of that towards the city budget as it is, or even all for public safety. What would the impact on the city be? Nearly a billion dollars later we would be exactly where we are now. No new businesses.  There would be more jobs to work for the city, sure.  But we need more widespread economic growth, not just a budget buffer. Investing in things that create activity and spur investment, bring new businesses and create new jobs, we could increase the tax base by almost that much or maybe more.

On the other hand, we could just let MAPS die.
Would that save us from the recession? A few hundred dollars a year per family--a kind of "city-wide stimulus"--instead of significant investment in city infrastructure. Would that create more jobs? The city's collective blood pressure may drop a point or two, but it wouldn't create the kind of sustainable economic boost to the city we need. We need business to boom, companies to grow, and job creation to explode.  Retiring MAPS won't do that for us.

We need to expand the ecosystem of businesses large and small, and create opportunities for home-grown entrepreneurs. We need to generate more intellectual gravity for our universities and institutions.  We have to bring in knowledge-based companies and nurture an environment for new ones.  As someone who works for a small technology company and is soon to be married, I want to be proud to start my family here.

As I said before, I didn't say MAPS3 was perfect.  It's hard times across this nation right now economically.  But we can't just hide in the shelter waiting for the storm to pass.  We're Oklahomans--we've gotten pretty
brave dealing with those.  But it's time to get out there and rebuild.

There's worry that we won't hit the projections we need.  Some think if the going gets tough that smaller projects would be the first to get going. This includes the bike trails, sidewalks, and even the water park. I implore our city leaders to have the health and well-being of Oklahomans in mind as they move forward. And we need to hold them accountable.

The proposed rail system could weave together downtown OKC, sidewalks and trails could spider web throughout the entire city, and the Oklahoma River would transform from afterthought to a phenomenal attraction. These projects could be the catalyst for the next phase of our city's resurgence.

I hope that we can band together as a city and support the growth of OKC.  I hope that we will support the small businesses that we have and urge our friends and even ourselves to start new businesses and explore new opportunities.  I hope that individuals and companies invest in these new businesses and in the downtown Renaissance.  I hope we solidify our path not just onward, but upward.  I hope we pass MAPS3.

Startups: Build a Team of Waifs and Fatties

In my last post I talked about worrying. It made me think about some of the startup founders I've met over the years.  In my oversimplified and grossly generalized view, there are really two kinds of startup founders.  
The hard-charging, risk-raking product champions that won't take no for an answer and have a long-term vision for the company based on research and a heaping serving of intuition.  I see Steve Jobs as one of these men.  Then there are the constantly worrying Chicken Littles.  They say, "that won't work," "we can't afford that," and/or "I need this feature completely and totally mapped out for launch before I'll write a single line of code." I'm sure you know many of these guys.  Often the former is a business-type founder and the latter is a technical-type founder. 

Try to be BOTH.

The best startup teams I've seen are of a savvy technical founder and a sharp business founder.  Many would argue with me here.  That's fine.  And in the early goings just a technical founder is fine.  You have to focus on building product.  If you're a lone star, you need to inprove your skills across all business and tech functions.  You have to be a jack of all trades. You can hire specialized masters later.


It's better to have a product with no business than a business with no product. 
Before you go out raising funds, handling accounts payable, and other things of that nature you need to build, build, build. But at some point you need to write a business plan, devise a marketing strategy (and tweeting about it doesn't count), set up the financial architecture of your company, navigate legal hurdles, etc. If you're the business founder you'd better be surrounding yourself with brilliant programmers/designers and incentivizing them before you go running out and building a business with no products.  

Building a Team of Waifs and Fatties

One of my favorite video games of all time was Ice Hockey for NES (God, I should just go buy a walker and a burial plot). You choose between 3 types of players: the bloated behemoth that took 10 minutes to cross the rink but could knock the snot out of anything in its path; the stocky and average "Joe"; and the weak, spindly waif that was only about 2 pixels wide but skated blue line to blue line in less than a second.  
I loved setting up my team and trying out different combinations of characters. (None of these combos helped beat my older brother though. Ass hat.)  This is a microcosm for your organization/startup/small business.  

For Cohesion You Need Diversity.

If you're a startup founder, take a look at your cofounders.  Do you have multiple "Steve Jobs'?" (Gosh his name sucks to pluralize.) If you do, you're in trouble.  You need someone with their feet on the ground.  You need a detail-oriented worry wart.  Have two technical founders and no marketing/bizdev person? Get one.  Have two marketing/bizdev founders and no developers? You're off to a really bad start. You have to have representation for the different silos of your organization or there will be major gaps.  And if no one is "minding the gap" you're going to wake up one day in a world of hurt.

Opposites Attract...Funding

Lots of marriages are between two seemingly "bad for each other" people, but they work perfectly together.  Jobs needed the Woz. Gates needed Allen. Page needed Brin. Take a look at your startup.  Where's your copilot? 
I see this a lot with startups founded by good friends.  They are too similar, and they need someone to balance them out or they will lead each other astray.  Building a "fundable" team is about filling the silos, covering the bases, and showing that you have your business under control. nothing is worse than a board making hiring decisions or structural changes.  
Hire your opposites.  Hire waifs AND fatties to round out your business.  


P.S. Take Your Work Home with You

Forget your co-founders for a second. Does your co-pilot at home just dismiss your ideas or does he/she engage and question your thought process? My wife-to-be grills me. Makes me feel like crap sometimes because I overlooked something, or energizes me on a new initiative. If your spouse doesn't support --and challenge-- your ideas, how can you hope to succeed?

The Power - and Folly - of Worrying

Worrying about your business isn't just about worrying if you can make payroll, if you can raise that next round before your runway disappears, or praying your competitors won't see that gap in your IP. It's about realism. You need to know your numbers better than your accountant (often you are the accountant in the early goings). You have to know your market better than your competitor. You have to know your code and your IP better than, well, anyone.


Embrace the fear
Fear is often called "the great motivator." And it can have a great impact on your company--and your bottom line. You should worry about the impacts of that new investment. That new furniture/computer/office/whatever. The growth your marketing push will have on your ability to handle increased traffic on your servers or sales on inventory/production. Making irrational assumptions and just letting the chips fall is an easy way to find yourself up a creek without a paddle.


How do I know I'm worrying too much?
Are you able to sleep? Have you not pitched your business to a potential customer/investor/partner because you were afraid they'd steal your idea? Worrying too much can have a  crippling on your ability as a decision-maker. A healthy dose of worrying is fine, but don't let it get to you.

When to Assume and When to Worry
This was posted on the window of our laboratory and production facility. Our chemistry and manufacturing guys are the consummate worriers. That's a powerful trait to have when what you're producing will either heal-or hurt-the recipient based on your attention to detail. And they are incredibly good at what they do. Other scientists and developers I've worked with are worriers as well. They worry about reproducibility/hypotheses/bugs/scalability/UX, you name it. And it helps them be better at their jobs. However, when you step away from the lab bench or the command line you see that you have to believe in your skills--or identify the areas you're weak in and consult someone who has those skills--to get the job done.
If you've ever put together projections for production, timetables, or pro forma financial statements, even the most basic, you know what a dramatic effect assumptions can have on the outcome. Tweak a value here or there and the result can differ by thousands, millions (even billions). Remember when Twitter's projections were leaked? Biz Stone had estimated 1 BILLION Twitterers! Sure, Biz. Not with the latest numbers I'm seeing. Assumptions can lead you down crazy roads.


Don't Assume, Don't Worry. Just Be Realistic.
The best thing you can do is to make assumptions, establish how and why you came to them, and stay mindful of them.  Don't be afraid to change and tweak as new info comes to light--especially if it is negative! The key to being realistic (and reducing the worry) is making rational assumptions based on whatever facts are at your disposal. Write into your model how you came to those conclusions so whoever reads it can come to those same conclusions.  I'm amazed at some of the stuff I read sometimes, it just doesn't make sense (Like the Twitter projections: One month of 1000% growth isn't sustainable, Biz).


So don't worry, just be "cautiously optimistic."

Mountains to Molehills: Targeting and Executing Your Best Ideas

Your best ideas are the ones you are most likely going to be able to execute.  Your pie in the sky ideas about wind energy or search algorithms (unless you've got a PhD in electrical engineering or computer science) are too far outside your core competencies to be able to execute without significant financial and human capital behind you to fill in the gaps.  Good entrepreneurs are good at finding weakness, opportunity. Once you have amassed significant resources, have VCs who will not only take your call but will call YOU, then you need to identify opportunities with low thresholds.  Should you throw your pie-in-the-sky ideas out the window? No.

Small victories can lead to big successes in the long run. Sir Richard Branson, the eccentric mogul behind the Virgin empire, got his start with a student magazine dubbed, unsurprisingly, Student. Once he established the Student he expanded it and identified other opportunities.  He started a mail-order record distribution company and put ads in his own magazine. He "snowballed" his approach. Had Branson started out saying, "I want to start an airline to compete with British Airways" he would most likely have been squashed like a cockroach.  Believe me, even with the Virgin empire at his back BA tried their best.  (I highly recommend his autobiography Losing My Virginity: How I've Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way.)

I have a prescription for you to do better at picking your horse to run in the race.  Sure, you can run multiple races. But in each race you have to pick the right horse.
Write down all of your ideas on paper/excel/whatever.  Use the company name if you've come up with one, or a quick phrase like "virtual goods ebay." (Not a bad idea actually. Excuse me while I add that to my list.) Make three lists, with all of your ideas on each list. Rank them based on the criteria for each list:

• Big Ideas: Rank them in order, high to low, in terms of the idea's impact, disruptiveness, opportunity, market size, or revenue potential.
• Most Executable: On this list write down those same ideas in order of simplicity, easiest at the top.  Order them based on how quickly, easily, inexpensively you could execute them. This will depend on your resources and competencies. Be realistic.
• Time Sensitive: Write your list again, this time in order of how quickly you should act on these ideas. Is the window just opening or has it been open for while? Is this sector moving at a lightning pace? Are there a slew of new companies popping up to meet this need already (move these ideas lower on your list, your competition is ahead of you)? Do you have IP (patents) where the clock is ticking? First mover ideas should be ranked higher, "me too" ideas lower. For some, if the door is closing you should rank these ideas lower.  

Now take your lists and draw a line across each of them after the fifth idea on the list (or three, or two).  If any of your ideas are on multiple lists, start with the idea highest on the "most executable" list.  This is your target.  If you have one or more ideas that you're currently working on already, then you may want to add another column to your spreadsheet for each idea you have currently going and how closely related your other ideas are to it.  This goes back to Branson and leveraging your other successes.

If you look at the most successful entrepreneurs, very few had knockout success with their first big idea.  Many failed, and failed often, before seeing success.  Sure, there are exceptions. But for the most part, you need to build a foundation of successes before you can tackle the really big ideas.  Even if your first ventures are blips, they are something.

You have to reduce risk.  If it is way outside of your realm of expertise or resources you have very little to help you succeed.  If you only have two or three ideas, go with the one easiest to execute.

But if you just can't let that big pie-in-the-sky idea sit on the shelf, then go for it.  There are always exceptions.

How do you decide on which of your ideas to pursue?

OKC's MAPS3: Calling All Cars

[Usually I want to keep this blog about innovation and entrepreneurial topics.  From reading a string of comments on MAPS3 in OKC, I wrote this reponse.  I felt it might be good to also post it here. I welcome your comments and discussion.  And I promise I'll get back to writing about startups again after this digression.]

Let me first start off by saying that I firmly believe that OKC Public Safety is understaffed. I agree that we need more feet on the ground because our South side is in desperate need of revitalization.  However I have to call major foul on the representatives of the leadership behind public safety on the MAPS3 issue.

We have over 1,027 uniformed officers and over 300 civilian employees to serve our 1.1 million-strong metro area. Sounds like a lot right? Nope. It’s 0.93 cops per 1,000 people.  National average is 2.8 officers/1,000.  We rank very low on officers per capita, and this does not account for the further burden our annoyingly spread out city places on our officers.  Less cops, more spread out.  It frustrates me that our force is the exact same size as it was in 1989. It boggles my mind.

But this has NOTHING to do with MAPS3 does it?  Monies for public safety, which amount to a whopping 55% of our city’s annual budget, are totally separate from MAPS and the two have no correlation? Wrong. 

And to say the MAPS3 monies won’t be doing good for our city is hogwash. A few points:

1-40 has to be moved. It’s falling down as we speak.  Moving the highway (not part of MAPS3 money) will leave a HUGE tract of land, already largely abandoned and neglected and in need of gentrification.  What will move in then? Would you rather we spend money out of the current budget to do something with it? We have to plug that hole, and doing it with the park, convention center, and other projects in MAPS3 is the way to do it. So to say that MAPS3 “may or may not create jobs” is bullshit.  What is going to create jobs, an abandoned warehouse or a convention center?

Light rail will make downtown safer and cleaner.  And I’m sorry there’s no way to avoid the light rail parking issue in a city this sprawling.  But relieving the traffic in downtown will be huge, and I firmly believe that this light rail project, if successful, will lead to some stations that can transport people from low-income areas to downtown for work.  And by connecting the residential areas of downtown with the corporate areas, will actually reduce the number of cars as a whole.

Roads. Correct, there is no money directly for roads or bridges.  But shit we already spend millions on roads and bridges (granted, lower-income areas are neglected, but that is not uncommon in any city. It’s not right, but it’s a separate issue than MAPS3). What we need desperately, and will get with MAPS3, is sidewalks all over the city, 57 MILES of bike trails, and these are things that will help the people of OKC to get up off their asses.  MAPS3 is a small, but important step in this direction.

River improvements. We have the opportunity to be a world-class rowing destination. Remember the Olympic athletes that got sick last year? We can’t let that happen again. We must make improvements. Also, a public white water kayak facility? Seriously? That is fucking awesome! Needed, probably not. But the kind of forward thinking that will lead to more people willing to move here, better jobs because companies will want to relocate and start up here, and more tax revenue to go to public safety.

Convention center.  This isn’t even worth talking about. The amount of travel and increased economic activity surrounding a convention center is incredible.  The BIO conference has a nearly $100 million economic impact on the host city each year.  That’s one conference.

Why would the contingent behind public safety want to stifle our cities growth?  I firmly believe they do not want to stifle growth.  We were able to become a “major league city” because of MAPS, the Bricktown area is the pride of the state, and the MAPS programs have led to $5 billion in increased economic activity in Oklahoma City.  This increased the tax base and led to significant increases in budget allocation for public safety over the last 7 years (as far back as the financial reporting on okc.gov website goes).

Just staffing budgets for Police and Fire were increased by $5.4 million for the upcoming year in the current budget.  Assuming an insanely high per officer compensation, benefits, etc. of $100k per year per officer, we could more than quintuple our entire police force!  The OKC police department just finished building a $4.6 million dollar emergency response center in downtown OKC.  The stimulus package from last spring allocated $4.9 million for capital projects such as new training facilities, new cars (last I checked they’ve been driving cruisers that are just a step down from Knight Rider already) and a slew of other material needs.  And a similar allocation was made for fire in the Recovery Act.

Now let’s get down to brass tax.  The figure that was given that the police force has the same amount of officers as 1989 is really troubling me.  So I went and looked at the actual budgets for the city of OKC for the last 15 years. 

Amount of budget allocated public safety: 1994 - $79.4M;  2003 – $155.5M; 2008 - $291.9M

Each year the budget was between 50-55% of total funds.  Are you kidding me? We have increased the public safety budget by more than 267% since 1994 and nearly 100% in just the last 5 years? How are they still underfunded?  These figures don’t take into account the stimulus money either.

So have the personnel budgets stayed stagnant? Is all that increase in funds going to upgrading the technologies needed to keep our streets safe? Nope.  Personnel budget for 2003: $36.4M (50:50 split for fire, police). Personnel budget 2008: $67.0 million.  An increase of 84% in just the last 5 years.  And the 2009 budget increased almost 10% over last year.  Well it must just be cost of living adjustments, right? Inflation? Taking the 2003 personnel budget for police and using the number of officers we get $17,721, and for 2008 we get $32,619. First of all, inflation adjusted increase would be only $20,708. So their salaries are increasing at roughly 5 times inflation. That is damn good. Second, these numbers are way low. Average salary for cop in OKC in 2008 was $41,000.  (I personally think it should be higher, that is a dangerous and important job). Is this about right officers?  Frankly I want to know how the hell we spend more than half our budget on you guys, you get millions in stimulus, drive $50,000+ vehicles, and still can’t get the staff you need to keep our streets safe with enough officers.  You should look not to the city but to your leadership.

So what is the deal? Why aren’t we talking about MAPS3?  Well we are. Well remember MAPS for Kids? The city cut out a chunk of MAPS for Kids for public safety.  The portion of sales taxes that came in from OK companies selling products to out of state consumers would be allocated to public safety.  Public safety netted $60 Million from that little carve out. 

The problem is that when MAPS3 was shown to everyone, the cops and firemen said, wait a minute? Where’s our chunk? It wasn’t there.  MAPS3 isn’t about the projects, bad or good, it’s about the money.  Police and fire departments want their cut.  It’s as simple as that. 

So why are cops and fire still fighting against MAPS3? Didn’t Mick Cornett put back in the provision?  Yes. The tax from MAPS for Kids is back in the bill.  It is estimated to net the police and fire forces some $30 million.  So why are they still fighting against MAPS3? Well $30 is only half of $60 million, and they are used to doubling their budget allocations over 5 years.  Shouldn’t they get $120 million?  That is the argument.  That is why they’re trying to block MAPS3.  And the rank-and-file officers are incensed and being manipulated.

I think we should have more officers on the streets. I think we should have the safest city in America, no matter what side of the tracks you are on.  But the OCPD and OCFD’s arguments against MAPS3 disregard for the future of this city, and they need to realize one thing.  You get your money from tax revenue.  Our most powerful tools to increase your budget is to increase taxes, or increase economic activity. I think you would agree that raising taxes is not a good idea (yes MAPS is a sales tax, but it is not additional taxation, taxes stay where they are).  We need to pass MAPS3.  Because if we don’t, you can expect only one thing. Tax revenues will decrease. Your budgets will be cut.  You should be looking to your leadership asking questions, not trying to bring down a good bill that will do a lot of good to improve this city.

Entrepreneurs: You Have to Burn the Ships

In a short video played at an event to celebrate Global Entrepreneurship Week I heard a great quote (@okccoco the host, Shelli Todd from OKStartup.com the presenter).

"As an entrepreneur you have to do what the Vikings did. You have burn the ships."

Photo Credit: edinburghguide.com

When Vikings landed their great oared ships on foreign lands seeking conquest, they would do something dramatic. Yes, dramatic beyond the huge blonde beards, giant axes, and horned helmets. After they had set to shore, they would burn the very vessles that brought them there. Then march to war and never look back.

This is quintessential entrepreneurialism.

There is no retreat. Whether you're just starting out and second-guessing yourself, or bootstrapping is wearing you down, fighting to make payroll,  or trying to get the next round of funding to... just... please... close... you can't give up.

The battle is ahead of you, not behind.

Steer yourself towards that goal and charge towards it with that obscenely large axe like there's no tomorrow.
Financial accounting has a term they use that is in the spirit of "burning the ships"--sunk costs.  Money you've already spent is irrelevant.  Look ahead.


This theme should invade your thinking (excuse the viking pun) in all aspects of your startup.  Are your users demanding a feature tweak? Make the decision and move ahead.  Fretting over the new design? The old design is a burned ship.  Scavenge the pieces you need to take with you in the battle ahead and move forward. 


Pick up your axe and take the fight to your competitors.

[Disclaimer: This is not supposed to be one of those entrepreneurial affirmation articles, but that pearl of wisdom really grabbed me.]

Startups: The Great Big Balloon Ride

I'm about to launch a new startup and I have no clue what's going to happen. I've done my homework.  I'm prepping everything in my arsenal to get the word out, without overdoing it. I'm hoping that the social/viral components are intuitive, easy to use, and will help grow the site. I'm going to get out there every day and tell people about it. I'm going to listen to our users and try to make their experience better.  I'm going to measure, measure, measure. But in reality, I have no clue what's going to happen.

People, companies, b-school professors, etc. talk a lot about the "product life cycle." In fact, writing on the topic for a class in my executive MBA is what sparked the idea for this post.

So... introduce your product, grow and develop your market, grow like gangbusters, crest the wave as your product matures, and then crash! This couldn't be further from the truth, in my opinion.

Rollercoaster of Dreams
Launching a product may feel like a rollercoaster, but the product life cycle is not life rolling up a rollercoaster forged from steel. There are no rails holding you to the towering infrastructure below.  There are no cars on tracks, here folks. No matter how well you plan, strategize, forecast, spend... you cannot precisely predict anything. You can only react. Certainly, having a thoroughly conceived business and marketing plan is crucial. You have to chart your course as best you can. But, and this is especially true in the Web 2.0 era, everyone has myopia.  You can see the road two feet ahead, but looking down the road everything is a blur.

The Great Big Balloon Ride
Launching a new product is more like launching a hot-air balloon (I'm really going to do my best to avoid the balloon boy references).  You release the tie down and you have no earthly idea what is going to happen.  Sure, you pump the hot air to raise higher and higher. You measure your trajectory as often as possible.  You look for landmarks or other balloons to say "hey, we've made it past X." Or, "there's where we want to be! Steer!"

But in reality you're in a friggin' basket hanging under a giant pillowcase floating hundreds of feet in the air.  
You could run out of gas (cash), you could spring a leak (faulty manufacturing/development), the wind could blow you astray (marketing miscues) or another balloon could be more well equipped and just pass you by.

So what do you do? You have to stay hyper vigilant.  Make a plan and stay the course, but always be mindful of your coordinates and be willing to adjust course.  Making a lot of minor tweaks to your heading will get you closer faster to your end goal than huge, sweeping redirects.

Don't let the balloon just take you, because you won't end up where you wanted to be.

If You Want to Succeed, Hate Your Ideas.

Ok, so hate is a strong word. You should love your ideas like they're your children.  But you should be skeptical of your ideas. Even your best ones. All of them. No matter how great they sound.
The best thing you can learn is how to pull the rug out from under yourself.
Be unforgiving. Find your weaknesses. Because if you don't, you competitor will. Along the line a sharp investor surely will.
I love ideating. Eureka'ing is so much fun, and is the gateway to the entrepreneurial process. Granted, it's much like writing: the best ideas come when you least expect it.  So whenever you have a great idea, write it down.  And then start tearing it down.  It is a cathartic and important exercise. If you don't rattle the gates early, often, and thoroughly those gates won't withstand the maelstrom they are going to face down the line.
Do your due diligence from the get-go. It will save you a lot of time, effort and money.
Here's my approach:

• Google it. Now. 
• Great ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution is everything. Sure. But your great idea is probably taken. Go find out. Now. If some other company is already doing it then keep looking. They will have competition. If your idea is different you need to find out how, and fast. No easier way to find out than by learning about your competitors early and exploiting their shortcomings.
• Find the Holes
• If you've got competition, you should be finding out how to fill the holes they have in their business model and how to exploit them. If you're extremely lucky and it's an open space start identifying your weaknesses (I doubt it. Keep looking.). I'll say it again: The best thing you can do is learn how to pull the rug out from under yourself.
• The Idiot Test
• If you can't explain your idea simply now, you won't be able to communicate it effectively ever. You don't need a glossy, perfect elevator pitch. But if you can't get your idea across in a few sentences to a layman, how do you expect to amass millions of devoted customers? Try it on your grandmother, your kids, the mailman. Anyone. If they stare blankly-and they will-you need to keep working.

So be suspicious of your good ideas. You'll filter out the so-so ideas quickly and the result will be the very best ideas in your arsenal--and the start of a pretty decent business plan.

Anyone Can Change the World, Here's How

There, I said it. And I truly believe it.

Wanting to change the world is a common theme. From individuals to collectives, startups to "Big" industry, everyone wants to change the world. It's happening every day. All around us.  Ever hear of the wheel? the nanotube? the ipod? kiva? Gandhi?  Ok, those are big time examples. But they started out with simple ideas that grew and grew into big movements.  You can do the same thing.

Whether it's for profit or not for profit, changing the world HAS to be done. And I'm sorry, I know we've all heard that word a lot this year.  But it's really important.  I think too many people and too many companies are being lackadaisical about this lately.  I think everyone and every company, startup or established, needs to get back to the idea that they can change the world.  

You're going to find a lot of corollaries between the steps I'm going to outline here and the things that get drilled into your brain as an entrepreneur.  Maybe because I am one, and this is how I'd do it.

1. Ideate
2. Plan
3. Execute
4. Measure
5. Rinse and repeat.

So let's dive into each of these a little further.

1. Ideate
You're (most likely) not going to change the world completely and totally by accident.  Sure, the slinky was an accident (and yes, in my opinion it did change the world, if only a little).  But the idea that a coil could be turned into a child's toy took a different kind of inspiration. It took a eureka.  Eurekas can be accidents, sure. But you have to have a eureka to be the foundation.  No one is going to stumble blindly and impact change in the world.

2. Plan
An oft-overlooked aspect of this process.  Says the naive: "I've got an idea! It's going to change the world! w00t!" Says the seasoned: "I've got an idea. Now how can I implement it."  Refer to #1.  You can't hope your idea will just magically come to fruition.  It's time to work.  But you have to have a plan of action. You can't execute without a plan. Does your idea to change the world need a business plan? Well is it a business? Then yes. Otherwise. No. (sure, there are exceptions)

3. Execute
Startups are indeed all about execution. You don't execute you don't survive. If you don't execute, then the change you want to see in the world will never happen.  If your change is "cleaning up my neighborhood" then grab a trash bag.  Don't just stare out the window and wish.  At lease push the first domino.
I've you've ever listened to Dave Ramsey (and you should) think of the snowball method.  Start with the smallest goals/tasks first, and scale upward.  The small victories will give you the fuel to achieve the big goals. Do whatever you can to execute, execute, execute.  You're trying to change the world, remember?

4. Measure
Outside of startups you may think this is impossible, or worse, not worth it.  I argue emphatically that you should measure everything you can. And I will admit I need to improve in this area.  In startups, this is easy. Growth in users, sales, turnover, time on site, and on and on... There are a million things to measure.
Measure everything. Measure progress versus objectives. How much longer did it take you than you thought it would to get that goal done? What impact did it have?  Are there any measurable results to compare against? If you can't find something to measure, you're just not trying hard enough.
A slight twist on an oft-used proverb:
If you can't measure it, it didn't happen.
How do you know the world has changed if you can't measure it?

5. Rinse and repeat
Keep working. Keep affecting change. Keep coming up with new ideas. Keep working. Keep measuring. Keep trying to change the world. It is worth it, and it is important.  Even if it's a small change. You're trying to change the world. Don't forget it.

If you need some inspiration here, I'm working on a project that will try to help.  It, quite literally, is about changing the world.  We're going live soon.  Follow us on twitter here.

I'll leave you with was something my fiancé told me when I soured on a project I'd been working on.  


She said, "The worst thing an entrepreneur can have is a short wick. You have to keep the fire burning."


Sorry guys, she's all mine.

Crisis in Innovation: The Economic Downturn and Its Effects on Biotech

The current global economic downturn has led to a major reorganization in the Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology industries. Many argue that Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical companies are insulated from recessionary periods because their sales are not dependent so much on consumer behavior—patients need medicine, no matter the economic conditions. Yet, the long term effects of the recession point to disturbing trends. Consolidation among some of the largest companies in these industries has occurred in 2008 and 2009, layoffs are piling up with close to 100,000 jobs lost, venture capital investment is down significantly, and the IPO market has stagnated. Furthermore, the Obama Administration has demonstrated a desire for nationalization, all or in part, of the current healthcare system, reduced drug prices, and easing in the regulatory path of generic drugs. Conversely, they have pledged to increase federal funding of the research that feeds the product pipelines in these industries to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. These factors have the potential to radically alter the competitive landscape in these industries, the process of technology commercialization and innovation at large, and certainly the financial environment that supports these industries from seed stage companies to multinational Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology corporations.

In recessionary times, many companies act quickly to reduce inventories, scale back head count, and reduce non-core projects in a race to conserve cash to weather the storm. In the Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical industries, where your supply chain possibly keeps patients alive, reducing inventories is difficult. This causes a deeper culling in non-core research and development, and layoffs. In an industry where intellectual property is a ticking time bomb for a product’s sales, the next drugs in your pipeline mean everything to future revenues. If companies focus only on what they consider core development (read: ‘blockbuster’ drugs), they leave themselves more open to catastrophic late stage regulatory failures and missed opportunities. For giant companies with large and fully stocked war chests, the recession has afforded them the opportunity to snatch up competitors with tougher cash positions or fire sale stock prices, but promising pipelines. Nearly $200 billion in acquisitions of public companies by Big Pharma have occurred during the economic downturn (Table 1). The potential fallout from this comes from there being fewer companies that will be looking to fund, partner with, or acquire earlier-stage companies. And as we are also seeing, there is less money flowing into these companies in venture investments.

Venture capital (VC) investment, the lifeblood of a capital intensive industry like Biotechnology, has been hit hard by the economic downturn. This April, the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) reported that in the first quarter of 2009 the Life Sciences sector (Biotechnology and Medical Devices combined) experienced a 40 percent decline in terms of dollars and a 31 percent drop in deals with $989 million spread across 133 rounds. Investment in Biotechnology fell 46 percent to $577 million in the quarter, while Medical Device investments fell 27 percent to $412 million. Investments in Life Sciences companies represented 33 percent of all investment dollars and 24 percent of all deals in the first quarter, which follows normative distributions from the past decade. Valuations for early stage companies took a dramatic plunge as a result of the downturn (Figure 1), meaning entrepreneurs and inventors have to give up a larger stake of their companies to VCs to get them started and to keep them going. The IPO market has evaporated for Biotech, and a poll of VCs recently reported that the IPO market won’t thaw until 2010 (Martino, 2008). With both the volume and size of deals contracting at an alarming rate, VCs are retrenching their portfolios. Biotech startups have to tighten their belts and stretch their current tranches as far as they can go. If new capital is definitely needed, companies better get out there and start fundraising sooner rather than later. In this environment, state and federal grants are more valuable than ever before—but are there enough dollars to go around?
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) was an unprecedented bill aimed at pumping massive funds into the U.S. economy across nearly all sectors and industries. The National Institutes of Health was awarded up to $10 billion in appropriations in the ARRA, with $8.2 billion in extramural scientific research across current programs and new proposals such as Signature Initiatives, Challenge Grants, Grand Opportunities (“Go” grants), and talent recruitment for faculty and internship programs. These monies will eventually flow into academic research, but is restricted from small businesses. Come again? That’s right, the NIH’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs don’t get a dime. When a researcher takes the leap and forms a company around their invention’s intellectual property, the SBIR and STTR programs are one of the main sources to facilitate this transition. The program, which has doled out over $26 billion across nearly 18,000 projects in its 25 years, is one of few sources of funding available to budding Biotech companies, but was left out of the ARRA entirely (Viscarolosaga 2009). And competition for SBIRs is often steep. Even small VC-backed companies are usually not eligible, and a reauthorization for the SBIR to include VC-backed companies has stalled in Congress. Moreover, the divide is widening. Small businesses receive only 4.3% of federal research dollars, yet the percentage of scientists and engineers employed by small companies grew to 38% in 2007 (Girard, 2009). As the debate over reauthorization drags on, Congress and the Obama Administration have to do some serious thinking about how their policies will affect entrepreneurial Biotechnology and drug development as a whole.

The Obama Administration has spoken loudly on the future of healthcare in the United States. Leaving the broader debate over nationalization and its effects aside, the intended sweeping healthcare reforms will undoubtedly have major impacts on the Biotechnology industry. In a public call for increased generic competition for biologic drugs, Obama opened a black box that could return to haunt him (USAToday, 2009). Biologic drugs, substances derived from living cells as opposed to chemical synthesis, are incredibly difficult to isolate, develop, manufacture, stabilize, and store. Far from the pill bottles in our medicine cabinets, biologics consist of specially designed sugars, proteins (often antibodies or interleukins), genes or vaccines made from recombinant DNA or other means, produced in scale, isolated, and stabilized in many type of matrices. It is incredibly expensive to develop and manufacture these complex three-dimensional proteins or other substances, and one false move can turn a million-dollar batch of drugs into a useless vat of bacteria. Errors gone unnoticed can lead to patient deaths—recall the tainted Heparin from China last year (Harris, 2008). Biotechnology has generated big profits from biologics, and patients pay a premium for these amazing medicines. In a push to reduce costs to patients, the first place politicians look to is generics. But whereas many pharmaceutical generics are simply bulk compounds available from large pharmaceutical manufacturers often simply pressed or encapsulated and shipped off, biologic drugs are proving very difficult to reverse engineer. Building a viable recombinant protein is no light task. If generic biologics are pushed through all the regulatory red tape and onto the market, the incentive for drug development takes a big hit. This stifles innovation and hurts patients in the long run. Obama needs to tread lightly on biologic drugs—especially imported generics—if he pushes forward with this. Revenues aside, the danger to patients is real.

The fear and concern caused by the economic crisis is wreaking havoc on the Biotechnology industry. There has to be efforts made to spur private investment in the industry, such as Obama’s proposal to eliminate capital gains taxes on qualified small business stock held 5 years or more (Small Company Lawyer, 2009). Congress must address the SBIR program, and come to some agreement on the role of small, venture-backed firms. It is a big problem that a publicly traded company with 499 employees can get SBIR funding, but a startup with 10 employees and only $3-5 million in VC money is not eligible. Something has to give. Innovation and entrepreneurship are the cornerstones of this country. Their neglect will have dire consequences on our future.

(This post is a paper I turned in for Prof. Keith Hazelton's "Money and Capital Markets" MBA class at Oklahoma City University. References are hyperlinked.)

Invisibility, Sweet Software, and Lupine Algorithms

So what do these three seemingly disparate things have in common? Absolutely nothing. Except that they are incredibly cool and this week’s Inno-Focus.

First we head off to sunny and somewhat socialist (alliteration aside) Berkeley, California where Dr. Xiang Zhang of Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and director of UC Berkeley’s Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center has made a significant advancement in cloaking technology. Read about it here at Science Daily (an amazing site I recommend highly). The article, published in Nature Materials, outlines the invisibility cloak in all of its ridiculous optical complexity. The long and short is that the cloak makes objects disappear by causing the light reflected from the cloak look like there is just the flat surface behind or under it. Right now it only works in the near-IR spectra. The tech is not quite there yet, but Zhang is confident his design will yield a visible light version soon.

Leaving the Harry Potter references aside for a moment, this is an incredible technology with myriad applications. Of course the mind immediately goes to military applications, but once the technology moves into the consumer space and costs come down this could be coming to a home near you. Windows where walls once stood. Glass-bottomed cockpits. Uncluttered surgeries (as long as they can avoid forgetting the invisible scalpel inside the patient. Read more from 'How Stuff Works' here. And I think this is only the beginning of the applications for this tech.

Wicked Cool Software - Bumptop

Young software genius Anand Agarawala has a vision. And it rules. Anand was voted one of Business Week's Best Young Entrepreneurs 2009. Well deserved. Bumptop turns your boring 2D desktop into a really sweet interactive 3D experience. What looks like a bird's eye view of a software developer's padded cell, bumptop's unique interface lets you pick up the icon for that spreadsheet you've been killing yourself over all week against the wall, and watch as bumptop's physics engine bounces around the realistic desktop, knocking into other icons that get "bumped" into, and rattle into place on the desk surface. Rifle through documents or photos like they were tangible items not just kilobytes in a folder, fan them out, stick them to the walls, all sorts of fun stuff.

But this is more than just a novelty download. I found myself fully immersed in Anand's (and bumptop gang's) world. I wanted to use the desktop more. I normally avoid adding shortcuts to the desktop. Within minutes I was grouping, organizing, and customizing my desktop in ways I'd never dreamed. And as touch interfaces become more pervasive in the coming years this will become the superior way to utilize your desktop screen realestate. Face it, the mouse is soon to be caught in the technology mousetrap (along with the fingerpad on laptops, and good riddance).

Despite only $1.65M in grants and angel investments (according to Businessweek's article), bumptop is out of beta and is shipping product. Download the only slightly limited-functionality of the free version or buy the Pro version for 3 workstations for only $29. A steal, frankly.

A friend showed me Anand's TED conference talk (use the Bumptop link above) about a year ago. I made a mess of myself when I first saw it. Try it, I dare you. You won't go back. Bumptop is in talks to ship bumptop with operating systems. Give them the Windows 7 deal, Ballmer! Please?

Lupine Algorithm

Ever get frustrated when you type an urgent question into Google and get back frustratingly irrelevant results? Enter mad genius Stephen Wolfram. (Ph.D. from Caltech at 20? Check.) Wolfram Alpha will scour the web, assimilate the data for your answer, and present your factual data in a coherent and straightforward fashion. No more trudging through worthless PDFs and gov't documents searchig for data. And if the algorithm can't answer it he'll email you himself. Ok, I'm kidding. But Google killer? TechCrunch thinks maybe.

Last week Google fired back, launching its own version of the data aggregator as Wolfram was debuting the concept during a talk at Harvard University. Wolfram followed with its own screenshot.

I have one question. Why the cat fight? Either Wolfram wants to fly solo and build the Google killer (good luck buddy). Or he has a checkered past with some of the Google execs (total speculation and unfounded). Or both. But if Wolfram is simply stretching his intellectual muscles, substantial they may be, the whole exercise smacks of muscle beach swollen ego. Wolfram may be mildly successful as a niche structured search engine, only to be surpassed in a year as Google bulks up its own offering. Or it does take off, and Google simply won't let that happen. Google has shown itself the internet's Pac-Man, gobbling up budding web technologies. And it has worked for them.

Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and CEO Eric Schmidt built the one of the coolest --and largest-- companies in the world buy smelling these opportunities from a mile away. They may not be Wolfram smart, but Wolfram hasn't shown anyone any business acumen. The two are not mutually exclusive, but I've seen countless braniacs think "running a company is easy, lesser men do it" and blow it. I think its a perfect match, and will amount to a substantial retirement package for Wolfram.