Philly

Bus Trip

(seb)

Saturday, February

23, 2013
Commons Circle @ 9:00am

Bus departs The

All Guests = $20

Ticket #: 41 of 50

BSU Fashion Show

Black Student Union
Saturday February 23, 2013
7:00pm
University Center, Ballroom
UMBC ID = FREE
General Admission = $10

Ticket #: 433 of 450

Kenan
Thompson Comedy Show

(seb)

Sunday, February

24, 2013
Center (RAC)
2700

7:00pm

Retriever Activity

All Guests = $12

Ticket #: 1488 of 2700

New
York City Bus Trip

(seb)

Saturday, March 2,
2013

Bus departs The
Commons Circle @ 8:00am

All Guests = $30

Ticket #: 32 of 103

OZ Midnight Premiere

(seb)

Thursday, March 7,
2013

Bus departs The
Commons Circle @ 11:00pm

All Guests = $5

Ticket #: 5 of 260

Medieval Times Bus Trip

(seb)

Saturday, March 9,
2013

Bus departs The
Commons Circle @ 6:00pm

All Guests = $35

Ticket #: 8 of 49

Forget cramming to learn your new industry inside and out. When you're starting up, ignorance makes you more creative, unique, and effective.

Maybe ignorance really is bliss. I talk with entrepreneurs all the time who started their businesses without a real understanding of what they were getting into. It sounds crazy, but I actually think it may have been their single greatest asset.

Here's why it pays to know as little as possible.

You're willing to take bigger risks, with bigger rewards.

A little knowledge can make you cautious--and hold you back. So often we're told that something isn't possible, that we won't be successful or that our venture won't work because others have failed. That's daunting. When you go into something new without lots of knowledge about who was there before, you aren't held back by the way it was approached before--by the standard way of doing things. That opens you up to greater possibilities.

When I first started User Insight, many in the research space told me that you "couldn't sell fixed price research and there was no way to turn it into a process"--that it was too risky to approach research that way. But I did it anyway. I turned research into a repeatable process, enabling my company to bid business on a fixed price basis anywhere in the world.

You bring fresh eyes.

If you have no experience in a space, you create new approaches to a problem that others might not have considered. You may bring something from another industry or experience to your current situation that is more appropriate.

I listened a group of entrepreneurs speak at a panel discussion the other night--one of them shared the experience of bringing a product to market. She recalled the moment when she was on the verge of signing off on the purchase of several hundred thousand dollars worth of molds for a bottle to hold the product.

First, she decided to bring everyone involved in the product's manufacturing process into one room and have them talk her through it, from inception to delivery in the consumer's hands. During this meeting, where she openly admitted to being the least knowledgeable person in the room, they identified several breakpoints in the process that would require major modifications to the molds she was ordering. This half-day meeting saved her start-up hundreds of thousands of dollars in mistakes.

The amazing thing--these industry experts, each with about 25 years of experience, said it was the first such meeting they had ever attended that took such a holistic look at the process for a product. All because she was ignorant.

You ask stupid questions.

Entrepreneurs who are new to a space ask questions to try to understand it. By having this outsider view, they can see gaps and opportunities others "on the inside" don't see. As newbies, they have permission to ask questions like "why do you do it that way?" and, "have you ever thought of doing it this way?"

If you have a staff, encourage them to ask the stupid questions when they first start with your company. If the person answering the question can't provide a solid answer with a specific reason, something might be broken: It might be a process or procedure to reconsider. Those so-called stupid questions may end up lending you the unique opportunity to be creative and solve a problem in a new and market-changing way.

The catchphrase 'hire slow, fire fast' is popular in the start-up community, but is it actually good advice? Depends on what you mean by hire slow.

Danny Boice, the co-founder and CTO of Speek, declared the popular axiom 'hire slow, fire fast' to be "a bunch of BS."

Getting rid of subpar performers quickly is indeed a great idea, he acknowledges, but for start-ups, 'hire slow' is unworkable advice. He writes:

No matter how you spin it, as a startup we have between 6 and 12 months to live… For an early-stage startup founder, doing anything slowly is simply not an option… You should, however, identify the key roles you absolutely need filled for successful product iteration and then hire great people to fill them fast. Too much wringing of hands and holding out for the perfect hire for a role is just as devastating as hiring the wrong person--potentially even more so.

Don't bloat your staff, Boice concludes, but don't even dream of being a hiring perfectionist. But is that what 'hire slow' really means? If a recent post by Matthew Stibbe, the founder of Turbine, is any thing to go by, Boice may have missed the essential point some folks are trying to make when they advise founders to 'hire slow'.

In his post, Stibbe lays out eight lessons of project management that he's learned through hard experience. Among them is exactly the expression Boice so dislikes. But when Stibbe lays out what he means by 'hire slow, fire fast,' the idea doesn't sound much like the heel-dragging hiring philosophy that annoys Boice:

My first boss advised me not hire one person until I needed two of them. I ignored that advice at IG and probably hired too many people too quickly. Some were amazing but a few were amazingly awful. My experience was that the handful of underperforming staff took up more time and energy than the vast majority of good people. The big lesson is to spend more time developing the good people than correcting the bad ones. If necessary, this means firing poor performers who can’t or won’t improve.

In my case, after I sold the games company, I kept things small using contractors, freelancers, and outsourcing and only recently have I begun to hire full-time employees again. I’ve made more money, and I’ve been far happier with the new, slow-but-steady approach. My first boss was right.

Rather than suggesting start-up founders wait around twiddling their thumbs for the perfect hire, Stibbe's 'hire slow' sounds more like an exhortation to get creative to avoid dragging down your team with permanent but middling staff. It's less 'hold out for perfection' and more 'work smarter, use independent pros, and develop the people you already have' so you can avoid saddling your company with less than stellar talent.

It's not that Boice's point that perfectionism in hiring is counterproductive is wrong. "Too much wringing of hands and holding out for the perfect hire for a role" does indeed sound "as devastating as hiring the wrong person," just as he writes. But this advice kind of misses the point—at least the point made by Stibbe, who definitely isn't advocating sitting around waiting for perfection.

What's your take – is 'hire slow' good advice, and if so, what exactly do you mean by that?

Before she built a beauty empire, Bobbi Brown gleaned business instincts from her Cadillac-selling grandfather.

Bobbi Brown may be the most famous entrepreneur in her family, but she wasn't the first. Decades before she launched her cosmetics empire in 1991, she spent weekends helping her grandfather Sam Shatten at his car dealership. His favorite lesson: Good things come to those who keep their eyes peeled.

Every business decision I ever made I learned from my grandfather Papa Sam. He moved here from Russia when he was a boy. He worked his way up selling newspapers and ladies' handbags, and eventually, he became Cadillac Sam, one of the biggest car dealers in Chicago. When you come here from another country by yourself, you're naturally entrepreneurial. You're used to figuring it out as you go.

There was one story that always stayed with me. One day, a guy who looked like he lived on the street came into the dealership carrying a big shopping bag. None of Papa Sam's sales guys would go talk to him. But Papa put his arm around the guy and said, "How ya doing, boss?" Turns out the shopping bag was full of cash. The guy bought two cars. My grandfather taught me how important it is to have your eyes open, because you never know what's going to come your way.

When I first proposed my lipsticks to Bergdorf Goodman, they said yes and then changed their minds. I had been working with Saks Fifth Avenue on a catalog shoot. I told Bergdorf's, "It's OK that you're not taking me, because Saks is." They said, "Let me call you back." That's how I launched at Bergdorf's.

It's not bluffing. It's thinking on your feet, and it's helped me a million times. One time, I was doing makeup for the Rachel Roy fashion show, and Rachel said she wanted lipstick the color of Hershey's Kisses and espresso. But when I asked my assistant for my lip palette, she whispered, "I forgot to pack it." I said, "OK, hand me the eye shadow and some lip balm." After the show, Rachel said, "I couldn't have imagined it better." Vogue wrote about it. Now, I have a lipstick named Mahogany, all because I didn't panic.

College major: Theatrical makeup
Total start-up funding: $5,000
Products sold per day worldwide: 60,000

A quick reader’s guide: Release It!, by Michael T. Nygard

There are days when I believe that anyone can develop a web app. But even when I’m willing to go that far, I’m never prepared to say that anyone can deploy reliable software. There are questions of scaling, user-generated errors and a plenty of problems waiting whenever an application has to function in the real world. Release It! is a practical guide to making sure that your software can actually survive in the real world, though, and it will leave you properly paranoid about how you write your applications in the future.

Nygard takes a ground up approach, teaching readers how to design applications to avoid key issues in the first place. The chapters are laid out with case studies of specific errors, paired with solutions. However, don’t expect this book to do the work for you. There are minimal code snippets included and those are only meant as examples.

Development: Forth Warrior
According to the readme, Forth Warrior is “a game of programming, stabbing and low cunning.” It doubles as a fun way to practice using your knowledge of Forth. There are a few similar games out there for other languages, too.

Funding: Think your investors are being difficult? Read this.
The mind of an investor is a mysterious place, but the better you can understand it, the more likely that you can recognize when your interests and an investor’s are very different. After all, investors and entrepreneurs can have very different goals for the same business.

Operations: Decoding the deadpool: How to tell when a startup has failed
Startups grow quickly, but they can also fail quickly. It’s hard to tell just when a startup is done, which in turn makes it easier for accelerators, investors and other folks with stakes in different startups to paint rosier pictures of their own success.

Marketing: The app stores are getting full: Only 2 percent of iPhone top publishers in U.S. are newcomers, 3 percent on Google Play
You can’t just build a mobile app and slap it into the appropriate app store — even if once, very long ago, that was enough to get you a few purchases, it’s not nearly enough now. There is major competition that you have to be aware of and that you must address as you’re planning your marketing efforts.

Beyond Tech: How (and why) to intentionally set yourself up for failure
We learn much more from failures than from successes. Provided you can create a safe environment in which to fail, setting yourself up so that you can’t easily succeed — at least immediately — guarantees that lessons will stick with you.

Our most popular link this week: Checking your security isn’t a once-in-a-while thing