Konamoxt, Inc.

Is there really no such thing as bad press?

Well, leave it to the crew at PETA, they know how to stir up controversy. They’ve grown out of throwing red paint on rich folks wearing fur… and set their sites on a bigger target: the meat loving, BBQ roasting, and bacon loving (lusting), cowboy culture of America. And honestly, what better way to get cowboys riled up then with hot chicks?

By now, you must have seen the sexy new ad that PETA attempted to run in this weeks Super Bowl. I’ve included it here for your critical analysis. The question I have is, was this a smart move for PETA’s brand?

Ignoring for a second wether or not you actually agree with PETA, or whether or not you find the ad offensive, or for that matter whether or not NBC is acting on good faith by rejecting this ad, but gladly airing the sexy ads from GoDaddy.com, Budweiser, or other mega brands, there is an interesting analysis to be had of the online marketing strategy employed by PETA in this increasingly online world.

I suspect that PETA’s strategy was actually simply link baiting executed perfectly.

What’s link baiting? If  you’re a brand marketer that’s paying any attention to the online world you had better already know what link baiting is. In all likelihood you’ve paid or considered paying an SEO expert tens of thousands to develop and execute a viral campaign. But if you weren’t rigorous and thoughtful about the goal of the campaign, and you didn’t have a clear grasp of your brand values, then you probably won’t pull off a stunt like PETA has.

The whole point of a link baiting campaign like this is to get people linking to your site… Whether or not people are talking about your brand (good or bad)… may not matter to you. Of course, if you execute your campaign “well” and it does take off, then people will talk about your brand, and you’ll get detractors as well as fans.

It doesn’t hurt if your brand is already considered edgy… Frankly you can’t get much edgier than a brand that literally assaults people by throwing paint on them… So being racy, and objectifying women: it’s hard to make a case that this will tarnish the PETA brand.

What was PETA’s goal? My hunch: Turn some heads (check), get some inbound links (check), and increase their page rank on terms related to vegetarianism and health benefits (check?). PETA already runs GoVeg.com which ranks 2 on google behind Wikipedia for “vegetarian”; 5 for “health benefits of vegetarian diet”; 5 for “health risks of eating meat”. That’s pretty good rank to begin with, but this link baiting campaign certainly isn’t going to hurt.

Filed by Brad Hefta-Gaub at 12:20 pm under Marketing, Social Media
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I have a confession to make… I’m an introvert. This may come as a surprise to anyone who’s worked with me or met me, because as they will tell you, I am one talkative guy. Oh boy, when I get going… watch out. But the truth is, when the phone rings, I’d much rather let it go to voicemail.

Being a technologist, I’ll admit to being more comfortable sitting in my office writing code, designing a database schema, or planning a new cloud computing infrastructure rollout. But as an entrepreneur, you have to get out there. It’s really simple actually, and most people would say it’s obvious.

Customers- they’re outside the walls of your office. Investors- they’re outside the walls of your office. Partners- they’re outside the walls of your office.

If you allow yourself (and your team) to be isolated, you are destined to fail.

But, how do you know when to take the meeting? How do you know it will be a good use of your time? Is that a vendor calling you? Is that investor really going to be interested in your business? Why meet with that business leader if you don’t have something to sell them. How do you decide. Well, it’s actually quite simple…

The secret: Always take the meeting.

I’m reminded of this fact after a couple of completely unexpected meetings this week. Yesterday I met with Kevin Merritt, CEO of Blist, a local startup in Seattle focused on building a revolutionary kind of database that makes it easy for anyone to “Easily share and publish data and lists on the web.”

Kevin and I met through local entrepreneur resources like the Seattle Tech Startups mailing list, and eventually connected on Twitter, but we’ve never met in person. He suggested we meet in person and grab a cup of coffee. I’m not sure if he had an agenda going in to the meeting, but I know I didn’t. Beyond just getting a free cup of Joe (Thanks Kevin! I’ve got the next round!), I got to meet a smart entrepreneur and extend my network. I’m not sure what will come out of it, but after meeting Kevin, I’m sure we’ll be able to be a resource to each other in the future.

It reminds me of a meeting I had last year with a local venture capitalist. I wasn’t really in the market for VC money, and I wouldn’t have considered our venture to be appropriate for his fund’s strategy, but I got an introduction through an entrepreneur friend of mine, and said, hey, I have to take the meeting. Although the meeting didn’t result in an investment, I did get to meet a new business leader, and I must have left him with a positive impression: a couple weeks later, out of the blue, I get an email introduction from this VC to the CEO of Brooks Sports.

Not a bad connection! Good thing I took that meeting.

Ironically, at the time, we didn’t have a product to sell to someone like a Brooks, but again, I took the meeting… who knows where it could go. Our first meeting was just a friendly conversation about Social Media and the Fitness Industry, there was no sale to be had, as we had no product to sell. But the connection was made and eventually a couple months later that connection turned into a great partnership.

The lesson is simple: When the phone rings, answer!

Filed by Brad Hefta-Gaub at 8:04 am under Entrepreneurship
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Hitwise, recently released details about Twitters amazing growth, and it appears as if twitter has now surpassed Digg to rank #84 in Hitwise’s list.

If you’re a media start up which has been executing a “social networking” strategy around Digg, StumbleUpon, and other user meta filters, but you haven’t yet embraced Twitter, you’re about to start falling behind.

It’s time to start paying attention!

Some interesting details in the report include:

• Twitters traffic from users aged 25-34, went from 12% a year ago to 45% today.

• Digg gets nearly 38.8% of it’s traffic from organic search on Google. Twitter however gets only 9.23% of its traffic from search, and instead gets most of it’s traffic from social networks and other web applications that integrate Twitters APIs. Traffic from Facebook and MySpace combined are almost double the traffic Twitter gets from Google.

• Also worth noting is that Hitwise’s report only tracks web traffic, and therefore misses all of the twitter traffic which comes from mobile applications.

Filed by Brad Hefta-Gaub at 11:09 am under Entrepreneurship, Social Media, Technology
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As I mentioned in my last post, one of the many things I do as an entrepreneur is to advise other start up companies. One of the common requests I get as an adviser is the help interview and vet potential CTO candidates. Unfortunately in many cases, the choice to hire a CTO is the worst choice a CEO or management team could make.

But don’t misunderstand me, every technology startup needs the skills embodied by a great CTO, you can’t afford to NOT have a CTO.

So what do I mean, but the skills embodied by a great CTO? Understanding these skills is critical to understanding how to hire the right people to flesh out your technology team.

I recommend that management teams think about the roles of engineering management in three parts:

• Leading, inspiring, and managing the engineering team - Some people think of this as primarily a “people management” skill. We often give the title of “Development Manager” or “Technical Lead” to this role. These are very much “soft skills”, related to making other people successful, happy, and motivated.
• Leading the architecture and technical direction of the product - This is closely related to leading the development team, but it is really a different skill set. These responsibilities are much more focused on hard skills, related to deep technical knowledge. We often call this role “Architect” or “Chief Scientist”.
• Executive technology representation and leadership - Representing the technology team to the rest of the executive team, Board of Directors, company, key outside customers, government or legal parties. This is high end stuff, requiring a level of maturity and preparedness. It’s a combination of soft and hard skills, mostly soft skills. But it should be noted that the more sophisticated versions of these skills are only rarely needed in most start ups.

In very large organizations you will often see these roles divided into different jobs: “Development Manager”, “Architect”, and “Chief Technology Officer”. But in a start up, you can’t realistically afford to pay three six figure salaries to fill these skills.  So what are you to do?

Can you live without these skills? NO! You need to find these skills for your start up!

You need these, and hopefully, you can find them in a single person on your team. My recommendation is to start as close to your engineering team as possible and find the person who is closest to embodying these skills. Once you find that person on your team, then cultivate them to fill out their talents to include the rest of these important skills.

I’ll explain how to do this briefly, but before I do that let me quickly address the most common retort I hear to this advice. Often CEOs and BoDs will insist that executive technology representation is the most important skill they need filled. From there, they usually assume they already have a good enough architect but what they really want is “someone to manage those engineers”. This reaction is understandable, most of us feel more comfortable with “people like us”, so executives want to find other executives to hang out with, and they are afraid of those “engineers” and they want someone like them to “take care of it”.

The problem with this view, is that engineers are usually only inspired by other engineers. Yep, that’s the hard truth of it.

If your “engineering leadership” lacks street cred, then you can be certain that they won’t get far with your team.

Air-lifting in an “expert people manager” is one of the most dangerous things you can do. But finding that inspiring engineer on your existing team, and making sure they have or are learning good soft skills, is a sure way to take your engineering team’s productivity to the next level. If you have five engineers on your team, and they’re being productive and getting stuff done, then you can be certain you already have that leader on your team.

If you don’t have that person on your team, then you need to be very careful in how you add that leadership to your team. Look for someone who could slot into your team and sit side by side with your engineers and write the same code that your existing engineers are writing.

Don’t confuse years of leading large teams, with street cred. In fact, the longer that manager has lead large teams, the higher the probability that they’ve lost their street cred.

This is critical! If your “hired gun” hasn’t fired his weapon in years… he won’t make it on your team. Your engineers will eat them alive. Instead, look for an engineering manager that is still comfortable writing code. Maybe you won’t have them writing code in your organization, maybe you will. But if they can still write code, then they will do a great job leading your engineers that must write code.

Another common mistake that executive teams make is to assume that your architect and your engineering manager can’t be the same person.

It’s certainly possible for these roles to be seperate, but it’s much more efficient and cost effective to have a single person who fills both these skills. And I’d argue that a great engineering manager has many of the same qualities of a great architect. In particular, as your team and your mission grows, more and more delegation to talented engineers are required. This means that your CTO will need to be able to unselfishly delegate to the rest of the team, and truly inspire those engineers to run with the vision of the company and build a great product to meet the business needs.

Finding all of these skills in a single person may seem like a daugnting task, especially when you consider that I’ve said that person also needs to be able to code. But these people are out there, and if your company has a great idea, with an exciting market and the opportunity to work on great technology, then you’ll have no problem attracting them to work for you.

Filed by Brad Hefta-Gaub at 9:00 am under Entrepreneurship, Hiring, Leadership
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Wow! What a day. What a day! There is so much to be said about today, so many emotions, so much hope, and an amazing sense of the enormity of what’s ahead of us as a country and a world.

But, I guess, my true colors as an entrepreneur came out today… as I listened to Barack Obama’s inaugural speed I couldn’t help but be inspired as a “builder”, as a “doer”, as a “maker of things”, and as someone who wakes up every morning feeling deeply accountable to make the world a better place than it was when I went to sleep the night before.

There were so many lines that struck me for so many reasons… but as an entrepreur, this line, borrowed only slightly out of context, really hit home.

“…people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.”

This is idea, that the nay sayers, people who prefer to blame others for their plight will ultimately be judged by history for what they are… the problem… this is a very powerful and inspiring idea for those of us who are driven to create against all odds.

In the Seattle high tech startup scene, like much of the country, there has been a rash of recent business closures. And sadly, too often in our immediate community, those entrepreneurs are derided and mocked by the bystanders. This is so common in Seattle, that many entrepreneurs have begun speaking out, and itemizing this local cultural phenomena as one of the reasons our Seattle tech community is less vibrant as other regions (like the oft-cited Bay Area/Silicon Valley).

I have my theories for why this negative attitude is so common in Seattle. I believe this attitude comes from the relatively large mass of local success which has come from a few number of very large organizations. Unfortunately, if my theory is correct, then it’s not something that is likely ever going to change. So instead of worrying about it, and railing against it, I choose to create in spite of it.

I couldn’t possibly say it better than our new President did:

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.

Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

Here’s to a new day in America and the World. Here’s to the Entrepreneurs, “the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things”!

Filed by Brad Hefta-Gaub at 11:28 am under Entrepreneurship, Leadership
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Before Founding Konamoxt, my last gig was the Chief Technology Officer for a local Seattle Startup. I have the classic resume for a CTO of a Startup company… if you’re trying to hire a CTO, I’m sure your recruiter has called me… I get those calls all the time. Mr. Startup CEO, I’m here to tell you, you can’t afford to hire a CTO.

[Note to tech managers and wannabe CTOs out there: Oh, don't worry guys my next post will be why you can't afford to not hire a CTO.]

Today, one of the many things I do as an entrepreneur is help advise other Startup companies. I’m on the Board of Advisers of several other startup companies in the Seattle area. One of the common requests I get as an adviser is the help interview and vet potential development leadership candidates.

Inevitably someone on the management team will say “What we need is a CTO! Can you help us make sure this candidate would make a good CTO?”

Whenever I hear this, my alarm bells go off. Do they really need a CTO? What is happening in the organization that causes them to think they need a CTO? And maybe more importantly what do you think you get when you hire a CTO?

Most of the time, a startup CEO (or more likely the Board of Directors) will decide he or she needs a CTO because the organization is feeling pressure about the product. Maybe the schedule has slipped, maybe the product is buggy, maybe they just have this feeling that something isn’t working right. This usually happens in the case where the CEO is not technical themselves. That CEO/Founder was very likely the product visionary, but they don’t know how to build a product, write code, or lead an engineering organization to build the product.

Another very common situation is when outsiders, often the Board, is frustrated with the overall performance of the business, and they begin looking for “problems”. Unless one of the founders has a past track record of being a CTO or VP Engineering in a larger organizations, this lack of experience will often be blamed for the frustration without much analysis at all of the actual facts on the ground.

Sometimes, this “gut reaction” is correct. Sometimes the engineering organization is indeed rudderless, and the right solution is a new technology leader joining the team. But more often then not, I’ve seen the non-technical leadership jump to the conclusion that new “experienced” blood is what’s needed. When in many cases, that move can actually be counter productive.

The common euphemism seems to be “We need some adult supervision in here!”

But if you’re looking to hire a CTO, you probably already have your engineering team in place, you may already have a team of engineers that are building and have built something. How have they gotten as far as they have without this “technical leadership” you’re so convinced is missing? Nine times out of ten, the CEO has become convinced that the existing team is just lacking that leadership.

That search inevitably begins like this… “Let’s find someone with years of experience. And since this company is gonna be huge, we need someone who’s managed big teams, someone who can take us all the way to going public! We’re going to be a $100m/year business with hundreds of developers in different divisions. We need the kind of leader who’s been there and done that.” Sounds like a job for a CTO, right?

Hiring that CTO, will be the biggest mistake you make. You’ll alienate your engineering team, you’ll waste your money, you won’t be satisfied with the results, and in all likelihood that CTO won’t last in your organization anyway.

Here’s the problem… 99% of the time “that guy” you think matches your wish list, hasn’t written code in years. He might have managed a 1,000 developer organization, but he hasn’t directly managed engineers in years. She looks great on paper, managed a 10,000 cpu data center processing billions of transactions a day… but she hasn’t ever done anything with cloud computing.

When ever I’m confronted with this dilemma as an adviser I’m reminded of a great quote I once heard about NASCAR, I believe it was the late great Dale Earnhardt that said…

“If you see a wreck in front of you, drive toward it, because by the time you get there, it won’t be there!”

This philosophy can apply to a lot of things about startups. The key to applying this quote is to recognize that things are always changing… and if you continue to move forward, then in the future you’re guaranteed to be someplace other than where you are right now. What looks like a disaster in front of you if you stay on course, may in fact be the best, safest, fastest, game winning decision by the time you actually get there.

How does this apply to searching for a CTO? Well, it may be the case that you already have your CTO on your team. You don’t recoginze them yet, because they haven’t yet managed that 100 person development team. That doesn’t mean they won’t be ready when the time comes. You probably only have 3 to 6 developers right now. And even though you don’t think you have a development manager, doesn’t mean that team doesn’t have a leader.

Sure, it’s possible your team has gotten as far as they have with no leadership… maybe as the CEO you’ve been guiding that product vision and you’ve been managing those developers. But unless you speak their language, because you’ve sat in their chair before… then I’d be willing to bet you that one of your developers is actually leading the team while you’re not there. Maybe it’s the most senior developer, or maybe its just the most passionate and sharpest developer.

Instead of hiring an outside CTO, you probably need to take a close look at your team and try to determine if you already have a CTO working for you… but under a different title.

Next post… Why Your Startup Can’t Afford To NOT Hire a CTO

Filed by Brad Hefta-Gaub at 8:20 pm under Entrepreneurship, Hiring, Leadership, Technology
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I admit it, I am a big fan of Twitter, I’ve talked in the past about why I think that more so than other Social Media tools, twitter has the potential to be a powerful tool for entrepreneurs and startups to build their brands and to manage and grow their influence (and ultimately relationships) with consumers.

One of the most powerful features of Twitter is the ability to explore the twitter network for potential audience members.

Last month, I decided to conduct a little experiment, to see if I could use this feature in a practical way to grow my twitter reach and influence in a meaningful way. As a startup entrepreneur, I’m always looking for effective ways to interact with potential customers. My goal was to find people that I thought might be interested in what I have to say. I was looking for people that I could interact with, that would reciprocate that interaction with me, that I would find interesting and more importantly (as the point of this experiment was to find people who would become part of my audience) would find what I have to say interesting.

If you consider Twitter to be a broadcast medium, and you are in the business of broadcasting your message, then a getting an audience of meaningful size is critical to your business success. Keeping them entertained and informed equally critical, but before you can keep them, you need to attract them.

As a media startup, imagine if you could start a conversation with every visitor of the most prestigious website in your industry?

I will start with the premise that you have to have something interesting to say. I won’t get into a debate about whether or not anything anyone says on any social network is interesting, my assumption is that you’re not an idiot, and you have a plan for informing and entertaining the audience once you find them (or they find you). But instead I am going to focus on the idea that the unique attributes of Twitter allow you as a “promoter” to find your audience, instead of waiting for them to find you.

From December 1st to December 15th, I used made a concerted effort to seek out potential audience members. When I found them, I reached out to them. I used the Twtter follow feature to follow those people, I sent them messages, and I commented on their tweets that were relevant to my topics of interest. For the most part, people on twitter tend to follow you back, especially if you interact with them on a personal level. The result is that your follow count will rise as you interact with more and more people.

The result of this is that my Twitter Reach (my second order network size) has now risen to approximately 2 million people, and I’m the 37th most “elite” Twitterer in Seattle.

Some people might argue that a twitter network of over 1,500 followers is fragile, and realistically these people are not actually interested in your twitter stream. However, since conducting my experiment, my twitter followers have continued to grow. Of course, I can’t know for sure why all these people follow my stream, but I can say that we’ve seen a direct effect on our business, from increased sign-ups, increased blog traffic, and viral spreading of our brand and message.

And as an added bonus, I’ve had a lot of fun meeting a lot of cool people in the process: whether it’s a late night IM about entrepenues working long hours with Guy Kawasaki or a conversation about punk rock music and vegetarianism with the former bassist of the great 80’s girl metal band Vixen.  Where else can you do that? Twitter Rocks!

Filed by Brad Hefta-Gaub at 8:07 pm under Entrepreneurship, Social Media
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As a member of the Seattle Tech Startup community I subscribe to a great email distribution of local entrepreneurs. Today there was a lively debate about the recent news that the Obama administration idea of computerizing our nations health records. More details from this CNNMoney article - “Obama’s big idea: Digital health records”.

Since most members of the list are technologist, there was a huge debate about XML/HTTP and which technology standards would best be used to solve this problem. Being a technologist myself I would love to have jumped into that debate, just for the gear head thrill of it… but alas it misses the big point. So here was my decided non-technical reply to the group.

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First of all, if any of you are really interested in exploring this issue/business deeply, I strongly recommend participating in the Health2.0 conference series. You can learn more about it here: http://health2con.com/

Last fall there was a great conference (3rd so far) where the primary focus was “User Generated Healthcare”… the conference was loaded with tons of great panels and keynotes. There was a great deal of discussion of the potential of an Obama administration (this was before the election) and the implications it would have on the health care industry moving forward.

There were many many “web” and “technology” companies presenting their various solutions for how to lower health care costs and more importantly how to “democratize health care” (I use the phrase very loosely).

The debates between technologists at the conference were not unlike the thread we’re having hear… in fact all the ideas discussed here are already being worked on by at least a half dozen companies in this space.

Which is a nice segue into the primary concern raised at the conference…. Peter’s email is introduces the concept nicely.

Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:28:36 -0800
From: Peter Denton
Subject: Re: [SeattleTech] Web app required. Budget: $100 Billion

Totally not trying to be naive here, but is there really incentive for the
hospitals, insurance companies, private practitioners, dentists, cosmetic
dermatologists to do this?

These companies not only lack incentive for progress… they actually have disincentives to make change. In fact, the argument made by most of the people in the trenches of Health 2.0 is that it is exactly _NOT_ in the interest of these entrenched companies to support this progress, and many of them are proactively taking steps to prevent progress.

Given there are countless examples of the federal
government truly showing its inability to create large, performing data
systems, is it going to convince the healthcare industry to work together
and create more risk in a risk-infested industry?

If only that were the biggest problem. Most of the companies in this space explicitly make money off of the inefficiencies in the market. Cleaning up those inefficiencies will negatively impact their bottom line, and they are therefore motivated to work against this progress.

I know that healthcare is a great national investment, as it is 99% a domestic product, but is this a good approach?

I’ll admit to being a bit cynical about this, but I’d almost be willing to bet that the whole idea of “standardized medical records” is a red herring intentionally suggested by the lobbyists to create a giant bureaucratic failure, in order to prevent real progress and reform.

Normally I’d argue for the free market approach, but the problem with health care today is that it is not a free market, but instead a market which is easily manipulated by the power brokers (in this case the insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, etc). Although I’m not necessarily a fan of socializing these types of programs, I suspect that the only way to really reform this system is to create a single public system for health care… (universal health care, single payer, etc…)

The end result of such an effort would be a great deal of business carnage in some huge names, massive loss of wealth of investors in these companies, a huge short term burden on the tax payers, but at the end of the tunnel, potential for much more cost effective and higher quality health care for all of us.

Note to all of us on this list: Our own companies would greatly benefit from a reduction in health care costs… as it is one of the largest expenses we face in growing our companies.

Filed by Brad Hefta-Gaub at 12:06 am under Entrepreneurship, Healthcare, Social Media
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