The man who pioneered the smoking gun message looks to have been brought down by his own. Eliot Sptizer wreaked havoc on Wall Street 5 years ago in the aftermath of equity research conflict of interests securing a massive $1.4 billion settlement from leading investment banks. He has now admitted what can only be called a cliche of scandals.
What a pathetic man wallowing in his own hypocrisy.
Picking up the phone and talking to someone is my preferred way to get a point across these days. Email is the crutch of the business world where people can communicate in a way they would never contemplate in a direct conversation. It dominates our daily communications and has changed the way we work (not necessarily for the better) where typing has replaced talking.
Here’s a story from the NY Times (via Instapundit) on the demise of the office phone and how that is impacting both work dynamics and organizational learning. I especially like this quote:
"That brings up another reason the office phone call is worth preserving: there’s no ready substitute for practicing the necessary summoning of courage for potentially fraught encounters. Advancing in business is often a matter of gaining capacity for confrontation; to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever had to steel herself before sitting down to type a tough e-mail message."
If you have ever made a cold call, the quote above should hit home.
In a related post, Fred Wilson does a nice summary here of the running discussion on money saving tips for start ups including this bit of advice "Don’t buy a phone system. No one will use it." Although the advice is based on the fact everyone already has a cell phone, I’ll still give Fred credit for scooping the Times.
A really great friend of mine, Michael Barry, has been recognized by the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business as the Outstanding Young Alumni for 2008. Michael is a Partner with law firm Epstein, Becker, and Green in Atlanta and has earned three degrees from UGA (BBA, JD, & MBA).
We met during fraternity rush in the fall of 1989 and have had no shortage of great memories together since that time including being my best man at my wedding. Michael is a great lawyer, trusted adviser, and close friend. If you know him, please reach out and congratulate him. If you don’t know him, you should.
Congratulations Michael. I look forward to celebrating with you on May 3.
Downloaded the newest from Drive By Truckers: Brighter Than Creation’s Dark
I’ve got hiring and interviewing on the mind as this business week comes to an end and found a great post via Boulder, CO blogger Bill Flagg. I don’t know Bill and came across his blog via my on going affection from afar for the Boulder tech scene. Marel and I often talk about making it our home at some point and maybe one of these days the stars will align.
Anyway, the post is about "the smartest interview question" and I thought this was a great point:
"You are only as smart as your questions and as dumb as your answers. The more I shut up and ask questions, the smarter I get. The more I spout off, the less time there is to learn from what other people have to say."
Hiring the right people can make or break a start up or early stage company. Make sure you find those that want to help you build and know what that means.
If you are a SaaS company, this certainly has been sent to you a number of times by this point. This was from Omniture CEO Josh James’ preso last week that I missed but have heard quite a bit about since. Here’s Jeff Kaplan of ThinkStrategies take on that preso as well as the rest of the gathering.
So, what is the magic number? You’ll need the following numbers to find out:
1. Total quarterly recurring revenue for this quarter
2. Total quarterly recurring revenue for last quarter
3. Total sales & marketing spend for last quarter
How do you interpret it? From Will Price’s blog:
The magic number ("MN") is a metric that can be used to tell you the health of your company from the perspective of growing monthly recurring revenue ("MRR"). It is a common mode metric to compare companies MRR scaled by sales and marketing spend. The MN provides insight into the effectiveness of previous quarter Sales and Marketing spend on MRR growth. Your MN will be penalized if the spend is wasted (bad marketing, bad sales execution), if your churn is high or if the market has issues (saturation, competitive forces). It also has a very high correlation with Q/Q growth rates so in general, high Magic Numbers are good.
To calculate:
QRev[X] = Quarterly Recurring Revenue for period X
QRev[X-1] = Quarterly Recurring Revenue for the period preceding X
ExpSM[X-1] = Total Sales and Marketing Expense for the period preceding X
Magic Number = (QRev[X] – Qrev[X-1])*4/ExpSM[X-1]
For example, consider a hypothetical company with the following financials
Q1 Q2 Q3
Revenue (recurring total) 1M 1.2M 1.5M
S&M Expense 800K 900K
Then the magic number is 1.0 for the end of Q2 and 1.33 for Q3.
Fundamentally, the key insight is that if you are below 0.75 then step back and look at your business, if you are above 0.75 then start pouring on the gas for growth because your business is primed to leverage spend into growth. If you are anywhere above 1.5 call me immediately.
Two data points came to my attention on this topic in the past couple days. One is from Marc Averitt on the chaos awaiting him after being out of the office for a week even after trying to manage voice mail and email via BBerry.
The other is from a recent LexisNexis survey (via Info Governance) that states that in the 8.89 hour average workday (gotta wonder where that number came from) employees spend 2.3 hours doing on-line research. In digging into the study a bit, the results are heavily skewed towards legal and education sector employees which leads to the large amount of time spent researching.
Coincidence that LexisNexis provides research products/services? I think not.
Regardless, we have no shortage of inbound communication demanding our attention and no shortage of on-line content available to occupy our time. The question remains for us all -what is a priority and how do I get to the information I need quickly?
This is priceless. Bob Bauer, Obama’s top lawyer, crashed the Clinton campaign’s press conference call last night and took some shots at the Clinton campaign. Howard Wolfson was on the other end and did a reasonable job of managing the awkwardness of the situation. Here’s the link to Politico with the audio. I have no idea if there is any substance in the complaints and it comes across as bickering between two campaigns in a heated race. I’m more amused that someone thought it was a good idea to have a lawyer call into a press conference.
Pluck is an Austin, TX company led by Dave Panos that provides social media for publishers and one of the companies I link to over on the right side of this blog. According to TechCrunch, looks like $75MM cash on $10MM in revenue and $10MM in venture capital. I met Dave through a good friend many years ago and we have touched base off and on since. Congrats to Dave and the Pluck team.
Not everyone out here is a complete whack job burning down houses in the name of the environment. This is disgraceful and certainly not the way to push a pro-environment agenda.
Venture Vice 