Month: April 2007

Digital landfills

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

Was on a call this morning and one of the folks on the call referred to the mass of electronic records that companies are accumulating and are petrified to delete as a "digital landfill."

Here’s the visual that came to my mind:

Landfill_2




A big massive heap of debris (you know the ones we have all seen as we descend in an airplane to the city of the day) compacted together without rhyme or reason. Mixed in with all that garbage are some valuable items, but who wants to look for them?

Got me thinking – is there a way to apply recycling concepts to digital content?

At the very least, separating this debris before storing it off makes sense and gives you a better shot at identifying the more valuable content you and your company create on any given day.

Another chance to meet with a venture capitalist & a few pointers on how to spend your time

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

Jason Caplain from Southern Capitol Ventures has offered up a second day of his time, this time in Atlanta, for open meetings with entrepreneurs.

Looks like there was a good turn out last time around although, in the spirit of continuous improvement, he issued a few guidelines for the next gathering on May 17.

There are lots of points and posts on how to pitch a VC. A few good places to look are AsktheVC and the local Seattle Alliance of Angels has a good Powerpoint template to follow here. Take what they are telling you to heart as they are providing you a roadmap on how to be successful in fund raising.

Here’s a few pointers that I think are worthwhile:

  1. VCs have short attention spans (sorry fellas) so be brief and concise. It is more a function of their job than anything else – quickly tell them why they should care.
  2. Start with the problem you solve then describe how you solve it – describing how it works out of the gate misses the biggest piece which is why would anybody care.
  3. These are only 15 minute meetings so make them count. Plan on 5 minutes of content and use the balance of the time to field questions and be sized up by your audience. If you can’t get it across in 5 minutes, then you are not ready for this meeting.
  4. Use this as a framing statement “It does/performs/provides X and that is important because Y.” You probably know “X” inside and out, but “Y” is actually more important.
  5. No NDAs – they won’t sign them and it makes you look silly in a first meeting. You should be an expert at pitching your idea or company to anyone anywhere without fear of giving up your “secret sauce.” How else are you going to get real feedback and ensure you’re not drinking your own Kool Aid.
  6. Ideas are cheap and plentiful. Customers, trial users, and even interviews about the problem build your case and make what you are doing tangible – it is all about execution.
  7. Research the firm’s portfolio and understand current/previous investments, ones you are similar to, and even which ones may be competitive indicating they have already placed a bet on your opportunity.
  8. If you are desperate for a paycheck, this will come through loud and clear. Remember the leverage equation of these meetings – you are asking for their money but you are also selling part of your business (regardless of stage) to get it.

Be prepared to be told in a range of ways that it is not a good idea, not a big enough market, not right for the VC, or that you are not making sense. If you go around pitching your idea and at least one audience doesn’t react this way, be suspect because people may be tuning you out and/or don’t care enough to provide feedback. Counting on this happening will strengthen your resolve and put you in the right frame of mind to think through your business and be prepared for the hard questions.

Learning what your products can do from your customers

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

Funny thing about customers – they will show you how your product(s) can be used in ways you never imagined.

This is a great stage to be in as a company as our technology is finding new problems to solve and our customers are getting huge value out of our ability to solve them without having to shop for something new.

We had a recent experience where one of our customers came to us with the need to control duplicate emails before archival and wanted to use our classification product to do so.

De-duplication has long been the turf of pure storage and archival companies and is not necessarily something we considered or thought of ourselves as a solution to fix. We are not focused on single-instance storage and optimization anymore than we want to be an archiving company, but the opportunity came up to be used as a piece of the solution to this problem and we were able to address it.

We were asked if we could help eliminate duplicate emails before they entered the archive. Their problem was that in a multiple MS Exchange Journal environment, the same message could end up in multiple Journals based on the recipient list creating what was estimated to be as much as 30% duplicate emails in the long-term archive.

They are a pretty large company and that amount of duplicates translates to terabytes of extra storage not to mention the retrieval headache of seeing the same message over and over again. They looked internally at what they had that could address this and contacted us and another vendor for proposals.

Sorry for MessageGate commercial here, but we were able to get this problem under control with a pretty simple classification rule designed to detect duplicate message IDs and were able to do so with limited additional hardware cost. The other solution *could* have done this but was disqualified based on the amount of iron needed for processing.

The reason I point this out is that scalability is touted by every enterprise software company out there. No one is going to tell you they can’t scale. Where the rubber meets the road is how, operationally, you scale.  Chasing performance with server count and claiming infinite software scalability without including the associated hardware and processing costs is not a way to endear yourself to an enterprise customer or win business.

As you acquire customers and grow a business, be prepared to be shown how your product(s) can be used to solve their pressing needs in many ways you never even considered and to be able to meet these new requirements with an attractive total cost of operation.

Separating high-value from low-value email

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

I recently did a post on this topic based on a pilot I am running on my own Inbox with our classification software. Here’s an update:

    Number of days: 41 including weekends
    Number of emails: 816
    Total size: 21.9MB

Man, I get a lot of crap. Good thing I have this set up to route to specific sub-folder.

I need to do some spring cleaning and remove myself from these various lists or at least identify the ones that are of value (which very few seem to be). Also keep in mind, I am eating for two after picking up a departed co-worker’s mail.

My results are not atypical of what we have seen from our customers before they head down the road of intelligent email classification. This enormous volume of easily identified non-biz stuff not only makes its way to the Inbox but to the archive.

How big a deal is this? Go ask the person responsible for email retrieval/e-discovery how much they enjoy sorting through mountains of useless stuff like Joke of the Day, Fedex delivery alerts, or even Out of Office replies as they seek out requested emails.

Sending up the white flag – email bankruptcy

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

Got a kick out of this – declared by Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and followed by Jeff Nolan there is a way to get out from under the mountain of email piling up in your Inbox and the demands it places on you – declare email bankruptcy.

Whether this is closer to liquidation or reorganization remains to be seen but certainly is a great way to surrender from the juggernaut that is our Inbox. Especially true if, like me, you have been out of the office for a few days and have been on a Blackberry alone.  Wired did a piece on this a while back and instructs you how to engage with your "correspondence creditors."

Looks like Fred is going with liquidation while Jeff is going to reorganization by opting with voice-only communication going forward.

I always tell people that I read every email I receive, I just don’t reply to them all – and that is proving more and more difficult but I think I can stave off email bankruptcy in the near term although I am on shaky ground.

I hear what you’re saying – Bluetooth and forced eavesdropping

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

Every trip leads to a new story to tell. Some are horror stories about planes while others are about the people we encounter while moving about. I personally think airports are fascinating places to observe human behavior, identify trends, and witness how people actually use the gadgets and equipment they accumulate for a mobile life on the road.

That said, yesterday as I was waiting on a flight and browsing magazines in a kiosk, I encountered something I have seen time and again but this one really stood out.  A guy on a Bluetooth headset having a conversation so loud you couldn’t help but be included.  The only downside is that as a bystander you get one side of the conversation.

Needless to say, the loud and boisterous discussion played out in the store much to the dismay of the rest of us. The guy behind the counter starting shaking his head in disgust/dismay at this fella as he thumbed through a few magazines while demanding an unseen subordinate “get the income statement cleaned up blah blah blah and find him blah blah blah.”

Who knows if this guy was a poser or if he actually needed to be acting this way.  Regardless, I’m not sure it needed to play out in the store.

Now, we’ve all been "that guy/gal" who has had to be on the phone and be overheard, but as a rule I try to step away from people or even outside for a little privacy and to spare innocent bystanders of my one-sided gibberish.

I’m a fan of David Brooks of the NY Times and in one of his books (either Bobos in Paradise

or On Paradise Drive, I can’t remember which) he talks about how people spend more time telling the people they are talking to on the phone what they are doing vs. having a substantive conversation.

I think we’ve all heard this conversation before:

    …hey, yeah, just getting on a plane in [insert city or airport name] and trying to find my seat. Hang on a sec while I put my bag up and sit down…

    (or the past tense version of the previous)

People are funny.

And the addition of these little glowing headsets (which I don’t own….yet) make us even funnier. I am still an old school earbud and wire guy with my Blackberry which at least keeps me tethered to my device as I talk to an invisible person on the other end. Here’s a pretty good story from the Washington Post about a year ago that drives that point home.

I’m still trying to come up with something catchy to call this affliction – some good ones suggested to me include “Nocluetooth” or “Rudetooth” (thanks Shaun).

Anything you send may be used against you – a “Miranda Warning” for email

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

In a recent conversation with a CISO, he was lamenting the amount of time he spends on incidents and events related to employee-generated email.

He certainly believes what we have seen at MessageGate which is that most unauthorized usage is not malicious but that there is certainly a lack of awareness about the implications of hitting the send button and creating a corporate record.

The conversation evolved and he remarked “you know what we need? A Miranda Warning for email. Something to let people know that anything they put in email these days may come back to them to explain, defend, or justify.”

That it has come to this or that email has become both our best friend and worst enemy is telling. At some point, the hassles of email will outweigh the benefits but we are still a long way from finding a better way to communicate and share in the workplace. In fact, one of our customers actually performed an analysis on the cost of an email vs. the cost of a phone call.  Email won…hands down.  The challenge is to get people to stop and think about what they are typing (or thumbing) before sending it along.  There are certainly a variety of ways to drive awareness from training seminars to a product like our SenderConfirm offering.

One company chooses to send email awareness emails – the irony in that speaks for itself.

Bad boys bad boys
Watcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do
when they come for you

People use email for what?!?!

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

Great post by Jeff Nolan on MS Outlook and the difference between what software is built for vs. what it ends up being used for (a great product management lesson and part of the natural evolution of new products).

Big surprise to everyone – people use their email for file storage!

It is certainly not what the application was designed to do, but it is how it is used and an entire generation of workers has this ingrained in their thinking.

We see pretty consistently that over 50% of the volume (size, MB/GB) of corporate email is due to MS Office attachments. Is Sharepoint or any of a number of other collaboration servers a more efficient way to share documents and work together? Yes. Will the world use email only for the pure purpose of communication? Nope.

Email has grown organically both in usage and infrastructure over a relatively short period of time (I got my first external email address at Andersen in the mid-90s) and it is now the de facto workflow, collaboration, file sharing, document management, [insert other category of enterprise software] out there.

I have followed Jeff’s blog for some time and first met him when SAP was an investor in one of my first start-up experiences.

Weak Point, Speak Louder

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

I have always been intrigued by Winston Churchill both as a strong leader during the Second World War and as a not so successful politician. His life is a study in leadership and how special people rise to the challenges put in front of them.

Some time ago I came across a story about his oratory skills and his notes on the manuscript of one of his speeches. As the story goes, there was a section underlined in red and in the margin was written “Weak point. Speak louder.” In trying to actually source this (unsuccessfully), I found this page of great Churchill quotes.

Regardless of what you do, there are always weak points in your story as you package it and communicate it to others. Be prepared to be called on them and find them in advance so that you know where they are and how they will be viewed by your audience. Many times we are in such a hurry to get our points across to get our audience to come to our way of thinking that we overlook this subtle but important perspective. So the next time you pitch an investor, meet with a prospect, or engage in active debate on any topic, know your weak points in advance and be prepared to “speak louder.”