trendpreneur

Lifehacker recently published an article “Five Best Startup Management Tools”, which I naively thought was a post on entrepreneurial webapps, but is in fact about autorun and trimming your Windows boot sequence. I don’t even use Windows (unless forced), so the article — which I keep seeing linked around the place — annoys me on multiple levels.

Here’s my take on what Lifehacker should have written to satisfy the other meaning of ’startup’. (Yes, it’s sort of a list post; I have another blog post brewing on that subject, and more.) The five top tools that help me run my startup, day in, day out, manage everything that’s going on, and not go insane in the process.

1. Email and Twitter

Two for the price of one. Really, the number-one ‘management tool’ that keeps everything flowing is communication, but there are platforms and webapps and gadgets galore for such a basic human act. I spend 95% of my communication time writing, reading and managing email or Twitter. Email… well, no need to go into details, although multiple inboxes, superstars, more filters than you can shake a stick at and labelling really save the day. Not sure what I’d do without Gmail.

Twitter isn’t a key internal management tool, but it has great benefits of its own — new opportunities, new contacts, quick attention-grabbing DMs, keeping up to date on trends, fostering relationships with key people and building a brand/reputation around a specific anchor. This isn’t just idle speculation, either; everything I just listed has actually resulted from my use of Twitter as a sort of mixed corporate-personal communication channel (both on @jennielees and, in August, our shared @festbuzz).

2. Dropbox

I use multiple machines, from multiple locations, across multiple platforms. Having the headache of ‘oh shit, that file’s on that computer 300 miles away’ totally removed from my life is worth the Pro subscription’s weight in gold. I mainly use this for startup work, as personal stuff is just less likely to be as vital, but I’m starting to put more trivial content into Dropbox just for the convenience. Because it’s a ‘real’ folder, I’m not worried about losing the data, but I am a little niggled by the ‘it’s all on the cloud’ aspect — I deal with uber-secure stuff in a slightly more paranoid way. Not sure how I’d transition from personal-dropbox to startup-dropbox shared with multiple people, but I can totally see the benefit of that as we grow.

3. Skype

We don’t use this tremendously much but it’s been insanely valuable when we have. Being a distributed company with the main lynchpin in the arse-end of Scotland people often assume we can meet face to face with them when we can’t; free video calling really does help to bridge the gap. (And, initially, having an 0131 number without a real phone.)

“Virtual facetime” isn’t quite the same as real facetime though, so I should probably add a tiny mention for Easyjet here, despite their monumental awfulness. (And big up the Generator hostel in London, yo.) My mileage for the year’s nowhere near Ewan’s, but I’ve still spent plenty of time on those lovely bright orange 6.30am planes.

4. Macbook Pro

My trusty laptop. I’d say “a” laptop is useful — really, required — to run a startup, but major props to the MBP (disclaimer: matter of personal taste). It’s over three years old, and although it feels quite sluggish now, and the battery life is somewhat laughable — about one and a half hours — it’s definitely served me well.

The main reason I love Macs is because I’m a control freak and command-line junkie on one level, but I also like shiny pretty things. OSX combines the best of both worlds in a way that’s well and truly converted me to the Cult of Jobs; I can get dirty stuff done quite happily in Terminal, set up a near-perfect coding environment that beats ‘four-terminal fwvm2′ into the dust, and yet also use a fantastic array of apps which are generally jolly good. And it doesn’t do games, which is great for a work machine, but it does do WoW, which is great for a junkie’s fix on the road (yesyes, I gave up for good over six months ago).

Honourable mention goes to the iPhone for keeping me connected on the move (providing there’s signal), but frankly, its call quality is terrible, the no-ring/voicemail bug is frustrating in the extreme, the ‘no service’ weirdness I’ve experienced lately is even worse, and the bewildering array of apps is entertaining yet ultimately a huge problem that’s just not being solved. Yes, it’s a great mobile email, web and SMS client, yes, some of the apps are great, yes, Google Maps has saved me more times than I can count. But international data rates, poor signal, low battery etc mean it’s usually an expensive iPod most of the time I’m travelling.

5. Other Startups

One of the things that has helped me learn, improve and generally stay on top of things has been other people — specifically other people who are, or have been, in the same boat. Thanks to communities such as Hacker News it’s easy to learn from others’ mistakes and get a quick opinion before you plunge; of course, I’ve still made plenty of my own, but I feel I somehow did so with a little education. There are a load of events that help startups in various ways, through learning, networking, presentation practice and so on, and it’s easy to get carried away and go to too many. However, having the option and the amount of information there for the taking is still great.

In meatspace, it’s also important to balance the often-isolated habits of entrepreneurship with the real world, and that’s where things like the Informatics Ventures/TechMeetup communities and EPIS have really helped. There’s something nice about the size and energy of the Edinburgh tech community; it’s small enough that you can really get to know people well and yet not too small to be insignificant.

Events like the Silicon Valley speaker series, Ken Morse courses, School for Startups and so on bring the world to Edinburgh. We still have a lot of barriers to get over to put the city on the map, so to speak, and there are plenty of times when I wish I was in London — but I do sense a force for change up here and some genuinely serious interest and investment in pushing Edinburgh’s ’scene’ further.

A side note: simply being in the right place is important to startup management, although not necessarily a deal-breaker. For example, it’s easier to manage a company if your co-founders, employees, investors and clients are all in the same city as you! However, it’s not impossible to succeed if none of them are, which is practically the case for me — you just have to think about things a little differently, and use tools such as those listed above to help with the process.

Having said that, there is a balancing act on hand. Despite the loveliness of Edinburgh and its awesome community, I’m going to be spending the next year in San Francisco simply because I feel I need to be there in person to nurture various things along, and get to a stage I don’t feel I can achieve remotely. But I’ll be back, and that’s what counts.

Photo is of Citizen Space, where I spent a happy nomadic afternoon working. Fortunately, the hot desks have power sockets.

Growing up, my family finances revolved around cheques. Routinely, we’d go food shopping three days before payday and hand over a bit of paper promising that, once the cheque cleared, we’d actually have the money to pay for the things we were taking home. My mother used to call this “robbing Peter to pay Paul”, borrowing from our future selves to enable us to eat today. This led to a vicious cycle; on payday, all the money would be pre-spent, leaving us with nothing for another two weeks until the next cheque could be written.

Of course, credit cards started becoming available to even those of dubious financial standing, and chequebooks somehow fell by the wayside. Why pay in full for something three days early when you could pay it off bit by bit over months or years? Hardly “robbing Peter to pay Paul”, more “giving Paul a PlayStation and making Peter put in overtime to keep up with the interest”.

Laid out bluntly, the maxim “don’t spend what you don’t have” is incredibly simple. Yet it’s also incredibly hard to keep to, or so it seems. I’ve fallen prey to it in the worst possible way — expecting birthday money, for example, I’d spend my existing cash in advance to get an immediate kick, then once the money arrived, spend that as well because it was my birthday. It’s pretty easy to do, especially if you’re not that connected to your personal finances and avoid looking at your online bank statements.

So, why don’t I do that any more? What’s made me realise I did it in the first place? Actually, it was teasing from people close to me who were familiar with my spending pattern and a little worried about it. I’m not the sort of person who announces my bank balance to friends at the drop of a hat, but they’d picked up on my money mismanagement from offhand comments and new purchases. If someone close to you seems to follow this pattern, it’s seriously useful to pick them up on it, though obviously calling an intervention on someone you don’t know too well is a bit much.

How to stop this unfortunate habit? It’s kind of easy, really: own up to your finances and therefore own your finances. Once you know you’re doing it, stop spending money you don’t have yet, or simply money you don’t have.

Keep your balance.
Know how much you’ve got in your accounts and when that number is going to change — set up Mint or Kublax, log on to your internet banking every day (force yourself for a while and it stops becoming scary; at that point, you can stop logging on daily, but still keep checking regularly).

Plan, but don’t spend.
When you have a windfall coming in, plan what you are going to buy, but don’t buy it. This has the added tried-and-tested advantage of giving you time to reflect on the decision, make the best possible purchase and even change your mind. Imagine yourself owning the item. Are you really happier?

Know where it’s going.
Using Mint, a spreadsheet or the back of an envelope, figure out what your finances generally look like, so you can work out when you have spare cash to spend — and when you don’t. Spending the remainder of your current account balance the day before your rent’s due? That’s money you don’t have. Finance automation is a great help — my income is pretty sporadic, so I squirrelled away my upcoming quarter’s rent and bills into a separate account, making my current account far more reflective of the actual money I had.

Cut up the credit card.
Seriously, they have their uses, but my life’s become so much better (financially speaking) since I stopped using my credit card. If you insist on keeping yours, be super, super aware of what goes in and out, how much that interest is really costing you, and pay it back before you buy new things. Far easier said than done, which is why ditching it worked for me.

Forget the numbers.
Finally, if you’re like me, you have an unfortunate habit of remembering your card numbers, making payments online far too easy. Stop yourself buying things by forgetting your card numbers (or rather, getting a new card and not learning it in the first place), unlinking your bank account from PayPal (no more impulse eBay shopping) and the like. Having to physically look at the card really makes you remember you’re spending money.

This post was originally going to be about more than money, as we “rob Peter to pay Paul” in more aspects of our lives than just the financial. Ever pigged out on food, skipped a day of exercise, procastinated on a deadline or pulled a sickie at work? We’re constantly living in the now, leaving our future selves to pick up the bill, and that’s before we even start to think about the state we’re leaving the planet in for our future generations…

(This is in response to a discussion I had yesterday and then an amazingly similar post by Nicholas Lovell on the same theme.)

So here’s the deal. You’re a smallish startup. Everyone counts. You don’t take hiring decisions lightly; you employ someone because they’re a great fit and the best at their job. In other words, they really matter. They help you build a great business, they establish a ton of contacts with the outside world and become part of the ‘face’ of the company. Internally, they’re part of your company.

Then they turn round and say “I’d like six months off, please, for personal reasons” — and you legally have to let them take it, and take them back again afterwards.

This just doesn’t fit with how startups work at all, and to be honest, if I was that deeply enmeshed in a startup, I wouldn’t want to hurt the company by having kids. If I knew children were likely to be in my near future, why would I even take the risk of joining a startup at all? Hence a self-perpetuating glass ceiling, and on it goes.

The logical thing to do as a startup owner is to hire regardless, and if a woman decides to have a child, replace her as if it’s permanent (according to the stats in Nicholas’ post, it may as well be). Then when she returns to work, treat her as an awesome skilled employee alongside the replacement. The company will have moved on and jobs changed anyway, so you can’t just “step back in” so to speak. Of course, this leads to politics and Drama, doesn’t it?

It seems way easier to find a replacement permanently, than “oh your job only exists for six months” (in this regard, 3 years is easier). And obviously some roles are easier to fill than others, a talented engineer probably would be replaceable on a temporary basis whereas a salesperson/COO isn’t. You could also promote internally (not like startups have complex organisational structures) and replace the promotee, and figure things out when the maternity leaver comes back. The bigger problem to me is funding. You’re basically throwing money away. Ideally, you’re investing in an excellent employee, vital to your startup’s success — but it doesn’t always work like that.

The crazy thing is I hadn’t even thought about all this. I’m a female startup founder, and I’m certainly not having kids in the near future. Despite the proliferation of baby avatars among my Facebook friends, I tend to forget other people want them, and that as an employer it can cause all sorts of trouble. It certainly hadn’t occurred to me that the very existence of maternity legislation makes it hard for all women. I can’t even legally say in a job interview that I don’t intend to have children within 5 years, can I? (And who’d believe me? Everyone knows women are fickle, hormonal creatures.) Argh. Can, worms, presto.

Elephants, stealthy creatures one and all, have been cropping up a lot lately, so I’m running with the theme.

What’s the elephant in your room?

We all have big, nasty problems that are either horribly current or just around the corner. We know they need to be dealt with, tackled, met head-on with a stiff upper lip; but instead we choose to pretend they’re not there, in the hopes they’ll just go away if we wish hard enough.

Now, sometimes this does work! Usually when the problem is time-based, or contingent on a decision, and the “la la la” approach wastes enough time to make it all moot. Oh, I’ve been guilty of this, but I always feel terrible afterwards. Instead of facing up to the situation, I just let it… happen without me. Instead of taking the risk, I wait until the risk isn’t a question, and convince myself I wanted the safe route all along. (So even when the approach works, it doesn’t work satisfactorily).

I started feeling a lot better about the elephants in my life when I started confronting them, though. It turns out half the time they’re not even elephants at all, but out of the corner of my eye, when I’m looking the other way, they seem gargantuan, insurmountable and infinite. Turns out when you start looking closer, they’re really quite manageable.

This week’s MMO Manager insight is somewhat reversed from the usual. Instead of MMO lessons applying to business, here’s a business post that applies beautifully to the world of MMO guild management.

Dumb Little Man’s “50 ways a manager can get employees to quit” post lists several ways a mis-managing manager can manage to alienate those he or she works with, and many of these apply to the world of WoW. There are a few key lessons any guild leader can learn from this list, notably in the form of don’ts:

• Giving people the wrong sort of reward (usually none at all)
• Talk more than you listen
• Reprimand people in front of the whole group
• Disproportionately rewarding those who are fun personalities but shoddy players
• Disproportionately rewarding females over males or otherwise showing favouritism
• Ignore complaints
• Give advice on topics where you aren’t the expert
• Hold irrelevant, long, over-frequent meetings
• Insist people do pointless tasks

This leads into some dos:

• Do treat everyone from an equal footing…
• …but be sure to recognise merit.
• Do listen to others and acknowledge that they may know more than you
• Do communicate that you’ve received feedback, and make internal processes (officer discussions) clear to everyone
• Do recognise when people go the extra mile for you
• Do take interest in your guildies and take action when needed

Obvious? Probably, but it’s always worth stepping back and checking you’ve not let little idiosyncrasies or habits slip in. Always prefer your favourite tank? Giving specific rewards to officers but not the proles? Ignoring feedback and finding yourself in the middle of long waits while officers discuss issues but members have no idea what’s being discussed? Maybe it’s time to patch up a few of those management skills.