David Cummings on Startups

Author: David Cummings

  • Thoughts on the Employee Hiring Process

    We’ve been spending quite a bit of time lately doing interviews and hiring new people, as we’re experiencing significant growth in both of our product lines. Here are some quick thoughts:

    • Come up with simple bullet points of the types of characteristics you look for in the person and include those in the actual job posting (e.g. good natured, professional, self-starting, etc. are what we look for)
    • Identify some easy ways to filter resumes (e.g. in-bound emails from @aol.com addresses and those without a full paragraph or two in the email message itself are immediately deleted, without even looking at the resume due to not being tech savvy enough as well as not interested enough)
    • Do phone interviews first, followed-up by in-person interviews, and include the Top Grading techniques if it is a manager position or requires several years of experience

    Good luck!

  • Quarterly Performance Reviews

    I’m a big proponent of doing 360 degree performance reviews every quarter. Many companies do them annually or twice a year. I feel that is too infrequent and that you spend most of your time talking about the most recent quarter, at best. Another benefit of doing it quarterly is that compensation discussions aren’t tied to every review. This makes it less stressful and more useful.

    We follow the advice of Patrick Lencioni and only have four simple questions on our quarterly performance reviews:

    1. What did you accomplish?
    2. What are you going to do next?
    3. How can you improve?
    4. How are you following the values?

    Every employee answers these question for themselves as well as their direct reports and manager. It is an invaluable tool and I highly recommend it.

  • Negotiations – A few thoughts

    I was talking with a friend the other day about negotiating a deal and I had a few pieces of advice:

    • Always go into the deal with the ability to walk away. Always.
    • Set an absolute minimum in advance of negotiations and use that as a private lens during the process
    • Put yourself is the shoes of the person on the other side of the negotiation and think about concessions or points that they are interested in and how those might stack up to your interests

    Good luck!

  • Prototype vs jQuery

    We’ve been debating switching our Ruby on Rails application over to jQuery from the Prototype JavaScript Framework that comes standard with Rails. Several different items prompted us to evaluate our strategy:

    • We already had to use jQuery for a special word processor widget we used so have both frameworks resulted in going from 150k of JavaScript to 300k, reducing the user experience due to download times and browser performance
    • There was a much better tree control with drag and drop available for jQuery
    • jQuery’s syntax is more Ruby-like
    • jQuery’s UI library is more mature now (it’s similar to Scriptaculous)

    After lots of researching and testing we’ve decided to make the switch. So far so good…

  • Entrepreneurs’ Organization

    I joined the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) three months ago and I have nothing but great things to say about it. According to the EO website, EO is:

    The Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) is a global network of business owners, all of whom run companies that exceed US$1M in annual revenue. We engage leading entrepreneurs to learn and grow through executive education and other tools for business owners.

    One of the most important aspects of the organization is what’s known as Forum. Forum is a group of 8 – 10 entrepreneurs that meet on a regular basis (usually monthly) and it acts as your own personal advisory board. This is an invaluable way to learn from other entrepreneurs and (hopefully) minimize potential mistakes and maximize opportunities. If you’re an entrepreneur, I recommend you look into EO.

  • How consolidated are your systems?

    Do your CRM, CMS, ERP, etc systems “talk” to each other? If a customer calls up do you have one interface to see their entire history? Even with the profiliferation of affordable, high-quality systems like Salesforce.com, Pardot, and Parature, most companies don’t have a way to see the history of interactions with a client from one screen. Typically, companies also have custom spreadsheets or applications where related customer information is kept, in an even more siloed fashion.

    One major benefit typically found in true SaaS systems (not fake ones) is that of an open web services API (typically SOAP or REST). An open API, and a system that isn’t in your own private network (who wants to keep ports open in their Firewall?), is a good recipe for integration. More companies should invest in consolidated systems as part of a larger strategy to divest of non-core IT functions (like CRM and CMS).

  • Attitude + Effort = What Matters

    Attitude and effort is what really matters. Think about it: 99% of the business issues you run into relate to those two items. Pretty simple, isn’t it?

    • Attitude captures the emotion, passion, and genuineness of the interaction.
    • Effort captures the care, fastidiousness, and desire of the situation.

    What matters to you?

  • What’s your one liner?

    I was talking to two young entrepreneurs last Monday at Startup Riot (thanks Sanjay) about their stealth company. After asking tons of questions, I was finally able to distill it down and come up with a simple one liner. Fortunately, I read as many technology and entrepreneur blogs as I can (via Google Reader, of course) and had lots of example companies to choose from when coming up with the one liner.

    Why is it so difficult?

    Well, often times it is technology based, and sophisticated at that, so it is difficult to explain in layman’s terms. I recommend coming up with two one liners: one for technologists and one for your grandmother. Here are the one liners for one of my products:

    • Technologists: B2B Ning.com with CMS
    • Grandmother: Tools to allow people to communicate on a website and update webpages

    What are your one liners?

  • A New Product’s Brand

    Working on the brand for a new product is an interesting and rewording part of the development cycle. I like to wait until after the product is in an alpha state to start the branding process as it takes a while to understand the feel and personality of the application. The first and most important part of the brand is the logo. Nowadays, it is easy and cheap to get a logo done. I’d recommend looking at one of the following:

  • Adapting > Predicting

    Adapting is a more important skill than predicting when it comes to building companies. Too often entrepreneurs and leaders think they have to decide every little detail in advance and follow the plan. Wrong. It is much more important to adapt and be perceptive of the market around you than it is to stay the course.
    In a similar vein, you have to make decisions with imperfect information. Markets, products, and conditions change too quickly to spend months coming up with a plan. Getting something down on paper and communicating that things are going to change as the plan is executed is the best path to take. There’s a famous quote that summarizes it well:

    A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.
    — George S. Patton