Like most in the startup community, I’ve been following (how could you miss it) the various media coverage of the economic downturn and contemplating what it means to me both as the employee of a startup and as an aspiring entrepreneur.  Here’s what I have to offer for your contemplation, as I continue mine.

Some favorite song lyrics by Onelinedrawing for “Livin Small” come to mind:

These dreams’ll raise you up
Some kids wanna be rockstars, and some kids wanna be firemen

But those dreams’ll mess you up
If you’re in it for the bright lights and the battle scars
It’ll turn you into a liar, man

I don’t know if I’ve seen a million faces
I’m not sure if I’ve rocked them all
All I know is I’ve met a lot of people
Filled a lot of spaces
Learned to jump and learned to take a fall
And if that’s not livin’ large, then
I’m happy livin’ small

Well, most of us, when we go out looking,
as we do, for our lovers and our friends
Yea, we know it’s not just supposed to
be about what looks good
We know it’s not really all about the benjamins
Yea, but business is a lot like love and
business is a lot like friendship, isn’t it?
Yea, well either way, if you just go out
looking for what’s rich and hot
You’ll end up with a piece of shit

I don’t know if I’ll make a million dollars
Yea who knows, maybe if I return those calls…
All I know is when I tune in,
turn on and go out
It’s not my radio
It’s not my tv show
It’s not my rock-n-roll
Looks like one big fashion show
All these punk rock pimps and hoes
Sellin’ this and sellin’ those
Sodas, cars and phones
I mean, what’s the dilly, yo?
This channel isn’t clear at all
And if that’s what passes these days for livin’ large
Then I’m happy livin’ small.

Jonah playing this song live, in a living room (wish I had been there):

You might have noticed I have been posting as frequently here as in the past, and in part that’s because my attention has been diverted to writing posts for Seattle 2.0 as the events editor.  Marcelo Calbucci, who runs Seattle 2.0, has brough together a team of contributors and we’re on a schedule to generate at least one new post a day for the Seattle 2.0 blog.  In addition to this content, posts from Seattle tech blogs are aggregated in on the front page.

As the events editor it is my job to cover events taking place in the Seattle tech community, with a particular focus on startups.  I go to events, write about what happened there, who I met, what I learned, and what an individual should expect to get out of the event.  I also will be featuring various community organizers as they talk about the events they host; everything from how they plan to what their vision is for the future of the Seattle tech community.

Check out my first three posts:

• No Business Cards Allowed – October 9th
• Weekly Coffee Dates Help Fuel Eastside Startups – October 16th
• Planting Seeds with Six Hour Startup – October 17th

Of course, I’d love to receive feedback on how I can make my posts interesting and useful so if you want to reach me please leave a comment with a valid email address and we’ll talk.

I ran into a friend over the weekend, and over a impromptu cup of coffee we talked about many things. One question, which has been in the forefront of my mind lately, is who do we write for?  All this content we put out there, what are we hoping to achieve?  Who do we want to reach?  For me, understanding this is part of the process of getting naked, so I’m going to share a previously friends-only Livejournal blog post that I love:

December 26, 2006

When I was in college (the first time) my boyfriend at that time was in a class for recording music, and one morning we were able to book the studio for an hour and mic the piano with about six mics and record this improv of a theme I’ve been toying with since I was about nine years old. I was 18 at the time this was recorded, and I am 21 years old now. I am still playing with this theme:

Click Here to Listen to: “Soliloquy” Danielle’s Theme

I remember I started playing but the first 30 – 60 seconds were not recorded so the beginning comes in suddenly without some of the quiet build up. This is all improv of a theme that haunts me. This theme that I would play at night when I was stressed out and happy, or overwhelmed with emotion of any kind. I would go to the piano in the foyer and turn on the lamp so that it would illuminate me like being on stage and block out everything. I would play the same thing over and over exploring it, and learning that constant style of playing that would become my own. I loved music, and as repressed as I can be verbally about how I feel, when I would play the piano it was always deeply intimate. There was an unspoken (and later, clearly spoken) rule that no one was to talk to or touch me when I played. If the rule was broken the shock of coming back to the world was often devastating.

This theme originated from my obsession with triads and then later with chords and finding that there were many combinations of three that made incredible sounds. At first I was interested in C-E-G, then C-D-E and now I’ve started to partition my ramblings into sections with their own distinct patterns laid on top of the overall theme.

So what is this theme about? I thought about that a lot, especially when I was faced with the challenge of giving it a name. I chose ‘Soliloquy’, and I still think that is very appropriate to this day.

soliloquy
Main Entry: so·lil·o·quy
Pronunciation: s&-‘li-l&-kwE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -quies
Etymology: Late Latin soliloquium, from Latin solus alone + loqui to speak
1 : the act of talking to oneself
2 : a dramatic monologue that represents a series of unspoken reflections

I’m sitting here listening to the recording over and over as I write this and I am thinking about all the imperfections, but also remembering so clearly where I was at. Not just sitting in the cold studio and reflecting on 10 years of playing that brought me to the recording… but of what another 10 years be like. And will I still be playing this theme? Sometimes I desperately want to give it up so that I can write something new, but everything comes back to this theme and I can’t let it go. It’s the only thing I want to play, and I can play it for hours and hours on end without boredom. And every time I go back I find more complexity and more that interests me, more to explore. It’s an obsession.

I was at my parent’s house this weekend. They had sold my piano without asking, but they bought it back when I expressed the depth of my pain to my father. The fools at the piano place managed to tune and voice it to a point of sheer boredom in tone and my sister and I were lamenting that it will takes years of pounding to sufficiently break it in again. The action is still slow (but I like it because it is familiar) and now the E notes still are off at the octave. When you get right down to it, it’s a factory made late 80s Kawaii upright. But it was like a pet to me, it was something I cried on and poured out my heart to in the only way that I ever have been able to bare my soul, through music. I was something I would stroke when I walked by it with the same touch as a lover.

There was a time when I thought I would be a professional musician. I thought that I wanted to make music for a living, but I am certain now that I don’t want to. I don’t give a damn about the audience – I didn’t write this for anyone but me and if people like it I want them to like it because when they hear it they understand all the makes it a part of me. Or maybe they will see themselves in it too, and I will reach some place in them that is hardening and difficult to touch and they will realize that they are getting dangerously numb. I don’t know if I’d ever know that had happened, I don’t think people tell each other when they’ve touched their soul anymore. Heartfelt expressions like that get brushed aside. But music has moved me, since I was old enough to stand I have danced and since I was old enough to sit still I have made music.  I have raised my voice in song with a choir of over one hundred voices, and I know why Christians had a choke-hold on music for thousands of years.  Reverence.  Joy.  Passion.

In music I find exaltation, and I have experienced nothing higher.

We write, and create, for ourselves first.  I still work on this piece of music today, it has changed a lot since this recording and so have I.  I express myself through creating music, and hope that there is someone else out there who will understand that expression and help me see myself more clearly.  Each blog post is a soliloquy, a bit of talking to oneself.  A variation on the theme that is the progression of a life.

I have to top this homemade zombie costume I wore in 2006 (last year I borrowed a fairie costume from a fashion designer, but that was cheating).  This is a 1960s evening gown from Value Village.

I’ve noticed many 30-second elevator pitches indicate a company’s size and scope, such as “Expeditors International is a Fortune 500 global logistics provider” or “Pelago is an early stage company building Whrrl”.

When does a company go from being a startup to being “early stage”, or a “small business”?  Milestones for making the jump could be:

• X number of employees (30? 50?) and/or someone dedicated to HR full time
• Heavy funding, or no expectation of taking additional funding
• Existed longer than X period of time (4 years? 7 years?)
• Enough revenue to keep your business alive, or profitable (now or in the past)
• Publicly traded, or are part of a merger or acquisition

Keeping the “Feel” of a Startup

I can understand the desire to identify your business as a startup, even when you’re technically not one anymore.  Maybe some companies call themselves startups for longer than they should because they want to project a particular company culture:

• Fast moving (running 100mph every day), with a sense of racing the clock
• Scrappy and frugal when it comes to spending money
• Open to new ideas, new directions, and able to seize opportunity quickly
• Innovative and inventive, nothing is set in stone yet, no bureaucracy

You Can’t Deny Reality

So why does this matter? It matters because saying, “It’s okay, we’re a startup” becomes a cop-out eventually. Saying this to potential employees, investors, or customers when it isn’t true comes off as disingenuous and smacks of enormous denial of reality. Denial of reality (think ostrich with its head in the sand) is my number one red flag when dealing with other people.  I find the inability to see the world as it truly is, is rarely a one-time error.  Usually, it can be found to be a systemic flaw in thinking that rarely results in success.

Some companies cling to the title of startup even when they are heavily funded businesses, hiding behind the label as an excuse for not having reached profitability.  Being a startup is like being an entrepreneur, it’s a temporary state.  You can be entrepreneurial but not an entrepreneur just as you can be scrappy and innovative without being a startup.  In the best case scenario the entrepreneur becomes a successful businessman and the startup becomes a successful business.

Breakdown of Business Types

Startup:  a new company, working on building proof of concept

Early Stage:  has achieved proof of concept, working on building revenues

Business:  a company with revenues, working on achieving profitability

Successful Business: a profitable company

In the upper left-hand corner there’s a text blurb where I describe myself, and it says, “23 year old entrepreneur…”.  Well, actually it said ‘entreprenuer’ until an anonymous commenter was nice enough to point out my spelling mistake on my bio page.  This same commenter asked what makes me an entrepreneur, and my first reaction was to jump to the defense of all my projects and work; instead I looked up the definition of ‘entrepreneur’.  The Wikipedia entry is probably the most useful for getting a good definition, as well as some interesting references:

An entrepreneur is a person who has possession over a company, enterprise, or venture, and assumes significant accountability for the inherent risks and the outcome. The term is a loanword from French and was first defined by the Irish economist Richard Cantillon. Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to the type of personality who is willing to take upon herself or himself a new venture or enterprise and accepts full responsibility for the outcome. In common understanding it is taken as describing a dynamic personality.

As I wandered to the shower (where I do my best thinking) I asked my husband, “am I an entrepreneur?” and he responded, “Well, life has a lot of risk”.  After my shower I asked him again and he said, “no, you’re not right now”.  He’s right.

Although I generate content and work on various projects beyond my day job, it isn’t part of any system that forms an enterprise.  I’ve been an entrepreneur on a very small scale in the past, when I ran little businesses like web design or teaching people how to use their computers.  However, right now I’m more of wantreprenuer with many ideas and a continuously growing stockpile of knowledge and understanding of what people want, but no business to show for it yet. 

Right now, I’m finding people I can learn from about pitching, financing, filtering through good ideas and bad.  I’m also building a network that I hope will someday consist of potential customers, partners, advisors, employees and investors.  The tech community in Seattle is a big change from the networking I’ve done in the past, in finance and in international trade.  It’s refreshing; people tell you what they really think of your ideas and they’re excited about seeing you make them a reality.  Being involved in the community helps me meet people who can give me a sanity check, or suggest problems that need solving.  I’m still learning more about myself, and what kind of business I want to work on and live with for several years.

In the meantime, I’m working for a Web 2.0 (or 3.0, whatever that means) company learning all sorts of different things.  In the past year I’ve learned how to use Linux, mySQL, manage bloggy goodness with WordPress like a champ, and furthered my MS Excel guru status through even greater utilization of Visual Basic.  I’m also learning to give interviews and speak publicly, which I’ve discovered I enjoy and hope to someday be truly good at.  Most recently, I’ve been learning to blog to a public audience about more than just my day-to-day life.

So, am I an entrepreneur?  No, not right now.  If it didn’t have such a negative connotation, I’d call myself a wantrepreneur.  Instead, I’ll go with ‘entrepreneur in training’ – I’ll fix my tagline.

——————————————————————————

Who’s Weighing In?

Seattle entrepreneur Marcelo Calbucci says:

“The Wikipedia definition of entrepreneur is wrong, IMHO. Here is my definition: An entrepreneur must start something from nothing. Must create value out of thin air, either by creating a product or service, directly by his handy work or by aligning the right people to do so.  Risk is just a consequence and not “causation”.” 

Kevin and I just celebrated our one year wedding anniversary a few weeks ago, and now it sounds like he’s planning to head to China for four months on an assignment from Microsoft to work with the Chinese arm of the Sharepoint team just outside of Beijing. So clearly I’m not going to be able to take four months and go with him, although I’m going to try to visit at least twice while he’s gone.

So last night over a glass of wine with Raviv and Andrew we talked about how I was going to deal with being alone without male companionship for such an extended period of time. I have this crazy idea, which I might try to act on if I can find any interest at all, to have some fabulous women come live with me and attempt to start a blog about our adventures. Good idea? Bad idea?

Is our culture is moving towards making connections that are deeply rooted in the physical world around us using technology?  I certainly think so.  For me text just isn’t enough anymore; I crave the complexity of human interactions and the thrill and challenge that comes with meeting new people.  

Today I had a moment of serendipity that thrilled me.  I was reading this post and decided that I should email the author with some questions and thoughts.  I clicked through his contact page but there was no email address; instead there was a link to Skype.  I’m not a huge Skype user (although after this experience I don’t know why) but I figured: he posted the info, so I might as well start a chat.

Turns out Stuart Henshall is one of the founders of Phweet and in our twenty-minute-ish conversation he downloaded Whrrl (I asked if he had feedback for us) and gave me a walk through of the Phweet service.   Phweet makes it easy to connect and talk, for free, without even revealling your phone number – using Twitter usernames as your credentials.  Stuart told me that it should be able to support a very large number of users.  I can’t wait!  Think of what this means for coordinating tweetups, or even just providing customer service.

In the course of just twenty minutes I used two technologies; one that I wasn’t that familiar with and another that was brand new, and out of it I got a real human being on the other end of the line (and over a thousand miles away) and had an interesting and friendly conversation with a complete stranger.  And to top it off – I felt completely safe!  I’m going to try this out, I wonder what will happen if I get out of my comfort zone to contact more of the people who I usually just read passively. What is to stop any of us from connecting with people who interest, inspire, or even infuriate us?

If you’re not familiar with screencasting, wikipedia has a helpful entry. Screencasting has been around since at least 2004, and maybe even earlier, but I just have gotten into it in the past month and I have a sense that it could be an excellent freelance business that has yet to really hit the mainstream. I wonder if in the future every software product will strive to present themselves through well-designed screencasts. I’d like to be a part of that. You can check out a few videos I’ve made that are public work product for Pelago, and I have a lot more in production now.

Introspection. Making a video under three minutes in length requires a clean distillation of the key ideas behind a product or feature, which can be very revealing when someone who isn’t as close to the product tries to do it. For example, sometimes I give more attention to certain areas than the product creators would like – simply because those are the parts of the product with a value proposition I can grasp, get excited about, and explain to others with confidence.

Engagement. Show instead of tell and even ADHD viewers will engage their brains actively for a short burst of focus, as long as the content is interesting and well organized.

Portability. Video is unbelievably easy to distribute on the web, and can immediately influence SEO for your product or product blog as well. Embedding video into blog posts, FAQs, and licensing it under creative commons can virally promote your product for free if the content is worth watching.

So far, this conference has been great. I’ve met a really diverse crowd of people (and not just geeks either) and I’m pretty blown away by the level of really human connection. The audience has remained engaged, and the enthusiastic and passionate speakers are a great mix.

How can you keep up with all that’s going on at Gnomedex?

Gnomedex Schedule: http://www.gnomedex.com/schedule/

Live streaming video: http://chris.pirillo.com/live/

Chat: http://widget.meebo.com/mcr.swf?id=QanRtCQrXr